Baz Luhrmann is not a director I hold in high regard. All of his previous films have either annoyed the hell out of me or given me a blistering headache. He’s a director turned up to eleven, a director who believes more is more, a director who is the enemy of good taste. So colour me surprised when I found myself enjoying his latest offering.

Australia does not have a promising beginning. As is typical of Luhrmann, you’re bombarded with flashy visuals, quick editing and ridiculous acting. There’s a horrible sense of hysteria about the thing. Indeed, the exposition at the beginning is so rushed and so relentless that you feel like someone is shouting at you while slapping you in the face with a leather glove. Are you listening, the film is saying? Are you paying attention? Because I’ve got to get this tedious setting-up-the-story shit off my chest quick so that I can have some fun.

The hysterics extend to Nicole Kidman’s acting. She’s a talented actress but she has another side to her, a side that wants to paint with the broadest brush strokes. For the first hour or so this is the Kidman we get. The one with wild eyes, a shrill voice and exaggerated body movements. But then eventually she settles down and her performance improves considerably.

The problem with the beginning of the film is that it’s a broad comedy. Kidman enters the story as a prissy Englishwoman down under. And before you know it she’s getting hot under the collar about Hugh Jackman’s plan to mate horses and cooing like an idiot at kangaroos.

The kangaroo scene is a good example of just how awful the beginning is. Kidman’s character sees them out of the window of a van and dumbly admires their beauty. And then just as she’s cooing like a gibbering imbecile, one of Jackman’s pals shoots one and we’re confronted with a horrific close-up of Kidman’s grotesquely startled face. It’s exactly the kind of shit I expect from Luhrmann – childish, hysterical filmmaking.

The point at which I began to enjoy the film was when the characters entered the city of Darwin. Kidman’s acting had calmed down and there was little of the broad comedy that had tainted early scenes. Suddenly the film seemed almost comfortable in its own skin.

The first sequence in Darwin boasts some of the film’s best moments. There’s a lovely moment when Nullah, a mixed race child, watches The Wizard of Oz while wearing black face. He does this because it was the policy in Australia to separate mixed race children from their families so that the black could be ‘bred out of them’. This ingenious way of avoiding the authorities made me smile.

The sequence in Darwin is also where Kidman and Jackman fall in love. Previous to this, their relationship makes little impact whatsoever – Jackman is the typical Indiana Jones/Crocodile Dundee-style rogue with a heart of gold and Kidman is a boring toffee-nosed Limey. But in the sequence in Darwin, Jackman suddenly turns up all clean-shaven and looking every inch like James Bond. As a red-blooded, heterosexual male, even I’d be tempted by this hunk of a man.

The scenes in the rain where Jackman and Kidman first kiss are kind of reminiscent of David Lean. Sure Australia is nowhere near as good as a Lean film, but Jackman and Kidman have chemistry and the love scene is surprisingly sexy.

However, it seems to me that Luhrmann is far more enamored with Jackman than he is with his leading lady. Time after time we see lingering shots of Jackman’s toned physique. Indeed, in one of the opening scenes the director’s admiration is kind of ridiculous. As the characters camp in the Outback, there’s a slow-motion shot of a topless Jackman pouring water all over his chiseled body. No wonder Kidman gets so hot and bothered.

For me the film’s peak is a brief montage sequence after the events in Darwin where we see Fletcher feed his boss to the crocodiles. Previous to this Fletcher has been nothing more than a mealy-mouthed henchman to a ruthless cattle merchant. But in an instant Fletcher goes from being an annoying pissant to a cold-blooded psycho killer. And the sequence is perfectly filmed. There’s some wonderful voiceover from Nullah, there’s some great music and there are some fantastic visuals. It’s everything cinema should be – visually and aurally arresting without calling attention to itself.

My second favourite scene occurs after the Japanese attack Darwin. There’s a scene where Jackman wanders the devastated city and finds the bar where he first met Kidman. The music is perfect and there’s some echo-drenched voiceover from previous scenes. Again it’s surprisingly restrained cinema and subsequently has a pleasing emotional punch – Jackman thinks Kidman is dead and this is a nostalgia trip to stab himself in the heart with.

The scene at the bar also serves the film’s political point. At first the barman won’t serve Jackman’s friend, an aboriginal, but after some threats and some screaming, Jackman manages to get equal treatment for his friend. Jackman is a voice of reason in a society where racism and prejudice is always on the surface.

