ANY DAY NOW
(98 minutes) M
★★★

Any Day Now is a movie of good intentions and bad wigs, warm-hearted but slightly oversimplified. Actor-turned-director Travis Fine has adapted a script by George Arthur Bloom to tell the story of the obstacles faced by a gay couple seeking to adopt a child at risk. The film is set in Los Angeles in 1979. Rudy (Alan Cumming) is a lip-synching drag performer. At the bar where he works, he meets Paul (Garret Dillahunt), a lawyer at the district attorney's office. Rudy becomes aware that a neighbour's son, Marco (Isaac Leyva), is frequently left alone. Marco is a teenager with Down syndrome who is being neglected. After looking after him for a year, Paul and Rudy seek to adopt him, but there are obstacles in their way - overt, institutionalised discrimination and bigotry. It is a strong, affecting story, but it is told in a way that sometimes becomes heavy-handed and rhetorical. Fine should have trusted his leads more. Cumming is an exuberant, sardonic Rudy, Dillahunt gives the more introverted Paul a restrained solidity, and Leyva, as Marco, has a quiet, strong presence and some vivid expressive moments. PH
Selected release

DIVERGENT
(140 minutes) M
★★★

The meek have inherited the Earth, or what is left of it, in Divergent, a post-apocalyptic tale aimed at young women.

Shailene Woodley is perfectly cast as the young heroine, Beatrice Prior. She has the right combination of innocence and intelligence, sensuality and watchfulness. Beatrice has grown up in a wrecked Chicago, a decade after an apocalyptic war. The city is protected by an enormous fence. The people inside are segregated into factions, but some people don't fit only one faction; they are ''divergent''. The film is both a romance and a self-help text for teenage girls.

Divergent rips along in director Neil Burger's hands. In widescreen and close-up, it feels quite intimate, even overwhelming, but that is the new style - romance and self-realisation wrapped in violence. At least Divergent has more to ponder than most in the field. PB
General release

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL
(100 minutes) M
★★★★

Wes Anderson's films are triumphs of simultaneous order and chaos. His cinematic vision is symmetrical, structured and immaculate. Yet within a beautifully ordered frame, things don't go according to anyone's plan. Human frailty and fallibility are always in evidence. Characters flounder in confusion and things are off-kilter. Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson's eighth feature. The film is an idiosyncratic period piece, set between the two world wars. Its main location is the imaginary Eastern European Republic of Zubrowka. It takes place over three time periods, each depicted in a different aspect ratio. It is beautifully designed, visually ravishing and symmetrical to the nth degree. It is also full of frantic chaos, with a Lord of Misrule at its centre played by Ralph Fiennes. It is endlessly, deliciously entertaining, but there is also a brittle, painful centre to it, a sense of melancholy and loss. PB
Selected release

MUPPETS MOST WANTED
(113 minutes) G
★★★

With plenty of songs, explosions, jokes, celebrity cameos and buffoonery, Muppets Most Wanted features the Muppets on a tour of Europe, where Ricky Gervais as conniving manager Dominic Badguy (pronounced ''Badgee'') plots to replace Kermit with an evil double as part of his plan to steal the Crown Jewels. Gervais is perfect for the role. Like Charles Grodin in The Great Muppet Caper, he exudes oily self-absorption from every pore, making it plausible he wouldn't care that his companions aren't flesh and blood. Getting the Muppets right is harder than it looks. The trick is to combine maximum zaniness with minimum cynicism, and there are moments when Muppets Most Wanted misses the mark, occasionally getting bogged down in its crime plot. The film seems at odds with the ethos of the Muppets' beloved creator, the late Jim Henson. The plot has a moralistic streak, whereas the original Muppets, at their best, celebrated chaos. JW
General release

Now showing

THE ARMSTRONG LIE
(123 minutes) M
★★★

Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney had signed on to make a documentary about Lance Armstrong's return to the Tour de France in 2009, four years after he had retired. It was supposed to be a story of triumph, but events overtook the project, and when Armstrong made his extraordinary admissions about doping to Oprah, Gibney had to start over. The Armstrong Lie is an act of retrieval, and in some ways quite a skilful one. It doesn't really give us much that is new, but it has some interesting small revelations. Its last glimpse of Armstrong shows a man who, despite everything, is still trying to recast a story to his own advantage. PH
Selected release

