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  Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:10:49 +0100

"The thing is to take them back from the world of monsters and restore them to the world of people," says Errol Morris in his director's commentary. Morris brings his sensibilities to bear on a famous and depressing subject: the torture and humiliation of the Abu Ghraib inmates we were all made aware of when the photos appeared. As ever, with unpromising visual material, he creates something arresting as well as insightful. Morris uncovers shocking facts: mattresses and clothes were returned to cells for a day during Red Cross visits; no high-ranking soldiers were arrested over the affair.

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  Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:10:49 +0100

Another week, another freewheeling scatological comedy featuring a cast of American boy-men in various states of disrepair. Perhaps there are too many of these beasts in the forest these days, but this one is better than most.

Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott play thirtysomething slackers who crash a car and are sentenced to 150 hours of community service helping troubled kids on the "Sturdy Wings" mentoring programme ("jail would be better," groans Rudd). The kids are wayward and irresponsible, though they pale in comparison with their mentors, and therein lies the humour.

Role Models is exuberantly staged, fitfully funny and boasts a glorious supporting turn from Jane Lynch as the demagogic onetime addict who runs the course and has an in with the judge ("I don't want to get too graphic but I used to suck his dick for drugs"). Matters duly wrap up with an extended role-play battle in which a bunch of geeks go at each other with plastic swords. It's hard to take against a film in which the hero is forced to enact a tragedian's death scene while dressed as a member of Kiss.

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  Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:10:49 +0100

Joe Swanberg's no-budget film, starring its co-writer Greta Gerwig, is a quintessential "mumblecore" movie. It's very distinctive, with performances that are so laid-back they are hardly performances at all, but ultra-casual selfconscious improvisations very different from conventional acting, but also very different from real life.

Gerwig plays Hannah, a twentysomething who appears to have a job in a TV production office. She's on the verge of breaking up with her muso boyfriend and flirting with the talented, but emotionally prickly duo of comedy writers on the show.

This kind of movie idiom is a taste which I've tried to acquire, but can't - not quite. For me, there is something conceited and even passive-aggressive about its quirkiness. It certainly tries for a kind of unadorned emotional openness - and this may tie in to the fact that Hannah does get her kit off a good deal.

But there is something teeth-grindingly cutesy about the whole thing, reaching epic levels of dippiness in the, ahem, nude trumpet-playing scenes. That makes it sound interesting, come to think of it, and perhaps it is. Some of the time. But it is a film with a faint, self-satisfied smirk.

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  Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:10:48 +0100

From the Judd Apatow production line, a goofy stoner comedy starring Apatow regular Seth Rogen in which pudgy losers have implausibly hot girlfriends, but male friendship is the key to life. It also comes as a surprise in being very bloody, developing into a stoner Rio Bravo. The surprise element here is director David Gordon Green - a delicate and oblique talent who would not be many people's first choice for a raucous romp. I think it's the Green influence that adds sweetness to the camaradarie between Rogen and his chum, a dope dealer played with great charm by James Franco, yet another graduate of Apatow's Freaks and Geeks TV show.

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  Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:10:48 +0100

The success of the Judd Apatow films may have created a market for knowing, chubby guys in sex comedies in the manner of Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill. So it is with slightly mixed feelings that I here welcome 23-year-old Clark Duke, who, in the role of the smug best friend, pinches this intermittently funny teen-road-trip romp, which has itself been stolen from half a dozen other films in the same vein.

Josh Zuckerman is Ian, the shy, sweet young guy who is going to college soon but has not yet done the filthy deed, and is secretly in love with his cool best friend Felicia (Amanda Crew), who in turn has a guilty secret crush on Ian's appalling friend Lance, played by Duke, a bespectacled teenage sexual gourmand who wears cravats. Ian is bullied by his homophobic step-brother Rex, played by James Marsden - the sort of role that might otherwise have gone to Seann William Scott.

The funniest moments come when Ian has to wear the humiliating Mr Doughnut outfit that he is forced to dress up in for part of his part-time job at the Doughnut stall at the mall, parading around in this ridiculous get-up, handing out discount leaflets and so accustomed to having to work Mr Doughnut's moving lips when he speaks to customers that he can't help doing it when he speaks to people he knows.

