Kate's great, but Will will make you ill

By Damon Smith

The Reader (15)

5/5

Beautifully scripted, elegantly-filmed and powerfully-acted, The Reader finally won Kate Winslet the Oscar she was denied in five previous nominations.

It’s a chilling tale of secrets and lies, guilt and recrimination, truth and reconciliation, which asks  fundamental questions about the nature of forgiveness. More particularly, can post-war Germans ever come to terms with the role of their elders in the Holocaust?

David Kross plays Michael, a 15-year-old in 1950s Germany whose childhood innocence is brought to a shuddering end by a passionate affair with Hannah (Winslet) a seductive older woman hiding  a  deeply personal secret.

Michael discovers Hanna loves being read to. “Reading first, sex afterwards,” she says. So he obliges, naturally, without a thought as to why she would value being read to so much.

Then, Hanna disappears. Eight years later, an older, colder Michael is a law student observing the Nazi war crime trials, and sets eyes on Hanna once more – as a defendant.

Director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter David Hare navigate the shifting timeframes with aplomb, while the talented cast, including Ralph Fiennes, as the older Michael, rise to their task.

But it’s Winslet who really shines. She’s never been better and completely inhabits her character. That Oscar, when it  came, was richly deserved.

Seven Pounds (12)

2/5

Like The Reader, Seven Pounds is a film about redemption. That’s where the similarities end.

In this relentlessly mawkish drama, Will Smith stars as a broken man  trying to make amends after causing  a crash in which seven people died,  including the woman he was going to marry.

Tormented by remorse, his life becomes a search for people who actually need him, or more pertinently, bits of him. He donates a bit of his lung. Then a part of his liver. Then his kidney.

Smith turns on the world-weary charm, but his nervous smiles and furrowed brows don’t help matters.

The plot twist which brings the whole sorry business to an end is blindingly obvious from the pedestrian opening 15 minutes.

Beverly Hills Chihuahua (U)

3/5

This simple yet sweet, family-oriented romp collars some decent laughs as it spins a predictable “dog out of kennel” yarn, augmented with slick visual effects which allow the four-legged protagonists to talk to each other.

Chloe (voiced by Drew Barrymore) is the pampered four-legged companion of cosmetics doyenne Vivian Ashe (Jamie Lee Curtis).

When Vivian is called away to Europe on business, the doting owner entrusts her most prized possession to selfish niece Rachel (Piper Perabo), who just wants to party with her pals.

To that end, Rachel heads for Mexico on a weekend break with her bikini-clad girlfriends and promptly loses Chloe to villainous dog-nappers.

Rachel and Vivian’s hunky landscape gardener Sam (Manolo Cardona), plus his devoted dog Papi (George Lopez), give chase.

Meanwhile, the plucky yet emotionally-crippled German Shepherd Delgado (Andy Garcia) helps Chloe to escape from her captors, and they go on the run for their lives.

The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants 2 (12)

2/5

Audiences who looked past the unwieldy title of the original Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants  in 2005 were rewarded with a well-written and impeccably acted coming of age story.

Aimed at teenage girls, the charming film charted the upheavals and   romantic travails of four friends, united by the discovery of a pair of jeans (these are American pants,  mercifully) which  fitted them all.

The mystical denims travelled the globe with the girls as they found love, compassion and a greater understanding of their parents’ failings.

All of the original cast reunite under new director Sanaa Hamri for this lacklustre sequel, which sends them all on their trouser-related travels once more.

Ugly Betty star America Ferrara benefits from her rising status by enjoying slightly more screen time than her co-stars on this occasion, playing the supposedly ugly duckling who is gifted a chance to break the mould.

Screenwriter Elizabeth Chandler drizzles cloying sentiment more obviously but still manages to navigate the minefield of cliched adolescent angst to find moments of self-reflection and pathos.

Iron Maiden – Flight 666

3/5

With their best years behind them, their best albums behind them and even the re-mastered re-releases of those albums behind them, what next for Iron Maiden?

The obvious turn is the warts ’n’ all documentary, writes Lee Marlow, and that’s almost what we have here. A documentary, with their manager as executive producer, which, predictably, is low on dirt.

Instead, what we learn – on this 45- day, 50,000-mile trek though 23 countries – is that Iron Maiden are great blokes, and they like a few beers after a show, and they love their fans, and the fans are all rabid, and Bruce Dickinson is not only the singer but also pilots the band’s Boeing 757 and is also, it has to be said, a bit of a tool.

What saves Flight 666 is the sheer Sunday Times-style weight of it all.

For your £16, you get a two-hour documentary followed by a 100-minute live show, featuring all their best songs (they were nearly all recorded before 1988) and a mad Brazilian vicar with 162 very dodgy Iron Maiden tattoos.

Ugly Aur Paagli (12)

2/5

Ranvir Shorey and Mallika Sherawt star in this remake of a Korean movie which got a missed reaction from critics who praised the protagonists’ performances, but panned the plot, writes Badri Ahmed.

The run-of-the-mill guy meets gal story takes a twist here when the girl puts the bloke through a number of obstacles, humiliating him in the process. But why and what happens when he finds out the reason is the crux of the film.

The bumbling lover that Ranvir  essays sparks a few laughs and his character is appealing. Mallika too as the sassy siren copes well with the comedy though the film does not  depict her inner turmoil with sufficient force.

All in all, this film is a tiresome affair.