The wedding farce is almost a sub-genre in its own right, and this Algerian/French entry into it, is a genuinely amusing and always charming affair. Mounir (director Lyes Salem) is driven to build his status within his small village. He calls himself a horticultural engineer, but is really just a gardener for The Colonel, the village’s big cheese, often mentioned but rarely seen. His sister, Rym, is narcoleptic, given to falling asleep at key moments, not exactly prime wife material. This has made Mounir something of a laughingstock.

Rym though, has been seeing Mounir's best friend, Khliffen, on the sly. He is too shy to ask her hand. When Mounir gets drunk one night, and announces to the village that a rich foreigner is wooing Rym, she decides this is a great opportunity to force Khliffen's hand. Of course the foreigner is fictitious and the lie spins out of control.

While there is nothing new about this story, it is light-hearted and good fun to watch. Salem had brought together a genial team of actors all of whom perform well. Visually the film is assured and I know I for one, will be eagerly waiting to see what this talented Algerian comes up with next.

Roald Dahl's beloved book about a wily fox outwitting three mean-spirited farmers has delighted children for years, and this big-screen adaptation will too. Wes Anderson's quirky visual style is tailor-made for this kind of film, and he does not disappoint with this vibrant stop-motion adaptation.

The story is, like most of Dahl's work, simple on the surface, but hinting at more serious things underneath. Mr. Fox is a good husband and father, providing for his family the only way he knows how: by thieving from the neighbourhood farmers. When the farmers decide to fight back, the fox family and several others, are trapped underground with no way to escape except to dig. And dig they do, outwitting the hapless farmers in the process.

Featuring a veritable constellation of star power in the voice talent. Fantastic Mr. Fox will delight adults as well as children with its expressive animation and visual flair.

web: www.fantasticmrfoxmovie.com

In a Romanian village in 1953, a couple, Iancu and Mara, are preparing for their wedding. Everything is not running smoothly. Their fathers are not thrilled with the match, and the village mayor is both a fool and a Communist.

When the news of Stalin's death reaches the village, the mayor, bound to Moscow, must enforce a general state of mourning. All celebrations are called off. Including weddings. Iancu and Mara are determined to go ahead with their matrimonial celebration in spite of the ban and decide to go ahead with it in silence.

Emir Kusturica is the master of this slightly absurd slice of Eastern-European life cinema, and director Horatiu Malaele owes much to Kusturica here. The film is centred firmly in village life, form the old drunks in the local tavern to the proprietors of the Mom & pop store. The Communists are seen here as buffoons and nincompoops, following orders that make no sense for no good reason.

Witty, whimsical and at times dabbling in what can only be called magic-realism, Silent Wedding is an entertaining look at another culture at another time and gives us hope that the joys of human nature can always overcome politics.

web: www.nuntamuta.ro

Set in the Midwest in 1967, this is perhaps the most autobiographical film the Coen Brothers have ever made. It is also the most dense in terms of plot and features some of the most complex characters in the Coen's career. It is also about as far away from No Country For Old Men as you can get.

Larry Gopnik is a physics professor whose life gets thrown into turmoil when his wife abruptly announces she is leaving him for an overbearing smooth talker. His brother Arthur has been sleeping on his couch and shows no signs of leaving any time soon, something that irritates Larry's nose-job seeking daughter no end; Arthur stays in the bathroom far longer than even a teenage girl. His son, Danny, is smoking pot and listening to Jefferson Airplane while he is supposed to be studying the Torah for his bar mitzvah. On top of this he has a gun-toting redneck living next door, a failing student who is bribing and threatening him and anonymous letters threatening his chance at tenure. Overwhelmed, he turns to religion to help him through. But can religion really help one become "a serious man"?

Opening with a flashback to an earlier time in a Polish shetl, the film's multiple themes are set up before the main story even begins. And what themes they are! Man's search for meaning in life, the existence of God, pattern and randomness in the universe, and the solitude of the human condition are all touched on here. It sounds heavy, and in many ways it is. But it is also extremely funny; outrageously so in places.

