Breaking and Entering (Anthony Minghella, 2006)

Minghella's final film is another set of musings on the vagaries of relationships, this time set around London's King's Cross, the station clearly symbolic of characters in transit between national identities and emotional attachments. Jude Law is an architect with grand plans for redevelopment of the area, his partner a Swedish-American drifting away from him, preoccupied with their ADHD-afflicted daughter. His offices are burgled by a gang of Bosnians, and he tracks one of them, a parkouring urchin, to his home where he falls for Juliette Binoche, the burglar's mother.

This has the makings of something wider to say. Certainly, you could never accuse Minghella of short-changing us intellectually, and the script does well to sidestep the more predictable narrative twists. But...the displaced immigrants set-up can't avoid unfavourable comparisons with, say, Frears's Dirty Pretty Things (casting Binoche as a Bosnian inevitably brings Tautou as a Turk to mind), which developed emotional depth in sticking to one main theme, rather than just using the characters' varied backgrounds as a gloss. Law's character in particular is also disgracefully shallow, considering the actor's limitations, and it's asking a lot to rest our sympathies on his self-involved flitting. It ends up less than the sum of its parts, much like other pieces aspiring to profundity on urban life through interlinking disparate players, such as Paul Haggis's Crash.

5/10

Vals Im Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)

Waltz with Bashir is a rare beast: an animated documentary which got a Best Foreign-language Film nomination at the Oscars, on a particularly fraught political subject, namely massacres of civilians in the Lebanon War in 1982, which were facilitated by the compliance of the Israeli army.

It's told from the Israeli perceptive, Folman playing himself as a veteran of the war, now trying to piece together the entirety of what transpired through interviews with other witnesses or participants. This angle helps to unshackle the story from the customary ball-and-chain accusations of anti-Israeli bias and the animation technique employed further wrenches the viewer from their comfort zone, where images of Middle Eastern conflict might otherwise have lost their impact through over-familiarity. The technique used here is not rotoscoping, as in A Scanner Darkly, but has a similar effect: it induces a sense of hyper-reality, and really plunges you into the midst of events.

If there's a critique to be made, it's that Folman doesn't ever get round to showing the Arab resistance or civilians in any other light than as unseen snipers or nameless victims, being wholly preoccupied with the invaders' agonised hand-wringing after the event. But it could also be argued that such an alienating dissociation between the abuser and the abused is part and parcel of the nature of modern wars.

7/10

Knowing (Alex Proyas, 2009)

In which astrophysicist Nicolas Cage is the only person in the world to be gifted with the foreknowledge of every coming world disaster, revealed through mystical numbers (shorthand for science). The dreadful burden of this drives him somewhat anxious, so that he gets to do some acting in that anguished gurn style that keeps the world's cinema audiences flocking back for more. This is a pity, as his air of dumb vulnerability can be worked to good effect by an astute director - for comic effect, as in Raising Arizona, or the angst-stricken, as in Leaving Las Vegas or Adaptation. Likewise this script, which bamboozles religious orthodoxy by mixing up aliens with angels and is brave enough to actually end the world, also has a seed of something more substantial buried within it. That seed remains ungerminated, however, and all it really gives up is a series of increasingly impressive shots of big things blowing up.

4/10

Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)

The fourth film about the IRA activist Bobby Sands, who died a political martyr through his 1981 hunger strike in the Maze prison, does away with any preambles as to what he was culpable of and concentrates solely on his final protest. In this way, the director McQueen is effectively electing to avoid becoming embroiled in the background facts of Sands's individual case and letting the human aspects of brutal incarceration and blindly unshakeable determination come across instead, unimpeded by the baggage of terrorism. Some would see this as a tacit condonement of the republican cause, and certainly juxtaposing Sands's pitifully wasted body with the voice of Margaret Thatcher condemning the strike gives the latter a heartlessly inhuman air. But the contrast intended is not so much between the IRA and the British state, rather than between fragile humanity and impersonal government: McQueen's film is not an outright espousal of Sands's cause, as the opinions voiced by the prison priest in the bravura 17-minute one-take scene in the middle of the film make clear.

The dialogue in that scene in particular is constructed with a fierce intelligence and depth and gives the film its purpose. Added to that is McQueen's interest, as a visual artist, in the arrestingly powerful image, which makes the whole a hybrid of sorts between cinematic narrative and video installation art. To its great credit, it never loses itself in the experimental ground between the two.

8/10

Redbelt (David Mamet, 2008)

A mixed-martial arts film from David Mamet? How on Earth is this going to pan out?

No fear. This turns out to be Mamet's standard model, just deceptively transposed into an unexpected setting. There are backstabbing twists, a prevalent sense of fatalism and that trademark mannered dialogue style where all characters repeat themselves like a mantra (see Homicide, in particular). Oh, and Joe Mantegna.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, as the honour-bound jujitsu instructor who gets suckered into the corrupt world of MMA tournaments, makes a decent fist of dragging the script through its hokey philosophising and improbable turns with his understated gravitas, and there is a neat moment when the realisation dawns that while we're still watching a run-up to a final showdown, it's not with a man-mountain opponent but rather with the money-skewed American legal system. Sadly, Mamet seems to lose sight of this by the end.

5/10

WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)

...or how Pixar once again hit the right balance between cuddly and funny for the kids, and satirically pointed for the grown-ups.

The titular hero is a waste disposal robot alone on an abandoned future Earth of garbage-mound skyscrapers, plodding away compacting trash and anthropomorphically picking out sentimental curios until the arrival of EVE, a sleek probe robot sent to find signs of regrowth. So, what ensues is a love story in which the puppyish main protagonist follows EVE to where the departed humans have vacationed for the last 700 years, growing so bloated that they're unable to walk any more. Here's the magic formula: waddling blobs are laughs for the kids, whereas their parents will basically see all of civilisation turned into Americans on sunbeds, drip-fed milkshakes.

It goes without saying that the animation is hugely impressive, and that the appropriate references are made to various stock sci-fi sources. What does come as a surprise, though, is that the lead robots, with their two-word vocabularies and pared-down faces, have somehow been infused with more personality than most of the actual human personae in Hollywood.

7/10

Du levande (Roy Andersson, 2007)

Veteran director Andersson took three years to carefully assemble this series of vignettes, where successive troubled characters such as harassed fathers or troubled hairdressers wander onto screen and express their hopes and fears, frequently in the form of describing their dreams, which are then played out in full. A rare balance is struck in places between the pathetic and the hilarious, the barrier between the two extremes made more fragile by a framing technique that strips the characters bare - there are only prolonged static long shots, so effectively each piece works as a stage soliloquy.

Somewhat stereotypically for a Swedish view on dreams, You, the Living is also dourly heavy-handed at times, but there's a lot of food for thought here nevertheless.

6/10