Jane Campion says she made a movie about John Keats because she “was terrified of poetry”. A tricky poem was like a spider in a high corner of her brain; making meaning hard to reach; staining her enjoyment. But Keats proved a good teacher. As he says in the movie: “A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.” Bright Star is about a love of verse.

An impoverished Keats is a lodger at the Brawne household in 1818. His poetry has not sold well. He shares a bachelor parlour with his friend Charles Brown and spends his days, like most writers, staring at a blank page the way a sniper watches an open window. Then one day his landlady’s daughter takes an interest in his poems. Her name is Fanny Brawne and she dresses like a rare orchid. She speaks to Keats with a directness he finds intriguing. She wants to understand his work. Since Keats lacks funds, she agrees to pay him to be her poetry tutor. She will become Keats’s muse, and the “Bright Star” of his most rapturous sonnet.

“Bright star, would I were as steadfast as thou art/ Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night…No – yet still steadfast, still unchangeable/ Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast…” In those lines – that mixture of headiness and eroticism – Jane Campion finds her movie. The love between John Keats and Fanny Brawne is chaste, unyielding and tragic. Like Keats’s poem, it conjures a feeling like taking your last breath; that special awareness that comes with sensing mortality. There is no sex in the movie, but the physical connection between the two leads is palpable. Their every kiss is like a resuscitation. Their every touch pierces skin.

Ben Whishaw plays Keats as a bookish man with a roaring heart. There’s an intensity about him, but nothing threatening. He’s a man who could look right through you if he were reading. But he’s also present – the way people are when they have experienced death at a young age. He isn’t sentimental, or mawkish. Rather, he’s someone who has a passion in life, and who is loved because of that passion. When Jane Campion films Whishaw sitting, musing, by a tree, another actor might look fey or ridiculous. Whishaw looks real, as if he really were receiving inspiration. Even his consumptive coughing fits avoid the ominous-cough cliché.

Abbie Cornish, faced with the more difficult task of embodying a muse, goes the practical route. Fanny Brawne isn’t an inscrutable beauty, or a tantalising enigma, she’s a young woman who understands John Keats. Cornish smiles too knowingly for a waif; she smiles like a card sharp. Again, there’s no trace of sentimentality. Her feelings for Keats strike her like a hammer striking an anvil. When he dies, her tears are searing. Cornish looks at Whishaw throughout as if, when she was around him, she could see the blood moving through his body. When he’s sick, it’s as if she can see the sickness. The final meeting between the two, when Fanny begs John to take her with him to Italy, is heart-breaking because they both know it’s their final meeting. It’s mutual awareness that makes them kin.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever/ Its loveliness increases, it will never/ Pass into nothingness… What Bight Star captures is the ecstasy of love: the part that’s like a great poem. There are easier things in life than love and poetry – accepting mystery is hard – but the rewards are ample. Keats’s metaphor of “diving in a lake” is apt because it’s dangerous. If you refuse to swim for shore, you could drown. But that’s only if you give up. What Jane Campion celebrates in Bright Star is the urge to grasp intangibles: whether you’re struck by a face or a verse, if you pursue that impulse, you discover life.

You know you’ve learnt something when you’re changed by what you’ve learnt. If you’re still you, plus a memorized inventory: no dice. That’s why most of most what we learn in school is only exam fodder. There’s a big difference between knowledge that helps you get on in life and knowledge that helps you live. The new British movie, An Education, is about a valuable lesson taught to a 16-year-old by her first whopping great mistake. She is Oxford-bound, a straight-A student, so she could easily have stuck to her books and missed her opportunity. Thankfully, she studies her mistake – appreciates it – and allows experience to enhance her mind.

England, in the early 60s, was still a Jane Austen world for girls. You either aspired to one of the spinster professions (teaching, secretary) or you aspired to marriage. A girl like Jenny (the movie’s heroine) might, ostensibly, be studying to get into Oxford, but in reality – i.e. in her parent’s view – she’s studying to make it easier to find an educated husband. Jenny’s parents are hardly tyrants, but they feel they know what’s best for their daughter. Then one day she brings home a seemingly nice, seemingly educated older man, and says she loves him. Today, we’d call him all sorts of names. In England, in the early 60s, he’s seemingly a good prospect.

