When John Boorman took his idea to the studio for a film version of pulp book The Hunter, he was accused of having gone mad. When the studio saw the rushes of one scene, in which seven men talk in a green office wearing green suits, green shirts and green ties, they thought he’d totally lost it. Boorman would have the last laugh as Point Blank is one of the most iconic, powerful films of the 1960s, and still looks fantastic. If you want to know where the style for Mad Men came from, it started here.

The terrible script actually brought Boorman and Lee Marvin together – they both read it, both hated it, but Marvin negotiated a deal letting Boorman have carte blanche. The result is a head-scratcher of a thriller with an extraordinary visual architecture and dream-like feel to it.

Marvin plays a crook, Walkere, shot in the opening seconds in his cell in Alcatraz. We then fast forward to him plotting revenge – it seems he was part of a gang who stole cash from ‘The Organisation’ but he never got his share and he stalks the man who took it – Mal Reese, who is also sleeping with his wife. What follows is a classic one-man-against-the-system thriller, with Marvin battering, punching and shooting his way across a brutalist-looking Los Angeles to get his man and his cash.

His only ally is Dickinson’s Chris, an uber-sexy, cool woman every bit as tough and manipulative as Walker. They fire sparks off each other but stick together – in one classic scene she beats and flays at Walker, who stands there as impassive as a tennis umpire facing a McEnroe-esque rant.

The ingredient that makes this such a stand-out thriller is the psychological slant Boorman gives the whole film. It is fragmented, nonsensical, and leaps backwards and forwards so much that we never know if this is actually happening or if it’s Walker’s dying wish fulfilment. He repeats the line ‘It seemed like a dream’ several times, and a cocktail waitress at one point says ‘Walker – are you still alive?’.

Boorman’s visuals matches his dream-like ideas, with Los Angeles looking like a bleached-out, brutalist, concrete nightmare in which there are plenty of places to hide, even in daylight but especially at night, even with all that neon lighting.

Marvin is never better than here, his lantern-jawed features and white hair giving him the perfect spectre-like appearance, and Dickinson is just plain gorgeous, in a very 1960s way. Gone is the ditsiness of stars like Monroe or Russell, replaced by a hard-nosed woman who knows what she wants.

Overall verdict: Welcome reissue of one of the cornerstones of 1960s thrillers, well worth another look for the dream-like feel.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

While Danny Boyle was busy turning himself into a national treasure during the Olympics he was making this twisty thriller. His Opening Ceremony was one of the great outside events, so he can be forgiven for taking his eye off the ball with his film. Trance is always watchable, never dull, but ultimately it’s Boyle-light. It’s very, very slight.

The plot is very Hitchcockian. James McAvoy is a trained auctioneer with huge gambling debts. The only way he can pay them off is to join up with a gang of thugs, headed by Vincent Cassel, to steal a priceless Goya painting from the auction room. The heist goes to plan until McAvoy gets hit on the head, and cannot remember where he hid the canvas.

Pulling his fingernails out doesn’t jog his memory, so Cassel is forced to bring in a hypnotherapist, Rosario Dawson, who is confident she can unlock McAvoy’s brain and find the missing painting. However, McAvoy’s mind is stuffed full of repressed memories and it takes many sessions to start to unpick the mystery. She suggests also hypnotising Cassel and his whole gang of thugs, with comical results.

However things get really serious when both Cassel and McAvoy fall for Dawson, and she seems to manipulate both of them – but why? Is she after the picture too, or is she genuinely interested in them romantically? If so, which one?

The plot starts off in standard heist mode, before the second half gets very dreamy and very, very complicated. While the characters are well drawn and the plot moves apace, there is something a little hollow at the centre of the film. For a movie that is concerned with the inner workings of the brain – a pretty complicated subject matter – it’s all very superficial. Boyle’s visuals and music are their usual frantic self, with cross cutting, speeded-up sequences, bent-out-of-shape POV shots and pumping house music, but not much of it leaves a trace.

