Horrid Henry: The Movie 3D – review

Down with (private) skool: Anjelica Huston as Miss Battleaxe in Horrid Henry.Horrid Henry: The Movie 3DProduction year: 2011Country: UKCert (UK): URuntime: 92 minsDirectors: Nick MooreCast: Anjelica Huston, Mathew Horne, Noel Fielding, Parminder Nagra, Prunella Scales, Richard E Grant, Theo StevensonMore on this film

The work of a highly regarded British editor, Horrid Henry is a broad, noisy comedy based on a series of popular books and TV films about a rebellious primary-school boy in revolt against his family, school and all things genteel. The most interesting aspect is that Henry comes out in defence of his coeducational state school against the villains of the piece, who are the slimy headmaster of an expensive private school (Richard E Grant) and the snobbish parents who send their kids there to learn to sound their aitches and despise their contemporaries.

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Arrietty – review

When it comes to the quality of the product, the world of animated film is dominated at the moment by Japan's Studio Ghibli and America's Pixar. And with the latter's current offering, Cars 2, being something of a disappointment, Ghibli's entrancing Arrietty is the clear choice for a family outing this summer. The film's youngish director, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, worked as an animator on such Ghibli classics as Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle and Ponyo, but the idea of an animated version of Mary Norton's The Borrowers has been a long-cherished project of Ghibli's great film-maker Hayao Miyazaki, and the original Japanese title translates as "Arrietty and the Borrowers".

ArriettyProduction year: 2010Country: Rest of the worldCert (UK): URuntime: 94 minsDirectors: Hiromasa YonebayashiCast: Keiko Takeshita, Mark Strong, Mirai Shida, Olivia Colman, Ryunosuke Kamiki, Saoirse Ronan, Shinobu Ohtake, Tom Holland, Tomokazu MiuraMore on this film

Several generations of children have now grown up on Mary Norton's books about sweet-natured little people living beneath the floorboards of British houses and supporting their modest lifestyles by "borrowing" their simple necessities from the ordinary human occupants. They have no special powers and they are not, in any real sense, thieves, borrowing only things that have been discarded or will not be missed – an old hat pin, for instance, or a cube of sugar. The first book was published to considerable acclaim in 1952, five years before the same idea was used by Richard Matheson for his celebrated novel and horror flick The Incredible Shrinking Man. In Matheson's story, a suburban husband, after exposure to nuclear radiation, steadily shrinks until he is forced to live first in a doll's house and then in a matchbox in the basement, fending off spiders with a pin he wields like a sword. There have been several TV series based on Norton's books, but only one film, Peter Hewitt's 1997 The Borrowers, in which, symbolically, the full-size people living upstairs in a timeless London house are American while the eccentric tiny folk living by ingenious scavenging below are English. It seemed to suggest that the borrowers were a non-productive, disregarded underclass. The result wasn't bad but lacked magic and wonder.

The Ghibli version is set in a verdant Tokyo suburb, but except for a pair of dim-witted insect-exterminators the people don't look particularly Japanese. As in Norton's original, a sickly teenage boy comes to stay at a rather grand house with his pleasant aunt and a surly old housekeeper, and on his arrival he spots Arrietty, one of the little people, as his own father and grandfather had also done as children. Arrietty is a pretty 14-year-old borrower who's been protected by her concerned mother and father from human contact, a little reminiscent of Miranda in The Tempest, and like her is swept away on encountering the dangerous, brave new world of humans from upstairs. The movie is beautifully drawn, universal in its combination of east and west, and has a narrative that flows as elegantly as its graphic line. There are wonderful sequences: Pod the father taking Arrietty on his first borrowing expedition in the house upstairs; a tour of the human family's elegant Edwardian doll's house; a crow trapped in a mesh window screen as it swoops down in an attempt to seize Arrietty; her mother imprisoned in a bottle by the vindictive housekeeper; an escape in a floating tea kettle to a new home.

At the heart of the film, however, is the tender, trusting friendship between Sho, the boy of the house, and Arrietty. Theirs is a beautiful, perfect love, but ultimately doomed like so many relationships in myths and fairytales. This moving, amusing and resonant tale also touches on environmental and ecological concerns, on xenophobia and the fear of the threatening other. And it has taken on new meanings about the respect and preservation of disappearing species and the need to treasure and recycle valuable resources.