Carey Mulligan plays Jenny as the sort of girl who Audrey Hepburn would have essayed. She has wry eyebrows and an impish smile. She’s capable of looking sweet and looking serious without either look jarring. And she can make you believe an older man isn’t a pervert just by looking back at him – sweetly serious, the way Audrey used to – as if to say, “I’ll be good enough for us both”. Scenes that could potentially be very awkward to watch – Jenny dating a 34-year-old! – are always (as intended) romantic because Mulligan doesn’t act foolish. She isn’t playing a girl who gets seduced. She’s playing a girl who falls in love. In another movie – an Audrey Hepburn movie – there’d be no problem with her choice. Carey Mulligan’s triumph is to portray Audrey Hepburn struggling with reality.

Peter Sarsgaard plays Jenny’s seducer like a man falling in love. He’s equally the reason why the movie works because he isn’t all the ugly things he could have been. You don’t feel that he’s controlling Jenny or that he’s leering at her. You don’t feel that her intelligence is a threat to him, or that he’s indifferent to her needs. He’s simply a man doing the wrong thing because he’s in love with a 16-year-old. Sarsgaard, who has a knack for morally lapsed characters, is comfortable in his role because he doesn’t play Jenny’s boyfriend as a liar. He tells her the truth about his feelings. The rest seems irrelevant. But for niggling reality, he’d be her ideal husband.

There’s a lot of comedy in An Education, as there should be in any movie about youth. Emma Thompson probably gets the most laughs as Jenny’s anti-Semitic (though not entirely stupid) headmistress, who responds to news that Jenny’s boyfriend is Jewish with the heartfelt plea: “You are aware, I take it, that the Jews killed our Lord.” Thompson, dressed like Margaret Thatcher, brings such a sense of British-ness to her performance that you wonder she doesn’t wrap herself in a Union Jack. Her meetings with Jenny form a kind of dialogue between pre and post-60s Britain, but Thompson ensures we don’t see the Age of Austerity as merely dim.

Learning that you’re a fool is life’s best lesson. We’re insufferable without humility. Success might breed success, but it’s murder on the ego. What Jenny learns from choosing the wrong man is exactly what will help her (with hindsight) choose the right one. An Education lets you know from the title that this isn’t a tragedy. It’s a coming-of-age story; a “how I came to be…” Usually, these stories are so brittle with cliché that they’re choked from telling you anything sincere. But An Education resists cliché and caricature the way its heroine resists conformity. It tells you – right from the moment Carey Mulligan flares on screen – that the lesson will not be rote.

Terry Gilliam has a reverence for failure. In his movie The Fisher King, Jeff Bridges talks (ruefully) of Nietzsche’s “bungled and botched…expendable masses” who “get close to greatness, but never get there.” In a Gilliam movie, the hero is always either a fool or a madman, someone who sees much but blows his chances, aims high but is often speared by the world. As screen alter-egos go, these characters are candidly self-lacerating. Alexander Pope’s aphorism “To err is human…” is like a dare to Gilliam. He needs to conceive of movies that can’t work in order to prove that they can. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a case in point.

A Faust-like character named after the home of the ancient Muses, Doctor Parnassus is a thousand-year-old fool and a gambler. Long ago, he made a deal with the Devil that would grant him eternal life, on condition that, should Parnassus ever have a daughter, at the age of sixteen she would become the Devil’s prize. Through centuries, the Devil has toyed with Parnassus, but now, in present-day London, the Doctor meets a young man who may be able to help him outfox Beelzebub. One problem is: the young man comes to Parnassus with no memory. The other problem is: this maybe-saviour is found hanging by a noose from London Bridge.

Heath Ledger literally enters dead. It’s a first scene so stupendously tactless that it stops you worrying (in an odd way) what your reaction should be to his final performance. While the audience is weighing up the moral vicissitudes of even looking at Ledger, Gilliam strings him up for starters. My bet is; the actor would have liked the honesty of this approach. There was something about Heath Ledger – his carpenter’s face, the ridges of his smile; his oft-abused hair – that said: to hell with propriety. He made a lot of crap, and you sensed he knew it, but also you sensed the crap was bearing him somewhere. Parnassus is not his destination, but – playing a man who tricks the Devil, cheats death, and wows the girls – Ledger appears like a tantalising ghost… making promises we know he can’t keep.

