Sunday 20 December 2009

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

Friday 18 December 2009

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

Thursday 17 December 2009

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

Wednesday 16 December 2009

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

Tuesday 8 December 2009

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.

7/10

Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009)

Better to steal than to plagiarise. And if you're going to steal, steal from the best. So, Duncan Jones's debut plunders 2001, Dark Star, Silent Running and both versions of Solaris and somehow comes up with an end result that stands up on its own. Basically, it's the perennially underrated Sam Rockwell as the sole astronaut manning a mining base on the moon and going slowly mad in the process. Things decisively take a turn for the worse when he meets himself.
I'm not at liberty to reveal any more, but, while this never reaches the idiosyncratic or poetic heights of the sources it's indebted to, it's well-meshed together, taut and acute. A fine addition to the cerebral space sci-fi canon, and a whole lot more cohesive than Sunshine.

7/10

The Happening (M. Night Shyamalan, 2008)

After the exceptional use that he put Bruce Willis's pained whisper to in the moody Sixth Sense, then managing to hit the superhero genre from a totally unconventional angle with Unbreakable, great things were rightly expected of Shyamalan as a figurehead for intelligent films on the supernatural. Promptly, he did his damnedest to disabuse us of this notion with a succession of duds increasing in stink, recycled elements growing increasingly threadbare. However here he may have just arrested the slide.
Waves of mass suicides erupt across the eastern seaboard of the United States and are believed to be caused by terrorism. Oddly, what saves this disaster movie is Shyamalan's overreliance on the weird, as the environment itself, pushed too far by man, is revealed as the cause. The unconventional nature of the menace hence elevates a B-movie riddled with illogicalities to something the director hasn't achieved for years: it's actually eerie. It's not much to crow about, but I wouldn't write him off just yet.

5/10

Sunday 6 December 2009

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

Some directors, whether by nature or by design, end up as tightrope walkers, constantly skirting disaster, and you find yourself watching partially just for the thrill of seeing the fall or how it's staved off. Wes Anderson is probably incapable of doing anything else. All characters must have quirks and realism is just too dull. In 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums, for example, the wheels definitely came off after a number of interesting wobbles.
Here they just about stay on, even with some rather pointless Finding Nemo-style fish thrown in as Bill Murray does his Bill Murray as Jacques Cousteau on a quest for a big shark and various heavyweight actors such as Anjelica Huston and Michael Gambon ham it up around him. Willem Dafoe gets to try on a camp German accent and Owen Wilson is Owen Wilson. It's about as profound as the toddlers' end of the pool in its meditations on the meaning of life, but at least the dialogue is crisply unpredictable and the wanton quirkiness mostly works for chuckles.

6/10

There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

Paul Thomas Anderson turns out features slowly enough that it becomes a kneejerk response to double-check each release by his hacky namesake Paul W.S. (Resident Evil et al.) for fear of missing out on the next masterpiece on the level of 1999's Magnolia. But it's clearly worth the wait. There Will Be Blood makes a virtue of simplicity, confident enough in the strength of its central theme, consuming greed, to obviate the need for twists, turns or undue pyrotechnics. The setting of the early years of oil exploration and exploitation in small communities in California is absorbing enough, and Daniel Day-Lewis's portrayal of the increasingly solipsistic and maniacal oilman Daniel Plainview at the film's centre is simply astonishing, rivalling anything he's turned out in a sparse but mostly carefully chosen career.

8/10

Gomorra (Matteo Garrone, 2008)

Based on Roberto Saviano's book on the Camorra crime syndicate, this delivers a matter-of-fact and in-your-face slab of life on the grassroots level of crime in Naples. Garrone has little interest in glamourising his subject matter by highlighting cinematic considerations, and this is both to the film's advantage in being taken as vérité reportage and disadvantage in that there's actually very little to engage the onlooker. Characterisation is undeveloped and it's all rather dramatically flat. Worthy, then, but of little interest to the outsider beyond being a documentary in a more easily digestible form.

6/10

Up (Pete Docter & Bob Peterson, 2009)

Disney/Pixar collaborations continue apace, producing adult-friendly children's films in which the cutesy visual elements are leavened with streaks of verbal wit or worldly allusions, and the much-lauded Up is very much in this vein, mixing fantasy and pathos as an elderly widower sticks a finger up at property developers by attaching balloons to his house and sailing off to South America, with a bumbling boy scout in tow.
It's certainly rare to find bereavement handled at all in a kids' film, and the vertigo-inducing aerial scenes in particular are visually stunning. But it all stretches a bit thin at feature-length, and the introduction of some villainous talking dogs feels uncomfortably close to merchandising. Pleasant, but don't go expecting innovation or bellylaughs on a par with Toy Story or The Incredibles.

