Eleven Days in May review – children pay the price of war

★★★★ ELEVEN DAYS IN MAY Children pay the price of war in new film from Michael Winterbottom and Palestinian co-director Mohammad Sawwaf

Palestinian child victims fondly remembered in an understated anti-war documentary

In another flare-up of Pyrrhic Hamas missiles and punitive Israeli bombing one year ago, over 60 Gazan children were killed. Michael Winterbottom and his Palestinian co-director Mohammad Sawwaf made Eleven Days in May as a “simple memorial to the children who lost their lives”. Sawwaf interviewed surviving relatives, who detailed those lives and erased futures. The result is an understated, unanswerable anti-war film.

Wonder Wheel review - Woody Allen and Kate Winslet channel O'Neill

★★ WONDER WHEEL Woody Allen and Kate Winslet channel Eugene O'Neill

A romantic melodrama in Fifties Coney Island also stars a prattling Justin Timberlake

In recent months Woody Allen has been publicly disavowed by a conga line of major film stars. The latest who seems to have expressed regret for working with him – if not by name – is Kate Winslet. She stars in his latest film, and may also feel slight regret for artistic reasons.

DVD: Steve Jobs

DVD: STEVE JOBS Fast-moving biopic of the original Apple genius

Fast-moving biopic of the original Apple genius

If you saw The Social Network, for which Aaron Sorkin wrote the script, you will recognise the type also on display here – a hugely driven, arrogant genius who is emotionally illiterate. In The Social Network it was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg; in Steve Jobs, it’s the co-founder of Apple.

The Dressmaker

Kate Winslet revenge drama needs serious alterations

What begins as a would-be exercise in camp devolves into perfervid tosh and ultimately tedium in The Dressmaker, a belligerently over-the-top revenge drama that might just about have squeaked by as an opera - an art form better-suited to such deliberately over-the-top theatrics.

Steve Jobs

STEVE JOBS Michael Fassbender gives good monster, but Kate Winslet wins this iBattle

Michael Fassbender gives good monster, but Kate Winslet wins this iBattle

A couple of years ago there was a television documentary about Steve Jobs which wafted much smoke up the sainted iHole. A variety of famous fanboys wept over the curve on the iPhone 3 and simpered at the kleptocratic takeover of the music industry. Never mind that Jobs was reportedly short of redeeming features. A documentary has no obligation to supply drama. A feature film is another story. The makers of Steve Jobs have their work cut out finding something plausibly nice to say about a driven egomaniac who tells anyone who’ll listen that he’s changing the planet.

A Little Chaos

Kate Winslet has green fingers in Alan Rickman's second, overly languorous film as director

We’ve waited 33 years since Peter Greenway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract for another film combining romance, intrigue and 17th century landscape gardening. Now we have one, and it couldn’t be more different.

LFF 2014: A Little Chaos

Pulpy costume drama is a visual feast

Alan Rickman returns to film directing 17 years after he first stepped behind the camera with a film as pulpy and bodice-ripping as his debut feature, The Winter Guest, was chilly and austere. Visually enticing and packed with a blue-chip international array of actors, several of whom have precious little to do, A Little Chaos addresses a preferred English topic (gardens and gardening) displaced to some mighty elegant French environs.

Divergent

Neil Burger provides the dismal direction on a film which fails to stand out from the crowd

Goddamn The Hunger Games movies for reminding us (after the travesty that was the Twilight saga) that films based on YA fiction could be thought-provoking and thrilling, for they've only gone and hoiked our expectations up too high. Those expectations have recently been dashed by the likes of Ender's Game, The Mortal Instruments and Beautiful Creatures.

Labor Day

LABOR DAY Kate Winslet in a peach of an unintentional comedy.

Jason Reitman directs Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin in a sweaty drama cum unintentional comedy

Like his father Ivan (Ghostbusters) Jason Reitman has shown himself to be a sure hand at helming comedy, and his less commercial sensibility has resulted in films as spiky and interesting as Young Adult, Juno, Up in the Air and Thank You For Smoking.

Carnage

Roman Polanski brings Yasmina Reza's thoroughly entertaining comedy of middle-class manners to the screen

Yasmina Reza first came to theatregoers' attention with her 1994 play Art, a very funny three-hander about friendship and intellectual pretension. God of Carnage, this time a four-hander but an equally astute comedy of manners peopled by another bunch of bourgeois characters, debuted in 2007 - and now Roman Polanski has adapted it for the screen, co-writing the screenplay with Reza and moving the action from Paris to New York City.