The Descendants is a film about adultery, death and bad parenting, with a side-element concerning race and real-estate in Hawaii. It is directed and co-written by Alexander Payne, who rose to fame with the terrific 1999 satire, Election.
Meryl Streep is famously good at mimicking voices and accents, but she is also a genuinely great actress, and in The Iron Lady she gives a magisterial performance as Margaret Thatcher that ought to be a sure bet for an Oscar nomination.
It is largely because of her that the film makes for such gripping and often very moving watching.
Marilyn Monroe's appeal can seem hard to understand today. Her strange mixture of innocence, voluptuousness, dumb-blondeness and little-girlishness are as alien to contemporary sexual tastes as the heavyweight beauties in baroque paintings. Nevertheless, the doomed, damaged, superhumanly glamorous star remains an object of fascination almost five decades after her death.
Seth Rogen cannot help seeing the funny side of life. "I don't try to find it, it just happens," he says. "I can't remember the number of times somebody's been telling me a movie idea they have and I think it's a comedy, and it's not. Someone'll go: 'There's this guy who's hit by a car and he has to get his leg cut off', and I'll go: 'That sounds hilarious!' It's just how my brain hears things."
Knowing that the programmers of the UK Jewish Film Festival have done most of the hard work before you, choosing films to see is more a matter of determination to be out and about nearly every night of the week — there are gems available throughout the festival.
Although its premise is rooted in today's financial scandals and crises, Tower Heist harks back in subject matter and sometimes in tone to some of the great Depression-era comedies.
Most modern Hollywood movies about politics are even more ill-informed and cliché-ridden than the ones depicting the worlds of journalism, medicine or the military.
There are very few movies that depict Seder nights. There are even fewer that do so with an affectionate and intelligent sense of the celebration's variety, or the way that it brings out the best and worst in Jewish family dynamics.
Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic produce a disproportionately large number of talented actors, most of whom end up based in London. One of the younger crop is Cillian Murphy. He came to international notice as the hero of Danny Boyle's 2003 sci-fi horror film 24 Days Later.
It is now clear that filming in Britain brings out the worst in Woody Allen - or at least makes painfully clear just how tin-eared and clueless he can be when attempting to depict a culture outside his own. His last film to open in the UK, You will meet a tall dark stranger, was arguably worse than Match Point, Scoop and Cassandra's Dream.
The Debt is the most remarkable film of the year so far: an exciting espionage thriller, a love story and a provocative meditation on crime and punishment. A remake of Assaf Bernstein's 2007 Israeli film, Ha-Hov, it reveals John Madden, director of Shakespeare in Love and Mrs Brown, as a master of action and suspense.
It is its provenance as much as the promise of its trailer that make Cowboys and Aliens such a disappointment. Directed by Iron Man's Jon Favreau, its producers include not only Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, but Steven Spielberg.
Chris Weitz could have parlayed his success as the director of Twilight: New Moon into an even bigger film. Instead, he used it as an opportunity to make a small, intimate drama about a Mexican illegal immigrant called Carlos, who does back-breaking work to provide for his teenage son, Luis, while trying to keep him out of the gangs in their poor East Los Angeles neighbourhood.
The comic-book superhero Captain America was the creation of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, both Jewish, both the sons of immigrant tailors. He first appeared in print in December 1940. Though it was a full year before the United States was to enter the war, the series took a firmly interventionist, anti-Nazi stance.
There were many moments in Holy Rollers when I wished that it had been made by someone like Danny Boyle. Armed with a good script, the director of Slumdog Millionaire would have been able to convey with conviction the rich strangeness of Chasidic life, the seductive temptations of the drug trade, and all the dilemmas that would confront a young man caught between the two.
