Reviewed by David Levinson

AFTER floundering through arrested development in this year’s Knocked Up, Seth Rogen has handed the baton over to a new wave of dropout with Superbad – a high school comedy all about (duh) getting laid. Co-written by Rogen (along with Evan Goldberg), the movie tempers its sharp guy-girl dynamics with liberal fixes of crudity, in a way that doesn’t really differ from the “new sincerity” of Judd Apatow (who produced). But where as Apatow’s manchild odysseys are so obsessively rooted in the now (Spider-Man 3, anyone?), Superbad takes aim in a bonghazy past: Closing the gap between the single-day rigour of Linklater, and the fluffy liberalism of American Pie, it arrives at a view of the teenage libido that’s always amusing, but too contrived to really nail the zeitgest.

Reviewed by Robert Metcalf

Joy Division is a promising debut feature from British director Reg Traviss; a mixture of sixties spy story and the brutal recreation of the Second World War’s Eastern Front, with the narrative shifting between the two. These settings are so different, and the central character so changed, that the two strands of the narrative at times feel like two separate films.