The idea is that Ian wants to drive across country to see a hot chick he's met online - and so finally have sex - taking his wacky buddies with him and on the way having bizarre adventures. Seth Green has a funny cameo as a droll Amish guy whose sarcasm is so habitual that no one can decide whether he is angry with them or not. Duke has good scenes as Lance, but this is a rental, rather than a go-see.

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  Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:10:47 +0100

Bride Wars is a film about Bloomingdale's, Vera Wang and the Plaza hotel. It is also - at times tangentially - about two former best friends (Kate Hudson, Anne Hathaway) who love Bloomingdale's, Vera Wang and the Plaza hotel, but who hate each other on account of booking their respective weddings on the same date at the same place (the Plaza hotel, as luck would have it).

"Is there anything better than Vera Wang?" they squeal, although this question is meant rhetorically. Product placements taken care of, director Gary Winick sends the twosome scuttling from boutique to hotel while the jaunty soundtrack reminds us that this is intended as a light, frothy comedy as opposed to, say, the satanic black mass we might otherwise take it for.

My heart went out to Hudson as the ironically named "Liv". Her dead eyes and rouged cheeks suggest she's bypassed the wedding and gone straight to the funeral.

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  Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:12:26 +0100
Obituary: Prolific crime novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter and man of many pseudonyms

Considering he has made films about astronauts mending the sun (Sunshine), a virus that wipes out most of the British population (28 Days Later), and a pair of angels sent to earth to reunite Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz (A Life Less Ordinary), it might seem strange that what is most important to Danny Boyle is that his characters are "real". But almost everyone who has worked with the 52-year-old Lancashire-born director agrees he will go to remarkable lengths to make his cast bewitch the audience into believing quite remarkable things.

When making Slumdog Millionaire, his new, transnational, Oscar-tipped film about a poor teenager who wins the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Boyle dumped the actors in Mumbai's poorest district to make them understand what it was like to be part of the 50% of the city's population who live without a toilet. For the sci-fi adventure Sunshine, he put the cast into a flight simulator, and encouraged them to read the works of Richard Seymour, a futurologist who invented the cordless kettle and pocket mobile phone.

When Boyle cast Katy Cavanagh, now best known for her role as Coronation Street's Julie Carp, as a strippergram in his 2001 TV film Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise, he naturally dispatched her to learn how a professional stripper takes her clothes off.

"He's so passionate about everything being really real - even if that leads to rather unflattering camera angles," Cavanagh told the Guardian yesterday. "When we filmed the strip scene, it was a Sunday morning and it was in front of 80 extras. I was terrified, and Danny knew it, so after the first take, he came over, picked me up and said, 'That was AMAZING, are you OK?' And then, 'Let's do it again!'. I think we ended up doing it eight times in the end."

It is a shame that the only man ever to have said anything bad about Boyle is the actor with whom the director is arguably still most closely associated, 14 years since they first worked together on Boyle's debut, Shallow Grave. But when Boyle chose Leonardo DiCaprio to star in The Beach, his first foray into megabucks film-making, despite apparently promising the part to Ewan McGregor, the Scottish actor was wounded. "It was a betrayal," McGregor said later.

But ask anyone else who has worked with Boyle what he is like, and they immediately switch into a stream of the sort of rhapsodic praise Boyle himself is famous for heaping on his cast and crew.

James Nesbitt, a star of Boyle's 2004 children's film Millions, said yesterday that Boyle is "the sort of man you aspire to be like - he is incredibly loveable, very kind and has a real passion for life."