As Parnassus and the Devil, respectively, Christopher Plummer and Tom Waits play their roles broad, the way Gilliam likes it. Plummer (a man who once played a Shakespeare-loving Klingon in a Star Trek movie) has no problem with the surreal nature of his character. He latches on the wrongheaded, stubborn, King Lear-ness of Parnassus and even manages to dangle from a CGI cliff with an air of tragedy. He’s abetted by Waits, who brings out the Vaudeville in the Devil’s act. Like archaic comedians going through a clapped-out routine, they circle each other – professional, even cordial, in their blood feud.

London in Parnassus is Lily Cole, the model-turned-actress who plays the Doctor’s daughter. Cole, who looks like Millais’s “Ophelia”, has one of those now-hard, now-soft London voices that speak of money and getting unexpectedly stabbed in the dark (a pretty accurate hint of the city), and Gilliam dresses her to look like a homeless girl caught in a lingerie advert. She can’t act, but looking the way she does, it hardly matters. Much the way, a thousand years ago, Uma Thurman appeared in Gilliam’s Baron Munchausen as Venus, now Cole adopts the role of Beauty for Beauty’s Sake.

There’s a curate’s egg quality to The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Admittedly, with that mouthful of a title, the end result was unlikely to be without flaws. But, as ever with Terry Gilliam, all the broken pieces are somehow precious. After all, nobody else on Earth would make a movie like this. A clattering, dazzling, Heath Robinson contraption, filled with idiosyncrasies and gormless, half-noble ideas; it’s not a monument to Heath Ledger, but rather, the sort of movie that Heath’s success allowed him to risk. Don’t go in expecting it all to make sense. It’s a story of failure. Some are bound to get lost.

Watching a new zombie movie recently, I was reminded of Bret Easton Ellis. Put a pair of Wayfarers on any reanimated corpse and they come to resemble one of Ellis’s creations; the blank indifference to life, the remorseless appetite. For over twenty years, Ellis has been hacking away at our world, again and again writing “tan” when he means “damned” and “tried to smile” when he knows one verb cancels the other out. There are no characters in Ellis’s books, there are only bodies. Much the way a zombie looks at the world and callously notes a holocaust, so the rich kids of Less Than Zero stare indifferently at the death of their souls.

A boy named Clay starts the novel with the famous line about how “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles”. He’s the classic Ellis anti-hero; anaesthetized, young, only conscious of other people in terms of their clothes. Clay’s friends are all one-syllable non-entities: Rip, Trent, Blair, Spin. They’re all so well-off they never mention money. All except his friend Julian; the one who winds up hustling so he can stay out at night. Stay out and keep out. The way Clay stays out. The way the whole of rich, jaded Los Angeles – and Bret Easton Ellis’s every sentence – stays out, wears a look, rejects every sentiment, and epitomises cool.

Reading Ellis is like being poisoned seductively. He’s a hard writer to transfer onto film. To get him right you’d have to cast underwear models and only offer them minimal direction. The key is that – even when characters voice their fears about not feeling anything – we don’t believe them. It’s a mistake to assume anyone can be redeemed. Ellis writes about monsters the way a fellow monster would; knowingly. He’s been to the same parties, worn the same expressions and heard all the hollow recanting. So when he writes about millionaires regretting their debauchery, he knows a lie and how little these people want to change.

As one character says (after doing something terrible), “If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it.” The trouble for characters who want to be good in a Bret Easton Ellis novel is that his world doesn’t seem like a place for good people. In Less Than Zero, Clay’s most honest admission is that: “I want to see the worst”. And Clay is a moralist by Ellis’s standards; he’s actually troubled by some of the things he sees. He doesn’t actually do anything to stop anyone (that would risk being a participant), but he does mourn his void of feeling.

If you directed Less Than Zero right, the best template would be a horror movie. The same nubile young cast, the same lust for blood. There’s “talk of a werewolf” in Less Than Zero, and Ellis’s short story The Secrets of Summer is about vampires. People often overlook the fantastical elements in his fiction, but they offer a good guide as to how his world is supposed to look: like the world of the dead, like all the best cynical advertising; a style that makes you want to buy things and stop thinking, to consume and be consumed. His is a horrible vision, but it’s moreish as a nightmare. When bad things happen in Less Than Zero, they’re written in neon.