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER (3D)
(136 minutes) M
★★★☆

The Steve Rogers/Captain America character burst onto cinema screens three years ago fighting Nazis in the 1940s. The new movie, again in 3D, takes place in the present. "Cap" (Chris Evans) doesn't like thenew ultra-weaponised airships under construction at SHIELD, the CIA-like agency run by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford). In a plot borrowed directly from the 1975 Redford thriller Three Days of the Condor, Rogers goes underground, trusting no one except his new friend Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and his colleague Natasha (Scarlett Johansson), the ex-KGB assassin.
The new movie is  rambunctious, funny, complex and engaging. It's far less "patriotic"than the title might suggest, with a plot that questions the American response to 9/11, at least for a moment. The finale is crafted by the numbers, calculated to appeal to all stripes of the American audience with a depressing predictability, and an ear-bashing finality. PB
General release

HALF OF A YELLOW SUN
(111 minutes) M
★★★★

In the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70, starvation was used as a weapon against the Biafrans. The images that reached Australia were horrible. Half of a Yellow Sun uses real TV news reports to background political events, but sparingly and threateningly. While Kainene (Anika Noni) takes over the family business, her twin sister, Olanna (Thandie Newton), goes north from Lagos to teach sociology at the university town of Nsukka, where she has fallen in love with Odenigbo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a radical professor. By delaying the intrusion of politics, the film establishes a sense of what is about to be lost, and how easily things can go bad. The turmoil closes in on the characters almost without their noticing. We see almost no films from this part of the world. This is a UK-Nigerian co-production filmed in the country, with a rare degree of passion and commitment. It is a superb piece of work. PB
Selected release

FAITH CONNECTIONS
(115 minutes) MA
★☆

Once every three years or so, Hindu pilgrims converge at the Kumbh Mela festival in Northern India to bathe in sacred waters and discuss matters of faith. Last year's festival, held at Allahabad, has been described as the largest peaceful gathering in human history - attracting close to 100 million people.
An event of this magnitude is awe-inspiring on multiple levels; the logistics alone boggle the mind. Who owns all this land - and what is it used for, when it isn't carpeted with colourful tents and corrugated iron shacks? Who is responsible for the clean-up afterwards? Such questions go unanswered in Pan Nalin's Faith Connections, a slick yet mostly tedious documentary. In a striking early shot, the camera weaves  between groups of worshippers while sticking close to the ground. Children are central to the film's vision: one ongoing subplot concerns the hermit Hatha Yogi Baba, who has adopted a small boy and as a result finds himself half-unwillingly reconnecting with the world. JW
ACMI

THE GREAT BEAUTY
(141 minutes) MA
★★★★

Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty is extravagant, knowing, bleak and spectacular. It begins with a quote, the image of a tourist overwhelmed by beauty and a protracted immersion in a late-night party to end all parties, then winds its way, in episodic fashion, through a city and its implications. The city is Rome, the people we see are almost exclusively from its upper echelons, and we are in the company of the jaded Jep (Toni Servillo), a writer celebrating his 65th birthday at the film's opening party. Jep watches, observes, floats from party to encounter to event. He's a journalist and a man about town; having failed to follow up the success of his first novel, he's become a bystander, watching the parade, keeping his distance. The Great Beauty is unmistakably in debt to Fellini and La Dolce Vita, embracing its model with assurance, gesturing towards other films and influences. Its depictions - of contemporary art, contemporary religion, the contemporary world - are often unsparing, yet feel oddly graceful. Even its most severe moments have a lush, sensory charge. PH
Selected release

HER
(126 minutes) MA
★★★★

Writer-director Spike Jonze sets his movie in a not-too-distant future, a retro-inflected world that feels like a mixture of hipster dreamscape and hipster anxiety attack. Joaquin Phoenix plays Ted, who works for beautifulhandwrittenletters.com, crafting other people's correspondence for them. He is separated from his wife and leads a solitary existence. Then he acquires a new operating system, advanced and personalised, that leads him into an unprecedented experience of intimacy.

