These articles were (almost) all written as previews – without having seen the films concerned – for a long-lead agency supplying the local press. The opinions expressed in them do not necessarily represent my final views of the films concerned after finally getting to see them.

They are probably best accessible from the archives, where they are arranged by the approximate date on which the films were released in the UK.

Sooner or later it’s going to get to the stage where every conceivable combination of talking animals has been exhausted in Hollywood’s desperate drive to churn out more and more computer-animated tales for the kids. We’ve had sharks, insects, fish, no less than two based on the inhabitants of a New York Zoo, prehistoric and fairytale beasties, and countless others. Some have been better than others.

Thankfully, this is one of the good ones. Seemingly partially inspired by the classic Watership Down, a group of American woodland animals emerge from hibernation to find that human suburbs have spread out over their forest, leaving them but a small clump of trees cut off from the tidy lawns of mankind by a towering, perfectly-trimmed hedge. Led by a rascally raccoon, voiced by Bruce Willis, soon this mismatched bunch find themselves engaged on a series of excursions to the neat human homes, and that’s really about that. No grand adventures, just a simple plot ideal for a series of well-conceived capers as the humans gradually get fed up with their furry neighbours making raids on their rubbish bins.

As is often the way with these things, the voice cast that has been assembled by Dreamworks, the studio responsible for previous anthropomorphic animal animations Antz, Chicken Run, Shark Tale, Madagascar and the superb Shrek, is truly impressive. Joining Willis are Garry Shandling, William Shatner, Nick Nolte, Eugene Levy, Alison Janney and Steve Carell. Admittedly, beyond Willis, Nolte and Shatner the names may not be too familiar to British audiences, but all have top-notch comic timing and are ideally suited for their disparate roles, even with the seemingly mandatory silly voices so many of them opt to put on.

This is one of those films that really doesn’t stand up to much analysis, and nor is it meant to. Despite a few spoofs of other movies scattered here and there, this is firmly aimed at the kids, with few of the Shrek films’ adult-aimed jokes. It’s simple and silly, with few real messages beyond the obvious vaguely conservationist, loosely environmentalist ones that would be obvious merely from the plot outline.

Despite having been responsible for the most successful computer animated film franchise yet with Shrek, Dreamworks maintains its great sense of what works. Inserting more adult humour or more complex adventures into this basic set-up would simply have spoiled it. Instead, they’ve concocted yet another expertly-crafted movie that should prove a genuine hit with the kids – and like all good family films be enjoyed by the adults as well.

Normally, sensible cinemagoers know there’s little worse than a film that relies almost entirely on child actors. Although you may every now and again find a Haley Joel Osment or Jodie Foster amongst the crop of precocious drama school brats who flock to auditions at the behest of pushy parents, the vast majority of pre-adolescent actors are dire. A wooden, nervous and stilted, getting a naturalistic performance out of youngsters is like the proverbial blood from a stone.

Back in 1991 the Macaulay Culkin vehicle My Girl had a similar first love theme to that of Little Manhattan, with its eleven-year-old leads sharing a screen kiss which, though entirely innocent, in these days of tabloid scares about perverts outside the playground, it’s hard not to feel that some of the on-screen antics of the young lovers could be misinterpreted.

Yet despite the nods to more grown-up romantic comedies, this is simply a sweet, nostalgic look at childhood and the first dawning realisation that the opposite sex can be something of interest rather than the enemy. It is hardly a new idea, and one which has been explored on film countless times, but rarely has it been done in such an assured manner.

Male lead Josh Hutcherson, fresh from his turn in the charming children’s space adventure Zathura, is beginning to prove himself a worthy heir to the child stars of yesteryear, and is more than capable of forming the lynchpin of the movie as he explores his disturbing new feelings for a girl he’s known all his short life. As his love interest, newcomer Charlie Ray also demonstrates herself to be a great find, showing a subtlety and maturity of acting style far beyond her years

Ably directed by first-timer Mark Levin, the writer of 2004’s average romantic comedy Wimbledon as well as the producer of 1980s coming of age sitcom The Wonder Years, if you remember that sitcom, you’ll know what to expect here. With a similar use of voice-over to that popular series, the same themes of early pubescent love and confusion are explored in a similarly sentimental, yet never cloying way.

