LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Plastic is not a very good movie. The dialogue is laughable, the performances are iffy, it's directed with as much verve as an insurance infomercial and plotwise it's about on parallel with an average episode of Hustle. But it at least has the decency to be relatively quick and breezy and, at bare minimum, is enjoyable as trash.

Our heroes are four students making their way through uni with a combination of credit card fraud and low-level fencing. They are; Sam (Ed Speleers), the brainy one; Fordy (Will Poulter), the trustworthy one; Yatesey (Alfie Allen), the dickhead one; and Rafa (Sebastian De Souza), the gullible one. Between them they run a pretty tight operation, working in tandem to clone cards, steal pins, commit identity fraud, but online goods and sell them off to other students. But then it all goes tits up. They piss off a German gangster (Thomas Kretschmann), who threatens to kill them unless they can get £2 million for him in just two weeks. The film then takes a slight left turn from the dreary, overcast skies of the outskirts of London to Miami, where the gang, now with a blonde girl in tow, begin to plan a diamond heist to end all diamond heists.

For about the first third of the film my stomach was gradually sinking into the cushioned cinema seat. These characters are eminently hateable, the film's efforts to get us to sympathise with them by having them moan about their post-university employment prospects fall utterly flat. Further mitigation is attempted by showing them ripping off rude, rich people, I guess in an attempt to view them as brave Robin Hood types. Nope, they just seem a gaggle of arsehole-cheeky-joker-lads-banter archetypes who, let's face it, probably deserve that shallow grave in the woods they're being threatened with.

Those are child bearing lips.

The peripheral characters aren't much better. There's Frankie (Emma Rigby), who depressingly functions entirely as eye-candy for the guys to clash cocks over. She has next to zero involvement in the central plot, can't act worth a damn and is primarily there to walk around in a bikini behind a pair of pouty pneumatic lips - a panacea for the Zoo Magazine crowd the film is clearly targeted at. The villains don't fare much better either; a collection of swarthy ethnic stereotypes that barely approach two dimensions, let alone three.

All that said, when the central heist plotline kicks into gear, the film settles into a groove that while familiar and rote, is at least competently executed. Again, this is nothing you won't have seen before, but Gilbey does a decent job of laying out the plan, the marks and the stakes. Then in classic heist film style it all goes tits up and everyone freaks out in a blur of double-crossing, flashing blue lights and gunfire. Perhaps the main reason why the latter half of the film actually works is the presence of Graham McTavish as a gullible jewel merchant. Performance-wise he's light-years ahead of everyone else in the film, and after a painfully witty 'banta' from the lads that sinks like a stone, it's nice to see someone actually being funny.

Alfie Allan is actually pretty good as a total arsehole.

Things also pick up when the guns come out of their holsters. Gilbey may have skimped on the script, casting, soundtrack and well, damn near everything else in the film, but he's spared no expense when it comes to the squibs. When people get shot in this film they explode in a stickily goopy shower of crimson, the impacts looking like someone is exploding jam doughnuts under the character's shirts. These are the kind of effects that you only see in the finest 1980s VHS video nasties, big explosions of corn syrup blood all rendered in exquisite, quasi-pornographic slow-motion. A back to basics straightforward gun fight like this can go a long way towards redeeming the film. Yeah, it's a shitty movie, but at least it has a good time rolling around in its shit.

Though the good things in the film are nowhere near enough compensation for all the awful, they go far enough to make Plastic a difficult film to actually dislike. Honestly, I actually kind of appreciate it for only taking up 90 minutes of my time given the recent spate of 2 and a half hour stinkers clogging up multiplexes.

Plastic'sfuture has been pre-ordained: a short, unmemorable cinema run followed by it finding its true home, the end of aisle discount DVD bin in Asda, the actors faces on the DVD cover unceremoniously obscured by a neon yellow sticker: "Only £2.99!!!!". Here the film will come into its own. Nestled next to myriad other low-budget/no brains straight-to-DVD detritus, Plastic will wind up looking pretty good by comparison. Not a hidden gem by any means, but as cinematic trash goes at least it's vaguely competent trash.

★★

Plastic is on general release from April 30th.

Throw Gladiator and Titanic into a blender and Pompeii would trickle out of the nozzle. This film from Paul W.S. Anderson (doomed to be forever known as 'the other Paul Anderson') is a largely moronic slice of pure-grade cheese, boasting a paper-thin romance that'd make Mills & Boon blush, antiseptic action sequences and Emmerichesque destructo-porn only faintly spoiled by the knowledge that this particular disaster actually happened. But it's not all bad!

The volcano disaster movie subgenre has lain dormant for the last 15 years or so, the equally underwhelming 1997 doubleheader of Volcano and Dante's Peak having failed to set box offices ablaze. Bolted onto the disaster flick template are large portions of Gladiator; a young celt Milo (Kit Harington) who hates the Roman Empire making a name for himself in arena combat and subsequently being transported to the big city to prove himself; and Titanic. Colliding with that is Rose's plight from Titanic in the form of Cassia (Emily Browning) a young rich girl who's sick of the trappings of her class falling head over heels for a sexy bit of Celtic rough. This forbidden love would struggle to bloom under normal circumstances, let alone when there's burning lava bombs plummeting from the sky and gigantic tidal waves tearing through the city. But hey, if it worked for James Cameron...

Pompeii ultimately turns out to be a complete load of cheesy bullshit, but that's not necessarily the kiss of death. Cheesy bullshit, ladled out with the right amount of sincerity and gusto, can be just the ticket if you want a lazy, undemanding, dumb sort of cinema experience. And fortunately Anderson, with his track record of the Resident Evil franchise and a smattering of enjoyably dopey B-movies like Mortal Kombat and Death Race, is more than in possession of the directorial skills to make this cheesy bullshit the best cheesy bullshit it can be.

Kit Harington ain't no Russell Crowe that's for damn sure.

That's not to say there's not a ton of things wrong with the film. Most obvious is the utterly leaden romance that's supposedly the core of the film. Kit Harington and Emily Browning are pretty dull when they're alone on screen, but together they form a black hole of charisma, with never the remotest glimmer of passion between them. They're not helped by a dog of a script which has some bizarre ideas about how to set up a love story. The weirdest is their first meeting, where Cassia falls for Milo on the basis that he can break a horse's neck with his bare hands (whatever floats your boat I guess...). Beyond that the two barely get a chance to interact at all, meaning the romance never feels remotely moving.

The central romance being a stinker could have killed this film stone dead, but fortunately it's more than rescued by two excellent supporting performances from Kiefer Sutherland and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. Sutherland, playing the villainous Senator Corvus, pulls out his best Jeremy Irons impression and goes to town with a whirlwind of smug smirks and archly raised eyebrows - if Romans had moustaches you can bet this guy would be twirling his. At times it's like Sutherland is in a scenery chewing contest with the volcano; and honestly, the two come out about equal.

Sutherland nailing it.

Similarly ace is Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Atticus, our hero's gladiator buddy. Purely by dint of his natural charisma he's massively more compelling than the bland Harington. Fortunately he gets a decent amount of time on screen, but this would have been a much more successful film with Akinnuoye-Agbaje as the hero. He's also got far more chemistry with Harington than Emily Browning has, the one glimmer of actual sexiness a scene where the two topless gladiators rub each other's wounds down with wine! Going full-bore homoerotic would also have the added bonus of making the erupting volcano a big fat throbbing visual metaphor.

The eruption is the 'money shot' of any volcano movie, and, like every member of the subgenre, a moment that's teased in multiple shots of character's looking suspiciously at dust falling from ceilings or plates clanking on a shelf. When things do geologically kick off it's probably exactly as you imagine - oodles of tiny CG Romans getting squashed by columns, burnt by lava or swept away by raging seas. Watching this entertaining carnage I felt a little curl of guilt in my belly, after all is it right to vicariously enjoy a simulation of other people's deaths - even if they were 2000 years ago?

Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Atticus. He should be the hero! He's much more fun.

This gives rise to the one smart bit of film-making in Pompeii. The focus of the big gladiatorial contest is a recreation of the the villain's greatest triumph - the annihilation of the hero's tribe. As we've experienced this from the POV of our hero early in the film we instinctively find this distasteful, frowning at the amphitheatre audience baying for blood. These braying assholes are us - we're both getting our yuks from watching a bowdlerised, sanitised fictional account of historical misery. It's moments like these when you suspect that Paul W.S. Anderson might not be quite as dumb as he's often made out to be.

It's difficult to wholeheartedly recommend Pompeii - enjoyment of it is largely predicated on your tolerance for cheese and by how much enjoyment you get from scenery-chewing camp performances. For me it just about strayed into guilty pleasure; the kind of film best enjoyed curled up under a blanket nursing a severe hangover on a Sunday afternoon, a pot of warm tea and a few packs of chocolate biscuits in front of you.

★★★

Pompeii is on general release 30 April 2014.

The frat house genre spreads its tentacles throughout comedy like a pissed up, stoned octopus. From Porky's and Animal House on upwards the genre works within very narrowly defined boundaries that mean every frat film has basically the same plot - yet people never seem to get sick of them. That ur-frat-plot revolves around three crazy parties. The first party creates problems the boys have to overcome, the second exacerbates those problems and the third resolves them. Along the way someone will puke, you'll get to see some tits and that one nerdy guy will either take drugs or shag a fat girl (preferably both for max laffs).

Bad Neighbours follows this template to the letter, though slightly distinguishes itself by framing the frat house from the perspective of two thirty-ish parents living next door. They are Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly (Rose Byrne), the two trying to juggle caring for their year old daughter with continuing the mildly hedonistic lifestyle they enjoyed in their twenties. Unfortunately they're losing the battle: defeated by their responsibilities towards the baby and the subsequent fact that they're knackered all day.

The situation is kicked up a notch when a party-crazy frat house moves in next door. These guys are your stereotypical bro types, all shades, tans and popped collars. Their leader is Teddy Sanders (Zac Efron), sporting a physique so defined that Rogen memorably describes it as looking "like an arrow pointing to your cock". As soon as they're neighbours the frat boys launch into the first of a series of titanic house parties; replete with bass drops, shrooms, weed and people drinking out of bright red cups.

Mac and Kelly don't want to seem like old duffers so they join in, but soon the constant bass rattling through their house gets to them. They call the cops with a noise complaint, and from this point the two houses are feuding; Mac and Kelly conniving and plotting to get the frat kicked out of the college and the frat planning like, totally the biggest and most craziest party EVER.

