Neil Simon's heartwarming yet highly amusing story, based on the original Broadway stage hit. Herb Tucker a once respected Hollywood writer, but now finally adjusted to bachelorhood and poverty, is suddenly forced to face the responsibility of fatherhod when he is unexpectedly visited by his teenage daughter, Libby. She is now a talented actress, but they have not seen each other for nearly sixteen years. With the help of his level-headed girlfriend Steffy, the two of them set about rebuilding their relationship, with hilarious results.

A great Australian movie, Chopper is loosely based on the autobiography of career crim Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read, whose attention-seeking mix of psychotic violence and matey ingratiation made him an outcast even in the underworld and finally-with bizarre logic-turned him into a bestselling celebrity without any need for repentance and regeneration. Andrew Dominik, a music video maven making his directorial debut, wrestles the unpromising material into shape, using a striking palette of blues inside prison and sickly neons outside, wisely building the film around a terrific lead performance from stand-up comedian Eric Bana as the crook who had his own ears hacked away so he could get off a prison wing where he was marked for death and whose forceful personality means that he can always rekindle a relationship even with those to whom he has done dreadful violence in the past and whom he certainly intends to shoot, batter, rob and betray in the future-with the mildly redeeming caveat that he sometimes drives his victims to the hospital after injuring them. The movie has a lot of smart incidental detail, like the paranoid dealer who doses his dogs' water with speed, the ridiculous mix-up of an assassination set up in the wrong car park of a nightclub that has two, and Chopper's repeated mood swings in the middle of lengthy dialogue scenes that begin with conciliation and apology and pay off with doubts and eruptions of violence that leave the perpetrator genuinely regretful of what has happened. -Kim Newman.

The extraordinary 1970 British film Performance marked the directorial debut of cinematographer Nicolas Roeg (working with Donald Cammell). James Fox portrays a London gangster who has to hide away for awhile and ends up staying with a fading rock star (Mick Jagger). The latter recognises something of his old, daring self in the violent criminal, and after pushing open the boundaries of the hood's experience with psychedelics, the two men begin to intertwine as one. The film is an exciting pool of ideas about real and presumed power, about the mysteries of "performance" as a pressing outward toward an abandonment of identity and embrace of revelation. Beneath it all, however, is Roeg and Cammell's suspicion that the worlds of these two men-pop shaman and underworld soldier-are not dissimilar in their self-serving goals. -Tom Keogh.

After a string of mediocre movies, director Tim Burton regains his footing as he shifts from macabre fairy tales to southern tall tales. Big Fish twines in and out of the oversized stories of Edward Bloom, played as a young man by Ewan McGregor and as a dying father by Albert Finney. Edward's son Will (Billy Crudup) sits by his father's bedside but has little patience with the old man's fables, because he feels these stories have kept him from knowing who his father really is. Burton dives into Bloom's imagination with zest, sending the determined young man into haunted woods, an idealised southern town, a travelling circus and much more. The result is sweet but-thanks to the director's dark and clever sensibility-never saccharine. The film also features Jessica Lange, Alison Lohman, Helena Bonham Carter, Danny DeVito and Steve Buscemi. -Bret Fetzer.

Sidney Lumet's directorial debut Twelve Angry Men remains a tense, atmospheric (though slightly manipulative and stagey) courtroom thriller, in which the viewer never sees a trial and the only action is verbal. As he does in his later corruption commentaries such as Serpico or Q & A, Lumet focuses on the lonely one-man battles of a protagonist whose ethics alienate him from the rest of jaded society. As the film opens, the seemingly open-and-shut trial of a young Puerto Rican accused of murdering his father with a knife has just concluded and the 12-man jury retires to their microscopic, sweltering quarters to decide the verdict. When the votes are counted, 11 men rule guilty, while one-played by Henry Fonda, again typecast as another liberal, truth-seeking hero-doubts the obvious. Stressing the idea of "reasonable doubt", Fonda slowly chips away at the jury, who represent a microcosm of white, male society-exposing the prejudices and preconceptions that directly influence the other jurors' snap judgments. The tight script by Reginald Rose (based on his own teleplay) presents each juror vividly using detailed soliloquies, all which are expertly performed by the film's flawless cast. Still, it's Lumet's claustrophobic direction-all sweaty close-ups and cramped compositions within a one-room setting-that really transforms this contrived story into an explosive and compelling nail-biter. -Dave McCoy, Amazon. com.