In 1987 they made a movie adaptation of the book, as an anti-drugs story. It was the easiest route to take. But the drugs and the drink and the sex and the murder are all symptoms in the novel. What’s wrong with Clay is: he’s a zombie. Even if he didn’t do anything, he’d be a monster. That’s the line all Bret Easton Ellis’s novels take: that the old feeling world has ended, and the best case scenario is that you find you can blend in – you’re shallow enough to survive.  There’s no God in Ellis, no fealty, no conscience. In his own way he anticipated the information age (know-all, careless). Sadly, as he must have known, we like to look more than we care to reflect.

Contrary to what Terry Gilliam movies teach us, going mad is no fun. The only thing real madness makes you aware of is how you should prize sanity. There are no life lessons to be learned, sadly, from slipping out of your head. Real madness is a hell with no dimensions: ungraspable and unkind. There’s something especially pitiless about a disease that corrupts thought. The new movie, The Soloist, tells the true story of a schizophrenic Julliard-trained musician named Nathaniel Ayers. He is, by turns: loquacious, gentle, intriguing and capable of snapping your neck. He is not changed by the movie’s end, and the movie is better for it.

Seeking human-interest stories for his “Points West” column in the L.A. Times, Steve Lopez meets Nathaniel Ayers by a statue of Beethoven. Having overheard Ayers mention Julliard in-between talk of space aliens, Lopez calls the school and discovers his next story. It turns out Ayers – a man who sleeps rough and dresses like he’s headed for Mardi Gras – is a former music prodigy. Lopez writes a column about Ayers’ plight, and one of his readers sends in a cello. For the journalist, minor celebrity and bigger pay-days beckon; Ayers seems like manna from Bedlam. But slowly, Lopez’s conscience stirs; his meal-ticket doesn’t like the spotlight.

The difficulty in playing “mad” is that it’s easy to overdo it. Madness, like alcohol, offers actors an awful temptation to grandstand. Think of Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys, Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, or Nicolas Cage in anything (including his “sane” roles). Playing an actual living mad person doesn’t tend to sway actors one way or the other (they’re mostly focused on the Oscars), but thankfully, Jamie Foxx is reasonably restrained. Give the man credit, he’s playing a homeless (read: Oscar-worthy), schizophrenic (read: Oscar-worthy) music prodigy (read: And the winner is…), so the urge to break-dance through his scenes must have been crippling. But Foxx is admirably free of extraneous ticks and finger twirls, and even when he gets a Shine-esque, enraptured-by-the-music scene, he refrains from weeping (and other, shameless, hand-me-the-Oscar-isms).

In the more sedate role of “disillusioned reporter”, Robert Downey Jr. opts to watch Foxx in most scenes. He knows he can’t compete with a madman’s wardrobe and a musical instrument, so he listens and waits for his scenes with Catherine Keener. Since she’s gorgeous as August and sexy as ripe cherries, Downey knows we’ll spend far more time puzzling how his character got divorced from her than we will pondering Jamie Foxx’s madness. We’ll suspect Downey of being an ass, but since he can play “smart” with his shoes on the wrong feet, it’s this fallible quality that keeps him interesting. He’s believable as an ex-husband without coming off like a douchebag, which is no mean feat when his ex-wife such a knockout. 

Catherine Keener isn’t on-screen for more than ten minutes, and most of her screen-time is about building Downey’s character, and I really shouldn’t devote any lines to her at all… but can I dub her the new Susan Sarandon? She’s the right age for those Sarandon roles (i.e. the “mom” role, plus sex), she’s the best thing in most things she’s in, and her voice is tailor-made for giving life-wisdom. As I say, she has next-to-nothing to do in The Soloist, but… oh, you know.

Nothing much happens in this movie, except that one man helps another man. It doesn’t end with Nathaniel Ayers winning American Idol, or Steve Lopez winning a Pulitzer Prize. The homeless people of Los Angeles do not bond together and put on a show. Instead, you get the reality of Ayers’ condition: he can be helped, but he will never be a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. There are some schizophrenics who do manage to hold down jobs, marry and have children, and there are a lot who don’t, and Nathaniel Ayers is the latter. The lesson here isn’t nihilism; it’s realism. That, and the fact a good deed should be its own reward.

