Stuart Little 2****
Dir: Rob Minkoff
With: Michael J Fox, Geena Davis, Hugh Laurie, Jonathan Lipnicki, Anna Hoelck, Ashley Hoelck, Nathan Lane
78 mins, cert U
www.stuartlittle.com
It's painful to admit it, but the tiny, perky FX mouse in jeans and sweater once again carries the summer's most enjoyable kids' movie. This sequel stars the voice of the estimable Michael J Fox as our eponymous feisty rodent, and Geena Davis and Hugh Laurie play his live-action step-parents with tongue-in-cheek wholesomeness. It should be icky and yucky, but actually it's got bags of fun and loads of laughs, with a very cutely judged moment of pathos as Stuart has to drive home from school on his own in his little roadster, because no human kid wants to play with him.
The star of the show is the miserable family cat Snowbell, voiced by Nathan Lane, resentfully roped into helping his species enemy Stuart. Lane gets some cracking lines from Academy award-winning screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin, and director Rob Minkoff turns in a terrific piece of family entertainment. And at a tight 78 minutes running time, it certainly fulfils the Phineas T Barnum dictum about leaving you wanting more.
Jason X**
Dir: James Isaac
With: Kane Hodder, Jeff Geddis, Lexa Doig, David Cronenberg, Markus Parilo, Jonathan Potts, Lisa Ryder
93 mins, cert 15
www.jasonx.com
You know you're getting older when policemen look younger; your prostate gets bigger, contemporaries die off one by one and the number of films in the Friday the 13th series goes into double figures. Jason Vorhees, the unstoppable masked killer, is back. He is here distinguished as Jason X, not, sadly, because of any conversion to radical Islam. It's just that this is his 10th film. As one character says here, with desperate weariness: "We electrocuted him, gassed him, put him in front of a firing squad. Nothing was any good!" I suppose not.
Anyway he's back in the year 2455. Jason has been cryogenically frozen and thawed out for more slash-orientated mayhem, this time aboard a spaceship peopled largely by total babes. Former FX man Jim Isaac, here directing his first feature film, borrows conservatively, and indeed larcenously from Alien, Star Wars and Star Trek. It's got a few jaded laughs, but you might find yourself in agreement with one of the scientists, about to be blown into oblivion through the ship's ripped hull: "This sucks on so many levels!" There aren't that many levels available.
Hijack Stories***
Dir: Oliver Schmitz
With: Tony Kgoroge, Rapulana Seiphemo, Percy Matsemela, Makhaola Ndebele, Moshidi Motshegwa
94 mins, cert 15
An interesting Soweto-set thriller from Oliver Schmitz, the South African director of Mapantsula. Tony Kgoroge plays Sox, a would-be actor from the township ghetto who has yuppified himself and got a white girlfriend, but now, yearning to play a top gangsta in a TV show, tries re-immersing himself Method-style in his old neighbourhood - and gets out of his depth. In the course of coolly conceived short episodes, Schmitz shows how the business of car-jacking and auto-stealing to order works in modern South Africa, and shows it muddled up with radical but vague race politics. As the film wore on in search of an ending, it indicated a certain inability to raise its game for the final act. But it is an intriguing film with some exciting, tightly directed moments.
The Abduction Club**
Dir: Stefan Schwartz
With: Liam Cunningham, Alice Evans, Daniel Lapaine, Sophia Myles, Ben Palmer, Matthew Rhys
96 mins, cert 12
A genial, sweet-natured but ultimately flaccid romp set in 18th-century Ireland. Well-born but impecunious younger brothers kidnap heiresses and roguishly attempt to persuade them into matrimony. Daniel Lapaine and Matthew Rhys are twinklingly charming fellows who attempt to carry off the comely Kennedy girls: Alice Evans and Sophia Myles. It sometimes has an engagingly Fieldingesque quality, ending with our two heroes quivering under the shadow of the hangman's noose; there's nice support from Edward Woodward and Patrick Malahide and lovely locations, but of the female leads, only Sophia Myles seemed to be able to relax in the costume and maquillage and have some fun.
Lighthouse*
Dir: Simon Hunter
With: James Purefoy, Rachel Shelley, Christopher Adamson, Bob Goody
95 mins, cert 18
www.lighthouse-the-movie.co.uk
This is a very odd British film from young writer-director Simon Hunter - here presented as part of a double-bill with the Sam Raimi classic The Evil Dead. It's a project that's been in gestation for eight years, completed three years ago with lottery help, and already out on video in the US under the title Dead of Night. It's a straightforward, unimaginative slasher picture about a serial killer convict, one Leo Rook, who kills off warders and fellow lags one by one when they are marooned on a lighthouse. It has some glimmers of interest, and some diverting visuals, but really nothing makes up for the laborious pace and risibly bad writing. This is a film school project, nothing more: making the public see it - and indeed partly subsidise its existence - is not easily forgiven.
Vivre Sa Vie*****
Dir: Jean-Luc Godard
With: Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot, André S Labarthe, Guylaine Schlumberger, Gérard Hoffman, Monique Messine
83 mins, cert 15
Vivre Sa Vie was made at a time when Godard and Anna Karina were near to break-up, but, superbly shot in black and white by Raoul Coutard, it's a film that shows the director was still totally fascinated by her. He watches her face almost as if he were a client of the Parisian prostitute she becomes in the film. It's not so much a story as a series of tableaux describing the life of a married woman who wants to get out of her mundane existence and become an actress, but ends up a whore.
Most of it is highly stylised but even in its colder, more existentialist moments possessed of considerable emotion. There's a passion there that's hard to define except in terms of superb, totally fluid and, for the time, completely original and audacious film-making. Karina doesn't so much act as react, and her every movement is watched by Godard, seemingly almost in awe. Only Godard could have made this film and at the time - 1962 - it seemed like a masterpiece. It remains so now, telling us more, sometimes by the simple device of telling us less, than any other film about what the French used to call "the life".
Derek Malcolm
Malpertuis****
Dir: Harry Kümel
With: Susan Hampshire, Michel Bouquet, Mathieu Carrière, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Daniel Pilon, Walter Rilla
125 mins, no cert
After a hacked-about English language version was presented at Cannes in 1972, Harry Kümel's extraordinary Malpertuis largely disappeared from view. Kümel had made two films before this one - the impressive Monsieur Hawarden, and the more famous Daughters of Darkness, which cast Delphine Seyrig as a lesbian vampire. He is a kind of Belgian Cocteau - but a good deal more baroque and with certain affinities to his more fastidious countryman André Delvaux.
His film is based on Jean Ray's fantasy novel and follows Mathieu Carrière's sailor home to the ornate and mysterious family mansion presided over by his dying uncle (Orson Welles, who apparently had bits of his script deposited here and there over the bed linen). The sailor, trapped in a house with endless hidden chambers, meets three women, each of whom is played by a surprisingly lubricious Susan Hampshire. It looks as if he will be lucky to get out alive.
The film, adorned by a George Delerue score, has a surreal, dreamlike edge to it and there's a highly coloured portentousness that neither Cocteau nor Delvaux would have allowed. Even so, this "histoire d'une maison maudite" is so striking that you can forgive Kumel his dafter flights of steamy imagination and recognise the film-maker as a true original.
Derek Malcolm
