Suxxess (Peter Schildt, 2002)

A Swedish IT company gets a new boss, who swiftly turns out to be a soulless hatchet man in Schildt's dark satire on the evils of the corporate world. He's opposed by Daniel, one of his employees, and eventually comes crashing down, impaled on his own hubris. So Daniel gets given the poisoned chalice of leadership in his place, just to end up as amoral and platitudinous as the man and values he initially stood up against. Power corrupts: the message is as old as the hills.

But it's carried out here with some real brio, featuring a set of effectively unctuous leads and some scenes of stark inhumanity that, combined with an icily plangent soundtrack, occasionally really pull the rug out from under your feet. Creepy fun, as long as you don't work in one of these offices.

6/10

Hancock (Peter Berg, 2008)

Strictly one for superhero aficionados, Hancock starts out with an amusing enough idea: Superman as an out-of-control alcoholic slob, causing property damage wantonly wherever he goes. Since he's also Will Smith, however, this state of affairs will clearly not last. And the change to a force for good comes far too soon, as he's coached by a PR man with principles, who inevitably also has a cute kid who soon puts a spark of sentiment back into the hero's jaded eye. Still, it's amiable enough with a few decent gags that go some way to compensate for the cheese, until a fairly pointless attempt in the second half to introduce a meaningful backstory for the character and thereby somehow try to reangle the whole enterprise as a romantic tragedy.

4/10

Comme une image (Agnès Jaoui, 2004)

This was titled Look at Me for the English audience, which neatly missed the point of the title already telling you the central premise of like father, like daughter. It's populated with a self-centred closed circle of literary and arty middle-class couples, with the main attention on the overweight ignored daughter of a novelist who can't see beyond his next review. They, equally self-regarding, form what there is of a dramatic hub.

Both Jaoui and her partner Bacri, reprising much of his warmer draft on emotional unawareness from Le goût des autres, are on less solid ground here. But, all said, it's really not bad. What will always save writing of this quality, even when lacking focus, is the truthfulness of its characterisations. You go away unfilled but not displeased, which doesn't necessarily apply to all pieces of this ilk.

6/10

Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (Philippe Claudel, 2008)

In I've Loved You So Long, Kristin Scott Thomas arrives at her sister's after a 15-year absence so haunted and withdrawn, she's only there as an extension to her cigarette. Early warning flashes of cutesiness in the sister's feisty adopted Vietnamese children and stroke-silenced father-in-law with a twinkle in his eyes soon lead to an irresistible momentum in her re-entry into the world of the living. And so we're set on a linear narrative trajectory, following the gradual revelation of why she was in prison and disowned by her parents.

This is basically a superior soap that constantly, teasingly promises more depth than it's capable of delivering. It's just fortunate that Scott Thomas does wan and emotionally tortured with such understated poise; her performance raises the whole piece above the humdrum until the crashing shock of the frankly illogical denouement.

5/10

No Country for Old Men (the Coen brothers, 2007)

Here, the Coens return to their knitting, after losing their way with remakes and genre imitations in The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty, and it's a huge relief, even if the fallback position is just a Peckinpah-soaked cascade of bloody misfortunes heaped on top of each other. Josh Brolin witnesses something he shouldn't have and gets Javier Bardem as a terminator on his tail. Tommy Lee Jones crops up occasionally as a weary sheriff who's always a step behind, tacked on to the events as he is to the text.
We're in the Coen brothers' netherworld of Gothic western again, more or less the feel of Blood Simple 20 years on, far from the warmth of Fargo or the pathos of Arriaga's The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, in which Tommy Lee Jones occupied a similar role, and which resonates through the Coens' take on the same landscape. But here, ultimately, it's no country for anyone, not even Bardem's icily terrifying destroyer.
It's hardly their best work, in that it's hopelessly nihilistic, and therefore lacks a real point. But few films of recent years take you to that concluding realisation with such panache.

7/10

Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2006)

So, how to follow up Donnie Darko? How's about putting all your cards down and letting the world see that you can spin up a 'big concept' and not actually have a clue as to how to resolve it...Kelly meets his end in a big way by attempting too much, with new-age, computer games, musicals and low-brow comedy all somehow forced to serve an apocalyptic Christ-parable. It's one of those rare films that you watch like a slow-motion car crash; the horrors just keep on getting worse and worse. And when you think you've had the last of it, Christophe Lambert turns up.

As it happens, having The Rock playing a neurotic geek as the main lead in a mess that probably imagines it's an eclectic ensemble piece a la Altman is one of the few things that'll get you through this. He would be well advised to do another proper actioner pronto; The Mummy 5 or somesuch could not be as embarrassing. As for Kelly, as least M. Night Shyamalan managed to rattle off two whole good films before he was found out.

3/10

Raising Cain (Brian De Palma, 1992)

There's cheerfully wanton stealing, like Tarantino's, which can be said to be a craft in itself, the massing of references in a collage offering an added reward for the cinephile viewer. The often-cited comparison to Shakespeare's cannibalising of existing plots may be a hackneyed one, but nevertheless contains a grain of truth. Closer to the mark might be T.S.Eliot's saturation bombardment of allusions to, and snatches from, a vast range of texts across the centuries in The Waste Land. The main difference is just that Tarantino has a shallower pool to draw from and, in Eliot's shoes, would probably have used a great deal more from penny dreadfuls and showtunes.

Then there's the smudged carbon-copying of Brian De Palma, usually of Hitchcock and here almost entirely so. He adds nothing but a patina of contemporary-strength gore to the Marnie/Psycho-reworking of the split personality killer and goes one worse by seemingly having decided, following decades of being ridiculed for his hero-worship, to parody himself. 

The end result is just awful. John Lithgow, as the titular headcase, is an actor with a wide range and an effortless command of modulated performances, but ends up in this morass of grand guignol campery just mugging the camera with gurns, basically Dick Solomon with a carving knife. Preposterous plotholes abound, the photography pokes you in the eyes with pointless split-focus shots and hypercoloured close-ups, and there isn't even the germ of an original idea to latch onto. It's a truly damning indictment of quality control in the studio system that some still see De Palma as an auteur. You can build the whole of the case for the prosecution on this film alone.

2/10