Eli Roth has described this landmark slice of French cinema as “cinematic punk rock”, which is spot-on. Even 50 years on from its first release it’s possible to see how this free-spirited homage to film noir, set in a glowing Paris, must have stunned audiences with its improvised feel, loose rhythms and jump-cutting.

Plot-wise it’s classic b-movie noir material – our hero, Michel (Belmondo), steals a car and drives from Marseille to Paris to pick up some cash he is owed by a dodgy gangster. En route he shoots a cop, and when he arrives in the capital the police form a constant shadow. There he hooks up with old girlfriend Patricia (a radiant Seberg), and tries to persuade her to sleep with him and that he really loves her. She however doesn’t trust him – how can she, when he is clearly a petty criminal and a thief, and she has a better offer from a publisher? The rest of the film is pretty much the two of them verbally sparring and running from the police, twice taking refuge in the comforting dark of a Champs Elysees cinema, until the inevitable showdown, which owes as much to the Western as noir. Godard said “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl,”, and here is that movie.

It’s really all about the style over any substance, but what a style it is. The original cut was well over two hours, but the final film had to be 90 minutes. Instead of cutting out scenes, as was the usual practise, Godard cut out moments between actions, thus speeding up the action and creating a jerky visual style. It was a huge risk, but it works brilliantly, requiring the audience to fill in the gaps. The shooting of the policeman is a classic example – we see the bike approach Michel, a close-up of his gun in his hand, and the cop falling to the ground. All of the action in between – any dialogue between the two of them, Michel reaching for the gun, and aiming it – is gone, yet the scene still makes sense. It was something of a cinematic breakthrough, and Godard spent the next 30 years trying to refine his new language.

The director  also makes great use of his three big stars – Belmondo, Seberg and Paris itself.  Belmondo is the epitome of 60s cool, fag constantly in mouth, endlessly borrowing money from his friends so he can zip around Paris in a stolen car, staying one step ahead of the cops. Seberg is equally visually iconic – the picture of the two of them walking along the Champs Elysees with her in an International Herald Tribune t-shirt is a classic. She is an American trying to become a journalist, using her pixie charm to get noticed. Their relationship is complex and playful – it is never really clear who loves whom – but always entertaining and ultimately tragic when the inevitable betrayal takes place.

Considering it was made by people who were more interested in film criticism than actually making movie – film journal Cahiers du Cinema gets a mention – it’s not surprising Breathless is stuffed with so many homages to cinemas. Belmondo bases his image on Humphrey Bogart, constantly rubbing his lips, he tells Patricia “I always fall for the wrong girls”, a line from The Maltese Falcon. The ending is very like High Sierra, which was Bogart’s first major role.

The cinema itself is a handy hiding place for the two lovers, and dialogue can be heard from Westbound, a 1958 Randolph Scott western, and Whirlpool, a 1949 Otto Premiger film. But the biggest homage is perhaps the story itself, which is very much like They Live By Night, the 1949 Nicholas Ray film noir. The French new wave of filmmakers were trying to overthrow the “Le cinéma du papa” – “dad’s cinema” – and bring in something fresh.

Paris has never looked lovelier – there is a stunning shot of the lights coming on in the Champs Elysees on a summer’s night, and the romantic surrounds can only create a hugely atmospheric setting for the love affair.

Ultimately it’s tempting to see Breathless as a fluke moment in time, when the planets were aligned. Certainly Seberg and Godard never hit the same heights again – Seberg had a long, slow, tragic decline and a suicidal end, while Godard became embroiled in politics and obsessed with challenging mainstream cinema, and basically made ever-more unwatchable films. He became an aloof, didactic bore. Here though his loose style of filmmaking works a treat – some days he would refuse to work because he was ‘uninspired’, some days the actors would have few lines and would have to improvise. Somehow the tributes to b-movies, the story and acting styles all converge to create one of the really iconic moments of ‘Nouvelle Vague’ French cinema. Writer Francois Truffaut and Godard never worked together again, in fact the film damaged their relationship irreparably, and Godard went on to have bust-ups with almost every major French writer and star. Yet despite all this, Breathless works.

Overall Verdict: Wonderfully spontaneous, fresh, blast of the French New Wave that looks as crisp as it did 50 years ago.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

As Harry Hill would say; “and relax”. After years in production, after the Pixar-Disney split and then merger (which was partly about Disney’s plans to make a Toy Story sequel without Pixar’s involvement), as well as the usual concerns over sequelitis, this looks set to be the summer’s genuine family entertainment. It’s marvellous – sweet, funny, pacy, loaded with jokes, and will appeal to younger children and parents alike. Only sulky teenagers could have any reason to dislike it, but then they get Twilight, which they’re welcome to.  