He opts for a female voice, and ends up with Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) who soon becomes an essential part of his life. What develops between them feels like the relationship he has been looking for. What's more, it becomes apparent, this is not an unusual development. Jonze does not labour the point, but others around Ted are finding the same thing. The future-present that Jonze imagines is subtly yet elaborately constructed with wit and wryness, even whimsy, but Her also comes face to face with loss, sadness and pain. There's an unexpected amount of emotional depth and complexity in Ted's search for and flight from connection. PH
Selected release

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS
(105 minutes) MA
★★★★

Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis is the portrait of the artist as a young man - a cantankerous, unfortunate, self-sabotaging young man with a guitar and a folk repertoire whose career seems doomed to oblivion. So what do we make of these qualities and what do they say about his art? Such questions haunt this dark comedy of aspiration and frustration right to the very end. We begin in New York in 1961, in a circular narrative that explores a week in the life of the title character, Llewyn Davis (a terrific performance by Oscar Isaac) as he searches for a gig, a place to stay, a future. We're not sure where the Coens are taking us - not towards redemption, justification or a vision of popular success, but towards something more problematic and unresolved. This is a film about the strange, tormented nature of creative endeavour, and it's rooted in ambivalence. Music punctuates and illuminates the film, with several extended performances that serve a range of functions. It also contains one of the great feline roles. There's a ginger cat whose presence seems to define, in different ways, the choices and fortunes of the title character. PH
Selected release

THE LEGO MOVIE
(101 minutes) PG
★★★

Emmet, voiced by Chris Pratt, is a construction worker whose life changes course when he stumbles upon the fabled Piece of Resistance and is hailed as The Special, the hero destined to overthrow the tyrannical Lord Business (Will Ferrell). As pure pop the film peaks early, in the inspired scene introducing us to Emmet's home town of Bricksburg - a shiny happy metropolis where everyone bops along in unison to the electro anthem Everything Is Awesome. The joke about this irresistible earworm is that it does exactly what it's meant to do: make conformity seem like fun. Indeed, for all the film's conceptual brilliance, the multilevelled satire leaves little room for the characters to emerge as individuals (the exception is Will Arnett's growly LEGO Batman). By design, Emmet is a stock dorky everyman, Lord Business is a stock villain, and Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) is a stock female sidekick, the kind who proves far tougher and smarter than the hero yet remains consigned to a secondary role. JW
General release

LE WEEK-END
(89 minutes) M
★★★

English couple Nick and Meg (Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan) are heading to Paris to relive their honeymoon of 30 years earlier. It looks set for disaster, even before the Eurostar pulls into the station. There's so much irritation and discontent between them - nothing is in sync, most of all sexual desire. Broadbent's passive-aggressive philosophy lecturer is a more developed character, but Duncan brings a sense of depth to Meg's simmering discontent. Relief of sorts is at hand in the shape of Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), Nick's former colleague, who's living in Paris - he's wealthy, successful, with a young French wife and a dinner invitation to extend to the couple. His presence leads to an epiphany of sorts, although Nick's moment of self-revelation is probably the weakest part of the film. Visually, the film treads a fine line of the Paris cliche, and the Godard reference is risky; but overall it's a bracingly bleak work with a saving element in the final stages. PH
Selected release

MINUSCULE: VALLEY OF THELOSTANTS
(88 minutes) G
★☆
The Americans continue to lead the world in computer animation, in part because this is a field where it's hard to innovate artistically without a great deal of money. A spin-off from a French TV show about the funny ways of insects, Thomas Szabo and Helene Giraud's Minuscule has been a critical and commercial hit at home, but seems unlikely to repeat the trick elsewhere. The characters don't talk, though they communicate with other sounds: whistles, tweets, and buzzing noises. A tranquil, bucolic mood prevails over whatever tension arises from the slender plot - involving a ladybird who befriends a group of black ants, and must help them save their colony from the wicked, slant-eyed red ants who want to steal their sugar. This plot, it must be said, is one of Minuscule's drawbacks. Once the red ants start using pine cones as battering rams and spraying insecticide at their enemies, why not have them ordering bombs by mail like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner series? None of this would matter if the film were funnier or more compelling. JW
Cinema Nova

