Bamako
PG, 117 mins Three stars

The Mauritanian film-maker Abderrahmane Sissako has devised an intriguing form of cinematic polemic. A drama, it takes us to the yard of an ordinary house in Bamako, Mali’s capital city, where a trial is being conducted in which the World Bank and the IMF are accused of having impoverished Africa. Sissako wants us to take on board the prosecution arguments, but he also shows the locals getting on with their lives, ignoring the trial and even calling it a bore. I wouldn’t go that far, but there are certainly passages in which the sights observed by the wandering camera are much more attention-grabbing than the words from the makeshift courtroom. Yet, while the film may be impaired as an oral treatise, Sissako’s use of the trial is still vindicated. It provides rich symbolism in what is, on the whole, a stimulating work.

Orchestra Seats
12A, 105 mins Two stars

In this French feelgood film (directed and co-written by Daniãle Thompson), a smart Parisian neighbourhood hosts three cultured types yearning to be true to themselves. A well-off but typecast actress (played by Valérie Lemercier) longs for a more fulfilling role; a widowed art collector (Claude Brasseur) has decided to sell all his pieces; and a successful pianist (Albert Dupontel) contemplates giving up concert halls to play in hospitals and prisons. With its cafe-society ambience, the film is easy to watch, but why did it have to be so insipid? Without any change to its essential cosiness, it could surely have been more surprising in its emotional scenes and funnier in its comic ones.

Satan
18, 94 mins Two stars

Vincent Cassel is fantastically entertaining in this French comic horror film, playing a weird yokel encountered by a group of city kids on an unplanned trip to the countryside. The actor’s features are naturally those of a handsome Mr Punch. Here, he adds wild, centre-parted hair and a set of mouldy yellow teeth. Baring them in a savage grin, he gives us a grunting brute who makes bizarre attempts at bonhomie while secretly working on a grisly occult scheme. His character is by far the best thing in Kim Chapiron’s movie, which suffers from a vague story line and a lack of finesse in its set pieces. If only Cassel had saved his performance for a collaboration with the League of Gentlemen.

School for Scoundrels
12A, 101 mins One star

Todd Phillips’s previous comedies — Road Trip, Old School and Starsky & Hutch — are nothing special, but this latest effort is particularly short of decent comic ideas. A reworking of the 1960 British film of the same name, it stars John Heder, of Napoleon Dynamite fame, as a geeky New Yorker who signs up for classes in guile and super-assertiveness, taught by an intimidating guru (Billy Bob Thornton). The master and the pupil go after the same woman (Jacinda Barrett), and a battle of wits ensues. But only toward the end of the film do the hostilities reach a level of recklessness with any potential to be funny. If things had started at that pitch and been ramped up from there, Phillips might have had a movie worth making.

The Number 23
15, 98 mins One star

A daft enigma gives Joel Schumacher’s film the virtue of being hard to predict, but it’s a dull trudge to the final revelation. Jim Carrey plays Walter, an ordinary guy who becomes obsessed with a cheaply published book found by his wife (Virginia Madsen) in a secondhand shop. It contains a tale of murder and madness in which characters are tormented by the supposedly mystical properties of the number 23. Soon, Walter is decoding every significant word and number he comes across, always finding a link to 23. He also has dreams about killing his wife. Spookily, it must have been in about the 23rd minute that my spirits began to sink and I thought: “There’d better be an awfully clever pay-off at the end of this.” Well, there isn’t.

Edward Porter

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