The addition of two talented TV actors, The West Wing’s Bradley Whitford and Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon, as the boy’s separated parents also helps provide and added subtext – remember the loves of your youth, and your adult romances could benefit from the less cynical views of childhood. The end result is a charming, if sentimental, movie. But then the sentimentality is a lot of the point – cynicism and love hardly go hand in hand, after all.

The world of politics has inspired some of the finest comedies of the last few decades, from the still-relevant British sitcoms Yes Minister and The New Statesman through the American Spin City and films like Bulworth and Bob Roberts, the fact that politicians are at once so disliked and so powerful has made them prime targets for comedians’ bile. But it is often the little, anonymous people orchestrating things behind the scenes who deserve the most attention.

It’s beginning to look like a good time for movies with a bit of a political message as, hot on the heels of April’s satire of President Bush and Pop Idol American Dreamz, comes this intelligent comic take on the political lobbying industry. Picking those anonymous PR types who pressurise governments to allow their products and industries ever greater freedom from tax and regulation as a subject may at first sound like prime material for immense boredom, yet there is a rich vein of comedy here yet to be fully mined.

Here the tobacco industry is the target, along with Hollywood itself, long blamed for the glamorisation of smoking through the iconic screen images of the likes of Humphrey Bogart and James Dean, cool cinematic heroes rarely seen without a cancer stick to puff on.

Aaron Eckhart – one of those actors who looks familiar but you don’t know quite from where – is perfect as the suave and smooth-talking tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor, charged with convincing an increasingly sceptical public of the sheer joy of a smoke while deflecting health concerns left, right and centre. It’s a tough job, but he’s the best at it, raising doubts about the anti-smoking argument with ease, from suggesting that as cholesterol causes more deaths than cigarette smoke, by the same logic cheese should be clamped down on to convincing schoolchildren that tobacco isn’t harmful and rekindling Hollywood’s love affair with the noxious weed.

With some great one-liners working superbly amidst an intelligently subtle script, although there are many belly-laughs there’s also plenty to ponder. Rather than the usual hammer-blow attack on an industry that these days everyone agrees is at best rather morally suspect, you’ll come away with a few preconceptions decidedly challenged, even though the message remains, as you’d expect, decidedly anti-tobacco.

With Eckhart, putting in a performance that should remind everyone how talented a performer he was in 1997’s sexist office satire In the Company of Men, backed up by the likes of Robert Duval, Rob Lowe and William H Macy alongside more vaguely familiar faces on top form – with special mention to ER’s Maria Bello and Anchorman’s David Koechner – this is a great show of ensemble comedy. With any justice, in Eckhart we could have a new comic star on our hands, while twenty-nine-year-old writer/director Jason Reitman has finally proved that he’s truly his father’s son – his dad is Ivan, the man responsible for the comedy classic Ghostbusters as well as the excellent White House comedy Dave. This is definitely one to watch – a perfect combination of comedy and cleverness.

It is a rare thing for Robert Redford to merely act in a film these days. In the last twenty years he has appeared in just eleven movies, having been one of the most prolific and popular actors of the 1960s and 1970s. Instead he has been focussing on producing other people’s films, and in nurturing fresh generations of filmmakers through his hugely influential Sundance Film Festival, which has helped launch the careers of the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Jim Jarmusch.

In other words, to get such an influential Hollywood figure to simply act – especially as Redford is one of the few actors to also have won a Best Director Oscar – takes something special, and in itself is enough to attract other big name stars. Here, though the focus is largely on him, co-stars Morgan Freeman and Jennifer Lopez provide great support, as does newcomer Becca Gardner as Lopez’s early teenage daughter trying to come to terms with suddenly finding herself out in a rural backwater. So good are the cast that this could even be the film that lets Lopez shake off her somewhat unfavourable reputation, as she finally gets back to proving that, when she decides to avoid tedious romantic comedies, she actually has the talent to deserve her fame.

With the arrival of Lopez and her daughter, the tranquil farm life of best friends Redford and Freeman is instantly shattered. The estranged wife of Redford’s dead son, father and daughter-in-law have not seen each other for so long that he was not even aware that he had a grandchild, the initial hostility almost enough to ensure that he sends her instantly packing.

What follows is surprisingly predictable for a film that managed to lure Redford from his self-imposed near-exile. With Lopez playing scared fugitive, Redford gruff but good-hearted and Freeman his typical wise old man, quite why this script got Redford interested out of the many thousands he must receive each year is hard to fathom. But as his directorial outings A River Runs Through It and The Horse Whisperer amply show, he certainly has a liking for sentimentality. That’s not to say this is a bad film, but you have to wonder how a man of Redford’s superb judgement thought this was worthy of his time.

