THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON ****
Starring: Brad Pitt, Kate Blanchett, Julia Ormond, Taraji P Henson
Dir: David Fincher

An old woman lies dieing in a New Orleans hospital, hurricane Katrina is approaching and she asks her daughter to read to her from an old journal: thus we are introduced to the curious case of Benjamin Button.
Everybody by now knows the 'gimmick”, the extraordinary central conceit of the film, which is that Brad Pitt in the title role lives his life backwards. He is born as a grotesquely wrinkled and old-looking baby, is an eighty year-old boy with arthritis and weak sight, and slowly grows physically younger, later becoming an old man suffering dementia in the body of a young boy.
Obviously with a premise like that you need to do a pretty special job to carry it off, and the film is full of rare wonders, from it's panoramic trip through the years from Benjamin's birth in 1918 to the present, to the remarkable aging and visual effects that are seamless and invisible, so totally convincing that you almost forget that Kate Blanchett ages even more than Brad Pitt during the film. The CGI make his the showy central turn but her performance is a marvel, never less than totally convincing and believable.
But most remarkable is that the film manages to transcend the unlikely and contrived premise and become an aching meditation on the transient nature of life, a subtly mythical parable, and a slow sad beautiful love story.
And it is slow. The film gives the audience time to think and absorb, and probably will suffer from the distractions inherent in home viewing. At two and three quarter hours it is long and absorbing and will most repay viewers willing to be absorbed without distraction.

Role Models (****) looks like being dumb crass fun, as two irresponsible friends find themselves diverting a month in jail by becoming mentors for troubled kids, but due to an unlikely combination of charm and complete wackiness ends up being much better than that. Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott and an entertaining odd couple, there are cameos of wonderful eccentricity, and the climax which mixes Kiss costumes and medieval fantasy battling is a surreal masterstroke. And why are foul-mouthed small black kids so funny? Dunno, but this one is. The blu-ray comes with an extended version though most of the extra stuff is on the DVD as deleted scenes.

Someone kills Brian Cox's dog in Red (***) and the rest of the film is a reaction to that one cruel deed. The someone in question is a clearly sociopathic teen, who shoots the old man's dog right in front of him as he is fishing. This is, in a left-field way, a revenge movie, but an unexpected one. It is unexpected in that everything the man does – simply trying to get an acknowledgement and apology – is decent and moral; there is no grabbing of the shotgun and blazing away. This is a slow-burning little film, easy to ignore, but one that packs a surprising power by its conclusion.

The Spirit (*) is, without putting too fine a point on it, a disaster, one of those valiant experiments that, from pretty much the first frame, doesn't work. Shame really. I loved Sin City and the thought of iconic comic book writer Frank Miller – who co-directed that one – making another film in similar style was mouth-watering. Sadly, this is knockabout cartoon comedy and the stark tough black and white look of Sin City is completely at odds with the material. Perhaps if it was filmed in day-glo colours it could have limped by as silly slapstick but the result here is almost bewilderingly bad.

The set of a no-budget pirate flick is the setting for Dark Reel (*), which aims for a mood of light-hearted horror as a mysterious killer, somehow connected to the pre-credits death of a fifties actress, starts knocking off the stars. Lance Henriksen has a nice line in in-jokey dialogue as the exploitation film company boss but a chubby Edward Forlong fares less well and the uneven tone and general uselessness of everything else suggest the reason this has remained unreleased for the last few years.