Nunta Muta (Horaƫiu Mǎlǎele, 2008)

Silent Wedding takes place in Romania in 1953, when the whole country is officially in mourning following the death of Stalin. And it's also a hoot. As with Kusturica's black comedy romps through the communist era in Yugoslavia, Mǎlǎele's film jigs a merry dance between tragedy and celebration with irrepressible zest.
In a nutshell, a small village decides that a local wedding will go ahead regardless of the silence imposed on the country...in absolute silence. Needless to say, this proves a tall order for the chirpy villagers.
Satire and pathos are blended in without overwhelming the joie-de-vivre of a rumbunctious and likeable cast who have the naturalistic air of lay actors. Some of the humour is too broad, to be sure, and the more absurdist moments occasionally have a randomised feel, but overall, like with Kusturica, it'd take a heart of stone to resist getting pulled along with the mood.

7/10

The Taking of Pelham 123 (Tony Scott, 2009)

Well, another pointless remake of a reasonable Golden Age of Hollywood heist film with Tony Scott, a hack of medium standing who somehow always commands a hefty budget despite a singular failure to ever deliver anything memorable with it, unless you count the pace-setting homoerotics of Top Gun. Add the dead certs that Travolta will ham it up something rotten as the villain and Washington will provide the compromised but surprisingly tough everyman angle. Expectations duly lowered by this combination,  the efficiency of the dialogue and set-up in the first half hour come as a pleasant surprise. Then Scott realises at the same time that there's not much more dialogue to be had between his two principals, and there's still half an hour until the train hijackers' deadline to fill up somehow, and that his goldfish audience might be drowsing without screeching cop cars or machine guns, so it's time for some wholly gratuitous crashes in scenes quite redundant to the actual drama at hand. We just about make it to the end before the cliche and plothole count has gone through the roof, but it's a close-run thing.

4/10

Doomsday (Neil Marshall, 2008)

After Dog Soldiers, The Descent, this heap and Centurion it would be decent of Marshall to Ronseal it and change his surname to 'Generic Survival Horror'. Although, to be fair, the first two films at least met their undemanding brief with some fun and pizazz. Whereas with this one the soldering of source materials is just too glaring to be anything other than embarrassing. Appropriately, since cannibals feature somewhere in the leftover stew of a plot, the whole thing is shamelessly cannibalised from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and 28 Days Later, cobbled together with some double-sided sticky tape in the form of lesser pilferings from Resident Evil and Escape from New York.
In a sentence: Rhona Mitra does Kate Beckinsale as a foxy hardnut, Scotland is isolated because of a plague that makes all it doesn't kill sprout mohicans, and Bob Hoskins and Malcolm McDowell breeze by to pick up their paycheques. Meanwhile, Marshall spends $30m on petrol bombs. That's your lot.

3/10

Antichrist (Lars Von Trier, 2009)

Von Trier has stated that this protracted nightmare arose from his continuing battles with depression, and Antichrist certainly manages to ferry the viewer to the land of the unwell with some panache. Viewed as a psychological horror film, its air of looming menace is leagues ahead of the slasher pack. Viewed as a dissertation on the disabling effects of grief, it's far less effective, as Charlotte Gainsbourg's bereaved mother gets increasingly hysterical and takes it out with escalating severity on her psychiatrist husband, Willem Dafoe. It's not that her delusional mania is unfeasible per se as a depiction of mental illness brought on by trauma, it's just that it's difficult to see the loss of a child as the catalyst for not only the self-loathing but also the misandry that follow. In seeking to communicate his blackest moods, Von Trier seems to have chosen the wrong narrative vehicle.
Then there's also his familiar and unresolved preoccupation with women as victims, though here Gainsbourg's character has in effect become her own victim, and that in turn raises an uncomfortable air of women seen as both ultimately unfathomable and prey to insanity in their vulnerability.
Overall, Antichrist is best taken without concessions to whatever red herrings of psychological analysis Von Trier may dangle before us, and with a refusal to read any more than a habitual provocateur's brief to shock into the scenes where he starts mutilating his actors. It works beautifully as eerie, satanically tinged horror, the performances scarily committed and the photography in particular of exceptional nuance and vividity.

6/10

Chocolat (Lasse Hallström, 2000)

Chances are that if you were in the market for this, you'll have seen it already, seeing as it has chick-flick stamped so solidly through it as a stick of Blackpool rock. Not that any adaptation of a novel by the superlatively imaginative Joanne Harris should be dismissed out of hand as serving only that market.
The basic structure of the source material has survived in the film version: Vianne Rocher, with precocious daughter in tow, causes turmoil on arrival in a tight-lippedly conservative French town little adapted to the post-war world with her sensuous confections and forthright interventions, soon leading to the mayor plotting to have her sent packing. The allusions to the conflict between church and atheism/paganism are still there too, and the main characters are well served by dependable casting, from Juliette Binoche to Judi Dench, Alfred Molina as the scheming mayor and Johnny Depp in a vanity cameo as a roguish traveller and Vianne's love interest.
But Hallström's film fails on one critical count: it's too flat to convey the magic of the bewitching chocolatier's alchemy, and so the ecstatic conversions she brings about in the repressed villagers just come across as instances of ludicrous gluttony whereas it should be apparent that there's real witchcraft at work. It's all perfectly charming and light, but leaves too sugary an aftertaste. Something more along the lines of Tom Tykwer's painstaking working of Perfume was called for.

6/10

Tokyo Sonata (Kyoshi Kurosawa, 2008)

This starts with a premise akin to that of Laurent Cantet's Time Out, in which a businessman made redundant continues a sham routine of going to work in shame at having to reveal his situation to his family. However the Japanese setting lends Tokyo Sonata an extra dimension, given the enormous stigma attached to unemployment in a culture accustomed to employment guaranteed for life, with redundancy therefore carrying the baggage that the jobless are at fault for their own circumstances.

