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Harry Potter and his magical chums are all grown up in The Half Blood Prince, the sixth film in JK Rowling�s franchise, which has darkened considerably since the jolly schooldays fun of The Philosopher�s Stone back in 2001. The Half Blood Prince is a stop-gap film, designed to drag these characters into young adulthood while providing Harry with the motivation to confront his evil arch-nemesis Lord Voldemort in the series finale The Deathly Hallows, now split into two parts for release over the next couple of summers.

The film opens with a wordless shot - in what will become a signature inky monotone - of Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), battered but victorious after the events of The Order of the Phoenix. The story closes, two stirring hours later, at a sensational moment familiar to readers of the book, a time when all hope seems lost. The Half Blood Prince is a film made up more of fleeting emotions, moods and tones, than a strictly plotted story. Harry has returned to Hogwarts school for the start of another year when the demonic Death Eaters, led by Voldemort, start wreaking havoc throughout the country, including attacks on Muggles, ordinary people not connected to the wizard world. Sworn to protect their leader, and destroy Harry, a covert Death Eater has followed him to Hogwarts and begun hatching a sinister plan.

Harry has his suspicions, but his friend and headmaster Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) is more interested in preparing the young wizard for his most dangerous mission so far, the discovery of a vital clue to destroying Voldemort known as a Horcrux. The key to finding this fragment of Voldemort�s black soul is known only to Hogwarts� new Potions Professor, Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent), information Dumbledore can retrieve from his memories and display on a shining bowl of silvery water. At the same time, Harry is benefiting from helpful notes jotted in the margins of one of his schoolbooks, a battered old text that used to belong to a young prodigy who signed himself �the half-blood prince�.

Meanwhile, teenage hormones are casting a spell of their own. Harry�s moon-eyed pursuit of Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright) is developing into something deeper, helped by their shared skills on the quidditch field. Harry�s best friend Ron (Rupert Grint) has spurned his long-time crush Hermione (Emma Watson) and become entangled in the lavish affections of Lavender Brown (Jessie Cave), to everyone�s annoyance.

The ins and outs of Dumbledore and Harry�s quest might prove confusing to the uninitiated, but otherwise Yates and his screenwriter Steve Kloves draw clear, clean lines through the reams of Rowling�s original text, dropping everything that doesn�t contribute to their ever-darkening theme of momentous change. In the process, characters like Robbie Coltrane�s ungainly Hagrid and Maggie Smith�s pernickety McGonagall are relegated to remember-me cameos or solitary, declamatory scenes.

If there is no real urgency in The Half Blood Prince it is because we have waited so long for these events to arrive, and are still awaiting a final conclusion, that the film feels like it is spanning a gulf in time and development rather than standing alone as a narrative. Everything is pointed at the catharsis of the final reel, meaning much of the rest is incidental; a series of comforting comic asides, cleverly introduced flashbacks, distractions and side-bars. They might mean very little but these sequences are beautifully rendered by Yates and his creative team, who create a tangible atmosphere of foreboding with muted, spectral light, innovative angles and a sparing use of the series� occasionally intrusive special effects.

Read my set-visit and interview with Daniel Radcliffe here

The films of French director Claire Denis are maddeningly reticent and ephemeral things, wisps of character and story that, depending on ones disposition, will either linger long or disperse at the slightest breeze. Her latest, 35 Shots of Rum is a bittersweet story of a phase in family life told with the director�s signature languor.

The first time we meet Josephine (Mati Diop), she is buying a rice cooker, an everyday item that becomes a symbol of the young woman�s growing independence. A student and part-time worker, Josephine lives with her train-driver father Lionel (Alex Decas) in an apartment in a modernist block on an anonymous street in the outer ring of Parisian suburbs. Their life together has settled into a comfortable household routine which often sees them sitting together at the table and eating steaming plates of rice, topped with scarlet harissa.

Their chain-smoking taxi-driving neighbour Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) holds a lingering flame for the leonine Lionel, waiting for him on the stairs and writing poetic love notes. Upstairs, the suave, jet-set Noe (Gr�goire Colin) is cautiously circling the feline Josephine, batting away rivals for her affections and catching her eye with meaningful glances.

Halfway through, the story that Denis is forming appears to be about this foursome pairing off in their own romantic directions, but the director aspires to more subtle methods than that. Gentle ripples begin to appear that reveal a smaller, more intimate story that the director wants to show us, not tell us. A night out that doesn�t go as planned leaves all four stranded in a cafe where they drink, flirt and dance to The Commodores� Night Shift. Later, father and daughter take a road trip to Germany; a journey that explains how father and daughter came to be living together alone just as Josephine will soon leave home.

