The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden, 2015)

A sequel was inevitable given the pressure of the likelihood that some of the veteran cast would soon start popping their clogs for real and so we have another instalment of the same, drawn our over two hours. This is no bad thing in that it's as cosy as a cup of cocoa and the principal players are always watchable, but the main plot is even thinner than last time around, largely ripped off from Fawlty Towers as Dev Patel's jittery young hotel impresario gets it into his head that a particular guest is a hotel inspector, with all the predictable consequences. The awkward real India of the film is also pushed so far into the background as to remain completely out of view. Still, it would be foolish and pointless to expect social realism here and the spiky verbal interplay between Maggie Smith and co. remains a delight, even if a lightweight one.

5/10

Small Apartments (Jonas Åkerlund, 2012)

Great British TV comedians have not, on the whole, had a happy history of trying their luck on the big screen, and sadly Small Apartments is no exception, though it does prove that Matt Lucas is actually capable of acting as well as doing silly voices, so he's really not to blame. He plays Franklin Franklin, a blobby loser given to playing an Alpine horn in his dingy little Californian flat, with an assortment of oddballs for neighbours and a pantomime villain landlord who he ends up killing inadvertently, leading to scrapes thickly ladled with gallows humour as he attempts to cover up the crime. The tone swings uncertainly from absurdism and gross-out comedy to pathos, and there is the vexatious overall air of a belief in the notion that if you stick enough weirdness in, profound meaning about life's rich tapestry will be generated, which is a cloying hallmark of much of American independent cinema and fiction. Thank God, then, for Lucas, who may yet have a film career on this evidence, successfully bridging the gap between his Little Britain monstrosities and a real dramatic persona.

4/10

Emil und die Detektive (Gerhard Lamprecht, 1931)

The first screen adaptation of Erich Kästner's children's adventure best-seller, the popularity of which extended far beyond Germany, Emil and the Detectives is somewhat of a historical curio due to the novel's setting in the years of the Great Depression and subsequent filming in the last days of the Weimar Republic. Added to this is the presence of Billy Wilder as scriptwriter before his flight to Hollywood and the end result is very odd indeed. The basic framework is a precursor of the Famous Five genre, with a plucky young boy and his cohorts bringing down an adult villain who has robbed him, but the Berlin setting with its low-lifes, unusual for the children's literature of the time, and the strong influence of expressionism in the photography, particularly in a tripped-out sequence where the hero is drugged by the crook, confound expectations constantly.

6/10