The Beach (15)
Directed by Danny Boyle Starring Leonardo Di Caprio, Robert Carlyle, Guillaume Canet, Virginie Ledoyen, Tilda Swinton
Sun, sand, sex, drugs . . . all this and Leo too. The adaptation of Alex Garland's best-selling potboiler must have seemed like a surefire winner. Add in the Trainspotting production team of Danny Boyle, John Hodge and Andrew McDonald and you can almost hear the pitches at breakfast meetings: "It's Lord of the Flies with a chemical twist". Actually, The Beach is not as bad as that, but the main problem is Di Caprio - not his acting, but his status as megastar of the moment, which misshapes the film.
Best (15)
Directed by Mary McGuckian Starring John Lynch, Ian Hart, Linus Roache, Jerome Flynn, Roger Daltrey, Patsy Kensit, Stephen Fry, Clive Anderson
McGuckian's film, co-written with her husband and star, Lynch, fails the key test of the sporting biopic - transmuting the base material of true events into the stuff of resonant drama. Lynch struggles to make something of the role, but fails to find a way around his character's passivity. Once the action moves off the pitch, we're into a hackneyed world of drinking bouts and dolly-birds, rendered with stilted clumsiness.
Topsy-turvy (15)
Directed by Mike Leigh Starring Jim Broadbent, Allan Corduner, Timothy Spall, Martin Savage, Kevin McKidd, Shirley Henderson
The Victorian world of WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan depicted here is not the ossified set of cliches of so many nostalgia-driven heritage movies - it's modern, hectic, messy and confused, much like ours. Spanning just a few fraught months in the relationship between the two, Topsy-Turvy's joy lies in its many brilliantly-observed vignettes and the sympathy and bittersweet humour with which the large gallery of characters is observed.