Weirdly the Goya painting, which is at the heart of the film, is actually very little seen – surely its visual clues have more to say? One particularly strong sequence has a hypnotised McAvoy dreaming he visits a church in France stuffed full of masterpieces by Van Gogh, Modigliani, Rembrandt and Goya, but none can ever actually be viewed – they have all been stolen, and presumably lost forever.

Every time McAvoy and Dawson get some sexual chemistry going, a plot point comes barging in to break it up. They are both terrific – McAvoy is allowed to use his native accent, thank goodness, presumably as a nod to Boyle’s early Scottish films, and Dawson is very sensual and reveals she has a fantastic voice for film. Cassel, sadly, does his Pepe Le Pew franglais accent and is never that threatening for the head of a gang. Michael Fassbender was originally cast in the role and, sadly, had to pull out.

The many, many twists and turns in the second half end up blunting the impact of the film’s strong first half, and stretch credulity to snapping point. Are we really meant to believe a murder happens in broad daylight at the scene of the heist, with police and ambulances everywhere, and no one notices? Would Dawson really feel safe surrounded by thugs in their nightclub den – and not only that, hold court?

Boyle reunites with Shallow Grave and Trainspotting writer John Hodge, and the resulting script is very talky, very plotty but without much in the way of insight. There’s lots of psychobabble about memory and the brain, but ironically very little of it is memorable.

Let’s face it, even Hitchcock made bad movies, as film historian Boyle would be the first to admit. He stretched himself with his play version of Frankenstein, and dazzled the world with the Olympics, but seems to have lost his edge with his day job. At one point Dawson, referring to Cassel, says “never forget he’s a criminal”. Boyle seems to have temporarily forgotten what he does best.

Overall verdict: When Boyle’s work is seen in full this will be seen as a minor work. A flashy, stylish thriller but one which leaves as much mark on the memory as one of hypnotist Dawson’s therapy sessions. Something of a disappointment.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

For many film buffs The Big Lebowski remains one of the great cult movies of all time. A film noir that obeys every rule except one – it’s not a film noir, it’s a comedy – is pitch-perfect. So whisper it – whisper it very quietly – Small Apartments, at times, matches it for tone, comedy and script.

Bear with me, I know what you’re thinking – Matt Lucas in a comedy noir? In LA, with Billy Crystal? Come on…I had exactly the same reservations, especially after watching the dreadful trailer. But watching the film itself is a Coen-inflected, quirky, visually stunning, occasionally very funny delight. It has an internal logic and mood that it never breaks, even when the characters threaten to get too kooky.

Lucas, an unlikely a lead man to have ever headed a film, stars as Franklin Franklin, a sad loser living in a decrepit flat in a grubby part of Los Angeles. He lives alone – apart from his dog, which is equally rancid-looking – and wanders around his greasy, dripping flat in his pants, drinking pop , spying out of the window and playing his Swiss horn. His neighbours are an equally downbeat bunch. James Caan is his grumpy old man next door whose wife has died, Johnny Knoxville is a lazy stoner with a Jesus-worshipping alcoholic mum and Juno Temple is a wannabee stripper deluded into thinking she is going to make it big in Las Vegas.

Franklin has a problem – his landlord’s dead body in his flat, and the opening hour is spent trying to dispose of said cadaver. It might bring back memories of dreadful farces like Weekend At Bernie’s, but it’s way funnier than that. Having left enough evidence to let CSI convict him in about five minutes, instead we get Billy Crystal’s fire investigator, another hopeless character with an estranged wife and a cynical outlook – the gumshoe of the piece.

Meanwhile Franklin reminisces about his beloved brother (James Marsden), who was his reason for living until being led astray by a weird cult figure played with scenery-chewing glee by Dolph Lundgren. A film that makes Lundgren funny, without the usual ‘I’m too old for this shit’ Stallone-esque cheesiness has a lot going for it. And yes, the idea of the handsome Marsden being brothers with Lucas, with his hairless, baby-like body and cartoon-like face is utterly unlikely, yet the film has such surprising charm it’s hard not to go with it.

