When the word "honestly" is used as a suffix to statements such as "I love you" or "I'll pay you back", it tends to have the opposite effect to the one intended. Likewise, you have to wonder what a film that announces itself as "a true story" has to hide. The plot of Clint Eastwood's Changeling is peculiar enough to justify some manner of corroboration, but its pre-emptive declaration of [...]

Emily Dickinson wrote: "Remorse - is Memory - awake/Her Parties all astir/A Presence of Departed Acts/At window and at Door." Her words find their cinematic equivalent in Waltz With Bashir, a sophisticated blend of documentary, fantasy, war film and testimonial in which the film-maker Ari Folman charts the awakening of his own Memory, and the return of Departed Acts in all their woozy horror.

Folman was a humble grunt in [...]

The mythology surrounding Baader-Meinhof has long appealed to the fashion-bible aesthetic and the rock 'n' roll sensibility. A style magazine currently on the news-stands marks the release of Uli Edel's film The Baader Meinhof Complex with an article that trumpets the group as "West Germany's coolest killers". There isn't an accompanying picture spread on terrorist chic - "What the swankiest guerrillas are wearing over their explosives belts this season" - [...]

As leaving gifts for Republican presidents go, a biopic from Oliver Stone is probably about as welcome as a set of novelty Hugo Chávez tea towels or a Hillary Clinton dancercise video. But W, Stone's super-punctual assessment of George W Bush's presidency, is hardly the bomb-disguised-as-a-carriage-clock that might have been anticipated.

Josh Brolin, who plays Bush, is a decent performer with a variety of shifty facial expressions to compensate for [...]

Film distribution often operates on the principle of counter-programming: if a blockbuster about, say, a nattily dressed secret service agent is scheduled to open in a certain week, it makes good business sense to release an art film concerning the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands on the same day, as any audience overlap will surely be negligible. That's the theory, anyway.

The peculiar thing about watching Quantum of Solace, the [...]

Cynics tend to regard the High School Musical phenomenon as a pernicious force that has quietly permeated our society, not unlike chlamydia, or David Cameron's Conservatives. Long before the avalanche of merchandise - CDs, ice shows, dolls, duvet covers - came the TV specials on the Disney Channel, revolving around a group of chirpy Albuquerque-via-Stepford school friends who responded to whatever life threw at them by putting the show on [...]

Releasing two new films in the space of a year might seem like an act of generosity from the Coen brothers, but the proof is in the pudding. If their Oscar-laden thriller No Country for Old Men was the main course, an overcooked dish purged of any nutritional value, their espionage comedy Burn After Reading, is dessert - light, fanciful and forgotten the moment it's slipped down. It might have [...]

The godfather of all Mafia films is, naturally, The Godfather, but it has been hard for subsequent Mob stories to escape its influence. However, the new Italian picture Gomorrah, which focuses on the Neapolitan Camorra rather than the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, proves that there is more than one way to decapitate a horse. I'm speaking metaphorically: the days when organised criminals would put in the effort to stash the head [...]

They say you should never work with children, animals or Jennifer Lopez, but one man has done all three. The lunatic in question is the Indian director who has elected to be billed simply as Tarsem, thereby placing himself in the company of other mono-monikered legends - Pelé, Madonna, Kenzie from Blazin' Squad. Tarsem previously directed The Cell, in which J-Lo roamed inside the mind of a serial killer without [...]

The "spoiler", that morsel of information that can remove in one stroke a film's element of surprise, takes many forms. Voters at the Academy Awards did a nice job of ruining The Crying Game for anyone who hadn't seen it (and stop reading now if that means you) by nominating Jaye Davidson as best supporting actor, thus revealing a twist that nobody - except, one trusts, Jaye Davidson's mum - [...]