Nesbitt has never forgotten his first encounter with the director, when he appeared, aged 16 or 17, as an extra in one of Boyle's early TV dramas, filmed in Northern Ireland. "I had just got my Equity card, and I took two days off school to play a soldier sitting in the back of a van. I vividly remember just being struck by how Danny, who was then a young director, never marginalised anyone. As an extra, you can feel like fodder, but he gave us the impression that we were important, that we could make an impact," Nesbitt said. "I think it was him that made me think 'Hmm, maybe I could do this for a living.' "

Dev Patel, the 18-year-old star of Slumdog Millionaire, said yesterday: "When you see him on set it's like an animal in his natural habitat. When he tells you how to say a certain line or do a certain thing, he acts it himself as he explains it. Sometimes he would be panting and taking heavy breaths - he was really feeling it. He can always articulate exactly what he wants from a scene, and he is not afraid of changing things. We would rehearse for a week, and then when we got on set he would totally change the things we had practiced 90 times."

He added: "The funny thing about Danny is that he knows a little bit about everything in the world. Sometimes we would be in the car and he would point to a building and tell me a fact about where the bricks came from."

Screenwriter and author Frank Cottrell Boyce, who wrote Millions, says Boyle loads his arsenal of facts by reading constantly. "Generally he goes to bed early and reads - one day he'll be telling you about a book on Kazakhstan, the next he'll be reading something about Soviet oil policy, or some poetry," he said yesterday, further adding to Boyle's nice-guy image with the observation that he was "generous to his collaborators, generous in his thinking, generous with his energy".

Boyle is even liked by his ex-partner, Gail Stevens, the casting director with whom he has three children. Though the couple split in 2002 after 20 years together, they still live round the corner from each other and Stevens has continued to work on all of his films.

• Slumdog Millionaire is released today.

CV

Born 20 October 1956, Radcliffe, Lancs

Family Three children with casting director Gail Stevens (now separated)

Education Thornleigh Salesian College; University of Wales

Early career Director, Joint Stock Theatre Company; Royal Court, London; TV work included Inspector Morse (1990 & 1992) and Mr Wroe's Virgins (1993)

Film credits Shallow Grave (1994), Trainspotting (1996), A Life Less Ordinary, Twin Town (1997), The Beach (2000), Alien Love Triangle, 28 Days Later (2002), Millions (2004), Sunshine, 28 Weeks Later (2007), Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

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Mulholland Drive
10pm, Sky Movies Indie
(David Lynch, 2001)

Even by Lynch's bizarre standards, this is a puzzler. Loosely, it's a modern, Hollywood-set film noir centred on the relationship between an amnesiac starlet (Laura Elena Harring) and a fresh-faced kid just arrived from the sticks (Naomi Watts). Amid the tangled narrative strands and identity switches, it's an atmospheric, multi-layered tale of modern American corruption.

Superbad
12.35pm & 8pm, Sky Movies Comedy
(Greg Mottola, 2007)

Produced by Knocked Up team Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen, this lacks the surprisingly mature observations of that scabrously humorous film. It's another tale of nerdy young men who are gagging for it - in this case Jonah Hill, Michael Cera and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, hoping to become some high-school girl's drunken mistake at the leaving party - and it's hugely, grossly, funny.

The Untouchables
9pm, Film4
(Brian De Palma, 1987)

De Palma's big- screen homage to the 1950s TV crime series is done in brilliant style, and sharply scripted by David Mamet. Kevin Costner makes his name as the upright fed Eliot Ness, pulling together a team of incorruptibles (Sean Connery, Andy Garcia, Charles Martin-Smith) to nail Robert De Niro's ferocious Al Capone in crime-racked 1930s Chicago.

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Soooo ... did Brad Pitt cheat on Jennifer Aniston while he and Angelina Jolie were making Mr & Mrs Smith?

The idea that these pages are roomy enough to chronicle every cough and spit of this deathless psychodrama is obviously preposterous. The internet itself isn't even big enough for that. Here, then, are the absolutely freshest developments in the love triangle, beginning in October, when Angelina told the New York Times that she longed for the day her children could watch the Mrs & Mrs Smith DVD and "see a movie where their parents fell in love". Also, one of the absolute worst movies of the noughties.

Alas, this defibrillated the whole thing for Jennifer, and when Vogue profiled her she rushed to brand Angelina's behaviour "really uncool". Vogue's coverline duly ran "What Angelina did was very uncool", which sparked yet another reaction, with Jennifer granting whole new interviews in which she called out Vogue for being "tabloid", but then bridled and said she had answered honestly.