There are worse setups for a comedy and by and large Bad Neighbours goes about its task as concise and professional a manner as possible. Make no bones about it, the film has its fair share of big laughs, though through much of it everyone involved appears to be on autopilotes. Seth Rogen is, once more, playing pretty much himself. I suppose you don't hire Seth Rogen and expect Daniel Day-Lewis, but he's hardly being stretched with material like this. Granted, he does this schtick well enough, but to see him guzzling magic mushrooms and dealing with responsibility begins to feel increasingly like a retread of Knocked Up.

Rose Byrne fares a bit better, sinking her teeth into a stereotype-defying role. She's smart, fun and angry in ways that female characters aren't generally allowed to be, at one point angrily pointing out that she's got every right to be just as irresponsible as any man. One thing I like most about Byrne is that she's utterly unafraid of making herself look completely ridiculous - possibly the most memorable scene of the film is her clutching her breasts in pain and demanding that a terrified Seth Rogen "milk me now, dammit!".

Do you find this picture of Seth Rogen having sex with some topiary funny? If yes then you will probably enjoy this film.

By comparison the frat boys over the road are pretty much two-dimensional. Zac Efron is a touch too old to be playing a teenager and to be honest, given his sturdy dramatic performances in Parkland and The Paperboy it's a little disappointing seeing him regress to boneheaded comedy. Nobody else really stands out among the students, save for the bizarre and unexpected appearance of Craig Roberts as put-upon pledgee 'Assjuice'. What on earth is the unassuming, introverted star of Submarine and Benny & Jolene doing here? He gamely shoots for an American accent (by way of Caerphilly) and does a decent enough job, but I hope this isn't the kind of role he's going for to try and 'break America'.

That aside, Bad Neighbours is a decent enough comedy film - with at least enough intelligence to pin down some fairly universal concepts. Mac and Kelly's desire to stay young and fun while also trying their hardest to be responsible parents is the kind of thing that everyone in their early 30s has to deal with. Crucially we see that the wild, UV drenched and drug saturated parties - depicted as a kind of low-rent, toned down version of Spring Breakers - are fun. But we also empathise with the annoyance of having bass booming through the bedroom walls and disturbing your child night after night. This tug of war going on their heads makes a huge amount of sense; and when they're finally driven to calling the police on the frat house we experience a touch of their guilt at becoming 'the man'.

But these positive things are balanced against a bunch of stuff that doesn't really work. The film slides into cartoon territory towards the end, with a series of low-key fight scenes that don't really work, a tedious reliance on endless cutaways to a cute baby's reaction to things and a pat emotional climax that reeks of a studio-mandated reshoot.

As far as mainstream US comedies go Bad Neighbours isn't scraping the bottom of the barrel, but you can see the bottom from here. It's relatively amusing and rarely hilarious, with a workmanlike double act from Rogen and Byrne giving it a solid core. Unfortunately this plays it safe every chance it can get; the end result being vaguely okay but way too cookie-cutter and formulaic to actually recommend. You'll be forgetting it as soon as the credits roll.

★★

Bad Neighbours is on general release from May 3rd

Hayao Miyazaki sits at the pinnacle of animation; his only equals Walt Disney and John Lasseter. His 30 year filmography, from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to The Wind Rises, is beloved by children and adults across the whole world. Miyazaki poured his inspiration, his sweat and his passions into his cinema, never putting a foot wrong through his long, lauded career. And now it's coming to an end. Last year he announced that The Wind Rises was to be his final feature length film, followed by a relaxing, well-earned retirement.

It's appropriate then that The Wind Rises summarises Miyazaki's twin obsessions; aviation and morality. This is a highly fictionalised biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, man who designed fighter planes for Japan during World War II - the crux of the film the internal conflict of a talented, passionate genius whose masterpieces tear his world apart. We follow Horikoshi from his childhood daydreams of flight, through his education and finally his professional career working for Mitsubishi as war looms menacingly over the horizon. Save for the occasional dream sequences this is much more grounded than Miyazaki's usual fare, a straightforward, sober and emotional story so deeply felt that it feels like a true passion project.

From his first films, Miyazaki has always adored flight. Practically every film he makes has an exhilarating flight scene; highlights being Nausicaä piloting her Mehve, Satsuki and Mei being carried across the night sky in My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki riding her broomstick, the hero of Porco Rosso diving into aerial combat and Chihiro riding on Haku's back through the clouds in Spirited Away. Miyazaki sees the notion of flight as freedom, or his words, "a liberation from gravity". When his characters rise above the clouds they literally see the bigger picture, the action of viewing their world from on high exposing opposing sides as part of a larger whole.

This goes hand in hand with his deeply held humanist morality. In contrast to the starkly manichean world of Disney with its clearly defined boundaries between good and evil, Miyazaki's movies never feature a true villain. There may be an antagonist, but care is taken to give them sympathetic motivations for their actions. My favourite example being Eboshi in Princess Mononoke, she's cutting down a forest in order to expand her industrial town which seems like classic environmental villainy. The twist is that Eboshi is a straightforwardly feminist defender of social outcasts, providing a refuge for former prostitutes and lepers. In Miyazaki's movies, just as in reality, good and evil are never as clear cut as they might seem.

These preoccupations reach their ultimate synthesis in the character of Jiro Horikoshi. We have to square his innate nobility, passion and quiet heroism with the fact that he's furthering the aggressive military ambitions of authoritarian imperialism. Even with the full knowledge of the misery his creations will wreak upon the world, we can't help but want him to succeed in creating beautiful flying machines - to realise his dreams even with their terrible cost.

As we progress through his life, we encounter portents of the oncoming war. A stunning sequence shows us Horikoshi navigating the Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which with its shockwaves tearing down buildings, enormous fires and earth-shaking booms is an eerie premonition of the later destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On a research trip to Nazi Germany we watch the secret police chase a man down, watching the shadows of a beating around an alley - a mysterious man (voiced the English dub by none other than Werner Herzog!) speaks darkly of inevitable, oncoming annihilation.

It's difficult not to read Jiro Horikoshi as a mirror of Miyazaki himself. Both men are expert draftsmen that transform pencil on paper into reality, both are torn between their professional careers and their personal lives, and most obviously, both dream of flying. These parallels raise an obvious question: how on earth are Horikoshi's planes and Miyazaki's animations connected? After all, one visits death and destruction upon the world, the other brings joy to millions.

Here you have an artist puking blood onto a canvas. Draw your own conclusions.

The disquieting answer reveals a depressed, introspective Miyazaki - a man at the pinnacle of his profession, yet introspective, full of regrets and apparently a bit depressed. Knowing a little about Miyazaki's personal life, his estrangement from his son Goro and the amount of time he's devoted to his art at the cost of a family life helps appreciate the movie -a master film-maker questioning whether all these technical and artistic achievements were worth sacrificing his relationships for.

To that end, The Wind Rises sits apart from the rest of Miyazaki's filmography, hitting a sober, contemplative tone that makes it difficult to recommend for younger audiences. It's essentially a low-key, intimate arthouse film, yet produced to the highest possible standards of traditional animation - a unique combination in cinema. It's beautiful from top to bottom; art design, organic sound work and considered philosophy crystallising into a film that's as precision engineered as Horikoshi's fighter planes.

It'd have been easy for Miyazaki's final film to have been a triumphant victory lap, for the master to roll out one last optimistic fairytale. For him to give us this muted, introspective, rather depressing slice of self-criticism speaks volumes as to his honesty and intelligence. The Wind Rises is a Rosetta Stone for understanding the man behind the magic, and so the perfect capstone to a glittering career.

★★★★

The Wind Rises is on general release from May 9th

Nothing beats a documentary about a crazy dreamer. American Interior has two; musician Gruff Rhys and 18th Century Welsh explorer John Evans. Gruff Rhys is the lead singer of Super Furry Animals, though latterly he's released a string of excellent solo albums, the playfully sugar-coated Candylion to the sunkissed retro Hotel Shampoo (not to mention his work as Neon Neon). A man of many talents, he branched out into cinema in 2010 with the excellent documentary Separado!, about his quest to meet up with his long lost Patagonian uncle. That film explored a far-flung outpost of the Welsh language - a topic Gruff now returns to.

The subject of the film is John Evans; an obscure Welsh explorer who became obsessed with the legend of Prince Madog, a mythical Welsh figure who, legend has it, crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1170 and ventured through the country befriending the Native Americans, eventually settling in Missouri and giving rise to a tribe of 'Welsh Indians'. Evans, his heart abuzz with Welsh revolutionary zeal, decided to track down this tribe, hopeful of discovering a utopia in the New World where his fellow Welshman could live in harmony far from the oppression of the hated English.

Gruff Rhys

With a few pennies in his backpack and a fire burning in his belly Evans landed in Baltimore in 1792, setting out into the mythical, uncharted American interior. His adventure placed him smack-dab in the middle of a war between Spain and England, and after bouts of malaria, imprisonment, misery and hunger he found himself commissioned as a cartographer, charged with a mission to chart the Missouri River, discover if there are Welsh speaking Indians and, uh, try to bring back a unicorn if at all possible.

It's a pretty crazy shaggy dog tale, the details further blurred by Evans being a tricky man to historically pin down. But just as Evans walked in the footsteps of Prince Madog, so Rhys walks in his, taking in a concert tour following the rough path of Evans expedition and plaintively enquiring whether there are, indeed, Welsh speaking Native Americans after all. Joining him is John Evans himself, albeit in Muppet form. Whoever was tasked with creating this felt Evans did an outstanding job, capturing the same insouciant, intelligent glint that you see on Gruff's face throughout the film. Underlying this historical detective story is a thoughtful dialogue on culture and language, Rhys drawing parallels between the eradication of the Native American languages and shrinkage of their culture and English cultural domination of Wales.

John Evans (in Muppet form)

As a fan of Gruff Rhys I was pre-disposed to enjoy this, and it more than captures Gruff's ramshackle, acid-tinged aesthetic. He's just an extremely likeable guy, combining a fiercely creative intelligence, a touch of the wide-eyed mystic and a smidge of child-like innocence. His best dramatic weapon is a slightly bewildered stare, as if he's an alien landed from Mars trying to work out the foibles of these crazy human beings. Most of the people he meets along the way aren't quite sure what to make of this bearded Welsh poet -though he obviously clicks with the members of Native American Mandan tribe - the Welshman and the Native Americans clicking in a way that neatly compliments the themes of the film.

