Vue Mystery Movie

This is your chance to attend a Mystery Movie at a cinema near you, and see a blockbuster film before its general release to the public!

Vue Entertainment is giving you the chance to see a movie before everyone else with the launch of their Mystery Movie. The very first screening is on 5 May at 6.30 pm, where you will be given an opportunity to view a film ahead of its official release.

But, you won’t know what it is until the opening credits…

The title of the movie is being kept so secret, that security will be present at each cinema to make sure that no-one lets the cat out of the bag.

Just buy your ticket, take your seat, and if in the first 20 minutes of the film you decide it’s not for you, you can get a full refund. To be honest though, what are the chances of that happening?

For tickets and a list of participating cinemas, go to www.myvue.com/mysterymovies

CINEMA: FAQs About Time Travel

If Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel had started life as a quirky BBC TV series (Think Hitchhiker’s or Red Dwarf) it would probably have built up a massive cult following and been made into a reasonably successful movie. However, it didn’t, and the result is a film where the nerdy characters never really have enough time to grow, fill out and become substantial, while the plot (which would have even been stretched over a half hour episode) goes exceedingly saggy in the middle.

Enter our trio of sad, loser mates Ray (Chris O’Dowd), Toby (Marc Wootton) and Pete (Dean Lennox Kelly) who like nothing better than sitting in their local arguing over science fiction, black holes, the paradoxes involved when interfering with the space/time continuum and other assorted trivia. Until the day Ray makes a quick detour to the lounge bar and discovers the woman of his dreams, Cassie (Anna Faris), who informs him she is actually a time traveller repairing holes in said space/time continuum and has discovered there’s a time leak in the Gents. From hereonin Ray, Toby and Pete’s lives are literally never going to be the same again as alternative futures get played out in front of them, including one future where they are all massacred.

There’s something quaintly old-fashioned about the story, the acting and the special effects and even though one or two of the alternative future scenarios have their moments it is all a bit ploddy and Blue Peter-ish in a sticky back plastic kind of way.

At some point somebody asks: “What would Miss Marple do?” Probably dismiss it all as nonsense, have a nice cup of tea, and head home.

Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: I Love You, Man

If this film doesn’t make a star out of the ever-dependable Paul Rudd then nothing is going to because his performance here is pitch perfect.

He plays LA realtor Peter who is so in touch with his feminine side he’s forgotten how to hang out with the boys (that’s if he ever knew how to). So, when he proposes to girlfriend Zooey (Rashida Jones) a rather large problem looms into view – who the hell is he going to ask to be his best man?

Not his gay brother, not pig Barry (Jon Favreau) the bullying bad-tempered hubby of one of Zooey’s friends, so how about a total stranger? Enter couch-potato womaniser Sydney (Jason Segel), whose sole redeeming feature is his adoration of ancient rockers Rush;  who just happen to be Peter’s favourite band of all time. Soon Sydney is teaching Peter to walk the walk and talk the talk, but this being a comedy, Peter’s cringe-making efforts to be a man’s man are the most embarrassing thing you’ll see on the big screen this year.

The reason why Rudd’s performance here is so brilliant is even as he tries to be cool and fails epically you can see on his face that he knows he just looks like a dork, which makes him redouble his efforts – only to face even more cataclysmic failure. Not every comic scene is pulled off successfully but there are enough good moments here (choosing tuxedos, Peter trying to outdrink Barry, The Hulk turning up as himself) to keep you giggling uncomfortably in your seat. Paul Rudd, you are a star and we love you, man!

Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: Good

In the last few years Viggo Mortenson has really shown his range as an actor and here he changes pace and direction yet again to play a good, honest man who becomes corrupted more by his own apathy and lack of direction than by moral weakness.

In this film he plays John Holder, a German university lecturer in literature who, just before World War 11, publishes a novel in which a man practises humane euthanasia. The book is in part inspired by John’s relationship with his mother (Gemma Jones), who is suffering from premature dementia. Although it is fiction the burgeoning Nazi party seizes on the book as condoning its own plans for creating an uber-race and before John realises what is happening he has become a spokesperson for the party.

As his political star rises he ditches his down-at-heel wife for the ambitious Anna (Jodie Whittaker) and finds himself increasingly isolated from his best friend Maurice who just happens to be a Jewish psychiatrist (played with great passion and energy by Jason Isaacs). It is only when he realises he cannot help Maurice escape the concentration camps (which partly exist because of a doctrine he has passively endorsed) that this ‘good’ man finally faces up to his own complicity.

