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One of Britain’s favourite old-timers and new rising stars come together in this immensely warm and affectionate observation of ageing, alienation and death. If that sounds too depressing by half, the movie is anything but a downer, being full of humour and light and wonderfully uplifting life.

It’s the 1980s and young Edward (Son of Rambow’s Bill Milner) is less than ecstatic that his mum and dad (Anne-Marie Duff and David Morrissey) have chosen to turn their house into an old people’s home whose inmates have a habit of dropping off this mortal coil before he can capture the sound of their souls leaving their bodies on his dodgy old tape-to-tape recorder. To add insult to injury he has to give up his bedroom when new resident Clarence (Sir Michael Caine) arrives. After initial hostile manoeuvres against the old man, Edward starts to actually like hanging out with him when he discovers Clarence was once a famed magician, The Amazing Clarence, and can teach him lots of cool tricks to impress the bullies at school. Soon, the lonely and slightly confused old man and the rather stroppy schoolboy have become bosom buddies who get into all sorts of scrapes.

Young Bill Milner may be just a whippersnapper, but he proves an impressive foil for Sir Michael and their scenes together are full of banter and joshing and brilliant dialogue – when Clarence discovers the friendless Edward has an unhealthy interest in death and séances he says to him “why don’t you join hands with the living?”

Sir Michael is now a formidable acting force and he gives another brilliant performance here showing the utter horrors of getting old – all jibbering simpletons wetting themselves is how he puts it. But apart from the performances it is the absolute peach of a script that stands out here. It manages to steer the right side of sentimentality because it isn’t all happy, cheery, chirpy niceness, but is spiky and uncomfortable and sometimes even downright nasty. This is this year’s Venus and deserves just as much praise.

Dee Pilgrim

In which Logan ditches the other ‘original’ X-Men to hang out with a whole new bunch of mutants. In fact, this is a prequel to the other X-Men movies, exploring how Logan (Hugh Jackman) was turned into the unbeatable wolfman with adamantium talons through a series of experiments at a top-secret military base.

The man in charge, William Stryker (Danny Huston), has assembled a crack team of mutant mercenaries, including Logan and his brother Victor (Liev Schreiber), to carry out missions impossible. While Victor (aka Sabretooth) glories in the killing involved, Logan grows to hate it and after one bloodbath too many walks out on the group. He loses himself in a new romance with Kayla (Lynn Collins) at a hideaway in the hills, knowing that at some point his past will come back to haunt him. So when Victor comes to call, Logan knows the game is up and has to track down his old mutant buddies in order to get back at the man he believes has wrecked his life.

From here the plot goes a bit AWOL as subterfuge and bluff bring us to the point where the feuding brothers must lay down their differences in order to fight the uber-mutant Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) atop one of the giant cooling towers of a nuclear power plant. This proves to be the set piece of the movie and the special effects are years ahead of those seen in the original X-Men movie. Fans of the comic series will also be pleased to know the character of Gambit (Taylor Kitsch) finally gets to make his cinematic debut here and very impressive he is too with his lightning rod antics.

But, is the movie any good? It’s certainly entertaining and there’s plenty of dry humour from Jackman, who seems to be playing Wolverine less as a tortured soul these days and more as a perplexed slice of beefcake. This is basically a series of explosive fight and action sequences tenuously threaded together by a very leaky plot. But if you like big booms and bangs and awesome special effects this will do nicely until Terminator comes along.

Dee Pilgrim

This is a British film that won’t be scooping many accolades as it is more an experiment in filmmaking than a complete, finished product. Made for pocket money and featuring an unknown (and mostly amateur) cast, this is less of a straight narrative tale and more of a mood portrait.

Helen (Annie Townsend) is the product of the British care system and as she approaches her eighteenth birthday must face the transition from social care into the big wide world where she must fend for herself. However, when she is chosen to be the stand-in for a reconstruction of a young girl’s disappearance, her world dramatically opens up. The missing girl, Joy, had a whole life, a “normal” life, so different to Helen’s own she finds she wants to explore what it would be like to actually be Joy. She befriends Joy’s parents and boyfriend, retraces her footsteps on the day she disappeared and tries to be just like her. It’s an interesting idea but it makes for a film that moves at a snail’s pace.