Thankfully, the cast and director Lasse Hallström are strong enough to lift this film up above the weak plot, turning it from what, in lesser hands, would have been merely another tedious TV movie sentimental semi-thriller into a showcase of what good actors can do. The only slight problem is that we all know that these three stars can do this – they are all playing the same character they have played many times before, even if Lopez here does it better then usual. The end result is a well-made if hardly earth-shattering movie that will be comfortingly familiar and probably draw a fair amount of critical ire. But if movies were made for the critics alone, they’d be a very dull thing for everyone else.

Having burst into the national consciousness with his wonderfully eccentric debut film role in Withnail & I twenty years ago, Richard E Grant has become a perennial British favourite. Though hardly the most subtle of actors, always playing a variant on the same slightly extreme, slightly posh character, he found himself a formula that works and is popular, and has made a very good career out of it.

Back in 1997, Grant published his diaries from his time in the film industry to rave reviews. His easy, amusing writing style won over a new legion of fans as it became clear that as well as having managed to make his upper-class screen persona hugely likeable at a time when being posh was, following the anti-Tory backlash of the mid-1990s, decidedly out of fashion, he was a genuinely nice chap with a good sense of humour and an eye for the absurd.

Wah-Wah is both Grant’s screenwriting and directorial debut, but he has stuck to a subject he knows inside-out: himself. Although similar semi-autobiographical film projects could end up self-obsessed, Grant’s account of his early teenage years makes for a wonderful mix of all the classic coming-of-age themes, from the discovery of the opposite sex to the dawning of political awareness as, from their home in Swaziland, the looming political independence of the British colony mirrors his parents’ gradual break-up and his own emergence into adulthood. In fact, were this not based on his own genuine experiences, the plot could risk seeming nearly as contrived as his screen persona would in the hands of a less genuine actor.

In many ways the film is similar to Franco Zefferelli’s tale of British ex-pats in fascist Italy, Tea With Mussolini, but despite the less momentous setting this is somehow a more engaging a tale of coping with a shifting political situation than that slightly impersonal exploration of similar themes. While the subject-matter could be off-putting and heavy, Grant’s light-hearted script and easy, restrained directorial style make this a wonderfully absorbing and frequently entertaining look at a now-lost world about which most people know very little, even if it was only forty years ago. As with his screen persona, Grant has somehow managed to create something instantly likeable, while, as with his earlier diaries, he’s once again proved that he’s more than the usual one-dimensional actor by turning out a very impressive directorial debut.

To back up the cunningly interwoven themes, Grant has assembled an enviable cast, from About a Boy’s Nicholas Hoult as his fourteen-year-old self through Gabriel Byrne, Miranda Richardson, Emily Watson, Julie Walters and Celia Imrie as his family and their colonial friends and rivals. Many of the characters are as familiarly archetypal as are the actors’ faces, yet with such talents on board, combined with Grant’s amusing and insightful script, this is far more than the usual “posh people try and maintain a sense of familiarity in a far-off land” story that has been done so many times before.

It may have only been five years and the repercussions of that day may still be being felt around the world, but already the wounds of September 11th 2001 have been judged to be sufficiently healed for the film versions to start emerging. Soon to come will be Oliver Stone’s take on two of the fire-fighters who ran in to the burning World Trade Centre and were caught in its collapse, but first to hit the screens is this dramatisation of the hijacking of United Airlines flight 93, the plane supposedly destined for the White House that ended up crashing in Pennsylvania after an apparent attempt by passengers to overcome their hijackers.

Unsurprisingly, the very decision to dramatise those events has been hugely controversial, especially in the United States. Trailers for this film were pulled from New York theatres after audiences were overcome with emotion, and despite its sensitivity to the wishes of the families of those killed on board the flight, who were closely consulted, there are many who feel not just that this is far too soon, but that the events are too painful ever to be fictionalised.

Of course, despite a few hints from phone records made by passengers to those on the ground, precisely what happened on board flight 93 can never be known. All that seems certain is that, thanks to being delayed on takeoff, the hijackers were unable to coordinate their attack with their comrades on the other three planes that hit the World Trade Centre and Pentagon. Those onboard flight 93 apparently heard the news of the attacks, realised what was going on and decided to act. Beyond that, the details are sketchy.

