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Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

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A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

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Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

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The Trip (Film)

by Mark Demetrius | June 27, 2011 14:05 | Edited June 27, 2011 14:07

While this offers up the odd laugh, the continual banter grows tedious and wearying, and the whole affair seems pointless.

A curious project, this. British comedian/actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play themselves. The premise is that Coogan is commissioned to do a story for the food supplement of London's Observer newspaper. His job is to drive around the north of England (from which he hails) for a week, and review half-a-dozen of its restaurants.
The plan is to take his American girlfriend along for the trip, but she's left him and returned to the States, so he conscripts old chum Brydon to be his travelling companion. 

 

That's about it really, plot-wise. Coogan and Brydon sample the food, admire a lot of (admittedly gorgeous) scenery - in the Lake District, Lancashire and the Yorkshire Dales - and visit a few sites connected with the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. Coogan climbs rocks, smokes a bit of dope, and sleeps with a couple of women at the hotels that they stay in. It's tolerably pleasant viewing for a while, and Coogan has an engaging presence, but it's also irredeemably pointless, except perhaps as a travelogue.

 

As for the humorous component, there's the odd passable quip, and one particularly funny dream sequence. But there's also an excruciating amount of tedious competitive "banter", wherein the two men show off and compete at length to see who can do a better impression of Michael Caine, Sean Connery or Hugh Grant, among others. The false modesty of Coogan agonising onscreen about whether he's "past it" is irritating. And there's some downright gooey sentimentality. Coogan and Brydon have ponced about self-referentially for director Michael Winterbottom before, in A Cock And Bull Story. It was self-indulgent and a tad egotistical then; now it's even more so.