Apollo 18 (Gonzalo López-Gallego, 2011)

Making a space film with the budget of a home video is certainly a bold challenge, and the director has to be applauded for making such a decent fist of it. The original footage slots in quite neatly around stock images from the moon landings, with a creepiness factor accentuated by the claustrophobic setting as two astronauts find themselves haunted by increasingly troubling events around their marooned lunar module. The mash-up concept aside, there's unfortunately nothing else innovatory in the mix, but the execution is solid nevertheless.

5/10

Potiche (François Ozon, 2010)

Getting Deneuve and Depardieu in the same billing must have been too much to resist. Of course, being troupers, they provide value for money, but this is a limp vehicle for their talents. The premise is basically Made in Dagenham turned into a farce, set in the '70s in an attempt to lend some verisimilitude to the anachronistic notion of Deneuve as a trophy wife neglected by her philandering husband. She takes over his factory when a union dispute drives him to ill health, and soon has the whole shebang wrapped around her little finger. The principal interest of the piece is seeing the director avoid all his customary misanthropy, but at the cost of creating nothing but fluff. Ozon does complex angst proficiently, and should stick to his knitting: this just gets far too silly long before the singalong finale.

4/10

Angel-A (Luc Besson, 2005)

A loser con artist in Paris has an unorthodox angel sent to him when he's at his tether's end. This being a Luc Besson film, she is a statuesque gamine model and can kick butt with the best of them. She proceeds to sort his life out in next to no time with scant attention paid to plot continuity or feasibility, with the icing on the cake being falling in love with the little gimp, played by the mystifyingly popular Jamel Debbouze, who seems to have it written in for every part that no-one refers to his lame right hand. It wouldn't be a problem except that here he's called to undergo some sizable physical challenges.
It's not that the film is unentertaining: Besson has enough tricks in his locker that he could probably direct this in his sleep. It just suffers heavily in comparison with the likes of Wings of Desire in every emotional sense and the low-brow comedy doesn't do enough to compensate for the absence of magic.

4/10

I Am Number Four (D.J Caruso, 2011)

Squarely aimed at the Twilight demographic, and also yet another attempt (see Stormbreaker) to launch a teen franchise around Alex Pettyfer's moppy pout, I Am Number Four posits photogenic surfer-dude aliens amongst us being hunted down by non-photogenic, leery ones. Fortuitously the former all have their own superpowers, which they seem to learn to use with some rad effectivity in the space of an afternoon, much as they would the controls to a console RPG. It's thoroughly undemanding fare, slipping down the gullet frictionlessly, and leaves no nasty aftertaste. There's no need to make the lead such a fence post, though - even the target audience might have been able to cope with some acting.

3/10

Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim, 2008)

In this low-key Ozuesque Korean drama, a mother goes off to try to find her husband, leaving her two daughters with their callous aunt. The girls are too young to fully grasp what's going on and go from day to day imagining that they'll be soon reunited with their mother, turning with the pragmatism innate to the very young and innocent to displacement activities such as catching grasshoppers to occupy their time.

So Yong Kim's film contains no dramatic events beyond this but passes amiably enough, with the two waifs independent more than sentimentalised, and there are no great pretensions to do more than tell things as they are. It's of interest to note that men are wholly absent from the film, only ever seen at a distance if at all. The only close-up exception is a stranger who tells the children that their aunt's number is disconnected; the allusion to masculine abandonment is obvious.

6/10

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011)

A laconic, detached stunt driver moonlights as a getaway driver par excellence for robberies in an LA of nocturnal freeways. His life is spartan and compartmentalised, and his success assured until another factor enters the equation...
Drive unabashedly draws from the seminal 1978 noir, The Driver: even if Winding Refn's claim not to have seen Walter Hill's film until having started work on this one is to be believed, he has acknowledged its influence on the writer of Drive's source novel. By a bizarre and surely unintentional coincidence, the antihero is even played by another Ryan; Gosling instead of O'Neal, and they share a mix of cockiness tinged with melancholy. But the two films are still different animals: whereas Hill's was a more straightforward cat-and-mouse thriller with Bruce Dern's cop determined to reel the rogue in, Winding Refn, as always, is more interested in the existential angle. In that, while both filmmakers are obviously indebted to Le Samourai, it's the latter who is more in line with the Melvillian philosophy. Gosling's character is a self-contained robot who is later forced to feel.
The spark for the transformation is affection for Carey Mulligan's single mother, but there's no stock physical consummation between them: the relationship retains the idealised distance of a fairytale. The rest of the film is consistent with this ethereal air: neon lights flash by, a determinedly '80s retro synth soundtrack pounds away and conversations fade out with more implied than said. It's brazenly stylised, übercool, and yet in the end, unexpectedly sad.

7/10

Kukushka (Aleksandr Rogozhkin, 2002)

A small and unpretentious gem of a film, The Cuckoo is something like what you'd get if you crossed Hell in the Pacific with Down by Law, and added a dash of Jules et Jim. In Lapland during the dying days of the Russo-Finnish war, a Russian political prisoner and a condemned Finnish sniper find themselves under the roof of an independent Lapp woman, at each other's throats and eventually with a begrudging mutual tolerance.
None of the trio speak each other's languages and the film exploits this to rather sweetly comic effect as they continue to yammer on regardless, with no end of talking at cross-purposes even as they fully believe to have understood each other. It works as a neat metaphor for the barriers of mutual comprehension that lead to wars without labouring the point unduly.
The characters are attractively drawn, too, from the coquettish but gutsy woman to the motor-mouthed and pragmatic Finnish soldier and the distrustful but fundamentally decent Russian. They are all fallible and likable without becoming caricatures. Add some evocative Arctic landscapes and a sparing reliance on soundtrack or histrionics, and the end result is a breath of fresh air.

7/10