Not just a timely movie, a great one...Timbuktu feels at once timely and permanent, immediate and essential.

The movie, like the book before it, is an expertly built machine for the mass production of tears. Directed by Josh Boone 'Stuck in Love', with scrupulous respect for John Green's best-selling young-adult novel, the film sets out to make you weep - not just sniffle or choke up a little, but sob until your nose runs and your face turns blotchy. It succeeds.

War of the Worlds is rated PG-13. Much of the earth's population is wiped out, leaving very little time for sex or bad language.

Pearl Harbor is strenuously respectful of contemporary sensitivities, sometimes at the cost of accuracy.

Recently, I took my son to see The Haunted Mansion, which was one of the worst things (I hesitate even to call it a movie) that I have ever seen. He thought it was better than Finding Nemo and we had a fruitless argument which I'm sure made him acutely aware of the disadvantages of having a film critic for a dad.

Tiny as a sparrow, fierce as an eagle, Lisbeth Salander is one of the great Scandinavian avengers of our time, an angry bird catapulting into the fortresses of power and wiping smiles off the faces of smug, predatory pigs.

We have reached a strange new place in marketing when tweets become full-page print ads.