Since Walk Hard, I've pretty much gorged myself on film. I've seen six movies all at Vue Gunwharf Quays, helped greatly by their Orange Wednesdays 2 for 1 scheme and I will now attempt to review them all. Crazy? Maybe.

First up was Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. I saw this and then No Country for Old Men - perhaps not a very clever idea. Anyway, Sweeney Todd is a film version of the stage musical by Stephen Sondheim. Therefore everyone sings what they'd be better off saying. This doesn't get old quite as quickly as you may expect, and leaves you plenty of time to love/hate Johnny Depp's singing in the title role. The songs are actually quite funny, despite their gory subject matter, but the best is a duet by Depp and Helena Bonham Carter (acting in her fifth film with hubby Tim Burton in the Director's chair) as Mrs. Lovett a pie shop owner. With cameos from Sacha Baron Cohen (very good) and Anthony Head (blink and you'll miss him), plus the likes of Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall in bigger, creepier roles Sweeney Todd is bloody good, in every sense, but not for the squeamish. 

Minutes later and I'm sat in front of beautiful Texan landscapes as Tommy Lee Jones (ageing local sheriff trying to make sense of a changing world) is on the trail of Josh Brolin (wisecracking opportunist crook) who is being hunted by Javier Bardem (the scariest man - and haircut - of the year)because Brolin stole a case of drug-money. This is a Coen brothers film, and as such requires a bit of interpretation. This is great. I'm not sure if I've seen a Coen brothers film before, least not all the way through, but I like them. I ought to see more of their work. 

So, an unsettling, nerve-jangling, blood-letting evening, all in all.

Perhaps ignoring the headrush of seeing two films back-to-back in the cinema, perhaps encouraging it, I saw Cloverfield and Juno the following Saturday. 

Each recommended by almost all the critics, Cloverfield and Juno share an odd sort of anti-Hollywood sentiment. Cloverfield is a relatively small budget monster movie which focuses on the human story without skimping on the CGI. Whilst Juno couldn't be more independent if it wore a t-shirt with 'Fuck you I'm independent' written on it in big homemade lettering. 

Cloverfield is best known for being the film with THAT mind-blowing trailer. Y'know the one where a party is interrupted by the Statue of Liberty's severed head crashing into the buildings and streets outside. This was just the starting point for fans of Lost-creator J. J. Abram's work. His fans are a different breed. They will pick apart and analyse every snippet of anything even rumoured to be connected to one of J. J's projects. So, if you wanted to, you could follow the big fact hunt for the back-story for Cloverfield. You'd encounter a suspicious slush drinks company, an eco-terrorist organisation and about half a dozen Myspace accounts for the party-going characters. 

I followed all this second-hand, through CloverfieldClues, after I was pointed to the website 1-18-08.com, one of the key parts of the massive online marketing campaign.

It lives up to much of its own hype, and if you've seen it, you too can ponder the possibility of a sequel! I like the idea of a fake documentary which is interrupted during filming by another attack. Perhaps the monster's still alive; perhaps it left something deadly in its wake.

Juno, as you'll have guessed from my earlier uber-blog is a pretty big deal. I wanted to see it almost a month before its full release, so I must have been impressed by a lot of stuff in the trailer. I found out about Juno during a YouTube click-frenzy, and loved the slang that the younger characters speak. I loved the plot, a re-jig of the TV-movie teen pregnancy story - only with heart and laughs, and I loved the fact that it stars Ellen 'Hard Candy/X-Men 3' Page and Michael 'Superbad' Cera. That the film also features a hamburger phone (you'll all want one) left me willing February to come quicker. 

I snaffled advanced preview tickets from Vue (who I'm glad decided to show Juno, even if the American audience had to prove its worth first) and so popped in to one of the smaller screens after the Cloverfield screening looked like it had finished. Turns out it hadn't quite, but I didn't have all day. So to Juno - clever, funny, touching, beautifully filmed, containing inappropriate touching, smart-without-being-smartass, teen-focused without being preachy and the best opening sequence featuring Sunny D and a reference to Etch-A-Sketch. 

And the soundtrack is totally awesome. Buy it, share it, and love it. 

Yesterday featured Russell Brand. He was in both Penelope and St. Trinian's - the last of my twofer Film Fests to date.

Penelope stars Christina Ricci with piggy ears and a snout. Odd though that sentence is, its nothing compared to the accent-fun her fellow actors indulged in. Set in some sort of Mid-Atlantic London, where the Brit-born can practise their US English and the Americans can pretend to be the landed gentry of the UK, it’s hard to place at times. Couple this with the fact that Ricci is still cute as a button despite the bacon-features and certainly not jump-through-a-plate-glass-window repulsive, and you start to wonder who could come up with this head-funk. Reece Witherspoon.  Sort of. She stars in it and her production company - Type A Films - had a hand producing it. It’s a lovely film, if a bit hit and miss. Brand plays a man from the male lead's past, btw.  James McAvoy is that male lead - though you'd never guess by sound alone. I'd have preferred his actual accent, but the films pretty nice as is.

St. Trinian's stars Russell 'tousled-hair sex-fiend' Brand as Flash Harry, the go-between with the criminal underworld for the schoolgirls and hopeful suitor of the Head Girl. She's played by Gemma 'mysterious leaker of Bond secrets' Arterton who is excellent and sexy - sexcellent, yeah I said it.

The plot of St. Trinian's is simple. The school is teetering on the brink of destruction at the hands of Colin Firth as the Education Minister, and the girls see that it's their duty to raise the necessary cash to keep the school in the black. These girls are feisty, no-nonsense and skilled. They decide to steal a famous painting and fence it to get the money, to do this they need entry to the gallery where the painting is, so they cheat their way to the final of a University Challenge-style quiz show presented by Stephen Fry. Here they must attempt a Mission Impossible - steal the art before the Education Minister, his posh bully daughter or the entire crew of the quiz find out their plan. Told you it was simple. 

Drawing its influences both from the previous outings of the troublesome school girls and modern day school tribes - Chavs, Emos, Geeks, unruly first years etc., St. Trinian's is a great laugh.  This is probably because of all the Brit talent this film contains. The previously mentioned cameos are all spot on, but its Rupert Everett as a rich toff art dealer AND his sister, the school's headmistress, who really proves himself. He clearly loved the drag-act, and his Prince Charles-spin as her brother is always good for a laugh.

Phew! I think I'll just sit here now; you can hook the next lot of films to my veins.