In the absence of solid facts, numerous conspiracy theories have arisen, aided by the lack of any definite confirmation of just why flight 93 ended up crashing. Some have claimed that it was shot down by the US military, others that the terrorists themselves lost control and dived too soon, yet more that the pilot and crew were unable to keep the plane in the air for any number of reasons, from bomb detonations to having been killed as soon as the plane was taken over.

In other words, this is only one version of events and, unsurprisingly, the least controversial. While doing a great job of humanising the victims, the desire not to speak ill of the dead has ensured that the entire affair is incredibly one-dimensional. The terrorists are typically shifty-looking and evil, the passengers and crew all wonderful, flawless human beings. Life is rarely that simple.

Nonetheless, the film has received rave reviews in America, perhaps because of its potential to help act as a focus for the ongoing process of national healing. The presence of British writer/director Paul Greengrass has also helped. A former documentary-maker working for World in Action from warzones around the globe before coming to the big screen with The Bourne Supremacy, he has more experience than pretty much anyone in Hollywood of presenting real events as objectively and sensitively as possible. The end result is a good piece of docu-drama. As history it may be lacking in objectivity, but it will take far longer than five years for that to be possible with the events of September 11th 2001.

In 1974, an unusually philosophical drama set in 1930s Los Angeles found itself hailed as an instant classic, with eleven Oscar nominations at the following year’s ceremony and almost unanimously rave reviews. Had it not been for the insanely tough competition of The Godfather: Part II at the 1975 Oscars, Chinatown would have cleaned up. As it was, the only Academy Award for that near-perfect movie was for screenwriter Robert Towne.

Thirty years on, Towne has returned to the same 1930s LA of Chinatown, this time as director as well as writer, adapting a classic 1939 John Fante novel of Depression-era cross-cultural romance, long mooted for a screen outing.

Although Towne was responsible for the screenplays for a number of other 1970s hit movies, and was at the forefront of the decade’s revitalisation of Hollywood through his work on the likes of The Last Detail, Shampoo and especially Chinatown, his star has somewhat diminished in the last couple of decades after lacklustre, mediocre work on a number of bog-standard movies like Tequila Sunrise, Days of Thunder and Mission: Impossible II. His directorial career has likewise not been especially well-regarded and, in the US, his adaptation of this classic American novel has come in for a lot of criticism.

But to expect anyone to live up to the genius of Chinatown is unrealistic and, really, rather unfair. Likewise, to expect any adaptation of any novel to do full justice to the original author’s work misses the essential point that where a novel will generally be several hundred pages long and take a bare minimum of several hours to read, a film version has to cram as much as possible in to just a couple of hours. When the central theme is the blossoming of mixed-race romance in a disapproving society and the pressures of embarking on a largely sedentary literary career, some of the nuances and subtlety of the novel’s more versatile form are naturally going to be lost.

Yet for those unfamiliar with the book, as most British audiences will be, there is much to applaud here. Salma Hayek as the illiterate Mexican waitress and Colin Farrell as the aspiring Italian writer desperate for the American dream of success and a beautiful blonde wife both give believably absorbing performances, their nascent relationship given plenty of time to emerge thanks to Towne’s leisurely pacing.

But the real beauty here is not the plot or the evocation of the artistic struggle, although Towne and Farrell respectively make good stabs at them, it is instead the recreation of an era. Thanks largely to the beautiful cinematography of Caleb Deschanel, probably best known for his work on 2004’s The Passion of the Christ, combined with some superb period sets and costumes from the Coen brothers’ favourite Production Designer, Dennis Gassner, the look of this film is slick and near-perfect. When Farrell dons his trilby, he could almost be Jack Nicholson in Chinatown all over again – albeit without the bloody nose.

That kind of classic Hollywood style is rare these days, and almost worth the price of admission on its own. A visually wonderful, intelligent film with good performances from the leads, if you’re expecting another Chinatown you’ll be disappointed – but if you have those sorts of expectations you should be used to that by now.

The trend for remakes of 1970s movies continues with this updated version of the 1972 sinking cruise ship disaster classic The Poseidon Adventure. As with so many remakes, the first question really has to be “what’s the point?” – especially after James Cameron has brought us his epic version of the sinking of the Titanic, which is surely unlikely to be topped for sheer sinking ship spectacle for a good while.

