QUENTIN (Nat Wolff) and Margo (Cara Delevingne) have been friends since they were young, growing up on the same street.

Margo is a free-spirited and adventurous type, prone to disappearing for days and weeks at a time, while Quentin mostly pines for her from afar as they grow into their teens and he sees less and less of her.

He’s trying to forget how in love he is with her and she mostly ignores him, but Q, as he’s called, can’t resist when Margo comes to him for help during their final days at high school for various revenge schemes on people who’ve wronged her.

The initial impression given here is that Margo is something of a sociopath, and it’s hard not to view her as a selfish, attention-seeking brat, but at least people eventually start to vocalise this as the film progresses.

Anyway, after this night she disappears once more, with Q getting it into his head that she has left a number of clues for him to follow to come find her.

Paper Towns is based on a book by John Green and the first film adaptation of his work, The Fault in Our Stars, was a huge hit last year. But while this is as strong in many ways, it doesn’t quite have the same hook nor the same depth.

It’s about taking chances and doing interesting things in your life, but its characters take a while to find their feet.

After the early stages when it feels like spending an extended amount of time with Margo is going to be hard to take, it becomes much more enjoyable for the stretch in the middle when she’s out of the picture. It basically becomes a road trip from this point, as Q sets off with a bunch of pals to find Margo.

As they look for clues it can sometimes be more like The Goonies than The Fault in Our Stars, and the group are a nice bunch to spend time with.

You may well ask why Margo would disappear and want to be found, but all becomes clear to both us and Q as events take their course.

Oddly, it’s Gregory’s Girl that ultimately comes to mind, although don’t go expecting anything on quite that level of charm. But despite its occasional stumbles, as a film about growing up and facing life, Paper Towns is as good an example as we’ve been given in recent times.

Running Time: 116 mins

Director: Jake Schreier

Vacation (15, 99 mins)

Director: John Francis Daley

3 stars

Rebooting the much loved Chevy Chase comedies of the 80s, this fun sequel sees Rusty Griswold (Ed Helms), wife Debbie (Christina Applegate) and their two sons embark on a road trip from Chicago to California to visit Walley World, the theme park Rusty’s dad (Chase, who cameos) took him to in the original movie. It reheats some of that film’s gags but finds plenty to make its own as they travel cross country in an unworkable Albanian car, with pitstops along the way that range in disastrousness and comedic value. A goofy guy slowly imploding is the hook and Helms and Applegate are well cast, while the kids are also great, with the younger one’s psychotic bullying of his older brother offering a top running gag. There’s lashings of crudity and much of it is manic and stupid, but laughs are surprisingly bountiful because for once with this type of thing the jokes are well timed and executed. There’s contrivance, sure, some sloppiness and a fair amount of filler, but the laughs are there and that’s pretty much all that matters.

Escobar: Paradise Lost (15, 120 mins)

Director: Andrea Di Stefano

3 stars

Set in the early 90s, this well constructed drama stars Josh Hutcherson as a young Canadian who ends up a mule for Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar (Benicio del Toro). When he’s asked to make a drop and kill a guy, we’re told in flashback the story of how he came to this point, starting off with good intentions but falling for Escobar’s niece. It’s a good way into the story and characters, an innocent’s point of view as he becomes part of the family and gradually gets his eyes opened to the reality of the situation, even if his transition is a little on the quick side. Working fairly well as a thriller, this is far from an Escobar biopic, thank goodness, and it’s actually much more Hutcherson’s film than del Toro’s. Thematically it’s closest to something like The Last King of Scotland, where a naive young man enters a dangerous world and has his head turned by a charismatic and powerful father figure, but loses steam when the focus turns to Escobar.

Gemma Bovery (15, 99 mins)

Director: Anne Fontaine

2 stars

Gemma Bovery (Gemma Arterton) and her husband (Jason Flemyng) are a British couple living in northern France where Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary. Their neighbour, the local baker, finds himself enchanted by Gemma and her similarities to Emma Bovary, and thinks she’s going to come to a tragic end like Flaubert’s heroine. When discussing the book, a character actually says it’s still interesting even though nothing happens, but that’s sadly not the case with the film. As drama it simply drifts along, neither challenging nor involving, flat but not unpleasant. Arterton is far from the best actress in the world to begin with, but saddling her with having to say half her dialogue in French really doesn’t help matters. It’s thoroughly unconvincing and often hard to listen to, and even when she and Flemyng are speaking English it still feels like there was a language barrier between them and the director.

Good People (15, 88 mins)

Director: Henrik Ruben Genz

2 stars

James Franco and Kate Hudson are an American couple in London struggling with their finances who get mixed up in a cockney gangster racket when their lodger dies and they discover a bagful of cash belonging to some very bad people. Before they know it various parties are interested in what they’ve done with the money, including Omar Sy’s French drug lord and Tom Wilkinson’s cop, in what might have been sub-Guy Ritchie fun, but is actually just dull. High on silliness and burdened with sledgehammer ethics, this dopey and lifeless thriller plods along in pedestrian fashion before turning, risibly, into Home Alone.

The Wolfpack (15, 90 mins)

Director: Crystal Moselle

3 stars

This haphazard documentary follows the Angulo family, which consists of six brothers (and a mostly ignored sister) who have spent almost their entire childhood inside their New York apartment, sometimes not venturing outside for a years at a time. Movies are how they know the world and they’re first seen re-enacting scenes from Reservoir Dogs, which provides an entertaining way into their lives. Information about their upbringing is well parcelled at first, like where their parents are and what they do for money, but the chaotic nature of the footage can be distracting and initial intrigue eventually gives way to restlessness. There are some people compelling people at the centre of this but the bottom line is their story is simply not told in an interesting enough way to sustain a feature and deeper, perhaps more troubling questions are either never asked or have been met with a refusal to be answered.