Film releases: February 26

Irony tycoon: Michael Moore (right) in ‘Capitalism: A Love Story’

The attack dog has come off its chain again. After savaging American violence (Bowling for Columbine), American governance (Fahrenheit 9/11) and American healthcare (Sicko), Michael Moore has a go at American, indeed planetary, free-market capitalism. Capitalism: A Love Story (

) feels a little like an ageing mutt’s last go at the postman. Since this postman is already in tatters – we have been documentaried to near-death by directors attacking those blameable for delivering our biggest bills since the Depression – we feel tempted to call “Time”. Moore is Moore, though. He has much to say. He says it wittily. And unlike most screen essayists he uses the screen.

The entire opening segment is a visual pun comparing one empire to another. In snippets from an old educational film depicting Ancient Rome – where does Moore find these kitsch gems? – toga’d fools of destiny walk about tall-pillared sets irresistibly suggestive of modern neoclassical Washington. Glimpses of that tarnished New Rome are ever more pointedly intercut: the crumbling banks, the melting money, the new imperium tottering.

Thereafter the soothsayer keeps himself centre-screen. This is personality cinema and we want it that way. The filmmaker-presenter doorsteps the usual corporations. (Weary guard to weary intercom: “Michael Moore to see the president.”) He runs down – in all senses – the greedy companies ripe for satirical downsizing. He presides over a health-insurance segment that includes a spoof clip of Robert Powell’s Jesus of Nazareth, re-dubbed to say to a cripple, “I cannot cure your pre-existing condition”. And, mid-movie, the director who made Roger and Me is able to say “I told you so”, as the very setting for that early attack on corporate delinquency, Flint, Michigan – one-time General Motors capital – is revisited by Moore and his ex-car worker dad. It is now an industrial wasteland, though the town served a recent stint (we learn) as the country’s centre for issuing foreclosure notices.

The irony industry, at least, goes on. Moore has by now bought up all the factories. These include the irony plant that produced the moment when airline pilot Chester “Miracle on the Hudson” Sullenberger publicly laid into penny-pinching airline bosses – hero turns corporate villain in an instant – and the irony plant that created the piquant fact that Goldman Sachs, a Mephistopheles of the meltdown, was the Obama presidential campaign’s biggest private donor.

The film is good fun. Perhaps we have seen it all before, but you could say that of a sunrise. Every sunrise is different and Moore’s are usually worth getting out of bed for.

Wacky: Dany Boon and Julie Ferrier in ‘Micmacs’

Several times during the press show of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs (

) I sensed a collective think-bubble rise from colleagues, posing the question, “Is your Jeunet really necessary?” During the second world war people had to question their need to travel. In this movie the need to travel from story point A to story point B becomes increasingly debatable in a long, doolally comical caprice from the maker of Delicatessen and the loved-by-some, loathed-by-me Amélie.

Jeunet makes films about pretend human brings – that includes Amélie – who live in a winsome corner of whimsy-land. He is better at farce than romance, so at least Micmacs belts along, even if like many industrial belts it moves in a circle. A gang of eccentric second-hand dealers live under a scrap heap in Paris. They include a contortionist (Julie Ferrier), a cannonball man (Dominique Pinon), a cook-cum-den-mother (Yolande Moreau), a maths genius, a midget and the hero (Dany Boon), a video-shop assistant given a vengeance mission. A locally produced bullet has lodged in his head. The enemy? A pair of rival neighbourhood arms factories.

The film pumps up its antiwar posture to lend pomp, or purpose, to a story that would otherwise be a string of Heath Robinson-style sabotage stunts. Some of these have enough ingenuity to get a giggle: a human cannon shot across a river, a bowlful of bees timed to fall and smash at an exact diversionary moment. Since the film is shot with wacky Terry Gilliam colours and compositions we can never be bored – except with surfeit – and sometimes a line of dialogue has a Duchamp surreality: “He burst a lung in a hot-water bottle exploding contest.” But it all comes to a sticky end – as in schmaltz, not bloodshed – when the captured arms tycoons are confronted with real photos of real landmine victims. Suddenly a film that has belaboured our funnybones for 100 minutes makes a charge for our tear ducts. Neither we nor the landmine victims deserved this facile flipping of agenda.

Robert De Niro is the main reason to see Everybody’s Fine (

). Hollywood’s remake of Stanno tutti bene, a nearly forgotten film by Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso), moves that rueful Punchinello phiz through funny-sad stations of paternal disillusion, as he journeys round his offspring after they have all cancelled on a reunion chez Pop. Think of About Schmidt, and garnish with a sprig of Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers.

Believing the kids are all right, De Niro finds they are all wrong: all lying about their careers, their marriages, even their survival. (No one has told dad about drug-doomed Danny.) It is a good lesson for fathers to learn. Most other audiences can stay at home. Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell strive to animate the children. De Niro alone is worth watching, even if one suspects the pain on his face comes from the script he must speak rather than the story he must enact.

Extraordinary Measures (

), by contrast, gives sentimental storytelling a good name. It has “disease-of-the-week telemovie” written through it like lettering through seaside rock. It was made with modest means by CBS. Yet Harrison Ford’s participation as star and co-producer has helped it into theatres, where it may moisten handkerchiefs as it did mine.

Yes. Even when scripted and directed tritely, the right true-life subject – here the Lorenzo’s Oil-like story of two parents fighting to find a cure for Pompe’s disease, a muscular dystrophy variant that affects two of their children – can drill for brine in any of us. If one wasn’t caught up, the cornball contrivances would be obvious, not least the conflating of several real research scientists (as the makers admit) into the adorable and crusty one played by Ford. But the acting is good, the true-story imprimatur a help. The movie ends with clasped hands, brimming tears and inspirational music pedalling the end credits. I surrender. Pass me another hankie.

The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates. Then again, there are some examined lives that make one want to go out and shoot oneself. The examined life of Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ character in From Paris with Love (

), for instance, is boring to its minutest detail, even though he is a Paris-based embassy official turned hit man. He is mentored by John Travolta. Egg-bald, bearded and seemingly dressed by the Village People, Travolta shoots human targets with insouciance and tells Meyers to do the same. The monotony is crowned by a predictable plot twist. Producer Luc Besson, maker of the similar but superior Nikita, conceived the original story. It should, like most of its characters, have been killed on sight.