Nullah, the film’s narrator, is also a means for Luhrmann to assuage some of his country’s guilt. Here is a mixed race child who experiences the push/pull of wanting to be with his surrogate white family and with his aboriginal grandfather. The character says that he’s neither black nor white and therefore exists in some sort of no man’s land. But at the end of the film Luhrmann has the child choose his black grandfather over his white family. This seems to be an apology for the harm that the Australian authorities did and a way of illustrating how important it is to retain our cultures – the way that the authorities tried to breed the black out of children was cultural robbery pure and simple.

At the end King George (Nullah’s grandfather) says to his grandchild that this is their country. Yes Australia is their country but the way that he says it seems to be inclusive. Australia, for better or for worse, also belongs to the foreigners who settled there.

The ending notwithstanding, the final act of Australia is kind of a disappointment. It ends with a rather dull child rescue sequence. And the demise of Fletcher smacks of desperation (he gets speared by King George – it’s like Lurhmann doesn’t quite know how to get rid of his villain and so just decides to give him a soap opera death). But that being said, I was still pleasantly surprised by Australia. I found it highly entertaining.

The Golden Compass is a curious film. Based on a not very good novel, it’s neither faithful to the text nor does it try to drastically reinvent it. Instead the filmmakers just fiddle with the chronology of events here and there, omit key scenes and change a couple of the characters a little bit. I can’t imagine the result is satisfying for anyone.

Possibly the most puzzling thing is that the book’s final set piece (a fight between two giant polar bears) is moved to the middle of the film. It’s the most exciting piece of action in the novel and it’s also the emotional climax of the relationship between the young heroine Lyra and her polar bear pal Iorek Byrnison. In the book he travels days and days to rescue her from a rival polar bear King. It takes a while. But in the film he seemingly comes out of nowhere and the fight doesn’t have the high stakes that it should have. The point of travelling days and days to have a scrap with a fierce polar bear King is that he’ll be weak and tired when he finally arrives – he’ll be at a major disadvantage. But in the film you don’t see a journey. Therefore Byrnison just seems pathetic when he can’t put up much of a fight.

Moving the fight to the middle of the film and not showing the journey that Byrnison makes also means that you don’t see the love that he supposedly has for Lyra. In the book his sacrifice is highlighted in a much more successful way – he flirts with death to save her. Here he just risks getting beaten up a little – you never sense that he’s really in serious danger.

I also think that the casting for the voice of Byrnison is all wrong. The filmmakers cast Ian McKellen. Somehow an aged Englishman was not the voice I imagined for a fearsome polar bear. I imagined a coarser, fiercer, more youthful, more unrestrained voice. The filmmakers have obviously tried to hire as many names as they can.

This desire to hire star names extends to having Daniel Craig turn up for a few minutes and for such luminaries as Christopher Lee, Tom Courtenay and Derek Jacobi to play thankless minor roles. As such, the talent on display and the total waste of that talent is another nail in the coffin of this film.

While moving the polar bear fight is the most puzzling decision, changing the ending proves to be the most foolish. In the book, Lord Asriel (played by Daniel Craig), who is obsessed with a material called ‘Dust’, sacrifices a child and moves to a parallel world. It’s kind of silly but at least it packs a punch. In the movie, though, this doesn’t happen at all. The movie ends with Lyra having a conversation with the child who’s going to get sacrificed. It’s incredibly anti-climatic and comes out of the blue. When the screen faded to black, I didn’t quite believe that this was it. Surely there was more. But there wasn’t. Presumably the end of the novel, which is a cliffhanger, was going to form the basis of the beginning of the sequel. But because this film is so bad that sequel may never happen, which makes the ending of the movie version seem even more ridiculous.

I’d be quite interested in hearing what those who have only seen the movie think about the plot. To me, I think the film must be pretty incomprehensible. The concept of ‘Dust’ and daemons aren’t explained particularly well and events seemingly happen at random – the movie doesn’t flow at all; it’s one of the most stilted movies I’ve seen.

But we are given a brief explanation. Dust, this mysterious matter that can be viewed in certain types of photographs, is supposedly original sin. However, this Dust doesn’t form until children hit puberty. Therefore the shadowy religious organisation in the film wants to find a way of preventing Dust from forming so that it can keep people good and pure. To do this, they try and separate children from their ‘daemons’ (every person has an animal daemon/spirit that follows them around). And this daemon is basically a physical embodiment of an individual’s soul. So by separating a child from its daemon, the church is basically trying to perform spiritual castration.

All of this is interesting stuff, but while the idea doesn’t quite work in Pullman’s book, it’s even less successful in the movie. In the book the concepts seem clunky and a little confusing, but here they’re hardly explained at all.

