Benjamin Button breaks your heart

Don’t have the three hours to sit through an epic tale spanning eight decades, three continents, two world wars, and one enduring love? Here’s the gist: youth is wasted on the young.

Look beyond the larger-than-life presentation, get your head around the central premise – dude ages in reverse – and, yes, there’s not really much to ‘The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button’. But don’t let that put you off. This is compelling storytelling, plain and simple. Whimsical fantasy and genuine heartbreak collide in a delicate fairytale, lovingly and intimately told.

Angelina Jolie is the real ‘Changeling’

Computer hacker, coke-head supermodel, cyborg, collector of bones, sociopathic mental patient, the world’s hottest archaeologist (with pout), mail-order bride, humanitarian aid worker, Colin Farrell’s mom, and professional assassin (twice) — her roles have been diverse but today none could be more appropriate for Angelina Jolie than that of mother.

In ‘Changeling’, the serial collector of children plays single mom Christine Collins. She dotes on her son, Walter, but the demands of her job mean the nine-year-old has developed quite an independent streak. So when she’s unexpectedly called in to work on a weekend, she thinks little of leaving him home alone. It is quiet, suburban Los Angeles in 1929, after all.

‘The Wrestler’ gets real

Christian Bale lost 28kg in four months, dropping to 54kg by eating a can of tuna or an apple per day. Daniel Day Lewis studied Czech, broke two ribs by hunching over for weeks, learned to live off the land, and took lessons as an apprentice butcher. And Robert DeNiro worked as a New York taxi driver for three months, boxed competitively, and gained a third of his body weight.

Amateurs.

340ml are sorry for the delay

There’s something undeniably depressing about the bleak apartheid architecture – the tatty Regent’s Park Hotel; Triompf’s faceless flats; Parktown’s cold concrete constructions – that comprises the artwork of ‘Sorry For The Delay’. And yet, in Ross Garrett’s striking photographs, the gloomy buildings have a haunting beauty.