The Last Kiss

"I do feel morally angry about a film in which we are asked to sympathise with men who impregnate their partners and then decide that the manly thing to do is run away and go and enjoy themselves with 23-year-old students" - Mark Kermode, BBC Radio 5live

Zach Braff stars in a film that almost single-handedly turned Mark from a staunch supporter of director Paul Haggis into a fierce critic. Haggis had already been taking flack amongst the wider critical community after his film Crash (the Sandra Bullock one) won Best Picture over Bareback Mountain at the 2006 Oscars, but Mark had been a big fan of Crash, naming it alongside A History Of Violence as his favourite film of 2005. Haggis had also been the subject of scorn for his script for Million Dollar Baby and the way it treated euthanasia - but again, Mark had thought these criticisms were wrong-headed. Directly as a result of seeing the "horrible and really vile" The Last Kiss, the Good Doctor began to question whether he had in fact been wrong.

Much as with Closer or We Don't Live Here Anymore, the real problem was the failure to portray characters as behaving in any way that related to the real world: "I don't believe these people exist, and if they do exist, I want to put them on an island, drag it into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and sink it."

Mark was especially concerned with the way the film tried to sympathise with male characters who act so appallingly to their female partners: "I mean it's just like, I'm sorry, what are we going to have next? Movies saying, 'serial killing? Hey, well - it's just something people do when they're having crises'?"