The really clever thing here is that the gags appeal to everyone. There is no adult-child split like so many children’s films. Even when Barbie meets Ken and they get together in his dreamhouse, the temptation is resisted for any bawdy or adult humour – but they are still hysterically funny, especially the hopelessly vain Ken (voiced by Toy Story newcomer Michael Keaton).

It opens with a lovely sequence, an adventure story which we quickly realise is going on inside Andy’s head, just using his toys and his imagination. We then cut forward to Andy as a teenager about to go to college, so his mum makes him decide – either take the toys with him, put them in the attic or take them to the local nursery. He decides to keep Woody and put the rest in the attic, but due to a mix-up they end up in the nursery, where they meet lots of other old toys, headed by purple cuddly toy Lotso (Ned Beatty) . Life is great here, they are told – the nursery is full of kids who just love playing with toys, conditions are good and Lotso keeps everyone happy.

However, what the newcomers don’t realise is that there is a strict system in operation here, the senior toys get played with by the nice kids while the newcomers get pulled apart by some truly horrible brats – a particularly funny sequence. Something must be done, but Lotso operates a prison-like operation to stop anyone escaping. It’s up to Woody and Buzz to form a committee to get them out of there.

The real reason this is such a delight is the script, written by Michael Arndt, who did such a fantastic job with the wonderful Little Miss Sunshine. He brings the same gentle humour to proceedings here, and wrings out every joke he can from each comic character. Mr and Mrs Potato Head are gloriously wonky, Rex (Wallace Shawn) is over-excited at the prospect of being played with again and of course Tom Hanks and Tim Allen are on top form as Woody and Buzz. When Lightyear is ‘reset’ to a Spanish setting, the results are witty, but the joke is never overdone.

The ‘bad’ toys are equally finely drawn – never has a baby doll sounded so threatening, and Beatty manages to make a purple cuddly toy genuinely evil. Arndt also has loads of fun with some of the minor toys, especially Mr Pricklepants, played by a gloriously hammy Timothy Dalton. However it’s when the script pairs up Ken and Barbie that it really lets rip – Barbie can’t believe her luck, a man with a room just for trying on clothes. Ken (Michael Keaton) is comedy gold, a toy so stupid he can’t seen how he is actually for girls, not boys.

Such is the confidence in the set-up that the film even goes for a sequence where the toys find themselves in an incinerator, and it plays it straight. It’s superbly pitched, and almost unbearably tense, even for adults. The way the story plays out offers a moral of sorts, but it’s not overdone and actually remains true to the spirit of the first two films.

For me the best joke is John Ratzenberg’s Hamm the pig, offering a line which could be straight out of Cheers. Trivia fans should note; he is the only actor who has been in all 11 Pixar films. Like all of the toys his voice fits his toy perfectly, keeping the mums in the audience as happy as their kids, who, at the screening I attended, were mesmerised for over 100 minutes without fidgeting at all. That’s a real triumph.

Overall verdict: A summer treat that will keep the whole family happy. Wonderful family entertainment that works on every level, and the jokes come thick and fast. Lovely stuff.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

You have to love Russell Brand, really you do. Any accusations of buffoonery and his sheer preposterous qualities are just water off a duck’s back – he’s way ahead of them. No-one takes himself less seriously and has more self-awareness, which means he has enormous comic skills but also can be serious too.

All of his qualities are in evidence here. He plays Aldous Snow, the absurd, preening rock star he played in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, perhaps the most approachable of the Judd Apatow school of comedy. There he stole Kristen Bell from Jason Segel, here he is living the rock star’s life in London. Over in LA, record MD Sean Combs wants some ideas to generate cash, and Aaron Green (Hill) suggests a 10th anniversary restaging of Snow’s legendary concert at the Greek Theatre.

It’s a done deal, now all Aaron has to do is get Snow out of London and onto a plane. Easier said than done – partly because Aaron has to cope with his girlfriend (the wonderful Moss), who wants to move to Seattle to pursue her doctor’s career. His bigger problem though is Snow himself, a rock star with a huge ego who simply refuses to catch a plane on time. Aaron suffers a mad 48 hours in London, before finally they go to New York to announce the gig on the Tonight show.

That is a predictable booze-fuelled disaster, but worse is to come when Snow insists on stopping off in Las Vegas to meet up with his estranged dad (Colm Meaney), now a jobbing musician. That ends up in a fight, and there is no respite when they finally reach LA as Snow wants to hook up with old flame Jackie Q (Rose Byrne).

