Alan Dee’s film preview: Labor Day is a lush slice of melodrama, however you want to spell it

The Color Purple, Pearl Harbor – big budget movies that insist on the Stateside spelling are nothing new.

In this tangled tale Kate Winslet goes all traumatised and dishevelled as the sad sack single mum of a teenage son, left high and dry by her hubby giving her the heave-ho.

What she needs to do is meet a nice chap, but Josh Brolin’s menacing escaped convict hardly fits the bill.

Even if they did click, there’s no future in it, what with him being on the run and a convicted murderer to boot.

But after being forced to give him a lift, she offers him a haven and over a long weekend they begin to bond.

It’s from a Joyce Maynard novel and directed by Jason Reitman, the man behind Juno and Up In The Air. It’s all a bit overwrought, but it has a certain melodramatic meat to it.

More tongue in cheek is A Long Way Down, in which Pierce Brosnan continues to prove that there is life after Bond in a movie version of the Nick Hornby book about a mismatched quartet of would-be suicides who meet up by accident at the top of a skyscraper where they all plan to end it all, find there’s something of a queue and eventually agree not to do the dread deed just yet, and look out for each other in the weeks ahead.

Imogen Poots and Aaron Paul, both seen only the other week in Need For Speed, also feature, as do the ever watchable Toni Collette andSam Neill.