The detail in this film is outstanding, with props and costumes offering sly insights into characters. The little known actors in the lead roles give outstanding performances of great depth and subtlety. And this has one of the best endings of any film this year, one that will have you thinking for days after the screening, and probably coming back for a second viewing. Which would be very worthwhile because this is a film that both deserves and demands multiple viewings.

web: youtube

Based on the highly successful novel by Steig Larssen, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a taut and twisty thriller. Mikael is a journalist who has been sentenced to three months in prison following his revealing of a financier’s dodgy tax shelters. Still at large while waiting for the date his incarceration is to begin, he is contacted by an industry tycoon, Venger, who has a forty-year-old mystery he would like solved. Impressed by Mikael's journalistic work, and his tenacity when he knows he is onto something, Venger hires him to try and get some answers.

Mikael moves to Venger's island community and begins investigating, helped with his odd quest by a Goth woman hacker, Elsbeth. Elsbeth has a criminal past of her own, and is reluctant to give away anything about her past.

I can't say much more about the plot without giving it away, so I'll stop here. Anyone who has read the book is likely to be a little disappointed by how compressed the novel has become in this screen translation, despite it being close to two and a half hours long. But for those who haven't read it, there are enough plot twists, dramatic turns and unsavoury characters to fill two regular movies. With news of a US version going into production already, make sure you don't miss the Swedish original!

web: loshombresquenoamabanalasmujeres.es

trailer: youtube trailer

Widely heralded as the saviour of British independent film making, Eran Creevy's debut feature is a hard-hitting, emotionally devastating look into the life of a petty crack dealer in the London suburbs. Four years earlier, following the accidental drug death of a girl, Chris fled London. He has settled in Manchester and is quite comfortable there, living a white-collar existence. He returns to London and looks up his best mate, Shifty, who had been dealing weed and took the fall for Chris four years ago.

What follows is a day in the life of the crack dealer as Chris trails around after him, trying to find out why his friend, so brilliant at school, has sunk to such lows. Meanwhile, Shifty's supplier, Glen, is out to get him, trying to set him up to look bad. And one of Shifty’s clients, Trevor, is desperate to get his hands on some gear, despite having no cash and being kicked out by both his wife and his employer.

There is no glamour to this life and Creevy does an admirable job in capturing the grim squalour. Shifty's devout brother's house is an oasis of cleanliness and order into which Shifty brings his business, with devastating consequences. This is a film about the reality of drug taking and drug dealing: sneaky people doing nasty things behind closed doors.

Made for less than $100 000 pounds, this film looks incredible. The actors are uniformly good, especially Riz Ahmed as Shifty. After so many Guy Ritchie imitators trying to capture the dark underbelly of the British drug trade, this film is refreshingly without gunplay. Gritty, realistic and often heart-rendingly horrible, this is a tragic tale of friendship gone awry and a life that may be wasted.

web: www.shiftyfilm.com

A few years back Florian Habicht delved into the psyche of New Zealand's Far North with Kaikohe Demolition. Now he has refurned to this fertile ground to cover the Snapper Classic, the world's largest snapper fishing competition. Held on Ninety Mile Beach, the competion's $50 000.00 prize brings fishermen from around the world. Habicht follows a group of men and women as they battle it out, in a Northland storm, to haul in the biggest catch.

Habicht himself asks the questions, often curly ones like whether fish have feelings, something most New Zealand blokes who fish may never have considered before. Yet his disarming of these people makes them answer honestly and it is both intriguing and hilarious to see these people wresting with such philosophical ideas.

Fishing is generally a solitary pursuit, something that people do in order to have time out from real life, time to think and imagine. And the film grasps this well, truly getting across the almost religious nature of fishing as contemplation.

web: www.flicks.co.nz (info)

trailer: www.flicks.co.nz (trailer)

films website: www.picturesforanna.com

This endearing, funny and extremely clever film owes as much to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich as to Russian author Gogol. Paul Giamatti plays Paul Giamatti, an actor struggling with the role of Uncle Vanya. He is getting weighed down by the character and is finding it increasingly difficult to function in real life. He stumbles upon an article in The New Yorker about a doctor who extracts souls in order to lighten the burden some people are carrying.

