BRIAN VINER: Comedy star Seth Rogen is well and truly PICKLED!

An American Pickle Rating: Verdict: Sweet and sour Young Ahmed Rating: Verdict: Powerful and timely Papicha Rating: Verdict: An auspicious debut The comic premise of the innocent abroad has a long cinematic heritage and comes in many forms: Woody Allen in Sleeper, Peter Sellers in Being There, Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee... all found themselves plunged into an unfamiliar society in which, whether by accident or design, their ‘otherness’ helped them to thrive. In An American Pickle it’s the turn of Seth Rogen’s Herschel Greenbaum, a pious Jew from the fictional Eastern European town of Schlupsk, who in 1920, with his wife Sarah, emigrates to America to escape the twin horrors of extreme poverty and violent anti-Semitism. His nice mother is beside herself; just a month earlier he was playing video games, now he’s raging about heretics Nevertheless, An American Pickle has charm, zest and a running time of under 90 minutes — a solid trio of virtues. La Dolce Vita - Federico Fellini’s masterpiece goes on a bit but that just makes it a bigger treat 2) The Lives Of Others Very few directorial debuts are as assured as Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s absorbing tale of a mid-1980s surveillance operation by the Stasi, the East German secret police.