The most interesting interactions are with extroverted Americans, their eagerness to tell an exciting, bombastic story clashing nicely with Gruff's subtler Welsh demeanour. Towards the end of the film there's a tour of a New Orleans graveyard, with a hugely energetic, very loud woman frantically explaining every little jot of history that's gone into the place. The contrast between the two people couldn't be greater; Gruff slightly spaced out and subdued, her acting like she's just taken an injection of speed to the eyeballs. It's pretty funny stuff to watch, but also illustrates a crucial cultural difference that gets right the heart of what American Interior is about.

Gruff's focus on language isn't based in anything as crude as simple nationalism, rather of using it as a unique format of artistic expression - all languages contain concepts that can't be straightforwardly translated. So while both Gruff and this tour guide tell the same story, the way they tell it couldn't be more different - the presentation of the information practically as important as the information itself. So it's appropriate that the evocative cinematography and music tell the story just as well as the exposition. The American landscape, be it the arid desert, lazy rivers or dense forest is shot in harsh grayscale, often with day-glo psychedelic animation over the top of it.

The film is being released in tandem with an album of the same name, so the film is soundtracked by Gruff's dreamy indie-pop. It's great music, acoustic melodies laid down over dreamy synths and Gruff's relaxed, melancholic singing voice over the top. Many parts of the film feel like short music videos, both music and narrative driving each other onwards with almost synaesthetic synergy.

American Interior is suffused with so much heroic adventure that it, at it's best, it approaches Werner Herzog levels. John Evans, with his doomed madman's quest for knowledge at the end of an unmapped river is a very Herzoggian hero. The film swims in questions of identity and myth; on a personal level Gruff trying to understand his ancestors and heritage and, zoomed out, asking wider questions about the wider Welsh psyche. Wales is occupied land: it's predominant language, culture and governance an alien imposition. American Interior seeks to clean out the wound, Gruff showing us that while there might not be a literal Welsh utopia, there's abundant psychic territory out there for the Welsh language and culture - and it's important that it remain infused with the exact branch of vibrancy that pulses through the veins of this great documentary.

★★★★

American Interior is released 9th May 2013

Mapping London is a fool's errand. Sure you can catalogue the rough geometry and index off street names, but this doesn't get you any closer to understanding what the city is. London is 2000 years of wonderfully gunked up, unplanned human muck; Saxon hunting trails made permanent by imperial Roman road builders, streets spiralling out from them like bacterial growths, a million tangled pissy alleys growing out of that. Capturing all this on paper is madness. Your Google Maps and your London A-Z merely diagram out the space, trying hard to boil down fuzzy anarchy into comprehension - but these maps can't capture the mood of a place; the baked in sleaze of Soho; the cool authoritarianism of Kensington or the enterprising fragility of Brick Lane.

Tannaz Oroumchi obviously understands these limitations, her work exhibited in Curious Duke Gallery chopping and screwing the streets London to brilliant effect. Under her eye the street layout twists into spider-webs, computer generated graphs, bacterial infections and micro-printed circuit boards. London transforms into a pulsating, electric organism, the apparent permanence of concrete and steel revealed as flexible, temporary and, above all, manipulable.

Reading the Rosetta Stone of the City, transforming static into fluid motion and exposing the psychological layers and contours of urban life, is an idea (if you'll excuse the pun) very much up my street. This field of thought is known as psychogeography, defined by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals." Planting its roots deeply in the Marxist anti-authoritarianism of the French Situationists, the discipline of psychogeography seeks to chip away the 'taught' methods of navigating urban space, underlining the importance of deviation from established paths, exploration and reclamation of restricted spaces and the ability to emotionally analyse architecture and street layout.

In Oroumchi's work the city is stripped of its labels, the tangle of London streets revealed as a crazy mandala - the product of thousands of years of unguided, unconscious human endeavour. The work reveals the biological nature of London, and how it frustrates attempts at applying systems of order to it - something that makes this city more human and honest. The grids of New York, Los Angeles et al are designed for efficiency and ease of commerce; maps of capital. They're efficient and slick in a way London can never be - foe example barely a quarter of central London's streets are used for traffic circulation, as opposed to 90% of New York's.

That London is a knot inevitably means planners are tempted to untangle it; notable candidates being Christopher Wren post-Great Fire of London with his vision of a London subdivided into grand Parisian boulevards and Corbusian post-war architects, whose ambitions to wrestle London into becoming a 'car city', with the Strand pummelled into a motorway and any extant pedestrians frowned upon as a vestigial aberration.

It's a nightmare vision, imagine the entire city in the style London Wall and Upper Thames Street. The maps on display in Hectified elegantly refute the ordering of cities, finding beauty in the snaking, sinuous lines, and throwing up their own subtle analyses of the motions of people around the metropolis. Focal points quickly become apparent; St Paul's Cathedral has a peculiar gravity, it's historicity sending ripples into the street plans around it. Similarly, the parts where the tangle doesn't intrude become marked out as pure, sacred spaces. The reality of Smithfield Meat Market is a grubby place of smashed pallets, bloody smocks and bald, racist men, but here it's appropriately revealed as an oasis of permanence - after all meat has been sold here for a thousand years or so.

When you see these maps your first instinct is to try and place yourself within them. Usually the easiest way to start is with the Thames, counting the bridges across, then winding your way up through the streets until you find yourself. It's irresistible, and this simple act makes the work almost auto-analytical. My barometer of appreciation of art involves finding something of yourself in the work; an echo of your individual passions and philosophies in it. In pinpointing your location you are you have to think about your personal relation to the city, to divorce yourself from boundaries, districts and names and analyse the layout of the streets around you. That this occurs instinctively makes the work a success, achieving its aim of throwing new light on London without any prodding explanation or lecture.

What Oroumchi demonstrates with Hectified is the mystery and joy of London; an anatomical study of a city achieved without killing it. She lays bare the maze of gloomy side-streets, bustling arterial traffic routes and semi-abandoned leafy squares that give London its vibrancy and character. When you walk through the streets of London, seeing imperial Portland Stone give way to the stained clay of London Stock Bricks, enjoying the dichotomy of 16th century churches abutting the glittering green glass of 20th century finance, marvelling at something so bizarre as a Roman pavement sunk in a secret crypt, or a 3000 year old monument bristling out of the Thames, you should understand that London as a whole is a manifestation of humanity, a patchwork blanket created by the consensus of millions upon millions of human beings for thousands of years.

Oroumchi's Hecitified lays all that this out simply, clearly and without ego. I very, very much enjoyed it.

Hectified is at Curious Duke Gallery, Whitecross Street until May 31st

So what's the deal with the big fake head? This question fuels Frank, an idiosyncratic muso-comedy that has the balls to take one of the most handsome leading men of our time and confine him to a super freaky looking staring head. This head has burned itself into Britain's cultural conscious; invented by Chris Sievey for his comedy character Frank Sidebottom - a creation that doles out amusement and nightmares in equal amounts. But Frank is not a biopic of Sievey, it's an askance examination of just why a man would wear a big fake head that underlies a deeper look at the dangers of egotism in art.

Our entry point into the world of Frank is Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), a frustrated songwriter living in a coastal town that they forgot to close down. He walks the dull, grey streets trying frantically to compose lyrics that, y'know really speak to people, yeah? He's not having much luck, lyrics about women holding bags and children building sandcastles not amounting to anything. This a man seems built for a life of desaturated corporate misery, this destiny averted by chancing upon a man trying to drown himself. This man turns out to be the keyboardist for a band called 'Soronprfbs', fronted by the enigmatic, big fake head wearing Frank (Michael Fassbender).

Immediately volunteering himself as a replacement keyboardist he finds himself drawn into the chaotic vortex of the band, which aside from the obvious strangeness of Frank, is entirely composed of weirdos. Prime among them is the surly Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a character that immediately endears with the snarled line "don't touch my fucking theremin!". With Jon in tow they head to a remote Irish cabin to record an album, followed by a reluctant appearance at SXSW in Austin where everything goes tits up.

Jon is a talentless, annoying dick. But that's kinda the point.

Frank often feels a little too self-consciously quirky, though it's easy to forgive this in a film that has something genuinely important to explain about what makes an artist and a general instinct for expressing yourself. The two poles of the film are our protagonist Jon, a character who treats music as a short-cut to adoration and Frank, who, with the anonymity granted by a big fake head is a creature without ego.

We repeatedly see Jon wrestling with his own songs, trying frantically to find his voice and write something truly meaningful - and failing utterly. He envies the mental illnesses, the troubled childhoods and eccentricity of his band-mates - vocally moaning about how his well-adjusted, middle-class childhood has left him devoid of inspiration. What we eventually realise is that all the effort he expounds upon realising his inner artist is pointless. There is no inner beauty within him - Jon is an intrinsically untalented individual with absolutely nothing to say to anyone.

His is a quest for popularity; a success measured in Twitter followers and YouTube hits. He craves a conventional vision of musical success, all couture leather, eyeliner, flirting with pretty A&R girls and rides to gigs in the back of limousines. He expresses himself as a sop to his ego, seeking the adulation of the masses via 'likeable', middle-of-the-road music. Jon would fit perfectly into a band like Coldplay or Snow Patrol, but when confronted with true passion in the form of Frank and Soronpfrbs he can't help but fuck everything up.

Though all his character flaws are intentional, Jon is the biggest problem with Frank, Domhnall Gleeson's smug, ironic voice-over unpleasantly echoing the execrable About Time. Fortunately, Michael Fassbender's Frank more than saves the film. He's the model of an artistic soul, able to find create art from thin air, with lyrics about dirty bathroom and damaged carpet springing direct from his soul. His jumbled up word salads lyrics are heartfelt - sung with no self-examination or analysis. The anonymity provided by his head removes ego from the equation with a stroke, erasing the individual from the music and forcing us to interpret him purely through art.

So Frank boils down to a stand-off of ideas: Jon's vision of music as a vehicle for his ego and Frank's instinct to create because he needs to. The rather depressing (though probably accurate) conclusion to this argument is that if you don't really feel it then you shouldn't bother - that anything consciously created to make yourself look better is hollow and shitty. In a world of instant ticket to fame talent shows and ephemeral online fame it's a timely idea - a pointed rebuttal to the aphorism "fake it 'til you make it".