Arrietty is being shown in two versions in this country, a Japanese one, and one dubbed into English. Given the choice last week, I opted for the dubbed one, which I normally do with foreign animated pictures, because after all we're not concerned here with losing the actors' real voices the way one is with customary dubbing. Of course I noticed a superior smile on the faces of some purist colleagues as they descended to the basement viewing theatre (the appropriate place for those who sympathise with the borrowers) to hear the Japanese version. But all the children present attended the dubbed version upstairs and seemed to enjoy it hugely. I might have felt differently had we been invited to see Disney's dubbed version, with teenage American accents. But I doubt if a better cast could be found anywhere than the British actors assembled for Arrietty by Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan, who were also the producers of the 1997 The Borrowers. Saoirse Ronan is a heartbreaking Arrietty, Mark Strong a splendidly decent dad.

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Our Day Will Come – review

Olivier Barthelemy in Romain Gavras's Our Day Will Come: 'all sensation without revelation'.Our Day Will Come (Notre Jour Viendra)Production year: 2010Country: FranceRuntime: 87 minsDirectors: Romain GavrasCast: Justine Lerooy, Olivier Barthelemy, Vanessa Decat, Vincent CasselMore on this film

A discontented schoolboy in run-down north-west France is given a lift by a deeply troubled shrink (Vincent Cassel), who persuades him that popular prejudice against redheads is what's responsible for their joint troubles. So they acquire a red Porsche and set off for Ireland, where carrot-tops are welcome, but their folie a deux escalates exponentially as they acquire a crossbow and a shotgun and they get no further than Calais. All sensation without revelation, the film has ambitions but they end up as hollow pretensions.

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Zookeeper – review

Kevin James stars in Zookeeper.ZookeeperProduction year: 2011Country: USACert (UK): PGRuntime: 101 minsDirectors: Frank CoraciCast: Adam Sandler, Cher, Donnie Wahlberg, Ken Jeong, Kevin James, Leslie Bibb, Nick Nolte, Rosario Dawson, Sylvester StalloneMore on this film

A romantic comedy long on sentimentality but short on jokes, this is a vehicle for the ungainly, overweight Kevin James, a specialist in roles as supposedly lovable all-American slobs. Here, he plays a caretaker at Boston's Franklin Park Zoo who, having been jilted by his girl, is instructed by his friends, the menagerie's talking animals, in how to woo her back using the mating techniques of the plains and the jungle. I would rather lie on a bed of nails watching Dr Doolittle for a week than see a single reel of Zookeeper again.

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Poetry – review

Yun Jeong-hie in the Korean drama Poetry: 'a remarkable central performance'.

The body of a teenage girl floats down a river in Korea. Mija, a neatly dressed, 65-year-old, working-class widow, is diagnosed with early Alzheimer's. Every afternoon, she attends to an old man suffering from a stroke who seeks sexual relief from her and she waits hand and foot on her lazy, ungrateful grandson while her daughter is working in Seoul.

PoetryProduction year: 2010Countries: Rest of the world, South Korea Cert (UK): 12ARuntime: 139 minsDirectors: Lee Chang-Dong, Lee ChangdongCast: An Haesong, David Lee, Kim Hee-Jeong, Kim Hira, Kim Yongbaek, Yun JungheeMore on this film

Meanwhile, she joins a poetry class at a social centre and wonders about personal creativity. What unites the various strands of an apparently simple woman's life and a society she struggles to understand? The answers are gradually provided by a thoughtful, cleverly developed script.

As her mind becomes clouded by dementia, Mija is drawn into a conspiracy by a group of parents at a school to cover up a suicide brought about by rape and humiliation involving her grandson. Steadily, she acts with a new moral and social awareness, organises what remains of her life and discovers the inspiration to write poetry. A fascinating, satisfying film with a remarkable central performance.

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Whisky Galore – review

High spirits: Basil Radford in Whisky Galore. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

The year 1949 was a pretty miserable time in Britain. Postwar austerity was at its height. Many city centres were still largely bomb sites. The cold war was getting chillier. The British film industry was in crisis after the Labour government had imposed a punitive tax on American films, which led to Hollywood studios withholding their product. Then suddenly, in the early summer, three pictures opened on consecutive weeks that together defined what we now know as "the Ealing comedy". The films got darker and Ealing Studios' reputation greater as the month wore on.

Whisky GaloreProduction year: 1949Country: UKCert (UK): URuntime: 81 minsDirectors: Alexander MackendrickCast: Basil Radford, Joan GreenwoodMore on this film

In the first, Passport to Pimlico, a London borough, supported by a recently discovered medieval document, declares itself to be part of ancient Burgundy and thus an independent state. In the second, Whisky Galore, the thirsty inhabitants of a remote Scottish village hijack the cargo of a whisky-laden merchantman wrecked on their shores during the second world war and defy the authorities to repossess it. The third film, Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets, has as its hero a bitterly aggrieved Victorian outcast from an aristocratic family who avenges his mother's death by killing all the relatives between himself and a seat in the Lords.

