Running at: City Pride (Kothrud), E-Square

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 mere 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) whose timetable is thrown out of whack when the deceased's body - well, I won't spoil that gag, because it's one of the six.

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

Movie Name: Sweeney Todd

Directed by: Tim Burton

Cast: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall

Running at: INOX,Gold Adlabs, E-Square

Sweeney Todd, the Daemon 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 breathtakingly, rigorously pessimistic view of human nature. As it was originally performed onstage, with all the songs composed for it, Sweeney Todd balanced 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 as the basis for a hit show - what a perverse and delicious joke.

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.

Thumbs up

Movie Name: The Lives of Others

Directed by: Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck

Cast: Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Muhe, Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Tukur, Thomas Thieme, Hans-Uwe Bauer

Running at: INOX, E-Square

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