This film, based on Audrey Niffenegger’s runaway best seller of the same name, tells the story of the complicated love story between Henry DeTamble (Eric Bana) and  Claire Abshire (Rachael McAdam). What makes it complicated is that Henry is a Time Traveller (through no fault of his own) who has a bad habit of popping in and out of Claire’s life at the most inopportune moments.

So, assuming you accept this premise (which is so full of holes it doesn’t bear thinking about), you are left with an engaging, if somewhat confusing tale of a relationship that spans a couple of decades, between two otherwise unremarkable people. Henry spends a lot of time popping up naked in the most inconvenient places, while the eternally patient Claire paces a lot, cleaning and picking up after him, when he disappears without warning.

It is to the credit of Eric Bana and Rachel McAdam that one can sit through this film and accept the premise it is based on as a reality. Both actors play their parts with utter sincerity and one is drawn into their story, despite themselves. Henry’s “condition” is deemed genetic, although what survival need Mother Nature was thinking when she cooked up this rather silly mutation is anybody’s guess. Still, our ears grow hair and our noses get longer as we age, and I don’t think anybody has explained the survival need for that, satisfactorily, either.

The story stays close to the book, which will please Niffinegger’s legion of fans. Eric Bana does a competent job as Henry, although I hear she had Adrian Brody in mind when the film was first floated, which to me would have been closer to the Henry I remember from the book.

Director Robert Schwentke (best known for Flightplan with Jodie Foster) has managed the confusing times jumps quite well, and the story hangs together, provided you don’t start asking too many questions about the plausibility of the whole time traveller gene thing. In fairness, Niffenegger did nothing to offer an explanation in the book, either, so in that respect, Schwentke has done it’s source material proud.

When it gets down to it, I suppose, this is a love story with a twist, no more absurd than the idea that a Katharine Hiegl would hook up with a Seth Rogen in Knocked Up, played with admirable sincerity by two competent actors supported by an equally competent cast, all of whom manage to keep a straight face despite the absurdity of the plot.

One for the true romantics.

In 1975, amid deafening international silence, Indonesia invaded East Timor when the Portuguese withdrew from their former colony. A team of Australian journalists rushed to cover the invasion, in the hopes of drumming up some international outrage — Channel Seven's Greg Shackleton (Damon Gameau), Gary Cunningham (Gyton Grantley) and Tony Stewart (Mark Leonard Winter), along with Channel Nine’s Brian Peters (Thomas Wright) and Malcolm Rennie (Nathan Phillips). In October 1975, they disappeared in the town of Balibo and where never seen again.

In November 1975, four weeks after the five Australian journalists were reported missing,  veteran foreign correspondent Roger East (Anthony LaPaglia) was approached by a young Timorese man — José Ramos-Horta (Oscar Isaac)  — trying to recruit him to run the East Timor News Agency. Roger reluctantly agrees when Horta offers to help him discover the fate of the missing journos.  Once in East Timor, he discovers the journalists had gone to Balibo determined to film the Indonesian invasion and that all five men had been executed by the invading Indonesian troops,  their bodies (and their film of the invasion) burnt beyond recognition.

For many Australians, the incident in Balibo in November 1975, will remain forever a scar on our relations with both Indonesia and East Timor. That five young men lost their lives covering something that went almost unnoticed internationally and in Australia until later events forced their fate to light, continues to aggravate many who feel the massacre was covered up for the sake of not offending the Indonesians. That is clearly not the intention of this film. The Indonesians do not come out of this treatment well at all. 

The film centres around Roger East’s search for some clue about the fate of the journalists, but the tension of the search is watered down by the confusing editing which cuts back and forth between the events of four weeks earlier with Roger’s search, in scenes often featuring the same people wearing the same clothes. Even more confusing is the fact that the film is book-ended by the testimony of an Timorese woman, Juliana, who merely met Roger East in passing as a small child, giving the impression that it’s her story, when in fact she had little or nothing to do with any of it.