The populist politics of discontent were later to be identified as Poujadism, a term attached to a short-lived revolt of the petite bourgeoisie against the stifling bureaucracy of France's Fourth Republic, and led by shopkeeper Pierre Poujade in 1953. These Ealing films were skilfully scripted, visually observant and performed by what we now see as a rep company of stars and character actors, and a collegial team working behind the camera.

The comedies were part of their times and yet transcend them – they live on to comment on later eras. Whisky Galore, for instance, based on a novel by the early Scottish nationalist Compton Mackenzie, is a colourful contribution to the current debate on the future of Scotland.

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A Better Life – review

Jose Julian and Demian Bichir in Chris Weitz's tense A Better Life.

Chris Weitz is nothing if not eclectic. Having worked alone or in collaboration with his brother, Paul, on the envelope-pushing American Pie, screen versions of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass and Nick Hornby's About a Boy and one of the overwrought Twilight teen-vampire films, he's now made what is in effect a transposition to California of the 1948 neorealist masterpiece Bicycle Thieves, the work of another highly eclectic moviemaker, Vittorio De Sica.

A Better LifeProduction year: 2011Country: USACert (UK): 12ARuntime: 97 minsDirectors: Chris WeitzCast: Bobby Soto, Chelsea Rendon, Demian Bichir, Josie JulianMore on this film

The oppressed hero is now an illegal immigrant from Mexico (played by leading Mexican actor Demian Bichir) and the bike has become a pick-up truck, an essential tool for his job as a gardener in Los Angeles. The thief is again a pathetic figure in as desperate a position as the hero. The son, however, is no longer an adoring little boy but a surly teenager estranged from his father. In many ways, the protagonist's situation is worse here than in the Italian original, because any false move could put him in the hands of the immigration department, with the almost certain prospect of deportation. It's a small, convincing, tightly constructed movie about an urgent, seemingly insoluble problem.

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Jules et Jim by Henri-Pierre Roché – review

Jeanne Moreau in Francois Truffaut's 1962 film version of Jules et Jim. Photograph: The Ronald Grant Archive

A shadowy figure amid the 20th-century beau monde – friend to Picasso and Gertrude Stein, and buyer for the American art collector John Quinn – Henri-Pierre Roche waited until his 70s to publish his teasingly semi-autobiographical debut novel, which became one of the 20th century's most famous depictions of a menage-a-trois.

Jules and Jim are best friends – perhaps soulmates – who together pursue a charmed life of bohemian indulgence in turn-of-the-century Paris. Drifting from liaison to liaison they share their women as easily as wine, without jealousy or regret – and then they meet Kate. With her "archaic" smile and lips made for "milk – and blood", Kate is obedient only to the diktat: "He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword." Marrying first Jules and then Jim, Kate draws all three into an ecstatic cycle of intimacy and betrayal, unleashing a seemingly limitless capacity for tenderness, forgiveness and revenge until their passions eventually burn out.

Roche's guileless prose lends the quality of a parable to his story, which is startling in its erotic candour and its visionary pursuit of love. Kate owes much – perhaps too much – to the figure of the eternal feminine: cruel, beautiful and volatile, she is more archetype than actuality. But that is not really Roche's concern – instead he probes the "essential quality of our intimate emotions", laying bare the complex and paradoxical dynamics of desire.

Today the novel is eclipsed by Francois Truffaut's celebrated nouvelle vague film starring Jeanne Moreau, and Truffaut contributes a valuable afterword to this edition. Reflecting on the film in 2000, Moreau described it as "the dreamed image of amorous life"; in its exuberant rejection of conventional morality, Roche's novel describes an emotional logic that is both inscrutable and compelling.

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Captain America: The First Avenger 3D – review

Chris Evans as comic superhero Captain America: 'deadly dull'.

"Unhappy the land that has no heroes," says someone in Brecht's Life of Galileo, to which Galileo replies: "No. Unhappy the land that needs heroes!" Make that superheroes and I'd say: "Hear, hear." Hollywood, working with Marvel Comics, is currently giving us a surfeit of these caped crusaders with camp costumes and special powers, the latest being the deadly dull Captain America, originally created as a comic book figure in 1941.

