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Here’s another film for all of life’s losers – hey guys (and gals) you may not make it to the top spot, but you’ll find your niche. Teenage Hal (Reece Daniel Thompson) may have a good mind, but it’s a bit difficult to let people know how witty he is when his stammer keeps getting in the way. Which makes it all the more surprising when high achiever Ginny (Anna Kendrick) approaches him to join the school debating team. Hal can hardly say hello, let alone master the super-fast speech technique needed for debating against the clock, but he decides to give it a go as he’s smitten with the forceful Ginny. From hereonin Hal’s life just gets weirder as he befriends the kid who lives across the road from Ginny (just so he can spy on her), keeps getting pushed around by his big brother (Vincent Piazza), gets drunk for the first time and finally meets the legendary Ben (Nicholas D’Agosto) who crashed out of the Debating Championships in explosive style the year before.

With a sweet-as-popsicle indie soundtrack and some superb performances this puts a new twist on the Heathers/Napoleon Dynamite school of teen angst misfit movies. What gives it its biting edge is a script that’s so acidic it sometimes makes you wince. It’s weird, surreal and loopy, but always utterly believable and anyone who has been through puberty will recognise the cringe-worthy awkwardness of the teen years as portrayed here.
Dee Pilgrim

Early on in this film the motives of Eugene Hutz and his exploration of the music of his gypsy ancestors are thrown into question. Entering a garden in a rundown gypsy camp in Zakarpattia, Ukraine, this hip troubadour hands his guitar to an enquiring local. Although noticing a missing string, the man plucks, strums and slides with the ease and articulation of a teacher guiding a pupil. When asked where his guitar is by Hutz, he smiles and says: “I don’t have one. Guitars are too expensive.”

At that point, Hutz, an NME ‘cool list’ contender and frontman of New York-based gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello, seems starkly out of place – his journey to play music with real gypsies no more than slumming it with talented, poor, forgotten people. However, the realisation that follows, as the man’s neighbours clamour round with an ensuing eruption of song and dance, is that Hutz’s journey is to learn, to discover the “gypsy root” and that he is celebratory, not threatened, when that involves unearthing superior talent to his own.

Hutz’s exuberance in gathering knowledge of Ukrainian folk music is welcomed with amused intrigue in the Carpathian region and his home town of Kiev. But in a devastating scene his self-styled gypsy hip-hop is rejected by the head of the Kiev Gypsy Theatre as a threat to their enduring tradition. In characteristic form, the musician muses on their immutable differences: “I come from a fucking punk rock background. I’m building my way back into the gypsy tradition.”

Throughout, the enamoured filmmaker Pavla Fleischer is one step behind Hutz. Apart from a mutual love of gypsy music, her main reason for following Hutz is amorous, though not reciprocal as Hutz is accompanied by his lover whom is never filmed. Fleischer’s increasingly concerned voiceovers about the enigmatic Hutz betray the carefree relationship depicted on camera and it becomes clear that if he is the pied piper, then she is one of the innocents of the fairytale, doomed in her uncontrollable urge to follow.

What is unfortunate is that this relationship of mutual appreciation on the edge of obsession is not sufficiently scrutinised. At the film’s close Fleischer sums up Hutz’s journey and naively attributes his working-class childhood as the reason for his musical driving force. What remains subtly overlooked is the director’s need to be around Hutz and her compulsion to follow. With this omitted, even moments as disarming as Hutz accompanying his grandmother through songs in his family’s tower block apartment cannot prevent the feeling that only half of the story has been told. Beren Neale

Buy it here, comrade.

Back in the late 1970s/early 1980s director Sydney Pollack made a string of thoughtful, intelligent movies with a slow burn (Absence Of Malice, The Electric Horseman), and so it seems fitting that he has a significant role here as a performer in another thoughtfully provocative movie that takes its time to tell its story.

He stars as Marty Bach, one partner in a high-powered law firm that employs Michael Clayton (George Clooney) to do its dirty work. If a mess has to be cleaned up, then Clayton handles it; if someone needs to keep his mouth shut, then he will ensure silence reigns. But when another partner, Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), starts to spout off about dirty deeds concerning a chemical company represented by the firm, Clayton is uneasy. He has to deal with the new executive at the company, the steely Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), and something tells him all is not as it seems. Slowly, inevitably, he starts to peel back the layers of lies and conspiracy to reveal the truth – and what he finds chills him to the bone.

This is a dark, dignified, beautifully put together film that gets more intense as it slowly and purposefully paces to its conclusion. Although it does start out in a rather confusing series of seemingly disconnected scenes (it is not told in chronological order), as the pieces of the puzzle fall into place so the tension mounts. George Clooney is superb as the disillusioned Clayton who feels he has somehow let his life slip into a grey area and now sees an opportunity to redeem it. Equally good is Tom Wilkinson as Edens, a man whose troubled conscience sends him to the brink of madness. Then there’s Tilda Swinton, breathtaking as the company woman who will sacrifice everything for her job. The final confrontation between Clooney and Swinton is a masterclass in acting, a perfectly poised battle of brinkmanship to see who will hold their nerve. This is not a shoot-‘em-up adrenalin burst of a movie, but a richly detailed, measured observation of the human condition. Expect Oscar nominations. Dee Pilgrim

Almost as deranged as its monstrous star during the first act, shifting between intense, gory violence and sledgehammer comedy, UKM eventually becomes comfortable with its identity as a rou-teen horror.

With Michael Madsen earning above-the-title status by making regular appearances throughout, the narrative follows an unfortunate bunch of foolish army cadets played by obligatory unknowns expiring in a conventionally-paced fashion as the 80-minute mark gets closer and the credits finally roll. Shot almost entirely on cheap, characterless sets, which represent the corridors and rooms of a military research station our Breakfast Club ensemble bicker and bond. That is until they begin being torn apart by the monstrous super-soldier of the title. Or falling victim to the genetic material they’ve been injected with.

An isolated location, teenage victims, a mad scientist, head crushing, faces ripped off and gratuitous underwear scenes, this film has it all. But it’s everything you’ve seen a million times before done far better.

The most interesting thing about this film is that its director David Mitchell previously made a film called The Killing Machine back in 1994, and you know that now so save your money. This is one for die-hard fans of horror movies or Michael Madsen only. Richard Hawes

Buy UKM here mofo!

If you haven’t seen, or don’t like the Thick of It, Armando Iannucci’s political satirical comedy following the stories of the people behind the politics, then you might as well stop reading now, as what is about to follow can only be described as the equivalent of an overexcited and giggling schoolgirl in prose form.

I think I could sum up this book in one simple word – Essential. However, as that would look rather poor form for a journalist, I’ll elaborate a bit. The Thick of It could be one of the most important comedies of this generation. Based around the running of a government office and filled with more expletives than an orgy for tourettes sufferers, the show shows the often stretched relationships between an MP, his staff, his public and the ‘ever loving’ Press office of the Prime Minister.

Of course, if you have seen the series before, you might think that this book will add little or nothing to you, However, due to the pace of the show, and the natural nature of the character performances, it was only after reading back over the show that I realised just how many little gags and beautifully written snidey comments there were in each episode. Add to that a wonderful additional chapter of Malcolm Tuckers sent email box, which made me laugh so much, someone heard me in the next Tube carriage, and you see why my original “Essential” is entirely justified.

The Thick of It: The Scripts is available to buy from yonder.