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Reading this on mobile? Click here to view videoThis dislikable comedy is about dislikable characters who dislike each other. It's a dishonest picture about people agreeing to tell lies in the cause of peace but eventually coming out with uncomfortable truths that somehow lead to a happy, sentimental ending. The bride involved in the eponymous big wedding in fashionable Greenwich, Connecticut is the daughter (Amanda Seyfried) of a xenophobic stockbroker who's facing jail for fraud. The groom is the adopted Colombian son (Ben Barnes) of a priapic, alcoholic sculptor (Robert De Niro) who's left his kooky wife (Diane Keaton) for her best friend (Susan Sarandon). The tone is set by Keaton accidentally stumbling on De Niro talking about cunnilingus and then practising it on Sarandon beside the kitchen sink. Subsequently, the jokes are squeezed from the ragged plot with the grace of an arthritic senior citizen trying to get milk out of a coconut by hand. The oily officiating priest is Father Robin Williams, who's the last straw, or should that be the extreme unction?ComedyRobert De NiroDiane KeatonSusan SarandonRobin WilliamsPhilip Frenchguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view videoThis deeply moving animated movie from Japan's Studio Ghibli is being rereleased (along with My Neighbour Totoro) to mark its 25th anniversary. It's set in the last year of the second world war in a suburb of Tokyo devastated by American fire bombing, leaving the brave teenage Seita to care for his bewildered little sister Setsuko after their mother's death. She's last seen wrapped in blood-stained bandages like a mummy before being cremated. The stylised images suit the simplicity and gravity of a grim story of love, sacrifice and survival in the face of adult indifference and cruelty. It's an accomplished, affecting, relentless work. But seeing The Bridge on the River Kwai on TV a few hours later, I was reminded that there's another side to this story.AnimationPhilip Frenchguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

After years of minor and starring roles in low-budget independent pictures (mostly exploitation flicks produced by Roger Corman), Jack Nicholson achieved star status playing unaccommodated outsiders in two major countercultural films, Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970). Thus began a string of critical and popular successes that included Carnal Knowledge, Chinatown, The Last Detail and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. But there was, in 1972, the critical and box-office disaster of The King of Marvin Gardens, now a rarely revived cult classic back in cinemas and on DVD thanks to Park Circus.One of the most downbeat movies of the time, it features Nicholson as the deeply depressed, anti-charismatic David Staebler, who earns a modest living telling miserable tales about his family in the early hours of the morning on a Philadelphia FM radio station. He's lured at the height of winter to the once grand, now decaying New Jersey resort of Atlantic City by his estranged brother, Jason (Bruce Dern). This fast-talking, ever hopeful wheeler-dealer and con man is involved with gangsters in a dicey project to buy a Hawaiian island and turn it into a casino.Atlantic City is the model for the original 1930 Monopoly board, launched at the height of the Depression, and the game and the city are here a symbol for the despair and false hope engendered by the American dream. Jason is in prison without a get-out-of-jail card, and when he's bailed out he leads the weary, incredulous David on what is ultimately a dance of death, accompanied by an over-the-hill former beauty queen, Sally (Ellen Burstyn), and her whimsical, spaced-out stepdaughter (Julia Anne Robinson).The movie is a flawed masterpiece full of menace, surreal moments and obscure dialogues, with the city photographed in all its desolate, decaying beauty by László Kovácscorrect, who also shot Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. Probably the greatest sequence has the four main characters recreating the Miss America pageant in the desolate, deserted Convention Hall. Marvin Gardens (a misspelling by the game's creator of Marven Gardens, a township south of Atlantic City) is a yellow property on the Monopoly board. The movie is best viewed alongside Louis Malle's masterly Atlantic City, shot a decade later while the town was in the process of getting a multimillion-dollar facelift.Jack NicholsonDramaPhilip Frenchguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

This worthwhile centenary documentary centres on the influence on Britten's music of the lifelong leftwing convictions, pacifism and hatred of cruelty that were engendered by his education at the progressive Gresham's school in Holt, East Anglia, the alma mater of WH Auden and Donald Maclean. The case is well argued. There are useful contributions from, among others, the composer and teacher Joseph Horowitz and the cellist Anita Lasker Wallfisch (former inmate of Auschwitz, who heard him accompany Yehudi Menuhin at Belsen after the liberation in 1945). The music is well chosen and performed. John Hurt delivers the commentary with characteristic authority. Unfortunately, the dramatised sequences are acted with stilted tentativeness.DocumentaryBenjamin BrittenPhilip Frenchguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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