Based on the 1980’s play by CP Taylor, the film seems rather dated and clunky – in fact, it now seems terribly heavy-handed with no subtlety or nuance. However, Mortenson, playing John with an English accent, once again gives a superbly measured performance, showing John’s bewilderment and almost bemusement at what is happening to him and around him. Had the material been stronger and more biting the film would have been good whereas it is, in fact, merely adequate.

Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: Let The Right One In

From the very first shot of snowflakes silently dancing against a dark sky there is something otherworldly and eerily beautiful about this film.

Set in a frozen town in Sweden it tells a tale of the dispossessed, the lonely, and the left behind. Young Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) is being bullied at school and fantasises about stabbing his tormentors. Instead, he befriends Eli (Lina Leandersson) the strange young girl from the flat next door to his who only appears in the flats’ snow-filled courtyard at night – minus shoes and coat. She seems both feral and supernaturally calm and Oskar unwittingly wins both her eternal friendship and love by giving her his Rubik’s cube.

Their nightly meetings give his life meaning and hope but the realisation slowly dawns that Eli is not like other children and to reciprocate her love will alter Oskar’s life forever.

Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: Fifty Dead Men Walking

It takes a very special kind of actor to play a role as ambivalent as that of Martin McGartland in this real life story, so hats off to Jim Sturgess who gives an absolutely monumental performance here.

McGartland was a young man in his twenties during the troubles in Northern Ireland and with his mate Sean (Kevin Zegers) used to sell knocked off clothing around the Catholic areas of Belfast. He was a bit of a lad and a bit of a clown who just wanted to keep himself and his family away from all the violence – from the police on the streets and from the IRA who were doing their own heavy-handed policing of the community. But Martin’s fate was already out of his own hands because he was being watched by one particular British police officer, Fergus (Sir Ben Kingsley), who had seen Martin’s keen intelligence and antipathy to the IRA and then managed to persuade him to become an informant.

With Martin deep undercover within the IRA you can almost smell the tension as he treads a very fine line between truth and lies, always having to watch his back to make sure he is not under suspicion. When he and his sweetheart (Natalie Press) start a family, the atmosphere becomes even more explosive as you realise just what he is putting at stake in order to foil bombings, kneecappings and assassinations.

However, it’s not just Sturgess as Martin who impresses, Kingsley imbues Fergus with such world-weary realism, his voiceovers go beyond despair into some dark, alternative plane of existence while director Kari Skogland uses great kinetic camerawork to give the movie edge. However, the violence really is brutally awful – and seems even more so as it is meted out in such a casual way, as if it is the norm. So, not for the squeamish, but impressive nonetheless.

Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: Waveriders

For most people, Ireland is not the first location that comes to mind when you mention surfing, but as this stunning documentary shows, riding the waves and the Emerald Isle have more in common than you might think.

Waveriders is a story about one man from the past, and how his legacy now impinges on the present and the future – and no this isn’t an April Fool’s joke, it’s absolutely true.

George Freeth was an extraordinary man; the son of an Irish father and Hawaiian mother, during the early 1900s he was almost single-handedly responsible for launching surfing as a leisure activity. A strong swimmer and all-round waterman he lived to surf and helped introduce the sport from his native Hawaii to California where it really took off. As the film traces Freeth’s footsteps to some of the best known surfing locations, present day surfers such as Kelly Slater talk about his legacy and it is at this juncture that the movie takes a surprising detour and adds a twist to the tale. For the one thing Freeth didn’t know was along the coast of Donegal are some of the most dramatic waves just waiting to be surfed. At one time they were thought to be too dangerous to ride but as modern day surfers Gabriel Davies and Richard Fitzgerald have since proven, a new generation of extreme surfers are now catching monster waves of over 50 feet in the icy waters around Ireland.

With stunning action footage of the surfers on the ocean and an almost lyrical voiceover from Cillian Murphy, this is a documentary that seems to lift itself out of the genre to become a movie of myth and legend. Even if you don’t know the first thing about surfing what you see here will not only impress but also inspire. This film is as important as Big Wednesday as far as surfing films are concerned and watching this will make you want to jump on a board immediately.       Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: The Life Before Her Eyes

Taking as its focus a Columbine-style massacre in a school (a la Elephant) the one feeling I wasn’t expecting to experience while watching The Life Before Her Eyes was fury – and that wasn’t even provoked by the subject matter, but by the way it is handled. You’ll have to go a long way this year to find another film as misogynistic as this, in which all women are either one of two things: virginal Madonnas, or bad mums, bad daughters and sluts (the word used in the film).

