Cinemas - Still showing - 10/12/09

Dec 9 2009 Ellesmere Port Pioneer

THE BOX (12A)

CAMERON Diaz stars in a cautionary tale from Donnie Darko writer-director Richard Kelly about a family living in 1970s suburban America who are faced with a terrible moral dilemma. They receive a box with a red button: if they push it in the next 24 hours, someone they don’t know will die and they will collect one million dollars; if they don’t, the box will be taken away and they get nothing.

STAR RATING: ***

A CHRISTMAS CAROL (PG)

ROBERT Zemeckis’s technologically groundbreaking adaptation of Charles Dickens’s festive novella is a delightful early Christmas present.

STAR RATING: ***

THE DESCENT: PART 2 (18)

ARRIVING more than four years after Neil Marshall’s moderately successful horror film, The Descent: Part 2 is more of the same slash and slaughter. Jon Harris, who edited the first film, makes his directorial debut with an ill-fated rescue mission to locate the missing characters from the original story. The fearless, carnivorous predators nicknamed Crawlers return too, just as hungry for human flesh.

STAR RATING: **

JULIE & JULIA (12A)

MERYL Streep provides a tour-de-force portrayal of American cultural icon, Julia Child in the new comedy from writer-director Nora Ephron. Showing at Clwyd Theatr Cymru in Mold from Friday-Monday.

STAR RATING: ***

LAW ABIDING CITIZEN (18)

JUSTICE is blind – and by the end of F Gary Gray’s gruesome thriller, it’s also horribly burned, dismembered and disembowelled as a family man (Gerard Butler) turns the tables on the lawmakers who let him down. Butler’s brilliant inventor exacts bloody revenge on the prosecutor (Jamie Foxx) who agrees a plea bargain with one of the men who killed his wife and daughter. Scenes between them lack tension as both actors go through the motions - justice is bland.

STAR RATING: **

MID-AUGUST LUNCH (U)

GIANNI Di Gregorio directs this charming story of a middle-aged wine-loving bachelor who shares a small apartment in Rome with his mother. It gets a lot smaller when the rent gets into arrears and they are forced to look after the landlord’s mother while he is on holiday. Showing at Clwyd Theatr Cymru in Mold from Tuesday-Wednesday.

STAR RATING: ***

NATIVITY! (U)

CHRISTMAS comes early, courtesy of British director Debbie Isitt (Nasty Neighbours, Confetti) and her improvised comedy about the preparations for a primary school nativity play.

STAR RATING: ***

ME & ORSON WELLES (12A)

High School Musical star, Zac Efron steps away from cutesy, teen-friendly fare with this handsome period piece, directed by Richard Linklater. He tests his acting mettle as part of an impressive ensemble cast in a drama inspired by Orson Welles’s notorious 1937 Broadway staging of Julius Caesar, but is upstaged by Lancashire-born newcomer Christian McKay, who plays the bullying, egocentric titular legend.

STAR RATING: ****

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (15)

ENTERPRISING Israeli-born film-maker Oren Peli wrote and directed this much-hyped, low-budget supernatural horror movie that is set to make him millions. Shot at his own house in his spare time, his modest vision has bloomed into a 21st-century Blair Witch Project, scaring the bejeezus out of audiences with its deceptively simple narrative and grainy camera work.

STAR RATING: ****

PLANET 51 (U)

THE computer-animated comedy from debutant Spanish directors Jorge Blanco, Javier Abad and Marcos Martinez unfolds on a world far from ours where little green men, women and child live in domestic bliss. But the crash-landing of a dim-witted American astronaut (voiced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) causes chaos. Planet 51 is an entertaining if slight fantasy that nods to the likes of ET and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

STAR RATING: **

2012 (12A)

HAVING previously destroyed all the major cities in an alien invasion (Independence Day) and plunged the globe back into the Ice Age (The Day After Tomorrow), director Roland Emmerich goes one better in 2012 by trying to wipe out the entire human race. John Cusack stars in the jaw-dropping, special-effects frenzy based on the premise that Earth will come to a dramatic end on December 21, 2012.

STAR RATING: ***

THREE MILES NORTH OF MOLKOM (15)

ROBERT Cannan and Corinna McFarlane went to Sweden’s Angsbacka festival to direct this documentary about New Age groups and just happened upon a hilarious element in the form of an Australian rugby coach who had turned up by mistake. Showing at Clwyd Theatr Cymru in Mold Thursday only.

STAR RATING: ***

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON (12A)

THE eagerly anticipated rendering of the second installment of the four-book Twilight saga is thoroughly entertaining and more polished than its predecessor. Although the good-looking cast could probably stare silently into the camera for two hours and fans of Stephenie Meyer’s teen romances would still flock to the multiplexes in their millions, as soap opera writ large goes, this is still a great film. It even comes complete with a cliffhanger finale that leaves the audience teetering on the edge of their seats until next summer.

STAR RATING: ***