Every character, however small, has a scene that explains their character – and all of them are extremely well-written and delivered, but some may find that a little too neat and cute. On the whole though it works, and director Åkerlund pieces it together with just the right amount of pacing, while allowing his scenes to breathe. His visual style too really works – his history is in pop videos, but here the quick-cutting and time-delays are understated and all the more powerful for that. Los Angeles has never looked so grubby or ruined, despite the relentless sunshine and primary colours.

Small Apartments might exist to give Lucas a vehicle to branch out into Hollywood, and may well be too left-field and quirky to gain much of a mainstream following. However in a piece in its own right it works, and given Lucas’ previous film roles that’s a triumph. He was terrible in The Infidel, and mercifully brief in The Look Of Love, but here he is allowed to be as weird as he wants, and that actually works.

Overall verdict: An offbeat comedy/drama that calls to mind The Big Lebowski, and, at times, matches it for wit, charm and quirkiness. A totally unexpected delight.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

Just because a film is based on a true story doesn’t make it convincing. Zobel’s story screams at us that the crime his film depicts over 90 gruelling minutes actually happened, but that doesn’t make it any more palatable. In fact it makes the task of watching this thing, through what feels like four hours, complicit in the terrible creepy crime it depicts.

A fast food outlet gets a phone call from someone claiming to be ‘Officer Daniels’ from the police. He claims that a young cashier, Becky (Walker), has stolen some cash. He tells the duty manager, Sandra (Dowd), to take Becky into a room and hold her. He then makes Sandra, her co-workers and even her fiancée perform increasingly degrading acts on Becky, all in the name of finding the missing cash.

These include strip-searching the girl, making her do star jumps and worse. The call goes on for what seems like forever, and at no point do the workers suspect the ‘policeman’ is in fact a pervert. When they ask Daniels when the police are going to arrive he claims they are searching Becky’s house for drugs.

Put this film together with the recent docu-drama The Imposter and you’d have some pretty overwhelming evidence that the majority of Americans are unbelievably naïve and stupid, and will believe anyone in a uniform or who claims to be a cop. If that’s the aim, then mission accomplished, but it seems an utterly cynical and dark exercise – and to continually point to the ‘this really happened’ banner doesn’t excuse cynicism on this level.

The only real plusses are the performances of those actors who willingly put themselves through this stuff. Walker in particular is exceptional, looking more and more frightened as the nightmare she is put through gets ever darker. Naked for much of the film, it’s a tribute to her that she manages to retain her dignity as long as she does. Dowd too is good as the frankly unbelievably dumb manager, easily seduced by a phone call and all too willing to do as she is told by someone she has never met or seen.

Overall verdict: It sets itself up as an issue movie but all too quickly lapses into a mixture of ludicrous hyperbole and sheer tastelessness. The visual griminess is matched by the utterly depressing nature of the film, which goes way too far. Grim.

Reviewer Mike Martin

A great take on the classic children’s fairy tale, Jack the Giant Slayer is a fun blockbuster to take the kids too. Directed by Bryan Singer, this film takes a pretty direct approach to the story without adding too much fluff to beef up the content. That said, the story does elaborate a bit more on the story of Jack, and in doing so allows the audience to really get caught up in the action of the film.

The film begins with Jack as a boy, his father reading him a bedtime story of the giants in the sky. Initially reassured by his father that the cause for the thunder is not the footsteps of giants in the sky, Jack is set to worry again when asking his father, “How do you know there’s no such thing as giants”, to which his father cryptically replies “I don’t…”.

Skip forward quite a few year and Jack (Nicholas Hoult) is now living with his uncle on a farm, since his father has passed away. Cutting straight to the chase of the plot, Jack is sent away to the castle to sell their horse and cart in order to make some money. Within the castle, sinister deeds seem to be taking place, as Roderick (Stanley Tucci), a noble man courting the princess, plots to steal the magic beans from the tombs of the kings in order to use the giants in his plot against the King.