Kurosawa's film is a sensitively nuanced mix of black comedy and social critique. The characters are perceptively drawn too, from the self-pityingly hypocritical father and atypically blunt mother to the idealistic older son. It does go OTT at the point of maximum catharsis, with all the principals temporarily losing their marbles, but thankfully recovers its bearings for a rather salutary and moving end.

7/10

RocknRolla (Guy Ritchie, 2008)

Can anyone explain why Ritchie did this? Was a repro simply called for by the bank? We know the man is no Eisenstein, but his patented snatch-and-grab formula of geezers, shootahs, comedy grotesques, flashbacks, slo-then-superquick mo and Laahndahn at least put him ahead of the Michael Bays et al. But he was meant to move on from there. This is a bad, bad regression to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, where you might have thought that Ritchie had got the gangland thing out of his system with the garbled Revolver.
There's not much point in summarising the plot, except that this time a flimsy Roman Abramovich caricature is the worst of a bad lot. There's also a Pete Dohertyesque rock star and Mark Strong narrating in a hackneyed voiceover whilst playing on his increasingly strong resemblance to Andy Garcia when called to act. That it's still more fun and inventive than many of its Hollywood counterparts is just a pyrrhic victory.

4/10

Feux Rouges (Cédric Kahn, 2004)

Red Lights kicks off with the conventional French family drama set-up of a bickering couple driving off to pick their kids up from summer camp. But, being armed with the knowledge that it's based on a Georges Simenon thriller, transposed from its original American setting, the rapidity with which their trip disintegrates unsettles from the first minutes, even before a series of hallucinatory interludes intrudes.
The allusions to Hitchcock are evident, but unlike in the case of of ineptly aping thriller hacks like De Palma or a host of other directors' winking pastiches, there's a genuine freshness about Kahn's selective referencing. He doesn't plunder scenes or characters, just techniques, and the effect becomes quite startling, as the husband spirals through a night of scotch-gorging madness on the eerie side roads of rural France.
In consequence, you end up as much without a road map through the film as the directionless driver, a neat mirroring effect which then makes you question what is really going on, to far more disquieting effect than any number of road-cum-slasher flicks. Furthermore, after all that, Kahn's film actually has the audacity to say something. It certainly falls short of the profundity that it fancies itself for having, but it's still quite a juggling feat.

7/10

Luftslottet som sprängdes (Daniel Alfredson, 2009)

At last, the final instalment of the Lisbeth Salander saga: The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Mind you, the heart rather sinks with the realisation that it's still the same director at the helm as for the messy and flat second part, where half the edits necessary to bring running time to a manageable length obfuscated and drained the story of character rather than streamlining Larsson's occasionally turgid prose. And if you've read the third book, you know that it'll be easy to get swamped with its reams of dry exposition of the evidence-gathering and investigations to uncover the institutionalised corruption that built up over the course of the preceding parts.
So it's a relief to find that Alfredson either seems to have learnt his lesson, or anyway had lots of professional help. It's still way too bulky and unevenly paced, of course, but that now seems to be down to the more forgivable sin of wanting to stay faithful to the original novel lest fans object: what's been removed this time is, as a rule, just dead wood. Noomi Rapace really makes the film this time too, as the punky bisexual hacker who refuses to lie down and play victim: she scarcely utters a word until the finale, a defiant wall of silence with an occasional twitch on her face communicating volumes, until when she eventually, tremulously, steps out from behind that barrier and her revenge becomes gratifying indeed.

6/10

Four Lions (Christopher Morris, 2010)

Morris's recent output certainly couldn't be called prolific; his debut feature has been 5 years in coming after his last satirical pennings. It therefore has to come with raised expectations; is Morris running out of things to lampoon after caustic attack upon attack on the idiocies of popular culture throughout the '90s?
Not many satirists could be accused of mellowing out in picking a Muslim terrorist cell as a target for black humour, but there's a degree of affection on show towards the bumbling protagonists which Morris's darkest works have largely eschewed as counterproductive to really getting stuck in to the chosen targets of ridicule. By making the Sheffield Jihadists more daft and directionless than dangerous or vicious, Four Lions runs the risk of coming out as toothless as its wannabe suicide bombers. It seems that Morris may have held back out of a desire to avoid aggravating an incendiary situation. Though he probably also didn't particularly want death threats.
Nevertheless, Morris's ear for the finely turned nonsense phrase remains acute and there are plenty of decent comic scenes. It actually manages to be quite poignant by the end, too. So, whilst some more barbs might not have been amiss, it does get marks for being more fully rounded than just a piece of slapstick.

7/10

Legion (Scott Charles Stewart, 2010)

Assault on Precinct 13 with warring archangels? How could that not float your boat?
Quite easily, it seems. This is a clunky piece that steals the ideas of better films and tries to pass them off as its own. Paul Bettany, in nicking his Hollywood dollar, could have chosen better than as a tooled-up archangel Michael; this may turn out to be a career-wrecker. None of the rest of the cast have to worry, though: they're either nobodies or if you want Dennis Quaid in your film, you probably already have his agent's number.
As with so many failures in the pseudobiblical genre, there was the germ of a good idea - the second coming, and a war in Heaven. It all gets lost along the way, and turned into inferior survival horror.

3/10

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008)

Bigelow is a Man's Woman of a director. She likes male bonding and guns. Former husband James Cameron probably felt a bit womanish in comparison. This is not to say she hasn't made decent films; a few she turned out in the '80s, primarily the vampires as burning junkies Near Dark, were near classics.
The Hurt Locker gives a bomb disposal team in Iraq going about finishing their tour of duty. It got the Oscar for best film for being about Americans in a contemporary hard situation. It's nicely shot, with decent cutaways and asides to allow for other audiences to find something too, and not as xenophobic as you might have feared. But once you take that away, there's nothing left. It's a documentary masquerading as a film, where the only trick is to kill its big name-actors as soon as they appear.