Great news: there's more! Brad himself has yet again taken to the pages of W magazine, where his bi-monthly invade-my-own-privacy domestic tableaux are interspersed with the insistence that he and Jen were totally On A Break.

"What people don't understand," he tells readers, "is that we filmed [Mr & Mrs Smith] for a year. We were still filming after Jen and I split up. Even then it doesn't mean that there was some kind of dastardly affair. There wasn't. I'm very proud of the way that it was handled. It was respectful. [The film] will mean something to our kids. It will, that's all."

I guess one's first response is to shriek: you were filming Mr & Mrs Smith for a year. Really? Really? It took less than three months to wrap Citizen Kane!

But eventually that impulse will fade, and give way to an acceptance that no matter when the end of the world comes, the very last words, spoken by the very last human, will be "Can we go over that again? Because I just don't see how that version tallies with Jen's timeline ..."

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Ladies and gentleman, take your seats in a hushed and expectant movie theatre. It's time to dim the lights for The Anne Hathaway Oscar Campaign.

The first major staging post will be Sunday's Golden Globes, of course, but the fragrant Miss Hathaway's impression of someone who is just awed to be nominated already looks to be paying off. This week Anne picked up a Desert Palm achievement award for Rachel Getting Married - but apparently lost the audience somewhat when she began talking about "process metaphysics" in her acceptance speech. And this a mere couple of hours after a dispatch from the red-carpet front line, in which she expressed a clipped and studied disappointment in Barack Obama's choice to have his inauguration invocation delivered by a conservative evangelical pastor.

Don't worry about "process metaphysics" - it's something Anne read somewhere and almost certainly doesn't understand - but the question is, what was it doing in her podium speech? And why is she casting herself as a kind of Susan Sarandon for the Twitter generation?

Well, for this awards season, Anne has delivered a career performance as an innocent sweetheart who has to find her inner mettle. I know what you're thinking. That's the only performance she has ever given, be it in Becoming Jane, The Princess Diaries, The Devil Wears Prada, or in the currently playing Bride Wars. (Kate Hudson as a high-powered attorney? Come on, Hollywood! Not even in a comedy. Really.)

So are they giving out Oscars for that stuff now? No. Anne has actually rested this trusted shtick for Rachel Getting Married, the movie for which she has the Oscar-buzz. Instead, she has been working the mettle-finding-sweetheart angle in real life.

And so to a refresher course for our remedial students. Until last June, Anne lived in Manhattan with her long-term boyfriend Raffaello Follieri, in a $37,500-a-month penthouse in Trump Tower. Without wishing to spoil the ending for you, Raffaello now lives in a federal prison in Pennsylvania, having pleaded guilty to a multimillion-dollar fraud, in which he had basically used all the investors' money to enjoy a lavish celebrity lifestyle with Anne. He told her he was, um, "the chief financial officer of the Vatican".

He was also CEO of the Raffaello Follieri Foundation, upon whose board Anne sat, though she never asked to see the tax returns, preferring instead to give frequent keynote addresses on how hot his job made her. "My boyfriend is incredible," ran one of these. "But when it comes to his charity ... one of the most untouted aphrodisiacs in the world is charity work. Seriously, you want a girl to be impressed, vaccinate some kids, build a house."

Yes, get one of your people to stick a needle in some adorable little urchin, and Anne's pupils dilate, her pulse begins to quicken, and she'll stick an "ARTIST GETTING SEEN TO" sign on her trailer door for the afternoon.

Among the many, many hilarities in the federal indictment of Follieri is the detail that our hero also kept various Catholic clergy vestments, including monsignor robes, in the wardrobe.

Anyway, Anne finally broke up with Raffaello two months after he had first been arrested on fraud charges, and a full six hours before he was led away in cuffs by FBI agents. This month, her awards juggernaut docks at American Vogue, where she tells the magazine what went wrong between the pair - and it turns out to have been an irreparable schism over a vase of wilting cherry blossoms.

