TIGHT SPOT **

 Excellent, hard-boiled crime movie that wastes no time in getting down to the action and then never really lets up, despite its enclosed setting, (it was based on a play). Ginger Rogers, (very good), is the tough-talking jailbird taken from prison so she can testify against the mob though Ginger isn't too keen on talking and the mob aren't too keen in keeping her alive.

Brian Keith is the cop whose job it is to ensure she stays alive and Edward G. Robinson, (superb as ever), is the District Attorney who wants her to testify. The director of "Tight Spot" was Phil Karlson and this was right up his street and it's still one of his best films. Talkative, yes, but then the talk is good and while it may have been a B-Movie it was certainly a first-class one.

THE BARRETTS OF WIMPOLE STREET ***

 Sidney Franklin's first screen version of "The Barretts of Wimpole Street", (he remade it again in 1957), is a ridiculously entertaining period piece about the blossoming romance between the poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, (Fredric March and Norma Shearer, both excellent in their very Hollywood way), and how finally Elizabeth and the rest of the Barrett clan, (there were nine of them), rebelled against their tyrannical father, (a superb Charles Laughton, at the time only three years older than Shearer).

It was a very typical prestige production of the period. Irving G. Thalberg was the producer and he obviously chose it as a vehicle for the missus, (he was married to Shearer at the time), but it's almost stolen by Maureen O'Sullivan, surprisingly good as one of the Barrett girls and Una O'Connor is a delight, gliding across the room as if on wheels. The source was a play by Rudolph Besier and it's the kind of thing that would have gone down a treat on the London and Broadway stage, the archetypical 'well-made-play'. Yes, it's decidedly old-fashioned and very talkative and unlikely to appeal to today's audiences but it's also very good, a little on the camp side certainly but a very fine example of just how good the studio system could be at its best.

DONKEY SKIN *

 Jacques Demy was certainly a frivolous film-maker but what's wrong with frivolity in the name of art? "Peau D'ane" was his very literal fairy-tale made in homage to Cocteau's "La Belle et Le Bete" down to the casting of Jean Marais among a litany of famous French actors and while it was never going to be in the Cocteau class it certainly looks like a highly attractive entertainment and features a luminous Catherine Deneuve in the central role of a princess who must flee her home when she is forced to marry her own father, the king, (don't ask!).

Naturally, this being a Jacques Demy film every tiny detail of its production design is close to perfect and the cast, that also includes Delphine Seyrig, Jacques Perrin and Micheline Presle throw themselves into the confection with abandon and yet it's all a little too twee to be considered among Demy's better works. It might appeal to little French girls and bigger French boys with a crush on the gorgeous Deneuve but Demy aficionados will be disappointed. Oh, and the songs are pretty bad, too.

BARBIE ***

 "Barbie" is undoubtedly one of the most enjoyable films I've seen this year and yet it's also the most infuriating. Highly imaginative, (it's got the best pre-credit sequence in years), and laugh-out-loud funny it's got ideas to burn and therein lies the problem. Director and co-writer, (with partner Noah Baumbach), Greta Gerwig has set out to make the ultimate feminist tract dressed up in the brightest of pinks as a satire and while it works perfectly well as a satire full of self-conscious digs at its very creation, (we are constantly being reminded this is a movie called "Barbie" that we're watching), it's as a tract that it's in danger of sinking. That it doesn't is very much to Gerwig's credit; she's much too smart to really ruin her product and there is an awful lot here to enjoy.

The thin plot has Barbie and Ken leaving Barbieland for the real world so Barbie can repair some sort of hole in the spectrum or some such nonsense that has allowed 'real' feelings (of a negative kind) to slip in and, naturally, since this is a film about dolls coming to life, it's decidedly silly and if had stayed silly it might have been inconsequential fun but Gerwig and Baumbach wants this to be 'consequential' fun, a laugh-a-minute message movie. Unfortunately one message doesn't appear to be enough; there were times I felt I was being battered to death by a giant message-wielding Barbie and by the time Will Ferrell's CEO of Mattel has left the real world for Barbieland the laughs had begun to dry up.

Perhaps if someone had snipped about 20 minutes from the running time and dropped a few of the film's sermons this might have been the classic it was clearly aiming to be; that said, there are a lot of plusses here. It looks fantastic, the best gags are as good as anything Gerwig or Baumbach have given us in the past and best of all, it's got a couple of living dolls worthy of the name.

Margot Robbie was born to play Barbie, (there's even an in-joke about her in the movie), and, of course, she's wonderful and yet the film isn't hers. Barbie really belongs to Ryan Gosling who might become the first actor to be Oscar-nominated for playing a doll and given that the film is structured to make him a mouthpiece for its creators he brings an uncanny degree of feeling to the role and his performance is up there with his very best. As for Gerwig, maybe now that she's got her inner Barbie out of her system she might finally settle down to make comedies that are funny and meaningful and leave the sermons at home. We already know how good she can be.