Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
This could have been a satire of a spiritually dead London where urban wage-slaves grind back and forth to work on a crumbling underground system, crammed into carriages with, in TS Eliot's words, "only the growing terror of nothing to think about".
Instead it's just another depressing, mediocre, muddy-looking British film that wastes an awful lot of talent.
Mackenzie Crook plays Paul, a depressed London subway train-driver who has two people fall in front of his train in a single week.
His colleagues whisper that there's an unofficial "three-and-out" rule: if three unfortunate souls wind up under his wheels within one month, he gets pensioned off with a mouthwatering lump-sum of 10 years' salary.
So Paul sets out to find someone who wants to commit suicide: he will give them a cash advance on his future payout and they can live it up for one last weekend before chucking themselves under his train.
It is a promising high-concept idea, but it gets derailed almost immediately as we follow the sentimental story of his putative self-topper: glowering Irishman Tommy Cassidy, played by Colm Meaney.
The scene removes, bafflingly, to the touristy-picturesque locale of the Lake District (did funding depend on this?) where we meet Tommy's long neglected wife, played by Imelda Staunton - too good for this nonsense. Their grown-up sexy daughter Frankie is played by Gemma Arterton, who does lots of catwalk posing in her beret and is more wooden than all the Woodentops combined. - PB
Judd Apatow's comedies are always watchable and sometimes hilarious, but with the latest to emerge under his aegis, I have to admit it is getting harder to defend them against the charge of misogyny.
This is basically a vehicle for its writer and leading man Jason Segel, an Apatow repertory player who was in the TV show Freaks and Geeks. He plays Peter, a slackerish and likeable-if-not-loveable guy who is dating hot TV star Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell).
Sarah dumps him in favour of drawling Brit pop singer Aldous Snow, played by Russell Brand, who is actually the best thing in the film. Deeply upset, Peter goes on holiday to Hawaii, only to find that Sarah and Aldous are staying at the same resort.
There are some laughs, but not that many, and a weird, nagging undertow of self-pity and resentment of beautiful women making honest guys' lives a misery. - PB
This, the first of two live-action movie outings for the Japanese manga franchise, provides a welcome break from the rapidly tiring long-haired ghost lady-haunted cellphone and videotape shtick.
A cursed book that ensures the demise of anyone whose name is written in its pages falls into the hands of the student son of the local police chief. The boy, accompanied by a 10ft-tall demon that only he can see, becomes a vigilante, offing criminals and becoming a mysterious sensation among teenagers.
Kaneko, responsible for the groundbreaking giant-monster Gamera trilogy of the 1990s, keeps things visually bright and matter-of-fact, downplaying the creepiness of the story. And the final half-hour is more than satisfying, tying complex threads together and setting up an exciting sequel. - Phelim O'Neill
Writer-director Jan Dunn attracted a modicum of attention in 2005 by making Britain's one and only Dogme-registered film, Gypo: a putatively hard-hitting shaky-camera drama about the fractious relationship between residents of a housing estate and the local Roma. Here she tries her hand at less fraught and more technically ambitious fare: a meandering character study revolving around a testy widower, played by Bob Hoskins.
Dunn introduces a multitude of narrative threads: a grandmotherly French neighbour is trying to seduce gruff Bob, a troubled local teen wants to race his pigeons, while a small girl's friendliness attracts unwelcome accusations.
But despite a nicely nuanced performance from Hoskins, the limitations of the threadbare budget are a little too evident. The acting is of variable quality, to say the least; and many sequences are only sketchily conceived.
And an annoying soundtrack score that frequently interrupts the first half of the film doesn't help either. - Andrew Pulver
