Blue Jasmine (2013)

It was hard not to have high expectations of Blue Jasmine: the reviews have been almost unanimously positive, particularly of Cate Blanchett's performance as the deranged and dynamic lady at the core of Woody Allen's latest offering. It's true, she is excellent. She manages to be the one thing it should have been impossible for her to be: wholly unattractive. Her Jasmine is a refugee from Wall Street's upper class, desperately seeking solace at her sister's humbler home in San Francisco. But her problems swell frighteningly beyond the financial. She is a Manhattan matriarch composed entirely of artifice and beneath the cracking surface lies a mad and embittered psyche. And Allen's camera is besotted with its subject's disintegration - it closes in on Jasmine's shaking, perspiring form as she rattles her diminishing bottle of Xanax. This is a film that sweats.

In A World... (2013)

When I went to see this film the cinema had overbooked the screening and left me sitting on a hard bar-stool at the back, holding a beer and a grudge against the girl at the till. It was not the best start to the evening so my expectations of In A World... were suitably corrupted: I had a feeling it was going to be a disappointment. What a joy it was to be proven wrong.

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.

Side Effects (2013)

Steven Soderbergh's allegedly final film is a strange kind of hybrid. It starts out as a critique of the pharmaceutical industry, and of the mental health profession more widely. America is a self-professed nation of medicinal consumers - if it has a name, there's a pill for it - and taking a scalpel to the surface of this vast market is a fascinating premise. But Soderbergh is all the while laying the groundwork for what actually turns out to be a psychological thriller, with a lot of unexpected strands sparking simultaneously as it winds its way to a conclusion.

What it does deliver on unequivocally is a great performance from Rooney Mara, who took on the daunting task of playing Lisbeth Salander in the US remake of the Swedish hit a few years ago. She rose to the challenge then, and she rises to it now, easily the most convincing in this all star cast. Emily, her wide-eyed, slightly haunting heroine  is suffering from severe depression after  her fraudulent husband (Channing Tatum) returns from jail. Channing Tatum never really seems to act - he just kind of is - and for that reason he's almost quite good, in a very naturalistic way. Following a suspicious car accident, Emily seeks help from Dr Banks, Jude Law at his best, slightly smarmy self in the role of patronising psychiatrist. He prescribes her something fresh from the laboratories, Ablixa, and you just know it's going to be a disaster. What follows is a bizarre series of somnambulist outings, several fraught consultations, and a bloody murder with a kitchen knife. Catherine Zeta-Jones enters the fray as another paragon of virtuosity from the medical profession; actually, she looks kind of creepy with giant glasses and unnervingly slick hair. I'm such a fan of her performance in Chicago I'd probably forgive her anything but I'm not sure she quite fits this role. Her voice, with its syrupy transatlantic drawl, is a bit distracting and she sounds more like she's doing voiceovers for M&S than giving serious medical advice.

All these elements make for a slightly confusing narrative and the interrogation of the pharmaceutical industry is somewhat lost. It turns out not to be about the pills Emily has been prescribed; rather, Soderbergh delights in unraveling the world of Dr Banks as he slowly realises he's been played. I was a bit disappointed by the 'big twist' - it was neither shocking nor particularly well constructed.

However, Side Effects is a beautifully shot film and we sail through a world so cleanly imagined, with such smoothness and depth of colour, that it feels uncannily like a drug commercial. It is an interesting, if not brilliant final outing from Soderbergh and it certainly showcases some impressive acting talent from Mara. I left the cinema a little more suspicious of the pills we are all prescribed but equally, and more worryingly, of the people who are prescribing them.