Oranges and Sunshine Jim Loach, son of Ken, debuts as a feature director by telling the story of Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker who, in the 1980s, uncovered the scandalous deportations of children from Britain to Australia that took place over several decades up to 1970. In the central role, Emily Watson has all the quiet stoicism you could ask for, and Rona Munro’s screenplay is shrewd on the psychological dimensions of Humphreys’s dealings with the parentless adults she meets in Australia, Hugo Weaving’s lost soul and David Wenham’s outwardly defiant self-made man. Yet the film’s brisk steps from one emotional flash point to another become monotonous. The facts of how parents and offspring are reunited are largely omitted, and a parent who in one scene is said to be untraceable appears a couple of scenes later. EP
Passenger Side It happens to have been made by a Canadian, Matthew Bissonnette, but this small movie has an archetypal American indie feel; if you like that sort of thing, you’re well catered for. The film studies two thirtysomething brothers (Adam Scott and the director’s sibling, Joel Bissonnette) as they drive around Los Angeles and expose the dynamics of their relationship through awkward banter. At first, this promises a deliberately aimless tale, which isn’t a great prospect: the script isn’t sharp enough to get by on conversation alone. Eventually, though, the film comes good by revealing a pithy little drama. EP
Essential Killing In this art-house spin on The Fugitive, Vincent Gallo — never speaking a word — plays a man captured by the US army in what is perhaps Afghanistan. Having been tortured and transported, he escapes in a snowy eastern European woodland and goes to desperate lengths to stay alive. Made by the intriguing auteur Jerzy Skolimowski, it’s a film that grips you with its nonstop action, whether or not you see any deep, rewarding meaning therein. Gallo’s character resorts to at least one source of sustenance that no hero of a thriller has ever used, but other scenes are improbable in ways Hollywood would recognise. EP
Great Directors It’s hard to tell why, having filmed interviews with 10 directors (of varying degrees of greatness), Angela Ismailos decided to edit her footage into a single 90-minute documentary. None of her subjects — including Agnès Varda, Ken Loach, David Lynch and Bernardo Bertolucci — receives enough screen time to satisfy a serious fan, yet Ismailos finds no unifying themes to justify her selection. The film amounts to a sort of tasting menu, but it still has enough interesting titbits to be worth a look. EP
Killing Bono Neil McCormick’s I Was Bono’s Doppelgänger, a memoir about growing up and trying to become a rock star in the shadow of a certain schoolmate, has been turned into this comic drama, directed by Nick Hamm and starring Ben Barnes as the young McCormick. Fictionalising the book’s story, it gives us a broad-brush tale in which our hero’s ups and downs are as conventionally ordered as the verse-chorus structure of a pop song. The screenwriters include Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, and the film is buoyed along by their lightly salted brand of male-bonding comedy, but it’s still too long for such an insubstantial venture. EP
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Hop Hop is a mix of CGI with live action that tells the story of EB (voiced by Russell Brand), a teenage rabbit who would rather be a rock star than follow in his father’s footsteps (voiced by Hugh Laurie) and become the Easter Bunny. So EB escapes to Hollywood, where he teams up with a thirtysomething slacker, Fred (James Marsden), and together they follow their dreams. Here is a flat and formulaic piece of entertainment that might delight children, but will bore parents. The characters are clichéd, the voicing by Brand and co is lazy, and it’s simply not funny or visually engaging enough to delight. CL
Blooded Drugged in their sleep, a group of young fox-hunting enthusiasts awake to find themselves seminaked in the Scottish Highlands, being pursued by rifle-toting men in balaclavas. This idea of hunt sabs on the rampage has caused controversy, but it’s a fair enough source of menace for a thriller. Where Ed Boase’s film loses credibility is in its mock-documentary presentation. We’re told that what we see is a reconstruction of events, and the surviving characters duly provide retrospective commentaries. Wouldn’t it have been better to throw us viewers into the thick of things, without any clue as to who gets out alive? EP
Louise-Michel Named in tribute to the 19th-century anarchist Louise Michel, the two main characters in this French black comedy are a lumbering, slow-witted woman, Yolande Moreau’s Louise, and a hefty, equally stupid man, Bouli Lanners’s Michel, who team up to assassinate the fat cat responsible for the closure of Louise’s workplace. Their supposedly outrageous exploits aren’t funny, and even the meticulous timing of the slapstick jokes fails to appeal: it’s too coloured by the air of self-satisfaction with which the writer/directors, Gustave de Kervern and Benoît Delépine, have imbued their film. EP
Young Hearts Run Free Clearly made for next to nothing, this Northumbrian film can be forgiven the limited visualisation of its early-1970s setting: flared collars and a few rolls of bad wallpaper have to do most of the work. Less easy to overlook is the clumsiness with which the writer and director, Andy Mark Simpson, tells his story of young love and hard knocks, in which a northern lad (Andy Black) falls for a southern minx and resorts to crossing a picket line during a miners’ strike to earn the money he needs to follow her to London. A battle between strikers, scabs and the police provides the only bit of flair in a lifeless soap. EP
Sucker Punch A cross between Inception and Burlesque, this teen action movie by Zack Snyder seems to have been made in the belief that the youth of today, so accustomed to virtual entertainment, don’t need even the slightest degree of reality in their popcorn films. No sooner has the film’s young heroine, Baby Doll (Emily Browning), been imprisoned in a grim asylum than the scene shifts to a world of her own imagining — she’s now a dancer trapped in a cruel nightclub. Then we slip into a further level of nonreality, in which Baby Doll and her girlfriends are warriors in a variety of videogame-style scenarios. Flashy though it is, the whole thing struck me as bewilderingly pointless. EP