As legends tell, there is a magic crown (which he too has in his possession) that can bend the might of the giants to the wearer’s will. This is quite a handy little tool it turns out! A monk seeking to foil Roderick’s plan steals the beans and gives them to Jack. Later that night, the adventure-seeking princess Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson) comes to seek shelter from the rain in Jack’s farmhouse. However as luck would have it, the magic beans do indeed get wet and sprout into the massive fabled beanstalks. Leaving Jack behind, the sprout shoots up into the sky, taking the princess and his house with it.

Waking up in the morning to destruction, a massive beanstalk, a disappeared princess and a concerned King, Jack has to make things right. Aided by the deceptive Roderick and led by the Kings finest knight, Elmont (Ewan McGregor), Jack climbs up the bean stalk.

All in all this film is a simple pleasure to watch. If you’re not expecting to be entirely mentally stimulated or to catch an Oscar worthy performance, the film provides sufficient thrills. As mentioned previously, it will do great as a day out with kids on a rainy spring weekend. The production is fantastically good quality, with the visuals creating much of the excitement.

Although I am rather put off by the needlessness of the 3D, it certainly doesn’t hurt the action sequences of the film. The cast do a lovely job with Ewan McGregor’s performance as the confident and quirky Knight Elmont definitely adding some great humour to the action. It was great that the giants spoke and actually had motives and a plan to get back down to the land of man. Although the plot does move along predictably, as we all are familiar with this story this wasn’t to the film’s detriment.

Jack the Giant Slayer is a good action film for the young at heart. If you are up for some simple thrills and some really great CGI action sequences, this film is certainly recommended. Solid family fun.

Reviewer: Kevin Van Der Ham

Burt Wonderstone’s star, Steve Carell, has had a varied career. From his first major film role in Bruce Almighty (alongside Wonderstone co-star Jim Carrey) to his cult status character, Brick in Anchorman, Carell can muster a menagerie of comedy stylings, but often gets stuck with the more abrasive, dumb characters he played so well in his early days. With The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, Carell falls into his usual brash comedy and unfortunately it feels all too safe and familiar.

The film opens with a young Burt escaping a beating from the local school bullies. At home his mother leaves him a birthday gift – a magic set from celebrity magician Rance Holloway – and so his love of illusions begins. Flash-forward 30 years and along with lifelong friend and magical companion Anton Marvelton (Buscemi), he is the headline act in his own Vegas theatre. Marvelton and Wonderstone’s act has become bloated, tired and overdone. With new kid on the block, Steve Gray (a street magician who fantastically lampoons real life conjurer Criss Angel), hustling for their position, it isn’t long until the pairs’ show falls apart and Wonderstone loses everything.

The first half of the film sets up some great gags that play on the homoerotic overtones of Wonderstone and Marvelton’s ‘magical friendship’, as well how despite his humble beginnings, Wonderstone has changed into an arrogant fool. The scene in which he seduces a fan in the largest bed in Vegas is definitely a highlight. However, once Burt loses all his fame and glory, the film falls into the realm of cliché, often feeling like a version of Zoolander but with magic instead of fashion.

Another of the film’s faults is the cast, there are too many funny people in this film who aren’t used well enough. Carrey is brilliant as Steve Gray but he isn’t on-screen enough. The same goes for Steve Buscemi, who could have been the film’s highlight but is instead used for below average jokes and generally gets wasted on screen. Thankfully Alan Arkin, who with his recent run can seriously do no wrong, does a fantastic job as the catalyst for Burt’s love of magic, while James Gandolfini has a fantastic bit part as a bumbling Vegas mogul with more money than sense. There’s also Olivia Wilde, who plays the love interest, but that’s really all she’s used for, which is a disappointment as she usually delivers a solid performance.

The film starts to lose momentum about halfway through, the set pieces feel tired and obvious, with too many bit characters trying to deliver poor one liners. Things pick up in the film’s third act but by then the damage is already done.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone could have easily been comedy gold, but with too much talent and not enough great material for them it feels rather baggy and loses its magic within the middle act.

Reviewer: Gareth Haworth