New in Town
Renée Zellweger stars as Lucy in New In Town, a romcom about a Miami company executive who is sent to a small, freezing Minnesota town to oversee the restructuring of a yoghurt manufacturing plant. True to the hackneyed script of the big-city girl who has trouble adjusting to the underwhelming schedules of a small town, Lucy has her fair share of people who drag Jesus into ordinary conversation.
As she is shown around the town by her personal assistant she meets Ted, the unionist, played by Harry Connick Jr, at a dinner at which, predictably, things go wrong. Their icy relations thaw when one cold day Lucy nearly freezes to death. She is saved by Ted, who, coincidentally, happens to be driving on the same road. New in Town is weighed down by its predictability and blandness that comes, in part, because of its use of happenstance and other easy solutions for difficult problems. — Percy Zvomuya
Watchmen
The long-awaited movie adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel (the greatest of them all, bar none) does a decent job of translating to the screen a story at least as complex as a big novel with no pictures. The book is, in fact, a deep examination of the conventions of the comic-book genres of the masked crusader and the supernatural superhero, as well as a dark, wry reflection on the pulpy, sensational roots of comic-book narrative; it also contains many moral and political issues to chew on.
Some of the subplots and supplementary material that so enriched the graphic novel have had to be removed to get the film down to a mere three hours long, but the basic storyline is there and it is realised with a visual panache that confidently updates the look and feel of the original. At the same time, though, the film rather deadens some of the climactic resolutions by reverting to a very mid-1980s sense of impending nuclear destruction, which feels outdated today.
But then this is a world in which Richard Nixon is still in the White House, well into his fourth term; the era is an alternative 1985. Actors such as Matthew Goode, Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley and Jeffrey Dean Morgan embody their characters well, and Billy Crudup gives a convincing face (though probably not body) to the Übermensch figure, Dr Manhattan. Keeping faith with the graphic novel, the film allows him to appear naked a lot of the time, though there is a suspicious lack of mobility in the lower regions. — Shaun de Waal