Evan Rachel Wood is bad girl Diana, always getting into trouble and on the brink of being thrown out of school. Unexpectedly, she forms a close friendship with goody two-shoes religious Maureen (Eva Amurri) and the two become inseparable, until tragedy strikes when a pupil turns his guns on his classmates. Years later, a now reformed Diana (Uma Thurman) is teaching art in college, but still traumatised by the events at the school and as the anniversary of the massacre nears, finds herself in an increasingly fragile mental state. However, there’s a twist to this tale that may or may not come as a surprise depending on whether you’ve been watching out for the increasingly heavy-handed clues. On one side you have a pure, clean vision of female loveliness in the form of Maureen, on the other the wild, bad, baby abortionist Diana, so who deserves to die?

This blinkered vision of women (either as saint or sinner) belongs back in the dark ages. Meanwhile, it’s not just the film’s screenplay that is heavy-handed but also its imagery with Diana’s house existing in an idealised, flower-laden garden, while dust motes dance in shafts of light as she makes her way to the school.       Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: Genova

Of late, Michael Winterbottom’s films have been getting more and more diverse and Genova is hard to categorise. On the surface it is very obviously an exploration of grief, but it is also about guilt, growing up, being a stranger in a strange land, and also about hope and new beginnings.

Having lost his wife in a car accident, university lecturer Joe (Colin Firth) takes up a new position in the Italian city of Genova on the advice of old colleague Barbara (Catherine Keener). Already disorientated by the loss of their mother, Joe’s daughters – teenage Kelly (Willa Holland) and ten-year-old Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) – find it hard to adapt to this new life where they know no one and cannot speak the language. Kelly copes by throwing herself in with a wild crowd, smoking dope and experimenting sexually, while Mary doesn’t cope at all frequently waking from terrifying nightmares and seeing visions of her mother among the crowded, twisting allies of the old city.

Although Barbara is aware that Mary needs help it is as if Joe has deliberately blinded himself to the problems, believing if the family just moves on things will turn out all right. In fact, by ignoring the growing chasm between himself and his children, Joe is putting them more at risk than he can ever know.

As an observation of grief and bereavement Genova is spot on and the thorny problem of sibling rivalry is also nicely handled. But overall, there is something indefinably missing from the film; there’s always the feeling you are passively watching this family in crisis rather than rubbing shoulders with them and feeling their pain. Without that empathy Genova is not as moving or engaging as it should be, and it remains a clinical exploration of grief without immersing you in the messy, tormenting emotions the grieving feel.     

Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: The Damned United

Is there anyone the amazingly talented Mr Michael Sheen cannot play? I only ask because following his pitch perfect performances as Tony Blair (twice), Kenneth Williams and David Frost, he’s now nailed football manager extraordinaire Brian Clough. The film concentrates on the disastrous period in Clough’s career when he took over from Don Revie as manager of Leeds United and promptly made a pig’s ear out of the whole experience.

We’re back in the days of Watney’s Red Barrel and fags, when footballers were about as fit as your granny and Clough would leave a towel, an orange and an ashtray for each player in the away side’s changing room.  The ever-ambitious, full of himself Clough truly believed he could do better than Revie at United, but his cockiness got the better of him and he managed to piss off not only his players and United fans, but also the directors of the board.

However, although ostensibly about football, the beautiful game is really not what lies at the heart of this wonderfully acted and masterfully directed (by Tom Hooper of John Adams fame) gem, it’s actually all about friendship. Most especially it is about the bond between Clough and his right hand man Peter Taylor (played with great subtlety by Timothy Spall). Whereas Clough is all swagger and clever one-liners, Taylor quietly chugs along, preferring to manage things in the background.

It is in the scenes where Clough and Taylor interact that the film’s strength lies – showing Clough’s more human side and Taylor’s great skill in bringing out the best in this often quite difficult to like man. That’s why, even if you hate football and know nothing about Cloughie, The Damned United is still so worth seeing.      Dee Pilgrim