5/10

Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010)

Or 'The Return of Alice', as it should be titled, since what Burton offers on this outing is a 19-year-old Alice finding herself back in Wonderland with apparent amnesia regarding her first visit, which facilitates going through more or less all the same scenes and characters. Then a bit of dragon-slaying is tacked on so that we get a heroic quest element too. I have a sneaking suspicion that Burton avoided a straight telling of the original book just so he could tweak the structure to give his family, i.e. Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter, more substantial parts as the Mad Hatter and Red Queen respectively. I suppose at least it made Disney happy, and to be fair repeatedly casting those two is a no-brainer in that it's a guarantee of at least two dependable turns. And just to be sure of pulling power, Burton's included such a galaxy of British thesps throwing in fleeting voiceovers for CGI beasties that reading the credits becomes quite revelatory. Why did they have Michael Sheen in to do ten lines of White Rabbit, for instance?
Ok, now to the actual film. Well, it could hardly be anyone else's work - it works a rich colour palette and contains the usual digs at the stolid adult world. The dialogue is the customary breakneck wordplay, and the fresh-faced unknown chosen for the lead puts up a good show.
But Burton has been treading water for a while now, and clearly 2007's Sweeney Todd was a false dawn. For all the trademark spidery Burtonisms, this is a kiddie product designed to shift merchandising units. The Red Queen's castle even looks uncannily like the Magic Kingdom, almost as if Burton had slipped it in under the corporation's radar to reassure the loyals with a wink. One can only hope so, because the charm of the source material is swamped by the unnecessarily hyperactive CGI action on show, as if the objective was to compete with George Lucas, and I found myself longing for the 1951 animation instead. The one by a certain Disney corporation.

4/10

Pontypool (Bruce McDonald, 2008)

The zombie genre will keep on marching on, oblivious to having all but the most rudimentary nerve functions shot away. So, Canada this time and the signs are ominous with a radio station in a small town in the dead of winter and gradually worsening reports coming in of mayhem somewhere outside.
Here's where the twist comes in: not only do you start to fathom that we're not to be getting the battles with the plastiqued undead, but that the makers are actually trying to put a new spin on necrotic origins: language itself has become the means of infection.
All credit then to McDonald for trying; there's a nice sense of besiegement built up and rather oddly for a long while it works as a documentary on the workings of  two-bit radio stations, whilst also playing on the fantasy that English as a language has become terminally diseased. It does of course, having painted itself into a corner with its single-set and single novelty proposition, then hit a dead end and never resolves what it has set out on. There's a baton to be passed on to the next zombie theme milker, nevertheless.

6/10

Cass (Jon S. Baird, 2008)

Did we need another film about the halcyon days of English football hooliganism? Probably not; everything to be said about the need for thick working-class lads to bond and develop a sense of identity by stoving in the heads of thick lads from other towns has already been well covered by the likes of The Football Factory, I.D., The Firm and Green Street, with varying degrees of success. The protagonists go around banging about pride while their families and partners wail and demand they change their ways.
Cass does do better on some counts than the average footy thug flick: it's at least based on a true story, which it avoids embellishing, and because its eponymous star is, rather unusually for the time and role, a black man raised by a white family, the film manages to have something to say about racism and the effects of unrootedness on the psyche. A pity then, that amongst some decent casting, it seems to have been obligatory to include the likes of Tamer Hassan and Leo Gregory to make damn sure that we know we're in the land of the diamond geezer.

5/10

La Noche de los Girasoles (Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo, 2006)

The lives of three geologists visiting a remote village are thrown into turmoil by a sequence of events precipitated by a travelling salesman attempting to rape the woman amongst them on a deserted road. They get into deeper trouble in misidentifying a local farmer as the attacker, and then a corrupt policeman enters the scene to muddy the waters further.
While the basic premise of The Night of the Sunflowers is nothing revelatory, there's a deconstructed element to the narrative structure which is used to good effect rather than just remaining a gimmick, and the moral ambivalence adopted to the dilemma of the protagonists is refreshing, particularly when a stock set-up leads us to believe that a formulaic reckoning is imminent. The plotting does get a little fuzzy towards the denouement, as if part of a reel were missing, but it's worth sticking with just for the simple virtue of being well-crafted and uncondescending.

6/10

Kynodontas (Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009)

Dogtooth posits a family living in a hermetically sealed bubble of the father's making, the teenage children brainwashed into thinking that cats are the most deadly predator there is, that they had an elder brother who died  for his disobedience, and that the outside world beyond their walled estate is unreachable. The parents also systematically misinform them with made-up explanations of any new words that slip through their net. The children have ended up a mix of innocence and amorality, turning to incest through lack of external contact.
Lanthimos's film clearly intends to unsettle with its set-up alluding to Josef Fritzl's imprisonment of his daughter, while attempts to say something larger about the banality of evil as well. That it also wants to get laughs in the gallows humour department doesn't help; the ignorance of the children is too chilling to be used as the butt of satire, and overall the tone falls badly between several stools. Sheer idiosyncrasy keeps you watching, but it's clear after a while that there will be no pay-off.

4/10

Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)

A series of ritualistic murders in California during the late '60s and '70s were attributed through anonymous letters to the media as the work of a single killer, thereafter known as Zodiac. The story took wing in popular culture as a succession of cryptic clue-leaving psychopaths taunting hard-nosed cops on a mission, from Dirty Harry onwards. Here, after his own dallyings with the topic, most notably in Se7en, Fincher has taken on the original story in a format that has to be commended for sticking as closely as possible to the facts of the ground-out police investigation while running the risk of boring us to tears, particularly as we know that there's no pay-off in the pipeline.
Mark Ruffalo, as the animal-cracker munching proto-Callahan Detective Toschi, whose life gets swallowed up by the case, does an creditable job, and Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr. are amongst a panoply of big names offering dependable support. It does of course hit one dead-end after another in mirroring the real-life investigation, and here's the double-edged sword at the crux of what Fincher is doing: it makes us feel the frustration that the investigators feel, whilst taking us around in circles at the same time. Marks for authenticity and execution then, minus some for still taking place on the same well-worn ground.

