Death at a funeral

There’s no dearth of rude humour on screens right now, but Death at a Funeral stands apart because its characters - mostly reserved upper-middle-class British folk who have gathered to bury a patriarch—are determined to keep a stiff upper lip no matter what. That’s no small feat when one of the mourners has ingested a psychedelic drug and another is secretly holding a would-be blackmailer hostage in a room metres from where the body lies in state.

Heart is represented by the movie’s hero, Daniel (Matthew Macfadyen) a super-responsible sad sack who arranged his father’s funeral. Daniel is a would-be writer who has promised his wife (Keeley Hawes) that they’ll move out of mom’s house one day. Robert (Rupert Graves) is a pampered hotshot novelist who has flown in first class from New York yet pleads poverty when asked to cover half of the funeral expenses. Daniel must also juggle the emotional demands of myopic, squabbling guests and the anxiety of an overscheduled reverend (Thomas Wheatley). The most striking guest is a mysterious dwarf named Peter (Peter Dinklage, natch) who shows up uninvited, reveals a secret, demands a share of the family fortune and spends much of the film hogtied and abused.

Horror show

Sweeney Todd: The demon barber of Fleet Street

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is as dark and terrifying as any motion picture in recent memory, not excluding the bloody installments in the Saw franchise. Indeed, Sweeney is as much a horror film as a musical: It is cruel in its effects and radical in its misanthropy, expressing a rigorously pessimistic view of human nature.

Sweeney Todd balances its inherent grisliness with a whimsical vitality. The basic story is a revenger’s tragedy more Jacobean than Victorian, but the director nonetheless wrings some grim, boisterous comedy out of both the impulse for vengeance and the bustling spirit of commerce. A barber, wronged by a powerful judge, returns to London and sets up shop, cutting throats as well as hair. The bodies of his victims are turned into savory meat pies by Mrs Lovett, his energetic partner in business and crime. Cannibalism and mass murder is the basis for a hit show. It is a fable about a world from which the possibility of justice has vanished, replaced on one hand by vain and arbitrary power, on the other by a righteous fury that quickly spirals into madness.

Perfect timing

Vantage Point

Vantage Point is a gimmick in search of a point, is nothing if not, er, timely. Set mostly in a Spanish city, it has been given a hard sheen by the director Pete Travis. This is competent if completely impersonal filmmaking of a familiar type that finds the usual allotment of famous, or at least famous enough, actors —Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker, Matthew Fox and Sigourney Weaver —arranged in various configurations in assorted spaces and delivering instantly forgettable dialogue. What does register: a slimmed-down Whitaker looks as sleek as an otter.

This jigsaw puzzle exploits a repellent conceit—the shooting of an American president (William Hurt, effectively insincere)—in a vague attempt to explore questions of narrative and subjectivity through the box-office-friendly form of a thriller. Instead of pushing the story forward, the filmmakers instead repeatedly return to the crime, or rather to a handful of witnesses, all of whom saw the same exact event from critically different angles.

Thumbs up

The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others is a suspenseful, ethically exacting drama, beautifully realised by the writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.