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Vicky Cristina Barcelona

There is no major US filmmaker quite as prolific as Woody Allen. In the UK, his last film Cassandra’s Dream opens on Friday. In Cannes, his new picture Vicky Cristina Barcelona premiered Out Of Competition on Saturday. In the States, work is already underway on his next one, starring Larry David.

Over recent years, many of us have wished there had been a bigger emphasis on quality, rather than quantity. Match Point, the first of Allen’s three London pictures, had its good points. Scoop never achieved a UK theatrical release, which tells its own story. And Cassandra’s Dream is yet another misfire from the Oscar® winning veteran, seeming to suggest that his creative powers are now in inexorable decline.

Not so. If London failed to rekindle Allen’s creative mojo, it seems the man finally found what he’s looking for in the sunny streets of Barcelona.

Waltz With Bashir

Certainly a novelty among the films competing for the Palme D’Or in Cannes, Israeli director Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir is billed as the world’s first animated documentary feature. It has already made an impact equivalent to French-Iranian animation Persepolis, which premiered here exactly a year ago.

The story begins with the film-maker meeting an old friend from their army days. As young men, they served in the first Lebanon war of the early 80s. Folman’s pal is plagued by nightmares featuring the 26 dogs he shot one night in order to facilitate the silent ambush of a Lebanese town. Folman goes on to chronicle the troubled recollections of other friends from that time.

Blindness

The opening night film of the Cannes Festival may have failed to delight the notoriously astringent critics here, but then that was the case a year ago with Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights, and even more so in 2006 with The Da Vinci Code. But Blindness deserves better treatment.

The third feature of Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, who made City of God and The Constant Gardener, Blindness is adapted from the acclaimed novel by Jose Saramago. Those who have read the book – in which the world falls apart after being hit by a plague of blindness – tend to complain that Meirelles and screenwriter Don McKellar have failed to capture its raw power. I haven’t read it, which may be a factor in why I liked the film.

Caramel

Caramel is about five beautiful women of varying ages living and working in Beirut. I grew up with Hollywood’s idea of a strong woman being Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft, so Caramel’s female characters were a reassuring breath of fresh air. They’re all ordinary women, who support each other and laugh together, and each has their own faults and desires but are so much more admirable and likeable because of them.

This film is full of charm, a large part of which comes from the lead actress, co-writer and director, Nadine Labaki, who plays Layale. Layale is in her late twenties and runs her own salon but she is a ‘romantic failure’, marriage being the real measure of success in Lebanese society. She is sexually involved with a married man who is increasingly dismissive of her attempts to make the relationship something more than an affair. Her largest achievement however, is to bring together this microcosm of Lebanese women into her salon where they can be themselves and convey their fears, temporarily free from outside social pressures.

Charlie Bartlett

Charlie Bartlett, according to the film poster, picks up where Juno left off. And despite sounding like it’s cashing in on the success of another funny, off beat teen angst movie, it’s actually quite accurate. If you liked Juno, you will love Charlie Bartlett. The filmmakers struggled to get funding for the script, repeatedly told that it was ‘too dangerous’. Dealing with a rich kid who starts to con his psychiatrist for drugs to dole out to his fellow students, Charlie Bartlett surprisingly oozes charm.

Charlie is played by Anton Yelchin (last seen in Alpha Dog), the son of two Russian figure skaters. He has big, wide and innocent blue eyes, and he plays the part adorably. The only son of a deluded, wealthy mother, Charlie is a big dreamer with incredible optimism. Booted out of every private school for his wheeler-dealings, he is beaten up in state school for wearing a blazer and carrying an attaché case. To help her son deal with the bullying, his mother calls in her psychiatrist who prescribes Charlie drugs which sends him to ‘Ritalin euphoria’. Charlie soon realises he is on to a winner in a school filled to the brim with angst, and becomes a quasi-counsellor to his fellow classmates in the loos, even convincing his bully to be his business partner.

UK Box Office May 9-11

It's only week 2 of the official Summer Blockbuster Season, and already cinemas are in trouble. Over in the US, commentators yelled "flop!" after news that the candy-coloured CGI spectacle Speed Racer had taken just $20 million – as against Iron Man's debut of $102 million the weekend before.

In the UK, Speed Racer has done even worse. Based on its US gross, a UK figure of around £2 million might have been expected, although that calculation does not reflect the fact that the TV programme on which the movie is based – the "property", in Hollywood parlance – isn't so well known over here. Nor does it take into account the warm weather enjoyed across much of the country, which encouraged potential cinemagoers to enjoy parks, gardens and barbecues instead. Speed Racer's UK opening weekend gross was in fact a disastrous £362,000 from 442 screens, for a per-cinema average of £819. This compares with Iron Man's opening last weekend in excess of £5 million.