Wuthering Heights makes more sense if you’re a teenage girl. Heathcliff is clearly hot. For starters, he’s filled with inner turmoil. He doesn’t have parents, so there’s no-one to cramp his style. His sudden violent outbursts are mostly directed at less-hot men. And he shares his name with the late Heath Ledger. It’s a crying shame there were no teenagers around when Emily Bronte wrote the book, as you could have saved critics years of wrangling over subtext. Fortunately, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight was immediately understood by its readership. It’s about a Heathcliff-type named Edward, who struggles with love (and being a vampire).

Replacing the Yorkshire moors with the forests of Washington State, Twilight is the story of Bella Swan; the kind of girl who wears black and underlines a lot of Emily Dickinson. Bella arrives in America’s damp hinterland after her parents divorce. Her father is the chief of police in a little town called Forks. He doesn’t talk much, but Bella likes quiet men. When Bella enrols at the local high-school, she’s instantly drawn to a pale mute with a cool haircut and a tight sweater. As it turns out, this brooding hunk of well-coiffed man-candy is a vampire. He warns Bella: “If you’re smart… you’ll stay away from me.” But since when did talk of being bad prove a turn-off?

Every time Kirsten Stewart looks at Robert Pattinson in this movie, she looks horny. He’ll be droning on about the moral quandary of being a vampire… blahblahblah, and Stewart is making a sex-face. This perks up the story no end. We’re so used to seeing women talk and men wait for sex to happen that it’s startling to be aware that this girl wants Pattinson in the Biblical sense. Stewart (who looks like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club) has a fiercely honest face. It’s always more plausible to watch her scenes with Pattinson as two virgins skirting the bedroom than one virgin and a hundred-year-old vampire. Bella Swan might want Edward Cullen because he’s a tragic figure, but Stewart wants Pattinson because he’s buff.

If you ever wanted to understand how Heathcliff maintains his appeal in Wuthering Heights when (on the surface) he’s a morally-depraved, dog-murdering lunatic – look at Robert Pattinson. This man could eat a bowlful of pets and still look shag-able. He’s got post-coital hair, eyes for only you… a broad, monogamous chin. He looks like he was born to scale balconies. Though, as an actor, Pattinson is more Judd Nelson than Marlon Brando – since this is a movie told from the girl’s point of view, his acting doesn’t matter. He’s there to be adored, and he looks comfortable with adoration. His lips command kisses.

There is a subplot in Twilight about a group of “bad” vampires running around killing people, but you’re never meant to pay it close attention. The intended viewer – female, 11-16 – is a lot more interested in Bella and Edward’s prom night than they are in watching monsters brawl. Those who complain about the big fight being sidelined are missing the point. In this movie, it’s Kirsten Stewart’s prom dress that merits scrutiny, not the blood spurts. Prom is, of course, worth dying for (for most girls). So it’s no surprise Bella would accept a dance from a killer rather than sit prom out. Twilight’s success is down to focusing on real-life terrors over and above supernatural upsets.

Emily Bronte would have included a prom scene in Wuthering Heights, if she’d known about prom. Anything that a young girl can develop a feverish excitement about is her cup of tea. Look at Heathcliff: Would any sane woman over 30 date this man? He doesn’t appear to wash for most of the book. But that’s because he’s a fantasy. Heathcliff is a man who could only seem romantic to someone who’d never dated a Heathcliff. Like a vampire, he’d kill you in the long run. Stephenie Meyer understands all too well why that’s true – but girls read Wuthering Heights anyway. Twilight is in love with heartache.

Ninety per cent of New Media makes me feel like Buck Rogers. I look at something like the Second Life phenomenon as proof I’ve fallen through a hole in time. The idea of living vicariously through a computer-generated alter-ego just seems bat-shit insane to me. Call it my Gil Gerard-reflex, but when I read about a real-life couple who met through a computer game and divorced when the husband had a virtual affair, my sense of what’s real goes a bit 25th century. Admittedly, the new action movie, Gamer, is not the ideal platform for questioning the direction of early 21st century social-norms, but the story is (at heart) a Second Life parody.

In the not-too-distant future, as folks tire of controlling virtual people on-line, a new technology is born that allows jaded gamers to remote-control real people. There are two main games to choose from: in one, much like The Sims, you can take possession of an avatar that will wear funny clothes and have sex with pseudonym-ed strangers; in the other, much like a lot of computer games, you run around trying to kill everything. The latter game is called Slayers, and its remote-controlled people are all convicts. If an i-con (as they’re called) survives 30 battles, he’s granted his freedom. As our story begins, one i-con has just survived battle number 27.