The trouble is that by the time these critical moments come about, they might pass unnoticed among the rest of the perfectly photographed, comfortably meandering incidents and trajectories. Does it mean anything that Lionel�s colleague has recently retired? What, if anything, are we supposed to glean from the lecture about the Breton Woods System that Josephine delivers to her classmates?

Suitably for a film that opens with a ten minute montage of trains, 35 Shots of Rum is more about the journey than the destination. Denis is reluctant to signpost anything, preferring to gently nudge her characters into place and have the viewer decide what is important. Her way of telling a story places manners and behaviour over action or plot, working a delicate web of gestures and actions that threatens, at times, to not form into a film at all. This kind of construction requires a talented cast to make it work, and Denis ambitions are well realised by fine performances from the ensemble, in particular her regular male lead Descas, who brings power and dignity to what is a slightly-written character.

The short, sensational life of 1930s Chicago gangster John Dillinger passed into folk legend even before his corpse grew cold. During the Great Depression, Dillinger robbed the banks that in turn had robbed the public, in the process becoming a hero to the public and a lightning rod for gangsterism. He was the first crook dubbed �Public Enemy Number One� by J Edgar Hoover�s newfound FBI, who eventually cornered their man outside a Chicago cinema, the Biograph. In time, Hollywood even came to made films about him; Lawrence Tierney scowling down the barrel of a tommy-gun in 1945�s mostly fictional Dillinger and Warren Oates repeating the trick in John Milius� ribald 1970s retelling.

This is the crime movie stripped down to bare essentials; fedoras, sub-machine guns, bags of loot, fast cars, spinning headlines and lipsticked molls. Mann takes all these creaky devices and uses them to make an old story feel new and unexpected, exhilarating and emotionally moving. From the straightforward biography of a daring thief, Mann spins a multi-layered history that documents the seismic shifts in both crime and justice that defined the era; the establishment of a continental police force, the FBI, and the rise of the Mafia, who see Dillinger�s attention-seeking methods as dangerous to their way of life. However, Mann�s deliberate paring has the effect of rendering some of the secondary cast, including Stephen Dorff and Shawn Hatosy, almost completely anonymous.

Photographed with digital cameras in glorious deep focus, Public Enemies moves at a breathless pace, banging out the story in a series of staccato set-pieces and illuminative diversions. Jailbreaks are followed by bankheists and getaways in a tumble of adrenal scenes before the tension is broken by a moment of character, like an eerie sequence that sees Dillinger walking alone through a police station, looking at his own photograph on the wall. Better yet is a surreal scene, in a packed cinema, where Dillinger sits and watches a newsreel clip that asks the audience to check of the man sitting next to them isn�t the infamous gangster.

Depp plays Dillinger with effortless charisma and confidence, a timelessly glamorous cross between Robin Hood and Clark Gable. Opposite him, but relegated by the story into a grim-set cipher, Bale does well as the clenched, driven Purvis. There is a gripping inevitability to the way in which Mann places two opposing forces at either end of the spectrum and gradually, carefully brings them to a point of violent convergence, as he did in Heat, or Last of the Mohicans. With Public Enemies, this payoff happens during a bullet-ridden shootout at a remote hotel, filmed at the actual historical location, where Dillinger and his gang, including Stephen Graham�s Baby Face Nelson, are corner by the G-Men and must shoot their way out. It is an extraordinary centrepoint scene; frantic, percussive, bloody and brutal.

*Read my interview with Micheal Mann for Heat here.

Writer and director Harold Ramis has had a lean time of it since the days of Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day, a run that continues with Year One, an epoch-spanning comedy about a couple of Palaeolithic morons who get caught up in a series of scrapes with various Old Testament characters.

Jack Black and Michael Cera play caveman buddies Zed and Oh, literally an old-school double-act composed of obnoxious, zinger-spouting mammoth hunter and meek, straight-man fruit gatherer. When Zed eats a golden apple from a forbidden tree, they are both exiled from their village at the end of a pointy spear. Their quest proper begins when they stumble into the middle of the last argument between Cain and Abel (Cena�s Arrested Development co-star David Cross and Paul Rudd).

Things quickly go from bad to worse when Zed and Oh are sold into slavery and marched across the desert by the imperial Romans, led for some reason by the deeply unamusing Vinnie Jones. They escape their bonds, only to inadvertently intervene during a delicate moment between a sword-wielding Abraham (Hank Azaria) and his timorous son Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), at the top of a mountain.

From that point on, the story dissolves into a series of skits build around Biblical stories with much unprintable merriment derived from a visit to the notorious city of Sodom. There, the duo's aim is to rescue their slightly more evolved romantic interests, Maya (June Diane Raphael) and Eema (Juno Temple), taken as slave girls by the scheming Princess Inanna (Olivia Wilde).

