Alan Dee’s cinema guide

Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman are the two boyhood pals who have grown apart as they’ve grown up – one’s a stressed-out family man lawyer, the other a singleton slacker. Both envy the other’s lot in life, and guess what –after a drunken binge they wake up in each other’s bodies and soon find out that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence.

Alan Arkin is a welcome addition, as always, but you’d expect more from the behind the camera team that penned The Hangover and called the shots on The Wedding Crashers.

It’s better than last year’s Hot Tub Time Machine, but that’s not exactly a rave review.

> Don’t women have it hard? They have to juggle jobs, homes, complicated personal lives, kids – and then they get portrayed on screen by gormless Mr Ed impersonator Sarah Jessica Parker.

I Don’t Know How She Does It was a best-selling book by Brit writer Allison Pearson but with whiney Parker as the superwoman and Greg Kinnear, Pierce Brosnan and Kelsey Grammer among the men she has to cope with and Christina Hendricks, the current must-have sidekick in all sorts of things, also in the cast as her catty best friend.

The whole shooting match is so detached from reality that nobody can take it seriously. It’s supposed to be a comedy, but Parker just isn’t funny. I don’t know why she does it and I donlt know why they let her.

> Another ‘I don’t know why they did it’ moment – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was classic telly and is still a rewarding watch, but for some reason the Le Carre tales get a cinema shake-up with Gary Oldman in the George Smiley role made famous by Alec Guinness.

Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, John Hurt, Ciaran Hinds, Kathy Burke – all get roped in for this downbeat story of everyday spies, and it’s perfectly fine. Just unnecessary.

> Oh, if only 30 Minutes Or Less was the running time of some movies... Here were have Jesse Eisenberg and Danny McBride in a bank robbery comedy. A weird true story about a hare-brained scheme to get away with the loot inspired this effort from director Ruben ‘Zomebieland’ Fleischer but the set-up is the most original thing about it.

> Finally there’s You Instead, a love story with the backdrop of Scotland’s T in the Park rock festival. The singer in an American band and the feisty front and centre female of an in your face British combo hate each other, then love each other, there are handcuffs incvolved and at least the soundtrack has a bit of bite.