Review: The Adjustment Bureau

Matt Damon's latest draws comparisons to recent hits like Inception and Source Code in being a slick Sci-Fi thriller with brains, but sadly this doesn't quite manage to hit the levels of its peers, the greater focus on the love story making it come over more light weight in comparison.

However, The Adjustment Bureau is still a lot of fun and the love story really shows off some great chemistry between Damon and Emily Blunt as the couple who have to fight against destiny to be together, but after a promising start the film ends up as a bit of an anti-climax, with the final chase falling flat and failing to take advantage of Damon and get him to bust out his best Jason Bourne with a hat on impersonation.

Review: Foo Fighters - Back & Forth

A documentary that traces the rise of the Foo Fighters to the stadium filling rock band of today, Back & Forth is always entertaining thanks to the way Dave Grohl and his band-mates can tell a tale, but the lack of real drama or conflict means this lacks what made other rockumentaries like Dig! classics. Try as they might, its hard believe that no matter how many times they tell you its that much of a challenge to make a record in a garage when Dave Grohl's garage is the size of a house itself.

Review: Lemmy - The Movie

You'd think Lemmy would be the ideal subject for a warts 'n' all documentary about life in a rock 'n' roll band - however Lemmy: The Movie is pretty much just 2 hours of famous people saying how cool Lemmy is and contains the not so shocking revelation that Lemmy likes to drink a lot. So whilst being lightweight stuff, not something usually associated with Motorhead, at least the famous people they rope in for talking heads are actually quite famous, meaning you actually care about what they have to say.

Review: Bridesmaids

Bridesmaids charm is found in how it switches around the traditional Judd Apatow set-up of friendships being threatened by relationships, to see it from a more female orientated point of view than the increasingly borish and laddish antics of Rogan and co.

That's not to say that the humour is completely different, with one scene coming close to matching Team America for best gross-out jokes of recent times, but the relationships at the core of the film make it more satisfying and realistic than the usual fat/man-child/stoner/slob wins over the supermodel plots of many other recent comedies from the frat pack.

Kristen Wiig does an excellent job holding the story together, but Bridesmaids strength is its excellent ensemble cast, though sadly a couple of the bridesmaids seem to disappear half way through the film with little explanation, a fact made doubly sad since unhappily-married Rita has many of the best lines on the film. When they go, the film isn't quite as good as it was, taking a little bit too long to get to the rather obvious ending.

Review: Kung Fu Panda 2

The first Kung Fu Panda back in 2008 was surprisingly good, so big things were expected from this sequel to the original adventures of Jack Black's martial arts animal.

However what we get is a poor film that seems longer than it really is, thanks to the incredibly formulaic pattern of joke about being fat followed by action sequence being repeated insensately over 90 minutes from start to finish with a lame adoption storyline tagged on to it as well. The impressive voice cast is wasted also, as looking back at the credits you realise some of the star names only had the odd line thanks to the reliance on Po's antics.

Review: Senna

An incredibly powerful film that tells the story of the life and death of Ayrton Senna, considered by many to be the greatest racing car driver of all time. Anyone with even a passing interest in Formula One knows what's coming as the film reaches its end, but that doesn't make the scenes any less shocking or upsetting.

The one downside in framing the story of Senna as Ayrton the Hero and Alain (Prost) the villain is that the film is so biased towards Senna you never really feel like you get the full story at any point - any criticism of Senna is quickly shot down as being someone else's fault - be it Prost, Politics or the position of pole and whilst lip service is paid to the amount of crashes and incidents the highly competitive Brazilian was involved in, no footage is actually shown of them.

Despite not dwelling too much on Senna's darkside, the raft of never before seen footage from behind the scenes is expertly cut together to make one of the great sports film of our time.

Review: Source Code

Starring Jake Jake Gyllenhaal as a brain stored in a container, this really should've been called Jarhead - but we've seen that film before, which is also strangely apt as Source Code is based around Jake living the same 8 minutes over and over again as he tries to save the day and stop the bomber on the train.

For a film based on such repetition, Source Code never bores, the changes keep your interest throughout. Wisely short and snappy at 90 minutes, Source Code doesn't give you time to think about a plot that probably has a million holes in it if you really thought long and hard about it and instead is entertaining pop corn fare that doesn't treat its audience like idiots.