The focus instead, as you can imagine, is on action set-pieces and special effects. And while the action and the effects are fine, they aren’t enough. They certainly can’t hide the clunky writing – none of the dialogue is there to build character; all of it just moves the story along. The script is sterile and exposition filled.

The screenplay also makes Lyra far less heroic. In the book, she’s captured by ‘Gobblers’ (child snatchers who perform daemon-separating experiments for the church) and then pro-actively leads an escape. In the movie, though, she doesn’t start a revolt – she just makes the facility blow up. To me this seems more like Arnold Schwarzenegger shit.

And speaking of Gobblers, they’re handled very poorly in the movie. In the book they’re these scary, faceless monsters that steal children for unknown reasons. But in the movie their true nature is revealed very quickly and they subsequently have none of the creep factor.

But then this goes for the movie entire. Nothing is allowed to develop. Nothing is allowed to build. You just have exposition-heavy scene followed by exposition-heavy scene with some action smattered in-between. It’s a deeply unsatisfying experience.

I can remember watching a Channel 4 documentary a few years back about new age soldiers who would stare at goats and hang weights from their genitals. The staring was supposed to kill the subject they were staring at but I’m not sure what the weights did. Regardless, the documentary was very amusing and had a complete ‘what the fuck?’ aspect to it. It was hard to fathom that the military would allow a bunch of hippie soldiers to do all of these wacky things.

However, I quickly forgot about the program and it was consigned to the deepest, darkest recesses of my mind. But then one day I saw a trailer for a new film called The Men Who Stare at Goats. Suddenly it all came flooding back: the Jedi-hippie-samurai-warrior monks who spend their time taking acid and hanging weights from their genitals. I had to see the movie.

It would be kind of hard to fuck up a movie like this. The subject matter is just so silly. And to be fair, the filmmakers do a decent job. The film is well acted and very funny. But at the same time it’s nothing more than a fluff piece. There’s a tiny bit of commentary on Iraq and how corporations are carving it up instead of nations, but most of the film is gag driven. Which is fair enough – the film is very funny – but you aren’t really given the bigger picture. I wanted to know more about the climate of fear during the Cold War that allowed this very peculiar brand of craziness to flourish.

In general it’s the flashback sequences that I found the funniest. There’s a hilarious bit where George Clooney’s character joins the New Earth Army. He’s told to dance. At first he’s kind of stiff but then he loosens up, gets a goofy look on his face and begins to go crazy. It’s just fun to see Clooney let his hair down and it’s obvious that he’s having a great time.

This scene has another moment that had me cracking up. There’s a flashback to Clooney’s character as a child. We see why he’s so reluctant to dance. You see, the kid loves to dance to pop music but his father doesn’t approve. In fact, in the scene, the father, upon seeing his son dancing in a very feminine fashion, throws something at him and tells him to stop acting like a ‘queer’. It’s a very harsh moment, and it didn’t actually get many laughs in the theatre, but I was cracking up. The kid, the music and the timing are all perfect.

I was also highly amused by some of the horrific experiments that the army got up to. There’s a bit where the military want to know if a cat can telepathically tell whether its kitten is in danger. So we see a scientist about to stub out a cigarette on a kitten’s face. It’s horrific to think about, but the pathetic meow that the cat makes and the absurdity of the experiment make it blackly funny.

There’s a Dr Strangelove element to all of this. We find out that some of the experiments into telepathy and psychic phenomena are inspired by gossip, rumour mongering and hoaxes. The Soviets and the Americans both get into this nonsense because they fear that the other side will have some success with it.

Sadly most of this information is dwelt on for just for a few moments. The vast majority of the film focuses on the relationship between a reporter, played by Ewan McGregor, and an aging soldier, played by George Clooney. Yes their journey is consistently amusing, but it can’t disguise a rather moribund story.

It takes a while to learn why Clooney’s character wants to go to Iraq, and when we do find out, it lands with a dull thud. The wraparound story and the finale are the least interesting things in the film.

One of the film’s biggest selling points is its cast, and most of them do an excellent job. George Clooney, in particular, is excellent. As is Jeff Bridges, who basically reprises the role of The Dude. Ewan McGregor, on the other hand, lets himself down with his American accent. As my wife pointed out, it just sounds like a monotonous drone, which is a shame, as McGregor’s comic timing is excellent – he and Clooney work well together.

A bit of a head scratcher, though, is Kevin Spacey. Yes the man is funny but he seems to be making a career out of bit parts. I’m not saying that the role is beneath him, but it’s disappointing that he seems to be choosing ‘easy’ roles. It seems his film career is a brief holiday from his theatre duties at the Old Vic. He isn’t taking many risks.