This makes Frank, for it's imperfections, a deeply smart film. It's narratively uneven, and relies a touch too much on the intrinsic humour of the Frank visual. That said, its heart is definitely in the right place; it's got a great acid-inflected soundtrack, a complex and vanity-free performance from Michael Fassbender, a sweary, spiky, cooler-than-thou Maggie Gyllenhaal and genuinely does follow through on its promise to explain why a man would spend his life inside a big fake head. In a multiplex lineup of superheroes and drippy romances it stands out a mile: a passion project that, while not an unreserved success, is a brave bit of film-making that deserves an audience.

★★★★

Frank is on general release 9th May 2014

Professional cycling is an ego incubator. Out there, alone for hours on the road, the cyclist's thoughts turn inward. The pain they feel in climbing a hill is cross to bear, their speed entirely their own, every triumph borne solely by them. No wonder they turn into pricks. This documentary explores the life and untimely death of Marco Pantani, a hugely popular and vaguely eccentric professional cyclist feted for winning both the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France, a feat still unequalled in the sport. He became known as 'The Pirate', becoming a folk hero in Italy. He was on top of the (cycling) world.

Then six years later his cocaine-stuffed corpse was dragged out of a cheap hotel room. From the heights of athletic achievement to drug-fuelled depravity - what the hell happened? Pantani: The Accidental Death of Cyclist tries to go some way to answer this question, linking athletic excellence with addiction, the sweaty cyclist conquering a mountain in the noonday sun a metaphor for deepr internal struggles.

Pantani's story is shown through a combination of stock footage and dramatic re-enactments. By and large it's a pretty seamless combination, the lookalike they've cast as Pantani does a decent of job of standing in where cameras couldn't go. Though technically this is all decent enough, the childhood sequences have more than a whiff of a Dolmio ad, with a smiling Italian grandfather buying a young Pantani his first bicycle under a picturesque Mediterranean sunset.

As he begins to get a reputation as something special on a bicycle, particularly when it comes to climbing hills. This quickly snowballs into a promising career, and soon he's a professional racer - picking up accolade after accolade. Disaster strikes midway through his career when a forgetful cop overlooks a road closure - and while zooming down a mountain he smashes headlong into an oncoming car. Doctors don't know if he'll even walk again - let alone cycle, but after a long period of recuperation he miraculously gets back on his bike and goes on to win big. Textbook triumph over adversity stuff. But this is cycling in the 90s, that's doping territory. After failing a blood test he's disqualified and shamed, sending him spiralling into depression and drugs.

Hang on a minute... A champion cyclist triumphing over medical adversity followed by a doping disgrace? This is awfully familiar stuff... It's impossible not to think of Lance Armstrong watching this, and particular of Alex Gibney's recent The Armstrong Lie, a documentary that covers the same territory beat for beat. I didn't really enjoy The Armstrong Lie, but Pantani definitely suffers from being released in close proximity. This is more cinematic bad luck than anything particularly wrong with the movie, but if you've seen one explanation of what a pelaton is, or how performance enhancing drugs work, sitting through it again is a bit tedious.

There are high points within the film. EPO, the drug that caused all this ruckus ups the red blood cell count, allowing more oxygen to be transported to muscles. Having so many red blood cells means that the cyclist's blood runs the risk of "silting up" if their heartrate falls below a certain level, i.e. when sleeping. To counteract this, doping cyclists had to sleep with heartrate monitors on that'd wake them up if they were in danger, after which they'd hop on exercise bikes built into their bedroom and start to pedalling away so as not to die. There's something poetically kinda neat about these quasi-vampiric nocturnal cyclists who've chemically screwed up their bodies up to such a degree that they need to cycle... or die!

But these interesting nuggets of information are few and far between, and as we close in on the fall from grace the documentary shoots for a rather far-fetched defence of Pantani. Essentially they infer that Pantani wasn't really doping, rather he was just too good a cyclist. It's just not interesting to see the same man winning every race, and so the top bods secretly plotted his downfall by faking the results of his blood tests and kicking him out of the sport. This is paranoid conspiracy theory, and from my (admittedly armchair) perspective, if every other damn cyclist was shooting EPO into their bloodstream then in all likelihood Pantani was too.

There's also a suspiciously quick glossing over of his post-racing life, the audience only learning that he was difficult to be around. Aside from people praising his athletic prowess there's a suspicious lack of people who appreciated him as a person. Professional cyclists tend to be arseholes even when sober, so I can only imagine the horror of a miserable coked up self-hating one. As such, the documentary ultimately feels a little like a PR exercise in image rehabilitation; smoothing off the rougher edges, downplaying the scandal and accentuating his victories - turning disgrace into tragedy.

What's left is a portrait of a man who was undoubtedly a very good cyclist, but doesn't appear to have that much more to him. The attempts to define him as a flamboyant man in a buttoned-down sport never quite come off, the lack of any critique of his doping feels a bit cowardly and the conspiracy theory theorising is just far-fetched. Even The Armstrong Lie, though largely dull, had the frisson of Armstrong publicly flagellating himself for the camera.

I suspect these cycling documentaries are tailor-made for those already into the sport, because they offer precious little to those that don't give a toss about bicycle racing. In my book the gold-standard for the sports doc is Senna, which managed to draw me into a discipline and personality I knew next to nothing about. But the difference is that Ayrton Senna was an interesting, charismatic kind of guy and professional cyclists are by design self-obsessed loners. Who wants to spend 90 minutes exploring their inner life? Not me that's for damn sure.

★★

Pantani: The Accidental Death of a Cyclist is on limited release from May 13th.

Miley Cyrus is honest in the way that a millions of earnestly gloomy guitar twiddlers can never be. Her primary pleasures in life are smoking weed, MDMA, masturbation, smoking more weed and wiggling her ass, and she's on an evangelical crusade to drag us into her hedonistic world. And fuck it, why not? There's a sense of the last days of Rome in Bangerz; the show a drug-frazzled, psycho orgy trying desperately to drown out the sound of reality of the world outside.

Bangerz is an escape into a fucked-on-amphetamines candy-world. Kaleidoscopes of epileptic animated cat gifs blur into PS2 graphics Mileys on jet skis blur into a neon Nintendo LSD Mushroom Kingdom blur into buttfucking furry-costumed pervs blur into a 30 foot dog shooting lasers out of its eyes blur into a multiheaded Miley-hydra thrashing a hundred jammed out tongues at us. Somewhere on stage a little woman dressed as a joint is furiously twerking at a man dressed as a zippo lighter. All this while an insistent ultra-trashy dubstep meets line-dancing 4/4 beat wobbles through the guts of the crwod.

She's grasped the high voltage cable of internet culture, transforming herself from a slightly dippy, balladeering popstar into the offspring of 4chan and FYAD, a style stitched together from viral internet videos that millions of people watch and immediately forget. Sure there's no substance here, but there's a difference between 'yer regular Bieberish vapidity and the aggressively nihilistic meaninglessness of Miley Cyrus. In a touch of zen, the whole point of Bangerz is that there is no point, the songs, visuals and flashing lights all aiming to drag us down, to make us dirtily writhe in the sweatiest, goopiest, candy-flavoured pop culture detritus.

Despite the near constant crotch-rubbing, revealing outfits and omni-gyrating, none of this is sexy. Bangerz works from some crazy fractured abstraction of sexuality; the purpose of masturbation no longer to make yourself cum but to define yourself as an individual devoted to their own pleasure. The swipe of fingers through a moist gusset is the Miley salute, the calling card of an army of bangerz banging away at themselves to the cold glow of laptop light.

Importantly, Bangerz isn't designed to make the audience want to fuck Miley. Throughout the show there's repeated attempts to uglify her; giving her deformed hillbilly teeth, videos slicing her into disconnected ribbons, her flesh blasted away by to reveal a screaming skull underneath - perhaps most obviously in introducing her through through a John K. cartoon - a spindly pop music gorgon with a slatheringmprehensile tongue. Even live, with a flesh and blood person on stage, it's difficult to imagine this strobe-lit, besequined creature as a real girl, more a walking personification of panicky, exploding libido.

So, for me the low point of the show was when she actually tried to be human. There's a lengthy acoustic bit in the middle where the action relocates to the centre of the auditorium and the band dutifully picks up wooden, stringed instruments. Miley even wears a flannel shirt - albeit one studded with diamonds and rubies - but a flannel shirt nonetheless. She ends up covering Dylan's You're Going to Make Me Lonesome - a choice which largely baffles the teenage audience. Dammit Miley, if I wanted soulful folk music I would have gone to a soulful folk music gig. Things pick up a bit when she moves onto a foul-mouthed cover of Dolly Parton's Jolene, gleefully re-writing the song: "Jolene, Jolene, that cunt Jolene!".

John K's Miley Cyrus from the stage show.

Adding insult to injury there's a painfully waffly segment where she talks at length about a magic Chinese man who fixed her in hospital, interspersed with explanations of how great weed is, how she'd really like us to be smoking weed and how much she's looking forward to smoking a big fat bifta after the show. Even across a stadium you can pretty much see her band members glancing furtively at each other and rolling their eyes, wondering just how long she's going to rabbit on for. On the whole Miley Cyrus works far better as a bundle of interesting ideas, imagery and sounds than she does as a human being - and the closer she strays to personhood the less engaged I am.

So, when the synths wail up again it's a relief to return to the bad trip nightmare Miley Cyrus that I know and love. A giant seizure-inducing dancing animated cat gif swirls on the background behind her as men in fursuits frot up against each other. Miley climbs atop a giant fibreglass hotdog (which is actually a banger, though I doubt she had this in mind) and climbs into the stratosphere. The whole thing gets off to a climax with glitter cannons, pyrotechnics, Siamese twins women connected by foamy Mt Rushmores and that little person clanging about the stage waving the crack of her Liberty Bell in our faces.

This is pretty much the epitome of pop, a chaotic cocktail of new ideas - some intelligent, some ridiculous - all interesting. Interspersed are the old; underground graphic art of the 1990s, early 2000s videogame graphics and black velvet acid art. But is this ultra-hip psychedelic soup all Miley? Isn't merely she the calculated product of some besuited exec? Is this all a money-making exercise to wring money from gullible teenage girls (and me)?