6/10

Wednesday 2 December 2009

Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi, 2009)

Oh dear. One never expected Sam Raimi to become mediocre. Not after such schlock classics as the Evil Dead films, Crimewave or Darkman, or indeed the first two Spider-Man films, which combined wit and brio with fan gratification in just the right proportions. But here it is: the first actual Raimi film (I thought I'd forgive him for Spider-Man 3; keeping a comic-book franchise fresh is superhumanly hard work) which leaves me utterly indifferent. Anyone could have made this.
A loan officer, played by the instantly forgettable Alison Lohman, declines a gypsy a loan and is consequently cursed to hell. Then pursued by spooks and demons of various kinds for 90 minutes, on an unswervingly dull path to the denouement. And I thought horror was meant to have surprises in it. D'oh!

4/10

Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (Tom Tykwer, 2000)

The Princess and the Warrior, Tykwer's follow-up to Run Lola Run, has to be one of the most misleadingly titled films I've ever come across. Surely it's a medieval fantasy? So why are we in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest 10 minutes in? And in a heist scenario some time later?
In a nutshell, the life of Franka Potente's mental hospital nurse is saved after a traffic accident by lowlife Benno Fürmann, who then doesn't want to know when she comes looking for him, convinced it all happened as part of some design. So far, so good. Both leads are arrestingly fragile presences and they're given some psychologically well-crafted dialogue to work with.
However, things go off the rails. The potential stifled romance film turns into a crime one instead, and then fantastical elements creep in after all. It's all very interesting, as you watch Tykwer change his mind repeatedly about what exactly he's making, but a bit of a light meal by the end.

6/10

Ghost Town (David Koepp, 2008)

British TV's comic icons do not have a resplendent track record in crossing over to the movie format, whether here or Stateside (witness as a recent case in point Simon Pegg in Run Fatboy Run, if you can stomach it). So this really comes as a pleasant surprise. Wisely, Ricky Gervais's Brent persona has been tinkered with just enough to leave the misanthropy and neediness while removing the weaselly attributes and the lack of self-awareness.
Gervais is an anti-social dentist in Manhattan who is horrified to discover one day that he can see the dead, and that they all want him to do them a favour. Of course he'll cave in under all the humanity and lose his curmudgeonly ways in the end, as we're firmly in romcom land from the outset, but there are enough witty touches along the way to make the journey to the inevitable agreeable enough.

6/10

Crank: High Voltage (Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor, 2009)

As Jason Statham attempts manfully to outsquint and outsnarl his previous sterling efforts, so too with the writer-directors, who are forced by the exceedingly high bar they set with Chev Chelios's previous rampage outing to take their cheery assault on political correctness to virtually unimaginable levels. Chinks, spics, women, gays - none shall remain unscathed as the indestructible Chev carves his way through all of LA's underworld, this time fitted with an artificial heart requiring constant jolts of electricity instead of the adrenaline last time round. There's really no point in getting offended; it's an equal opportunities bruiser of sensibilities. No-one has a go at rollercoasters for being morally suspect in just offering cheap thrills, after all.

5/10

Tuesday 1 December 2009

35 Rhums (Claire Denis, 2008)

It's almost immediately apparent, despite the radical shift in location and culture to a modern-day Parisian outer suburb and a black immigrant family, that we're basically in a remake of Ozu's Late Spring, where all the other characters serve as peripheral gravitational forces acting on the father-daughter pairing at the the centre. To be fair, Denis readily acknowledged the borrowing, so the question has to be what has been changed and whether it's for the better.
The spirited daughter is certainly an update on Ozu's meekly petulant Noriko, as is the world-weariness of Denis veteran Alex Descas in comparison with the stoic good humour of his Ozu counterpart. But the dynamic remains the same: the neediness of the child unwilling to strike out by herself, in the guise of an insistence on nurturing a father who'll be left alone. The theme works because of its universality, and some well-thought out scene set-ups and a liltingly beautiful soundtrack make for a rounded whole. Whether we really learn anything, however, is a different question.