Captain America: The First AvengerProduction year: 2011Country: USACert (UK): 12ARuntime: 124 minsDirectors: Joe JohnstonCast: Chris Evans, Dominic Cooper, Hayley Atwell, Hugo Weaving, Natalie Dormer, Richard Armitage, Sebastian Stan, Stanley Tucci, Tommy Lee JonesMore on this film

He's a 90lb weakling turned into a powerful democratic protagonist by a German emigre scientist (Stanley Tucci) as the US enters the second world war. He has an opposite number in Hitler's Nazi superhero, Red Skull, a Teutonic villain with a strong physical resemblance to Harry Potter's nemesis, Voldemort. There are borrowings from the superior Raiders of the Lost Ark (for which Captain America's director won a visual effects Oscar) and it's altogether inferior to Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. It ends, depressingly, with a trailer for a sequel due next May.

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The Light Thief – review

The Light Thief: 'a touching, pawkily amusing example of satirical tragedy'.

In the godforsaken, physically awesome Kyrgyzstan, left struggling after the break-up of the Soviet Union, an electrician tries to help his impoverished rural neighbours by providing them with illicit free electricity. He falls foul of the bureaucrats for his Robin Hood altruism but is then taken up by exploitative entrepreneurs, who want to use his skills to produce wind-generated power. However, he rebels against their venality, immorality and general corruption and pays a terrible price for his decency and probity.

The Light Thief (Svet-Ake)Production year: 2010Country: Rest of the worldRuntime: 80 minsDirectors: Aktan Arym KubatCast: Aktan Arym Kubat, Asan Amanov, Askat Sulaimanov, Stanbek Toichubaev, Taalaikan AbazovaMore on this film

Written and directed by its star, this is a touching, pawkily amusing example of that fairly rare genre, the satirical tragedy.

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Just Do It – review

Tree's company: a scene from Emily James's film about green protestors, Just Do It. Photograph: Mike RussellJust Do ItProduction year: 2010Country: UKCert (UK): 12ARuntime: 90 minsDirectors: Emily JamesMore on this film

Subtitled "A Tale of Modern Outlaws", James's partisan documentary is an inside account of life among near-fulltime environmental protesters as they prepare and execute their demonstrations in Britain and Denmark. They are an attractive, idealistic bunch, anti-capitalists of an anarchic kind. The film is informative about the way they operate, but a good many questions go unasked.

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Bobby Fischer Against the World – review

The definition of tortured genius: Bobby Fischer, Iceland, 1972.Bobby Fischer Against The WorldProduction year: 2011Country: Rest of the worldCert (UK): 12ARuntime: 92 minsDirectors: Liz GarbusMore on this film

During the summer of 1972 the world was riveted by the cold war drama of the chess games in Iceland between the Soviet chess master Boris Spassky and his American challenger Bobby Fischer. I remember it well as I produced George Steiner's series of analyses of the contest for BBC Radio 3. Steiner's classic essay on the affair for the New Yorker was published in book form the following year as The Sport Scene: White Knights of Reykjavik. Liz Garbus's fascinating but rather low-key documentary traces Fischer's life from childhood prodigy to the burgeoning insanity that culminated in his lonely, isolated death as a paranoid, antisemitic and anti-American Jewish American in 2008. The centre and highpoint of his career is of course that successful challenge to Spassky at the age of 29 from which the madness stems. It is a tragic story, often painful to watch and listen to, with some eloquent, highly sympathetic testimony from other chess players and outstanding photographs of Fischer by his friend, the Scottish-born Life photojournalist Harry Benson, but little insight into the game of chess.

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Hobo with a Shotgun – review

Here's one I maimed earlier: Rutger Hauer in the bloody horror Hobo with a Shotgun.Hobo With A ShotgunProduction year: 2011Country: Rest of the worldCert (UK): 18Runtime: 86 minsDirectors: Jason EisenerCast: Brian Downey, Gregory Smith, Molly Dunsworth, Nick Bateman, Rutger HauerMore on this film

Clips from non-existent films have been a regular cinematic feature for years, but I'm not sure when the first fake trailer appeared. There were several in John Landis's sketch comedy The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), including a beauty for the enticing "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble", and a couple the following year in the interval of the spoof 1930s double bill that constitutes Stanley Donen's seriously neglected Movie Movie. A couple of years ago Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez included a number in Grindhouse, their double bill of parodic exploitation films that never reached this country in its original form. The Canadian release of Grindhouse, however, was apparently accompanied by a joke trailer for a cheap, sadistic, gross-out horror flick with the in-your-face title Hobo with a Shotgun. This has now become an authentic cheap, sadistic, gross-out horror flick. Shot in deliberately garish colour, it stars Rutger Hauer as a grizzled tramp who arrives by rail in a hellish American community and takes on an outrageous gang of murderous local bullies. It should have remained a trailer. Most Hauer movies go straight to those bins that were once a feature of video stores. This one belongs at the bottom of a disused coal mine in one of those desperately impoverished West Virginia townships that advertise for people to send them their nuclear waste.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 – review