Who really gives a shit? The end product is what matters, and Bangerz is a superlative, outstanding bit of pop-theatre-music-performance art, a hedonistic microcosm where taste, self-respect and dignity are largely forgotten. At the final curtain, Miley Cyrus emerges as the real voice of a generation; a tongue-waggling, pussy-banging pop-Charon ferrying us across her digital River Styx. It's one hell of a show.

Janelle Monáe would be a superstar at any point in human history. She'd have rocked the rock and roll stages of the 1950s, been a disco queen of the 1970s, probably been worshipped as some kind of minor deity by ancient Egyptians - hell - if she were around in prehistoric times you'd be finding cave paintings of a razor sharp dancer clad in black and white furs with adoring neanderthals gathered around her. She's the whole package: all-dancing, all-singing, all-stylish, smart as a damn whip and supported by the one of the tightest backing bands about.

Monáe is a woman of many names; Cyndi Mayweather, the Electric Lady, ArchAndroid - yet this isn't a woman playing a series of roles, rather different aspects of personality filtered through prisms of style. Dressed from top-to-toe in her trademark monochrome she arrives on stage to the cabaret nightmare beat of her Suite IV Electric Overture before launching straight into the insistent stomp beat of Givin Em What They Love - the first ten minutes of her set reaching the heights most big bands save for the finale. Having opened in the stratosphere, Monáe proceeds to shoot for the stars.

For two hours she rattles through hit after hit, an astonishingly strong setlist given that she's only on her second album (and an EP). Standouts are the incredibly fun Dance Apocalyptic and Tightrope, two songs that it's impossible to resist wiggling your ass too - a smiling audience pulling their own shapes on miniature dancefloors carved out from the crowd. Occasionally she'll pull out a cover, the best an astonishingly accomplished ABC by the Jackson 5 - Monáe conjuring up the ghost of the dead King of Pop with a tremendous moonwalk across to an swell of amazed applause.

It's all pretty damn great stuff, but the undisputed highlight for me was Cold War. Sobering up for a moment, Monáe stops and decries the kind of horrible world where 200 Nigerian schoolgirls can be sold into slavery and no-one lifts a damn finger. This is tricky ground for a pop musician to tread on, and I had a tingle of worry that things were going to collapse into mawkish sentimentality. But as the coolly synthetic 80s electronica of Cold War kicks in, her comments give her gravitas, transforming what's already a virtuoso performance into something with social relevance. Midway through the song the lyrics devolve into a series of tortured, tuneful howls, a tiny moment that's easily one of the most powerful things I've seen a live singer do of late.

Throughout the show I couldn't help but compare and contrast it to Miley Cyrus' Bangerz show, which I'd seen a few days earlier. Though both solo female pop artists, the two occupy opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. Whereas Miley wraps herself in flashy, intense videos and an ADHD influenced momentum, Monáe strips things down to the bone. Her backdrop is simply a large blank white sheet that wraps around the stage, lit by various coloured lights, our eyes drawn down to the musicians rather than distracted by any maximalist frippery.

Both gigs were hugely entertaining, their aesthetic differences serving to amplify each artist's strengths. But if I was absolutely forced to choose between them I'd go with Janelle Monáe - though it's the kind of show that relies on a truly exceptional artist at the centre of it all, one able to shoulder the burden of carrying the whole show on her shoulders. She's more than up to the task - a performance suffused with crazy amounts of confidence, at times while watching her you begin to believe she's capable of anything.

Watching her twist, spin and moonwalk across the stage, every molecule of her body geared to the rhythm, all the while singing in perfect tune made me feel like a complete turnip. I can 'dance' - anyone can 'dance' - but I this is dancing dammit. She moves with tireless energy, executing whipcrack precise motions, moving like a black and white flickering zoetrope. She's a musical Bruce Lee, a complete pop package that, quite frankly, diminishes her musical contemporaries purely by occupying the same industry.

Janelle Monáe obviously has a long career ahead of her, and when she's treading stages in the 2050s she'll still be a hot ticket. But she'll be echoing the performances she's doing right now. Seeing her now is like seeing Michael Jackson in his Off the Wall phase, a young and hungry Prince or Elvis before he joined the army. These are the gigs that people will one day look back on and wish they'd had the chance to attend. I suspect Monáe's biggest days are still ahead of her, one really big hit single and she'll be deservedly packing out arenas around the world.

For now though, seeing up close in a packed out Brixton Academy makes me feel privileged. She is barnstormingly amazing at everything she does; destined to one day take her place in the pantheon of iconic artists. I can't really imagine anyone not enjoying her gigs - so beg, borrow and steal tickets wherever you can!

All pictures (c) Jason Williamson

Gareth Edward's reimagining of the Godzilla franchise is loaded with potential. Firstly there was the excitement of a hot young director with one excellent film, Monsters, already under his belt being let loose with a big budget. Then came one of the finest teaser trailers I've seen; as the camera pans over scenes of mass destruction with bodies lying everywhere we hear Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."All that scored by the monolith theme from 2001, climaxing with a tremendously angry roar from a colossal stompy monster.

Sold! Sitting down in my seat last night I was deeply excited to see what Edwards had come up with. Twenty minutes in I had that queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach that you get when you realise that you're watching a stinker. Godzilla is not good. Not by a long shot.

Boiled down, the plot is that giant insectoid monsters appear, start wrecking up the place and then Godzilla turns up to beat the snot out of them. It's a bit bare bones, but if you pay to see a Godzilla film then this is largely what you expect. Wrapped around this is the human drama, and it's here that the film comes unstuck. Working from an utterly inane, exposition-heavy script, the film proceeds to spend the majority of its runtime lumbering between a series of incredibly dull B-movie stereotypes.

The hero is as precisely as boring as he looks.

The prime offender in this is our hero, Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). By quite a long shot he's the most blandest protagonist in a long time. He has all the articulation of an action figure and the personality and motivations of a milporn videogame protagonist. It's a stretch to say he's even a character, functioning more as a convenient dramatic excuse to follow giant monsters around. That'd be fine, but we spend an inordinate amount of time with Brody as he runs around doing dull (but I guess cheap to film) soldiery type things.

His boring presence very nearly sinks the film, though to be fair to Taylor-Johnson, nobody comes out of this smelling of roses. Bryan Cranston, an incredibly talented actor, is just plain bad as the scientist-who-no-one-believes-until-it's-too-late stock character. Lost underneath a bizarrely unconvincing wig he looks embarrassed by his crap dialogue. The best I can say about him is that in a sea of bad acting, his performance is at least interestingly bad. Ken Watanabe looks similarly checked out, a one note character who feels parachuted in from a different movie altogether, delivering his lines with the vague contempt they deserve. As for the women? There's two of them in Godzilla, their combined dialogue maybe taking up a page or two of script, both relegated to standing on the sidelines looking worried as the men fix things.

The women in this film are tasked with hugging children and gawping uselessly.

Finally, after perhaps an hour spent watching painful exposition and endless shots of worried people talking on telephones, Godzilla shows up. The audience breathes out a collective sigh of relief; "alright, we sat through all that shite, now bring on the giant monsters!" Then we immediately cut away from the giant monster fight to a kid watching blurry footage of it on TV news. Bullshit!

This cuts to the most obvious problem with Godzilla: not enough Godzilla. The big guy is absent for most of the movie, only appearing properly in the final act. Even when he does finally show up he's a bit underwhelming after all the hype. Visually he's an indistinct dark green blob, his only distinguishing feature his back spines - other than that it's difficult to tell exactly what he looks like, what he's doing or even sometimes where he is in the shot (an impressive feat given he is 100m tall). Compounding this is that he's nearly always wreathed in smoke, fog and clouds - and the action scenes take place at night. Compounding that is that in the 3D version I saw (which added precisely nothing to the experience), the glasses make a dark film even darker.

A very grey movie. Godzilla is in this picture I think.

It all feels a bit sub-Pacific Rim, which did the whole giant monsters trashing cities thing much better than Godzilla does. The Kaiju in that film spewed great blue gouts of neon blood everywhere, battles illuminated by fluorescence and flashes of colour. By comparison Godzilla is muted and flat, the monsters grey, the sky grey and the clouds of dust around them grey - a disappointing choice given how colourful Monsters was.

Even Godzilla's subtext is starting to look clapped out. Godzilla is as much a giant metaphor as he is giant lizard; a symbol of mankind's hubris and the dangers of messing with nature and so on. Here he comes to represent disaster, the scaly embodiment of tsunami and earthquake - the puny human characters realising that they are nothing in the face of all-powerful nature. Fair enough, but that's the basic subtext of every single giant monster movie. There is a slightly more interesting set of symbols linked with the giant insects, Edwards associating them with Fukushima and nuclear waste disposal - but it never really goes anywhere interesting.

Frustratingly there are occasional all-too-brief shots where everything is framed beautifully and sounds good - all moments without any actors in them. But there's no way it's worth sitting through the rest of the bilge that makes up the majority of Godzilla to get to these worthwhile bits. I'd estimate that of 120 minutes there are, at maximum, maybe 10-15 minutes of worthwhile cinema in here. Unfortunately this is a sloppy, boring and largely Godzilla-free waste of time. What a shame.

★

Godzilla is on general release from 15th May

The sculptor Camille Claudel was committed to an insane asylum in 1913. Thirty years later she died there. Camille Claudel 1915 shows us just three days of this thirty years, just a tiny fraction of her total incarceration though more than enough to demonstrate what it is to be locked into a hell with no escape, to have hope beaten from your body and your mind destroyed. To put it mildly, this is not a barrel of laughs.

Born in 1864, Camille Claudel was a talented sculptor, the disciple and lover of Auguste Rodin. After realising that Rodin wouldn't marry her she left him, secluding herself in a studio and living a detached, artistic life with just her cats for company. From a modern perspective we see that she was suffering the signs of mild, treatable schizophrenia: paranoia and delusions of grandeur. After her supportive father died - she was summarily committed to an asylum on the orders of her brother, the writer and diplomat Paul Claudel.

We meet Camille adrift in a nightmare; surrounded by the screeching, the drooling and the manic - treated with clinically invasive politeness by the nuns that drift around the building like pitch-black, stony-faced ghosts. Camille herself looks like a half erased pencil sketch, her beauty being systematically scrubbed away by a neverending procession of daily humiliations. Mostly silent, Dumont locks his camera onto her face - pale skin stretched over her skull like an old bedsheet drying in the sun, eyes suspicious and darting, mouth pursed tightly as she tries her hardest not burst into tears.