Despite this, Spacey still contributes a couple of the film’s funniest moments. One scene in particular that I liked was when he makes a soldier take LSD and then bombards him with flashing lights until he goes mad. I also liked it when Spacey himself unknowingly takes LSD and contemplates blowing his brains out. He thinks about it for a second and then suddenly announces that he’s hungry. It’s both enjoyable and a letdown to see Spacey in these roles – he’s a funny guy but with films like Superman Returns and 21 he’s been punching under his weight for the last few years.

And that’s what the film does. It punches under its weight. With a bit more context it could have been a memorable satire. As it is, it’s just a funny, silly, forgettable movie. It’ll probably stay with me as long as the Channel 4 documentary that I watched all those years back.

The opening scene of 28 Days Later shows a bunch of animal rights activists breaking into a laboratory. At first the lab seems pretty ordinary. There are caged animals, there’s a weasely scientist and undoubtedly there are some lousy coffee-making facilities. But then we find out that a bunch of chimps are infected with ‘rage’.

As is customary for a bunch of sallow, undernourished Morrissey fans, they lose all sense of reason and decide to free the animals. But then rather than hug its liberator, a deranged chimp decides to leap on the person’s face. Somehow I doubt this fitted with the activists’ plan. They probably foresaw hugs of gratitude, a stroll down the High Street to weep at the inhumanity swinging in the windows of butcher’s shops and a special playing of Bona Drag. They never thought they’d be meat for the apes.

But how apt is it to have animal rights activists bringing about the end of the world? I mean, if it’s not the mink ravaging the countryside, it’s the apocalypse. These lettuce-eating, people-loathing humanoids will press the self-destruct button with their knuckleheaded do-goodery gone do-badery long before the jihadists and neo-conservatives get their shit together.

An unfortunate survivor of the disaster is Jim, a bicycle courier. He awakens in a deserted hospital, unaware that virtually everyone around him has been consumed by a horrible virus.

One puzzling aspect of Jim’s survival is that he’s left naked in a hospital room. Since when is that standard hospital procedure? When do they leave you stark bollock naked? But then I guess that’s socialised health care for you. There’s no money for the little extras like hospital gowns.

But I guess Jim’s nakedness is meant to symbolise his rebirth in this new world and his vulnerability in it. For a brief time he will be a helpless innocent – he’s going to have to relearn everything he knows.

Much has been made of the opening sequence where Jim walks around a deserted London, but as enjoyable and wonderful as it is, it’s not really that creepy. I’m sure most Londoners have roamed the streets early one Sunday and have seen how deserted the city can be. If you go to certain parts, you literally won’t see anyone. And so therefore the sequence doesn’t quite have the creepy novelty factor that it aims for – I’m sure Londoners staggering back from a night club early in the morning have seen the quiet and the mess that Jim encounters.

All that being said, it is wonderful to see London filmed with such skill and verve. Somehow 28 Days Later manages to take most of the clichés of filming in the Greatest City in the World (buses, parliament, Piccadilly Circus) and turn them on their head. We see a bus turned over on its side, parliament looks over a ghost town and Piccadilly Circus has become a home to missing persons flyers. It’s nice to see someone doing something different with the city.

One of the disappointing aspects of the London sequence is that it has to end. All too soon Jim stumbles upon a couple of survivors and the story kicks into gear. I think the film could have sustained a bit more of Jim’s loneliness. Thankfully, though, the film doesn’t collapse like I Am Legend when other people turn up.

That’s not to say that the script is anything special. In fact, in several instances, the film succeeds despite the script. This is especially true when Jim hooks up with the survivors. The exposition is pretty clunky.

However, even the acting can leave a lot to be desired at times. Cillian Murphy is excellent as Jim, and Brendan Gleeson is excellent as always, but the girl who plays Hannah is pretty awful. Her line delivery is consistently atrocious. I also think that Naomie Harris isn’t particularly great. She has the intensity that her role requires but she doesn’t necessarily have the acting chops – her performance doesn’t always feel particularly natural. Harris is obviously trying hard but she isn’t always succeeding.

Some of the soldiers, too, aren’t particularly great. There’s a dweeby private who seems to be touched in the head (the character is far too buffoonish – when he gets stabbed in the chest his eyes bulge out of his head like he’s a cartoon character) and there’s a cockney who is incredibly exaggerated – he’s like an EastEnders character on crack. Having said that, the cockney is so atrocious and so vile and so over the top that his death is incredibly satisfying – Jim literally buries his fingers in his head.