6/10

Banshun (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)

For those familiar with Tokyo Story, the tone and themes of its precursors Late Spring and Early Summer can easily be seen in retrospect as a run-up to the perennial world critics' favourite. There is such a continuity in setting, cast and even character names that it's tempting to view the three as a trilogy and then wonder why Ozu troubled himself with the facade of different characters at all. The constant figures through all three are Noriko, played by Setsuko Hara as a skittish but devoted daughter or daughter-in-law, and Chishû Ryû's genial father. Late Spring differs from its successors in being wholly centered on these two as the father gently tries to persuade the clingy daughter to leave the nest.
It's certainly true to life and moves with admirable restraint, wringing a wealth of meaning out of the slightest gestures. Sadly for this viewer, no amount of cross-cultural or chronological allowance can overcome the rising irritation with 10 minutes of unsubtitled Noh performance or the increasingly terrifying durability of Hara's winsome smile. Horses for courses, then.

6/10

Tuesday 20 October 2009

In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008)

The picturebook location may have helped to give this Irish crime drama a necessary kick up its arse. No matter. Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, as hitmen out of their depth, ordered to spend a sabbatical in Bruges, stand out as an odd couple and the environment is used to the full to play on their differences. Sure, it's just a B-movie, but one that's sure of itself and leaking dry wit through most scenes. And then Ralph Fiennes turns up and does a fairly good job of giving Kingsley in Sexy Beast a run for his money as the surprise thesp being a horrid Cockney villain.
If McDonagh gets beyond more than moneymaker fare, he may yet go far.

7/10

Monday 19 October 2009

Parlez-moi de la pluie (Agnès Jaoui, 2008)

Agnès Jaoui has ploughed a single furrow for a while now, ever accompanied by her husband Jean-Pierre Bacri, and the soil may be wearing thin.
Her directorial debut, Le goût des autres, 9 years ago was a breathtakingly fresh slant on the easy-to-sterotype French cinema of middle-class people excessively intellectualising over their lives and relationships, but Comme une image 4 years later had only angst to add to the equation.
Refreshingly, in Let's Talk about the Rain the tack has changed: humour is now on board, and France's leading comic light Jamel Debbouze is on board to bolster this shift, although it's Bacri's stock persona as a misguidedly self-important mid-lifer who gets to carry the laughs. The pair play bumbling documentary makers, Jaoui an aspiring politician who is the butt of their documentary, and various affairs get hatched and discarded along the way. Slight but at least light. Jaoui will have to come up with more the next time around, though.

6/10

Monday 12 October 2009

Død snø (Tommy Wirkola, 2009)

How could a devotee of schlock horror resist something promising Nazi zombies?
Quite easily, it turns out. The premise is a pale mish-mash of any number of scenarios with young folk stuck in a remote cabin threatened by menacing hordes, with evil Germans undead thrown in for good measure. Sure, there's a dash of wit thrown in and the makers beg for forgiveness for their daylight robbery by including a character who keeps on relating their predicament to The Evil Dead, but once you start watching the whole enterprise through a US teen filter, to leach out the Norwegian and historical facades, precious little remains.
At least in Outpost they had guns.

4/10

Sunday 11 October 2009

La habitación de Fermat (Luis Piedrahita & Rodrigo Sopeña, 2007)

Fermat's Room taps into the popular perception of the obsessive mathematical genius (see A Beautiful Mind), driven into a mania by the hidden truth behind the numbers and liable to form deadly rivalries with their counterparts in the quest for perfection. Much like another group whose work the layperson doesn't really understand, then, i.e. composers.
Four minds are invited by a man hiding behind the pseudonym of Fermat to a deserted farmhouse with the challenge of solving the greatest of conundrums. This promises a great deal, as they find themselves locked in a room with the power to kill them unless they continue cracking a succession of timed riddles.
Except that the link to the actual Fermat is utterly spurious: the makers cop out swiftly at this point in the script and instead present a series of brainteasers familiar from puzzlebooks with no particular relevance to mathematics. Having flaunted the prospect of an intellectual work-out, and then at least the visceral kick of an entrapment horror piece like Cube, they deliver neither.

