FILM REVIEWS By Demetrios Matheou

How To Lose Friends and Alienate People (15)
Director: Robert Weide
2/5

Brideshead Revisited (12)
Director: Julian Jarrold
2/5

Good Dick (15)
Director: Marianna Palka
3/5

Import/export(18)
Director: Ulrich Seidl
3/5

88 Minutes (15)
Director: Jon Avnet
1/5

Non-journalists may not know, or care about Toby Young's infamous failure to grasp the chance of a lifetime - a job at New York's illustrious Vanity Fair magazine - and his subsequent memoir of the misadventure, How To Lose Friends And Alienate People. But Young's experience was interesting, because it shone a light on the obsession with celebrity (over actual achievement) that has infected journalism over the past 20 years. It's also deeply endemic of today's culture that a book about failure became a storming success.

This adaptation, then, with the reliably amusing Simon Pegg as Young's alter ego, ought to have been a smart satire on the media, celebrity and the antics of a wannabe Brit in a Manhattan even more status-obsessed than London. That it manages no more than broad slapstick is incredibly disappointing.

Pegg does his best as "Sidney" Young, a hack whose ingenious attempt to gatecrash a glitzy film party lands him a job at celebrity bible Sharps, capturing Young's fish-out-of-water wonderment in the Big Apple, and his chips-and-curry-sauce boorishness. But the adapters do two very stupid things: they focus the film not on Young's careerist endeavours, but on a romantic interest (Kirsten Dunst); and they seek to redeem him, missing the point that their anti-hero is no better than the shallow people he seeks to impress. As such, the film plays as a low-rent Bridget Jones, rather than a comical Sweet Smell Of Success.

This first film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is also disappointing, not so much missing the point of its source, as above, but failing to capture the intoxicating, achingly bitter-sweet atmosphere that made the book, and the famous television series from the 1980s, so wonderful.

Spanning the 1920s to the 1940s, the story is, first and foremost, a class seduction: namely that of middle-class Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), by the aristocratic Marchmains. Meeting alcoholic, gay Sebastian (Ben Whishaw) at Oxford, Charles falls first for him, then for his sister Julia (Hayley Atwell), and mostly for their house, the magnificent Brideshead. But while our hero negotiates the siblings, their mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson), a devout Catholic unimpressed by his atheism, provides obstruction to both friendships.

Waugh's themes - the harmfulness of piety and alcohol, the dying days of a pampered class - are in evidence. What is lacking is time: time spent establishing the languorous days in which these various loves are cemented, the hooks under the skin; and time establishing Lady Marchmain's poisonous effect on her children. And so, as these lives fall apart, everyone is talking through feelings that we've been given no reason to believe, understand or care for.

Directed and starring Glasgow-born Marianna Palka, Good Dick is one of the weirdest and most satisfying romances I've seen in a long while. Palka plays a Los Angeles recluse, who only ventures out of her flat to secure 1970s porn from the local video/DVD store. She would probably rot in front of her TV, were it not for the store clerk (Jason Ritter) who inexplicably takes a shine to her, and whose pursuit segues from unappealing stalking, through ingratiation, to sweet, tolerant, even chivalrous courtship.

Each of these young people is damaged, yet Palka neatly keeps to a minimum both back story and psychology, instead merely observing, sympathetically, as he teases her back to life. It's a low-key, eccentric, tender little film.

Import/Export is a bleak glimpse of the grey zone where West and Eastern Europe meet, and of an underclass that migrates between the two in a thankless attempt to improve their lot.

The story follows two characters, travelling in opposite directions. Olga, a Ukrainian nurse struggling on paltry wages, goes to Austria in the hope of better prospects, only to become a cleaner in, of all places, a hospital. Pauli, an unemployed security guard, leaves Austria for the Ukraine to try to sell gambling machines - a daft enterprise in a place where no-one has any money.

Austrian director Ulrich Seidl shoots in a documentary style that places his two protagonists amid real people and places - notably a geriatric hospital, an internet sex parlour and a Ukrainian housing estate that has become a giant gypsy squat of unspeakable impoverishment. If the scenes in the sex parlour, and one involving a prostitute and her odious customer, seem unduly explicit, the reality is that Seidl only touches the surface of the exploitation and humiliation meted out by men in this region.

Moreover, these scenes are counter-balanced by moments of kitsch comedy and the heartening humanity brought to bear on the dying patients, when Olga's nursing instincts come into play. The film may be uncomfortable, but it is never dull, and contains a sort of grim enlightenment.

Al Pacino really deserves a director better than Jon Avnet, who is responsible for the actor's second dud in a week. After last week's team-up with De Niro, Righteous Kill, comes 88 Minutes. Pacino plays a forensic psychiatrist in Seattle who finds his reputation - and possibly his life - are on the line when a serial killer starts killing his women friends and informs him that he has 88 minutes to live. Suddenly everyone is laughably suspicious: the whole of Al's criminology class, his ex-lover, his assistant, the porter in his building. Could they all be conspiring to bring the man down?

It's straight-to-video bad, and Avnet is the weakest link, failing to engage the tension of the real-time scenario. It's such a shame, for Al is on non-declamatory good form, proving that there is mileage still in the diminutive powerhouse.