But while some of the acting and some of the writing disappoint, the direction is always a joy. The film has a very dirty, gritty feel to it. The digital cameras totally take the sheen off the picture. But at the same time the energy Boyle brings to the film ensures that it’s incredibly cinematic. The film feels a lot more expensive than it is.

The action set pieces also impress. They all have lots of tension and excitement. And this is made even more remarkable by some of the bad writing that brings them about. For instance, there’s a sequence where the characters get a flat tire in a tunnel. Before driving into the tunnel Jim says that it’s a shit idea for them to take this route, and he turns out to be right. But even though Alex Garland tries to write himself out of the situation by making Jim self-aware, it doesn’t stop the sequence from being highly contrived.

Another contrived sequence is when Jim wanders off from the group into an empty building. It’s a terribly hackneyed way of building a shock, but somehow, because Boyle is making the film, it still manages to work.

The final act of 28 Days Later has been criticised in some quarters. People who love the beginning see it as anti-climatic. But I think that the final third works pretty well. Sure some of the acting is lacking, but the banality of the soldiers’ evil seems correct – given the end of the world, they’re desperate for pussy. And it’s fun to have the infected run riot in the soldiers’ base and kill everyone. It kind of becomes a black comedy in the end.

However, as enjoyable as the final action set-piece is, you still have to put up with a huge flight of fancy. The bit I’m talking about is when Jim manages to climb over a wall with barbed wire on top of it with both of his hands bound. How the hell did he manage that? Somehow he becomes an Irish Superman.

But in the end Jim actually becomes more like the infected. He ends up killing people with his bare hands in a murderous rampage. As always in ‘zombie’ films, the zombies are the underclass – they’re loathed, they’re mocked and they’re figures of fun (the soldiers keep an infected person chained up and take pleasure in mocking him – it doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that he’s black). So in the end we’re almost asked to empathise with the infected. As violent and as base as they are, their actions are at least not premeditated. Their evil isn’t based on whims or prejudice. They’re slaves to their senseless bloodlust. Ordinary people on the other hand should know better. They should be rallying together. And so therefore the final triumph of Jim, Selena and Hannah is a victory for decency – the thing that will get us through hard times is belief in the family unit; no matter how hard things get we must always have the strength to think and feel.

Based upon a not-so-great novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife manages to improve upon the source material, but only slightly. This isn’t a Jaws or a Godfather – mediocre novels that were stripped bare and resurrected as cinematic masterpieces by visionary filmmakers. Instead we have an extremely minor improvement – we’re talking fractions.

Audrey Niffenegger’s novel was a case of someone’s ambition exceeding their talent. The premise behind the story was excellent but the execution left a lot to be desired. At times the characters were bad tempered and thoroughly unlikable and there was also a lot of queasy sexual content. Thankfully most of that has been erased from the film. But not all of it.

The most dubious part of the film is the first time that Henry (Eric Bana) and Clare (Rachel McAdams) make love. Henry has only known this woman for a couple of hours but the woman already knows him quite well. She knows him because an older version of him travelled back in time and befriended her when she was a child. So they make love and then we cut to their first meeting. Somehow the juxtaposition of mind-blowing sex and a child’s picnic seems slightly wrong. Yes, the filmmakers try and make everything seem as sweet and innocent as possible, but we’ve just watched these two characters screw. And so no matter how cute the filming is, it’s going to seem wrong to watch a child be confronted with a naked man in a bush with the knowledge that they’re going to be lovers.

And wouldn’t this be weird for Henry? Remember, he already knows that he’s going to sleep with an adult version of this girl. This is his future wife. Wouldn’t it be a bit strange to be confronted with a child version of his lover? Apparently not. He doesn’t display any awkwardness at all. I know that if I was confronted with a child version of my wife I’d be extremely self-conscious…and not just because she couldn’t speak English when she was six years-old.

But back to the first sex scene. Another reason why it doesn’t work is because Henry has only known this girl for a few hours. Sure she tells him a bunch of stuff and talks to him about his time travelling, but he seems far too willing to jump in the sack with her. Unlike Clare, his feelings seem to be motivated by lust rather than by love – she has years of emotional investment in him; he only has a couple of hours.

I also don’t like how the two main characters seemingly don’t have any free will. All of their decisions are already made for them by all the crazy time travelling that Henry does – he’s destined to fall in love with Clare and she’s destined to marry him and they’re destined to have a child and they’re destined to call it Alba. With everything pre-arranged, you kind of wonder what’s the point?