5/10

Les Enfants Terribles (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1950)

Based on Jean Cocteau's 1929 novel, and featuring Cocteau as an off-screen narrator, this is a melodrama with streaks of the fantastical characteristic of the writer's preoccupations with tortured sexuality, obsession, the world of dreams and predestination. Two sibling youths, brother and sister, live in a cocooned world of their private games, incessant back-biting and an interdependence that even an audience of the '50s could easily decode as incestuous. The death of their mother casts them out of their womb-like hovel into a barren palace of a new home, which, in conjunction with the arrival of a new pawn for their power games, eventually knocks their equilibrium off-kilter.
On the credit side, it generates a feverishly claustrophobic atmosphere in tune with the aimless and amoral fancies of its leads. Melville also translates Cocteau's singular visions to the screen with an assured flair. But it has also dated badly; the bickering of the emotionally stunted siblings is neither amusing or insightful after a while, and Cocteau's pseud blank verse in the narrative grates too, as adolescent as the youths whose maturity it purports to pass judgement on.

6/10

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, 1972)

One of Buñuel's last films, this is superficially far removed from the overt graphic surrealism of his early years, with a bunch of well-to-do middle class types pontificating pompously on society while arranging dinner dates with each other. That is, until it becomes clear that the characters are stuck together ad infinitum, will always do nothing else and will never get to finish anything, whether that be a meal, a sexual act or even a train of thought. Hence, the surrealism in Buñuel's later work has come to serve a political purpose beyond merely shocking us out of our complacency: it's a means to an end rather than just an end in itself. The bland repetition of the characters' rituals is a more savage critique of the self-consuming ineffectuality of the moneyed chattering classes than the full-frontal assaults of the earlier works.

So, there's certainly intellectual substance here. Unfortunately, it's weighed down with too many unfocusedly daft scenes and pointless whimsical characters to really work as precision satire. Yes, it got the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but that has to be seen more as a lifetime's work award for the director.

6/10 

Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau, 2010)

More of the same nuclear-powered aerobatics from Favreau and Robert Downey Jr, with a few more gadgets thrown in and the titular hero acting even more of a tool than in the first film. In this, there's a presumptuous reliance on the audience finding Downey Jr. so charming with his tic-saturated lounge lizard routine that they forgive a lack of both character development and original plot. At least in Iron Man, there was a stab at saying something about the arms industry in a geopolitical context. Here, it's just the nasty Government wanting to take Tony Stark's toys away, and Mickey Rourke as a growling Russian nemesis is never going to add anything, firstly because he's just a bag of Slavic 'you destroyed my father' stereotype villainy, and secondly because it seems that the only idea the scriptwriters can come up with for a baddie is a duplicate of the hero, only bigger and meaner, as with The Abomination in the 2008 Hulk film, the end result being lashings of collateral damage to eat up that big old CGI budget.
There's a brief glimmer of something diverting when Stark believes he's dying and starts acting progressively more stupid, but you just know that won't be allowed to last.
Oh, and they're making a third one too, if anyone still cares.

4/10

Beowulf (Robert Zemeckis, 2007)

With the budget at hand to finally do justice to the superheroic aspects of one of the earliest surviving Old English quest epics, it's a crying shame that its director had no intentions of linguistic authenticity or adherence to the original poem, making an action cartoon of it all instead. Admittedly, subtitled Anglo-Saxon would be quite a hurdle in terms of box-office appeal, but without the rolling alliterative rhythms of the poetry all that the story has in essence is a man slaying some beasties, and no amount of CGI and superimposition of modern baggage such as marital infidelity, making the monster pitiable or even giving the protagonist significant character flaws as a lying braggart will quite make up for that loss.
Zemeckis is just about the most unlikely director you could find for this: very good in his halcyon days of Romancing the Stone, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Back to the Future at zippy, inventive comedy. Here it just feels like he's taken on a ball and chain with leaden-footed dialogue, stock growling Vikings and sub-videogame link sequence motion capture animation. The hero has no expression in his face and, behind it, Ray Winstone's attempts to sound noble rather than just a geezer in a pub are cringeworthy. And when we do finally hear Anglo-Saxon, it's only from the monster Grendel, as if it were some form of devil-speak.
A right royal mess.

4/10

Hors de Prix (Pierre Salvadori, 2006)

Priceless stars French-Algerian comedian Gad Elmaleh as a barman in a posh Riviera hotel who's pounced upon by the omnipresent Audrey Tautou as a gold-digger who mistakes him for another idle millionaire to prey upon. When, inevitably, his cover is blown, she wants nothing to do with him but by then he's helplessly infatuated. From there on, the only way forward is to play the same game as her.
So, basically it's a fluffy romantic comedy in the traditions of farce. Nevertheless, there's also a satirical undercurrent directed at the vacuities of the ultra-rich and their relationship with their penniless toyboy/girl leeches that is played out with respectable restraint and it's nice to see Tautou again reaffirm that button-nosed cute is not all she's capable of as an actress as she blithely coaches Elmaleh in the art of twisting the moneyed around his little finger. Of course it's all heading for the feelgood finale, but it reassures to know that love might figure larger than money in the end balance.

