Screen: Reviews

DRAMA
Changeling (15)
4/5

At roughly this point every year, the taste of Hollywood shifts from hot dogs to haute cuisine.

It’s Oscar season, that special time when Tinseltown’s great and good compete to cry, yell, drawl and just generally darn well emote for the chance to win a little gold statue.

While many have awful memories of sitting through hours of worthy dross, actor-turned-director Clint Eastwood doesn’t often let down.

Eastwood’s measured approach to story-telling has allowed him to weave interesting tales and rustle up a few Oscars for his stars.

So it is with Changeling, a true story of police corruption which will probably draw a pithy pulpit speech from Angelina Jolie in February.

Jolie plays Los Angeles mother Christine Collins, who returns home one day in 1928 to find her son is missing. The police reunite them five months later, but she’s convinced she’s been given a different child. So she’s viciously dumped in a mental home for her trouble.

This plot is a big neon sign with Best Actress Wanted stamped all over it, and Jolie lights up with an affecting flurry of trauma and close-ups.

But it’s thankfully not just a tale of a mother’s fight for justice.

The malignant spirit of the old-time LAPD – conjured up in classics such as Chinatown and James Ellroy’s LA Confidential – adds weight to the tale. And it’s often more chilling than melodramatic, a feeling heightened by the later introduction of even darker characters than the brutal men with badges.

While Jolie will dominate the spotlight, Eastwood must be praised for widening his shot to cover not just one woman’s pain, but the drama taking place around her.

COMEDY
Four Christmases (12A)
2/5

Okay, so all the high street stores are busy selling gifts and pumping out festive music for Oscar Season.

But there's some other, less well-known holiday on the horizon, isn't there?

It's on the tip of my tongue. Something about turkeys maybe?

Oh yes, it's unutterably-horrible family-friendly Christmas comedy month, when actors that aren't grabbing at Oscars are grabbing at money instead, stuffing themselves into red suits and learning the true meaning of family through the medium of slapstick.

Behind the first door on this year's seasonal advent calendar of movie drivel lurk Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon, a happily-unmarried couple who generally flee abroad for Christmas Day. But their flight is cancelled, and in a "hilarious" and "zany" rollercoaster of events, they're forced to spend Christmas with each of their four divorced parents.

What's that, you say? Will there be bickering, and babies throwing up, and embarrassing relatives, and a hugely valuable lesson at the end that gets planted on the audience like a slobbering wet kiss from great-grandma?

Yes indeedy. And because you've been especially good this year, you'll probably get to see a film very similar to this every single day for the next month, until the repeats of It's A Wonderful Life and Morecambe and Wise emerge from their tombs for their annual rampage through the TV schedules.

Driving the humvee of humbuggery at this time of year may well cause a huge stink in the movie world.

But seeing that its only been a year since Vince Vaughn knee-capped his Christmas credibility in 2007's Fred Claus, you'd think that Hollywood would have cut the guy a break and cast him in a war movie or something instead.

COMEDY
What Just Happened (15)
3/5

What Just Happened is a satire that's let down by the fact it doesn't really have the nerve to satirise anything.

While the denizens of Los Angeles may snigger at the in-joke references to divas, fruit-loop directors and back-stabbing executives, What Just Happened never actually gets to the stage where it starts showing its teeth.

Clearly director Barry Levinson isn't ready to give up those cheques from his Hollywood paymasters yet.

Robert De Niro plays a top producer who has to save two of his biggest movies from the tank, while juggling ex-wife and daughter issues and a gaggle of unruly stars including a bearded Bruce Willis.

It's odd that Levinson and De Niro should find themselves here again so soon, having already teamed up on the similarly-themed Wag the Dog in 1997. There, De Niro played a fixer who hires in a Hollywood producer to "shoot" a fake war. But while that premise was intriguing, this is just a collection of supporting characters with no hook to justify their presence on screen yet again.

De Niro is likeable in the lead role, but there's no real insight beyond the regular cliched "insider" pantomime.