Persepolis (M) 4 stars Limited release MARJANE Satrapi was born in Iran in 1969. She achieved celebrity status in France with the publication in 2000 of the first of her series of four graphic novels in which she describes, with wit and candour, what it was like growing up in Tehran under the shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and, later, how she responded to the fundamentalist regime of the shah’s successors.
Tropic Thunder (MA15+) 3½ stars National release FIRST there was Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s troubled epic about the Vietnam War, and then there was Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, a documentary by his wife Eleanor Coppola in which she exposed the conflicts and traumas that went into making the film.
What happens when a person accidentally finds himself involved in a social crisis he knows little or nothing about?
A slick but specious horror film in which an attractive young couple is terrorised in a lonely house by three maniacal killers
AMERICAN films about the Iraq conflict and the war against terror in general continue to be made despite the fact that audiences, especially in the US, are shunning them.
SWEDISH director Roy Andersson has only made four feature films in a career spanning 40 years, but each one has been impressive.
MOST will probably find Pineapple Express, the latest from the increasingly strained Judd Apatow school, very missable indeed.
The Square (MA15+) 3½ stars National release THE faithless wife, the greedy lover, the supposedly perfect plot that goes dramatically wrong: the elements of the good old-fashioned thriller work as well today as they ever did, as stuntman turned film director Nash Edgerton proves in his first feature, The Square.
Wanted (MA15+) 2½ stars National release THE best thing about Wanted, a brutally violent and overwrought adaptation of a series of comic strips by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones, is Scottish actor James McAvoy, who plays, with surprising conviction, a wimp transformed into a professional assassin.
The theme here is the need for friendship and accommodation between Arabs and Israelis.
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