6/10

Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone, 2006)

Sly manages to wring a few last drops of milk from the teat that fed him at the start of his career, and you have to wonder what the point of it all is. His script is perfectly serviceable, but really just recycles the themes and events of the previous five films, complete with flashbacks: now it's his wife that has been killed off, for weepy bereavement value, and his son's a bit estranged, so that we can have manly hugs in reconciliation scenes. And then there's a mouthy young punk of a champion for whom Rocky must inevitably haul his leathery hide back in the ring for the finale.
It's by no means offensive and Stallone still plays the same lovable doofus slurring largely unintentionally funny playschool life philosophy slogans (sample: 'It's your right to listen to your gut, it ain't nobody's right to say no after you earned the right to be where you want to be and do what you want to do!'). It's just that everything to be said about the character was already said in the first film, and by now one just has to be relieved that we're only getting a retread of that instalment rather than an objectionable stinker like Rocky 4 or 5.

4/10

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (Mat Whitecross, 2010)

Cantankerous English lyrical icon Ian Dury, who seamlessly bridged the gap between music hall and punk in the '70s and '80s, was what could only be a called a character as a profound understatement: he was larger than life in every sense, from his childhood-polio induced disability, displayed like a badge, to his raucous stage and private personae, laddish aggro married with learned verbiosity to produce a unique whole. There's enough material in his life story for several films.
Whitecross opts to focus on the peak years of his popularity, and the film alternates between the music and Dury's rages in his family life. This has a somewhat bipolar effect, which, perhaps only unintentionally, but effectively regardless, accentuates the schizophrenic aspects of Dury's character. The rock biopic does of course commonly follow this structural archetype: as with, say, the Johnny Cash story in Walk the Line, the songs are slotted in either as a counterpoint or as ironic commentary on what's going on in the dramatic scenes between them, which usually culminate in some form of cathartic event in the performer's life. Why Sex & Drugs is superior to most of the genre is simple: Dury is just a more complex subject matter than the average self-destructive rock star, and the casting of Andy Serkis in the role is immaculate. The vocal inflections, the mannerisms and charisma come across so perfectly that the acid test of forgetting that you're still only looking at an actor, and not the man himself, is passed within five minutes.

7/10

Looking for Eric (Ken Loach, 2009)

Cantona, that is, who steps out of the hero-worshipping dreams of a depressed divorced Mancunian postman to offer him spiritual guidance in the form of his trademark cryptic aphorisms. When they're actually comprehensible through Cantona's accent - he still speaks English like someone reading a phonetic transcript - the snippets of wisdom dispensed gradually turn the put-upon single dad away from suicidal thoughts and back on track with winning his ex-wife back and steering his elder son away from gangland trouble, in a subplot reminiscent of Loach's My Name is Joe.

Thankfully, though, it's lighter than that. The scenes with postman Eric's circle of work buddies attempting some home therapy on him are particularly sweet, Cantona sends his guru status up nicely and while there's no great revelation at the end of it, and the imaginary friend device is hardly original, it leaves a hearty aftertaste.

6/10

The Infidel (Josh Appignanesi, 2010)

Omid Djalili stars as Mahmud Nasir, a regular Joe East End Muslim, albeit with some anger management issues, who gets rather upset the day he discovers that he's in fact adopted and was born Jewish. This when his son is about to marry the daughter of a fundamentalist preacher.
The combination of cheeky roly-poly Djalili and David Baddiel as writer leads one to expect a barrel of bellylaughs, which never really quite materialises as the script simultaneously wrestles with The Big Issue it has taken on, namely ethnic/religious identity and tolerance. To be fair, it gives this a fair bash until feelgood needs take precedence and we're on our way to a fairytale ending. You also can't help feeling that knowing that there's an Iranian and a Jew behind it makes it rather to easy for them to safely indulge in a swathe of cheap stereotyping of both sides for titters. Still, Djalili's indignant irascibility makes the most of the neater one-liners.

6/10

Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009)

Slow-mo boxing scenes with a sardonic voiceover set to Irish gypsy fiddling. Yes, it's a Guy Ritchie film. It's also a reboot of Sherlock Holmes, purportedly closer to the buccaneering spirit of the original than all the world's cerebral and mannered Basil Rathbones.
Robert Downey Jr. hams up the lead for all it's worth with a jittery eye-rolling performance, delivering his lines in a nearly indecipherable faux-Shakespearean accent which at times threatens to spill over into the Fast Show's 'I was very, very drunk indeed' character, while Jude Law clucks around him like an exasperated mother hen as his long-suffering sidekick. They kick some ass, bicker and then kick more ass. Oh, and save England from an occult master criminal's hokum scheme in the meanwhile.
It should all be terrible; there's far too much reliance on action to shunt the plot forward whenever Ritchie panics at the prospect of having more than a few consecutive minutes of actual detective exposition on screen. So it's with some shame that I confess to having been quite entertained and able to put up with Ritchie's large-looming foibles for the first time since his debut features. Downey Jr. is never less than watchable, the eccentricities in the re-imagining of the characters and the frenetic music, apparently frequently nicking Kusturica's orchestras, are cute rather than just irritating and the fantastical recreation of Victorian London looks amazing. Overengineered fluff, sure, but at least the thrills work for once.

6/10

El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970)

This is probably one of the most insane features ever made. Lest that sound too much like a recommendation, it's also muddled with its targets and shot through with a Russ Meyer approach to editing and production values. It's from the era of Zabriskie Point, after all.
Picture a cross between a spaghetti Western and a Christ allegory, with Tod Browning's Freaks and some Nicolas Roeg outtakes thrown in, all drenched in Mexican Christian mysticism. There, you have Jodorowsky's self-indulgent pontifications when he gets to direct and act at the same time. You can read it as a critique on Mexican history or organised religion or on blind faith or see it as a religious parable for our times, albeit one which is wilfully obtuse and gleefully mental, camping it up at unexpected moments. Jodorowsky, the imp, would probably be happy with any of these interpretations. It's never less than interesting just because you don't know what's coming next, and never more than disjointed for its farting about.