"They lasted a month and were beautiful even as they died," Anne sighs. "Raffaello always liked things fancier and perfect and told our maid to throw them out. That was when I knew we saw things differently."

Anne! Listen to me! Sorry about the flowers and stuff, but the FBI didn't even depose you. You were effectively deemed so clueless you were a person of no interest to their inquiry, when anyone with your kind of access could be reasonably expected to be the material witness. There were several sets of monsignor robes hanging in the wardrobe. Do you understand? Yes? Monsignor robes? Every time someone in the world types the words "several sets of monsignor robes hanging in the wardrobe", and you persist in lecturing the world on "process metaphysics", a fairy dies, OK?

That said, Lost in Showbiz longs for Anne to get the academy's nod, having a feeling she could even surpass Gwyneth Paltrow's spectacular Oscar acceptance meltdown. Remember that?

"... and Grampa Buster, (sob) you've created (sob), a beautiful family."

Grampa Buster is no longer with us, but let us hope that Anne has her own fruitfully loined paterfamilias, who can be cathartically thanked on the biggest stage there is, perhaps interspersed with archly delivered passages from Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent.

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  Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:10:48 +0100

With a little more ingenuity, a few more evilly funny lines and a more interestingly written role for its female lead, this could have been a minor cult classic. As it is, Stuck is a grisly, watch-through-your-fingers suspense nightmare, produced and directed by Stuart Gordon, the film-maker who gave us the 1985 horror Re-Animator.

Mena Suvari plays Brandi, a nurse in an old people's home who is thrilled to be told one afternoon that she is in line for a big promotion. To celebrate, she goes out clubbing and avails herself of some under-the-counter pharmaceuticals purveyed by her boyfriend Rashid (Russell Hornsby), and drives back home very much under the influence.

It is at this moment that her fate converges with that of Thomas Bardo, played by Stephen Rea, an honest jobless guy down on his luck, who has been thrown out of his apartment and now contemplating homelessness with nothing but a bundle of clothes and a heartrending photo of what appears to be a boy at a graduation ceremony - presumably his son. Well and truly off her face, Brandi runs over Thomas as he trudges across the street; his body is halfway through her windshield.

Panicky and hysterical, and afraid to call the police, Brandi drives home hoping that this inconvenient guy sticking out of the front of her car will die, and she can call on Rachid with all his criminal know-how to dispose of him. But groaning, twitching Bardo is a stubborn survivor, and the situation escalates from there.

At just 85 minutes running time, Gordon's film is a neat novella of a picture, with an agreeably twisted sense of humour - although reality checks were needed to explain away Brandi and Rachid's apparent indifference to CCTV cameras, of which there must surely have been a few.

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With Baskervillian barking in the background and devil-tarot cards flickering across the screen, Lady Macbeth's cadaverous face curls into a nefarious grin. After slathering vermilion lipstick on his stubbled mouth, Lady Macbeth - or rather, "Ladyboy" - and a cavalcade of droog-like witches get together for a spot of skull-duggery, cellblock C-style.

Not classic Shakespeare, for sure. This is Mickey B, the Educational Shakespeare Company's adaptation of the jet-black tragedy Macbeth, shot in HMP Maghaberry in Northern Ireland. Twenty-four of the 25-strong cast are still behind bars - and probably will be for a long time. In this version of Macbeth, usurpations are carried out with shanks, paid for with packs of Golden Virginia tobacco and the poison of choice is LSD, not hemlock.

Maghaberry is a maximum security facility and a lot of the inmates are lifers, so there was no way to film outside the prison. That makes the hour-long feature claustrophobic and, at times, uncomfortable viewing. The jail's brickwork and joinery rooms were transformed into a monochrome set over two weekends and its construction necessitated co-operation between prisoners and prison officers. The scene in which King Duncan is found slain in his bed takes place in a replica of one Maghaberry's 745 single cells; 13x7ft with an open top to allow high-angle shots.

