Rest of the week’s films

Edward Porter

The Yes Men
15, 82 mins
The work of Chris Smith, Dan Ollman and Sarah Price, this documentary is a mere appendix to the weightier anti-globalisation books and films of recent years. The Yes Men are two American prankster-activists, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, who were last in the news in December, when they fooled the BBC with a fake announcement of compensation for victims of the Bhopal disaster. The film shows them attending business conferences posing as reps of the World Trade Organisation, their mission being to shake things up by satirical means — delivering caricatured accounts of the WTO’s practices — and by pure tomfoolery, as in their use of a skin-tight gold suit with an inflatable phallus. For Bichlbaum and Bonanno, these stunts are a way of grabbing media attention for the anti-WTO cause. For us viewers, though, they are the film’s be-all and end-all. They are moderately funny but are never performed in settings grand enough to add a dramatic sense of risk to the proceedings. Three stars

Edward Porter

Solaris
PG, 166 mins
Next month’s Andrei Tarkovsky season at the National Film Theatre is prefaced there by a run of screenings of this 1972 science-fiction film, Tarkovsky’s version of Stanislaw Lem’s novel. Anybody who has seen Steven Soderbergh’s more recent adaptation will know the gist of what to expect: the story of a psychologist (here played by Donatas Banionis) who is dispatched to a space station orbiting the mysteriously powerful planet Solaris, and is there joined by an incarnate memory of his late wife. Indeed, Soderbergh’s 98-minute version does such an effective job that it reinforces what has always been the case against Tarkovsky’s film: that it moves more slowly than its vague philosophising gives it any right to. To be sure, it’s striking and, in many parts, involving, but I for one resent its vacuous longueurs. Three stars

Edward Porter

Moog
No cert, 75 mins
An avuncular figure now — all snowy hair and distracted air — the inventor Robert Moog was viewed by many traditionalists as a sonic terrorist when he began marketing his eponymous synthesizer in the 1960s. In Hans Fjellestad’s enjoyable if overdevotional documentary, Moog recalls the original machines, the price of which could “buy you a nice house and a car”. The earliest buyers came from the advertising industry, keen to dispense with tricky musicians and cut costs to the bone (no change there, then). It was only when the inventor introduced the Minimoog in 1970 that sales — and the worst excesses of prog-rock — took off. Yet, for all that his invention gave birth to horrors such as Switched-On Bach and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Moog was a visionary, anticipating by a good two decades the thinking that would eventually arrive at sampling, and still, at 70, fine-tuning one of the most important musical innovations of all time. Three stars

Dan Cairns

Shall We Dance?
12A, 106 mins
A remake of a classier Japanese film from 1996, Peter Chelsom’s film is codswallop through and through, but, for much of its running time, it’s not unlikeable codswallop, which is quite a feat, given that the film has Richard Gere playing his idea of a modest, sensitive, mature but well-preserved family man. Indefinably unhappy with his life, this Chicago-dwelling lawyer enrols for ballroom-dancing lessons, if only to meet one of the instructors: an enigmatic beauty (Jennifer Lopez), who, we learn, has yet to get over a heartbreaking incident in a competition in Blackpool (a place of which the characters speak with great reverence, apparently imagining it to be just down the road from Buckingham Palace). A brisk pace and lots of energy from the supporting cast ensure that, for a while, the film does its schmaltzy thing as well as could have been hoped. There’s no excuse, though, for the last act, which is cheesier than a 10-course gourmet banquet for mice. Two stars

Edward Porter

Criminal
15, 87 mins
This directorial debut from Gregory Jacobs is a faithful remake of the Argentinian film Nine Queens. Set in LA, it is the tale of 24 hours in the life of two small-time con men, Richard (John C Reilly) and Rodrigo (Diego Luna), who try to pull off a big scam involving a forged money certificate. To make a great con movie, you have to have either a very clever con or great characters; Criminal has neither. The relationship between Reilly and Luna is never developed, and the whole subplot involving Richard’s fight with his sister (Maggie Gyllenhaal) over the family estate has the melodramatic structure of an American soap. Still, Jacobs does manage to keep you wondering who is conning whom. The trouble is that when you get the answer you may feel that you’re the one being conned, because the plot is undermined by huge improbabilities. Undistinguished. Two stars

Cosmo Landesman

Are We There Yet?
PG, 95 mins
This virtually laughter-free comedy has Ice Cube as a bling-loving, child-hating bachelor who, in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the young divorcée with whom he is smitten, offers to take her two children on a 300-mile journey across the country so that they can all be together on New Year’s Eve. Determined to warn him off mum, the pair conspire to be as destructive as possible, making it a long journey for him — and pure torture for us. Firmly in the tradition of Home Alone, the crude, unpleasant humour depends on the characters behaving completely cretinously, leading to the inevitable stream of vomit, urine and fart gags. The kids (Philip Daniel Bolden and Aleisha Allen) are presumably meant to be cheeky-but-lovable little monkeys. In fact they’re repellent, sadistic monsters. Send ’em back down the mines. One star

Peter Whittle