5/10

Tuesday 6 October 2009

Låt den rätte komma in (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)

Let the Right One in comes in the midst of a deluge of re-imaginings on vampirism, given fresh blood as a genre by the teen emo culture, that anaemic take on '80s goth. This is unfortunate, as it's best viewed as a growing-up drama instead, which is only added a chill and frisson by the horror theme.
And it's a superior example of either genre, the sense of confusion and otherness of the alienated pubescent bolstered by the haunted outsider status of the nightstalker. The idiosyncratic two young leads do much to contribute to its power, and the glacial setting of an anonymous mid-winter early-'80s Swedish suburb, beautifully framed and lit, make for a whole that far transcends what may seem to be stock ingredients. There hasn't been a vampire film this good in terms of rising above the genre cliches since Bigelow's Near Dark, and beyond that it holds its own against acclaimed coming-of-age pieces such as Stand by Me or The 400 Blows.

8/10

Tôkyô monogatari (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

Age withers as well as ripens. Tokyo Story, almost always as the sole Japanese representative, save for the occasional Kurosawa, crops up on Western critics' lists of the best films ever made. Do not let this prejudice you.
It's just a simple, well-crafted tale of an elderly couple making their final rounds around their children's preoccupied lives. They're met with irritable tolerance by all but for their widowed daughter-in-law, and their stoic acceptance of how things are when the progeny view their progenitors as just a burden must have struck a deep and shocking chord in a Japan just on the mend from the ravages of the war. That it manages to speak to audiences worldwide is very much down to the beautifully understated performances of the elderly duo, and, above all a prevailing sense that we're dealing with a universal emotional truth.

7/10

Thursday 17 September 2009

Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, 2008)

Mike Leigh's films have always gone for a naturalistic feel, where commonplace people with drab lives undergo small dramas and discover little diamonds of positivity in the muck. Happy-Go-Lucky may be a step further towards a feelgood experience than most of his previous output, but is still in the same vein and could not feasibly be attributed to any other filmmaker in its formula of banality unmasking fundamental truths.
It revolves around a few weeks in the life of 30-year-old schoolteacher Poppy, a nuclear-poweredly irrepressible chirp machine who embodies the film's title. What little plot there is hangs on her driving lessons with a bag of pent-up Little Englander indignation, played finely between comedy and pathetic pathos by Eddie Marsan, and the scenes between them are by far the most substantial parts of the film. As for the rest, Poppy mercifully winds down a little by the end from her nigh-on insufferably screeching motormouth Cockney persona (a bit of a Leigh staple, this), with the benefit of a few sobering experiences. But it all remains basically life-affirming, and one must infer from this that Leigh wants us to rate excessive positivity over bleak pragmatism, even if the cost is terminal irritation.

6/10

Monday 31 August 2009

Doubt (John Patrick Shanley, 2008)

In 1964, a priest at a Catholic school is accused by the Principal, a nun, of sexually abusing one of the pupils.
Based on Shanley's own stage play, this is a surprisingly morally complex exploration of a topic that could so easily turn tortuous and sermonising. At one point the realisation hits home that we're more in an exploration of hierarchy and character than one of the nature of abuse. To enable this to unfold without the overbearing burden of condemnation, the true nature of events is left clouded. Our doubt at what occurred is therefore unforcedly mirrored by the doubt the principal protagonists feel towards each other, and eventually towards their faith.
This must be Meryl Streep's finest performance in years, as the self-righteous nun and accuser: what could so easily have turned out as an embittered harridan, a fanatical martinet, comes out instead as a woman on a mission that she must believe in in order to be able to go through with it, and it is quite startling to find a degree of sympathy for her zealotry. Meanwhile, Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the avuncular priest, is at his usual standard of excellence. It becomes as easy to believe him guilty as innocent, and this takes some command of nuance.
Perhaps the stageplay origins are betrayed by the verbiosity present, and some gripes might be had in that there is no real interest shown in a conclusive judgement of an odious issue. No matter: this is an outstanding study of character, not a lecture, and all the more life-like for it.

