Hurt Locker, The (2008)

Oh dear. One movie at a time, Mr Shyamalan!

A handsome reproduction of 1970s-era Britain but with a distinctly contemporary revulsion against Cold War style espionage and its practitioners

Mira Nair’s movie, with its Robert-Altman-goes-to-New-Delhi panorama of Indian life, means to be a feel-good movie. But who wants to feel good?

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort—which the American distributors are translating as The Young Girls of Rochefort—was directed by the late Jacques Demy in 1967 and now appears recut and restored by Demy’s widow, Agnes Varda. It is a strange—indeed, sometimes hilariously weird—but oddly charming French attempt at a Hollywood musical which stars the young Catherine Deneuve…

Sling Blade by Billy Bob Thornton deserves credit for the acting job of its director and writer, who also plays the principal role, that of Karl Childers, a mentally retarded man in his 30s released from a state institution — the state seems to be Arkansas — after serving twenty years for murdering his mother…

If Freaky Friday is the Disney version of what it’s like to be an adolescent girl with a single mother, this is more like the reality.