MR PEABODY AND SHERMAN
(97 minutes) PG
★☆

There is nothing wrong with children's entertainment having an agenda, but big-screen Hollywood animation seems to be getting too sophisticated in the worst ways. Take Mr Peabody and Sherman, directed by Rob Minkoff from a script by Craig Wright, known for middlebrow soap operas such as Six Feet Under. Wright has been encouraged to stay true to himself as an artist, with tiresome results: there are jokes about Philip Glass and the Oedipus myth, dialogues sodden with subtext, and a story that serves as a barely veiled allegory about the struggle of non-traditional families to win acceptance. The film appears to be marketed mostly at parents, for few children are likely to recognise the central characters, who first appeared half a century ago in sketches on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Peabody, voiced by Ty Burrell from Modern Family, is a gifted dog whose inventions include a time machine that allows him to tour the hot spots of history with his young protege, Sherman (Max Charles). Good intentions aside, Mr Peabody and Sherman is a chore to sit through. The jokes are bad, whether or not they are supposed to be, and the time-travel plot has a pointless intricacy that recalls Disney's forgettable Meet The Robinsons. JW
General release

NEBRASKA
(115 minutes) M
★★★☆

Director Alexander Payne has sent his male characters on the road before, on roundabout voyages of failure and frustration with a half shot at redemption. In Nebraska, a father and son drive from Montana to Nebraska - a journey that's meant to combine filial duty and an end to delusion. Bruce Dern plays Woody, an elderly, frail, fixated man with wild hair and a bowed gait. He's received a letter that he's convinced is the notification of a million-dollar lottery win. His younger son, David (Will Forte), decides that there's only one solution: take the trip to to Lincoln, Nebraska, with his father to set him straight. Things don't turn out the way he planned; human nature, greed, misunderstanding and chance all have their part to play. Nebraska, shot in widescreen black and white, is not really a road movie: it's an act of observation, carefully composed and austere. Dern, an actor with a volatile, erratic presence, portrays a character who seems walled in and unreachable. He's so muffled he's barely in a position to articulate his feelings, and Dern makes this utterly convincing. There is a sentimental aspect to the concluding stages - it's not as astringent as Payne's work can be - but there's also something intriguingly dreamlike about its vision for Woody. PH
Selected release 

NOAH
(138 MINUTES)
★★★☆

Even by Hollywood standards, Noah is big - no less than the destruction of all mankind, save for one man and his family.  The film's director, Darren Aronofsky, became fascinated with the story  when he was 13, which may explain why the movie is pitched at a younger audience than his other works (Black Swan, The Fountain, The Wrestler). The animals arrive unbidden, then Noah's wife  (Jennifer Connelly) puts them  to sleep with a wave of her special narcotic incense.  Noah's eldest boy, Shem (Douglas Booth), is sweet on Ila (Emma Watson), an orphan they rescued 10 years earlier. With the sky clouding over, King Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone) threatens to storm the ark with his hordes. Noah has big ideas and big melodrama, and it is gorgeous to the eye. The Icelandic landscapes alone are breathtaking. Russell Crowe gives his best,  but it still feels  as if the film  loses its way. Falling short of greatness, it  falls back on warfare, spectacle and sermon. PB
General release