The film feels authentic, as well it should, given it was shot in East Timor for the most part, but the choppy editing leaves a lot to be desired. I think the film would have been better served by having us follow the journalists first and then the man who sets out to look for them, rather than having the two happen simultaneously.  I suppose, when you have a star of the calibre of La Paglia, you need to make the film about his character, which is a pity, because although he does an excellent job as the jaded Roger East, he is the catalyst for telling the story, not really the focus of it.

This is not a happy film. It tells of a terrible period in history and reflects well on very few living people, the exception being incumbent East Timorese President, José Ramos-Horta, who won the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to free his homeland from Indonesian occupation. That nobody has ever been brought to justice for the death of these five young men only serves to make the audience angry, which perhaps, if justice is ever to be sought for the killers of the Balibo Five, could well have been the Director, Robert Connelly’s, intention.

Since he first appeared in a Japanese Manga comic book in 1953, Astro Boy has been whizzing about, trying to bring peace and harmony to human/android relations, aided by a really irritating voice and some heavy-duty maudlin sentiment, laid on with a trowel.

The remake for the big screen, voiced by, well, everybody in Hollywood  — Nicholas Cage, Freddie Highmore, Kristen Bell,  Samuel L Jackson, Nathan Lane, Bill Nighy, Donald Sutherland and Charlize Theron, just to name a few—attempts to breathe some life back into the franchise.

The story is essentially Astro’s origin story. Set in the futuristic Metro City (not Tokyo! gasp the purists), floating high above the wasteland of  a badly polluted Earth, Professor Tenma (Nicholas Cage) attempts to recreate his lost son (Freddie Highmore) by building an android replica and giving him his son’s memories (along with jet powered feet, heat rays in his arms and machine guns in his butt — as you do). The experiment fails, however. Tenma can’t bond with Astro and to make matters worse, he used the last of a precious experimental power source to drive the boy android, which evil incumbent president, General Stone (Donald Sutherland) wants to use to start a war between humans in Metro City and the rogue robots on Earth, to enhance his re-election chances.

Wounded by Tenma’s rejection, Astro escapes to Earth, where he meets runaway Cora (Kristen Bell) and the RRF — the Robot Revolutionary Front — a trio of wannabe terrorist robots somewhat hampered in their ambitions by the three laws of robotics which prevents them from harming humans.

After many adventures on Earth and the obligatory lessons learned about life, love, family and destiny, Astro is caught by the President and returns to Metro City to be deactivated. At the last minute, Tenma refuses to remove Astro’s power source and saves the android,  leaving him free to fight the evil robot who has absorbed the President and is on his way to destroying everything.

I have a soft spot for Astro Boy and was quite looking forward to this remake, in the hopes they’d made him less irritating to listen to (at the very least), and no quite so heavy handed on the treacly sentiment and the morals to be learned from every episode. I am happy to report writer/director David Bowers succeeded. The story is straightforward enough for kids to follow and sticks reasonably well to the spirit of the canon, if not the specifics. There are lots jokes likely to go straight over the heads of the target kiddie audience that will have their parents chuckling — the president’s banner at an election rally “No, it’s not time for a change” had me laughing out loud. The geek in me loved the RRF, too, and the practicalities of trying to be a terrorist when you’re specifically programmed not to terrorize.

This turned out to be a fun way to kill a couple of hours. My nine-year-old test audience loved it and I laughed a lot, although not at the same things the nine-year-old thought were funny.

And that’s the trick with a good family film, isn’t it? Everyone comes away happy, even if it’s for entirely different reasons.

At the age of 11, Li Cunxin (Chi Cao) was plucked from obscurity in a poor Chinese village by Madame Mao's cultural revolutionary talent spotters and taken to Beijing to study ballet, where he spent the next few years mastering the techniques, if not the soul, of classical ballet.

In 1979, Li was selected for a cultural exchange to Texas sponsored by Huston Ballet Company Artistic Director, Ben Stephensen (Bruce Greenwood). Li was chosen in the belief that of all the students in his ballet class, he would be the one most resistant to the evils of western imperialism. Had that been true, there would be no film, of course. Needless to say Li disappointed the Party by falling in love with an American dancer, Elizabeth Mackey (Amanda Schull), whom he secretly married. After some grief at the Chinese Consulate in Huston, which saw him almost dragged forcibly back to China, he managed to defect, but was forbidden to ever contact his family again.

