By Mathew Kumar

This week most of the cinematic excitement is kept for Cannes—after all, those lucky sods have already been able to see Pixar’s latest film, Up!—so there’s not very much that is likely to excite us otherwise (apart from the Inside Out festival, of course, as covered by our own Johnnie Walker).
Having said that, we can’t contain our surprise about how positive local reviewers seem to be about Angels and Demons, which like the (widely derided) Da Vinci Code contains a trifecta of lame hokeyness in Dan Brown, Tom Hanks, and Ron Howard. For example, NOW’s Norm Wilner claims “Angels & Demons doesn’t suck … It’s not particularly satisfying genre cinema, but after Da Vinci, any Brown adaptation that moves quickly and offers moments of genuine tension is an improvement.”
Also out this week: The Queen and I, a documentary about the widow of the deposed Shah of Iran, called “a personal and revealing glimpse of living history” by Eye’s Keiran Grant; Is Anybody There?, which stars Bill Milner (the main kid in Son of Rambow); and Fierce Light, a documentary by Velcrow Ripper that includes footage of Daryl Hannah living in a tree.