ALIVE AND KICKING **

This piece of Irish whimsy makes "The Quiet Man" look like neo-realism. "Alive and Kicking" is a totally daft delight that finds old ladies Sybil Thorndike, Kathleen Harrison and Estelle Winwood 'escape' from their Old People's Home in England only to end up on an island off the Irish coast where, with the help of the locals, including a young Richard Harris, making his film debut, they set up a business knitting sweaters for the fashion market.

It's all very silly and, if you're Irish, probably deeply patronising but it's also hugely likeable. Harrison and Winwood are excellent but it is Thorndike who steals the show. This grand-dame of British theatre has a grand old time scurrying up and down cliffs in search of birds eggs or hunting rabbits with a shotgun, (well, at least her stand-in does). Stanley Holloway is in it, too as the rich Irish-American who proves to be their saviour. Ripe for rediscovery.

BEAT GIRL no stars

Hard to believe that this tale of beat girls, beat boys and sundry strippers was once considered scandalous and had an 'X' certificate slapped on it when it first appeared. It's another warning on what can happen when you let your teenage daughter listen to jazz or worse still, jive music! Of course, it's mostly terrible but it has built up something of a reputation as a cult movie in recent years. (The club scenes and a chicken run stolen from "Rebel Without a Cause" are surprisingly good).

David Farrar is the rich architect who remarries; his new wife is Noelle Adam and she has a shady past and newcomer Gillian Hills is his pouty teenage daughter who resents her. The cast also includes Christopher Lee, Adam Faith, (not at all bad), Peter McEnery and a young Oliver Reed, (billed here as Plaid Shirt). The director was Edmond T Greville who brought a middle-aged man's disapproving eye to bear on the proceedings.

UNFRIENDED no stars

It was bound to happen. We have now moved from CGI to literally looking at a computer screen and it you think flicking between Facebook and Skype and God-knows-what-else on your actual computer is annoying wait until you see"Unfriended". Actually this movie, which takes place in real time on a computer monitor, moving back and forth between a group of nasty, randy teenagers who are being menaced by an unseen presence, is something of a technical marvel and it does provide the occasional frisson but it's also headache-inducing and hard to sit through. It's actually one of the few films that will look better on your tv or computer screen than in the cinema where the size of the screen just seems out of place or perhaps it's just one of those films that's best not seen at all since the originality of the concept is quickly swallowed up by the silliness of the plot. Amazingly, a sequel is on the way.

TOO LATE FOR TEARS no stars

The title might suggest a weepie of sorts but "Too Late for Tears" is a film noir and a fairly mediocre one at that. It's actually got a very good story (by Roy Huggins from his 'Saturday Evening Post' serial), but the treatment is poor. Lizabeth Scott is the greedy femme fatale who will stop at nothing, including murder, to hold onto the bag of money that lands in her lap, or at least in her car. Scott was never much of an actress and she's terrible here. As the blackmailer whose money she steals Dan Duryea is his usual excellent self and there's a nice supporting turn from Arthur Kennedy as Scott's sap of her husband. As I said it's got a decent enough story but director Byron Haskin wasn't the man to do anything with it and it just limps along to its rather torturous conclusion.

SAMMY GOING SOUTH ***

SAMMY GOING SOUTH. A road movie with a difference since the road young Sammy must travel runs all the way from Port Said in Egypt, where his parents have been killed in an air-raid, all the way to Durban in South Africa where his Aunt Jane lives. This is something of a late classic from Alexander MacKendrick, a movie in which the central character is a child but which isn't really a children's film, (though children will relate to it), and it's utterly devoid of sentimentality. On route he meets a number of people who both help him and hinter him on his journey and he learns to 'grow up' very quickly. One of the people he meets is Edward G Robinson's old diamond smuggler and in the end it is he who is really Sammy's salvation, (and as ever, Robinson is superb). As Sammy, Fergus McClelland is also superb; MacKendrick is a very fine director of children. Filmed on location in Africa, it is also visually very impressive.