Clare even makes a joke about her lack of choice. When Henry asks to marry her, she says no. She says that she’s exercising her free will. But then she says yes. It’s such an awful piece of dialogue and such a clumsy piece of acting that the lack of choice for the characters becomes even more startling. These people just seem to be going through the motions.

Of course there are attempts to provide some conflict. At one point Henry misses Christmas and Clare has to open her presents on her own. But her unwillingness to talk to him once he comes back seems incredibly petty. She knows that her husband can disappear at any time and she seems to have tolerated it quite well up until this point. Consequently she comes over as a bitch.

Another reason why I didn’t like the character that much. Clare and Henry make several attempts to have a child. However, the unborn children seem to have the same problem that Henry has – they time travel (therefore, somewhere in the past or in the future, a foetus just appeared out of nowhere – how charming). Knowing what distress this is causing him and his wife, Henry decides to have a vasectomy. Aha, he’s exercising his free will. Oh, but then the angry wife decides to fuck a younger version of Henry (who has time travelled to Clare’s present) and gets impregnated in the back of a beige Volvo. She says this isn’t cheating, but I’m not sure. But even if it isn’t, it’s fairly despicable. Okay, your husband should have told you that he was getting snipped, but a grudge fuck with a younger version of him is pretty bad. And then getting pregnant too and saying ‘fuck you’ to a decision he’s tried to make for your mutual benefit smacks of selfishness in the extreme.

But then Clare’s behaviour often smacks of selfishness. After a couple of miscarriages, she ridicules the idea of adopting a child. She wants to have Henry’s child and nothing else will do. Okay, but isn’t she dooming her offspring with the same dismal fate as her husband? As my wife pointed out, what’s she’s doing is no better than when people decide to have a child even though they’re aware that there’s a good chance they’re going to give them some crippling genetic disorder. She’s an idiot.

However, the couple, thanks to a young Henry, eventually manage to have a child. The moppet in question is exceedingly cute and time travels as well. Well done, Clare. Well done.

The end of the film is a shameless attempt to pull on your heartstrings, but because the story is so overwhelmingly manipulative, it didn’t work for me. You see, Henry time travels and then loses the use of his legs. He then has to go about in a wheelchair, fearful of his next time travelling venture, as he probably won’t survive it. Eventually he’s transported to the meadow where he met his wife when she was a child. Now, though, it’s winter and he gets shot. But he doesn’t get shot by just anyone. He gets shot by his wife’s father (he’s a Republican hunter type, kind of like Dick Cheney but more deadly with a gun). It’s a total accident but Henry is now dead meat and dies soon after. It’s kind of a ridiculous way to die.

But when you think that the film has thankfully come to an end, there’s a scene where Henry visits his daughter and bereaved wife. It’s supposed to be heart warming (the wife runs through the meadow to embrace her husband before he disappears) but in reality it seems kind of awful. Rather than move on, are these characters doomed to wait around for the odd visit from a dead Henry? If it’s supposed to leave you with a warm, tingly feeling in your guttiwuts, it fails dismally.

The opening to Goodfellas – the murder of Billy Batts – shows the beginning of the end of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). Up until that point, despite the thieving and the violence, everything is rather light-hearted. There's a sense of solidarity amongst the criminals. But once Batts is murdered, infighting, greed and addiction take over. The life will get you in the end.

The opening scenes are great at establishing the allure of being a gangster. As the movies have always shown, it's a very seductive world. Who wouldn't want to be able to thumb their nose in the face of the law if they could get away with it? Therefore it feels completely normal that the film shows you all the fun aspects of this criminal life and that the camera lingers on all the accoutrements of gangsterism – jewelry, shoes, cars etc. The crooks here are almost like movie stars.

And at the beginning even the violence is intended to seduce you. There's a great bit where Henry's postman is threatened with an oven to make sure he doesn't give any school letters to Henry's parents. The way it's shot and scored make it seem like something of a lark. You're asked to respect the power and audacity of these guys. And the icing on the cake is the final freeze-frame of the terrified postman's face – these guys control life and death; if you don't respect them you're going in the oven.

But freeze-frames occur frequently in the early part of the film. There's a powerful shot where Henry's dad is beating him with a belt and it's stopped right in the middle of the whipping. It makes the beating seem even more violent than it already is and it makes you identify with Henry's rebellion; soon no one will be able to do that to him again. However, the most famous freeze-frame takes place when Henry sets a bunch of cars on fire. The image is held as Henry makes a Christ-like pose with flames behind him – he's finally in the life; welcome to hell.