Desperate for anything that will make things easier for him, Paul goes to the clinic. Naturally he is full of questions, all of which the doctor manages to answer quickly and without fuss. So Paul allows himself to be placed in the soul-extracting machine, something which resembles an oversized MRI. Afterwards he is surprised to find his soul looks like a chickpea.

Without his soul Paul is a different man. He is light hearted, breezy, comic. And terrible as Vanya. He returns to Soul Storage to discover his soul missing from its vault. Desperate for something to help him, he rents a Russian poet's soul while he tries to find his own. His investigations lead him to discover that there is a huge black market for Russian souls and that his own soul may well have made its way to Russia in soul mule, Nina.

There's more, but to reveal what happens next would be to reveal too much. Suffice to say this is a very clever film, full of interesting ideas about identity and what makes a person themselves. The film would not work without Giamatti who manages to play himself with and without a soul, to great dramatic effect. While there are some ideas that don't get the attention they perhaps deserve, and a plot line that gets suddenly dropped part way through, there is plenty of food for thought here. And did I mention that it is also extremely funny?

web: www.coldsoulsthemovie.com

This very charming and witty Norwegian film is reminiscent of Amelie, only the Audrey Tataou character is a man who remains nameless throughout the film. He is an insecure young man whose life is turned upside down by the sudden arrival in his life of Marianne. He never really invites Marianne in, but she turns up, more and more often, and finally starts bringing her furniture to his apartment.

He is unsure if he really wants a girlfriend, but is helpless in the face of her determination and force of personality. He starts spending time at the local swimming pool where he befriends Glenn, a world-weary character who advises him to sleep with her if he wasn't to get rid of her.

This only makes Marianne cling more.

She decides that the pair will take a train trip around Europe, but not long into the trip they are separated, she wanting to stay in the countryside with a bizarre couple they met, and he moving on to Paris. In Paris he meets a young French girl with whom he has far more in common with than Marianne.

Visually inventive, laugh-out-loud funny and often scream-at-the-screen frustrating, Gone With The Woman has much to recommend it. Less a battle of the sexes than an intimate portrait of what happens when two completely different people fail to communicate, this is one of the funniest films I've seen in ages and one I urge you not to miss.

web: website - www.nfi.no

trailer: youtube trailer

From the director of The Italian comes The Admiral, a huge hit in its native Russia and a film that has gone a long way toward rehabilitating the reputation of the titular Admiral, Alexandr Kolchak. This is an epic movie in the style of Doctor Zhivago or Titanic, a film this owes much to in terms of structure.

In the midst of the First World War, Kolchak is at sea fighting the Germans. Back on land he meets Anna, the wife of one of his colleagues. Despite both being married, the pair share an instant attraction that maintains its strength throughout the Russian revolution and the Civil War that follows.

With a good mixture of history, romance and action, this film has something for everyone. The war scenes are exceptional, incredibly violent and with blood, guts and lost limbs flying everywhere. The romance plays out a little more sedately. With both parties already married, the relationship is very chaste and it is difficult to believe that the pair would hold out for each other so long based on just attraction. It almost makes you think the film makers skipped the good bits.

A new cinema is coming out of Russia and The Admiral is an excellent example of the quality and passion being put into telling Russian stories for audiences in Russia and beyond.

With Sea Shepherd's actions in our own waters making headlines recently, there seems no better time to screen this outstanding documentary about the organisation's founder, Paul Watson. The film takes us through Paul's activist background; his first claim to fame is having been the youngest founding member of Greenpeace. Once he realized that Greenpeace were primarily about raising funds and awareness and less about actually protecting the ocean, he left them to form his own organization to do more.

Now he is best known as the vigilante environmentalist who arrests illegal fishermen and shark-finners (see Sharkwater which we screened in 2008 for his scene stealing turn). This documentary covers several of Paul's most recent and noteworthy accomplishments including the time Paul saw Japanese fishermen fishing illegally. He rammed their boat after documenting their criminal act. The Japanese vessel filed a complaint against him. Paul admitted guilt and provided his videotape of the infarction as evidence to the courts. The fishermen never turned up to court and ended up dropping all charges, claming the event never happened.

