FIlm reviews: What to Expect When You’re Expecting | Free Men | North Sea Texas | The Source | Men in Black 3

The Scotsman’s film critics cast their eye over the latest cinematic releases

What to Expect When You’re Expecting (12A)

Directed by: Kirk Jones

Starring: Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Banks, Chris Rock

Rating: *

IN TURNING Heidi Murkoff’s bestselling, non-narrative pregnancy manual into a Hollywood movie about the wonders and woes of childbirth, What to Expect When You’re Expecting ditches the potentially interesting story of Murkoff herself – twentysomething woman unexpectedly falls pregnant and turns the experience into a multimillion-dollar business – in favour of another mirthless ensemble comedy that reinforces gender stereotypes and uses lowest-common-denominator thinking to tap into a universal experience.

Cameron Diaz, Elizabeth Banks, Jennifer Lopez and Anna Kendrick play women in various states of emotional imbalance as they cope with their specific pregnancy and fertility-related issues. Meanwhile, their significant others worry and panic about how their lives will be changed, fears that are reinforced, but of course quickly alleviated, by a Greek chorus of pram-pushing fathers (led by Chris Rock) who jokingly confirm ever “life is over” cliché before falling into line with the film’s hardcore family values message by proselytising on the overwhelming bliss of parenthood. Needless to say, the end result is torture to sit through, though maybe that’s the point: like the birthing process experienced by the characters, the film is so painful to endure that when it’s all over a joyous feeling (albeit of relief) does wash over you.

Free Men (12A)

Directed by: Ismaël Ferroukhi

Starring: Tahar Rahim, Michael Lonsdale, Mahmud Shalaby, Lubna Azabal

Rating: ***

FREELY inspired – as the pre-credits disclaimer puts it – by real events, this Second World War drama tells the intriguing, little known story of a Parisian mosque that sheltered Jews during the Nazi Occupation. Our entry point is Younes (Tahar Rahim), one of the many North African Muslims who flooded into the city looking for work before the war put a halt to immigration.

Now scraping a living selling goods on the black market, he’s coerced by the Vichy authorities into spying on the mosque after being caught hocking his illicit wares. Self-preservation, however, soon gives way to selflessness as he falls for Jewish resistance fighter Leila (Lubna Azabal) and befriends local singer Salim (Mahmoud Shalaby), whom he discovers is being sheltered by the mosque’s compassionate imam, Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit.

He’s played by Michael Lonsdale (Of Gods and Men), who brings typical gravitas to a film that offers a thoughtful meditation on a quietly heroic tale of interfaith co-operation against collaboration. But it’s really A Prophet star Tahar Rahim’s ability to command the screen with few words that makes this slow-burning tale more engaging than it would otherwise have been.

North Sea Texas (15)

Directed by: Bavo Defurne

Starring: Ben Van den Heuvel, Eva van de Gucht, Mathias Vergels

Rating: ***

ACCLAIMED for his gay-themed short films, writer/director Bavo Defurne’s debut feature is a pleasant, if unremarkable, coming-of-age story about a shy, good-looking boy called Pim who falls in love with his kindly neighbour’s older son Gino.

Kicking off when Pim is ten and doesn’t quite understand his attraction, the bulk of the film takes place five years later when Gino initiates an exploratory relationship with a smitten Pim.

This at least prevents the film from relying on the usual sexual confusion tropes to bolster the drama, although Pim’s awakening is complicated in other predictable ways: Gino’s sister, Sabrina, has a crush on Pim and threatens to expose his and her brother’s relationship; and Gino is also exploring his sexuality with a French girl he’s met at work.

Add to this mix Pim’s dysfunctional home life with his neglectful mother, and the fact that Gino’s mother has some health issues of her own, and the scene is set for a fairly rudimentary run through every dramatically inert world-cinema cliché of the last decade. What distinguishes North Sea Texas, though, is the rich, dreamy visual style that successfully turns the otherwise drab 1960s Belgian setting into the kind of mythic landscape that introverted teenagers fantasise about escaping into.

The Source (15)

Directed by: Radu Mihaileanu

Starring: Leïla Bekhti, Hiam Abbass, Hafsia Herzi

Rating: **

SET in an unnamed Arab village where a battle for sexual equality is brewing over the lack of running water, this comedy-drama-cum-parable is a strange, uneven film that sends out mixed messages about what it’s actually trying to say.

On the one hand, its stance seems very pro-women, revolving as it does around a tale of a progressive outsider (Leïla Bekhti) who motivates the other wives in the village to go on a “love strike” until the idle men start pulling their weight and helping them fetch water. On the other hand, despite the best efforts of an engaging cast, none of the characters has been given any real depth; they’re mere ciphers for an age-old tale about modernisation versus tradition.

Indeed, rather than turning the film – which presents itself as a fairytale – into a broad satire on the need to change horrendously backwards attitudes towards gender, it becomes a disappointingly soapy melodrama that seems to suggest the best course of action for progress is to lessen the burden on women in the hope that they’ll stop complaining and old attitudes can once again prevail.

ALISTAIR HARKNESS

Men in Black 3 (12A)

Directed by: Barry Sonnenfeld

Starring: Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Emma Thompson

Rating: **

THE first Men in Black, a fresh, smart pulping of alien invasion clichés, opened at the height of summer 1997. Fifteen years (and one underwhelming sequel) later, it may be telling that MIB3 shuffles out altogether timidly at May’s end, into a marketplace blitzed by Avengers Assemble.

With original ideas apparently at a premium, this quasi-prequel takes the Marty McFly route, invoking a “temporal fracture” that sends Will Smith’s Agent J back to 1969 to help his partner K (Tommy Lee Jones now; a livelier Josh Brolin then) close the one case that continues to bug him.

The monster-mash business – Smith wrestling with an outsized fish creature, an alien’s head deployed as a bowling ball – retains its charms, but the counterculture schtick is too rarely funny, and for all the whizzy 3D thrown at us, it still ends up clanking round on the same gantry flooring as a dozen other recent superhero movies.

Taken with the similarly fitful Dark Shadows and American Pie: Reunion, it’s enough to make you wonder whether mainstream Hollywood’s nostalgia has become a sickness. Haven’t we moved on from this? And if we have, why can’t they?

MIKE McCAHILL