THE DEEP BLUE SEA

Dir: Terrence Davis - Starring: Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, Simon Russell Beale.

In the first scene of The Deep Blue Sea Hester (Weisz) is in a small apartment preparing to commit suicide. She is interrupted and a stately story unfolds of her stifling marriage and subsequent infatuation with a dissolute RAF Pilot (Hiddleston). She leaves her husband for him, forsaking a privileged life and setting up in an unassuming bedsit.

Working from a play by Terrence Rattigan, director Davies is more than at home in this 1950s time period – in interviews he often seems like a man from an earlier age – and presents a telling examination of the stratified English class structure while offering Weisz a role of real depth and subtlety. She is rather magnificent as a woman so overcome by passion that she abandons everything. We can see the object of her affection is a worthless dilettante but her love, foolish though it may be, becomes almost a liberating statement, a rebellion against the stultifying strictures of a woman's place in post-war society.

It's a quiet, underplayed film, beautifully constructed and realised.

I don't get Rock of Ages. Why should people into big-hair soft metal of the 80s – Def Leppard, Poison, Foreigner, et al – want to see it resurrected in a Mamma Mia-style musical? There's no accounting for taste but, given my dislike for both the music and the genre, this left me cold. Despite the best efforts of a fun cast (Russell Brand, Alec Baldwin, Paul Giamatti) and mucho satirical retro banter, the story of a sweet girl's introduction to the rock ‘n' roll world amidst the conservative LA establishment's best efforts to close it down only really sparks during Tom Cruise's outrageously louche turn as rock god Stacee Jaxx. Elsewhere the over-long plot drifts, trying to cram too much in amongst the tsunami of 'classic” songs.

96 Minutes starts in the middle of a car-jacking: Dre and Kevin are fleeing, Carley and a shot Lena are terrified hostages. As the film progresses we see the unfolding chaos interspersed with each character's day, the events that led them to the car's violence. It's a finely made and serious piece, carefully delineating the various class issues, social differences and pressures that inform the quartet's decisions. The cast of young unknowns is very convincing even if there is a depressingly predictable (albeit realistic) arc to the overall story.

In Rampart Woody Harrelson re-teams co-star Ben Foster and director Oren Moverman, who were both there when he got an Oscar nod for The Messenger. And this again-insightful character study, of violently 'old school” LA cop Dave 'Date Rape” Brown, is equally impressive. Part of the notorious true-life 'Rampart” division, Brown is a cop out of time, struggling to pay debts, in trouble for video of him beating up a suspect, and with a complicated and collapsing home life. Despite a script credit for crime king James Ellroy there is no elaborate plotting, just a sober study of one man's decline.

Any film pitting Mickey Rourke against Bill Murray has to be at least interesting. Passion Play is a slightly surreal modern western noir in which Rourke's burned-out jazz trumpeter stumbles across a carnival show in the desert where he meets and runs off with 'bird woman” Megan Fox. Yes, she really has wings. As they fall for each other, danger threatens in the shape of Murray's ruthless gangster. Despite a distinctive look the film moves frustratingly slowly; Murray and Rourke seem determined to out-under-act each other, though Fox is surprisingly good. Laid-back, eccentric and unsatisfying to the point of irritation, some might enjoy it as a modern fairytale of sorts.