Thomas and the Magic Railroad. A mixture of live action, animation and modelling, Thomas and the Magic Railroad is an Americanised version of the British TV series based on the Reverend W Awdry’s children’s books. It’s whimsical stuff about the interaction of the railway (sorry, railroad) systems of a real community and a magical one and presumably inspired Andrew Lloyd-Webber to write Starlight Express. A “child psychology consultant” is listed in the final credits and one can only guess at the advice he might have provided. Philip French
Vertical Limit perfectly captures that mixture of genuine adventure-seeking, naked ambition and altitude insanity that seems to go with hanging around in the Himalayas. Chris O’Donnell plays the good guy who had to make a terrible climbing-related decision in his youth. Robin Tunney plays the sister who resents him for how that decision affected her. He stopped climbing and became a photographer for National Geographic, but she takes clients up mountains. Brother and sister meet again when she has to take a nasty version of Richard Branson up K2, the second highest and most dangerous mountain in the world. Naturally things go seriously wrong. The film makes good points about the whole affair becoming a media circus, when there is actually a war going on between India and Pakistan, and that this sport also attracts its fair share of interesting weirdos. The script is smart, witty and when you fall it’s forever. Neil Sonnekus
The Widow of Saint-Pierre. Living on the French colonial island of Saint-Pierre, off the coast of Canada, in 1850 is a married couple. He (Daniel Auteil) is an army captain and a free thinker; his wife (Juliette Binoche) is also a free thinker. Into their lives comes an oaf (Yugoslavian director Emir Kusturica, here moonlighting as an actor) who kills a man to find out whether he’s fat or big! (The English have their eccentrics, the French their lunatics, someone once said.) But there is no guillotine or executioner on this windswept island, and so the oaf is treated like a guest by the couple while Paris goes about its usual bureaucratic machinations. Naturally the couple’s odd behaviour gets tongues wagging, which perfectly reflects the homeland’s social ills on this beautiful Atlantic island. The build-up to the conclusion is magnificent. But director Patrice Leconte seems caught here between the profundity of his Ridicule and the Gallic ridiculousness of The Girl on the Bridge. NS