Movie reviews

AS A young boy Steven Spielberg sent his toy trains crashing into one another, filming the result on 8mm home-movie film; Orson Welles once described making movies as the biggest electric train-set a boy ever had.

In Super 8 (12A), JJ Abrams’ celebrates the exuberant innocence of movie-making in a ‘70s-set tale in which a group of geeky teens accidentally film a train crash whilst shooting their home-made zombie movie. “Production values!” whoops the teen director, unaware that the crash has unleashed an extra-terrestrial being transported by the US Air Force.

What follows is Abrams’ love letter to Spielberg, who serves as executive producer here; while the story has an undeniable charm all of its own, it also makes a virtue of stealing from the genius, as writer-director Abrams’ blends crucial elements from ET and Jaws, whilst also investing the story with the anarchic fun of The Goonies. Most of the movie’s self-generated charm comes courtesy of its pint-sized hero, the motherless Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), whose burgeoning romance with Alice (Elle Fanning) provides an authentic quality of geeky awkwardness and callow emotional intelligence.

There’s a touchingly raw honesty to the Joe and Alice relationship, a hesitancy that might have benefited the movie as a whole had it been applied to a production that is more interested in paying homage to Spielberg than it is in finding its unique voice, particularly during the heavy-handed metaphors that comprise the climax. Overall, Super 8 is good old-fashioned matinee fun, although it’s fitting that the high point comes after the credits roll, and the teenagers’ zombie home movie is revealed in all its shambolic glory.

AN American journalist living in Paris, Julia Jarmond (Kristen Scott Thomas) investigates the horrendous experience of a young Jewish girl during WWII in Sarah’s Key (12A).

Adapted by writer-director Gilles Paquet-Brenner from the novel Elle s’appelait Sarah by French author Tatiana de Rosnay, the story weaves together past and present as the 10-year-old Sarah and the 40-something Julia navigate their way around the obstacles strewn in their path by life, fate and circumstance. Strong on historical detail, particularly as Sarah’s family is rounded up and deported, not by the Nazis but by the French authorities, the film tells a fascinating tale for the first hour or so, as Sarah struggles to return to her home and free her younger brother, whom she locked in a closet when the police came to take her family away.

An absence of tension is monotonous enough in itself, but Paquet-Brenner’s insistence on drawing parallels between Julia’s mid-life crisis and Sarah’s journey to the heart of darkness represents a fatal failure of judgement.

IN Mr Popper’s Penguins (G), successful businessman Tom Popper (Jim Carrey) is outraged when he inherits a waddle of penguins from his estranged father, although he’s forced to think twice when his new feathered friends, who colonise his expensive New York apartment, offer him the opportunity to reconcile with his divorced wife Amanda (Carla Gugino) and children Billy (Maxwell Perry Cotton) and Janie (Madeleine Carroll).

They say in Hollywood that you should never work with children and animals, and they can now add Jim Carrey to that list. An interminable series of penguin-related gags, contribute little other than incipient migraine to as relentlessly banal a procession of sentiment-drenched clichés as has ever limped across Hollywood’s threshold.

KNUCKLE (15A) is a documentary by Ian Power about the bare knuckle fighting practised by Travellers here and in Britain. Power followed various Traveller families for 12 years to make his film, but while it’s a viscerally strong tale in terms of raw violence, it’s less successful in terms of its insight into the Travellers’ culture.

Power’s infrequent access to the Traveller women provides the film’s rare flashes of wisdom, but the lasting impression is one of a depressingly shallow and self-perpetuating stereotype of masculinity. If that was Power’s intention, he has succeeded handsomely. Currently showing at the IFI.