The famous three: Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and Daniel Radcliffe in The Deathly Hallows: Part 2. Photograph: Jaap Buitendijk/AP

On 18 November 2001, I began my review of the first Harry Potter movie: "It's difficult to separate the film of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone from Harry Potter the phenomenon – that astronomical budget; the producers' worldwide deal with Coca-Cola; the billion dollars-worth of associated merchandise; the actors' complaints of being exploited by Hollywood; the declaration by its director, Chris Columbus, that JK Rowling's novel merited the respect accorded to Shakespeare; the endless opinions on its significance ranging from world premiere guest Brooklyn Beckham to newspaper moralist Melanie Phillips."

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 3DProduction year: 2011Country: Rest of the worldCert (UK): 12ARuntime: 130 minsDirectors: David YatesCast: Alan Rickman, Billy Nighy, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Thompson, Emma Watson, Gary Oldman, Helena Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Ralph Fiennes, Rupert GrintMore on this film

A decade on, we have reached the end of what we now call "the journey". Seven Rowling novels have been turned into eight films which take around 20 hours to see (or 36 hours if you watch the DVD extras), and the phenomenon is infinitely greater. A generation of readers and filmgoers has grown up with the bespectacled, wand-waving wizard and saviour of the world from Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey, and the appearance of the final film coincides with the birth of a fourth Beckham child, suitably given the middle name "Seven" which could as easily be the number of books in the sacred text as her father's former Man Utd shirt.

There is a tentative attempt at the beginning of The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 at clarification, when a goblin asks: "How did you come by the sword?", referring to the Excalibur-like weapon retrieved from the bottom of a lake in The Deathly Hallows: Part 1. "It's complicated," replies a desperately tired, unwashed Harry, who rapidly dispenses with anything that might be described as a synopsis of preceding events, leaving people who don't know their Horcruxes from their Dementors to muggle through.

In that initial review in 2001, I admitted that I entered the cinema prejudiced by the hype and emerged having greatly enjoyed the film and admiring the skill that had gone into the making. I now have to say I feel as weary as the film's characters look after the final defeat of Voldemort. They stand dirty, dishevelled and triumphant among the battle-torn wreckage of Hogwarts, which resembles London after the Blitz or Berlin on VE Day.

The brilliant production designer Stuart Craig, who is to the Harry Potter series what Ken Adam was to the Bond movies (which is to say co-auteur), has done a consistently impressive job. There are moments of wit, fear, imagination and grace that one remembers over the years, but they are scattered among the long drawn-out, meandering narrative. I am readily prepared to concede that the films and the books have become for many young people and their parents a crucial part of their experience of this century. When, in the first half of The Deadly Hallows, the shifty Rufus Scrimgeour, minister of magic, says: "These are dark times", he could be any member of the coalition stepping up to the dispatch box.

In the late 1940s, the German Protestant theologian Rudolf Bultmann became famous for "demythologisation", the process of eliminating the myth and miracle from the Bible and bringing about a rational understanding of religion and the world. His work was celebrated in the 1950s by a few lines of comic verse that went: "Hark the herald angels sing/ Bultmann is the new-born king/ At least they would do had he not/ Demythologised the lot." At precisely the same time, a tsumani of remythologisation had got under way, first by CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien and then by lesser literary figures such as L Ron Hubbard, George Lucas and, perhaps most remarkably, JK Rowling. The Harry Potter books are a mishmash of myths ancient and modern, pulling in everything from Dickens to Wagner, the New Testament to Superman, with Harry as Christ, King Arthur and Clark Kent. They have seized on young imaginations that have lost touch with the Bible, classical mythology and historical tradition in general and thus with much that has sustained moral awareness and ethical thinking in the western world.