Gerard Butler’s appeal for women still mystifies me, but for men, it’s obvious: he looks like he could beat you up. Butler looks like Russell Crowe did before Crowe discovered Pick ’n Mix. He looks like a man carved out of beef, like someone who could build you a house single-handed, or someone who doesn’t feel the need to use a comb. His unvarnished, Scottish Highlands, flashback-scenes-in-Highlander look makes him a naturally fit for playing a soldier. In Gamer, the only back-story Butler’s character requires is one that explains the non-soldier aspects of his life. He’d convince you as a man with military training if you saw him eating hummus. In this movie, his job is to provide what Arnold Schwarzenegger provided in The Running Man: a) the muscle, b) the moral compass. As everyone around him waives their humanity for a Pac-Man fetish, Butler’s innate, Cro-Magnon gravitas shames hairy-palmed gamers even as they remote-control him.

Since Gamer is directed by the directors of Crank, roles for women aren’t quite as authoritative, but Kyra Sedgewick has fun as a Barbara Walters-style TV journalist. Alison Lohman crops up as a cyber-punk. And Amber Valletta plays Gerard Butler’s wife with the appropriate doe-eyed adoration and gym-toned physique. Valletta’s role, and the Sims-like game she’s a part of, could have been explored further, but Gamer never spends too long away from the boys.

Michael C. Hall gets the best scene in the movie, when, at the climax, his arch-villain character confronts Gerard Butler with a big song and dance number choreographed to Cole Porter’s very apropos I’ve Got You Under My Skin. Hall, who was always great in Six Feet Under, seems to have at last got some clout via his role in Dexter, and seizes on the chance to play the Ernst Blofeld of on-line gaming with noticeable delight. His health-food-psycho look (i.e. the sort of guy who’d recommend lentils to you as he wiped blood off his hands) is perfect for the morally-punctured lunatic he’s asked to play. When Hall smiles I hear body bags zipping-up.

Gamer might approach the Second Life craze from a who-should-we-kill standpoint, but it does feel horribly prescient at times. I say this as Buck Rogers – as a dinosaur – a guy who’s still amazed by the i-phone. But the idea of having sex when neither party is present, or of getting a divorce because your husband had a mouse-based affair, is pretty far from sanity. And those things have already happened. People, as a whole, don’t seem to be giving succour to their better selves in Second Life; they mostly dress-up in weird costumes and screw each other. Virtual morality is just that. It’s like asking Buck Rogers to observe the niceties of a new century.

Solider is one of the few jobs that make sense to a six-year-old. If your noun can be a verb – if your job implies an action – it has kid-appeal. That’s why Army Men are popular at playtime and Accountant Men stay in their original packaging. Accountancy, like most office work, is a profession that ill-suits six-year-olds. Sitting at a desk can only engage the mind for so long. But to be in the army! Think of it the way a small person does: a) you shout; b) you shoot at stuff; c) everyone gets a gun. No wonder G.I. Joe is catnip for kids. The new movie may even reacquaint a few office drones with their inner child.

It begins with two guys called Duke and Ripcord. They are Soldiers. The kind of guys Demi Moore was thinking of in A Few Good Men when she said, “They stand on a wall. And they say ‘Nothing’s gonna hurt you tonight. Not on my watch’.” Men of honour: memorial-ready. Duke and Ripcord are assigned to guard a Top Secret weapons convoy. But they’re ambushed! The evil “Cobra” organisation (which you’d think would be an acronym) wants the Top Secret weapons. Outgunned and perhaps slightly turned-on by their enemies (one of Cobra’s operatives is a former girlfriend of Duke); the boys are saved by the intervention of G.I. Joe, the most special of Special Ops.

As someone who watched G.I. Joe: The Movie in 1987 and promptly forgot most of it, I can’t claim to have known much going in, but G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is easier for non-converts than the Transformers movies. Embracing dualism, the essence of the Joe universe is that for every goodie there must be a baddie (who will dress according to who they’re supposed to fight). So the good girl must fight the bad girl, the good ninja must fight the bad ninja, and only General Hawk can fight Cobra Commander. The good guys are the ones trying to stop the bad guys. The bad guys (in a detail Carl Jung would have savoured) are the ones who wear masks.

