Films released Friday 20th November 2009.
The Twilight Saga: New Moon (12A)
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Genre: fantasy / horror / teen
Directed By: Chris Weitz
Running Time: 130 mins
Ents24 Rating: 3/5
In The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is devastated by the abrupt departure of her vampire love, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), but her spirit is rekindled by her growing friendship with the irresistible Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner). Discovering that she can summon Edward's image whenever she puts herself in jeopardy, Bella's desire to be with him at any cost leads her to take greater and greater risks, including a new liking for high-speed motorcycle jaunts. Her relationship with Jacob soon draws her into the world of the werewolves, the ancestral enemies of the vampires, and finds her loyalties tested. It is not long before Bella learns about the ancient secret of the Quileute tribe and Edward's true motivation for leaving her. She also faces the prospect of a potentially deadly reunion with Edward that is quite unlike the one she had hoped for.
The Informant!
Genre: comedy / crime / drama
Directed By: Steven Soderbergh
Running Time: 108 mins
Ents24 Rating: 4/5
A rising star at agriculture industry giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) suddenly turns whistleblower. As he exposes his company's multi-national price-fixing conspiracy to the FBI, Whitacre eagerly agrees to wear a wire and carry a hidden tape recorder in his briefcase, imagining himself as a genuine secret agent. Whitacre's ever-changing account frustrates the agents (Scott Bakula and Joel McHale) and threatens the case against ADM as it becomes almost impossible to decipher what is real and what is the product of Whitacre's active imagination. Based on the true story of the highest-ranking corporate whistleblower in U.S. history, The Informant! is a hilarious Erin Brockovich-style crowd-pleaser.
A Serious Man
Genre: comedy / drama
Directed By: Ethan Coen / Joel Coen
Running Time: 105
Ents24 Rating: 4/5
Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous colleagues, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who seems to her a more substantial person than the hopeless Larry. Larry's unemployable brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny (Aaron Wolf) is a discipline problem, and his daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is filching money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job. What follows is a carefully constructed farce about the impossibility of understanding the mind of God, set in Minnesota's Jewish community in 1967. A Serious Man finds the Coen brothers rebounding from the shambles of Burn After Reading with their funniest film since The Big Lebowski.
Glorious 39
Genre: drama / romance / thriller / war
Directed By: Stephen Poliakoff
Running Time: 129 mins
Ents24 Rating: 3/5
Glorious 39 is a tense psychological thriller about a young woman who uncovers dark secrets about Britain's relationship with Nazi Germany in the lead up to the Second World War. In present day London a young man explores his family history, asking searching questions of his older cousins (Christopher Lee and Corin Redgrave). But as he asks more and more about a woman called Anne - are his motives as simple as they seem? In the summer of 1939, Anne (Romola Garai) seems to live a gilded life - a budding young actress, she's the adopted daughter of Tory grandee Alexander (Bill Nighy) and head-over-heels in love with Foreign Office official Lawrence (Charlie Cox). She discovers some innocent-seeming recordings of meetings - but as she begins to understand quite what her discoveries mean, a tangled web of dark secrets begins to unfold.
Examined Life
Genre: documentary
Directed By: Astra Taylor
Running Time: 87 mins
Ents24 Rating: 3/5
In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today's most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions. Peter Singer's thoughts on the ethics of consumption are amplified against the backdrop of Fifth Avenue's posh boutiques. Slavoj Zizek questions current beliefs about the environment while sifting through a garbage dump. And while driving through Manhattan, Cornel West (perhaps America's best-known public intellectual) compares philosophy to jazz and blues, reminding us how intense and invigorating a life of the mind can be. Offering privileged moments with great thinkers from fields ranging from moral philosophy to cultural theory, Examined Life reveals philosophy's power to transform the way we see the world around us and imagine our place in it.
This week's Top Ten
