Enjoyable drama with likeable characters and some impressively directed musical numbers, but the film’s decision to focus on too many characters means that it spreads itself too thin and lacks emotional depth as a result.

Directed by choreographer Kevin Tancharoen (making his feature debut), Fame is a 2009 reinvention of Alan Parker’s series-spawning 1980 hit. The plot follows a group of around ten talented actors, singers, dancers and musicians as they navigate their way through four years at the New York City High School of Performing Arts.
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Whiteout has a good premise and a likeable lead, but it goes rapidly downhill and is ultimately disappointing, thanks to confusing direction, an anti-climactic finale and an ‘Is that it?’ plot that makes less sense the more you think about it.

Directed by Dominic Sena (from a script credited to two different sets of brothers – never a good sign), Whiteout stars Kate Beckinsale as US Marshal Carrie Stetko, who’s taken a post at a remote research station in Antarctica in order to escape a traumatic incident in her past. As her posting nears an end, she’s considering turning in her badge, but her departure plans are put on hold by the discovery of a mysterious body on the ice.
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Quentin Tarantino’s long-awaited Inglourious Basterds is a brilliantly written, well directed and genuinely thrilling war flick, with terrific performances from Brad Pitt, Melanie Laurent and Christoph Waltz.

Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds (which steals the name from but is not a remake of the 1978 Italian movie) opens with an extraordinarily tense 20 minute sequence in which Nazi Jew-hunter Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) interrogates the owner of a French farmhouse before slaughtering the family of Jews hiding beneath his floorboards. However, a young woman named Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) narrowly escapes with her life, whereupon she runs away to Paris, changes her name and becomes the proprietress of a cinema, where she hatches a plan to kill the German high command (including Hitler himself) at a prestigious film premiere.
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Watchable family sci-fi comedy with at least one hilarious and rather brilliant set-piece, but there’s never really any sense of danger or jeopardy so it’s not quite as exciting as it should have been.

Directed by John Schultz, Aliens in the Attic stars Carter Jenkins as Tom, a grouchy teenager who’s fed up with being a maths geek and is deliberately getting low grades so he can appear cooler. Tom’s disappointed parents (Kevin Nealon and Gillian Vigman) drag him and his sisters, teenaged Bethany (Ashley Tisdale) and six-year-old Hannah (Ashley Boettcher), off to an isolated lake house for a family fishing holiday, along with their uncle (Andy Richter), grandmother (Doris Roberts), cousins (Austin Butler and twins Regan and Henry Young) and Bethany’s obnoxious older boyfriend (Robert Hoffman).
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The boys behind the Crank franchise, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (or Neveldine/Taylor as they bill themselves), are back with Gamer—perhaps the most deliriously demented film of the year. I say that with honest admiration for the deliriously demented. The trailer tried to downplay its outrageousness and strangeness—making it seem more like a dumb action movie and less like a Crank movie. Don’t be fooled. While Gerard Butler’s Kable is a somewhat less ridiculous figure than Jason Statham’s Crank hero and there is less sexuality (or at least a different kind), this is very much in the same frenetic, assault-on-good-taste-and-the-senses mold. Dismissing Gamer as absurd (as at least one critic has done) is to completely miss the point.
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