Juliette Binoche is stunning in the lead role. Under the asylum regime the old Camille is gradually disappearing, and so Binoche underscores every tiny tic and glance with a sense of loss. Dumont has worked in about as much misery as 90 minutes of film can bear, but the biggest emotional wallop is the way Binoche plays Camille as someone who knows not only that she's gradually being disassembled but that the process is inevitable. Every day she loses a tiny fragment of her genius and talent and it's never coming back. There's a particularly utterly heartbreaking moment where Camille picks a piece of clay from the floor and compulsively begins to shape it, quickly realising that whatever artistic skills she once possessed have faded. She tosses it away, disgusted and humiliated by what's happened to her, and bursts into tears.

Binoche does an awful lot of crying, sobbing and general weeping here - totalling probably around 10 minutes plus of the run-time. All the while Dumont dispassionately closes in her with clinical precision, the director eyeing her like he's a butterfly collector about to pin her to a board. When she's not in floods of uncontrollable tears, Camille exists in state of tense, brittle stoicism, totally silent for large portions of the film. When the dam does break the words spill uncontrollably from her as she bemoans the state of her life, the cruelty of those around her and her painfully simple desires for freedom and privacy.

Dumont contrasts Camille's abuse-victim poise with excruciatingly disturbing close-ups of the other residents. The film is shot in a real-life asylum, and these supporting characters are played by the actual patients. It's difficult to summarise what it feels to stare into their eyes. They grin through mouths of smashed teeth, saliva drooling from their chins, staring blankly at the camera. Their faces look subtly warped, devoid of modesty, vanity and self-awareness. Do they know they're in a movie? Do they even know what's going on? Dumont refuses to blink, holding these shots for as long as humanly possible, forcing the audience to intellectually and emotionally engage with the patients. It's exhausting and traumatising - we soon realise that this just another facet of Camille's life - the only sane woman in an insane world.

Striated right through the film is a strong Christian morality; the cold charity of the nuns couple with the omnipresent statues of the bovinely demure Virgin Mary that dot the institution. Eventually Camille's brother Paul arrives to visit, and we cut away from the asylum to track his progress through the countryside. At one point he gets out of his car and kneels on the side of the road, making a disturbingly submissive prayer to God about putting his fingers in Christ's wounds. Right from our introduction to the character it's pretty damn obvious that this guy isn't going to be much help to Camille.

His presence in the film signals an abrupt swerve into theological debate, including a slightly bizarre scene where he sits butt-naked in a monastery writing a psychologically byzantine letter about his relationship with God. I was a bit dismayed that we'd cut away from Camille for a bit, and Paul's theological masturbations are, to be frank, kind of tedious. This is the one misstep the film makes - though even this serves to illustrate the hypocritical division between Camille's socially unacceptable mental illness and societal subservience to God.

Dumont's film is so hellish, so overbearing and so devoid of hope that we're left in little doubt whether or not there is a God. This is a cold world where Camille's beauty and art are smashed into fragments against spiky rocks. Here, compassion and love are absent: if there ever was a God for Camille Claudel he's either dead or a complete monster. The pious Christian smugness of viewing others misery as a necessary spiritual cleansing experience, "moving in mysterious ways" is exposed as a crutch to obviate their own guilt at their actions.

Camille Claudel 1915 will leave you angry and miserable. We know from the off that, for all her hopes of release, Camille will never leave this nightmare, her final destiny a forgotten carcass tossed into an anonymous grave. The mark of how good this film is is that you find yourself wanting to swoop into the film like a superhero, bash the walls of the asylum down and save her life. But we can't. She and everyone else in the film are just dusty bones; their misery eternal. So I can't exactly wholeheartedly recommend Camille Claudel 1915 as a fun night out. But it's a fantastic piece of cinema precisely for that reason: suffocating, harrowing and as grim as it gets. Be warned.

★★★★

Camille Claudel 1915 is released on 28th June

Watching an X-Men movie in 2014 feels like sliding on a comfy old pair of slippers. For nearly half my life I've been watching a topless Hugh Jackman quip and smoke his way around wood-panelled mansions, Patrick Stewart rolling around and offering well enunciated words of wisdom and Ian McKellen clearly loving hamming it up in a leather cape and silly hat. After 14 years and 7 films these characters feel like old friends, and though their films have ranged in quality from the good-to-competent (X-Men 2) to the diabolical (Wolverine: Origins) I've always had a kernel of good will towards them, if only because they've demonstrated a consistently great eye for casting.

Days of Future Past is very much an X-Men victory lap, bringing together almost every actor and character that's featured in the series thus far for a twisty-turny time travel caper. Leaving aside the actual quality of the film for a moment, this is one of the greatest ensemble casts of the last decade, a real embarrassment of riches. Director Bryan Singer, returning to the series after a decades absence, is supremely confident with the material - the time travelling plot necessitating juggling two ensembles and two entirely different settings all served up with dollops of special effects and quickly sketched character arcs.

There's also an neatly homoerotic element to much this stuff.

The basic plot is essentially a superhero reimagining of Terminator. We open in a perpetually nighttime, post-apocalyptic hellworld of concentration camps and ruins. Skeletons litter the ground amid lightning strikes and giant, spotlight wielding killer machines. Taking the place of Skynet are the Sentinels; omniscient invincible robots able to defeat our mutant heroes by copying their powers. The X-Men have been reduced to a ragtag group desperately trying to survive, though still wearing costumes that look like they're on their way to a rave circa 1998. As a mark of how bad things have gotten Wolverine has gone a bit grey, Magneto has lost his revolutionary spark and Professor X has never looked balder.

After a bit of super science hand-wavery it's decided that the best course of action is to send Wolverine back to the 1970s to stop the war from ever happening in the first place. Thus the series spirals back on itself to the rebooted cast of X-Men: First Class - where Wolverine has to play Blues Brothers and get the band back together. With Wolverine as our guide we journey through a Kodachrome tinted soft rock superhero past of bell bottoms, paisley shirts and outrageously wide-brimmed hats. There's even a villainous Nixon caricature!

Magneto is really nailing this outfit. Supervillainy with style!

It's a pretty convoluted set-up, but Singer keeps things light and most importantly, sustains momentum throughout. Obvious effort has been expended on creating a dynamic screenplay where character goals are crystal clear at all times. While the overarching plot of preventing the future war is always on character's minds, we have pleasant little diversions into heist caper, political thriller and even a smidge of rock star psychedelia. It's a sprawling mess of a movie, but it's an entertaining, well-realised mess sprinkled with sharp dialogue and well-realised action sequences.

Some highlights are an appearance from newcomer Pietro Maximoff, a smart-ass superspeed kleptomaniac who's the centre of an equally beautiful and hilarious slow-mo action sequence soundtracked by Jim Croce's easy listening hit Time in a Bottle. Similarly enjoyable (as always) is Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, who serves mainly to deflate the film's sense of self-importance by making smartass comments through a fug of cigar smoke. Probably the best thing in the movie is James McAvoy's Charles Xavier, who we learn has been reduced to a reclusive, depressed smack addict living in the squalid ruins of his mansion - a bit like Mick Jagger in Performance.

Wolverine slots so well into the 70s that I deeply want a scummy mutantsploitation flick.

One of the crucial hurdles that the X-Men series has to surmount is that it's all too easy to sympathise with Magneto. Sure the guy may be bonkers and occasionally sadistic, but with his commitment to direct action and his cinematic superpowers he's an exciting and charismatic guy to be around, whether played by Fassbender or McKellen. By contrast, the pacifistic liberality of Professor X usually leaves him looking a bit boring. Mutants are allegorical minorities, and seeing murderous bigots being minced by a smug, hovering man in a silly helmet is deeply satisfying.

So it's impressive that Days of Future Past puts the legwork in to actually get us onside with Professor X's viewpoint and recognise that Magneto is, as writer Grant Morrison memorably put it, "a mad old terrorist twat with daft ideas based on violence and coercion." Fassbender still imbues the character with basic decency and a strong conscience but before our eyes we see him warping into a damaged, wounded person for whom the ends very much justify the means.

This is basically Magneto vs Nixon.

Things are pretty sharp visually too. Singer recognises that after umpteen superhero films we're unlikely to be particularly wowed by Wolverine popping his claws out or Storm creating lightning - so interesting twists are made on their powers to keep things fresh. One particularly effective move is an action sequence shot in handheld faux Super 8. It echoes the Zapruder footage, and from this new perspective the image of a blue skinned, naked woman with bright red hair is once more scary, alien and bizarre.

It's surprisingly invigorating material for a sixth sequel and by the time the credits roll it feels as if the X-Men franchise has had new life breathed into it. I'd never consider myself an outright fan of these movies, but purely through their tenacity they've gathered some emotional resonance. There's a unexpected nostalgia in revisiting the bustling hallways of Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, and for a brief moment I'm once more that excited teenager sitting in a cinema in 2000, not quite able to believe that a major studio has made a fun, sharp and exciting blockbuster X-Men movie.

★★★★

X-Men: Days of Future Past is in cinemas May 22nd.

You're a prehistoric man standing in an arid savannah. The world is windless and a creeping dread takes hold in your brain. Gazing out into the billowing grass your eyes instinctively flicker at each anomalous motion. Too often your mind has played tricks on you, but you know full well that somewhere out there lies a hungry creature composed of muscle and teeth and you're only one mistake away from winding your way through its guts as just so much meat.

So what does the mindset of a paranoid caveman have to do with an art exhibition in leafy Chelsea? Tom Pike's work, composed of chaotic tangles of colours and shapes tweaks the same part of our brains that we share with our ancestors: the instinctive desire to transform the random into the structured, to reorder reality in order to spot the hungry tiger in the grass. We do this without thinking every day of our lives: stare into the static of a detuned television set long enough and faces begin to loom out at you; fixate yourself upon the ripples of a pond and the whole world ripples in response; random constellations of clouds transform into animals, objects and actions.

The notion of wringing order from chaos runs right through Pike's work; and it's hardly surprising to learn that his background is in architecture, a discipline that seeks to impose order upon an analogue world. At first glance a piece like Favela might appear to be the child of a shredder and a book of swatches, but stare for a while and you see the cool logic of its construction; the shards of text defiantly emerging from washes of paint. These elements bleed together, mingling on the canvas and creating a visual creole.

