"I won’t tell you what happens when its Zack and Miri’s turn to perform, writes Joyce Glasser, "but no matter how hard-up you are, the cascade of syrupy sentimentality that follows is too high a price to pay for the little bit we are given."

There has been no previous attempt to dramatise and chronicle the history of the infamous terrorist group that defined a period in Germany history almost as darkly as the Fascist movement they were rebelling against. This is what 'The Baader Meinhof Complex' sets out to achieve... but does it succeed? asks Joyce Glasser.

Oliver Stone is the self-appointed chronicler of post WWII America’s darkest moments. He directed Salvador about American involvement in South America, Platoon, and Born on the 4th of July about Vietnam and its war veterans respectively, two films about era-defining presidents, JKF and Nixon, and World Trade Centre about 9/11. And now, rushed out in time to correspond with, if not influence, the US Presidential elections and George W. Bush’s ousting from power, W. Joyce Glaser reviews a fascinating, if flawed, film.

Terence Davies’ trilogy (Children, Madonna and Child and Death and Transfiguration) and his features, Distant Voices Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, are set in his home town, Liverpool.  Only the House of Mirth, based on the Edith Wharton novel was a departure.  Now, at 63, Davies returns to Liverpool, this time with a eulogy to a city that formed him through equal measures of pain, anger, beauty and happiness.

Picture Truly Madly Deeply meets The Office and you have something of the flavour of director/co-writer David Koepp’s bitter-sweet and mostly hilarious romantic comedy, writes Joyce Glasser.  Even better, it stars Ricky Gervais as the curmudgeon, Dr. Bertram Pincus.

Following the harrowing hunt for a serial killer in the Oscar winning No Country for Old Men, comes some relatively light relief from Joel and Ethan Coen. Burn after Reading is a mix of dark humour, satire and farce, along the lines of their other ‘comedies’: the Big Lebowski, Intolerable Cruelty, Lady Killers and Oh Brother Where Art Thou?

La Zona refers to a borough or area of an undisclosed Mexican city. In this case, it is the gated, high security refuge of a paranoid cluster of upper middle class families. Outside are the filthy, impoverished, dangerous slums that surround the zona.  On one stormy night, three teenage boys gain access to the zona and rob a house.  When the owner surprises them with a gun the robbery goes bad when one boy kills the owner.