Get Him To The Greek – Opening Five Minutes

It’s pretty predictable plot-wise, and the seemingly never-ending scenes of Snow wildly out of control and Aaron trying to tame him do pall a little bit over the 109 minutes’ running time. Yet it does charm, ultimately for Brand’s funny, engaging performance.  Of course he’s pretty much playing himself, a louche, loud, outrageous man hiding the inner emotional life of a child, but there is no-one better than Brand at doing it. Even throwaway moments are witty – at one point he tells a make-up man “I’m not going to wear this hat in the studio, so what you’re doing is pretty much irrelevant”. He does push himself a little too, in a sweet scene where he plays with his young son to reveal a softer side.

He and Hill have a good chemistry too, even when Brand’s constant insistence that he take drugs leads to more vomit than is really necessary. Brand also has stage presence – in fact, he filmed scenes performing as Snow at  comedy show Scandalous, at the O2 arena in London, in front of an audience of 20,000 fans.

Of the female parts, Byrne is particularly funny as Snow’s dreadful girlfriend, absurdly earnest in her  charity work yet happy to end up in bed with Metallica’s drummer. She plays it with a convincing Cockney accent, and is very amusing. There’s also a quick cameo from Kristen Bell as Sarah Marshall, in her new drama.

The only sequence that really falls flat is when Snow goes to Vegas to meet up with his dad (Meaney). It doesn’t really go anywhere and ends predictably with yet another bacchanal, but the comedy pay-off is hardly worth it.

Overall verdict: With a high gag count and some great comedy performances this has squeezed more life out of the Atapow school  of comedy, and given Brand perhaps a career-defining performance.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

After the sheer ghastliness of Sex And The City 2, it’s so refreshing to see a film about females living in New York that is witty, engaging and very charming. Huge credit for that must go to writer-director Nicole Holofcener, who gave us the equally sweet Friends With Money. If you need evidence of her talent, she made Jennifer Aniston bearable in that story – well, almost. It’s tempting to think of her as a female Woody Allen, and that’s not unfair, and she did actually direct a couple of episodes of the TV series of SATC, as well as the wonderful Six Feet Under.

Like Friends With Money, Please Give is set in a comfortable, middle-class world where the lives of the characters are not as perfect as they look. The always watchable Keener is Kate, an antiques expert who runs a shop on Fifth Avenue and lives with her likeable hubby Alex (Platt) and daughter Abby (Steele). Things are good – Kate has a great eye for picking up furniture from New York residents who have died, Alex is a witty, fun husband, and yet she is unhappy. Not only is her daughter struggling with puppy fat and spots, but Kate is racked with guilt about her comfort, constantly handing out cash to the homeless.

Into their lives come Rebecca (Hall) and Mary (Peet), two sisters looking after their grumpy grandmother who lives next door to Kate. The sisters are very different, Rebecca does mammograms all day, is taciturn and suffers through disastrous internet dates, while Mary is utterly superficial, obsessed with tanning and clothes, and desperate to find out why her boyfriend dumped her.

Holofcener has two big strengths, her writing, which is effortlessly funny, and her way with actors. The first hour has loads of great gags, with Kate’s angst and Mary’s sheer stupidity being given a thorough comedy workover, but she also writes sparky dialogue which gives each character a real life. Even Abby’s teenage moodiness is rendered thoroughly believable.

The performances are universally excellent. Keener’s strained expression shows a woman who cares too much about things she fails to grasp, and Peet and Platt are jovially knockabout. But it’s Rebecca Hall, once again, who shows she has everything she needs to be a skilled film actress – she is flawed, fragile, vulnerable yet utterly beguiling, and has enormous presence as she showed in Vicky Christina Barcelona. The plot sets her up with a slightly unlikely boyfriend – he is little more than a cipher – but she still carries it off with grace.

The pace does slacken in the last half hour, and sentimentality oozes in when characters start dying and Kate starts returning objects because of her guilt. There is also a running theme of Abby and her desire for the perfect pair of jeans which wears a little thin, but overall this is a lovely way to spend 90 minutes in New York with fun but complex characters.

Overall Verdict: Funny, engaging, adult story of guilt with shades of Woody Allen at his very best, and which features some terrific performances. For people who found SATC2 unbearable this will restore the faith.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

Fans of the mighty Orphanage (2007) and even mightier Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) will be aware of a new wave of Spanish/Mexican psychological horror films, and this is the latest offering. The comparisons with The Orphanage are many, but this is a slightly more overwrought, slightly less effective chiller, but still with lots of brilliant moments.

