LIMITLESS (****)

Dir: Neil Burger. Starring: Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, Abbie Cornish

Limitless is a cute idea, and a cute film. It may have more than a few plot holes if you think about it too deeply, but there is actually an interesting exploration of the ethics and pitfalls of drug taking and addiction sitting beneath its entertaining glossy surface.

Bradley Cooper is an out of work writer – whiney and useless – who is dumped by his girlfriend (Cornish). Life seems hopeless until he is introduced to a new drug, NZT, which allows him to access 100 per cent of his mind. Suddenly his memory, his senses, his perception are all hyper-sharp. He is the man! His sudden conversion to superman leads him to the financial markets and he quickly becomes a money-making sensation. But there is a downside… Actually several downsides, from people trying to kill him, alarming side effects, and the difficulty of retaining a regular supply of NZT. The film morphs into an engaging thriller, and Bob De Niro pops up in ‘look at me I'm not even trying' mode as a shady billionaire.

Surprisingly, all of this works rather well. Cooper is well cast and confident, the plot – despite those holes – keeps moving, and the tone never gets either too dark or too silly. Best of all the various ‘lessons to be learnt' are kept in the background and the overall drug-taking theme is handled with the lightest of touches.

Allen Ginsberg, his eponymous ground-breaking poem, and the obscenity trial it engendered, are the subjects of Howl (***) which is, in turns, brilliant and frustrating. The film cuts between four settings. Two – interviews with Ginsberg (his own words), and a reading of the poem – are extremely well handled. James Franco is superb as Ginsberg and riveting in his performance of Howl. The courtroom scenes (actual testimony), featuring David Stathairn, John Hamm and Bob Balaban, are fine but lack background and tension. The fourth section, where the poem is accompanied by animation, is simply embarrassing and actually detracts from the power of Ginsberg's vision. Shame, but probably worth watching just for Franco.

'Exorcism is alive and well today” says Reverend Cotton Marcus in The Last Exorcism (***). It certainly is at the movies. Cotton does exorcisms but, as he confides to an attendant camera crew (the film is structured as a documentary) he doesn't actually believe in demons, just thinks he is helping ‘unhappy' people. So he sets off for the Deep South, one final exorcism allowing the film crew to expose the tricks of his trade. And – wouldn't you just know it – things don't quite pan out. But ignore the lurid cover image, this goes to unexpected places. Fine work from the cast, no gore, and a tense, spooky ride.

Beastly (**) is awful in the way that self-satisfied American high school films can so often be. It's a loose update of Beauty and the Beast with Alex Pettyfer playing a rich obnoxious good-looking guy. He naturally gets his comeuppance, courtesy of a teen witch, in the sort of social sect that only exists in fatuous movies. The comparisons with new Aussie drama Wasted on the Young are glaring, and this loses on every front aside from the plastic cuteness of its cast. Perhaps it might work for teenage girls still lost in the Twilight trance.

The Door (***) opens in a similar fashion to the somewhat notorious Antichrist: a father is off having sex while his child accidentally dies. We move five years on. He (Mads Mikkelsen, villain of Casino Royale) is down and out and discovers the titular opening, seeming to take him back to the past, more in a time-travel/parallel universe way than the Butterfly Kiss rewind thing. And, as is so often the way when you try and fix the past, no good deed goes unpunished and our tentative hero finds himself trapped in a noir-like web of tightening complications. Rather good really.