Coming Soon: Her (18/12/2013)

This cyber-romance from Spike Jonze  really is a love story for the modern age. Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore, the lonely divorcé who falls for the soothing tones of his Siri-like seductress Samantha (Scarlett Johansson being edgy again). Inevitably, developing a relationship with a computer turns out to be a complicated business. Samantha has been perfectly designed to suit Theodore's every need but their interactions are frustratingly filtered through the cold barrier of the screen. There's a point to be made here about the voyeuristic complicity of the cinema audience: the viewers' attachment to the characters before them is bound to be put under the microscope as they watch Theodore struggle with the emotional limits (and depths) of technology.

Coming Soon: Under the Skin (TBC)

Jonathan Glazer hasn't made anything new since Birth, an intensely disturbing study of loss released all the way back in 2004. That's not necessarily for want of trying - the production of Under the Skin has been plagued by reshoots and missed deadlines but it now looks like it's finally on its way to cinema screens. Next week, it will premier at the Venice Film Festival and this will hopefully accelerate its release although, as of yet, no firm date has been set.

Coming Soon: Blue Jasmine (27/09/2013)

Woody Allen is one of those directors people love to hate. I have a friend who walked out of Vicky Cristina Barcelona half way through because she despised it so intensely. Unreservedly, I can say that it is one of my favourite films - it manages to be playful in its pretentiousness, unlike the more recent Midnight in Paris, which I thought was terrible. That might have had something to do with the fact that Owen Wilson was in it, and just seeing his face on a poster makes me want to bite my own hand.

On another note, Blue Jasmine is shaping up to be an exciting prospect. The plot is vintage Allen: he's made the long pilgrimage back to America, although this time his distressed and demented female is leaving New York to stay with her sister in San Francisco. Cate Blanchett, with her imperial cheekbones on particularly fine form, is Jasmine and by all accounts she's feeling the blues. This is a story of and for the recession (or at least, the recession as it was felt by upper middle-class New Yorkers). The situation with Jasmine's trader husband, played by Alec Baldwin, has apparently gone awry as a result of his financial fiddling and so, like many of Allen's lovers cut adrift, Jasmine looks longingly at the horizon and decides to chase it as far as she can.

This is hopefully where the comedy and the drama will combine with fizzling effect. Blue Jasmine has an excellent supporting cast, including Sally Hawkins and Peter Sarsgaard, who was oh so creepy in Boys Don't Cry. As Jasmine's posturing begins to crumble in the face of her neuroses, Allen will hopefully manage to wrangle a dark humour from this tale of class tension and family rift.

Kick-Ass 2 (2013)

The moment an eleven year old Chloe Grace Moretz dropped the c-word twenty minutes in was the moment the first Kick-Ass announced its intention to ruffle a few feathers. It was a glorious, blood-spattered mess of a film, which managed to be both completely ridiculous and perfectly ironic. What made it appeal to a wide audience and not just the niche it seemed to cultivate was the fact that it knew exactly what it was doing. Despite the veneer of chaos, it was extremely well crafted.

What its follow up lacks is this consummate self-awareness. There is a painful absence of direction from the opening scene, which recalls a classic exchange from its predecessor but lacks the spark of originality that first made it shocking. From this moment on, there is a sense that Jeff Wadlow is trying to recreate the formula that was so successful first time round, only now things are a little stale. The cast is older, the jokes less well judged, and the thoughtful touches that gave the original its warmth have been replaced by a brash surface appeal. It's loud; it's bloody, but there's no depth to be found in its trashy reconstructions.

It's not quite all bad news. Moretz remains the best thing about the franchise and her now adolescent Hit Girl is every bit as outrageously charismatic as before. This might actually be part of the problem: she has really grown into her character, making the rest of the cast sound even more like tired repetitions of something that once worked so well. Nonetheless, she and Aaron Taylor Johnson retain a powerful dynamic and the moments they occupy the screen together are amongst the most sincere. Some critics have scoffed at the high school narrative that sees Hit Girl transported into a pseudo Mean Girls set-up, where her foes are bitchy cheerleaders and vapid jocks. This might have been really effective if the director had been a little more confident in the uncompromising tone Kick Ass took the first time round. Where there would originally have been carnage, now there's vomit, and it's all a bit Pitch Perfect where it was previously Pulp Fiction.

In terms of new additions, Jim Carrey has courted controversy by publicly distancing himself from the film on the grounds that it is too violent. It was a strange move on his part, given that he could never have been in any doubt about the gore content, but his grisly anti Captain America is actually an interesting figure and it would have been nice to see a little more of him before he was summarily dispatched. That's the thing about this sequel: it includes the good bits in its turnover and so we lose the coherence and comedy, resulting in something a bit gross and misshapen. Christopher Mintz-Plasse, now the world's first 'super-villain,' has become a sadistic caricature overlaid with Oedipal anxieties and even he looks a bit sheepish when that rape joke falls ironically flat. It's the worst moment of a disappointing instalment and it leaves a particularly bad taste.

As a big fan of its predecessor I had high hopes for this film. But it has unfortunately become the victim of its own success, forgetting the punchline of the joke it told first.