Like that film this has a young mum at its centre, in this case oceanographer Maria who is bringing up her five-year-old boy Diego on her own. She gets a month-long shift working on the island of El Hierro, but on the virtually empty ferry Diego disappears. She is distraught, the police do their best but facilities on the bleak, lunar-like island are limited. Eventually they find a body, but when Maria goes to identify it she insists the boy is not her son. The police insist on a DNA test but can only do one in three days’ time, so Maria is forced to check into a desperately creaky old hotel and explore the island.

The young woman suspects everyone – the island is populated only by some oddball campers and the police, but she seems to see her son – or echoes of him – everywhere. Is she going mad or is she on the right track? When she meets another mother whose son has also disappeared she becomes obsessed with the idea there is a paedophile somewhere on the wretched rock.

Like The Orphanage, Hierro has a stupendous central performance by its female lead. Anaya gives absolutely everything as Maria, driven apparently to insanity by her loss and willing to do anything to get her boy back. Even though she is an apparently frail girl she trudges up and down mountains, swims in the sea and drives like a maniac in pursuit. It’s a tremendously physical performance, yet the scene in which she seems most at risk is when she has a simple nosebleed in the shower.

Overall though, despite some amazing visuals – the island is as wind-swept and colourless as a desert – the story tips all too often into being overwrought and over-ripe. The hotel is just too slimy, the policeman a little too downbeat, the sea little too crashing. There is a twist at the end which virtually has flashing lights and a siren around it, so soon can you see it coming, and it seems overstretched even at a modest running time. There is also the seemingly obligatory cuts into David Lynch territory, as Maria’s hallucinations take on a dreamy, watery feel, but add little to the atmosphere once that is created.

Spanish films have come into their own in the past decade, but Hierro can only be considered a minor addition to their output. If you’ve seen The Orphanage before there’s a nagging suspicion you’ve seen this done before, and better. Top marks for the performances and visuals, middling marks for the way the story is handled and the longeurs.

Overall verdict: Haunting Spanish psychological story with a committed central performance and many atmospheric moments, but there’s a sense of déjà vu from Spanish cinema. It’s been done before and better.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

Killers is pretty much what you’d expect a romantic action comedy starring Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl to be – formulaic, not particularly good, but serviceable enough that you won’t be throwing things at the screen. It’s from the school of filmmaking that feels that if you aim low enough, you’re bound to reach your mark and create something bland, inoffensive but marketable. And apparently that’s preferable to aiming higher, where you might create something great, but there’s also a chance you’ll end up with an absolute stinker.

Kutcher seems to have an incredible nose for these sitcom level movies that demand little from him (and where even so he often under-delivers), and has filled his CV with them for the better part of a decade, while Heigl seems to be following suit and risks ruining a promising film career if she doesn’t choose her movies with a bit more care. That’s especially true as neither of them seems right here, despite somewhat playing to type.

Kutcher play a smooth, debonair professional assassin called Spencer, who meets the ditzy Jen (Heigl) while she’s on holiday in France trying to get over a break-up. The two fall madly in love with each and get married – the only thing being that he doesn’t tell her the part where he actually kills people for a living. But maybe it doesn’t matter as he’s going to give that up to live a normal life with his wife. Cut to three years later, and Spencer and Jen’s domestic bliss is interrupted when it’s discovered that someone has taken out a hit of Spencer, and now everyone and their dog is out to kill him.

Cue Heigl shrieking a lot after discover what her husband’s former job was, as well as the fact that bullets are flying at her seemingly everywhere she goes. It also turns out most of the people they thought were their white-bread suburban idyll friends and neighbours, are actually sleepers who would like nothing more than to kill Spencer.

Hollywood really does seem to have the lost the art of the screwball yarn, so that while we should watch Killers and just be able to revel in the romance, action and fun, instead it’s difficult not to keep wondering whether you’ve completely missed something vital because so little of it makes sense, and it’s not entertaining enough to completely cover that up. That’s partly due to the fact Kutcher and Heigl lack the chemistry and nous to make the implausible seem fun enough that you’re willing to go along for the ride. Instead Kutcher tends to sleepwalk through the film, while Heigl overplays it.

As I said, the movie aims low, so that while there’s not a lot of wit, sparkle, humour, romance or action spectacle, there’s a small amount of each, so it can tick all the ‘date movie’ boxes. It’s a film that doesn’t take enough risks to be a flat-out failure, instead coasting along in a not-loathsome fashion. You’re unlikely to hate it, but similarly I’d be surprised if most viewers didn’t wish the Killers was a whole lot better than it is.

Overall Verdict: It tick the boxes, but an implausible plot, lack of chemistry between the actors and a seemingly little desire on anyone’s part to make it more than ok, mean there’s little to recommend Killers, but little to hate it for either.

Reviewer: Phil Caine