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Already quickly remade by Hollywood producers, [REC] takes the reality TV concept and combines it with the conventions of a disaster movie and horror story. This is a film that delivers everything the much-hyped Blair Witch Project failed to.

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Many will doubtless dismiss this Spanish film as just another handheld horror, but that would be a mistake. One of the most authentic and gripping genre films of recent years, Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza’s experimental 75 minute feature is more than just Cloverfield without the blockbuster special effects.

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The slim storyline involves television reporter, Angela Vidal, and her cameraman, Pablo (actually cinematographer Pablo Rosso) who are filming a programme called While You’re Asleep in which they observe the night shift at a Barcelona fire station. There is very little in the way of excitement until the firemen are called to help an elderly woman in distress in a block of flats. It is at this point that events become chaotic, terrifying and confusing, the team obsessively capturing every possible moment on camera.

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This isn’t a film you watch, it’s one you experience. Sharing the camera’s point of view, Balaguero and Plaza’s aim was to involve the viewer. Unlike Blair Witch’s found footage concept, there is not device to detach the viewer. The concept and idea behind the title is that this is an event unfolding live and we are the camera. the witnesses. We are recording the experience and it is one we shall not forget.

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Featuring a great performance from a cast mostly unknown even in their own country, and led by real-life presenter Manuela Valasco as Angela, [REC] is a true modern classic that should find a broader audience on DVD than it did on its limited cinema release.      Richard Hawes

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Experience the film for yourself by clicking here.

Passage to India is probably the most famous of the group of films dealing with the last days of the Raj and the sometimes fraught interracial relationships forged between British colonialists and the indigenous population.  Before The Rains does not really add anything to this genre, but it does possess a sensual beauty that could have you longing for a trip to the subcontinent.

Kerala, 1937, and ambitious, idealistic British planter Henry Moores (Linus Roche) has decided the way to ensure a prosperous future for his family is to build a road high up into the mountains in order to get his spices to market more easily. He is helped in his endeavours by his Indian overseer TK (Rahul Bose), who feels great loyalty to Moores. But that loyalty is sorely tested when Moores’ affair with his Indian housemaid Sajani (Nandita Das) is discovered.

Moores is married with a child and his romance with Sajani could ruin his comfortable existence, while Sajani has even more to lose including her honour and, ultimately, her life. Will TK choose to back his master, or will his bonds to his people and his own culture force him to abandon Moores?

It’s a small, intimate story, which is nicely directed by Santosh Sivan (The Terrorist), but it takes an age to get to the point and so comes over as rather static. However the scenery is utterly sumptuous, showing an unspoilt rural India that is lush, green and somehow rather alien.      Dee Pilgrim

A new century has seen the birth of a new type of superhero. Gone are the days when Superman was shiny and bright, Captain America was wholesome and squeaky clean, and Batman had a sidekick called Robin. Now our heroes have troubled backgrounds, they struggle to make sense of a world where good and evil are no longer uncompromisingly black and white but infinite shades of grey, and where the public can turn nasty overnight.

It is in this murkily corrupt world that director Christopher Nolan places billionaire Bruce Wayne, aka Batman (Christian Bale), a man compelled to face his own demons in order to confront the likes of The Joker (Heath Ledger), a morally bankrupt anarchist who murders just for the hell of it. But Batman has a new ally in Gotham, District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), whose belief in law and order could well herald a new beginning for the crime-ridden city. Dent is keen on a zero-tolerance policy where Police Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) puts every criminal behind bars. However, the low-lives and gangsters aren’t prepared to go down without a fight, and so the scene is set for stunning battles, breathtaking special effects, and better gizmos than Bond has ever had (including the mega Batpod/car/bike which manages to outcool Bruce Wayne’s Lamborghini).

Tense and intense, dark and brooding, The Dark Knight will rattle your bones and send shivers through your very soul. Yes, Heath Ledger really is that good, his Joker is appalling and demonic and shocking. But the rest of the ensemble cast (even Maggie Gyllenhaal, given nothing to do as the would-be love interest) are equally as good, just much more low-key and understated. At two-and-a-half hours this is a film that certainly gives you your money’s worth with at least three spectacular set pieces, although the last half hour becomes a little uncomfortable and could easily have been compressed.