To describe Touching the Void as a mountaineering documentary would be to do this breathtaking drama an injustice. By intercutting narration from the climbers themselves with a nail-biting reconstruction of their remarkable adventure in the Peruvian Andes, the film has the best of both genres: the authentic stamp of factual storytelling and the edge-of-the-seat tension of a dramatic movie. In 1985, two British mountaineers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, embarked on a daring-arguably reckless in the extreme-attempt to climb the previously unconquered mountain Suila Grande. A mixture of overconfidence in their own abilities and underestimation of the climb's difficulties brought them to grief after the successful slog to the summit. What follows is an often harrowing account of their perilous descent, during which Joe horribly shatters his leg and Simon is forced to cut the support rope on which Joe's life, quite literally, is hanging by the proverbial thread. It's no secret that both climbers lived to tell the tale, but at every stage the audience will be left guessing just how the crippled Simpson could possibly have found the inner strength to surmount each deadly trial. Based on Joe Simpson's gripping book, the film boasts glorious widescreen photography of Suila Grande and its notorious glacier. Actors take the place of the two climbers for close-ups, though Simpson did return to Peru in order to re-enact parts of his dreadful crawl back down the ice. The story of Simpson's almost superhuman fortitude has become legendary in climbing circles, and even for viewers uninterested in mountaineering, Touching the Void is an astonishing slice of real-life drama, magnificently retold. On the DVD: Touching the Void is presented on disc in anamorphic widescreen, which makes the most of the glorious vistas, and Dolby 5. [+]

Cast Away reunites star Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis in their first collaboration since the heavy-handed sentimentality of Forrest Gump. Thankfully, this time their film's life-affirming message is delivered with more subtlety, attributable both to an extraordinarily committed, physically demanding central performance from Hanks and to Zemeckis' technically masterful but carefully understated direction. It's also a film with three distinct "acts" or, to be old-fashioned about it, a proper beginning, middle and end. The story follows schedule-obsessed but fulfilled FedEx supervisor Chuck Noland (Act 1) on a personal journey into the bleakest, most solitary despair (Act 2), before Helen Hunt, in the thankless role of ex-girlfriend, unwittingly allows him to glimpse an optimistic future full of untapped possibilities (Act 3). Hanks' sojourn on the island is the centrepiece, but this is no tropical island idyll: following a terrifying plane crash (the one sequence in the film where Zemeckis shows off his uncanny ability to choreograph action), life on the island is seen to be a depressing and bitter experience filled with disappointment, danger and suicidal despair. Having lost all hope of rescue, ultimately Noland's greatest test is not to survive, but to find a reason to survive. He has no Man Friday for company, just a volleyball named "Wilson" that is both a narrative device allowing Hanks to deliver dialogue and an intriguingly pagan personification of the island's spirit under whose protection Noland is finally able to summon fire (significantly, and heartbreakingly, Wilson leaves him as he regains contact with the world). In an era of MTV-style film editing, Zemeckis and Hanks fearlessly take their time establishing with total conviction the grim realities of Noland's situation, his devastating loss of hope and the means by which he achieves his escape. Like Contact before it, Cast Away is a refreshingly thoughtful piece of mainstream cinema that explores weighty existential issues but retains a warm human intimacy. On the DVD: The luminous anamorphic print with vivid Dolby 5. [+]

A pretty good movie of the week about prostitution