FIRST PARA
IRON MAN
DIRECTOR: JON FAVREAU
RATING: 
ALONGSIDE Spiderman, the Silver Surfer, Captain Marvel, even Hulk, Iron Man was not the liveliest superhero off the Marvel production line. This makes Iron Man, the film, a rarity amongst comic book adaptations: one that genuinely brings an extra dimension to a character. As embodied by the supremely witty Robert Downey Jr, this superhero has suddenly become a great deal of fun.
It's tempting to describe the man behind this iron mask, Tony Stark, as Batman's Bruce Wayne without the crippling angst. Like Wayne, Stark is a wealthy, handsome playboy and a self-made superhero, created not by freaky mutation like most, but high-tech invention. Unlike Wayne, he doesn't carry the world on his shoulders - even though he has an awful lot to feel guilty about.
When we first meet him, Stark is the world's most famous weapons manufacturer and chief provider of America's military muscle. "Ever lose an hour's sleep?" asks a female journalist of the man dubbed the merchant of death. "I'm prepared to lose a few with you," quips Stark, before taking her back to his Malibu mansion.
In his comic origins, Stark has his eyes opened by Vietnam. Here, it is an unspecific desert conflict, where his convoy is slaughtered by a force using his own weapons. His captors want him to build them a missile. Instead, he invents a powerful, fully-armed flying suit, busting his way out of the desert with a new conscience and a new mission.
Downey quips to perfection behind his demonic goatee, capturing not only Stark's hedonism and arrogance, but also a genius's solitary absorption. In fine support are Gwyneth Paltrow, as Stark's cutely named assistant, Pepper Potts, and Jeff Bridges - literally as we have never seen him before, bald and with a ZZ Top beard - as Stark's double-crossing business partner.
If the action scenes are light compared to most superhero fare, the themes are a tad more substantial: the choice of whether to apply technology destructively or for good; the allusion to the US supplying weapons to its own enemies in the Middle East whenever it suits them.
PRIVATE PROPERTY
DIRECTOR: JOACHIM LAFOSSE
RATING:
Isabelle Huppert adds to her burgeoning catalogue of challenging, disquieting films with Private Property, a family drama that will make any childless couple watching think twice about the plunge into parenthood.
She plays Pascale, a divorcée whose two aimless twentysomething sons Thierry and Francois (real-life brothers Jeremie and Yannick Renier) still live with her. At first, they seem a happy, albeit eccentric trio. But when Pascale decides she wants to sell their rural home and start a new life - assuming it's time for her sons to make their own way - the boys rebel. Deep-seated resentments on all sides rise to the surface, with Thierry, in particular, revealing himself as a nasty piece of work.
It's not uncommon for children who feed too long off their parents to hypocritically resent the continuing care. This is the core dynamic here, with the added friction created by the boys' father, stirring the pot from the wings. Writer-director Joachim Lafosse elevates traditionally mundane domestic scenes (notably countless mealtimes) to something painfully fascinating to watch - a family on the verge of self-destruction.
JOY DIVISION
DIRECTOR: GRANT GEE
RATING:
Last year, Control charted the career of Manchester band Joy Division, focusing on tragic lead singer Ian Curtis. As good as the film was, I felt that the other band members were pushed into the background of Curtis's life and suicide. And this was never a one-man band. The terrific documentary Joy Division not only redresses that balance, but more fully conjures the social and musical context - the northeast in decay, punk on the rampage - in which these young men presented their astonishing, bleak and beautiful musical landscape.
Director Grant Gee combines stirring archive footage of the band's performances with evocative images of urban grime and a succession of talking heads: notably surviving band members Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris (who subsequently formed New Order), late Factory impresario Tony Wilson, journalist Paul Morley and album designer Peter Saville - all shot with the fishbowl opacity of Saville's cover for New Order's Low-Life.
While the onlookers incisively commend the music, the band honestly and painfully reflect on how they simply weren't equipped to either understand Curtis (they didn't even listen to his lyrics) or help him. They were, after all, northern lads.
NIM'S ISLAND
DIRECTOR: JENNIFER FLACKETT, MARK LEVIN
RATING:
The family film Nim's Island comes with the vague message that while imagination is a fine thing, it's much better to get out of the house. Jodie Foster plays a writer of adventure stories who, in contrast to her hero, is a timid recluse. Meanwhile, on a tropical island, young Nim and her biologist father (Abigail Breslin and Gerard Butler) are routinely resourceful in a way that the writer can only imagine.
The plot is a huge contrivance by which the three will meet. But, unlike the adventures to which it's paying homage, the film itself is incredibly uninvolving.
MADE OF HONOUR
DIRECTOR: PAUL WEILLAND
RATING:
The horribly misfiring romantic comedy Made Of Honour features Patrick Dempsey of Grey's Anatomy, as a womaniser who only realises that he is in love with his best friend (Michelle Monaghan) when she agrees to marry another man (Kevin McKidd).
In New York, this is one of those twee meanders around Central Park and its upmarket environs by people with seemingly no need to work regular hours; when it relocates to Scotland, where our hero plans to sabotage the wedding, it combines picture postcard cliché with condescension.
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