A typical action sequence in G.I. Joe involves swords, guns, lasers, zombies, robots, explosions and a pretty red-haired girl. It’s made to a small boy’s priorities, but that’s not to say it isn’t fun. At its manic best, G.I. Joe captures the fervent excitement of waving plastic figurines at each other – the fate of the world being decided on your bedroom carpet – as Duke and his band of heroes go pow-pow-pow and the bad guys fall down. When the Eiffel Tower crashes into the Seine after being partially consumed by nanomites (they’re bad – does the rest matter?), the scene has far more to do with the joy of fireworks than international terrorism.

Channing Tatum plays Duke like a guy with a talking pull-string in his back, but it would be tough to see any other way to play him. He’s a toy. His back story is an assembly line in China. The love of his life is called The Baroness. She wears heels into battle. Duke’s friends are a blind ninja and a buxom red-head who shoots guys with a crossbow. They work out of an underground bunker in the Sahara desert. To accuse Tatum of bad acting is like accusing R2D2 of not beeping convincingly. Ok, Sienna Miller has more fun as The Baroness, but her costume is a rubber cat-suit – and she knows karate. When Miller stops in the middle of a gun-fight to compliment a woman’s shoes, she deserves her own Oscar category.

Sadly, women have no interest in G.I. Joe. Even Sienna probably rolled her eyes as she read of how The Baroness learned karate from an evil ninja called Storm Shadow. To women, G.I. Joe is like a farting contest; mortifying, pre-adolescent. When a man says, “Do you want to watch a G.I. Joe movie?” a woman feels let down. Not that she’s wrong to think this way. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra would not be best described as “adult”. What I would argue, however, is that if men (and six-year-olds) can find something to whoop about in G.I. Joe, maybe girls should try it. This movie dares you not to have fun.

If you’ve ever mooned over a girl, this movie’s for you. Yes, savour that paper-cut smile. You know the girl I’m talking about. You met her in your teens or your early twenties. She had a way of dressing just so. Her quirks were sonnet-worthy. She probably rode a bike, or played an obscure instrument. The chances of the relationship working were nil, but her cool only encouraged you. For you, love was all about delay. So you pratted about; writing a script for the pair of you, while she eyed up someone else. It ended. You met the right girl. And now you get to laugh fondly at yourself in 500 Days of Summer.

An ordinary guy with a yo-yo heart meets a pretty girl. They work at the same office. He regards his job like a comfortable chair. Instead of a career, he’s focused on romance (oh for a swirly font!). The pretty girl wants to date (which is: Not. The. Same. Thing). They go out, and the guy assembles his own heartbreak. The trick in the movie is that we keep hopping back and forth between Day 1, when Summer was the guy’s kooky saviour, and Day 450, when she “took a giant shit on [his] face”. Summer never quite promises him anything, but yearning (as we know) thrives on what’s “almost”.

Nerds are powerless to resist Zooey Deschanel. She’s named after a J.D. Salinger novel. She has a voice like a disappointed cloud. Her eyes are like bloody tractor-beams (to use an appropriately nerdy simile). And she dresses demurely. In 500 Days of Summer her role is to be everything a nerd’s heart could desire (in short: seemingly approachable, but actually remote). Like most girls in boy-meets-girl movies, she’s present in the boy’s head more than she is on screen. But Zooey can do a lot without talking, and she makes Summer into someone forgivable, even when she breaks a boy’s heart. She’s the perfect girl for a recollected love affair: spiky, sad, and pretty in a way you either worship, or can’t understand.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks like the kind of guy who’d fall for Zooey; a guy who thinks too much. From his pencil-thin physique to his earnest eyebrows, he beckons big knotty feelings. Like a young Samuel Beckett, he’s a good-looking nerd who’s a bit intense for most girls. But scrunched-up guys are good for comedy. The movie might be a rough road for Gordon-Levitt’s character, but it’s ok to laugh. He’s going through hell – but it’s the good kind of hell (heartbreak, like braces, is ultimately beneficial). And when he’s happy – as the song-and-dance scene shows – he can hear music, like the rest us. The movie isn’t a tragic, how-I-lost-her story. It’s about a neurotic who discovers misery won’t kill him.

