The Great Gatsby
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Elijah Wood, Carey Mulligan - Dir: Baz Luhrmann

Letting an extravagant director like Baz Luhrmann loose on a revered book noted for it subtlety and delicacy was always going to divide audiences. And so it proved. I feel somewhat divided myself: I love the book and while on one hand I think he trashes the feel and misses a couple of major points, the film is a visual delight and does get a lot of it entertainingly right.
Wood is our narrator Nick who finds himself living alongside the rich and spoiled, specifically the mysterious Jay Gatsby who befriends Nick, partly because Nick's cousin Daisy is his long-lost love. She is now married (for money) and lives across the bay so Gatsby holds a series of elaborate parties to get her attention.
It's a short, beautifully crafted book and Luhrmann hoes in with all the excess of Gatsby's over-the-top parties. Passages of text fly across the screen, costumes and revellers explode in wild colour, and the music deliriously skips from jazz age to hip-hop. This is not the polite approach of the staid seventies Robert Redford version (which won Francis Ford Coppola a Best Screenplay Oscar but was frankly a bit boring).
Everything about this that makes some people like it is exactly what makes others hate it. If you've seen Luhrmann's previous films - Moulin Rouge and Romeo and Juliet in particular – you'll know what to expect. Your choice.

The Hangover Part II was a follow-up pay check for everyone involved in the wild energy and originality of The Hangover - same jokes, same story, different country. The Hangover Part III is the one where everyone was sick of the idea but thought there were still a few more milkable millions in it. The plot is sorta new this time (Doug has been kidnapped, they have to find Chow to get him back) but the jokes are completely locked into imitating their (better) counterparts from previous outings and even Bradley Cooper looks bored. Best bits are in the end credits.

John Cusack has been in a lot of films over the last couple of years that have ended up going direct to DVD and being, in all honesty, pretty forgettable. The Numbers Station doesn't break that run. But that doesn't mean it's not a perfectly serviceable, if rather unambitious, thriller. It's basically a two-hander. Cusack is a rundown CIA agent sent to one of the titular facilities. He just has to guard Malin Akerman as she sends out number codes every day. It's a safe job. Except there's a sudden ambush, the codes may be compromised and all sorts of chaos ensues. Solid enough.

Everyone's favourite everyman, Matt Damon is his usual likeable self in Promised Land. He plays Steve Butler, a fracking salesman sent to rural McKinley to offer an economic lifeline to struggling framers. In exchange for drilling their land. Said likeability is cunningly used: Steve isn't such a nice guy; his charming lines are just lines and he's economical with the truth. But he's a true believer. The pros and cons are pretty well balanced initially, and with strong support from Frances McDormand, Hal Holbrook and others it's classy intelligent stuff with a distinct Local Hero vibe. Shame about the ending.

Sinister is a bit different from the glut of recent horror outings in that it's smart, has no zombies or vampires, and is actually pretty good. Ethan Hawke stars as a somewhat obsessive true crime writer who moves his family into a murder house (without mentioning it) so he can do research for his next book. There he finds some old home movies, 'snuff” films pretty much, but the answers he seeks prove both supernatural and nasty. Music and cinematography are effectively spooky, the cast are great and the tension wonderfully handled. Yep, it's a scary film that is genuinely scary!