Honestly wasn't expecting to like this. There are few people more annoying (and less funny) than Will Ferrell, but quite honestly he was very good in this. The other headliner, Mark Wahlberg, is almost always brilliant, and though I have seen him in a comedy recently, I still had my doubts he could bring it off, but he does. The appearance of Ray Stevenson—recently of Dexter—is well placed. And Steve Coogan is naturally superb.

The Ferrell-Wahlberg duo essentially take on…

With the change of presidency in Iran yesterday, to the ostensible "moderate" Hassan Rowhani, away from the fanatical Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it is quite a timely reminder that the Islamic Republic persists and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his Guardian Council are no less powerful for this change of front-man, who in all likelihood is not all that moderate in any case. Rowhani oversaw the "Supreme National Security Council" from the time of its creation in 1989, when the Iranian theocracy…

What would it be like to have your every moment viewed by others? Most people have moments—usually when doing something wrong or (at least if publicly known) embarrassing—when they will at least take a second look around for hidden surveillance equipment. But most brush this off, knowing it is the paranoia that comes from the unsuppressable comments of that other you—the Daemon or "impartial spectator"—with whom we carry on an internal conversation all day, every day, and whose approval we…

It is simply impossible to see what the fuss was about. Was it the visuals perhaps—surely surpassed now by Life of Pi? It can't be the acting—I like Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver as much as anybody, but reality is still reality. My impression is that the supposed wondrousness of the thing was political: this is a film that presents a vision of what idiots believe the Iraq War was about—and indeed what people now commonly take to be the…