FATHER BROWN **

Robert Hamer directed this thoroughly delightful comedy based on one of G K Chesterton's "Father Brown" stories, (it's also known as "The Detective"), and cast Alec Guinness as the priest and amateur sleuth determined not only to catch master thief Flambeau, (Peter Finch), but to save his soul as well. The humor is gentle and very British and both Guinness and Finch are marvellous as the detective and the criminal who  strike up a fond rapport with each other. Others in the fine cast include Joan Greenwood, Cecil Parker and Bernard Lee. Underrated and worth seeking out.

SONS AND LOVERS *

Freddie Francis won a much deserved Oscar for his superb black and white, widescreen cinematography on this 1960 screen version of "Sons and Lovers" which was directed by another great cameraman, Jack Cardiff. It was a huge success in its day, tying with "The Apartment" for the New York Film Critics' Best Picture prize but apart from Francis' cinematography it has very little to recommend it. This is a sanitized, unbearably literate treatment of Lawrence's novel with a hugely miscast Dean Stockwell in the crucial role of Paul Morel, Lawrence's alter-ego. The American Stockwell just about manages the accent but makes Morel a soulless, spoiled brat. As his coal-miner father Trevor Howard also struggles but, as always, Wendy Hiller is superb as the clinging, overly possessive mother and an Oscar-nominated Mary Ure isn't bad as Clara Dawes. It may have felt reasonably daring in 1960 but Lawrence deserves better than this kid-gloves approach.

THE PAPERBOY **

"The Paperboy" looks and feels like a trashy pulp novel. I haven't read Peter Dexter's original book but it may have been just that. It's told in flashback by maid Anita, (singer Macy Gray), and it deals with a murder and a possible miscarriage of justice. The murder, as it turns out, is really only a red-herring, (there are other murders to make up for it), and even the miscarriage of justice is virtually thrown away as a major plot point.

It's set 'in the past' in a place close to the Florida Everglades where racism is rampant. The paperboy of the title is the extraordinarily handsome Zac Efron, (who at least makes up in looks what he lacks in acting chops), whose job it is to deliver the newspapers his daddy prints. On the other hand, the paperboy could just as easily be Matthew McConaughey as his older brother, a reporter who has returned to the family fold to write a story about a man on death row whom he believes is innocent. He has another writer with him, a sophisticated black man from 'London, England', (he stands out like Virgil Tibbs in this backwater). The guy on death row turns out to be something of a neanderthal and is played brilliantly by John Cusack and he has a tramp of a girl-friend on the outside who he had never even met 'in the flesh', so to speak, (Nicole Kidman, terrific and giving the film all the sleazy kick it needs). It's she that Efron falls for in a puppy-love kind of way and it's this tiresome infatuation that makes up most of the film's plot.

In the end it shudders into some kind of life with a lot of unsavoury revelations and a double murder. It's all very watchable and there are some good soul numbers on the soundtrack and you may be inclined to think Kidman, (and perhaps even Cusack), were robbed of Oscar nominations but it's hardly likely to do much for director Lee Daniels' faltering career.

MAMA **

"Mama" is an old dark house, B-Movie horror flic given a bright new shiny coat of paint together with a smattering of "L'Enfant Sauvage" psychology amid the, admittedly goose-bump inducing, chills. It also features a couple of surprisingly good performances from Isabelle Nelisse and Morgan McGarry as the two little girls who share a somewhat unhealthy relationship with Mama, the rather malevolent spirit of the title. They are found in a cabin in the woods five years after their father took them there after killing their mother. He would have killed them too only Mama intervened and she's been looking after them ever since. Now they are living with their uncle and his kooky girlfriend, (a superb Jessica Chastain), but Mama has moved in as well and she's certainly not prepared to leave them in the care of a couple of interlopers.

This is a good, old-fashioned ghost story rather than a slasher movie or a tale of demonic possession with a genuinely frightening ghost and director Andy Muschietti certainly knows how to make us jump which marks "Mama" as quite a considerable cut above most run-of-the-mill genre pictures of this kind. If it isn't quite a classic it certainly enough to give you the occasional sleepless night.

