BARNEY'S VERSION
Starring: Paul Giamatti, Minnie Driver, Rosamund Pike. Dir: Richard J Lewis.

Barney's Version netted lead Paul Giamatti a Golden Globe win, but passed largely unnoticed at the box office. Which is a shame because this is a terrific film – funny, intelligent and touching.
The film explores the life of the titular TV producer (whose company is called ‘Unnecessary Films'), slowly peeling back layers from the hard-drinking cigar-smoking cynic – who might just be a murderer – and digging into the highs and lows of three marriages over 30 years.
It's a long film, rich, detailed, and ambitious in its storytelling, drifting between time periods with assurance and revisiting events so that they emerge in different lights. Giamatti is superb, heartrendingly human, with Minnie Driver fearlessly unsympathetic as his second wife and Rosamund Pike wonderful as his third, aging and growing with beautiful subtlety as years pass.
Dustin Hoffman also pops up and is delightful (and, for a change, not overplaying) as Barney's ex-cop father.
It really is a joy to watch such a skilful script being worked on by such a cast. This is a film that manages to make even its smallest characters into fully formed people and, in examining Barney through the years, shows that under what seems like an ordinary life lurks a wealth of truly extraordinary moments. It's a film that is rich in humanity and reminds us what it really means to be human in all its imperfect glory.

Bridesmaids made quite a splash at cinemas, embraced as the first mainstream ‘gross-out' comedy for women, or a female equivalent of The Hangover. In fact, it's a curious mixture, managing to weld together strains of the Farrelly brothers' excesses (a mass vomiting scene) with the sort of ‘adult' observationist comedy found in Judd Apatow's Funny People. Intermittently very funny, it takes a while to warm to Kirsten Wiig's neurotic heroine who is jilted as head bridesmaid when a new BFF arrives on the scene. Fortunately eccentric support characters carry the slack admirably.

Burning Palms comes with a tagline: ‘Five stories that will f*** you up for life'. If only. It did, however, waste 107 minutes of an otherwise enjoyable day. I guess the clue should have been ‘from the co-screenwriter of Disturbia and Paranormal Activity 2'. And, while we're quoting, how desperate is a film if it uses a quote on its cover from Screen Daily saying: ‘Superficially provocative?' It's a good assessment. In his debut as sole writer/director Christopher Landon presents a quintet of shorts that want to be Takashi Miike, but are simply misogynistic (four stories) and homophobic (the other one). Maybe it's a post modern irony thing...

There are not a lot of ‘adult' animated movies around and it seems unlikely that the ultra-violent Boogie will start a trend. Coming from Argentina, this eskews hi-tech 3D animation for the kind of retro look favoured by some recent French outings. The eponymous ‘hero' is a hard-bitten hit man, an over-the-top macho caricature – think Mickey Rourke in Sin City – who needs to prove he's ‘still the best' after a deadly younger model joins the scene. The animation is oddly effective as Boogie rampages through the streets like Sledgehammer on crack, but overall appeal is probably limited to comic book fans.