The romance with Liz fizzled after a time, in part because she was unable to get work in the Huston company, despite being married to their rising star.  Li performed as a principal dancer for the Houston Ballet for a number of years, where he met Australian prima ballerina Mary McKendry (Camilla Vergotis). After they married they moved to Australia where Li then performed as a principal artist with the Australian Ballet until he retired.

Not only is this an interesting story, director Bruce Beresford has done the bestselling autobiography of Li Cunxin proud, by hiring real dancers to play the roles of the ballet dancers and a sterling cast of actors in the supporting roles. In fact, production of the movie was held up for a number of years, while they searched the globe for an exceptional dancer of Chinese heritage to play the main role. It was Li himself who spotted Chi Cao at the Birmingham Ballet, a dancer with a story not dissimilar to his own.

There have been harder roads to fame and freedom, if not many that breach a gap as wide as the gulf between the abject poverty of the seventh son of a rural Chinese farmer, to the glitz and glory of the international ballet scene. Joan Chen is a standout as Li's mother, who urges her son to take the opportunity he’s been offered, and then turns on the party officials when they inform her of her son’s defection with the classic “well, don’t blame me. You had him last” defence. The rest of the acting is great, particularly the very natural and charismatic Chi Cao, who, if he’d followed martial arts instead of dancing, would have a great career ahead of him as the next Jackie Chan.

There are some manipulative moments, such as Li dreaming of his parents being dragged off to a labour camp, when in fact, no such thing happened to them, and the grand finale is milked for every emotional drop it can wring from you, but by then, you don’t mind. The film’s pacing is tight and the story — no doubt streamlined for cinematic effect — gets the key moments of Li’s transformation across effectively, even if it leaves some of the minor characters a little two dimensional in the process.

And the dancing is superb. For that alone, it’s worth the money.

Hollywood’s desperate need to remake anything from the 80s that made money is apparent here in the remake of a hit film that patently didn’t need a remake.

Fame is set in the New York Performing Arts Academy and follows a group of aspiring teens who want to be performers through four years of high school during which they never seem to age or noticeably improve. An ensemble cast of talented newcomers make up the cast of kids, while some very familiar faces, such as Megan Mullally (Will & Grace),  Kelsey Grammer and Bebe Nuewirth (Frasier), fill out the minor roles as the teachers.

The film belongs to the youngsters, however, and a talented bunch they are, particularly Naturi Naughton as Denise Dupree, the classical pianist with a talent for Hip Hop. Remember that name. You will be seeing more of this girl.

The film follows the plot of the original, sort of, updated for the noughties with the addition of some rap and hip-hop that wasn’t even thought of in the original. But the film follows ten different characters, and the years slip by so quickly, were it not for the “Freshman Year”, “Sophomore Year” etc, screens that pop up annoyingly every 25 minutes or so to give you a heads up, you’d think the whole film happened over the space of a couple of months.

There is little or no character development, and the characters we do get are cliché and well, pretty boring, actually. This is made worse by the fact that at graduation, (assuming you’ve worked out who's who) you have no idea what the future holds for any of them, except the kid from Ohio who’s heading back home to take over his mother’s ballet school, because his teacher has assured him, he can’t cut it as a pro.

The worse crime of this remake though, is it’s inevitability. By the end of the auditions at the start of the film, you know who’s going to do well, who’s going to rebel, who’s going to make it, who's going to have an epiphany, who isn’t… In the end, you’re watching it for the individual set pieces, which are well-enough done, but the coherence of the plot leaves you wondering about... the coherence of the plot.

I have seen the original film and the stage play of this musical and I have to say, I can’t see this remake has added anything to the mix. Which is more than the director of the original movie had to say about it. Sir Alan Parker said, in a recent interview, that "producing an inferior remake of Fame insults the memory of those involved with the original." Ouch.