Favela

The snatches of text, pictures and colour overlapping with each other remind me of the fascinating accidental juxtapositions that you see when they're scraping decades of accreted adverts from the wall of a tube station. I feel a bit perverse enjoying this effect: when an advert is new, complete and where it's supposed to be it's an annoyance out to trick me into giving them my money. But when it's sliced up and the years have rendered whatever it's hawking irrelevant it becomes something far more interesting.

Cut up like a Burroughs manuscript, old billboards become the geological strata of Western culture. Delve back through time far enough and you see the faces of the forgotten famous grinning back at you, outdated fonts and unfashionable colours leering through the white surf of torn paper edges. Pike's Revelation is an artificial attempt to recreate this process of destruction, trying his best to wrangle a chaotic, unpredictable process into conveying some definite meaning. But what meaning?

Revelation

Though the sliced up compositions of this work hold our interest, it's worth stepping back a few paces and examining them as a whole. The bright primary colours quote African and South American art (not to mention that one of them is actually called Favela). There's a deeply embedded cultural resistance in Britain to avoid intense bright colour - possibly because we're oh-so-refined-and-tasteful, but maybe more prosaically because these are palettes that look best in direct, strong sunlight - of which we have precious little.

Warp and Weft

Warp and Weft, with the embedded rectangles studded across the canvas bring photographs of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to mind, or the slums of Quito to mind. I imagine these places are what architects see in their nightmares; visions of a world without them. Absent are careful planning, individualistic design, any consideration of how people move through a space and any conscious understanding of mood and history in the buildings. In their place is are make do and mend constructions born of necessity; rickety piles of scrabbled corrugated iron succeed as buildings if they a) keep the rain off, b) keep the sun off and c) don't collapse and crush the inhabitants.

Aftermath

Things come to a bit of a head in my favourite work, Aftermath. Here the decollage effect manages simultaneously represent order and chaos - the design tangled and torn, yet progressing in relatively straight lines until *boom*, it's all disrupted by a wound in the design. This was described to me as an explosion, but I can't help but read it as an implosion, the gravity of the piece collapsing in on itself like a black hole - consuming itself.

There's a subtle satire here; the artist combining imagery and colours associated with the world's poorest people, splicing it with torn up fragments of British adverts and pop culture and placing the result in the gleaming white environment of a Chelsea art gallery; selling it in the middle of one of the richest neighbourhoods on the planet. Presumably, given their surface cheeriness, more than a few of these will spend their days brightening the walls of the locals, something colourful to stand out against intense monochromatic designer chic. Placing a little window into poverty in the midst of such opulence is a cheeky move, a subconscious reminder of the chasm between the rich and poor.

Perhaps I'm looking too deeply into the grass, seeing hungry tigers when there's nothing but random ripples of wind. Running away from something that doesn't exist might sound overly skittish, but that's the nature of apophenia. Reading something as being about economic divisions and exploitation says more about my sensibilities than those of the artist, but I can't help but see (and enjoy) what I see. After all, it's better to run away from an imaginary tiger than to be caught by a real one.

Unfortunately I attended the final day of the exhibition, but you can find out more about Tom Pike here: http://www.sandrahiggins.com/artists/tom-pike.php

"Blended is awful. Worse, it doesn’t even have the decency to be awful in an interesting way. I secretly love a bit of bad film rubbernecking, a ‘what-the-hell-were-they-thinking?’ trainwreck like Sandler’s Jack and Jill or That’s My Boy. Films like these are bonkers awful – so bad you can squeeze a fragment of masochistic pleasure from them. Not so with Blended. Here, Adam Sandler briefly steps away from his usual self-congratulatory manchild fare and attempts a schmaltzy, super-cutesy family romcom.

And it’s even worse than usual."

Read the rest at We Got This Covered.

★

Blended is on general release from 23rd May

Omar is an emotional experience. You'll feel fear, exhilaration, pride, envy, hate, sadness and anger. Especially that last one. Like the characters in the film you'll both bristle at the injustice and feel utterly impotent, getting mad as hell and not being able to do a damn thing about it. Set in occupied Palestine, Omar gives us a taste of how living under a military cosh mutates social structures, twisting friends into enemies, enemies into allies and love into hate.

Our hero Omar (Adam Bakri) becomes the metaphorical battlefield over which the wider conflict is fought over. He's a preternaturally handsome, athletic young Palestinian with an easy smile and a boyish crush on Nadia (Leem Lubany) that contrasts nicely with his adult revolutionary ambitions. After suffering humiliation at the hands of the IDF, he retaliates, concocting a plan with his best friends Amjad and Tarek to assassinate an Israeli soldier. But soon consequences come knocking and Omar is banged up in a nightmarish torture camp where he undergoes intense psychological pressure to try and get him to turn collaborator for the occupying forces.

The most obvious point of comparison is Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 masterpiece The Battle of Algiers. Pontecorvo's film (and if you haven't seen it drop everything right now and go watch it) is the go-to cinematic text on urban insurgency, asymmetric warfare and the morality of revolutionary acts, so highly regarded it was screened at the Pentagon in 2003 as an warning of problems that would be faced by Coalition Forces during the Iraq War (not they apparently paid much attention to it). Omar and Algiers share a lot of filmic DNA, a visually similar setting, willingness to emotionally engage with both sides and, most importantly, a ballsy commitment to exploring violence as a valid response to oppression.

Nadia and Omar

Over the course of Omar we realise that these characters and their respective countries are caught in an inescapable cycle of violent activity. The casual (and occasionally murderous) brutality of the IDF breeds resentment in the Palestinian people, which bubbles over into ambushes, assassinations and suicide bombings. This in turn causes Israel to tighten the screw ever more on the beleaguered country, which results in further retaliation - and so forth.

After a half century of this, both sides are ten kinds of screwed up. Israel has twisted itself into a monstrous oppressive force: able to argue in favour of bombing hospitals and schools, bulldozing people's homes and conducting programmes designed to starve the Palestinian people, who appear to be regarded as little more than subhumans by the extreme right-wing government. Faced with this military might, many Palestinians feel justified in strapping explosives to themselves and suicidally taking out their frustrations on the Israeli population in general. The two countries have become deformed by violence: Israel, founded as a safe haven, has become genocidal and Palestine simmers with antisemitism and religious extremism.

This situation is too big, controversial and unwieldy for cinema to tackle directly - so Omar pares everything down to the personal level. At the core of the film is the relationship between Omar and Nadia, two performances shot through with fevered, unrequited passion. In happier times they'd be starcrossed lovers, destined for a long and happy life together. Here, we see their affection perverted by war, trust undermined with suspicion: in military eyes love becomes just another variety of bomb. Omar is sprinkled with these perversions of affection, the conflict warping everything that's good and kind about humanity into something horrible.

Leem Lubany is particularly great: tragic and beautiful.

The darkest the film gets are the nightmarish torture sequences. Omar is suspended naked by his wrists in an infinite dark space that recalls Glazer's recent Under the Skin. Here he's beaten to a pulp, sexually humiliated and mentally manipulated. These sequences have a ring of 1984's Room 101 with Omar and Nadia playing Winston and Julia. Abu-Assad goes to great lengths to show us a situation where there is no right decision. Whether you're innocent or guilty the end result is the destruction of the self, followed by being tossed into a dark box and forgotten. In many ways it's a riposte to Zero Dark Thirty, here we identify with the man whose testicles are being burnt rather than the one doing the burning.

Make no mistake about it, Omar is a deeply partisan film, coming firmly down on the side of the Palestinian people - though its representation of events is so clear minded and grounded that it resists easy classification as propaganda. Abu-Assad neatly sidesteps religion to the extent that I don't think the words 'Jew' and 'Muslim' are even spoken in the script; the involvement of individual political entities within Israel and Palestine are similarly minimised, with just a few scant mentions of Hamas and Al-Aqsa. Again, this all works reduces the conflict to the bare bones; the oppressors vs the oppressed.

Omar is an outstanding piece of cinema; beautiful, heartfelt, political and intelligent. It never sags over its 98 minute run time, none of the actors put a foot wrong and the core romance of Adam Bakri and Leem Lubany is devastatingly well-executed. Testament to this is that, as the credits rolled, the audience sat still in stunned silence. Omar presents no easy answers; the Israelis effortlessly dominate the Palestinians through technology, finances and firepower, the human consequences of their occupation misery, distrust and death. With the West squarely behind this oppression their only possible response is fragmented desperate acts of violence. Omar will leave you angry and sad - angry that we live in world where oppression like this is tacitly accepted for diplomatic reasons, and sad that the end of this country's hardships isn't even a faint dot on the horizon.

★★★★★

Omar is released on May 30th.

All too often the art world can seem fragmented and transitional. You wander off the street into an interesting exhibition and vow that you're going to keep track of this artist, only to find that they promptly vanish into thin air. Not so with the Art & Science group at Central St Martins. In November 2013 I visited Experimentations; an exhibition held by a group of art students probing the divide between the two disciplines. It was promising stuff. In February I attended another: Live In Your Dreams, down in the crypt of St Pancras Church. This makes Heteroglossia the final instalment of a trilogy, the progression through the exhibitions leaving me with a much clearer sense of what makes these artists tick.

Here the edges of art and science are blurred, tangled and torn. Weird odours bubble from steaming pools, organs float in blissful suspended animation, proteins knot up into new materials, metal deforms around light and hard sterile glass becomes furry and plush. The science that the artists of Central St Martins have cottoned onto is the transmutation of materials, many of the pieces capturing or freezing the exact moment in which change occurs. This is alchemy - the primordial soup of modern science - and it's alchemical symbols, philosophy and rituals that this exhibition returns to time and time again.

Alchemist Laboratory - Jaden JA Hastings & Amy Congdon

The most literal interpretation is Jaden J.A. Hastings and Amy Congdon's Alchemist Laboratory. Here a labcoat has mutated into the occult robes of a magician, the table covered in glass flasks arranged to form a semi-symmetric sigil. It's an approach to science by way of magical thinking. This train of thought continues in Hastings' excellent Vitalitas, with a decellularised pig's heart preserved in formaldehyde within a pagoda-like reliquary. Decellularisation is the process by which the cells are stripped from an organ, leaving behind the extracellular matrix. This lowers the risk of transplant rejection, meaning the heart in Vitalitas sits right on the fence between its donor and its intended origin; frozen in time, space and biology.

