The Imposter
Bart Layton - Starring: Adam O'Brian, Anna Ruben, Cathy Dresbach

In 1994 13-year-old Texas teen Nicolas Barclay went missing. After three years the search for him had been almost abandoned with no clues of his whereabouts. Then he reappeared... in Linares, Spain. His family were ecstatic and welcomed him back with open arms but, in the meantime, he had changed. He had a French accent. And his blue eyes were now brown.
It turns out that the boy they had welcomed back into their home was Frederic Bourdin, a 22-year-old French-Algerian grifter. It took a curious private eye to uncover the deception after Frederic had apparently fooled the family, the federal authorities, the US Embassy and pretty much everyone else he met.
This is one of those stories that is so jaw-droppingly strange that you have to keep reminding yourself that it is actually true. Using a combination of interviews and re-creations director Layton teases out the tale, giving it the tension and twists of a good thriller. And there are certainly a lot of twists. To say more would be to reveal too much. The obvious conundrum of how the family could have so easily accepted this stranger raises more questions than answers in the ever-escalating maze of deception.
It makes for enthralling stuff - certainly one of the best documentaries I've seen this year.

Just weeks after his second most recent film arrived on DVD, here's Woody Allen's one before that. London-set You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is the kind of stuff Allen seems to do effortlessly, a relaxed story of a couple of couples, with Josh Brolin's blocked writer being tempted away from wife Naomi Watts by a sexy neighbour and Anthony Hopkins leaving his marriage for a fling with a gauche young prostitute. There's nothing you haven't seen before in other Woody movies and the various lightly-sketched moral dilemmas are never really resolved, but the cast are expert, making for a pleasant journey.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone should really have had Will Ferrell in it. It's exactly the type of Ferrell comedy we've grown used to, usually set in the world of minor sports. Here it's magicians instead, Steve Carell the titular egotist and Steve Buscemi his put-upon partner. They are forced to rekindle their friendship and love of magic when their long-running Vegas show is threatened by the popularity of Jim Carrey's outrageous street magician. And Carrey is far and away the best thing here, obviously modelling his outrageous character on Criss Angel and bringing a much-needed jolt of hilarious energy.

I Give it a Year is an upmarket English rom-com from Working Title, specialists in upmarket English rom-coms (Love Actually, Notting Hill, etc). It's smart and funny and relatively unsentimental by rom-com standards. The story follows Josh (Rafe Spall) and Nat (Rose Byrne) through the rocky first year of their impulsive marriage. He's a laid-back writer, she's a tightly-wound advertising exec; they are not a natural match. Complications arise in the form of Simon Baker (for her) and Anna Faris (for him). The usual gang of eccentric friends (Stephen Merchant, Minnie Driver, Jason Flemyng) are underused but nonetheless entertaining.

Upside Down is one of the strangest love stories in quite a while. I guess it's a fairy tale for grown ups. Here's the set-up: in a galaxy far far away there are two planets just like earth which, through a quirk of gravity, are right next to each other. So close in fact that you can see people (upside down) just several metres away on the other world. One planet is rich, the other poor. And a boy from the poor planet (Jim Sturges) falls in love with a girl from the rich planet (Kirsten Dunst).
A bit syrupy for my taste but the visuals are impressive.