Stuart Little 2 (75 mins, PG) Directed by Rob Minkoff; starring Geena Davis, Hugh Laurie, Jonathan Lipnicki
Hijack Stories (90 mins, 15) Directed by Oliver Schmitz; starring Tony Kgoroge, Rapulana Seiphemo
The Abduction Club (96 mins,12) Directed by Stefan Schwartz; starring Daniel Lapaine, Alice Evans, Matthew Rhys, Sophia Myles
Lighthouse (95 mins, 15) Directed by Simon Hunter; starring James Purefoy, Rachel Shelley, Chris Adamson
Jason X (92 mins, 15) Directed by Jim Isaac; starring Lexa Doig, Lisa Ryder, Chuck Campbell
Vivre sa vie (85 mins, 15) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard; starring Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot
Malpertuis (128 mins, no cert) Directed by Harry Kümel; starring Orson Welles, Susan Hampshire, Mathieu Carrière
We'll start with a teaser. Which of this week's new releases features the romantic leads getting lovey-dovey at a drive-in screening of Vertigo? Place your bets, then meet me at the end of this column for the answer.
In the meantime, let's hear it for Stuart Little 2. The original Stuart is a little classic. There's quick-witted dialogue ('Didn't your mother tell you not to go into Central Park at night?' asks a scaredy-cat feline. 'My mother was the reason you didn't go into Central Park at night,' comes the alley cat's reply); candy-coloured production design just this side of early Tim Burton; and glorious playing, from those present in body (Hugh Laurie and Geena Davis as the parents who adopt a computer-generated mouse called Stuart), or voice (Nathan Lane as the cat bumped into second place). Best of all, the film is an embarrassment to its co-writer, M. Night Shyamalan, who went on to direct the pompous thriller The Sixth Sense, and badmouthed poor dear Stuart in print.
Now the makers of Stuart Little 2 have hired another morbid scribe: Bruce Joel Rubin, who wrote the death-obsessed - and deathly-dull - trilogy of Ghost, My Life and Jacob's Ladder. The new film isn't as sprightly as its predecessor, and it would be tempting to blame Rubin if the fault didn't lie more with a case of sequel-itis. Most of the old cast is back, including the sardonic Lane, who could read a Kit-E-Kat label and make it sound like Oscar Wilde. But the freshness has, inevitably, evaporated.That said, a number of succulent visual gags will make it worth braving the summer-holiday scrum at the popcorn counter: Stuart sitting on the subs' bench at a Pee-Wee Soccer match, swinging his teeny-weeny legs; and a shot of his miniature car, vandalised by diminutive hooligans, its bobbin-sized wheels missing, presumably to be hawked at half-price off the back of a tiny lorry.
In Hijack Stories, a young black actor named Sox (Tony Kgoroge) hooks up with gangsters in a Soweto township in the hope that it will help his audition for the part of a television crimelord. It's a familiar story of the performance consuming the performer, with Sox forced to decide whether he is actor or hoodlum. The segmented chapter structure that works so well in Godard's Vivre sa vie here feels like a needless affectation. It's the only one. Oliver Schmitz handles his mostly inexperienced cast with aplomb, and makes light work of some gripping action sequences. An attempt in the closing minutes to transform the movie into a South African take on Performance is only moderately convincing.
Two new British films are notable merely for their lack of vision. The Abduction Club begins as a thigh-slapping swashbuckler, with a gang of eighteenth-century aristocratic outcasts kidnapping comely young heiresses and sweet-talking them into marriage, and ends with the traditional last-minute escape from the gallows. Everything in between is a blur of soft-focus and period prettiness, and hardly likely to hold the attention of the young audience for whom a 12 certificate has been thoughtfully secured. The eye must be quick to glimpse a proud Irish landscape neglected by the camera.
In Lighthouse, the eye must be quick to glimpse anything much at all: most of this low-rent serial-killer movie takes place in rain or shadows. One exception - a sequence shot in the blinding brightness of a toilet cubicle - indicates that the director Simon Hunter is a budding master of suspense; it drew from my mouth three astonished gasps in three minutes. But the excitement began and ended there. The film is being screened with The Evil Dead, which will do it no favours. That 1982 shocker, whose director Sam Raimi went on to make Spider-Man, is a textbook lesson in plugging budgetary holes with ingenuity and panache, not inadequate lighting.
The highpoints of Jason X, the tenth in the Friday the 13th series, are few, and easily itemised: David Cronenberg is harpooned; a woman has her head frozen, and then smashed to icy crumbs like a strawberry Popsicle. Since neither blade not bullet can halt the serial killer Jason Voorhees, the film has a pervasive numbness. I jumped once, when Jason was glimpsed in the deep-freeze, all icicles, eyeballs and gristle. Not because I was scared, you understand. It's just I have something at the back of my freezer that looks exactly like that.
Not many movies could get away with featuring an excerpt from Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc without making the audience want to rush out and watch that film instead. That's the arrogance of Jean-Luc Godard for you. In his 1962 picture Vivre sa vie, it is a screening of Dreyer's movie that prefigures the drift of Nana (Anna Karina) from acting towards prostitution.
Karina, who would be such a lovely livewire two years later in Bande à part, cuts a disconsolate figure, beautiful but hollow. Raoul Coutard's roving camera devotedly follows her around Paris, content with close-ups of the back of her head. You can see now what Bernard Rose, Mike Figgis, Lars von Trier and all the other DV-fixated filmmakers are striving for; they're trying to reclaim the freedom, the weightlessness, of cinema. Bravo to them.
Malpertuis was one of six movies to which Orson Welles contributed a cameo appearance in 1972, but it's safe to say that it was the most bizarre. He is the bedridden titan who summons relatives to his haunted house for some deathbed discourse. Released now in a two-hour director's cut, it's too pungent for my tastebuds. But if you like Mario Bava, Gothic literature, Greek mythology, Susan Hampshire or young blond sailors, there should be something in it for you. I hope I didn't leave out anyone.
As for those lovebirds necking along to James Stewart and Kim Novak - it was that wee rodent and his feathered belle, which by my reckoning means that the award for strangest film of the week goes, not to Malpertuis, but Stuart Little 2.