THE RAID 2
(148 minutes) R
★★★☆

In plot terms The Raid 2 has little more than a nominal connection to its predecessor, but the fight choreographer Iko Uwais makes a return appearance as the hero Rama, an unassuming yet exceedingly agile Jakarta cop. This time he goes undercover in jail, where he befriends Ucok (Arifin Putra), the son of the mob boss Bangun (Tio Pakusadewo). After his release, Rama starts working for Bangun, while striving to keep a rein on Ucok, a hothead keen to stir up trouble with the gang's Japanese competition. The dialogue scenes have an exaggerated stillness and stiffness, with lots of symmetrical head-on shots; when chaotic violence breaks out, the camera too goes crazy, flailing to keep up. For some viewers, it will all be too much. There are times when the phrase ''the pornography of violence'' applies rather too literally, such as the bloodcurdling scene in which Ucok casually slaughters a row of bound prisoners. Yet even these sadistic touches are mandated by genre convention: it is doubtful that Evans himself has anything whatever to say. At most, he seems to comment on his own blankness. JW
Selected release

RIDE ALONG
(100 MINUTES) M
★★★

Ride Along, directed by Tim Story, makes good on the promise of its friendly title: don't expect too much, and you'll be in for a pleasant couple of hours. The premise has a retro appeal, fusing two genres - the buddy cop movie and the slacker comedy. There's also an element of novelty in the person of Kevin Hart, a pint-sized motormouth who seems poised for mega-stardom. Here, Hart plays Ben Barber, a high school security guard with two things on his mind: joining the police force and getting married to his girlfriend Angela (Tika Sumpter). Unfortunately, neither of these schemes meets with the approval of James (Ice Cube), Angela's cop brother. The key scene comes early, when Ben warns a teenage boy that drinking with his mates will lead to dropping out of school, being forced into the army, and getting his legs blown off in Afghanistan. It's a typically absurd, exaggerated spiel but with a grim undertone that resonates later. JW
General release

TRACKS
(113 minutes) M
★★☆

One day in the mid-1970s, a young woman named Robyn Davidson arrived in Alice Springs with an unlikely plan: to acquire some wild camels, train them to serve as beasts of burden, and head out on foot across the Central Australian Desert, towards the Indian Ocean more than 3000 kilometres away. The story of that journey is told in Davidson's bestselling 1980 book Tracks, which has never gone out of print. A film adaptation has been talked about for many years, but it's taken till now for director John Curran (Praise) to realise the dream, with Mia Wasikowska as star. The limitation of the film stems from Curran's conventional, nudging technique: there are too many close-ups, too many montages, and far too much of Garth Stevenson's ''meditative'' score. The sense of solitude, emptiness and vastness is never as overpowering as it might have been with a little more restraint. JW
Selected release

WADJDA
(97 MINUTES) PG
★★★

Parents weary of the sexism of many Hollywood family movies should consider taking their kids to see Haifaa al-Mansour's Wadjda, a straightforward but pointed feminist parable about a little girl who challenges the system. The system in question is an unusually though not uniquely oppressive one: reportedly, this is the first film to be shot entirely in Saudi Arabia.

Played by Waad Mohammad, Wadjda is a lively 11-year-old from the suburbs of Riyadh who wears Converse sneakers instead of her regulation school shoes, listens to pop music on bootleg cassettes, and dreams of owning a bike so she can race her friend Abdullah (Abdullrahman Al Gohani). Since this dream is prohibited by law, she finds herself in conflict with the authority figures around her, for reasons she barely understands.

There are moments when the film could be accused of catering to the prejudices of Western viewers. Elsewhere, al-Mansour finds subtler ways to make similar points: the costumes tell a story of their own. JW
Selected release

THE WIND RISES
(126 minutes)
PG ★★★★☆

Announced as the final film by the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, The Wind Rises is a curious kind of artistic testament. Minus any overt element of fantasy, it's a fictionalised account of the life of Jiro Horikoshi, who designed many of the fighter planes used by Japan during World War II. Miyazaki's version of Jiro (voiced by Hideaki Anno) could be taken as an idealised self-portrait: he's a gentle visionary who spends his time drawing up sketches, just like an animator. More significantly, he represents the ''apolitical'' artist in general: rather than being a bellicose patriot, he simply wants to create beautiful objects that take flight. Visually, the film suggests that Miyazaki has set out to demonstrate, once and for all, what the craft of animation is all about - and viewers will be grappling for a long time with the profound, troubling questions it raises. JW
Selected release