5/10

Wolke Neun (Andreas Dresen, 2008)

An elderly East German woman finds a passion she had forgotten after 30 years of marriage to a staid train enthusiast through an affair with another pensioner. This causes no end of hand-wringing as she attempts to reconcile her own needs with her sense of guilt.
With this type of small-scale drama the virtues are also limitations: character depictions are life-like and there's no resorting to histrionics, but an adherence to realism can stunt dramatic structure as well. Yes, it's rare that we see pensioners having sex and it's a worthy point to make, but Cloud 9 frequently forgets to move on to the next point.
Nevertheless, it is a serious piece, well acted, and on balance makes a virtue of reminding us what crises lie just under the surface of small, everyday lives.

6/10

Das Trio (Hermine Huntgeburth, 1998)

For German viewers, the sight of Götz George, hard bastard detective Schimanski on the long-running crime series Tatort, as a gay circus compere and pickpocket in a mid-life crisis must boggle the mind as a piece of leftfield casting. For other audiences, it comes across as an engaging performance all the same, in Huntgeburth's slight but charming comedy drama.
George leads the trio of the title as Zobel, a Faginesque patriarch of petty theft, accompanied by his put-upon lover Karl and waifish daughter Lizzie. Their low-grade lives take a turn for the unsettled as Karl is hit by a car and the remaining duo are forced to enlist a novice to their crew. And then the inevitable emotional complications ensue.
I would have liked more on the intricacies of their scams; what we get is handled amusingly but doesn't surprise a great deal. Nevertheless, the director's touch remains light overall and the twist on the traditional menage-a-trois set up is refreshing, as is the unrepentantly amoral attitude to the protagonists.

6/10

Dead Man Running (Alex De Rakoff, 2009)

This lists Rio Ferdinand and Ashley Cole amongst the executive producers, and features ubergeezer Danny Dyer as a weaselly chav along with Tamer Hassan's lead and 50 Cent as a crime lord. Therefore, it does exactly what it says on the tin: aimless London gangstah fare in the Guy Ritchie mould, except lacking the wit that he at least occasionally managed with his first pieces.
On the plus side, it's handled with gusto, but the narrative is riddled with inconsistencies and it's really asking too much to care about two thugs simply because they've been set the usual 24-hour deadline to come up with a wodge of wonga or else they're history; at the end of the day it's just amoral morons robbing and punching their way to an undeserved survival.

4/10

Hundstage (Ulrich Seidl, 2001)

Rarely do you find a film where the director so patently obviously despises all his characters, and seems to think that hate on such a scale makes for social comment. Ensemble pieces of interlocking stories, above all genres, should have a moral centre of some kind to enable the viewer to latch onto whatever point is being made, lest it just all end up as babble. Dog Days contains none, and its gallery of self-centred Viennese suburban grotesques  pointlessly drinking and copulating seems to be making a case for the extinction of the Austrian nation. There's a mentally ill girl who spends the whole film hitching rides with perplexed motorists, an estranged couple who appear to continue living together just to seethe at each other, another woman in a helplessly abusive relationship and a pensioner who loathes his neighbours. Think if Michael Haneke and Werner Herzog had a competition to outdo each other in misanthropy, and it was all edited by a suicidal Finn. Yes, that bad.
Needless to say, it won prizes from those bodies that confuse torturing your audience with depth.

2/10

Barfuss (Til Schweiger, 2005)

In Barefoot, Nick is an itinerant loafer drifting aimlessly from one dead-end job to another until a day's stint as a cleaner in a mental hospital finds an inmate whose suicide attempt he prevented attach herself like a puppy to him. Unable to shake her off through various scrapes, he gradually discovers an attachment to her that he never had to any job or to his moneyed family or their obnoxious hangers-on.
Til Schweiger may be a quite a pin-up in Germany, so it helps that an international audience may know him for little more than a bit part as one of the Nazi hunters in Inglourious Basterds, and he does a surprisingly affecting turn as the misanthropic Nick, though the film probably belongs to Johanna Wokalek as the traumatised but naive waif Leila, who gets the lion's share of the moments of humour scattered through the film with her comically literal interpretations of the external world's mysteries.
Where the film stutters somewhat is in its transitions between this gentle humour and a desire to really jerk the heart strings; it rather wants to have its cake and eat it. It also creaks at times with an overreliance on soundtrack. But it's still a promising debut in solo direction for Schweiger, and rather sweet for all its foibles.


6/10

Surrogates (Jonathan Mostow, 2009)

Mostow's not the worst hack in Hollywood, but his output thus far never even seems to have sought to rise above mediocrity, and rather dismayingly this generic trudge falls short of the similarly-themed The Island, by the generally pointlessly noisy Michael Bay, no less. Ok, we're dealing not with body-part donor clones but avatars for a vaguely future world where the operators of the avatars are barely capable of leaving their homes as their virtual, more perfect 'surrogates' go through fuzzily realised detective intrigue shenanigans in the real world.
The likes of I, Robot and The Matrix also end up getting shamelessly plundered, and Bruce Willis is getting to be so self-parodically cypheresque with his grunting and mumbling that he should really give all this action palaver a rest by now. And then the muddled plotting is further evidenced by a conclusion - and I'm really not spoiling it for you here - in which he ends up effectively committing mass murder.

3/10

Joyeux Noel (Christian Carion, 2005)

The story of the unofficial ceasefire that occurred during the first Christmas of the First World War has passed into folklore as the one with the football match between the lines. Carion's film of the incident does collate that event with details of lesser-known similar breaks in the fighting, and therefore suffers at times from a lack to verisimilitude, not least when a popular female singer rises from the German trenches to perform to the troops of all three combatant parties. But, to his credit, Carion does not seem to intend any deception and whilst there's little originality on offer with the standard sneering officer class vs salt-of-the-Earth working man dichotomy abounding, the facts are just about strong enough to make it a worthy enterprise for its honesty and heart.

