For his directorial debut, Mark Aselton manages to wrangle together a dream cast including Paul Dano, Zooey Deschanel, John Goodman and Ed Asner and it’s the strength of these players that manages to elevate Gigantic from being just a fair first effort to something decent. It has a somewhat vague plot relating to commitment, adoption and mattress sales and engaging individual sequences that don’t always tie into a coherent whole. The dialogue is less precious and quirky but still very much post-Wes Anderson and it’s to the credit of the two leads that Deschanel and Dano are able to turn their rather boilerplate characters – manic pixie dream girl and stoically zoned out guy, respectively – into real people. It’s not an overall success – in the post-film Q&A the director admitted that some of the more curious stuff, like Zach Galifianakis’ homicidal homeless man were in there just because – but it certainly augers well for his future works. Especially if he can keep getting ensembles like this to work with.

I wish I’d know that Good was a play before it was a film because it would have explained away a number of my complaints about the adaptation. It would have explained why it was so static and monologue-ish and heavy-handed in its look at how normal citizens of 1930s Germany stood idly by or even signed up to participate in the rise of Nazism. It”s really a question that’s far too complex to ever move out of the realm of rhetoric and attempts to address it in a 90-minute film are futile and overly simplistic. While Viggo Mortensen gets top billing, his befuddled professor character is a disappointment but Jason Isaacs as his Jewish best friend fares far better. As far as acting goes – not so much in regards to plot.

Trailer: Good

I had initially been only moderately enthused about this as I thought the Guy Ritchie English Gangster Film genre was played out. As it turns out, it’s only the Guy Ritchie wannabes that should be avoided – the original still has the goods. Though it’s another ensemble crime/comedy caper in the vein of Snatch and Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, it’s still got loads of style and wit. There’s Russian mobsters, English hard men, junkies, poofs, Stringer Bell, a femme fatale and a painting of a MacGuffin. Only the titular rock star doesn’t really seem to have any particular purpose, but he’s good for a laugh. Ritchie is obviously in his comfort zone and complaining about that is like going to a Bond film and saying, “what, another spy film?”. It is what it is.

Trailer: RocknRolla

I spent the first third of The Other Man convinced that the projector had skipped a reel. Though it was obvious that the time-jumping narrative was deliberate, I couldn’t believe that it was being executed in such a graceless manner. I mean, I can appreciate the necessity of the device to keep the viewer off balance, but when you’re doing so with scenes that are staged identically and you can’t tell if a day/month/year has elapsed or even what country the characters are in, well that’s just shoddy storytelling. And it’s a bit of a waste of what could have been an interesting story, with Neeson as a husband obsessed with finding the man he suspects his wife of having an affair with – that’s Banderas, and that’s not a spoiler because you see as much before the opening credits are done. Neither is at their best (I personally think Banderas is a better actor than he generally gets credit for) and I’m fairly certain that the moments of laugh out loud humour were wholly unintentional.