Dr Seuss' The Lorax (U)
(Chris Renauld, Kyle Balda, 2012, US) Zac Efron, Taylor Swift, Ed Helms, Danny DeVito. 86 mins.
Dr Seuss's most environmentally minded story was a natural choice for movie treatment, but as with so many others (How The Grinch Stole Christmas, Horton Hears A Who!), the temptation to "expand" on the original runs out of control. Seuss's elegant tale of a land where they paved paradise and cut down all the Truffula trees has been injected with all the compulsory gags, subplots, musical numbers and painfully bright landscapes that family animation is now deemed to require, making for an eco-tale that's packed with artificial additives.
Searching For Sugar Man (12A)
(Malik Bendjelloul, 2012, Swe/UK) 86 mins.
An inspiring documentary that successfully rehabilitates the reputation (and perhaps more) of Sixto Rodriguez, a 1970s Detroit troubadour who never found fame at home but unwittingly became huge in South Africa – where his soulful protest ballads chimed with the politics of the anti-apartheid movement. Taking their lead from his lyrics, and rumours of his mysterious on-stage suicide, the film-makers hit the detective trail. Whatever they find, you're sure of a great soundtrack.
The Man Inside (15)
(Dan Turner, 2012, UK) Ashley Thomas, Peter Mullan, David Harewood, Michelle Ryan. 99 mins.
The artist formerly known as Bashy plays a young Newcastle boxer caught between two older heavyweights: his grizzled trainer/father of his girlfriend (Mullan) and his menacing gangster dad (Harewood), currently in prison. Can our young hero exorcise the demons of his childhood in the ring, or will he be sucked back into the criminal underworld? It's a familiar social tale.
El Bulli: Cooking In Progress (12A)
(Gereon Wetzel, 2011, Ger) 113 mins.
In terms of film food porn, this is strong fetish material: chefs in monastic concentration, slicing, reducing, vacuuming and otherwise transforming a range of ingredients into almost abstract taste sensations, to pass muster with the boss man Ferran Adrià and his once-world-beating restaurant. The treatment is as austere and rarefied as the subject – don't expect any TV-style docudrama.
Red Desert (12A)
(Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964, Ita/Fra) Monica Vitti, Richard Harris, Carlo Chionetti. 117 mins.
Restored and rereleased to mark the centenary of Antonioni's birth, this is a typically sparse, stark, modern study of 20th-century landscapes, inner and outer, centred on an anxious woman and set in a soulless industrial port. With the bold use of colour and framing, as well as Vitti's beguiling voguishness, it still looks ahead of its time.
Woman In A Dressing Gown (PG)
(J Lee Thompson, 1957, UK) Yvonne Mitchell, Anthony Quayle, Sylvia Syms. 94 mins.
Deserved rerelease for an inexplicably forgotten social realist drama, whose theme of a depressed, downtrodden housewife trying to win back her straying husband broaches issues few Brit dramas of the time dared to.
Out from Friday
Separation anxieties for Mark Wahlberg and his teddy. Out Wednesday.
Musical set in the drag queen milieu of cult doc Paris Is Burning.
Christian Bale leads Zhang Yimou's account of the 1930s Rape of Nanking.
Julien Temple tracks London's reinvention as a modern global city.
Andy Lau cares for his elderly housekeeper in this acclaimed Hong Kong drama.
Eames: The Architect & The Painter
Revealing documentary on the celebrated husband-and-wife design team.
A Welsh priest struggles with vampirism (and God) in this domestic horror.
Journalists investigate a cult leader who claims to be from the future.
Oscar-winning documentary on an underachieving college American football team.
Diary Of A Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
Summer holiday fun, and the futile quest for it, in this kids' comedy.
Coming soon
In two weeks …
Rachel Weisz and Jude Law in worldwide drama 360 … A lost world in Brit sci-fi The Dinosaur Project …
In three weeks …
Jeremy Renner fills a Matt Damon-shaped hole in The Bourne Legacy …
Kelly Macdonald leads Pixar's animated Scots fable Brave …
In a month …
Ben Stiller in The Watch … Andrea Riseborough leads IRA thriller Shadow Dancer …
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jul/28/new-cinema-releases-lorax-sugarman
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