Front Row Films

Dinner for Schmucks

4/10

I sat through this film which is being marketed as a comedy without a single laugh, though I came close once or twice. However, right at the end I discovered I was leaking a few tears. I think it must have been the happy ending - which I knew was coming from the beginning. Very strange.

Switch,The

5/10

This is a film which mixes the appealing with the banal and the predictable. The two elements fight it out for 100 minutes and it ends in a score draw.

Diary of A Wimpy Kid

5/10

Greg Heffley is starting middle school, and despite the worst predictions of his obnoxious older brother, he is convinced that he will become the popular kid in the school. But life can be full of surprises.

Grown Ups

2/10

Watching this appalling film, I couldn't help wondering how so many actors can consciously make fools of themselves without experiencing a deep sense of shame and depression. It completes a trilogy of truly dire films that I have seen in the last fortnight.

Tamara Drewe

6/10

Based extensively and brazenly on Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd, Tamara Drewe ran for 2 years in The Guardian as a comic strip based around the misdeeds of a hot young woman from London, who stirs the desires of three men in a sleepy rural village.

Piranha 3D

I've got nothing against trashy B movies which imitate better films - as long as they are entertaining. This is as a dull as a wet afternoon in Bognor Regis.

Marmaduke

On the basis of the worst user review I've ever seen on imdb, and having watched the trailer, I now pronounce this film a stiff.

Scott Pilgrim vs The World

7/10

I like totally think you should go and see this film, which is way awesome and cool, and the best comic book adaptation ever. Truly.

Salt

6/10

When Tom Cruise decided not to appear in this film, so as to make Knight And Day, Angelina Jolie stepped in to the vacant position. She got the better end of that particular deal.

Expendables, The

1/10

After The Last Airbender, I thought that we had achieved a new low in modern cinema. But this cheap, nasty, violent and horribly dated movie is a new contender for Worst Film of the Year.

The Girl Who Played With Fire

6/10

The bad news is that this isn't up to the standard of the first film. The good news is that it's still very watchable.

The Illusionist (animated)

5/10

Of all the films I saw at the Berlin Film Festival, this was the one I was looking forward to most - and therefore was most disappointed by.

The Secret in Their Eyes

8/10

When a film beats The White Ribbon and Un Prophete to the Best Foreign film Oscar, then it has to be pretty damn good.