The Daily Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 24

24 Film All in the jeans REVIEW Tim Robey The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants PG CERT, 119 MIN The Mighty Celt 12A CERT, 88 MIN Four girls and a screenplay is the unlikely recipe for a chick flick that works than it sounds. How could it not be? The word "sisterhood" such an instant guarantee of unwatchably mawkish fempowerment it's a wonder reviewers didn't have to be handcuffed to their seats on arrival. But it's important that your chick-flick-resistant critic single out the occasional one that's honest enough to work. and perhaps thanks to the well-liked source novel. by Ann Brashares this is just such an example.

My inner 14-year-old girl came out snuffling and elated. By "pants" we mean a magic pair of one-size-fits-all jeans. by "traveling" we mean and by "sisterhood" we mean a quartet teenage of independent Puerto Rican Carmen (Real Women Have Curves's America Ferrera). athletic. blonde Bridget (Blake Lively).

softly-spoken Lena (Alexis Bledel) and alternative. cynical Tibby (Amber Tamblyn). Heading off their separate ways one summer. they decide to share said totemic trousers to keep the friendship going. by wearing them for a week each and then FedExing them on to the next girl.

(It's the longest advert for the global delivery giant since Cast Away.) Will pants change their lives forever? No prizes for guessing. but MUST NAVI MOVIES The classics that every film-lover will want to own This is the last in The Daily Telegraph's exclusive offer, which allows readers to buy a range of classic films from the Rank archives on DVD for only from play.com. For full details of how to buy David Lean's Oliver Twist, see he Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is better Great lines: Alexis Bledel and Michael Ken Kwapis's film lays on plenty of educational heartache first. The gifted America Ferrera roundly transcends her role's you-go-girl particularly in a showstopping phone monologue to her dad. And 'Amber Tamblyn scowls with a fierce and funny integrity: she should have had the Thora Birch part in Ghost World.

Given that the screenplay comes from the pens of Delia Ephron (You've Got Mail) and Elizabeth Chandler (What a Girl Wants). it's Rady in The 88 1. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants un-toxic, never selling unpretentious drama is basically hero of his until the animal to peddle a about letting bygones be bygones. comes good on the racetrack. message, and giving drawing a veil and moving on.

It's familiar turf think Ken dialogue they can The main character is Loach's Kes with a greyhound. But their talents round. 14-year-old Donal (Tyrone first-time director Pearse Elliott Celt begins with McKenna). a mouthy lad with a manfully reins in the blarney. and fluttering in West passion for greyhound racing.

who there is something doggedly everyone looking helps local trainer Good Joe (Ken heartfelt about the movie's glum. Shoot a film here Stott) with everything except the commitment to unextraordinars for sure you summary execution of dogs that lives. As Donal's mother. Gillian back-story. But have outgrown their winning Anderson pitches in with a Robert Carlyle stars as a streak.

The same fate looks set to note-perfect Belfast brogue and gunman returning befall Donal's favourite dubbed swigs Guinness with the best of past. this The Mighty Celt after a comic-book them. All hail the mighty Gillian. performances. it's one of Lean's finest achievements.

and one of the best films of a particularly fecund period in British movie-making. It grips from the very start. as a young, heavily pregnant woman staggers across a terrifying, storm-lashed landscape towards the parish workhouse, where she dies bringing our hero into the world. This sequence daringly, more than six minutes pass without a word of dialogue was devised by Kay Walsh. aka Mrs David Lean, who appears in the film as the tragic Nancy.

The scene depicting Nancy's death at the hands of psychopathic brute Bill Sikes is also Telegraph Promotion breathtakingly powerful inspired. and look out too for and ingeniously realised. youngsters Anthony Newley Rather than showing the as the Artful Dodger. a assault. Lean focuses instead teenage Diana Dors as on Sikes's dog as it Charlotte.

and. as Oliver. scrambles and scratches at John Howard the door, trying desperately Davies. combining fragility to get out of the room. It is a and resilience with chilling sight.

extraordinary assurance. Robert Newton plays the The perfect casting is drink-maddened Sikes with matched by the look of the all the authority of an actor film. The expressionistic sets who was actually drunk for interiors and exteriors much of the shoot. He's the induce vertigo. and the perfect Dickensian lighting what there is of it grotesque, and not the only conjures up a dark.

one here: Francis Sullivan nightmarish mood. Squalor is brilliant as the appallingly and deprivation have rarely cruel Mr Bumble. but most been so realistically memorable of all is Alec depicted: nor have goodness Guinness as the creepy. and oleaginous Fagin. His performance is Monday's paper Thrilling, technically heartbreaking, astonishing, and Dickensian: Robert Newton as Sikes crammed with unforgettable 2-for-1 nights at stylish boutique hotels Mr Mrs Smith is the definitive guide to the Complete a Mr Mrs Smith voucher and Participating hotels most stylish places to stay in Europe, whether attach your tokens.

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FRIDAY, AUGUST 26. 2005 The Cave SHOWING THE DAILY TELEGRAPH arts.telegraph.co.uk 12A CERT. 97 MIN No one who saw Neil Marshall's taut subterranean nightmare The Descent will be scared by The Cave, which is almost exactly the 12A version, and has clearly been cut to ribbons to make it so. A very dull C-list American cast play professional underwater explorers recce-ing uncharted caverns beneath a 13th-century abbey in until they start being gobbled up by sightless demons going for a reptilian HR (Alien) Giger look. It's not wholly unenjoyable, but any real thrills have been pruned away by those editing shears.

which go into a squeamish frenzy whenever anything exciting threatens to happen. 1. amazingly these girls out shrink-to-fit the actresses actually get The Mighty Union flags Belfast. and thoroughly and one thing's won't want for although former IRA home to his Oliver Twist (1948) DIRECTED BY DAVID LEAN Then David Lean another embarked on Dickens adaptation immediately after completing his marvellous Great Expectations. Coward, who had co-directed the wartime classic In Which We Serve with Lean, thought it a terrible mistake.

Mercifully, Coward's reservations went unheeded. Twist surpasses even Great Expectations. Daily Telegraph UK and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D CERT. 93 MIN Robert Rodriguez is a busy man too busy to make this migraine-inducing superhero fantasy seem like anything other than a sop to his kids after Sin City. Written by his eight using the son same Racer dire and process that made Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over one of the most visually oppressive experiences I've ever had in a cinema.

this has if anything even less to recommend it. The dream-world of Max (Cavden Boyd, is visualised in a hyperactive see-what-sticks fashion that's mainly just irksome. and the desire to take those flimsy red-and-blue specs off and fling them at the screen nearly got the better of me. Summer Storm 15 CERT 106 So naively earnest it's almost of a guilty pleasure. Marco Kreuzpaintner's German coming-out drama has Robert Stadlober as Tobi.

a young Bavarian cox who hasn't told anyone he's steering for the other team. There literally is another team. and obligingly they're called No Rest for the Brave CERT 3801S3IAOW today, The hotels across the Amusingly oddball French existential comedy. in which Basile (Thomas Suire) refuses to the triumph of hope. Marc Lee nights for the Smith collection gO to sleep and instead massacres entire villages.

Or something. Don't ask me. TR Continuing one at is giving Ireland as you the chance recommended by to stay two the Mr Mrs price of.