Films I've Seen This Week

The History Boys, (**) based on the Alan Bennett play, is an early front-runner for next year's Oscars. And while in some respects, I can see why, I'm afraid this film really wasn't for me.

The barely-existent plot centres around eight grammar school boys on their journey to get accepted to Oxford University in the 1980s.

The adult performances are excellent. Richard Griffiths as the eccentric liberal Hector who has a penchant for fondling his pupils, Frances De La Tour as the wise Mrs Lintott and Clive Merrison as the highly-strung headmaster are all worthy of any Oscar talk.

But because the script is so wordy, the students' dialogue is so staged and 90% of the film takes place in the same classroom, you feel like you're watching a play being filmed rather than an actual movie.

The student characters, who I assume we're meant to love, are also highly irritating, bursting into impromptu songs, skits and poetry readings every five minutes. Nothing they say or do seems real and in the end, you don't particularly care about the outcome.

Just Like Heaven (**) is a total contrast. Light, frothy and completely ridiculous. Gardener David (Mark Ruffalo) starts to see visions of a young woman when he moves into a new apartment. Thinking he's insane, he then finds out it's the spirit of Elizabeth (Reese Witherspoon), a hot-shot doctor who fell into a coma after being injured in a car crash. After finding out her life support machine is soon to be switched off, with the help of David, she must find a way to save her own life.

Witherspoon and Ruffalo are usually brilliant in everything they do, but here it feels like they're coasting along, almost embarrassed to be in a movie with such a ludicrous premise. Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder is also wasted as a psychic slacker and the ending is cornier than a bowl of corn flakes. After Witherspoon's Oscar triumph, I don't think we'll be seeing her in anything as fluffy as this for a while.

When A Stranger Calls (*) has to be the lamest excuse for a horror movie I've ever seen. Schoolgirl Jill (Camilla Belle) is babysitting at a rather unique lakeside mansion when she starts to receive disturbing phone calls from a mystery man. And that is it!

Apart from a few insignificant deaths, the whole film revolves around Jill answering the phone, being scared for a few minutes, walking slowly down a hallway and opening a door only to find there's no-one there. And this happens every five minutes. Any hope of there being a dramatic revelation at the end which will make the torturous previous 80 mins at least count for something (e.g. who is the caller? why is he targeting Jill?) are shattered when you find out that the killer is a completely random guy who has no motive whatsoever. Utterly pointless. An episode of Where The Heart Is will give you more frights.