8/10

Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009)

Adaptations of the graphic novels of crusty visionary Alan Moore have not had an entirely happy history, from V for Vendetta to From Hell, and he seems to have disowned this one as a precautionary move. This was a mistake.
Watchmen, published over 20 years ago, is probably Moore's most emblematic work. Set in a parallel 1985, with Nixon still in the White House and the world on the brink of armageddon, it follows a group of former superheroes as a mysterious assassin starts trying to bump them off one by one. A complex plot, at least by the standards of the genre, is held together by the narrative of the vigilante Rorschach, a sort of an unhinged Marlowe with a mask, and contains more darkness than a Batman film could ever hope to entertain. We're firmly in adult territory here: this is an utterly broken world, full of cynical politics, and at the finale the main villain of the piece comes out as far more ambiguous than the mere idea of a superhero film could lead us to expect.
It helps a great deal, of course, that Snyder wisely sticks to the original work, virtually frame by frame, and adds only his one forte: gut-wrenchingly visceral action (see 300). Even the casting is slavishly faithful.
Don't go expecting great depth here, but it will also not insult your intelligence and it's a hell of a ride, far more involving than the much-feted but ultimately lumpy The Dark Knight.

7/10

Burn After Reading (the Coen brothers, 2008)

After a pair of ill-judged adaptations of other people's ideas, the Coens seem to have settled more or less back on track with another of their black comedies. Here, we get something like a butterfly effect of a story on human ineptitude as a stellar cast of characters, each imbued with a single clearly-defined flaw, end up doing each other over in paranoid encounters across Washington, all believing they're somehow caught up in an espionage intrigue. Meanwhile, the CIA watches in bafflement.
So, there's George Clooney as a philanderer, Tilda Swinton as an icy bitch, John Malkovich as an irascible former G-man who's lost his way badly, Frances McDormand as a dippy fitness instructor obsessed with her fading looks and Brad Pitt as her lunkhead friend. The casting itself is wonderful, and the interest of the whole relies a lot on this.
However, unlike in the Coens' last, the searingly dark No Country for Old Men, there's no consistency of tone: it falls between the two stools of relationship-based comedy and thriller, and so requires constant readjustment of viewer response from scene to scene. It's not a painful process by any means, and there's plenty here to entertain, but one hopes that the Coens will take a look at what their knitting is and not hedge their bets next time round.

6/10

Lakeview Terrace (Neil LaBute, 2008)

An interracial couple move into what seems like a suburban haven until their neighbour, a black policeman raising his kids single-handed on a tight rein, starts to turn the screw on their relationship and lives, fuelled by indignation at their co-habiting existence.
LaBute's directorial debut back in 1997, In the Company of Men, demonstrated a keen awareness of the real poisons that can run through people's souls, in a dog-eat-dog framework. In the light of some of the debacles that have followed, most notably the bottom of the barrel that his last film represented, i.e. the godawful remake of The Wicker Man, Lakeview Terrace could charitably be viewed as something of a return towards serious film-making. In this it fails on a big scale.
It should not have ended up as a psycho stalker pic like Pacific Heights, which it ends up resembling (and to its detriment by comparison, being far more muddled). But any real debate on racial divisions becomes badly lost by the end, probably not helped by the casting of Samuel L. Jackson as the racist cop, set out with instructions to just exude his customary menace throughout until flipping.

4/10

Sunday 16 August 2009

Blindness (Fernando Meirelles, 2008)

In an unspecified city, people start losing their sight in a flash and no cause is found. The epidemic spreads and quarantine centres are set up in the spreading panic. One woman retains her sight in the midst of the contaminated and chooses to hide this to stay with her husband, an eye specialist.
Once you know that Meirelles was behind City of God, a viscerally masterful exploration of the brutality of life in Brazil's favelas, a lot of what follows can only be viewed through that filter: the quarantined detainees swiftly become brutalised by their helpless situation and then by their prison confinement as a group of males amongst them go feral, ignored by a terrified government. It has uncomfortable echoes from early on of Carandiru, Hector Babenco's telling of the mass murder that occurred in an overcrowded and out-of-control Sao Paulo prison.
This is not science fiction: Meirelles is not interested in the causes of the blindness or finding a cure, only in how it can be used as a metaphor of disempowerment. To be frank he never really gets to the bottom of what his metaphor means, or how much of it is a metaphor, and so by the end we're still rather left in the dark as to what we're to have understood by it. But it's easy to forgive a lot in the light of what Meirelles does accomplish: there are stretches along the way which drip with insight into the human psyche and power relationships, and some of the images of desolation take the breath away without lapsing into pornography, which really requires a fine balancing act from a director.