There was a frisson of disgruntlement in the Northern Irish press about the close-to-the-bone nature of the project, some of which centred around the decision to film one of the more macabre of Shakespeare plays. But Mickey B director Tom Magill (who is also ESC's artistic director) believes the logic behind producing a film based on Macbeth - the tension of which resonated strongly with the detainees, many of whom experienced brutality on the streets of Belfast - is that it helps on the long road to rehabilitation. "Look at it like this," he says. "We're dealing with non-conformed prisoners, with people from both sides of the sectarian divide, loyalist and republicans. There are people here with no qualifications whatsoever. Here, they can be awarded with educational active citizenship awards."

The notoriety of the film was exacerbated when news broke that many of the cast were incarcerated for links to gangs and terrorist cells in the North, with some tabloid denouncing the project for making film stars out of criminals. But the legal obstacles involved in getting the film released in the UK make any potential glorification a moot point. Prison regulations state that there must be a three-year delay - or "lag time" - before any artwork involving prisoners can appear in public, even if no money is being earned. There is a "lag-time" in force with Mickey B, meaning it will not be available for public viewing until 2010 at the earliest.

But for the only cast member to have left Maghaberry, the press criticism missed the point of the project. Speaking at a screening of another prisoner film at the Royal Festival Hall, Sam McClane said: "This is the most important thing I've ever done. Jail can brutalise people. You can feel hopeless. This project meant something to everyone inside. For someone to say that we shouldn't be allowed to help ourselves in that way - it's crazy."

The films-in-jail operation of the ESC is one a growing number of government-backed initiatives that focus on rehabilitation through the arts, the products of which are becoming ever more popular. Along with organisations like the Koestler Arts Trust, which holds an annual prize for prisoner artwork and literature, and Billy Bragg's Jail Guitar Doors, ESC's statement of purpose is to dispel the stigma that, no matter what, "prisoner" is an indelible identity. With further projects in the pipeline, ESC is endeavoring to imbue those detained at Her Majesty's Service with the simple notion - an actor is always an actor.

• You can see the trailer for Mickey B at tinyurl.com/9odw2w

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  Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:10:46 +0100

Who is she?
A 17-year-old actor who appears in Michael Winterbottom's new film, Genova. She plays Kelly, an American teenager shipped to Italy by her English academic dad (Colin Firth) after her mum dies in a car accident.

She looks familiar. I've seen her somewhere before, right?
You've dropped yourself in it there. The answer is yes if you are a fan of a certain strain of American TV. Holland played Mischa Barton's naughty little sister in two seasons of The OC, and was a spacey model in a few episodes of Gossip Girl. She was discovered by Steven Spielberg - in his garden no less.

What, she was a stalker?
No, she was seven years old at the time, playing with his kids. Her stepdad is Brian de Palma.

Connections like that won't have done her any harm. But is she actually any use in Genova?
Yes she is. There is a lovely naturalness to her performance. Like Henry James's Daisy Miller, Kelly is an American girl in Europe, eyes opening to a new way of seeing the world and testing her place in it. Winterbottom's camera seems at times to drift around her, entire scenes with her barely saying a word.

Which sounds a million miles from the OC's articulacy overdrive.
Right you are. That said, Kelly does what every self-respecting, boy-mad 16-year-old would do in a new city: ditches her little sister and goes off in search of a bit of local action.

What next for Holland?
Well, she is already one step ahead of her screen sister, Mischa Barton, whose handbag choices have made a bigger splash than her film roles since The OC. Expect Holland to distance herself from the TV stuff. She's already on to her next film, a hellfire apocalypse drama called Legion, with Paul Bettany as the archangel Michael.

• Genova is out on 27 March

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  Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:10:50 +0100

After the intensity of Shane Meadows' last two features, Dead Man's Shoes and This Is England, this feels like a small holiday project. Tomo (Thomas Turgoose) is a teen escaping a bad home life and a refugee of sorts; he meets a genuine one in Polish teen Marek (Piotr Jagiello), left to his own devices while his father works on the St Pancras redevelopment (Eurostar was the main financier). The result is a freewheeling Jules et Jim for adolescents.

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