Lakeview Terrace

Lakeview Terrace places itself in familiar territory: an innocent suburban street; a pretty, optimistic young couple moving into the neighbourhood; everything so perfect you're just counting down the minutes until the dream turns sour.

This time our bouncy, liberal newcomers are Chris and Lisa (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington). They soon meet their neighbour, LAPD cop Abel Turner (Samuel L Jackson), who swiftly goes from being curmudgeonly to outright disturbing.

At first he merely frowns on Chris's smoking habit and his taste in rap music, but ultimately, it's his views on inter-racial marriage that begin to worry the couple. The twist here is that Abel is not some predictable white thug, but a middle-class black man.

Once the twist is turned, however, there are not really many places to go. Jackson's jig as the glowering neighbour who can't stand the mixed-race couple next door veers quickly into parody, and as Chris and Lisa's marriage begins to buckle, any insights we might have gleaned into the racial disputes are soon lost. What we're left with is something trashy and depressingly unsurprising. ·