Film: By Demetrios Matheou

FIRST PARA

CLOVERFIELD
DIRECTOR: Matt Reeves
RATING: One reason why The Blair Witch Project was such an effective horror film was that its creepy action in the woods was seen through the camcorder lens - and by extension, through the eyes - of its doomed protagonists. The device itself made their terror in the dark so much more tangible. Looking back to 1999, before the full onslaught of YouTube, camera phones and reality TV, we can appreciate the film's prescience, its victims chronicling their thankless final days for our chilly delectation.

JJ Abrams, best known as the creator of Alias and Lost, has acknowledged The Blair Witch Project as an antecedent for his latest brainchild, Cloverfield. If Blair Witch was a YouTube horror film, Cloverfield is the YouTube monster movie. Once again a youth with a camera spends 90 minutes filming the terrible things befalling him (and, on this occasion, the entire population of Manhattan). He sticks to his task for posterity, of course, not realising that if he put the camera down, he could run a whole lot faster.

For those who have not been following the teaser trailers and clues laid by Abrams on the internet, New York is again under attack: its nemesis a monster with a nod to the Godzilla template of giant lizard with attitude that emerges seemingly from nowhere and starts tearing the city apart. I'm surprised that New Yorkers could ever again stomach even a fictional destruction of their city after 9/11. But producer Abrams and his director Matt Reeves even have the temerity, the World Trade Centre being no longer available, to decapitate another of its symbols - the Statue of Liberty losing her head, literally, as the monster tosses it into lower Manhattan like a bowling ball. Perhaps, for the city's collective psyche, this is what's called getting back on the horse.

On the eve of his departure to Japan, 20-something yuppie Rob (Michael Stahl-David) is the recipient of a swanky downtown farewell party. While Rob is focused on patching things up with his ex-lover Beth (Odette Yustman), his friend Hud (TJ Miller) is given the task of capturing the party on camera. Things get ugly as Beth storms out and the party is awash with gossip. All of which is quickly forgotten as, suddenly, the building rocks, there is an inhuman roar, and the city's lights go out. The revellers run panicking on to the street.

What follows is a brilliantly fresh way of portraying disaster on screen. Hud instinctively keeps the camera running, but he's not the brightest spark. Thus we see the carnage through his amateur grasp of filming, and a perception of what is happening that is always several beats behind that of his friends. "I saw it. It's alive," says one youth, while the spunky party-crasher Marlena (Lizzy Caplan) goes one further: "It was eating everyone." As viewers we want to see the monster, too, but if Hud - our eyes and ears - catches a slither of lizard flesh bouncing against a building, we're lucky.

This is all to the good: monsters are always best unseen. In the meantime, as Rob and his pals dodge their way through the crashing city trying to find Beth, there is more than enough to keep us thrilled and frightened - from Liberty's terrific cameo, to the friends walking into an army shootout with the monster, to the crab-like and poisonous parasites that fall from the creature's body and chase them through the darkened subway tunnels.

The film falls down when it comes to its characters. We're meant to feel for these people as they try to stay alive against impossible odds but, with the exception of Caplan, the actors are a bland, interchangeable bunch. And Hud is such a dork, his constant puerile commentary on events driving even his friends nuts, that you actually wish him eaten - as soon as he can get the monster in his sights, that is.

THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE
DIRECTOR: Susanne Bier
RATING: Danish director Susanne Bier is a specialist in intense emotional tales fuelled by uncommon situations: the soldier home from the war, whose guilt destroys his family in Brothers; and the charity worker confronted with secrets from his past and an offer he'd rather refuse in After The Wedding. For her first US film, Things We Lost In The Fire, it's business as usual, and one is beginning to tire of the contrivance.

When loving husband and father Brian (David Duchovny) is murdered, his wife Audrey (Halle Berry) is so shattered and confused that she does something she never did when Brian was alive - welcome his best friend Jerry (Benicio Del Toro) into the house. Jerry is a heroin addict, so it's a little surprising that she should suddenly want him hanging out with her two children. But grief is grief, and Audrey needs to connect with this part of her husband's past.

The first half of the film risks alienating us. We're told much more than we need about Brian's death; the camera lingers so much on Berry's desperate eyes that we feel that our emotional response is being demanded, not earned; and when one of the children asks an adult, "Do you ever feel that you're in a movie?", the result around me was unintended laughter. Slowly, though, the actors win us over, as they avoid obvious emoting for subtler perspectives on their characters' resentments and fears. Berry is good, but without Del Toro - charismatic, constantly surprising as he reveals the intelligent, compassionate man beneath the addict - the film would, also, have been lost.

Penelope is a sweet, silly, happily bonkers fairy story, with Christina Ricci as an aristocrat's daughter, victim of a family curse that has left her with a porcine snout. Her only hope of a normal nose is to be loved by "one of her own kind", her parents arranging a stream of noble and totally inappropriate suitors, while true love is clearly to be found with down-on-his-luck gambler Max (James McAvoy). The romance works well, and is buoyed by a slightly melancholy, magical atmosphere rooted in the production design, which lends contemporary New York the patina of an Angela Carter fantasy.

BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD
DIRECTOR: Sidney Lumet
RATING: New York turns up again in Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, a film torn between a faddish crime plot of ever-changing perspectives and a family melodrama with the terrible aspect of Greek tragedy. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play brothers who decide to solve their problems by robbing the jewellery store owned by their parents. Someone clearly didn't feel loved as a youth. Directed by veteran Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon), it is ultimately undone by its bleakness.