And what about The Bat I hear you cry? The most iconic image in the whole film is of Batman standing atop a towering skyscraper, his dark figure silhouetted against the night sky. As Bruce Wayne learns to his cost, becoming Batman is one thing, but leaving him behind is something else entirely.      Dee Pilgrim

Albums based around stand-up comedy routines are a tricky thing to get right. Recorded in a studio without the benefit of an audience, they can feel contrived and stuffy with the comic often unaware as to whether the material is working or not. At the other end of the spectrum, if they are recorded in front of a live audience, there’s often a sense that you’re missing out on something visual that the raucous laughter just can’t compensate for. Sometimes the biggest laughs on the CD are caused by elements that are simply not relayed well through your speakers.

Released in the UK to coincide with his recent London dates, Todd Barry’s third live CD, From Heaven, falls into the latter category. Recorded in, of all places, a Chinese restaurant (well, can you think of a better place to record a live comedy CD?), Todd Barry delivers his American deadpan style effortlessly, leading the audience carefully from out-and-out gag to humorous musing like some kind of whimsical Pied Piper. It’s clear from this recording that Todd has spent years perfecting his material and stand up style. His second-perfect timing and handling of the audience is evident in spades, and you find yourself listening to the album with a desire to be in the venue with the audience rather than listening to it from the comfort of home (or your nearest available Tube seat during rush hour).

If this album does one thing, it highlights a gap in the comedy market in the UK. In America, any remotely successful stand-up is be signed up to a minor record label and releases their stand-up material whenever they can, with a hope of getting more coverage and gigs. This was how acts like David Cross, Chris Rock and Bill Hicks got noticed and built a faithful underground fanbase. In Britain though, there is a bizarre and worrying lack of this practice, with often the only way to hear a particular act is by attending a live gig, watching dodgy footage of the stand-up on YouTube or buying a CD taken from the audio of a live DVD (the latter simply exacerbating the problem mentioned above since now you know for sure that there’s something visual you’re patently missing out on). Perhaps it’s time that some labels in the UK woke up and started to look into professionally recording stand-ups in their natural habitat, especially with Edinburgh just around the corner. Until then, I guess we’ll just have to do with Americans like Todd filling up the market. Come to think of it, that’s not such a bad thing after all.

Todd Barry – From Heaven is available now. Click here to buy the CD or click here to visit his website

Dave Scullion went to see High School Musical: Live On Stage, so you don’t have to.

It was a TV film, it upgraded to the cinema, it had a best-selling album, then a sequel, an ice show, a live concert and now a full-blown stage show. This is the phenomenon of High School Musical – a Disney cash cow that will be gloriously milked until it’s dead and dry, and currently it’s still full of milk. Sadly, however, the milk tastes very, very sour.

Some would say “why bother going?”, simply because the entire franchise is known to be shallow and clichéd pointlessness, as deep as a thimble and half as intelligent, but sometimes you can be surprised by even the worst thought-of theatre. This is not one of those times. Not in any way. My presence at this show was an ironic birthday gift from a reviewer friend of mine, and for the first time in my life I got to utter the words “I wish I’d never been born”. In July, anyway.

The premise is so unoriginal it’s hardly worth mentioning – new girl (Gabriella) is a genius geek who is also gorgeous, who falls for effete basketball jock (Troy), but their classmates immediately oppose this horrendous love-match until the entire school simultaneously decides “actually, sod it, why not?” and they all live happily ever after.

It’s so repugnantly optimistic that every character gets together with their opposite number from jock & geek to basketball coach & lunatic drama teacher. But – pinch yourself – is that a gay teenager over there? Possibly, but he doesn’t end up with anyone and instead gets to dance around in sequined trousers and be mostly ignored. This avoidance of any form of edge (no bullying, no sexual relations, not even any real anger) makes it impossible to empathize with any characters. It is an idealistic world without threat, and the pre high-school demographic are in for a horrible shock come age eleven when their new school isn’t full of cheesy-faced idiots whose idea of bullying is “gentle persuasion”. Instead it’s genuinely cruel-hearted fools and a massive punch in the scrotum. But this is Disney after all, and boy do we know it.