A more disturbing section of the film deals with the Canadian culling of baby fur seals. Not only is the slaughter of these beautiful creatures horrific to watch, but the spewing invective coming from the cullers at the Sea Shepherd crew is full of blind, misguided hatred.

In the face of such a glowing portrayal, it would be easy to imagine that director Ron Colby kept something off camera, some darker side of Watson that he doesn’t wish to show. But Paul is an open book, admitting openly to damaging vessels whose occupants are performing illegal acts. But he also proudly claims never to have killed or injured anyone in the process. He has complete knowledge of maritime law, and is enforcing it in places where no national government is doing so.

Charismatic and committed, Paul Watson is a vigilante, but not in the classic sense of the word. The cause he champions is an important one, and he and his organization are clearly taking on a role that nobody else is willing to. This film will, I'm sure, bring more people together to support him.

web: www.pirateforthesea.com

Last year's Young @ Heart showed us how singing in a choir could be an uplifting and life affirming activity for people of any age and ethnicity. The Choir confirms this, and adds to it the redemptive qualities that singing in a group can have for a group of hardened criminals.

Shot over four years, The Choir takes us inside Leeukwop Prison, South Africa's largest penitentiary. Jabulani, a teenaged robber, and his fellow inmates struggle for survival, rebellious and angry. When Coleman, a wily old bank robber asks him to join the prison choir, his life is changed forever. The film follows the choir as it prepares to perform at the National Prisoner Choir Competition.

The prisoners are amazingly open, Davie having spent considerable time in the prison, gaining their trust. The stories they tell are often horrific, but we need to see where these people have come from if we are to fully appreciate the distance they have come. Music has changed their lives in such an immense and significant way that it is impossible not to be overcome by emotion when the beautiful voices soar.

This is an inspiring film about finding hope and freedom in one of the unlikeliest places on earth.

trailer: youtube trailer

Living in a shed with six children may not be many people's idea of an idyllic way of life. Yet for the Karena family, living in one room is an opportunity for sharing and togetherness, not hardship. This remarkably intimate film follows the Karenas over a four year period in which they lose their home and an unborn child, but never their ideals of raising a family in harmony with nature.

Peter's long-running bad blood with his step-father has made him staunch about raising his own children in the way he would have liked to have been, rather than the way he was. And the six Karena children are given freedom to roam and experiment while also being given much love. A respect of nature and the natural world is being instilled in them, and the children clearly thrive in the outdoors whether it is riding horses bareback on the beach or hunting in the mountains for deer.

Never has New Zealand's East Coast been filmed so beautifully. And the gorgeous Karena children fit so naturally into their environment it is like they were made for one another. While it is easy to be cynical and call these parents hippies, perhaps we would all be better off taking a leaf out of their books and allowing our children the freedom to become themselves.

web: thiswayoflifemovie.com

web: facebook.com/thiswayoflifemovie

A tense revenge thriller, Law Abiding Citizen opens with a horrific home invasion in which Clyde (Gerard Butler) is forced to watch as his wife is killed and unspeakable atrocities (thankfully offscreen) are done to his daughter. The perps are caught, but through some legal loophole, get off easily, something that Clyde finds unforgivable. He is bent on revenge.

The form his revenge takes is best not gone into here for it will spoil your viewing pleasure. But let it be known that his resourcefulness is almost super-human. As the unexplainable crimes mount up, District Attorney (Foxx) is as determined to take the killer down as he is on getting his revenge.

Often quite daft and logic-defying, this film remains compelling even in its more preposterous moments. Both leads have a gritty determination that informs their every move, while director Gray manages to build layers of suspense and dread into each consecutive scene until the tension level is near unbearable.

Infinitely enjoyable while in the cinema, this one will not stand up to much post-film discussion or dissemination, but really, if you've spent an entertaining hour and a half, who cares?

web: www.lawabidingcitizenfilm.com