7/10

The Time Traveler's Wife (Robert Schwentke, 2009)

Based narratively as closely as the limitations of the medium will allow on Audrey Niffenegger's phenomenally successful novel about a man who keeps disappearing and finding himself in another part of his life, this goes more explicitly for the romance angle. This is a wrong turn: while the original plot was clearly a reworking of Slaughterhouse-Five, it wasn't without a point in that it replaced the autistic metaphysics with a more universally accessible anguish. Here, this is replaced with an overpowering soundtrack and the blandly pretty Rachel McAdams weeping a lot as the chrononaut's hard-put-upon wife. Eric Bana does make for a watchably stoic lead and it is possible to sympathise with the couple's predicament, but something is lost is the slush: just being able to sympathise is no great shakes.
Overall, it's no disaster, but probably far more palatable to those not familiar with superior examples of the 'great love scuppered by temporal disparity'-genre such as, oh, Somewhere in Time, to pick one out of a hat.

5/10

Franklyn (Gerald McMorrow, 2008)

The director summed this up as a fleshed-out working out of ideas from a short in which a young woman is recovering from yet another suicide attempt. Always beware hacks when they justify what they've done as being through a need to explore everyone's backstories.
McMorrow piles on everything he can think of and it's all derivative: there's a Rorschach clone stalking a futuristic/gothic city overrun by religious fanatics under an obscurely oppressive government, cutting to Eva Green as the would-be suicide going hysterical with her mother in middle-class North London, Sam Riley (he of the excellent Control) seeing the dead and Bernard Hill agonising over his son's whereabouts. Having no confidence in one film, McMorrow gives us four, and then we have to suffer pointless narrative contortions as they're drawn together by hook and crook. A waste of time for all those involved.

3/10

La graine et le mulet (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007)

The English title, Couscous, may seem as hackneyed for a film about North African immigrants in France as calling one on Asians in Britain 'Curry', but couscous is at least heavily present as a concern as ageing boatyard worker Slimane is laid off and turns to setting up a couscous restaurant on a boat, drafting in his extended family. The fulcrum of the story, Slimane is also a diffident presence, prone to panic attacks not unrelated to certain members circling him like vultures. The film owes much of its cohesion, despite its rambling length, to Habib Boufares's performance, which carries much strength in its understatement.
Early on, as he loses his job, there is a key scene in which Slimane explains to his daughter that 'they're only taking on non-French people now' and this really encapsulates what's refreshing about the whole attitude of the film: we're not dealing with a straightforward piece on the hardships of immigrants, but, rather, an ordinary working-class family. And the plot subsequently mirrors this by constantly choosing the less predictable turn. If the director is too fond at times of the realism he's chosen to go with by also letting his actors yammer on freeformly, the end result is still rewarding enough.

7/10

Tuesday 4 August 2009

The History Boys (Nicholas Hytner, 2006)

Alan Bennett's award-winning play is, for the most part, successfully transferred to the screen by Hytner, previously best known as a director for The Madness of King George: that is to say, it rarely feels stagebound until the postscript, by which stage the shift in tone seems natural.
Eight boys at a public school in '80s Yorkshire are being coached towards Oxbridge, and the headmaster, a dunce masquerading as a martinet, decides that their chances need to be beefed up by more rigorous training than that provided by Richard Griffiths's poesying blimp (basically, his Uncle Monty reworked), whose 'general studies' lessons indulge the boys' playing out of musical numbers and old movie scenes. So, in comes a young new recruit to the staff, who proceeds to tell the boys at once that competence alone will not make them stand out: tactics are called for, from playing devil's advocate to outright lying.
It's not reality by a long chalk: almost every character in turn is employed as a mouthpiece for whatever quip or observation Bennett wants to chuck our way, which frequently jars with most of them, after all, being just teenagers. Griffiths's tentative molestation of his wards is also treated rather too lightly for comfort, as if it were just an endearing foible. But there's no denying the wit at work: it's frequently very funny and also comes with an understated, unsettling undercurrent concerning what it takes to succeed in a class-centred society.