The entire experience is an exploitative vampire puppeteered by Disney, from the £5 High School Musical pens to the shameless in-show plugs for previous Disney pieces (someone sings an excerpt from the Lion King and one guy wears a Little Mermaid t-shirt… and somehow doesn’t get bullied). The shocking surprise is how cheap the set and costumes look, dispensing with the usual plush evocative settings of most Disney shows and replacing them with cold and boring school walls and lockers. Yet this show isn’t about believability or emotional depth, it’s about… well, here’s the stumbling block. On one hand it tries to evoke a sense of righteousness in doing whatever your passion is regardless of general opinion, but then the other throws this idea out of the window if you aren’t important enough to have a speaking role. As refreshing an idea as the song Stick To The Status Quo is (where kids in stereotypical cliques admit they want to be something other than a skater, a geek or a jock), this revelation is completely ignored and the characters remain the same throughout, reverting back to their respective stereotypes and only altering slightly at the end when everyone suddenly loves theatre. And I mean literally everyone, including the basketball coach who utterly changes character and suddenly loves the fact his son prefers drama to sport. Billy Elliot, this isn’t.

So is the music or the script or the cast or even the source material to blame for this inane cavalcade of garishness? Oddly, the source material is so much better than the play. The film is much tighter, much funnier and surprisingly watchable. As embarrassing as it is to admit that I voluntarily watched a sizeable chunk of High School Musical: The Film, it does give me a unique vantage point from which to understand where the theatre version went crucially wrong. The script and music has not been well converted to stage, providing lines like: “Thank you for showing me your top secret hiding place” – a line even a seven year old would baulk at if they weren’t so busy clapping or screaming. It’s a cliché-ridden amalgamation of all things expected. Letitia Dean’s Ms Darbus even says to Coach Bolton: “Never in all my years in the theatre have I seen such small minded, simple subterfuge”. Welcome to Disney, Ms Darbus, welcome to Disney.

High School Musical: Live On Stage lacks the focus of the film, and at times so much action is happening across the stage that you wilfully ignore important dialogue and exposition in favour of watching a man in a hoodie pretending to be a kid pretending to be a caterpillar. Entire chunks of the flaccid plot are lost forever, leaving you in bewilderment as to how the school board allowed a major basketball tournament to happen at the same time as the science decathlon and the school play’s final recalls. This leaves anyone who isn’t solely interested in the music and spectacle utterly perplexed, and this misery is compounded when the first act is fifty minutes long and the second is an excruciating sixty. By the time the song Get Your Head in The Game came on I wanted to get my head in an oven and explore Sylvia Plath’s unique exit strategy… and that’s about twenty minutes in, although the song is generously repeated throughout the show for an audience clearly blessed with a memory of a dead goldfish and a severe hatred of originality.

Yet maybe this is too harsh for something aimed at children. This theatre piece is more akin to a pantomime than a musical, with audience members screaming and yelling for no apparent reason during potentially poignant moments. When Gabriella finds Troy in his “top secret hiding place” (a greenhouse, in case you cared) and they sing sweetly to each other, the audience started randomly clapping to a non-existent rhythm like a bunch of drunks at a music festival. Is this the fault of the audience or perhaps the fault of the play, unable to effectively convey the correct emotion to the audience?

Perhaps because of this lack of cohesion between actor’s intention and audience reaction the actors in High School Musical: Live On Stage never seem to really put their all into the sequences between songs, knowing their words don’t really matter too much. This seems especially so with Letitia Dean, who at times appears embarrassed and uncomfortable bumbling around like a desperate pantomime dame. Only Michael Pickering (Ryan) seemed to genuinely get into his role, but his character was the aforementioned (and unmentionable) gay guy, so any hope of exploring him was quashed as soon as he first flounced onto stage.

Finally, I must mention the venue. The Hammersmith Apollo is in desperate need of a revamp, in the same way the show needs to be smashed to pieces and rebuilt. The interior is literally falling apart, with missing seat and row numbers, carpets which are more chewing gum than carpet, and seats almost as flimsy as High School Musical’s plot. The Apollo’s aging sound system and poor acoustics meant words and songs were incomprehensible, making it even harder to accept the singing basketball team as they danced around the court.

Overall the experience was a garish and unpleasant one, where the audience’s senses were repeatedly assaulted with Disney’s worst kind of optimism which reinforces stereotypes instead of breaking them down. An embarrassing, torturous affair for anyone who’s not a child, and for those parents whose children have forcefully manipulated them into seeing this, it’s time to rewrite your will and exclude them from it forever.