6/10

Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, 2009)

Reitman already proved with Thank You for Smoking and Juno that he could negotiate the potentially tricky terrain between pathos, comedy and social comment with considerable aplomb, and Up in the Air occupies a similar niche comfortably. This time, the conflicted protagonist is George Clooney's corporate downsizer Ryan Bingham, who effectively lives in airport transit as he criss-crosses the nation passing on the bad news to employees of companies too squeamish to do it themselves.
Bingham can be seen as a mish-mash of Aaron Eckhart's smooth-talking tobacco industry bastard of Thank You for Smoking and Ellen Page's superficially self-assured teenager of Juno, living in a cocoon of his own creation built on fragile foundations. When technology threatens to force him to face the transitory vacuity of his existence and commit to a stationary life, the seeds are sown for doubt about his capacity to remain emotionally detached from his work or personal commitment.
As with Reitman's previous outings, the dialogue sparkles with jargon and wit, and the tone flows seamlessly from satire to catharsis. Clooney also gets to show once more that he's much more than just a walking roguish smirk. Perhaps the only reason why the whole doesn't quite emotively hit Reitman's previous peaks though, is that in centring on a man who's sadly trapped in limbo, there's no merciful release at the end of it all.

7/10

L'illusionniste (Sylvain Chomet, 2010)

Chomet's multiply award-nominated Les Triplettes de Belleville of 2003 served notice of a singular talent in the animation field, a craftsman harking back to a bygone era of the animated feature as a painstaking labour of love, proceeding not at a pace dictated by the imagined demands of the modern audience for pyrotechnic thrills, but rather with just the rate that the story and characters organically require. So it's a delight to discover that Chomet has painstakingly assembled another work in the same vein with the story of a French stage magician down on his luck in a changing world, who finds eventually himself in a remote Scottish village in his search to make ends meet. There, a starry-eyed young chambermaid latches herself onto him, and the weary illusionist's lot from there on is to try to provide for her too.
This could easily be painfully twee in the wrong hands. You wouldn't trust the laughably overrated fantasist Miyazaki with it, for instance. But instead, there's a palpable bittersweetness running through every scene, every character, which both grounds them in authenticity and yet is delicate enough to not overwhelm the ebullient humour and poetry.
The original screenplay was actually Jacques Tati's: the illusionist is Hulot to every last gesture, but somehow more accessible and less opaque than Tati himself ever was, as if his undoubtedly perceptive ideas had finally found their perfect medium. And it's really quite breathtakingly beautiful, too: a wealth of watercolours freshened up by sparing and inobtrusive CGI. Just see it.

8/10

The Book of Eli (Albert & Allen Hughes, 2010)

Take one post-apocalyptic template (desert, rusting wrecks, biker gangs, a Bartertown). Add mysterious lone wanderer, who is taciturn, insular but principled, and of course a badass. Sprinkle with cameos from proper thesps hamming up for gallows humour. And above all, remember to shoot it so washed-out that it's only a click from monochrome. Voila, we have our film.
It's not that The Book of Eli is wholly without merit. Denzel Washington always retains enough vulnerability in his action protagonist roles that you do root for him, the cameos are fun, Gary Oldman's umpteenth OTT baddie is as watchable as ever, and the obligatory mass melees are inventively shot as well as elegantly curt. It's just that all the substance that is really added to the template is an overtly religious message. Countless fantasy films play with religious material just because it's fun for hokum, without imploring you to become a believer - The Omen is a good case in point. The Hughes brothers, on the other hand, really seem to have intended a Christian recruitment advert for the Transformers generation.

5/10

Die Welle (Dennis Gansel, 2008)

The Wave, based on an American novel of the same name, in turn loosely based on a classroom experiment in California in the '60s, spans a week at a high school in a German Everytown during which an unorthodox political history teacher sets out to illustrate the workings of dictatorship in practice through a class project. What begins as a game to his students inevitably turns sour as they get drunk with the power imbued by their new-found sense of unity.
Does it have to be set in Germany? No, but it probably works better than it would in another context: not for the cliched reason that Germans should be seen, even now, as being more disposed to a weakness for seeking leadership and strength in numbers than others, but rather because, as we see from the students' wearied attitudes to the Nazi question at the start of the film, no other nation has been so bombarded with didactic warnings about history repeating itself. Hence an overall jadedness with the issue, which breeds a vulnerability to it.
Gansel's film is a mixed bag: the characters are mostly stock, with the usual high school film stereotypes (the wide-eyed jock, the lefty activist, the rich kid, the stoner skaters, the sociopathic geek) somewhat railroaded by a script that is more interested in its polemic. The degeneration of norms within a mere 5-day timespan also rings untrue. Nevertheless, performances are strong and the end resonates.

6/10

Schwarze Schafe (Oliver Rihs, 2006)

At its best, the portmanteau or anthology film can be a real feast, a table overflowing with the tapas of life's rich tapestry where parallel and often almost wholly unconnected storylines with disparate characters meld into a multicoloured whole rather than just crowding each other out. Pulp Fiction, Amores Perros and Short Cuts are solid modern examples of the format.
And then there are those works where the format is chosen because deep down the filmmaker knows that no single one of their strands is strong enough to sustain a whole film. Black Sheep is one of these sorry derivatives. Berlin as a setting is a marvellous font of eclecticism, so Rihs gives us a wide panoply of stereotypes united by their obnoxiousness, from horny Turkish lads, limp-wristed queens and drunken loafers to pitiful satanists. Then he gives himself a get-out clause by calling them all losers. There's little to connect with, bar a few occasions for smirks, and it's quite undeserving of the patina that its crisp and imaginative cinematography lends it.

