Film

The sun rises, spilling its rays over the land, so beautiful you can hardly believe this happens every day and you never noticed.

Thus begins The Fox and the Child, Luc Jacquet’s follow up to his Oscar-winning documentary, The March of the Penguins.

A nameless ten-year-old girl (Bertille Noel-Bruneau) is cycling through dense forest near her home, when she discovers a fox foraging for food. Mesmerised by her first experience of a fox at close range, she quietly tries to approach her. But like all wild animals, the fox is sensitive to the child’s presence and flees, leaving the little girl determined to find her fox again. We follow the resourceful child as she turns all manner of tricks to track down her fox, then watch in awe as they tame each other.

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The Dark Knight has whipped up such a hype frenzy that we wouldn’t be surprised if it cured the blind and healed the terminally ill.

In fact, people are going so potty over The Dark Knight that they’ve started to pretend that they’ve already seen it just so they can move onto speculation over Batman 3. So we may as well do the same. It’s not like we’ve got anything better to do.

Batman screenwriters David Goyer and Jonah Nolan have responded to claims that the baddies in Batman 3 will be Catwoman and The Penguin by saying that the baddies in Batman 3 definitely won’t be Catwoman and The Penguin. They’ve got a whole raft of other villains to chose from, so why pick the two most obvious? Especially when nobody’s put Lola Lasagne in a Batman movie yet.

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Wall-E director and Pixar stalwart Adam Stanton attributes his film’s meteoric success to behaving like a free-range chicken.

No jokes, at a recent press conference, which we were surprisingly invited to, he actually said: “When we were making this movie there was no one checking up on me, so I was basically a free range chicken left to do what I wanted.”

You heard it here first.

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Films about scaly, bright-red, middle-aged, barely-human creatures have been huge this year - just look at Sex And The City.

And now, adding to the list, is Hellboy II: The Golden Army - this week’s number one weekend box office movie. And Hellboy II should be proud of its achievements, too, because it managed to out-box office that film about lots of little Eddie Murphys living inside a big Eddie Murphy head. That’s impressive!

Actually, we’ll come clean and admit that we don’t know why so many people went to see Hellboy II: The Golden Army. We’re guessing that it’s because one of Bros is in it. Bros are still big, right?

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They are the guys we hate to love – the anti-heroes.

Amoral, ruthless, unorthodox and sometimes downright nasty they may be, but without them, going to the movie theatre would certainly be a lot duller.

But just why do we love them so much? Would we really want them in our circle of friends? Don’t get us wrong, we love Taxi Driver, but Travis Bickle would hardly be our first choice to go to the pub with.

Likewise, Snake Plisken, Mad Max and Dirty Harry would certainly be worth having around if things turned ugly, but would you really want to introduce your girlfriend to Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange or Alfie?

So what do they have which we like so much? Is it because we actually quite admire them? Not that there is much to admire. Looking down this list is like getting a textbook on psychological problems and looking down its contents. But there is one thing which all of them possess which we do all kind of admire - they really could not give a fuck what people think of them.

Harsh, yes, but certainly true. Anyway, enough rambling and on with the list.

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Drifting into cinemas this week is the much delayed The Mist, the third Stephen King adaptation from Frank Darabont, whose last two attempts - The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile - were both adored by critics and the public.

The Mist is a slight change of pace for the director, substituting the prison-enclosed stories of hope for an intense horror film. We’re pleased to say, though, this is a very good film that supplies shocking turns, great characters and some intense scenes.

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Like many people we enjoyed the original RoboCop, except for one thing - the ending wasn't depressing enough.

True, it was exciting enough when RoboCop stabbed that bad guy with the glasses, and touching when he referred to himself by his human name afterwards, but that's hardly very depressing, is it?

Are we the only ones who wanted to see RoboCop, his arms septic and withered from years of crippling heroin addiction, putting on a soul-destroying lesbian dildo show for a gaggle of sleazy businessmen?

Perhaps we are. But we always get what we want, which is why we're not completely surprised to hear that Darren Aronofsky - the director of Requiem For A Dream - is in talks to direct a new version of RoboCop. Seriously.

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So you’re Robert Downey Jr, perhaps the biggest movie star around right now. The world’s your oyster - so what’s your next move?

After the gigantic box office haul of Iron Man - one that’s likely to be repeated once Tropic Thunder is released later this summer - Robert Downey Jr can star in any movie he wants. But what movie has Robert Downey Jr decided to star in? A Sherlock Holmes movie, that’s what.

No, not the Sacha Baron Cohen/Will Ferrell Sherlock Holmes movie that was triumphantly announced earlier this week. Another Sherlock Holmes movie. A Sherlock Holmes movie where Sherlock Holmes is a musclebound action hero. A Sherlock Holmes movie where Sherlock Holmes is a musclebound action hero directed by Guy Ritchie. And there was us thinking that Robert Downey Jr had stopped taking drugs.

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Big Willy unzips his flies and unleashes his Hancock onto the big screen. A long in production project of the former Fresh Prince is an enjoyable if not a bit uneven summer blockbuster.

Things start promisingly with Will bucking trend as the foul-mouthed, alcoholic, reluctant superhero Hancock. Jumping straight into an action sequence, the opening is a funny, action-packed start of what seems to be an original take on the currently strong superhero genre.

Although it is obviously naive to think that the million dollar man Smith would star in a film as a character with few redeeming features, so the obvious turn around comes with the help of PR guru Ray who, after being saved by Hancock, insists on helping him turn his image around into a loveable crime fighter. Although the path is never smooth, Hancock’s attitude turns out not to be the only problem as Mary (Charlize Theron) puts a spanner in the works.

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Robert De Niro has a dream. Admittedly it’s not a great dream - it involves directing a couple of sequels to that boring movie about the CIA he made - but technically it’s still a dream.

Forget the fact that so few people watched The Good Shepherd when it was released that demand for even one sequel is about the same as demand for a sequel to the Ebola virus, because this is Robert De Niro’s dream. You can’t deny an old man his dream, can you?

Actually, we’re right behind Robert De Niro’s decision to keep churning out sequels to The Good Shepherd. With his current hit rate, one of them’s bound to be a knockabout family comedy co-starring Ben Stiller, and only an idiot would turn down the chance of seeing that, right?

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Will Smith just can't do anything wrong, can he? People always see his movies, even when they're critically-mauled, about boozed-up supermen and have silly endings.

Exhibit A: Hancock is number one in the US weekend box office. And, considering that Hancock's a movie which contains a scene about one man physically pushing another man's head into a third man's rectum, that's actually quite impressive.

Hancock's weekend box office success just furthers his incredible run of movies that are wildly popular despite not being especially great - I Am Legend, The Pursuit Of Happyness, Hitch, I, Robot, Men in Black II, Bad Boys II. A couple more of these babies under his belt and he might even beat the record currently held by Adam Sandler.

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It’s a little known fact that wars existed even before America was discovered.

Hollywood has done its very best to correct this mistake since, but there was a time when the world kicked the crap out of each other without any help from the US.

Anyway, to acknowledge the fact, Hecklerspray has rummaged through the annals of history to come up with the 20 best non-American war films.

Now, that’s not to say there are no Americans featured at all – that would be impossible.

But what we have tried to do is come up with either films about wars which did not involve the US at all or war stories told from a different country’s point of view.

It was difficult, we really struggled to cram it down into just 20, so we added a few honourable mentions.

Now, we are sure you have your own suggestions, and we are sure you miserable lot will have no hesitation in telling us which films we missed.

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