First-time director Marc Webb is obviously a guy who’s watched Annie Hall, but his movie isn’t going to get him sued by Woody Allen. 500 Days of Summer is more like a twenty-something’s primer for how romantic comedies should be made. After all, we’re a long way from the non-linear hey-day of the 1970s. A rom-com is seen as radical these days if the heroine stops herself from falling over. So Webb is obliged to keep a few staples in: the friends who act as a Greek chorus, a sing-along-able soundtrack, and so on. Where 500 Days does buck the (recent) trend is in its honesty: love, in this movie, does not guarantee wedding bells.

I promise you this: you will miss the days when you loved the wrong girl. Not the girl herself. (You know by now she wasn’t right for you.) But this movie nails the bliss of being hung up. A love that lasts doesn’t involve much walking on eggshells. But precarious love – love that’s one-and-a-half-sided – one constantly fraught and sputtering, is nothing but cherished tenterhooks. You get older and you find love can be simple (i.e. the girl loves you back, and shows this by making your life better). But everyone should experience a love that’s not right.  Only robots have no scars.

Soldiers are not allowed to smoke during combat. Before and after is fine, but during is reckless. It’s like talking on the phone while driving, except you’re talking a man down from a ledge, while driving in the Le Mans Grand Prix. Most soldiers have enough on their minds not dying during combat. So the no-no governing combat-smoking only applies to a select few. I’d say you feel one of two ways about men who smoke in the midst of a gun-fight. Either: a) they offer proof of man’s ultimate de-sensitisation to violence. Or b) they’re f—ing rock stars! Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is for those who think b.

Into the jittery, adrenaline-spewing maelstrom of Iraq, a new guy arrives to join the bomb squad. He hasn’t come to weep for Baghdad, but to have a little fun. His name is Sergeant James. He looks like he grew up in a gun shop. His colleagues – still mourning James’s predecessor – don’t like him. James is a guy who would juggle hand-grenades to pass the time. But he’s the Bobby Fischer of bomb disposal. He is perfectly maladjusted for his job. Day after day, he puts on what looks like a 19th century diving suit, waddles over to bombs, and stops them killing. If he were doing this for anyone, he’d be a hero. But his heroics are strictly for him.

What The Hurt Locker gets right is the soldier’s perspective: the politics don’t matter. Some men are there because they want to kill; most are there because they want a pay cheque, a few because war is home. Although the movie is told from an American point of view, it doesn’t demonise those who want to kill Americans. They are just as the soldiers see them: an unknown. There’s a great scene where Sergeant James tries to avenge a boy he believes insurgents have murdered. From the moment he steps outside the Green Zone, he’s lost. This is not his country. The movie doesn’t denigrate his good intentions, but neither do James’s rushed plans succeed.

Jeremy Renner plays James like a NASCAR racer. He looks at people like they haven’t drunk enough beer. He’s everyday-tough, like a toolkit. Even his hair looks like it’s been on an assault course. Where there’s a risk James could be nothing more than a Top Gun caricature, Renner balances the egomaniac grandstanding with a practical man’s lack of self-awareness. His James is a guy who loves what he does, but doesn’t think of how he’s viewed. When a Colonel asks James the best way to disarm a bomb, Renner says “the way you don’t die” like that’s the answer, not as a quip. If there’s such a thing as suicidal sangfroid, he embodies both traits.

Director Kathryn Bigelow has always made movies about men. Her 1991 bullet-fest, Point Break, was so goddamn macho you needed a shave after watching it. You could count the number of women in Bigelow’s movies with your arms, not your fingers. It’s action that draws her. In a Bigelow movie, men explain themselves – and who they want to be – through gun-play. She gets how a gun can be like a woman’s clothes. For the kind of guys she’s interested in, even the most heartfelt confession doesn’t have the intimacy of battle. She never mocks these guys, or homo-eroticizes their behaviour (Point Break would be a gay love story no matter who directed), she just wants to be one of the boys. In Bigelow’s hands The Hurt Locker isn’t about war, it’s about fraternity.

While no-one would disagree with an anti-war sentiment (even the military don’t want to be on the losing side), as a dramatic premise, saying “war is bad” is like saying “adultery is wrong”. Yes, it’s true, but it also happens. The reason The Hurt Locker does well as a war drama is because it doesn’t hide from soldiers and the fact that – without war – they’d have no purpose. Sergeant James isn’t presented with jingoistic acclaim; he’s just a skilled mechanic. Kathryn Bigelow might want us to feel his excitement, but that’s her crush on guys like him, not American foreign policy. There’s a difference between being pro-war and being pro-warrior.