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An angry miner demands: 'Who is it who tells the police to beat me - a working man?' Cut mischievously to a clip of Margaret Thatcher raising her hand as [...]

One of the themes of Ruby Sparks is the difficulty of producing a follow-up to an award-winning hit, so you can see why the screenplay might have chimed with Jonathan [...]

In the United States, The Perks of Being a Wallflower is apparently a significant novel for teenagers, one that has sold more than a million copies, and been banned from [...]

James Marsh's documentaries Man On Wire and Project Nim established him as one of Britain's best directors - and all it takes is 10 minutes near the beginning of Shadow [...]

The first question we have to ask about The Expendables 2 is this: why are Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham et al called the Expendables, anyway? One of them is killed [...]

Despite Pixar's well-earnt reputation for super-lative storytelling, the studio seems to be having more and more trouble getting a 100-minute narrative to flow from start to finish. Up begins as [...]

Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Family Guy and various other post-Simpsons cartoons, has hit upon a corker of a premise for his debut film, Ted. It starts with a lonely [...]

Hollywood keeps foisting Dr Seuss adaptations on us, whether live-action (The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, The Cat In The Hat) or animated (Horton Hears A Who!), but they all trip [...]

If films had intervals, I'd advise you to use the interval in Magic Mike to leave the cinema and head for home, or better yet for the nearest strip club. [...]

Not enough directors have the good sense to put Willem Dafoe centre stage. Those gaunt, crazed features, with the jagged-toothed smile of someone who wants to eat you, no doubt [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber On Friday, Warner Bros are releasing a thriller about a terrorist who bombs London. True, the hero of V For Vendetta is carrying out his campaign in [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber More properly known as quadriplegic rugby, murderbal is a hybrid of basketbal and dodgems, in that the players crash their customised wheelchairs into each other as they [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Munich is Steven Spielberg's bravest and most ambitious film, but not his best. After a caption declares that it's 'Inspired By True Events', it opens on the [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Jean Renoir's beloved farcical fable is showing for three weeks at the National Film Theatre. Its title character is a permanently drunk, Santa-bearded tramp who tries to [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Expelled from Harvard, Elijah Wood retreats to his sister's house in London, where he's taken under the wing of her football hooligan brother- in-law, Charlie Hunnam. Green [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Currently the best British sitcom on television, Channel 4's Peep Show submerges us in the minds of two twentysomething flatmates (David Mitchell and Robert Webb) as they're [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber MITCHELL & WEBB These Cambridge Footlights chums make fine use of their square/cool dynamic in Peep Show, Channel 4's underrated sitcom. Robert Webb (left) acts in The [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Ridley Scott, the director of Gladiator, returns to the swords'n'sandals genre, this time giving us a knight's tale set in 12th-century Jerusalem. It's a disappointment. The biggest [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber For years, martial arts cinema has been defined by the high-tech smoke and mirrors of The Matrix and Crouching Tiger..., so it's about time someone made a [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber In Seoul, in 1950, two South Korean brothers are drafted to fight in the civil war. The elder of the two is told that if he earns [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber The long-awaited film of Douglas Adams's multi-media sci-fi satire is as ungainly and misshapen as the Vogons who pursue Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman) around the universe: there [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber The embarrassingly named Dirk Pitt (Matthew McConaughey) is a treasure hunter who believes, for some reason, that an American Civil War battleship is now buried in Mali, [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber The second series of Catherine Tate's show may have been given a well-deserved publicity boost, but it's in this first series that we meet the foul-mouthed Nan, [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Declaring that Latin is 'the final taboo in stand-up comedy', Alex Horne sets about teaching us the language in the style of a choose-your- own-adventure game book. [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber When the curtain went up on The Odd Couple last Sunday, one of its stars was only just belting through the front door of the theatre. Alan [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber If comedy is all about creativity, timing, improvisation and sheer hilarity, then Shazia Mirza doesn't rate very highly. Her show is more of an amusing lecture than [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Before Little Britain conquered Great Britain, Matt Lucas and David Walliams honed their character comedy on two series of UKTV's Rock Profile, deliciously caricaturing the world's pop [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Giving hope to us all, The Independent on Sunday's former theatre critic, Robert Butler, has his new play on at the Pleasance. But he didn't realise until [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Adam Buxton is an Edinburgh Fringe newcomer ' although there are newcomers and then there are newcomers. Already a veteran of TV's The Adam & Joe Show, [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Until the events of the last few weeks, Tony Marchant's grimy, multi-layered, eight-part TV drama was the last word on the pressure-cooker existence of contemporary London life. [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber HHHHH Swingers DVD retail/rental Jon Favreau's beautifully written buddy comedy stars him and Vince Vaughn as two struggling young Hollywood hopefuls: Favreau is the heartbroken Mr Nice [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber After Ridley Scott's Gladiator proved that there was money to be made from swords'n'sandals, producers all over Hollywood leafed through every history and mythology book in the [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Adapting the true story of a Russian emigre spy who could be working for the Bolsheviks, the Nazis or the exiled Tsarists in 1930s Paris, veteran French [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Bucking the trend for hip, American, modern-dress Shakespeare movies, Michael Radford has gone to great pains to set his Merchant Of Venice in the Venice of 1596. [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber James McAvoy is typically excellent as Rory, a mouthy troublemaker who has been left almost immobile by muscular dystrophy. Relocated to a dull Dublin nursing home, he [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Gurinder Chadha has given Jane Austen's novel some contemporary Bollywood spice, so Lizzie Bennet is now Lalita Bakshi (Aishwarya Rai), and Darcy (Martin Henderson) is a hotelier [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Layer Cake is the directorial debut of Matthew Vaughn, the producer of Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels - and it isn't a million miles away from [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Stewart Lee must have put on more Edinburgh Fringe shows than any other human being in history. He's also had a novel published, he's written for Steve [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber These Warner Bros gangster classics, from The Public Enemy (1931) to White Heat (1949), are four of the films which immortalised Cagney as a two-fisted tough guy [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber I'm not convinced that hawking advertising space for a sports magazine was ever a noble vocation built on honesty and friendship. But that's how it is in [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Nine years ago in Before Sunrise, two backbacking strangers (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) mooched around Vienna for a night, and the result was a Generation X [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber In Meet the Parents, Greg Focker did indeed meet his girlfriend's parents, and found his prospective father-in-law, Jack (Robert De Niro), to be a retired CIA officer [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Matt Damon returns as Jason Bourne, the amnesiac CIA assassin who retired to Goa at the end of The Bourne Identity. Flushed out of hiding by a [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber You'd expect any film that pairs up such comedy demigods as Jack Black and Ben Stiller to be a laugh riot - but you'd be very wrong [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber There are several key scenes that any biopic of Alexander the Great has to have: the one in which an oracle proclaims that he's Zeus's son, for [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Kate Hudson hasn't had much luck since she got that Oscar nomination for Almost Famous - Alex & Emma wasn't even released over here. Hudson stars as [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber After a disastrous 13th birthday party, an unpopular girl wishes away her teens and twenties, and wakes up to find that it's 17 years later, she's a [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Now that Pierce Brosnan is rumoured to be hanging up his Walther PPK, the issue of who should be 007 number 006 arises. It's an issue that [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber HHHII The Cat's Meow DVD/VHS retail/rental How did a weekend party on William Randolph Hearst's yacht end with the death of one of the guests? Nobody knows, [...]

Byline: Nicholas Barber Drew Barrymore stars as an art teacher who sustained brain damage in a car accident a year ago, and now wakes up every morning with no memory [...]