What Rowling's books also emphasise is an essential Britishness that has been partly maintained in the films through local casting involving almost the whole British acting profession. Hogwarts, the school of witchcraft and wizardry, s a celebration of the public school system with its houses, grand dining halls and traditional games as codified for lower-class kids in the early 20th century by Frank Richards in his stories about Greyfriars and St Jim's in the Magnet and the Gem. With this comes a stiff-upper-lip sense of duty exemplified by Harry, Ron and Hermione, and the snobbery, elitism and sense of entitlement that goes with it. Not surprisingly, the final film ends with a coda set on King's Cross station 19 years later, as the grown-up Harry, Ron and Hermione send their own children off to board at Hogwarts.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has dispensed with the amusing whimsy involving its eccentric staff that lightened the earlier films, and it takes its sense of mission very seriously. There is much portentous talk of impending death and the acceptance of it, of coming to terms with our own darker sides. There is, too, in the wielding of lethal wands, an almost gleeful surrender to Manichaeism and the politics of Armageddon. Ultimate evil must wear the face of characterless ugliness, in this case Ralph Fiennes's Voldemort looking like the inmate of an extreme burns unit, his English Patient reborn.

Two final points. First, the film is thankfully free of songs, either comic or sentimental. Second, when this epic odyssey began, I raised the question as to whether the Harry Potter films would endure as well as The Wizard of Oz. My answer then was: "Quite possibly." I'm now much less sure.

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Treacle Jr – review

It's a hard knock life: Tom Fisher and Aidan Gillan in Treacle Jr.Treacle JrProduction year: 2010Country: UKCert (UK): 15Runtime: 82 minsDirectors: Jamie ThravesCast: Aidan Gillen, Riann Steele, Tom FisherMore on this film

There must be a children's joke that goes: Q. "How do you approach a film called Treacle?" A. "Syruptitiously." Anyway this low-budget British movie centres on the brief odd-couple relationship between a middle-class dropout who leaves his wife and young child in a Birmingham suburb and lights out to live rough in south London, where he takes up with a manic, motor-mouthed, mentally disturbed Irish tramp. The latter lives with an abusive, promiscuous, exploitative black girl and scrapes a living by, among other things, attempting to hire out his cat Treacle to kill mice in greasy-spoon cafes. The film has its moments and Aidan Gillen is impressive as the Hibernian hanger-on from hell, but it's a slight affair. Back in 2000, Gillen starred in Thraves's highly promising The Low Down, a portrait of the drifting, directionless lives of a group of young people, once art school contemporaries, in north London. It too had an authentic feel to it, as I recall.

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Honey – review

Bora Altas as the young Yusuf in Semih Kaplanoglu's Honey (Bal).

AA Milne's Pooh Bear is one of the thickest, most tedious characters in fiction, but elsewhere in the movies apiarists and honey collectors are a mysterious, obsessive collection of individuals. One thinks of the taciturn father in Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive, Marcello Mastroianni in Theo Angelopoulos's The Bee Keeper, Michel Piccoli in Louis Malle's Milou en mai and Peter Fonda's Oscar-nominated performance in Ulee's Gold. Honey (aka Bal) is the concluding film in Semih Kaplanoglu's The Yusuf Trilogy, about a boy growing up in rural north-eastern Turkey where his father keeps bees in hives at the top of tall trees in the nearby forest and supports his young wife and little son by collecting honey. The six-year-old Yusuf, a serious, introspective boy through whose large, expressive eyes the world is presented, has a serious stammer that sets him apart from most of those around him, though his teacher and parents are delicately considerate.

Honey (Bal)Production year: 2010Country: Rest of the worldCert (UK): PGRuntime: 107 minsDirectors: Semih KaplanogluCast: Bora Altas, Erdan Besikcioglu, Tulin OzenMore on this film

A pre-credit sequence establishes the hazardous nature of the father's vocation in tending the hives and collecting the honeycombs, and it hangs over the rest of the films like a sword of Damocles, promising tragedy. Yusuf loves and respects his taciturn father who warns him of the dangers of speaking to people about his dreams, another theme that hovers ominously over this beautiful, contemplative, carefully composed movie. Although the third film in the trilogy, Yusuf is at his youngest here, and Honey won the Golden Bear at Berlin last year. The other two pictures, Milk and Egg, are soon to be shown in this country for the first time.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 – review

The famous three: Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and Daniel Radcliffe in The Deathly Hallows: Part 2. Photograph: Jaap Buitendijk/AP

On 18 November 2001, I began my review of the first Harry Potter movie: "It's difficult to separate the film of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone from Harry Potter the phenomenon – that astronomical budget; the producers' worldwide deal with Coca-Cola; the billion dollars-worth of associated merchandise; the actors' complaints of being exploited by Hollywood; the declaration by its director, Chris Columbus, that JK Rowling's novel merited the respect accorded to Shakespeare; the endless opinions on its significance ranging from world premiere guest Brooklyn Beckham to newspaper moralist Melanie Phillips."

