Father and Son
PG, 84 mins
Now best known for 2002’s Russian Ark, the director Aleksandr Sokurov made Mother and Son in 1997. It’s a slow, gloomy allegory in which an unnamed man and woman enact a representation of the universal core of maternal-filial love. That film has now gained a companion piece (“sequel” being far too grubby a term for a work so obviously not driven by commercial thinking). It depicts a widowed father (Andrei Shchetinin) and his young adult son (Aleksei Nejmyshev), who live together in a rooftop apartment in an anonymous city. Their habit of caressing each other like lovers can be attributed to their being symbols rather than realistic characters, but even in its essence, the conception of the father-son bond that they seem to symbolise isn’t true to life. Perhaps deeper meanings are there to be discerned by those more attuned to Russian perceptions, but that leaves the rest of us with a grinding film. Striking visuals might have made a difference (as they did, to an extent, in Mother and Son), but, though the images here are artfully lit and filtered and warped, they are also monotonously brown and sludgy. Two stars Edward Porter
A Cinderella Story
12A, 90 mins
You’d have thought that the sharp, sophisticated Clueless would have raised the game for high-school romantic comedies. But no; we’re firmly back to square one here, with the director Mark Rosman’s almost wantonly clichéd retelling of the childhood fable, transported (where else?) to the status-obsessed teen world of LA’s San Fernando Valley. Sam (a squat, charisma-free Hilary Duff) passively accepts the humiliations heaped on her by her ghastly stepmother (Jennifer Coolidge) while pining after the college stud she danced with at the Hallowe’en ball. Strangely old-fashioned (would Sam’s schoolmates really hold her in such contempt for working in a diner?), the movie’s plot machinations dispense even with the logic of fairy tales. There’s the odd goodish line from the camp Coolidge, but they’re not worth the price of a ticket. Bored teens on holiday should give it a miss and rent Pretty in Pink instead. One star Peter Whittle
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Merci Dr Rey!
15, 90 mins
That the film’s cameo from Simon Callow is not the most hammy and irritating part of the proceedings should give you an idea of just how extraordinarily hammy and irritating a film this is. Written and directed by Andrew Litvack, a first-timer working under the banner of Merchant Ivory Productions, it is a Parisian farce in which a weak script is bludgeoned to death by shrill overacting. Dianne Wiest plays an opera diva who, it is wrongly assumed, only has to be grandly theatrical to be funny. As for Jane Birkin’s performance as a burbling neurotic, there is so great a gap between her willingness to go over the top and the feebleness of her lines that you feel impelled to look away, as from a disastrous speech at a wedding. The direction is slack and ugly, creating such a heavy sense of dead air that you could be watching a video of a performance given in an empty theatre. I’ve seen plenty of useless films in my time, but few so precisely pitched to set one’s teeth on edge. One star Edward Porter
Love Me If You Dare
15, 93 mins
A pair of lovers make a tacit, even subconscious, agreement to persist in toying with each other rather than face up to the dangerous finality of settling down together. It is a subject familiar to us from screwball farces, and one from which a straight drama could also be drawn. By dragging it into an eccentric black comedy, however, Yann Samuell has made a film that is tiresomely hard to fathom. Julien (Guillaume Canet) and Sophie (Marion Cotillard) begin playing an impish game of dare and double-dare as children. They are still at it in adulthood, but now their unspoken love drives them to bait each other with ever more destructive pranks. Are we supposed to admire the strength of their obsession and refusal to conform to society’s boring rules? Or are they two nutcases who should be locked up? All I can say for sure is that I found their antics annoying, and when — in a final burst of dark zaniness — the film sent them to a horrible fate, I was only too glad. One star Edward Porter