Add to that the American TV remake that was screened last year to dismal reviews and the terrible Michael Caine-starring 1979 sequel Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and the whole concept of people trapped onboard sinking ships seems, if you’ll pardon the pun, rather washed-out. On top of that, it is surely rather insensitive to release such a film only a few months after the Egyptian ferry disaster in the Red Sea that killed so many hundreds of people.

But that’s being picky. The whole point of disaster movies is to be vaguely insensitive and play up to the audience’s most fundamental fears – be it of tall buildings with The Towering Inferno, flying with Airport, swimming with Jaws, outer space with Armageddon or the weather with Twister. The only thing that really matters is how good they are at creating sympathetic characters for the audience to root for amid impressive and believable levels of “will they survive” suspense and plausible special effects.

The original Poseidon movie naturally looks rather dated nearly thirty years on, yet remains one of the classics of the genre thanks to a combination of decent plotting and good characters, backed up by a top-notch cast. With stars like Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Roddy McDowell and Shelley Winters, all at the height of their game, there were plenty of people to root for as the bedraggled bunch of survivors tried to find their way out of the upside-down, rapidly sinking cruise liner. In the sequel the stars were there, with Caine backed up by Sally Field, Telly Savalas and Slim Pickens, but their characters were less rounded and the plotting less considered.

This remake may have upped the special effects to modern standards – albeit with significantly less budget than Titanic – but along the way the plot and characters have again suffered. The biggest names here are Richard Dreyfuss and Kurt Russell, both past their prime, with a couple of rising stars in Josh Lucas and Emmy Rossum – added largely to try and appeal to a younger audience and create more of an action movie vibe than the original’s more interesting look at how respectable middle-aged types would cope with a disaster.

But no matter how glamorous an actor may look on the cover of a glossy magazine, when drenched with water and covered in grime it’s rather more difficult to look pretty. When their characters are also so one dimensional as to give little interest, there’s very little reason for the audience to care who lives and who dies. This can work fine for a spoof of the genre like Mars Attacks! or Airplane! – but for a serious attempt at a disaster movie, the result is little short of, well, disastrous.

The best of the current superhero franchises returns with its long-awaited third instalment, reuniting the impressive cast of the first two movies under director Brett Ratner after the series’ directorial creator, Bryan Singer, jumped ship to take on the revival of Superman.

Thankfully Zak Penn, the writer of the second X-Men movie, has returned along with cinematographer James Muro, ensuring a continuity of plotting and visual style which could so easily have been jettisoned. Just take a look at the shift between Tim Burton’s Batman films and the disappointing later movies in that series to see the kinds of pitfalls many fans feared might have befallen the X-Men with Singer’s departure.

It has been three years since the X-Men last hit our screens in a superb sequel which somehow managed to improve upon their excellent debut. The already impressive ensemble cast of Patrick Stweart, Ian McKellen, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Anna Paquin, Famke Jannsen and the rest has been filled out further by some great additions in Ben Foster as the winged mutant Angel and, in an inspired piece of casting for fans of the comics on which this series is based, Kelsey “Frasier” Grammer as the blue-furred mutant intellectual, Beast.

As in the previous two films, it is the stand-off between the conflicting philosophies of Stewart’s Charles Xavier and McKellen’s Magneto and their respective mutant followers which lies at the heart of the movie, providing innumerable opportunities for parallels with current political crises alongside the series’ now-established exploration of what it means to be different in a distrustful society. Former director Singer made clear that his own homosexuality allowed him to empathise with his characters and understand both the differing approaches of Xavier and Magneto, who found themselves unlikely allies in the last instalment, and despite the change at the helm, none of these subtle parallels have been lost in this latest movie.

So, the fears caused by the departure of Singer allayed, fans of the first two films can rest assured that this is more of the same, done just as well as before. For fans of the comic books, the mention of Phoenix will be enough to know that this third outing for the X-Men should prove even more action-packed and explosive than the last two, while again allow for deeper exploration of the philosophical implications of a world divided. With the added mix of a cure for mutants, the continuing questions of what it means to be different ensure that, unlike so many of these huge-budget superhero blockbusters, the X-Men series retains an added layer of intelligence rarely seen in such mass-appeal movies.

The only fear that should remain for X-Men fans is that this third outing is subtitled “The Last Stand”. With such an entertaining franchise, especially supported as it is by such a big-name cast, all fans must be afraid that the series will end merely as a trilogy. Whether it will is as yet unknown, but one thing is certain – if this is the X-Men’s last movie, they’re certainly going out in style.