Another early scene I like is when the young Henry gets pinched. He thinks the guys will be mad at him for getting arrested, but because he keeps his mouth shut he's welcomed from the court like a conquering hero. And the scene even ends with another freeze-frame. It might as well be a family portrait.

The good times extend into Henry's adult life. He steals trucks, makes lots of money and even falls in love. And this leads to another great scene – the long Steadicam shot when Henry takes Karen to the Copacabana. This is her seduction. This is when she's seduced by the life. And another seduction is the scene where Henry pummels one of Karen's neighbours. He's supposed to have touched Karen so Henry rearranges his face with the butt of his gun. But although it's incredibly violent and although the sound effects make you wince, you can see why Karen would be turned on. How many other men would do this for her? How many other men would protect her in such a brutal way? Not many.

However, like I said at the beginning, Billy Batts is when everything begins to go downhill. From that point on the murders become more frequent and collective greed is overtaken by personal greed. But I do have to say that the Batts murder is my favourite scene. The dialogue and the timing between Joe Pesci and Frank Vincent is outstanding and the beating has so much emotion. You kind of get whipped up in it yourself. And the choice of music ('Atlantis' by Donovan) is perfect. It raises the scene to another level.

But Scorsese's choice of music is always spot-on. The other musical highlight has to be his use of the closing music in 'Layla'. It's a beautiful piece, which makes it work well with the grisly murders it shows – the images kind of show an end of an era, which, what with the music, lends the whole sequence a strange kind of romanticism. And it also works well because the emotion of the song and the final piece of music go hand in hand with what Jimmy (De Niro) is feeling at the time – the song and the music is about yearning for someone and then having that love fulfilled, and Jimmy is beside himself with pleasure that Tommy (Pesci) is being made. He thinks his dreams are finally coming true.

Unfortunately, though, that sequence is when the real nightmare kicks in. After this, Henry becomes an addict and screws up so bad that he has to betray his friends. And the sequence that shows the day of his arrest is rather amazing. Again Scorsese proves himself to be a master of using music to emphasise emotion and mood, and it's shot in such a way with zooms and fast edits that you feel as strung out as Henry. It's coke film-making...but in a good way.

And I also like the final scene between Jimmy and Karen. With smiles and promises he tries to conspire to kill her, but she gets scared and manages to get away. It's a good way of showing what's wrong with this life without moralising – in this life you can never truly trust your friends; and who really wants to live like that? Nevermind the morals. These people obviously have none. For no other reason than fear of death, I don't understand why anyone would want to live this way.

But at the end, despite everything, you also get to see that Henry misses life as a gangster. And although it's supremely arrogant of him to say that he gets to live the rest of his life like a schnook, insinuating that us law-abiding folk are something lesser, you sort of know what he means. If only he and his pals weren't so damn greedy they would have had it made. But that's kind of the point, isn't it? There's never honour among thieves. It's a myth. Scorsese brilliantly builds up that myth and then takes a scalpel to it, showing how hollow and disgusting this life is.

Body of Evidence is about a trollop who likes to fuck rich old men. She shags one in particular who has a weak ticker and who later pops his clogs. As a consequence, she’s put on trial for murder. Is she a killer? Did she screw the man to death?

On one side we have Willem Dafoe who thinks it’s no crime to be a great lay. On the other we have Joe Mantegna who thinks that Madonna herself is a deadly weapon – she’s no different to a knife or a gun. So according to him, the second the old man impaled Madonna, she impaled him with her magnificent screwing abilities – she didn’t stab him in the heart with a knife, she stabbed him in the heart with her vagina.

With this death by pussy theory voiced by the cops, Madonna is taken to trial. She’s either an innocent widow or she’s a lethal shagging machine.

It’s pretty obvious from the start that Madonna is a guilty-as-fuck black widow. But in time-honoured movie tradition, Willem Dafoe falls for her.

Body of Evidence tries to differentiate itself from other fuck happy erotic thrillers by introducing some kinky sex. We have nipple clamps, hot candle wax and oral sex on the bonnet of a car. But because the filmmakers have no interest in character or psychology, these sex scenes end up being empty attempts to titillate.