Flat, broad and unnecessarily scatological, Year One is slow to get going and never quite picks up the kind of pace it needs to carry it forward. There are a few genuinely funny moments; a trip on an ox-driven cart and a discussion about the origins of circumcision, but far more gags fail to find their mark and many scenes seem to end before time or drag unnecessarily.

Although admirably mounted and photographed (with scant use of cheap computer graphics), the same care hasn�t been taken with the script, which draws heavily on Monty Python�s Life of Brian and Mel Brooks� History of the World Part 1 by way of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby�s 1940s Road To� farces. These are jokes that have been told MCVXX�s of times before and there's little the cast can do to make then fresh again.

The bully Black should creates sparks opposite Cena�s withdrawn nerd but the dynamic doesn�t quite come off. As character comedians, both actors have staled badly; Cena�s drawling dreamer festering into an awkward passive-aggression while Black's energetic charm has been exhausted on almost-funny comedies like, well, like this one.

The first instalment of the revitalised Transformers franchise was a well-crafted piece of summery distraction formed from a combination of spectacular special effects and a funny, self-aware script. For the sequel, Revenge of the Fallen, it is clearly director Michael Bay�s intention to deliver more of the same, a lot more. This instalment is almost two and a half hours long, features 42 separate robot characters and a bizarre, unintelligible story that spans the globe. What was spectacular before is mundane and prosaic now and what was witty and clever irritates the second time around.

Here's what I made of the story: Two years on from the events of the first film, the good Autobots remaining on Earth have allied with the US military to prevent further attacks from the bad Decepticon robots. Meanwhile, the boy at the centre of the story last time around, Shia LaBeouf's Sam Witwicky, is trying to forget that he discovered a race of gigantic robot aliens and is concentrating on his first year in college and concerned about how to maintain his relationship with his ridiculously oversexed girlfriend Mikaela (the returning Megan Fox). Unfortunately, as Autobot leader Optimus Prime solemnly intones, �fate never calls on us at the moment of our choosing�. The Decepticons have returned to resurrect their leader Megatron, at the behest of an ancient and evil Transformer known as The Fallen, who plans to reignite a super-weapon hidden in the Great Pyramid at Giza and destroy the Sun.

So, Transformers II is patent nonsense but the first film was too and that didn�t stop it from being entertaining. It is obvious from the outset that, a series of vast action sequences aside, Bay and his returning writers Ehren Kruger and Roberto Orci don�t have any clear idea of what form their sequel should take. The plot is baffling, a hodge-podge of pubescent college humour, soft-porn pouting, military jingoism and blurred special effects. The sense of wit that saved the first film is replaced by a constant procession of dull one-liners and strained slapstick. Events and locations become blurred and difficult to follow. The gang go looking for an allied robot at the Air & Space Museum in Washington, break down a wall to escape and emerge in a vast airplane graveyard, in the desert, ringed by snowcapped mountains. If Bay cannot keep track of this thing, how are we supposed to?

This bloated leviathan even boasts its own Jar Jar Binks � the blabbermouth aquatic creature that single-handedly ruined Star Wars - in two awful new characters, a pair of bickering African-American inspired compact cars with an endless torrent of unfunny, ethnically derived epithets. This is a film that doesn�t know when to stop, reaching its dramatic climax around half way through, in a well-realised scene set in a forest, before lumbering on regardless for another hour of flat fight sequences, eardrum-shattering noise and stroboscopic visual effects. Bay, who drops a series of blatant references to his own back catalogue of films, has suffered the same malaise before with the interminable Pearl Harbour or the over-blown, obnoxious Bad Boys II.

The first Transformers was, evidently, a blip. Bay has fallen back into the habitual formulae that he believes make for entertaining cinema. His storytelling senses have been so numbed by noise and sparks that it has atrophied away almost entirely. His sense of the spectacular is waning too, the slo-mo, one-on-one robot ballistic ballets from the first film are far less interesting when played out by a cast of dozens. As the clanking battle rages on screen, it becomes impossible to distinguish one robot from another or figure out what anyone is supposed to be doing. Long before the explosive final scenes, Transformers II has become a celluloid headache, a numbing, mind-wearying exercise in bombast and excess.

With Batman on hiatus, Christian Bale�s back-up blockbuster franchise finds him playing John Connor, leader of the human resistance in a futuristic war against artificially-intelligent robots. Connor�s destiny, as laid down in the first trilogy, is to lead the human resistance army against the evil technological empire of Skynet, a defence system that turned on its creators. Opposite Connor stands Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a death-row inmate who donates his body to science in 2003, only to wake up, bruised and baffled, in 2018, in need of an oil-change. The process of re-establishing these characters and fitting them into a pre-determined timeline forms the majority of the story in Terminator Salvation. The rest of it is composed of fight-scenes and explosions.

