The writer of Juno, Diablo Cody, fires up her random hipster vernacular generator and out comes the screenplay for Jennifer’s Body. The premise — Mean Girls with demonic possession and a feminist subtext — is promising. But the film fails to deliver either laughs or scares in sufficient numbers, and the feminist pretentions are deflated the moment the two central female characters snog each other for no discernible narrative purpose.

As Jennifer, Megan Fox provides the body in question. And the director, Karyn Kusama, has no scruples about serving up her leading lady like a buffet for the teen boy audience contingent. But it’s Jennifer, ultimately, who does the most eating. Possessed by a voracious demon, she favours the entrails of the lecherous lads who hope to get lucky but end up as lunch. Pitted against Jennifer is her bookish childhood friend Needy (Amanda Seyfried), who vows to stop Jennifer’s feeding frenzy before her own boyfriend features on the menu.

There are, as you would hope and expect, a few snappy lines of dialogue. And while it’s a bit of a stretch to buy Megan Fox as a high-school student, she launches herself into the role with gusto. But Juno’s offbeat originality is sorely missed in this uninspired and somewhat generic horror movie.

Whimsical, solipsistic and self-indulgent, Paper Heart represents everything that is wrong with American independent cinema. Predictably the audiences at the Sundance Film Festival loved it. An inelegant blend of documentary with a dramatised central story, the film features the quirky comedian Charlyne Yi musing on the nature of love. Her disingenuous claim that she doesn’t believe in it seems to be an excuse to rally her celebrity mates (Seth Rogen, Demetri Martin) to tell her how loveable she is.

In addition to interviewing real-life strangers about their love lives, and recreating their stories using crude paper puppets, Yi plays a fictionalised version of herself who starts a new relationship with the actor Michael Cera (then her boyfriend in real life). It’s self-consciously cute and occasionally disarming, but there are barely enough ideas here to fill a three-minute pop song, let alone a feature film.

Although stories of Britain-bound refugees stranded in French coastal towns have been told before — Michael Winterbottom’s In This World was a particularly potent example — Welcome brings a fresh angle to the story. Bilal is a 17-year-old Iraqi Kurd who is idealistic enough to still believe that in England he’ll find a better life and desperate enough to want to swim the Channel to get there. Simon, a jaded swimming instructor, tries to dissuade him, but gradually grows to respect the boy’s spirit.

This is compassionate and humane film-making. While the story does sometimes lapse into cliché, the two beautifully judged central performances carry it through.

WI

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