STROSZEK ****

"Stroszek" may be Werner Herzog's greatest masterpiece. it's certainly his most humane picture and in casting non-actor Bruno S in the title role he gets so close to the feeling of raw truth we may as well be watching a picture of Bruno S's life, (something he also achieved in "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" where Bruno S's performance as Hauser totally transcended acting to become the character). Here he simply becomes Stroszek just as Eva Mattes becomes Eva and Clemens Scheitz becomes Scheitz. Herzog transports them from Germany to America where Stroszek gets a dead-end job in the garage of Scheitz's nephew and Eva becomes a waitress, (in Berlin she turned tricks to earn the money for their trip and doesn't appear too anxious to give up that line of work).

Nothing conventional happens but seldom on film has the mundane existence of ordinary people seemed so fascinating, (and Herzog's use of non-actors throughout only enhances this feeling of reality). Of course, these characters are misfits; they don't fit in and they lead lives of mostly unrelieved misery and this has lead to accusations that Herzog is nothing more than a misanthrope and that, at best, he patronises his characters. His continual casting of actors like Bruno S and Klaus Kinski has lead to a kind of alienation though, in Herzog's case, madness, like beauty may be only in the eye of the beholder with Stroszek no more to be pitied than Cool Hand Luke. If "Stroszek" is a tragedy, it is a comic one and immediately identifiable as the work of its director: you don't mistake a Herzog movie set in America as a Bob Rafelson movie. And yes, before you ask, it's visually superb and with a great soundtrack, too. Essential.

QUEEN OF THE DESERT no stars

The life of the adventuress and explorer Gertrude Bell might just seem like the kind of subject that the director Werner Herzog might embrace but this stately, grandiose epic is more like something James Ivory or even David Lean might have tossed off and which, for over two hours, moves at a snail's pace. Nicole Kidman does what she can with the part of Bell but is defeated by Herzog's own ponderous script and she is surrounded by some very dull men, (Damian Lewis, James Franco and Robert Pattinson as a slightly camp Lawrence of Arabia), and despite the locations it's not even a particularly attractive looking film. If you must spend time with a queen of the desert stick with Priscilla whose adventures were a lot more fun than Gertrude's.

THAT TOUCH OF MINK **

Thoroughly delightful 1930's comedy with Jean Arthur and Cary Grant except that "That Touch of Mink" was made in 1962 and instead of Jean Arthur we had Doris Day. Grant's still in it, though, replacing Day's usual leading man of the period, Rock Hudson. He plays a millionaire who wants to take Doris off to Bermuda for the weekend but she's wearing her professional virgin status on her lapel for all the world to see. It's actually quite a funny film with an excellent Stanley Shapiro/Nate Monaster script and is considerably old-fashioned despite its talk of sex and unmarried mothers. Perhaps the only real surprise is that it was directed by Delbert Mann, whom we normally associate with more social-realist movies. A big hit in its day, it was nominated for three Oscars and won the Golden Globe for the Best Musical or Comedy.

MISS SLOANE **

More dirty politics and particularly prescient in the time of Trump. Elizabeth Sloane is a lobbyist whose failure to get into bed with the NRA seems to be her undoing, especially when she decides to change sides. It may or may not prove to be a smart move but this is a smart movie with a cracker of a script from Jonathan Perera, a typically high-powered performance from the always reliable Jessica Chastain and a terrific supporting cast that includes Mark Strong, John Lithgow, Michael Stuhlbarg, Sam Waterson, Alison Pill and Gugu Mbatha-Raw.

It looks good and it sounds good but it's not likely to please the multiplex crowd; no matter how you dress it up, politics just aren't sexy and any plot concerning gun-control means you have to take your brain into the cinema with you, something most people aren't prepared to do these days so while Miss Sloane may be good at her job, and by all accounts no slouch in bed either, she will be fighting a losing battle at the box-office.