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Twilight has a reasonably valiant attempt at the 'high-school-girl-falls-in-love-with-a-vampire' genre - but you'd be forgiven for thinking that the genre had already been successfully explored in Buffy, and you'd most likely be right. Nevertheless, there are just about enough differences to make this feel reasonably different to the Buffy franchise - though the main change is from the girl being self-assured and in control of everything, a Vampire Slayer no less, to being a personality-less obsessed damsel-in-distress, willing to sacrifice everything in order to be with a bloke she's only just met and who poses danger and an incomplete love life. While hard-core feminists (the type that don't just, correctly, demand equal treatment and equal rights and equal opportunities, but instead seem to find fault and gender-bias with everything ever invented) usually seem to me to be wittering away about very little, I've got to concede that they have rather a point here in saying this is a substantive step-back from Buffy.

This film tries to straddle the line between those who know and love the books, and those like me who don't, and it doesn't quite succeed - not enough is explained to feel satisfied with the story (like, why does the one guy keep making these vampires? Why do they keep going to school even though they've done it many times before? Why aren't they better at security when they know there are some 'human-eating' vampires around? Why does he creep into her room at night to watch her sleep (apart from the really obvious echo of Angel with Buffy)? And many other things. A better story would have enticed me to seek out the book to find out these answers, but not in this case), and there is far too much setup time when we 'don't know' what is going on (seriously, how many people in the cinema aren't going to know he's a vampire?). And while I appreciate that the film looks very washed-out to emphasise that this is a family of vampires, there's no real excuse for the whole film being this drab. I've lived in Washington State, and yes it is wet and often dull, but the colours are mostly beautiful.

Kristen Stewart does a fine impression of a girl with no real personality of her own, who spends the entire film looking either constipated or filled with an insatiable lust, and in fact she makes both those things look remarkably similar. This isn't necessarily a criticism - quite possibly the character is supposed to be like that, as as I've already said I don't know the books at all - but it does get quite tiresome after a while. Robert Pattinson equally does a good impression of a moody depressed odd teen who happens to be a vampire, and while he manages to open up on occasion he doesn't really absorb us in his character. There is some chemistry between the two, to be fair, but this doesn't exactly feel like Romeo-and-Juliet-style tragically doomed love, despite what the makers seem to want us to think.

Many complaints apart, this is still an ok film that tries to take a slightly different view on vampires, and at least avoids the most obvious conventions of 'new girl turns up at school in middle of year', which would have been tedious indeed. It is hard though to see how so many teenage girls seem to think that this story of giving up just about everything just to be with a vaguely irritating moody bloke who can never actually have sex with you (or if he does, will kill you), is somehow the best love story of all. Hmm - perhaps the inevitable sequel will redeem the characters somewhat. 5.5 out of 10.

Of all the (new) films I saw in 2008, Caramel seems to have been the only one I neglected to review reasonably soon after I saw it. So I'll rectify that here, though I admittedly can't remember a great deal about the in-depth details of the film, and my attempts to remember are mostly invoking memories of the similar-setting of the more recently seen You Don't Mess With The Zohan (my review), which is an experience I'd generally rather avoid.

What I do remember is that this is a nice character piece whose value stems from simple and straightforward relationships in the workplace. Each woman has a story that she needs to deal with, some amusing, some touching, some troubling. There are also a set of secondary characters who contribute to varying degrees to the proceedings. Nothing especially major happens, but the interactions work and are remarkably satisfying. It is nice to see a film from Lebanon, and even better to see a film from the Middle East that eschews the terrible troubles of the region, and instead shows people living everyday lives with everyday problems. Often something small like this is far more powerful than any political polemic, important as they are.

I'm not going to highlight any individual performances, as at the distance of 7 months or so since I've seen it, I don't feel qualified to do so. But I did enjoy this, and it deserves 7 out of 10.

The Tale Of Despereaux is an over-complicated, rambling, structurally unsound animated fantasy, which wins points for looking reasonably cute and having a few interesting ideas but not much else. One surprisingly accurate thing it did teach me is that rats apparently do kill mice (there's even a word for it : muricide). I suspect they don't generally try to eat Princesses though, especially not for no particularly good reason whatsoever except that it provides a perilous conclusion to the film.

There's too many plots here and many don't really contribute to the story - one suspects they are included merely to pad out the running time to feature length. For example, two characters find out they are long-estranged father and daughter, in an over-telegraphed twist that inputs nothing whatever into the main plot. We have an extended prologue before we meet our hero, which establishes the story in a drawn-out way that could have been achieved in seconds by the narrator - the only other use for it would be to flesh out the character of the rat Roscuro, but his motivations change over the course of the film so wildly and irrationally that such time is wasted anyway. You may also question the wisdom of drawing attention to rats and cooking, when there was a rather more well-done film on just that subject very recently. In any event, we finally meet our hero, who has the serious problem that he needs (and gets) no development over the course of the film whatever. He's already brave, daring, adventurous, and so events just bounce off him. And he disappears again as the film nears its climax for what seems like an age, while other tedious plots progress or tie up. Other things just go nowhere at all - what use are Despereaux's big ears (he never gets to use them for anything)? Why does the chef have a bizarre living creation made from vegetables that does almost nothing but talk in a stereotypical chef manner? How does the King's mood control the weather?

For that matter, why is there an intermittent narrator to this story anyway? Narrators may have a role to set the scene and tie off the last bow (see Enchanted (my review) for a recent obvious example) but here she is intrusive and telling us things we should be able to deduce anyway if the story was slightly better crafted. Careless use of narrators is one of my main bugbears at the moment, and this is a particularly careless example.

As for the fact this is a children's film, what lessons are we supposed to draw? Rats are evil? Be true to your own nature (ok, that's not such a bad one), even if you'll get killed for it? (which may be taking it a little too far!). Prosecute class warfare in the most cack-handed way possible? It's ok to have wild personality changes and cause people to almost get killed as long as you apologise afterwards? (to some degree, evoking echoes of Hallam Foe (my review), but that wasn't intended to be a children's film!)

Too many plots, no coherence, and while it looks ok its not a style of animation that I especially like (too pastel, too stylised humans). Rather a mess, I'm afraid. 4 out of 10.