Vitalitus - Jaden JA Hastings

Charlotte Wendy Law continues this exploration into changing materials. Her pieces features a collection of objects seemingly flash-frozen between states. Lumps of jagged slag dot the work, the products of metallurgic experiments that bristle with danger and potential energy. Much these are remains, the viewer unconsciously forensically engaging with them them and deducing the processes by which they were created. In Action/Ode (Performance Remains) we see the charred remains of a piano, A Table is speckled with shattered detritus, smashed TVs glare out with imploded angry stares from beneath and A Metallurgic Sutra projects onto a curved, blasted piece of scrap metal. This is post apocalyptic art; the ruins of the old world repurposed for the artistic needs of the new. Viewed within this shiny new building it's a faintly sinister premonition of future disaster to come, occupying past and future simultaneously.

A Table - Charlotte Wendy Law

The idea of an object being neither one thing nor another, to be stuck in a transitional state is realised in a quite different way in Roderick MacLeod's Tempete du Monde (Bis). Here we have a furry white box with an inviting opening in the middle. You stick your hand inside and... hello what's this? It's rubbery, weirdly textured, kinda firm.. Yup. It's a big fat dildo! I always appreciate work that has the balls (no pun intended) to just straightforwardly be what it's about without hiding meaning under layers of obfuscation.

Tempete du Monde (Bis)

Stick your hand in a yonic slit and get a hard cock in the hand for your trouble. The piece is a collision of the sexes, forcing whoever interacts with it to confront the hermaphrodite inside them. It's a piece with a punchline - you can get just as much fun out of experiencing it yourself as watching others pop their hand inside, their faces lighting up with a mixture of shock, surprise and excitement as they grasp the cock.

The one who feels like a fish in the water - Boris Raux

Also taking gender as a point of division is the always excellent Boris Raux, who's as much scientist as he is artist. In two neighbouring pieces he explores gender through smell. The feminine is symbolised by a bubbling, circular pool of water - steam billowing out over the rippling surface. Masculinity is a meticulously constructed wooden box, reeking of rigidity and permanence. Both emit wafts of carefully composed smells intended to symbolise the genders. Smell is rarely exploited in art, it's abstract, technically difficult to create and unable to be replicated either in print or online. This means Raux's work charts relatively new territory, finding a space somewhere in the middle of our senses; artwork we inhale, that lodges deep within our own bodies.

These were just a few of the works on display, but walking around you quickly understand how beautifully the cool, unemotional sterility of science complements the reflexive and wild chaos of art. Both disciplines require a fierce intelligence to function at their best, and both require participants to be able to analyse and process the world around them into something fresh. As a bit of a confession, when I first read about a group of art students tackling scientific means I feared the worst; expecting a naive gaggle of pieces that would tend towards woolly pseudoscience.

The Point of Departure - Jaden JA Hastings

I shouldn't have worried. After three exhibitions I can see how well these artists have understood the potential of the crossroads they stand at, fully grasping the intrinsic beauty of understanding, the thrill of deduction and the wonder of transforming the world around you into something fresh, new and fascinating. If these works are the conclusion to a strand of their education, it's an endpoint derived of methodical, analytical thinking coupled with an keen eye for stimulating the senses of the audience. Colour me both impressed and happy that I got to see this body of work evolve over the last six months.

I bet every review of Edge of Tomorrow is going to mention Groundhog Day, but the comparison is irresistible. The blood of the Bill Murray classic has been transfused into the still warm body of the Starship Troopers franchise and the resulting film is a bit of a Frankenstein's monster. But instead of Punxatawny Phil we have Tom Cruise in science fiction hero mode, Andie MacDowell is wielding a giant sword and the cute groundhog is replaced with a horde of bloodthirsty tentacled monsters.

I've got a pet theory that Tom Cruise works best in a film where he plays a smarmy bastard that gets taken down a peg or two, and at the beginning of Edge of Tomorrow he's rarely been smarmier. Faced with a somewhat generic alien invasion of Europe, he's Cage, a former advertising executive turned military PR man with designs on staying as far away from any actual fighting as possible. His oily cowardice angers a General (a largely wasted Brendan Gleeson), who promptly pressgangs him into the front lines of an upcoming invasion of Europe. Sweaty, terrified and miserable as hell, Cage is strapped into a clunky robot exoskeleton and tossed into the beach sequence from Saving Private Ryan. He dies horribly.

Then he wakes up. It's the same day all over again. Once again he's thrown onto the battlefield, but this time survives a little longer before once more biting it. As he undergoes this endless cycle of death and rebirth he gradually becomes a better soldier, learning how to fight the monsters, use his equipment and stay calm on the battlefield. The problem is, no matter how hard he fights, the monsters always win. Enter the Full Metal Bitch (Emily Blunt). She knows exactly what's going on with Cage's time loop, and the two resolve to use it to end the war once and for all.

Tom Cruise is about to die horribly. Again.

Very quickly it turns out that the concept of being trapped in an endless time loop is intrinsically pretty funny, even if the human race is on the brink of destruction. Liman can't resist working through a series of extremely Groundhog Dayish time travel gags, the highlight being a short montage of Tom Cruise dying in various silly ways which amused me no end. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Cruise: while I can't deny his supercharisma and basic everyman likeability I take a sadistic pleasure in watching horrible things happen to him. Whether he's getting his face ripped off in Vanilla Sky or murdering clones of himself in Oblivion I'm enjoying myself, so any film where the most expedient way out of a sticky situation is to shoot Tom Cruise in the head (thus resetting the timeline) is a-okay in my book.

By quite a wide margin Edge of Tomorrow boasts the highest Cruise-deaths-per-minute in cinema to date, and I'd recommend it for that alone. Fortunately it's also got more going for it. Emily Blunt is quietly excellent as the buttoned down supersoldier, a warrior that's precisely as robotic and precise as the exoskeleton that powers her. Initially she seems a bit flat, but quickly you realise her emotional numbness is the logical psychological result of dying thousands of times and ultimately failing. She's so impressive as a cold-blooded monster-murderer extraordinaire that it becomes a bit disappointing when she begins to thaw and show her true personality. But Blunt keeps a tight leash on the character and Liman never quite lets Cruise overshadow her in the badass stakes.

Similarly impressive are the robotic exoskeletons. Though they must be computer generated they have an utterly believable clunky weight to them, the soldiers fighting and moving like Ripley in the Power Loader in the climax of Aliens. We're never quite allowed to take them for granted, and with weapons bristling out of them like a Swiss Army Knife designed by 2000AD they serve to keep the action sequences full of surprises and neat moments right up to the climax.

Unfortunately the same can't be said for the rather uninspired alien designs. They're essentially a blob of tentacles with a mouth in the middle, and though they move in a disarmingly quick manner the film never quite shows what they do to kill a man. Paul Verhoeven in Starship Troopers knew enough to show them disembowelling a man in the opening sequence, immediately underlining how dangerous his bugs were. By comparison, Liman's monsters are a bit bland and chew their way through the soldiers in a boringly antiseptic manner.

They've basically got to get a doohickey to find out where that space onion lives.

The screenplay also has a worringly tendency to dip into clunky exposition and technobabble to the point where characters look like they're trying not to crack up at the rubbish they're forced to say. Harold Ramis and Bill Murray knew better than to explain the 'how' of their time loop, but as science fiction Edge of Tomorrow seems to feel obliged to try, leading to some largely tedious scenes where characters stare at spinning holograms and blithely spout a load of portentous sounding drivel.

That all said, Edge of Tomorrow is inarguably a superior summer blockbuster. The time loop gimmick is a beautiful, if unoriginal, storytelling tool and Liman exploits the possibilities of it to the fullest. The whole thing falls apart like a house of cards if you think about it too much, but though there's the odd creaky moment the whole affair just about hangs together. Much as I hate to admit it, science fiction Tom Cruise is a safe bet right now. After all, the man enjoys silly alien stories so much he literally made it his religion - what finer recommendation could you ask for?

★★★★

Edge of Tomorrow is on general release from May 30th. Don't bother with 3D on this one.

"Benny & Jolene is what happens when low-budget indie mumblecore goes This is Spinal Tap. While not quite a mockumentary, this film covers the same fruitful territory of disastrous gigs, incompetent managers, brainless hangers-on and inter-band conflict. Yet while Spinal Tap were a heavy metal band powered by twin engines of egotism and stupidity, the duo at the centre of Benny & Jolene are hamstrung by shyness, naivety and an inability to speak up for themselves."

Read the rest of my review at We Got This Covered

★★★

Benny & Jolene is released June 6th

Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets is the best film that could be made about Pulp. The majority of British pop bands were eager to be seen as “one of the lads,” with a pint in one hand and a copy of Loaded magazine in the other. Not Pulp, who wholeheartedly embraced an individualistic style of pervy proletariat, outsider chic. Their lyrics are the stuff of fluttering net curtains in run-down terraced houses, chaotic and confused teenage lust and not only not fitting in, but knowing you’ll never be able to. This documentary, centring on the band’s 2012 farewell concert, grasps everything that Pulp is about. It’s less a straightforward band biography and more a sociological study of the swamp of fears, loves and passions that bubbles away under the industrially cratered landscape of Sheffield.

Read the rest at We Got This Covered

★★★★★

Pulp, A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets is released June 6th.

'Plastic' (2014) directed by Julian Gilbey

'Pompeii' (2014) directed by Paul W.S. Anderson

'Bad Neighbours' (2014) directed by Nicholas Stoller

'The Wind Rises' (2013) directed by Hayao Miyazaki

'American Interior' (2014) directed by Gruff Rhys & Dylan Goch

Tannaz Oroumchi: 'Hectified' at Curious Duke Gallery, Whitecross Street

'Frank' (2014) directed by Lenny Abrahamson

'Pantani: The Accidental Death of a Cyclist' (2014) directed by James Erskine

'Miley Cyrus: Bangerz' at the o2 Arena

Janelle Monáe at Brixton Academy, 9th May 2014

'Godzilla' (2014) directed by Gareth Edwards

'Camille Claudel 1915' (2013) directed by Bruno Dumont

'X-Men: Days of Future Past' (2014) directed by Bryan Singer

'Tom Pike: Incidents and Accidents' at The Foundry Gallery

'Blended' (2014) directed by Frank Coraci

'Omar' (2013) directed by Hany Abu-Assad

'Heteroglossia: Art & Science' at Central St Martins, 27th May 2014

'Edge of Tomorrow' (2014) directed by Doug Liman

Benny & Jolene (2014) directed by Jamie Adams

'Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets (2014) directed by Florian Habicht