The Greatest Trick

High School Musical - (3 stars) this is an absolute phenomenon with the kids, and I was desperate to find out why I was teaching teenagers who knew all the lyrics and dances inside and out. The answer is - Disney knows its market! A light tale about two misfits (pretty ones, of course) coming together through singing and dancing, and bringing everyone along with them through, you know, “being themselves” (what else in a Disney movie?). It’s fun enough, with some very good musical set-pieces (’Get your head in the game’ being my favourite), and if you’re below the age of 15 (and probably more for the girls), perfect, harmless entertainment.

Enron - The Smartest Guys in the Room - (3 stars) Greed, greed, greed. That’s what brought Enron down, and it’s so clear from this film. This documentary goes back over some of the key players in the Enron scandal, what they got up to and why, and is pretty interesting. There are parts that engage a lot more than others, such as listening to the recordings of Enron employees laughing at the misfortunes of the inhabitants of the West Coast of the US - absolutely repulsive, and a very effective piece of documentary film-making. Less manipulative than Michael Moore, and possibly for that reason less consistently engaging.

An Inconvenient Truth - (4 stars) Al Gore shows you his power-point presentation on the environment and climate change and forces you to think and act. As a family we are already quite enthusiastic about living ethically, doing our bit to look after the world that God made and so on, and this film just confirms that everyone needs to be doing this! The bit that kids at school apparently responded to was polar bears drowning in their own local environment due to melting ice caps; there are so many shocking facts, stats and images here that it seems unlikely that one could watch this movie and not try to do more for the environment. It’s not a perfect film - some of the inserts about Gore himself add very little - but it’s the most accessible education on global warming that you could get in under 2 hours. Oh, and the major worry about Gore creating a massive carbon footprint by going round the world showing his presentation is answered in the trivia section here.

The Wolf Man - (3 stars) Universal horror, detailing the werewolf myth, linking it to gypsy curses and including all the well-known moon-related tales. Lon Chaney plays the man under the make-up, which is brilliant, and the lighting and mood of the piece is suitably dark, but the film-making style always detracts from actual scariness in these films.

Right At Your Door - (3 stars) A dirty bomb is released in LA. Man gets home just in time, wife arrives back some time later to find herself locked out by him as the radio has advised everybody to keep doors and windows shut and not let anyone in or out. A tense period follows as both parties try to work out what to do and how they might get help in a terror situation. A good premise for a movie, with a nice thorny moral question at the centre, but the movie slows considerably in the middle and doesn’t quite have the courage of its convictions. A fair amount of swearing.