One such scene is the one where Madonna pours hot candle wax on Willem Dafoe. I guess someone could argue that the scene is about power games, or the link between pleasure and pain, or Dafoe’s self-destructive urges, but instead it’s a scarily earnest attempt to be sexy. We have lingering close-ups of the actors, we have candlelight and in the end we have the orgasmic pay-off. But the scene fails on even the most basic level (to at least give you a boner) because you have to watch the weasel-faced Dafoe gurn like mad as the smug, gap-toothed Madonna pours hot wax all over his knob. Sure this may be the best sex he’s ever had, but all I can see is the horrifying sexual gratification of the Green Goblin, something that’s enough to pour cold water on anyone’s lap (if the dead eyes of Madonna hadn’t already done that for you).

Another scene has Madonna squatting on Dafoe’s face as he lies on shards of broken glass. I’m sure a lot of people would be thinking, ‘Hey, that must smart a bit!’ But no, everything is explained in an earlier scene. You see, as a kid, Madonna liked to crawl through thorns to get her claw-like hands on strawberries. According to her, because of the effort it took to get them, they tasted even sweeter. And so it is for Dafoe. Writhing on broken glass makes Madonna’s cunt taste even nicer.

The pussy-eating scene is again rendered somewhat horrific by the gurning that occurs. However, this time the culprit is Madonna. Her gap-toothed throes of ecstasy leave much to be desired. (A special note for trivia buffs: in this scene Madonna does a Sharon Stone and shows her minge. Good for her.)

But while the cunnilingus scene features some pretty unappealing facial gymnastics, the scene that precedes it features Madonna’s one good bit of acting. You see, Madge is pleased with the work that Dafoe has been doing. Her lawyer has been acting like a little terrier. And so then in a crowded elevator Madonna rewards him with some clandestine wanky-wanky. I say it’s Madonna’s one good bit of acting because as she’s secretly tossing Dafoe off someone says goodnight to her and she cheekily says goodnight, too. It’s the one time that Madonna’s dead eyes have a sparkle in them.

Examples of Madonna’s incompetence as an actress are legion, but the example that springs to mind is when she talks to Dafoe about animal sex. ‘Have you ever seen animals make love, Frank? It’s violent. It’s intense.’ She’s obviously trying to make this bit of dialogue sound steamy, but she sounds like a simpleton who’s watched a little National Geographic. The line delivery is just so flat – badgers fucking are sexier.

I also like the way that Madonna blandly asks Dafoe is he’s scared right before she fucks him – she has him tied up. The only way she could scare me was if she sang the theme song for Die Another Day.

But of course, Dafoe is anything but scared. This is his wildest fantasy come true. I mean, his wife is played by Julianne Moore, and although she has an amazing body, she has a silly poodle-like haircut. Therefore it’s totally okay to cheat on her.

The first sex scene is preceded by one of my favourite pieces of symbolism. Dafoe sits in his car, spying on Madonna, possibly wrestling with his conscience (if he has one). He then sees a curtain billowing in the wind. The way it’s filmed, the curtain looks exactly like a vagina opening. Yes it’s this sight that gives Dafoe the courage to ditch his staid life full of cardigans and missionary position sex and embrace a new one full of hot candles and subterranean fuck fests.

But before Dafoe gets carried away with this amazing new lifestyle, he should have perhaps listened to the hilarious testimony of Frank Langella. He’s another rich old man that was involved with Madonna and he was another rich old man that had a bad heart. And in court he tells the story of how she tried to fuck him to death. He says that she would shag him a little and then before he could come, she would stop. And then she would fuck him some more and stop again. Over and over she did this until he was feeling ill. Now you might feel sorry for this guy. Oh, how Madonna took advantage of me. But he should have just mentally manned up. He should have thought unsexy thoughts in order to lose his erection – hell, he’s pretty old, I’m sure it couldn’t be that difficult to say hello to Mr Floppy. He should have just thought about football scores or rotting corpses or Madonna’s performance in Dick Tracy. Hey presto, boner gone!

Alas nothing will get rid of Dafoe’s erection. He even resorts to rape. Yep, this ordinary family man is so enraptured with his gap-toothed lover that he assaults her when she begins wanking in front of him. And to make the scene even more ridiculous, Enya-style music plays on the soundtrack as he prepares to bugger her. There’s lots of ‘Ooooh, ooh, ooooooh, oh’ Celtic-style nonsense.

However, even more hilariously, the music changes to ominous choral chants once the forced bum fucking begins. Suddenly the soundtrack sounds like something out of The Omen. It’s all very strange.

The strangeness doesn’t last long, though, and the film has a very conventional ending – Madonna gets shot and killed. This isn’t as awesome as it sounds and is something of an anti-climax. Indeed, the only good thing about the ending is when Madonna gets barged into a massive terracotta pot. It’s something I never knew I wanted to see until I saw it.