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 3DProduction year: 2011Country: Rest of the worldCert (UK): 12ARuntime: 130 minsDirectors: David YatesCast: Alan Rickman, Billy Nighy, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Thompson, Emma Watson, Gary Oldman, Helena Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Ralph Fiennes, Rupert GrintMore on this film

A decade on, we have reached the end of what we now call "the journey". Seven Rowling novels have been turned into eight films which take around 20 hours to see (or 36 hours if you watch the DVD extras), and the phenomenon is infinitely greater. A generation of readers and filmgoers has grown up with the bespectacled, wand-waving wizard and saviour of the world from Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey, and the appearance of the final film coincides with the birth of a fourth Beckham child, suitably given the middle name "Seven" which could as easily be the number of books in the sacred text as her father's former Man Utd shirt.

There is a tentative attempt at the beginning of The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 at clarification, when a goblin asks: "How did you come by the sword?", referring to the Excalibur-like weapon retrieved from the bottom of a lake in The Deathly Hallows: Part 1. "It's complicated," replies a desperately tired, unwashed Harry, who rapidly dispenses with anything that might be described as a synopsis of preceding events, leaving people who don't know their Horcruxes from their Dementors to muggle through.

In that initial review in 2001, I admitted that I entered the cinema prejudiced by the hype and emerged having greatly enjoyed the film and admiring the skill that had gone into the making. I now have to say I feel as weary as the film's characters look after the final defeat of Voldemort. They stand dirty, dishevelled and triumphant among the battle-torn wreckage of Hogwarts, which resembles London after the Blitz or Berlin on VE Day.

The brilliant production designer Stuart Craig, who is to the Harry Potter series what Ken Adam was to the Bond movies (which is to say co-auteur), has done a consistently impressive job. There are moments of wit, fear, imagination and grace that one remembers over the years, but they are scattered among the long drawn-out, meandering narrative. I am readily prepared to concede that the films and the books have become for many young people and their parents a crucial part of their experience of this century. When, in the first half of The Deadly Hallows, the shifty Rufus Scrimgeour, minister of magic, says: "These are dark times", he could be any member of the coalition stepping up to the dispatch box.

In the late 1940s, the German Protestant theologian Rudolf Bultmann became famous for "demythologisation", the process of eliminating the myth and miracle from the Bible and bringing about a rational understanding of religion and the world. His work was celebrated in the 1950s by a few lines of comic verse that went: "Hark the herald angels sing/ Bultmann is the new-born king/ At least they would do had he not/ Demythologised the lot." At precisely the same time, a tsumani of remythologisation had got under way, first by CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien and then by lesser literary figures such as L Ron Hubbard, George Lucas and, perhaps most remarkably, JK Rowling. The Harry Potter books are a mishmash of myths ancient and modern, pulling in everything from Dickens to Wagner, the New Testament to Superman, with Harry as Christ, King Arthur and Clark Kent. They have seized on young imaginations that have lost touch with the Bible, classical mythology and historical tradition in general and thus with much that has sustained moral awareness and ethical thinking in the western world.

What Rowling's books also emphasise is an essential Britishness that has been partly maintained in the films through local casting involving almost the whole British acting profession. Hogwarts, the school of witchcraft and wizardry, s a celebration of the public school system with its houses, grand dining halls and traditional games as codified for lower-class kids in the early 20th century by Frank Richards in his stories about Greyfriars and St Jim's in the Magnet and the Gem. With this comes a stiff-upper-lip sense of duty exemplified by Harry, Ron and Hermione, and the snobbery, elitism and sense of entitlement that goes with it. Not surprisingly, the final film ends with a coda set on King's Cross station 19 years later, as the grown-up Harry, Ron and Hermione send their own children off to board at Hogwarts.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has dispensed with the amusing whimsy involving its eccentric staff that lightened the earlier films, and it takes its sense of mission very seriously. There is much portentous talk of impending death and the acceptance of it, of coming to terms with our own darker sides. There is, too, in the wielding of lethal wands, an almost gleeful surrender to Manichaeism and the politics of Armageddon. Ultimate evil must wear the face of characterless ugliness, in this case Ralph Fiennes's Voldemort looking like the inmate of an extreme burns unit, his English Patient reborn.

Two final points. First, the film is thankfully free of songs, either comic or sentimental. Second, when this epic odyssey began, I raised the question as to whether the Harry Potter films would endure as well as The Wizard of Oz. My answer then was: "Quite possibly." I'm now much less sure.

