This week's new DVD reviews

SIN NOMBRE ****

Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. Starring Paulina Gaitan, Edgar Flores 15 cert

Weaving together two initially discrete stories (a boy falls foul of his gang in Mexico and a Honduran girl hops a train for Texas), Fukunaga’s debut is a relentlessly gripping melodrama with a properly powerful conclusion. The film may succumb to clichés of the holy urchin, but it has such a sure sense of narrative balance that few sensible viewers will complain.

THE INVENTION OF LYING ***

Directed by Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson. Starring Ricky Gervais, Jennifer Garner, Rob Lowe, Tina Fey 15 cert

Gervais’s debut as feature director takes place in a world where nobody knows how to lie (or has any tact). The central concept offers endless philosophical quandaries, but,

thanks to shallow characterisation, the film is simply not funny enough. Worthwhile enough, but we expect better from Ricky.

THE SOLOIST **

Directed by Joe Wright. Starring Jamie Foxx, Robert Downey Jr., Catherine Keener 12 cert

Wright’s follow-up to Atonement plays like standard middle-brow Oscar bait. Downey Jr stars as a journalist who helps Foxx, a homeless fellow, to get back to playing the cello. To be fair, The Soloist is less sentimental and formulaic than the summary suggests, but it remains a pretentious, unfocused mess. Performances are up to scratch.

COUPLES RETREAT *

Directed by Peter Billingsley. Starring Vince Vaughn, Jason Bateman, Jon Favreau, Malin Akerman, Kristin Davis, Kristen Bell, Jean Reno 15 cert

Appalling comedy in which the talent listed above retire to a tropical island for couples counselling and mildly risque humour. The film-makers are far too interested in teaching us lessons. As a result, time that could have been spent pushing the heroes into tide pools or having them walk into palm trees is taken up with long, tedious conversations with analysts. Disastrous.

THE UGLY TRUTH *

Directed by Robert Luketic. Starring Katherine Heigl, Gerard Butler 16 cert

Unnecessarily dire romantic comedy starring Heigl as an uptight TV producer and Butler as the misogynistic gender-wars pundit whom she asks – for no good reason – to organise her love life. The performances are useless, the story makes no sense, and the decision to include incongruous blue language in an innocuous comedy is utterly baffling.