We all have aversions to the ways of certain actors. I’m afraid that, in his self-conscious dourness, Alan Rickman has always seemed to me more mannered than Lucie Clayton. However, he’s well suited to this gloomy, Ontario-based drama from the director Marc Evans, about an Englishman with a dark past who, having been involved in a nasty accident in which a girl died, goes to meet her mother (Sigourney Weaver), only to find her a solitary, albeit functioning, autistic. She insists that he stay; they strike up a nonjudgmental friendship; he has an affair with her foxy neighbour (Carrie-Anne Moss); and demons are exorcised to varying degrees. There is the rather hackneyed subtext throughout that it is the conventional folk surrounding these characters who are the dull, insincere ones, and despite the eccentricities, little happens that we can’t predict. As the mother, Weaver was obviously going for a sense of unstudied, childlike unawareness. Unfortunately, her performance is about as studied as the Bible. Two stars PW
Driving Lessons
15, 98 mins
What will the British film industry do when Dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith are no longer around to play eccentric, life-loving grandes dames in unthreatening comic dramas? One answer is suggested by this Jeremy Brock film, which gets Julie Walters to fill such a role: a Hampstead-dwelling actress who encourages her 17-year-old helper (Rupert Grint) to stand up to his tyrannical mother (Laura Linney). Walters shows her worth, but the character is formed entirely from clichés: she’s posh, but swears a lot; she’s feisty and extrovert, but has known tragedy. The rest is just as conventional, except for the domineering mum, and her unusualness is of a kind that makes the story even more simplistic — she’s a cold, hypocritical Bible-basher with no redeeming qualities. Two stars EP
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Earthlings: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water
No cert, 70 mins
Greetings, my fellow ugly bags. I come in peace and to tell you this is one dull documentary about people who speak Klingon — the fictitious language created for a fictitious Star Trek race.
The director, Alexandre O Philippe, avoids the “look at these funny obsessives” approach and opts for a long and earnest series of talking heads discussing the joys of speaking Klingon. But it is an ugly language that requires spitting when you speak. Watching these people, you soon realise they have nothing interesting to say in English or Klingon. Nanu, nanu. Two stars CL
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Shanghai Dreams
15, 121 mins
In the 1960s, workers in China’s cities were encouraged to move west to factories strategically relocated to the sticks. That is the historical background to Wang Xiaoshuai’s drama, set in a Chinese village in the early 1980s. It concerns the family of a factory hand (Yan Anlian) who has lived in this spot for almost 20 years, but still hopes to return to Shanghai. The film’s attention to a less familiar nook of Chinese history adds interest, but not enough to compensate for the slow telling of a flat story. The worker’s sense of himself as a metropolitan man in exile makes him crack down on his daughter (Gao Yuanyuan) — to keep her from consorting with locals — and from this comes a standard tale of an intolerant dad and a despairing teen. Two stars EP
Right at Your Door
15, 95 mins
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Previously an art director on films including Fight Club and Minority Report, Chris Gorak has tried, in his debut as a writer-director, to give us an apocalyptic fright, but his small budget isn’t up to the task. The story has a number of dirty bombs going off in central Los Angeles, spreading a toxic cloud over the city, but we’re forced to witness events entirely from the viewpoint of a suburbanite (Rory Cochrane) who seals his house and stays put. He doesn’t even have a working television. We are stuck with a study of a relationship under pressure, cued when his wife (Mary McCormack) returns home and he refuses to let her in for fear of contamination. It’s a nightmare scenario, all right — two actors being allowed to fill a whole movie with anguished emoting. One star EP
Pulse
15, 90 mins
An American remake of a Japanese chiller, Jim Sonzero’s film is yet another dull teen-horror movie about a group of youngsters facing a not very scary threat — in this case, an invasion of malign spirits from the other side, able to appear in our world thanks to the internet and mobile phones. A plot that has several characters committing suicide does not prevent the heroine announcing that “the will to live never dies” — a claim that was also called into doubt by my ordeal as a viewer. Had the film been any more boring, I think my brain would have shut down. One star EP
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Beerfest
15, 106 minutes
Feel free to judge this by its title. A product of the Broken Lizard troupe (under Jay Chandrasekhar), it is a dumb comedy about a group of buddies preparing for an international beer-drinking competition, and is definitely not worth seeing unless you, too, have suitably fortified yourself in advance. There are a couple of passably funny jokes and a few moments that extort smiles through sheer childishness, but most of it is plain rubbish. There’s no reason why high-spirited consumers in search of Rabelaisian laughs shouldn’t be more skilfully catered for than here. One star EP
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