Film reviews: Green Lantern | Potiche | Stake Land | Life in a Day | The Messenger

Our film critic reviews the best and worst of this week's new releases...

Green Lantern (12A) ***

Directed by: Martin Campbell

Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Mark Strong

ONE of the less well-known DC superheroes, Green Lantern has neither the simplicity of Superman nor the brutality of Batman to make the transition to film an easy sell. That's perhaps why this first outing frequently feels like a well-crafted movie at war with its own silly concept. That Casino Royale director Martin Campbell has managed to wrestle the character's gibberish mythology into a workable movie is in itself a bit of a heroic feat given that it involves an intergalactic gang of fearless alien peacekeepers who protect their specific galaxies (or sectors) from destruction using magic rings. Said rings allow the chosen bearers to manifest in physical form anything they can imagine, something Ryan Reynolds' cocky, responsibility shirking fighter pilot Hal Jordan isn't quite ready to deal with when he finds himself unwittingly recruited into the Green Lantern Corps. This potentially clunky back-story is handled relatively nimbly, however, and while the film doesn't deviate too much from the standard origins story template, Campbell orchestrates his set-pieces efficiently and coherently, coaxes a good villainous performance from Peter Sarsgaard and – even though this is more po-faced than it should be – has a sense of humour about the ridiculousness of its heroes' outfits.

Potiche (15) **

Directed by: Francois Ozon

Starring Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu

FRENCH director Franois Ozon (8 Women, 5x2) is like the inverse of Woody Allen or Pedro Almodvar: watching his funny, campy films is more demanding than watching his serious stuff. Sadly, his latest film, Potiche, falls into the former category. A screwball farce set in 1977, it stars Catherine Deneuve as Suzanne Pujol, a trophy wife, or potiche, to Robert (Fabrice Luchini), the chauvinistic owner of an umbrella factory inherited from Suzanne's father. When a bout of industrial action results in the arrogant Robert's hospitalisation, Suzanne steps into the breach and soon discovers she has a flair for business, organisation and labour relations that she never knew she had. That's the film's cue for a breezy, light-hearted romp about female self-empowerment, but however welcome and heartening that subject matter is, the relentlessly arch tone Ozon adopts proves too grating and any enjoyment comes from the goodwill generated by its star, who proves an obliging presence as she embraces Ozon's blatant nods to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, willingly sports retro-jogging suits and, at one point, indulges in a spot of syncopated disco dancing with fellow icon Grard Depardieu.

Stake Land (15) ***

Directed by: Jim Mickle

Starring: Nick Damici, Connor Paolo, Kelly McGillis

A REMINDER that vampires don't have to be tortured teens or seductive aristocrats arrives in this low-key but impressively realised apocalyptic horror movie about a vampire hunter and his apprentice battling bloodsuckers and religious cults in an America overrun with feral fang-bearers. Co-writer Nick Damici stars as Mister, a lone vampire slayer who reluctantly takes a young boy (Connor Paolo) under his wing after saving him from an attack that wipes out the kid's family. Hitting the highways in an effort to get to the supposedly vampire-free Canada (renamed by survivors as New Eden), they find themselves being targeted by a loony Dracula wannabe who thinks the vampires are doing the work of a vengeful God. Director Jim Mickle (who made the straight-to-DVD Zombie Attack on Mulberry Street) has a good feel for the world he's created here, filling it with plausible characters and making it feel lived-in, ensuring that while it doesn't deviate too much from a lot of apocalyptic scenarios, it never feels staid. Think of it as The Road with less pomp and more chomp; a film with big ideas, but one that's also proud of its genre status.

Life in a Day (12A) **

Directed by: Kevin Macdonald

THOUGH this YouTube-funded global snapshot of 24 July, 2010, is rather loftily being touted as a record of the world as seen through the eyes of its inhabitants, all it really does is show how narcissistic we've become. Compiled from thousands of hours of user-submitted footage, the stuff that has made the cut is mostly comprised of attention seekers desperate to validate their lives by participating in a film co-executive produced by Ridley and Tony Scott and "directed" by Oscar-winner Kevin Macdonald. As a result, there's very little here of much worth, either as a historical record or as narrative of the day in question as sub-Koyaanisqatsi montages of landscapes flow into tedious scenes of people either sharing their most intimate moments, answering anodyne questions, or forcing their reluctant relatives to appear on camera (the scene where a father won't stop filming his tearful son on the day his mother has to go into hospital for major operation brings to mind Peeping Tom). Footage of the Berlin Love Parade tragedy during which many lost their lives does raise interesting questions about exploitation, but the film is too facile to make it worth engaging with them.

The Messenger (15) ***

Directed by: Oren Moverman

Starring: Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson, Samantha Morton

THE numbing effects of modern war on troops returning to civilian life has been dealt with countless times in movies, from Taxi Driver and First Blood to more recent fare such as Stop-Loss and Ken Loach's wretched Route Irish, so all credit to writer/director Oren Moverman for coming up with a new spin on the familiar post-'Nam tale of embittered veterans struggling to reintegrate into society. The Messenger examines the issue of post-traumatic stress through the eyes of two soldiers assigned to bereavement notification duty: effectively going door-to-door informing next of kin that their loved ones have been killed in action. Ben Foster gives another wired and wiry performance as an emotionally scarred war-hero learning how to deliver bad news from his older, but less decorated superior (Woody Harrelson) and Moverman uses the intricacies of the coded language they're supposed to use and their trained responses to unpredictable behaviour to subtly reveal the ways in which the dehumanising effects of war have become systemic. As Ben pursues an uneasy friendship with recent widow Olivia (Samantha Morton), who feels as if she lost her husband to the war long before his death, the film carefully builds to a cathartic ending and delivers an absorbing portrait of the need for human interaction.