7/10

The Walker (Paul Schrader, 2007)

Woody Harrelson gets to flex his acting chops further as a preening professional companion to a host of Washington politicians' wives, moving further than ever before from the lovable country doofuses of his earlier films.
Carter Page III is a man constantly overshadowed by the looming legends of his forefathers and taking refuge in the superficiality of his chosen milieu, where bon-mots serve as currency, until the murder of an acquaintance, the lover of one of the wives he ferries around social functions for his living, forces him to examine what values he actually has.
The setting of the glass cage that is D.C. high society might at first also seem a departure for Schrader, who as a screenwriter has repeatedly plumbed the depths of breakdown and despair, particularly through his work with Scorsese on Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and, most recently, Bringing out the Dead. But at heart the song remains the same: a man comes to realise that he stands alone and can either sink or swim. The Walker doesn't in truth have a great deal to add to this refrain, but gets by creditably enough on dialogue of superior intelligence and a heavy-calibre cast, including Lauren Bacall as an armour-plated society queen. Harrelson, meanwhile, just keeps getting better and better: southern gent pomposity, flamboyant campness and a quiet moral determination are all delivered without a false note.

6/10

Sunday 2 August 2009

Things We Lost in the Fire (Susanne Bier, 2007)

Bier's first Hollywood film sees her pick up on much the same themes as her last Danish piece, Efter brylluppet, that is, the pain of loss and how we come to terms with it in our individual ways. Here, Halle Berry is abruptly widowed and pulls her husband's best friend, junkie-in-precarious recovery Benicio Del Toro, into her orbit to fill the void left by his death.
On the technical side, there's absolutely no need for the modishly deconstructed narrative structure, and it's becoming apparent that Bier will keep trying to squeeze emotional content out of those eye close-ups. Also, both leads are perilously close to being typecast: Berry as the strong but damaged mother in denial of her pain, Del Toro as a mumbling mess just one wrong turn away from the gutter; Monster's Ball and 21 Grams respectively. But at least these are proven parts, and so both are used to their strengths, Del Toro particularly convincing in his instability.
Not a step forward for Bier, then, but still streets ahead of most Hollywood competition in terms of empathic depth.

6/10

The Last Horror Movie (Julian Richards, 2003)

Director Richards at least makes no attempt to deny having been 'influenced' by C'est arrivé près de chez vous, otherwise known as Man Bites Dog, in what is basically a North London retread of Rémy Belvaux's seminal Belgian shocker. So, we follow a serial killer amiably chatting away, documentary cameraman in tow, as he despatches a broad assortment of victims in a range of banally clinical ways. Richards does adopt a slightly different tack - and this would have to be the overriding justification for the plagiarised framework - to Belvaux, in that his killer is actually the instigator of the documentary and as such exercises editorial control, which enables him to dwell over several points about the nature of the voyeurism of the media and, by extension, us, the viewers.
However, his philosophising to camera hits a film-schoolish note far too often, directorially too insecure to proceed without constantly trying to second-guess the critical viewer. In the end it's actually far more effectively black and satirical, as Belvaux seemed to have instinctively grasped with Man Bites Dog, when it lets its sociopath's actions speak for themselves, and our presence as witnesses isn't even acknowledged.

5/10

Tuesday 28 July 2009

JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri, 2008)

File under curio: a number of people will watch this just for B-action-movie star Van Damme skirt an uncomfortably close line to how they might see his real life panning out, especially since J-C gets a weepy monologue in the middle to detail his actual life with its failings.
He arrives in Brussels, in the middle of a custody suit for his daughter, and gets sucked into a bank heist where his celebrity status puts him centre-stage, as spokesman for the captors, and then has to start agonising as to whether he can actually do anything resembling all his other personae. None of this will mean much to the casual viewer who hasn't gone through all the set-piece kickboxing moves from Timecop et al. It's also a partial shock to realise that, worldwide, he's still Belgium's biggest star (forget Audrey Hepburn; she was appropriated by others too early on). It's as if Dolph Lundgren was Sweden's.
A neat enough idea is wasted: Van Damme is actually very good at playing the saddo version of his own life, but there's endless wind-and-rewind with a small plot idea that probably fancies itself as Rashomon crossed with Dog Day Afternoon. Not disgraceful, but too big for its post-modern boots.

5/10

Friday 24 July 2009

Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (Uli Edel, 2008)

Edel's telling of the story of the Red Army Faction, anti-imperialist terrorists in '60s and '70s Germany, crams virtually every recognisable face from voguish recent German historical cinema, and while it avoids the trap of making a postulating egotist like the group's leader Andreas Baader anything other than an obnoxious arschloch despite the risky casting of the usually likeable Moritz Bleibtreu, it does end up creaking under the weight of the sheer number of passengers. The story of the would-be revolutionaries is narrated with a fair degree of punch and even-handedness, but in insisting on grinding out the full historical course of events, ends up rather dramatically directionless, particularly after the premature death of Martina Gedeck's Ulrike Meinhof. After that, we're left with a succession of court cases and increasingly flat acts of petty terror: Edel has simply stuck too closely to Stefan Aust's original book, and forgotten to adapt it to another medium. By no means a disaster, it nevertheless ends up leaving far too little aftertaste for an episode so sour.

