Ed

Review: What to Expect When You're Expecting

There's no end to what Hollywood can monetise. Board games, toys, popular holidays, and now non-fiction books that guide expectant parents through pregnancy. You'll have noticed one constant thread running through the examples linked above: in being straightforward, cynical attempts to cash in on a popular phenomenon with a distinct target audience, they all dispensed with one key tenet of film production. Namely, the idea that you're supposed to at least try to make a good one.

Review: Piggy

It's comforting to know that, if ever the necessity to commit acts of prolonged, unspeakable violence on another person crops up, as it inevitably does sooner or later in a man's life, there are plenty of disused warehouses around London that will make ideal locations for it. I will have no problems gaining access to them, nor will I need to worry about anyone turning up during the three days I keep my victim there, or hearing his screams, so remote will the location be. Or so Kieron Hawkes' debut feature Piggy would have us believe: with one foot in the gritty realism of traditional London crime drama, Piggy makes a respectable go of planting the other in a murky, almost fantastical netherworld of the psyche, but ultimately can't quite keep its balance.

Review: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

It's very hard to go into a film with no preconceptions. Unless you give Ali's 'no advance knowledge of Man of Steel' project a go yourself, there are too many posters, trailers and blogs around not to have some prejudice when you walk in. I certainly did. I thought I'd hate The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel; that it'd be full of lovely old middle-class people being lovely, old and middle-class, who then go through life-changing crises I wouldn't care about because they're lovely, old and … you get the picture. It is, of course, full of exactly this. But it's also crammed with some of the best British actors you could want to see on screen, and that's just about enough to carry it. Which is annoying really, because I had to scrap most of the put-downs I'd written on the way there.

Review: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

September 11th, 2001. Pretty bad day, overall. But ten years on, 9/11 is beginning to take its place alongside the Vietnam War in inspiring a genre of American cinema in its own right, and the story of how the day unfolded and its aftermath resonated is taking shape through filmmakers' eyes. The wounds are still raw, but while there might have been cries of "Too soon!" when Oliver Stone and Paul Greengrass released World Trade Center and United 93 respectively in 2006, in relative terms these guys waited longer than Coppola did before Apocalypse Now. Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close couldn't be accused of insensitivity: it's the first film I've seen to treat 9/11 as a historical event and look at the loss suffered in retrospect, rather than put you right in the middle of the clouds of debris or a doomed aeroplane.