At times it is so surreal and somnambulant you feel like giving it a good prod in order to wake it up. Filmmakers Christine Molly and Joe Lawlor demonstrate some nice camera moves but unless you are a film student this could send you to sleep.

Dee Pilgrim

Time Travel is a funny thing, everyone knows about it and has an opinion on it as over the last 100 or so years we have been exposed to it through literature, cinema and more often than not TV with our own Timelord the Doctor who explained it recently being like a big ball of string (kind of wibbly-wobbly/timey-wimey).

So when you’re sitting down the pub with your mates and are discussing time travel and all its paradoxes and problems then you would probably not expect to find a time leak in the men’s toilets of your local. This is precisely what this excellent film is about as three friends Ray (Chris O’Dowd), Toby (Marc Wootton) and Pete (Dean Lennox Kelly) accidentally discover a leak in time in the gents and by mishap and misadventure end up becoming unstuck in time and try desperately to get back to their pub.

Throw in Anna Faris as Cassie, a kind of time policewoman who plugs these leaks and endangers herself when Ray falls for her and she sort of for him and you have all the ingredients which at first glance look like a massive sci-fi flop but hells bells this is actually amazing stuff!

It’s great that the concept really starts as three blokes chatting bollocks in an old pub about what would happen if you could time travel, and lo and behold it happens to them but with huge consequences. Factor in a set of rules saying that the guys can’t stray from the confines of the pub or its garden, and we get an entire mini sci-fi epic set in an old boozer.

The central performances are brilliant, but the revelation is Faris who we already know is great at comedy, but here gives her character a welcome sweetness and believability. The script from Jamie Mathieson is sharp, intelligent and filled with plenty of geek references but it is also savvy enough in its time travel twistedness to interest scientists as well.

“Instant classic” is something that is bandied around a lot about new films, but this little British gem is destined to be something that will collect a following faster than a celebrity sex tape. See this with your mates and enjoy a genuinely funny and intelligent British film. Beam me up!

Mark Cappuccio

British crime/social dramas are often shite, for every The Long Good Friday there is The Heavy, but this film from first time writer and director Eran Creevy manages to not only impress but shows great promise for the future as well.

The story, set in the outskirts of London, follows 24 hours in the life of Chris (Danny Mays), returning to the town where he grew up to visit his friend Shifty (Riz Ahmed) who he left behind. He finds out that Shifty is now dealing hard drugs and is caught up with local nutter Glen (Jason Flemyng). Chris wants Shifty to leave all this behind and come back with him to Manchester where he has a good job, mortgage and normal life so that he can start again. But Shifty is still angry that Chris left, and in the course of one day things for the pair spiral out of control.

From the start of this film you know that it is all going to rest on the two central performances of Chris and Shifty, and Mays and Ahmed do not disappoint at all. Mays you will probably recognise from Channel 4’s recent sitcom Plus One where he showed his prowess at comedy and here he shows he is just as good at drama, giving Chris the emotional depth needed to make him not only believable but also likeable. Ahmed was seen as the boyfriend of Jaime Winstone in Charlie Brooker’s excellent Dead Set where despite having a minor but pivotal role proved his worth.

Here he provides Shifty with much humanity in that it’s always difficult for an audience to identify with a drug dealer. However, the film written from Creevy’s teenage experiences is honest and real enough for us to support Shifty despite his dodgy job. It’s also brilliantly scored with the music never drowning out the dialogue or action sequences which can often happen in first features.

Creevy does a great job of directing with some stunning photography that even manages to make the estate Shifty lives on look almost magical in places! The supporting cast and characters are a little clichéd in places like the coke-addicted builder and the thief who pops up more for comic relief than story development. Flemyng proves again that he can do evil just as easily as nice but has a very stereotypical drug dealer character to deal with, complete with stoned girls hanging around him which belies the films intelligence somewhat.

Overall Shifty is a gritty, realistic and a genuine warning to people and works well as a coming-of-age study of two 20-something men who need to grow up and find a real purpose in life.

Mark Cappuccio