More film reviews

There's a good idea behind Win A Date With Tad Hamilton: after all, what teenager has not dreamed of a date with a film star? America's favourite boy-next-door, Tad (Josh Duhamel), gets roped into this competition by his manager (Nathan Lane), who's worried Tad's real bad-boy self will become public knowledge. Pretty bumpkin Rosalee (Kate Bosworth) is the lucky winner, and pretty soon he's following the angelic checkout chick back to hicksville, hoping some of her shining goodness will rub off. But the potential for a tinselly fantasy is wasted on sanctimonious guff. Pete (Topher Grace), the genuine boy-next-door who's in love with Rosalee, is suitably distressed, but neither this nor the appearance of a megawatt star in a one-diner town is funny or affecting, probably because the scenario is screamingly predictable and the three leads are as dull as they are good-looking. The story's a throwback, but a charmless one: why do we get fed the virgin Rosalee rather than a normal girl with boyfriends? Legally Blonde director Robert Luketic ought to know enough about girl power to realise such sentimental rubbish is way past its sell-by date.

Monsieur N is a historical what-if film: what if Napoleon Bonaparte (Philippe Torreton) didn't die under guard on St Helena in 1821, or at least not in the way the history books say? What if he orchestrated an escape, or maybe just a different burial? Eurotrash's Antoine de Caunes puts on his director's tricorne for this multilingual exercise in historical revisionism but, oddly for such a funny man, his film is po-faced, overlong and frequently confusing, probably because its story - which involves switched corpses, lovelorn aides-de-camp and bribed Brits - is patently ludicrous.

What's worse than a cheesy tale of couples playing musical beds? Why, the above scenario with musical couples. The Other Side Of The Bed is an awkward fable of love-rat dilemmas: when Paula (Natalia Verbeke) dumps Pedro (Guillermo Toledo), he comes to weep on the shoulders of Javier (Ernesto Alterio) and Sonia (Paz Vega), little realising it's Javier that Paula's dumped him for. Soon Sonia's comforting Pedro, and the sexual shenanigans get progressively more complex and less entertaining, punctuated by some truly horrendous songs and choreography to match. Avoid.

Roman Polanski's Chinatown is a daring homage to the great films noir of the 1930s and 1940s because it places itself on a level with giants and manages not to look small. Jack Nicholson (pictured) is a private eye, Jake, duped into working for a rich but troubled lady (Faye Dunaway) with a father (Walter Huston) who's a lot richer - and a lot more trouble.

There's murder, intimidation, incest and dialogue as sharp as the knife Polanski's gangster character uses to carve a little persuasion into Jake's nose - all of it in the service of a story that revolves around LA's water supply.

Hardly the most glamorous subject, but this film is glam all right, from Nicholson's one-liners

to Dunaway's carmine lipstick. Who cares if the story's hard to fathom - even Raymond Chandler never understood the film adaptation of his novel The Big Sleep, and that's one of the alltime noir greats.

The Good Old Naughty Days

aspires to be more than just porn. Tartan, the distributors of this collection of early skin-flicks, talk about production standards, invention and humour, but they are done down by two factors: the compilers' intertitles, which are mainly an array of synonyms for genitalia, and the films themselves. With one exception - a hilarious cartoon about a man as undiscriminating as he is wellendowed - these films are more suitable for private viewing than for conventional public consumption (they were made for brothels). There are moments of unintentional humour, but mainly these are just hardcore films with more body fat.

The Other Side Of The Bed (El Otro Lado De La Cama)
Cert: cert15