ROLAND EMMERICH doesn't think small. He introduced the Martian-wrought destruction of America in Independence Day, brought Godzilla to Manhattan, and heralded the near-end of the world in The Day After Tomorrow. That last film's ice age was created by humanity's own misdemeanours. Emmerich's latest foray into computer-animated adventure goes back to a time when such chills were nothing to do with our carbon footprint.
10,000 BC
DIRECTOR: ROLAND EMMERICH
RATING: 
His 10,000 BC might be the mesolithic period, but don't hold me to that; and don't expect anything like an accurate prehistory lesson from the film. Emmerich and his collaborators maintain a vagueness about place, language and degrees of civilisation. For them, it's simply a long, long time ago, so why quibble over details. Anyhow, they would say, it's the same old story: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy tries to get girl back.
A mountain tribe, which survives on a diet of mammoth, is struggling to find as many beasties as it used to, their extinction beckoning. As they celebrate their latest, possibly last hunt, they are attacked by horsemen who abduct the village's young men. The strangers take only one woman, Evolet (Camilla Belle), whose beau, the new champion mammoth slayer D'Leh (Steven Strait), sets out to rescue her. Among the obstacles ahead are nasty prehistoric ostriches, a sabre-toothed tiger and, at journey's end, some evil proto-Egyptians (about 5000 years too early) who use slaves to build a giant pyramid and are not averse to a sacrifice or two.
As seems to happen every few months, a film's special effects take the art a giant step forward. And 10,000 BC works best as a series of spectacles: from the opening mammoth hunt - the tribesmen running between the stampeding beasts, so well done that you never stop to think they aren't real - to the realisation of the pyramid city.
However, there is little beyond the effects to sustain interest. Of the characters, D'Leh makes a hapless hero and Evolet an underused heroine, while the baddies are nondescript. The plot is ludicrous (mountain men meet African tribesmen, all of whom speak English). It impresses visually, while never making the pulse race.
The issue of language reminds one of a far superior film with a similar plot: Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, set in the dying days of the Mayan civilisation, in which the actors spoke a Mayan dialect. Of course, Gibson had more anthropological material upon which to draw, but the difference is in intent and execution. At the time I called Apocalypto "a relentless, jaw-dropping, edge of your seat adventure, which at the same time provides a convincing glimpse into another, bygone world". That description cannot be applied to 10,000 BC, despite its resources.
HORTON HEARS A WHO!
DIRECTOR: JIMMY HAYWARD, STEVE MARTINO
RATING:
The CGI of Dr Seuss' Horton Hears A Who! creates far more wonderment. While there have been other attempts to adapt Theodor Seuss Geisel's fantastical tales, this is the best by a country mile.
Horton (voiced by Jim Carrey) is the gentle elephant who comes across a speck on a clover - dislodged from its mountain sanctuary - and is convinced there are voices coming from it. Nobody believes him, least of all the jungle's resident tyrant, Kangaroo (Carol Burnett), who tries to ostracise the elephant.
But Horton's assertion that "a person's a person, however small" is right in fact as well as sentiment. The speck does indeed hold life, in the inhabitants of Whoville, a colourful, happy-go-lucky place whose residents are blissfully unaware of their plight should Horton drop the clover. The one person worried about the sudden tremors is the mayor (Steve Carell) and, just like Horton, he's having trouble making anyone believe him. After all, nothing goes wrong in Whoville. Never has, never will.
Seuss's tale is about having faith in your imagination and about tolerance of non-conformity. It plays out as a lovely comic escapade, as Horton sets off to return the clover to the mountain, pursued by Vlad the vulture, an assassin despatched by Kangaroo, while the mayor has to battle the town burghers. The 3-D animation is breathtaking, particularly in the detailing of Whoville and its designer fur-clad inhabitants. The two most amazing sequences involve the elephant's optimistic attempt to cross a ravine on a rope bridge, and the discovery of what the mayor's son has been up to in his lofty hide-out. The film-makers also have the confidence to supplement Seuss's humour and visual style with their own: note the hilarious Manga interlude.
REDACTED
DIRECTOR: BRIAN DE PALMA
RATING:
Last week I reviewed Battle For Haditha, Nick Broomfield's dramatisation of the murder of innocent Iraqi families by US marines. Redacted sees Brian De Palma working in similar terrain, but getting caught up in his ambition, as he creates what he calls a "fictional documentary" of another American atrocity.
To redact is to edit something out for publication. De Palma's point is that news coverage of the Iraq occupation has had all the truth excised from it by the government and mainstream media; and that by mimicking the alternative outlets by which, these days, the truth can be revealed - surveillance cameras, video diaries, online reports - he is shining a light on one such redacted story: the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl, and murder of her family.
We are first introduced to a group of soldiers stationed at a checkpoint, ranging from the thoughtful, to the instinctively patriotic, to the redneck sociopaths who should not have been drafted in the first place. Glimpsing them through different media, particularly the video being made by one of their number, we watch the burning fuse (which includes one of them blown up by a bomb), the crime and its aftermath.
On some levels De Palma is ideally suited to the material: his Casualties Of War dealt with a similar abomination during Vietnam. At the same time, however, his default mode comes into play - the man is invariably over-the-top.
De Palma gets so involved in his multi-media tricks (including a painfully stupid French art film-within-the-film) and so immersed in the vile verbiage of his GI monsters, that he takes his eye off a balanced story. Unlike Broomfield's film, this has no depiction of the Iraqi people other than as invisible terrorists or families intent on revenge. And whereas Broomfield created a sense of outrage that incorporated a recognition that the soldiers, too, were victims, De Palma merely makes us sick to the stomach and hateful of Americans. Redacted is not as helpful as he might think.
WATER LILIES
DIRECTOR: CELINE SCIAMMA
RATING:
Recent French films have been dealing very well with female adolescence. Although Water Lilies is not as overtly mysterious as Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Innocence, its characters are more enigmatic for being all the more recognisable.
In a bland suburb, three 15-year-olds deal with different experiences of that difficult age: Floriane, beautiful, older-seeming than her years, desired by every boy and hated by the girls; the chubby outsider, Anne; and the gawky, self-possessed, Marie, the most sure of her own sexual desire, which is for Floriane. Their lives criss-cross about the pool, where Floriane and Anne are synchronised swimmers, Marie a voyeur. Adults are absent in this world, and are not missed, as there is much entertaining splashing, in and out of the water.
Comic horror The Cottage opens promisingly, with two bickering brothers (Andy Serkis and Reece Shearsmith) arriving at a cottage in the woods, a kidnapped gangster's daughter in the boot of their car. Their incompetence is asking for trouble, and the pincer movement of arriving villains and an unseen threat in the woods, sprinkled with humour, bodes ill for them, well for us.
Sadly, though, the components lead to just another fruitcake family splatter-fest, decapitations and eviscerations in abundance, and the question: are we really expected to laugh when a woman has her face cleaved in two? Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams fared better with his debut crime thriller, London To Brighton.
Don't be tempted by the fact that Mister Lonely is set in the Highlands. The film could be located anywhere, so incidental is the locale. And it would be awful anywhere. It concerns a group of celebrity impersonators (Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, Chaplin), sad people who believe happiness is being someone else and have to endure each other's dull company before realising otherwise. Trouble is, we don't want to spend time with them either.
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