The summer silly season has one advantage. As the tide of quality in commercial cinema draws back to the horizon – a vast regressive ocean, a mare terribilis of G.I. Joes, G-Forces and Transformers – we have time to gaze at the tiny stuff on the sea bed. This is too often relegated, at other seasons, to space-saving honourable mentions at the end of a column.

Mid-August Lunch ★★★★☆
Gianni di Gregorio

Sin Nombre ★★★☆☆
Cary Joji Fukunaga

The Time Traveler’s Wife ★★☆☆☆
Robert Schwentke

A Perfect Getaway ★★☆☆☆
David Twohy

Aliens in the Attic ★☆☆☆☆
John Schultz

Some of this stuff has washed in from Europe. Take the exquisite, corralled miniature called Mid-August Lunch (better in the original Italian title, Pranzo di Ferragosto). It lasts 75 minutes. It contains almost no professional actor: the writer-director Gianni di Gregorio takes the main role, pals and unknowns nearly all the rest. And the story? There barely is one. A middle-aged bachelor (Gregorio), who devotes his life in a walk-up Rome apartment to looking after live-in Mama (Valeria de Franciscis, a vision in wrinkled, liver-spotted skin topped by bouffant-blonde wig), finds existence taking a turn for the worse.

Hung out to dry ‘Mid-August Lunch’

The rest of urban Italy has left for the August break. So Gianni, rueful master of the “staycation”, suddenly has other men’s mums deposited at his door, from that of his building administrator – who will waive Gianni’s arrears in return for a two-day bedding and boarding of the parent – to his doctor’s semi-dotty mama, delivered with an oral Magna Carta about pills and meals. Making a geriatric foursome is the administrator’s mum’s sister, snuck in by her cheating nephew before Gianni can protest. The battles begin. Who gets the best bed? Who gets the telly? Will Mama Doc make up for her all-vegetable dinner by hogging, after midnight, the remains of the macaroni cheese?

All human life is here, hung out to dry on the balcony of old age. It would be tragic if it were not funny. It would be hysterical if it were not also tragic. As director, Gregorio, who based the film on his own experiences (of a corralling mum who allegedly chased away his wife and daughter), delivers handheld, poverty-row filmmaking that shines like a jewel. The old ladies in the story, of course, always have the last word; the one asset that doesn’t wither with age is cunning. And a hero not so much hen-pecked as poultried-to-near-death somehow keeps picking himself up, in the faith that things will improve, if not in this life, then in that great Ferragosto in the skies.

Romance and revenge: ‘Sin Nombre’

In Central America, how many countries does it take to fix a lightbulb? Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre (Without a Name) is a Spanish-speaking film directed by an ethnic Californian in Mexico and Honduras, with US/UK co-production money topping off the seed cash from Mexican actors-turned-producers Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal.

This lightbulb burns fierce in early scenes: like a naked and sizzling filament in the vignettes of thug machismo in Mexico, where the tattoo-covered “La Mara” gang carry out horrendous initiation beatings and a girl accidentally dies during a rape attempt by the leader. Her gang-member boyfriend (Edgar Flores) then slays him, during a robbery-with-machetes on the roof of a freight train carrying would-be wetbacks to the Mex/Tex border. The pretty Honduran fugitive the boy saves in the process (Paulina Gaítan) is the last ingredient needed – oh and the little-boy gang member (Kristyan Ferrer), formerly Flores’ friend, who must turn avenging foe – for the ensuing pell-mell of romance, chase and revenge climaxing on the banks of the Rio Grande.

The movie never quite determines if it is docudrama or melodrama, though each, at times, shines strongly. Filmmaker Fukunaga actually rode one of these trains, so we feel the reality of the huddled masses swaying perilously to freedom, while vendors or well-wishers hurl fruit from the railside and halts at border-points catapult the refugees into an off-roof run-around to rejoin the train after Red Tape Junction. The plot and character components become weak late on: more fitful flicker than strong-filament blaze, both in some diffident lead acting and in the staccato of coincidence and contrivance required to get everyone together at the same moment, there on the shore of the Rio G, for the Act Three showdown.

Such hourglass precisions would be all in a day’s work for the husband of The Time Traveler’s Wife. For many this is the long-awaited screen version of a bestselling novel. For me it was like two hours on the Burma railway, heaving away at time/space conundrums, arch-to-soppy dialogue and tail-chasing plotting under the lash of distributors who put us in a crowded, no-escape cinema. Eric Bana keeps landing naked from another time zone; daughter Brooklynn Proulx (inheriting the gadabout gene) keeps meeting herself; wife Rachel McAdams keeps wondering how to time the turkey.
I timed it at 107 minutes. Bruce Joel Rubin, Oscar-winning screenwriter of Ghost, is evidently obsessed with dimensional travel, but this trip is made without freshness of vision or fun and funkiness in the execution.

Witless havoc: ‘Aliens in the Attic’

There are still parts of Hawaii, apparently, not overrun by reporters sleuthing through birth/death records in hope of breaking the story that Barack Obama was never born in the US. A Perfect Getaway is set on Kauai where life is more peaceful. There is just a serial-killing couple reportedly at large, with backpackers Cliff and Cydney (Steve Zahn, Milla Jovovich) mildly distraught that it may be their trail-met chum and his girlfriend (Timothy Olyphant, Kiele Sanchez). The scenery is fabulous, the script less so, the final action sequences a headlong plunge into hokum and bathos.

Aliens in the Attic is an appeal to our inner child. It says, “I appeal to you,” and the inner child replies: “Not this side of eternity.” Wrinkly digitised munchkins play witless havoc in a family’s August vacation home. It is very winsome and very long. They order these ferragosti better in Italy.