If Nora sometimes suffers from a lack of ease, at least there is a real sense of human innocence, of something radiant and imaginative being set loose between two people.The Whole Nine Yards is a popular but cretinous comedy starring Matthew Perry (Chandler in Friends) as a nervous dentist who gets involved in a murderous situation with his hit-man neighbour (Bruce Willis.) Poor Perry – fatter than suits him, the edge taken away from him in more ways than one – tries to be Chandler (neurotic, spitting out phrases, hanging on to lines, waiting for the right moment and atmosphere) but there is no Monica, or enthusiastic studio audience, to shore him up. The film lacks a central gimmick, and Willis is maddeningly supercilious.One Day in September, Kevin Macdonald’s long and meticulous Oscar-winning documentary, is an account of the Black September terrorist attack on Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics. With creeping vigour, the film employs contemporary footage (there is much of this, of course, since the whole thing was played out in front of the prying free press) and an interview with the last surviving member of the terrorist gang.The conclusion – that the German authorities behaved in an inept, and then utterly shifty way – is alarming.Macdonald seems particularly interested in the democratic, inclusive eye of television, and how it works both for and against our notions of heroism. So, we see a 19-year-old terrorist looking like a matinee idol, but full of deadly emptiness; and moments later, an Israeli fencing master, poignant via his physical blandness Both occupy the same frame.

Both tell a different story.Final Destination has a teenager (Devon Sawa) being bloodily stalked by death. There is some chat about “death’s design”, which is now expected in popular Hollywood horror, but really the film just wants to scare us senseless. How charmingly old-fashioned.Saving Grace has Brenda Blethyn playing a middle-class widow seeking to maintain her expensive pile in Cornwall by growing marijuana The film, however peachy, is just impossible to dislike. The best bits feature the rest of the cast (Martin Clunes, playing a local doctor, particularly) smoking joints in such a way (smoke coming out of the nose and ears, in Gandalf-like rings) that desperately hint they do it every night in real life, OK? Down to You is awful, witless. Two New York undergraduates (Freddie Prinze Jr and Julia Stiles) fall in and out of love.

With the exception of the occasional scene with Stiles (who is like a fair version of Ali McGraw) there is not a believable minute.. The first hazily shimmering image of Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides is of a lawn-sprinkler, a classic status symbol and infallible signifier of suburban affluence. Given that sprinkler, as well as the fact that virtually the only thing one knew of the film in advance was that its plot concerned the suicides of five sisters in the same family – and, no, it isn’t based on a true story, thank heaven, but on a cultish novel by Jeffrey Eugenides – one’s initial supposition was that it would be the latest of several recent exposés of the covert tensions and hypocrisies of Middle America. And one of the film’s virtues is that, at least until its overdetermined ending, it’s much more interesting than that. The first hazily shimmering image of Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides is of a lawn-sprinkler, a classic status symbol and infallible signifier of suburban affluence.

Given that sprinkler, as well as the fact that virtually the only thing one knew of the film in advance was that its plot concerned the suicides of five sisters in the same family – and, no, it isn’t based on a true story, thank heaven, but on a cultish novel by Jeffrey Eugenides – one’s initial supposition was that it would be the latest of several recent exposés of the covert tensions and hypocrisies of Middle America. And one of the film’s virtues is that, at least until its overdetermined ending, it’s much more interesting than that.
Though The Virgin Suicides is set in a Detroit suburb in the 1970s, its action is recollected, a quarter of a century on, by a young male narrator who had once been witness to the events it relates. The family in question, the Lisbons, consists of father, an affable maths teacher (James Woods, all the more poignant for underplaying the role); mother, a frumpy, repressed housewife (Kathleen Turner, unrecognisable); and their five adolescent daughters, each more scrumptiously blonde and peachy-complexioned than the last: Mary, Cecilia, Therese, Bonnie and, the only one we ever come to know, Lux. (An unlikely name, surely, for so conservative a couple to give their child?) And the girls are kept on a tight leash by their strict if, to start with, hardly tyrannical Catholic parents.