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Cell 211 – review

The prison genre, known in the trade as "the Big House movie" from the title of a seminal film of 1930, has spread from Hollywood around the world. This excellent Spanish picture has all the traditional ingredients: the fair but weak governor, the contrasted good and bad warders, the charismatic convict leader (knockout performance from Luis Tosar, famously menacing in Michael Mann's Miami Vice), the old lag, the slimy informer, the destructive riot, and the familiar message that the trouble is due to overcrowding, penny-pinching and the lack of either creative work or serious attempts at rehabilitation. The clever twist here (a variation on the opening of the Robert Redford film Brubaker) is that the sympathetic new warder, the 30-year-old Juan Oliver, is accidentally stranded inside during a preliminary tour of the premises when the riot occurs and has to pretend to be a hard-as-nails murderer in order to survive a lynching. A second twist is that the jail is temporary host to four Eta terrorists whose delicate status makes them potential hostages and political pawns.

Cell 211 (Celda 211)Production year: 2009Country: Rest of the worldCert (UK): 18Runtime: 112 minsDirectors: Daniel MonzonCast: Alberto Ammann, Antonio Resines, Luis Tosar, Manuel Moron, Marta EturaMore on this film

First-time director Monzon keeps the screws tightened in every sense, as well as avoiding conventional rhetoric and sentimentality. Jail pictures are the product of democratic societies, and such a Spanish movie would have been unthinkable under Franco. Oddly, one figure you might have expected in a Big House picture from a Catholic country is missing here – the prison chaplain, famously celebrated in Lenny Bruce's hilarious sketch "Father Flotsky's Triumph".

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Treacle Jr – review

Tramping around ... Aiden Gillen And Tom Fisher.Treacle JrProduction year: 2010Country: UKCert (UK): 15Runtime: 82 minsDirectors: Jamie ThravesCast: Aidan Gillen, Riann Steele, Tom FisherMore on this film

Jamie Thraves is a British film-maker whose 2000 debut, The Low Down, was a very likable movie and he has been too long absent from the screen. Treacle Jr is a low-key, low-budget portrait of the dispossessed in south-east London, with a teaspoon of Loach, a couple of teaspoons of Beckett and a very big, studied performance from Aidan Gillen to which, I must admit, I took a little time to acclimatise. Gillen plays Aidan, a sweet-natured Irish guy who wanders the streets doing odd jobs door-to-door and cheerfully talking very loudly, very rapidly, and sometimes unintelligibly to total strangers – he appears to have borderline learning difficulties. With a sublime indifference to how unwanted his attentions are, Aidan befriends Tom (Tom Fisher), a man who, in the midst of a personal crisis, has walked out on his wife and child in their comfortable home and is now apparently settling down to a new career of sleeping rough. They are the oddest of odd couples, though a friendship of sorts develops. The film is acted a bit broadly sometimes, and its ending is a little neat, but it reminded me of a phrase Martin Amis coined years ago: "tramp dread", a morbid terror of homeless people which is in fact a terror of how easy and even attractive it might be to give up work and responsibilities and become a tramp oneself. Gillen gives a, loose-limbed comic performance, often funny, sometimes very sad.

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Misterman – review

A day in the life of the small town of Inishfree becomes a season in hell in the hands of playwright Enda Walsh. In the character of Thomas Magill, he has created a tormented soul: part everyman, part Christ figure. In the opening moments of this unstinting solo performance by Cillian Murphy, we enter the echo chamber of Magill's mind, where past and present fight for his attention on an endless taped soundtrack. Walsh has used reel-to-reel tape recorders in other plays, but here they take centre stage and are used to explode the restrictions of the monologue form with their cacophony of voices.

Mistermanby Enda WalshBlack Box, Galway arts festivalUntil 20 JulySee details

Revisiting this play, which was first staged in 1999, Walsh has expanded the text significantly; and, under his own direction for Landmark Productions, it is given a monumental staging. Jamie Vartan's exposed two-storey set is a vast warehouse strewn with tyres and cast-off furniture. Murphy tears through this bleak space, playing a cast of increasingly hostile small-town characters, and engaging in a ritualised dialogue with the disembodied voice of his "Mammy". On a mission to bring religion and morality to the town, Magill records his conversations with his neighbours and jots down critical summaries of their characters, like a director giving performance notes to actors.

The comic absurdity of Magill's opening moments darkens to become a macabre study of a man who, in trying to control everything around him, has become slowly unhinged. The scale of the staging dilutes some of the intensity in this production, but Murphy is riveting, even in scenes that seem over-extended. This is not new territory for Walsh, but a bravura elaboration of his theatrical vision, in which we shift with every turn Magill makes, feeling sympathy for him, even as he falls deeper into violent confusion.

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