Emile Hirsch is the star of this vehicle, while Christina Ricci, Matthew Fox and Susan Sarandon ride in the sidecar of the campy, colourful live-action adaptation of a Japanese anime about the motorway adventures of an excitable sports car driver.
It's a seriously slick looking Wachowski brothers toy, packed with primary colours, flying car parts and jaw-jutting drivers, yet the story never hits top gear and goes on far too long for its young audience. If the Nazis had won the war, their big summer films would have been a lot like Speed Racer.
• On general release
Caramel (PG) ***
Lebanese writer/director/actress Nadine Labaki, below, channels Pedro Almodovar's Volver in this slender tale of a Beirut beauty salon where the chief depilatory agent is hot caramel. The main draw is the movie's sympathy for the humiliation women suffer for beauty or love. The melodramas and dilemmas here are universal: one character pines for her married boyfriend; another worries her fiancé will discover she's not a virgin; one's a lesbian; another has a crazy sister and so on. Not as gooey as Steel Magnolias, but certainly sweet.
• GFT, Glasgow, and Belmont, Aberdeen, from Friday
Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins (12A) *
Possible signs of the apocalypse include a judgment of fire, return of the Messiah and a funny Martin Lawrence comedy. No sign of the end being nigh this week then, because this story of a successful talk show star brought home to confront his anything-but deep South background features a pack of charmless clichés and comic punchlines that, like the Great Wall of China, are capable of being seen from space. The film's written and directed by Malcolm D Lee, whose past convictions include last summer's abject Wild Hogs, and the regal presence of James Earl Jones, as Roscoe's stern dad, only makes things more awkward. Imagine Sir Sean Connery piloting Sex Lives Of The Potato Men.
• On general release from Friday
Heartbeat Detector (12A) ***
A company shrink (The Diving Bell And The Butterfly's Mathieu Amalric) is asked to investigate the odd behaviour of the company boss (Michael Lonsdale, left) and a protracted commentary on the thin line between 20th-century atrocities and 21st-century corporate culture ensues in this chilly French psychological thriller. A kind of Michael Clayton but with Nazis instead of lawyers it is extremely slow to crank up, and tortuously drawn out at times, yet, by the end, proves to be both rewarding and haunting.
• Cameo, Edinburgh, and GFT, Glasgow, from Friday
The full article contains 433 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