Those arriving fresh to the story are not given much in the way of explanations to help figure out the tangled storyline or the significance of certain moments in the franchise�s long mythology. Frantic, confused and undeservedly self-important, the storytelling in Terminator Salvation is as grindingly mechanical as the robot villains. Fans of post-apocalyptic science-fiction will get some satisfaction from the occasionally arresting images of ash-strewn devastation but the action sequences, the main draw for the summer audience, are disappointing.

McG throws the camera around with abandon but, barring a couple of genuinely thrilling moments, the effect is more like playing a video game than watching a movie. It is understandable, given the iconic status of the series, that the new film would reference the Terminator franchise, but the director�s reliance on nods to other classic films; from The Great Escape to War of the Worlds, Alien and Blade Runner, are far less forgivable. Either McG is worried that his images will not carry any weight without echoing a greater work or, as I suspect, he is simply incapable of creating something original.

Bale is an actor that is at his best when grim-faced and taciturn, but he goes too far in his characterisation of John Connor, turning this legendary hero into an action-movie caricature. Monotonously intense and belligerent, Bale does achieve something original - or at least I have never seen it before � managing to shout each line of dialogue through gritted teeth. I was surprised to see Connor take orders from a squad of generals, headquartered in a secret submarine, as the Terminator mythology had consistently established that Connor was the boss. His mantle as the last messiah is further undermined by equipping him with a newly-developed gadget that, with a few frantic button presses, overrides the robot�s defence systems. Doesn�t that make the gadget the real hero? And isn�t the gadget a machine and therefore part of the problem?

Intended as a reboot for a long-dead franchise, Terminator Salvation lacks the emotion and innovation of the first two films, being a closer match for Jonathan Mostow�s uninspired third instalment than James Cameron�s original diptych. The script, which has passed through the hands of dozens of screenwriters, is constructed along an unswerving trajectory through a series of action set-pieces. Bale and Worthington aside, none of the secondary characters are given an introduction, arriving in the story when required before disappearing into the digitally composed background. The lack of connection with the characters means it doesn�t matter what happens to them, the effect is like watching a stranger crack open a toaster with a lump-hammer. There is a lot of noise and sparks but in the end, it is impossible to care.

With Bale having already signed up for two more Terminator films, the last ten minutes are spent setting up the sequel. On this pre-programmed evidence, the war might already be over. The robots won.

Sam Raimi�s Drag Me To Hell might be considered cinematic loose change in comparison to the excesses of his billion-dollar Spiderman trilogy but this old-school genre horror comedy is nevertheless a pointed return to the director�s low-fidelity roots, a queasily entertaining mix of giggles and gore.

After a short prologue that establishes the supernatural roots of what is to come, we are introduced to bank official Christine (Alison Lohman) as she listens to an improve-your-diction tape on the drive to work. Her first customer on the day is Mrs Ganush, a cloudy-eyed old gypsy woman (played with uncommon verve by Lorna Raver), who is behind on her mortgage payments and looking for an extension. Christine, who is striving for a promotion and unwilling to disappoint her boss (David Paymer), turns her down and the crone retaliates with a curse.

After a showdown in a parking garage, Mrs. Ganush snatches a button from Christine�s coat and utters a croaking incantation. �Soon it will be you who comes begging to me,� she swears, before disappearing in a swirl of creepy mist. But the witch dies before Christine can ask her to lift the hex, leaving our every-woman heroine with no-one but her sceptical boyfriend (Justin Long) and a floundering pseudo-psychic (Dileep Rao) to help her escape her fate. Christine has been given just three days to live, while being increasingly tormented by a goat-like demon (a visual nod to the ghoul in Jacques Tourneur�s Night of the Demon), before a fiery chasm will open beneath her feet and claim her.

With a straightforward plot and a scant back-story, Raimi�s objective here less about reinventing cinematic horror than it is to push all the genre-mandated buttons, in the right order. He does this by relying on the things he does best; flinging the camera around his carefully dressed sets in a series of pans and crash zooms, using creeping shadows and screeching sound effects to create inexpensive mood and splashing around the fake blood and crawling maggots in order to make the audience squirm in their seats.

Considering the current economic climate, it is perhaps strangely apposite to watch a banker being tormented by the malign spirit of a defaulting mortgage holder but given that Raimi and his brother Ivan wrote their script back in 1992, it is difficult to ascribe any particular political intention to his rollercoaster creep-show. Timeliness aside, what carries the film is its wicked sense of humour, each gruesome moment matched by a macabre gag, the narrative improbabilities and clanging coincidences becoming less important as the jokes pile up. It�s no classic, but it is a lot of fun.