Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold) **

Dir. Andrea Arnold

Starring Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Charlotte Collins, Harry Treadaway, Rebecca Griffiths

Sometimes it's better if a film completely fails on every level. There's less disappointment if you can just write it off completely and do a mental countdown until the movie ends. It can certainly be more frustrating if parts of a movie work really well so it grabs you early, but then you watch it just sit there and waste that early potential with several ridiculous flaws. Unfortunately, that is the case with Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, which squanders a strong central performance from Katie Jarvis on a poorly paced story filled with stupid clichés and hollow supporting characters.

Mia (Jarvis) is not your typical teen girl, unless of course you've seen an independent movie before. She drinks constantly, gets into fights, and every other word she speaks is of the four letter variety. Part of the problem is her mother, who isn't the best role model, what with her late night sex parties and drinking binges. It's certainly a fractured mother-daughter relationship, which threatens to get even more fractured when Mia develops an unhealthy attraction to her mother's boyfriend Connor (Michael Fassbender).

A Town Called Panic (Stephane Aubier, Vincent Patar 2010) ***

Dir. Stephane Aubier, Vincent Patar

I'm not sure what kind of narcotics one needs to be on to come up with the inspired lunacy that is A Town Called Panic, but I sure wouldn't mind a few of them to be distributed to some of the mainstream filmmakers that populate the multiplexes with bland retreads. This is one of the oddest animated films I've seen, but when it works, it is an absolutely hilarious adventure.

A Town Called Panic is a stop motion animated feature that follows the adventures of three plastic toys - an Indian, a Cowboy, and a Horse, all of whom live in the same house. Trouble starts when Cowboy and Indian throw a surprise birthday party for Horse and accidentally buy 50 million bricks. The bricks collapse and destroy their house and in the midst of rebuilding it, one of their walls gets stolen.This leads to a series of zany events in which they have to track down the stolen wall.