5/10

Saturday 11 July 2009

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

Friday 10 July 2009

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

Sunday 14 June 2009

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

Friday 12 June 2009

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, Christopher 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

Monday 25 May 2009

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

Sunday 24 May 2009

Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006)

In Glasgow, a widowed police CCTV operator leads a solitary and mechanical life until she chances upon the man responsible for her loss, released early from prison, and becomes fixated on his movements.
Andrea Arnold's low-budget film won a host of awards, including the Jury Prize at Cannes, and her follow-up, Fish Tank, is set to garner equal acclaim. It's not hard to see why: this is a deeply serious work, demanding of immersion in the head of the damaged protagonist and forcing it by cutting repeatedly from watcher to watched, until the viewer has no choice but to see through her eyes.
Kate Dickie and Tony Curran make for true-to-life leads as victim and evildoer, occupying their characters so naturalistically that the eventual switch in their roles comes entirely plausibly as a form of Stockholm syndrome develops. The focused blacks and whites of self-righteousness blur and all that's left is a targetless sorrow, which might finally allow tenderness in.
It's by no means an easy ride as Arnold is clearly intent on dragging the audience through the same mill of anguish, and there are longeurs when the technique insists on hammering home the point of emotional disconnection through repetition. But these are necessary evils: rarely does a film capture blame, guilt and forgiveness with such raw immediacy.

8/10

Wednesday 20 May 2009

Palindromes (Todd Solondz, 2004)

When is an apparent fixation just a bluff on the part of the filmmaker? Does Lars Von Trier really have a problem with women, and was Todd Solondz's childhood in fact entirely free of molestation? Because that's where we are again, although ostensibly the main focus is on abortion. 
The main character of Aviva, a plain teenager stubbornly set on having a baby, is played by eight actors of varying sizes, ages and races, one even male. This fragmentation made sense in, for instance, Todd Haynes's recent Dylan biopic I'm Not There, where each change of actor came with a change of directorial style to highlight a different aspect of the Dylan persona. Here, however, it can only be meant to bring across the universality of the protagonist's aspirations. It's a pretty clumsy device, not to mention an unnecessary one. 
And there are also other elements which jar badly, like the Christian fundamentalist family that takes Aviva in at one point, who do musical numbers on Jesus and basically come across like the cast of Freaks, as in Tod Browning's 1932 circus sideshow film. It's all very close to a perennial fallacy in American storytelling, i.e. that if you populate the story with enough disparate and outlandish elements and lace it all with pain (as in the hoax novels of JT LeRoy), what comes out will be some kind of more holistic truth. Instead of a smashed kaleidoscope, which is unfortunately the case here.
Solondz's modus operandi is to cut close to the bone, so the fact that here it just hacks to and fro and mostly misses shouldn't be too disheartening, for all the attempts at balance by coming at the subject from both extremes, and trying to shake us by placing deliberately adult notions in the mouths of babes. His is a preciously singular voice, and there's certainly another Happiness or Storytelling in his tank.

5/10

The Hit (Stephen Frears, 1984)

Stephen Frears's directorial career has been uneven, to say the least, swinging from comprehensive hits such as My Beautiful Laundrette, Dirty Pretty Things and The Queen to directionless dross of the ilk of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid or Mary Reilly. This gangland thriller is thankfully one of the former, i.e. where Frears gets the angle of approach of his take right.
What we get is John Hurt, an impassive streak of nicotine and dull malice as a hitman, and Tim Roth, still fairly freshly out of Made in Britain's juvenile thug boots, as his hooliganish little sidekick, escorting Terence Stamp's cryptically self-assured grass across the plains of Spain to meet his maker. 
It's a brutal, po-facedly laconic road movie that would be happy with Peckinpah at the helm and Warren Oates as the lead, and would hardly seek to deny the influence. An existential undercurrent constantly tugs at the foundations of the dialogue, and while it never really ends up delivering on what that promises, the journey is studded with enough craftmanship and invention to reward sticking along.

7/10