3/10

Flickan som lekte med elden (Daniel Alfredson, 2009)

The second part of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy of novels, rattled off the production line in swift succession,  The Girl who Played with Fire sees a change of director and an obvious slash in budget from the first film, both of which prove detrimental.
Again, the director has to grapple with the book's unwieldy length and dispassionately implement cuts to bring the running time to manageable proportions. Niels Arden Oplev was mostly successful with this in the first film; Larsson's books do after all contain a lot of pedantic padding in anything from detailing societal background history to the characters' eating habits, which cry out to be chopped. Alfredson isn't. Even a recent reader of the novel will struggle to make sense of the opening half hour, where scant explanation is given in jumps from scene to scene (for the international viewer, having the added burden of appallingly illegible white-on-white subtitling hardly helps either). And the directorial blundering continues, with his apparent unawareness of how to translate the written medium to cinema: you can't always just show what the characters do; you have to find other means to convey what's going on in their minds lest you lose a great chunk of the rationale behind the action.
The casting, one of the strengths of the first film, remains intact. But since Alfredson doesn't give us access to the protagonists' interior drives and also severs our main empathic connection with Lisbeth Salander's fury in neglecting her crucifixion at the hands of the police and the media, it all turns into a perfunctory plod to the soapish conclusion.

5/10

Flags of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, 2006)

Whereas Eastwood's depiction of the assault on the island from the Japanese perspective, Letters from Iwo Jima, was almost wholly focused on the grim battle itself, here half of the running time is taken up by an exploration of the angst felt by the surviving marines who raised the victory flag in an image that galvanised the American public, as they get carted around the States from one fund-raiser to the next, cogs in the government's propaganda machine.
Eastwood's tone has become increasingly statesmanlike, indignant and humanistic over the years, and it would take a churl to take issue with American hand-wringing over wars that never hurt their country at an extinction level as they did their adversaries; Eastwood balanced his books neatly with the stoic fatalism of the doomed Japanese in Letters, and there's enough cynicism here to leave no doubt that the title of the film is far from celebrating jingoism. My critique is rather that, as with his more recent Changeling, Eastwood is ultimately too concerned with covering the whole history, and dramatic structure suffers as a result. To be filed under worthy but dull.

5/10

300 (Zack Snyder, 2006)

Good God, where to start? It's a thinly veiled Western civilisation vs. the dirty Asians (gooks, Arabs and anyone else you care to mention) parable. And also the most homoerotic film ever chucked out by a big studio in the name of manliness. In a very topsy-turvy view of history, the Spartans are a bunch of bodybuilders in little pants who are vastly outnumbered by a horde of assorted foreign weirdnesses. They shout a lot, everyone gets slaughtered in slo-mo CGI and the Americans get a victory of morale if not of morals. It's only history in the sense that mythical events live on to provide a back story for current crusades. Nothing here is more than stupid, and even the few lines of defiant statements that Gerard Butler is given to deliver to the cartoonish baddies are puerile farts compared to the Braveheart standard that Snyder probably imagined he was hitting.

3/10

Chopper (Andrew Dominik, 2000)

Mark Brandon 'Chopper' Read, career recidivist and ultra-violent sociopath, has become a folk hero of sorts in Australia for his decades of war against various gangland foes, largely in chokey, and parallel self-aggrandisement which have led him to best-selling status with his autobiographies.
Not unlike Jacques Mesrine in France, then, but with the crucial differences that Read's murder and mayhem was mostly only directed at other criminals, and that he's still around, making the transition to 'a bit of a character' all the easier. Hence it's not startling that Dominik's slice of biopic casts Eric Bana, a stand-up comedian prior to the film, in an overly sympathetic portrayal of the unrepentant thug. And Bana invests the role with such charisma that there's no choice to outright rejection of this hero-worship but to be swept along by a witty script that sidesteps a lot of cliches of the prison film genre. The comic tone still leaves a nasty aftertaste, though.

6/10

Micmacs (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2009)

Or, roughly translated, 'shenanigans'. Jeunet's latest joyous foray does exactly what it says on the tin: a bunch of lovable Parisian misfits engineer a series of ingenious schemes to bring down two arms manufacturers. The plot is initiated by Dany Boon's genial video shop assistant, who's understandably sore after having a landmine deprive him of a father in childhood and then a bullet to the head put him out of his job, both objects courtesy of the two rival death merchants.
All of Jeunet's trademarks are present: cute freaks, fantasy cutaways, daft machines, lists of curios and the scrunched-up face of Dominique Pinon. The wackiness is revved a bit too much over the redline at times, but Jeunet brings such zest into his presentations of all that's humane and worthwhile in life that you just have to indulge him.

7/10

2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009)

Roland Emmerich is a kind, selfless man who only wants to act as an intermediary to transfer the big studios' money to poor CGI artists in their thousands. And if, by doing so, he gratifies enough Americans who were gutted at not being near enough the WTC Ground Zero to witness the awesome levelling of big buildings whilst people ran around screaming, so much the better.
Connecting a worldwide apocalypse to any religious prophecy is too hard work for this director: the priority is to  blow up, crush and flood as much stuff as possible in 2½ hours, and he does this with an admirable aplomb. Sure, some pseudoscience about er, solar flares, the Earth's core, magnetic realignment and the like has to be wedged in, along with the tedious necessity of providing a generic bunch of principal protagonists to 'provide a human dimension' - meaning the likes of John Cusack as the divorced dad and Chiwetel Ejiofor as the scientist no-one listened to have to do some sharp mental arithmetic to determine whether delivering yet more credibility-blighting shite is really outweighed by their paychecks.
So, Emmerich is also yet another artist who's forced to make compromises for the sake of getting his vision to the screen. And what a vision! The White House getting flattened by the JFK aircraft carrier is a highlight, but to Emmerich's credit, despite 2012's demanding length, the stupidity well never runs dry.

3/10

Bakwji (Chan-wook Park, 2009)

It was only a matter of time before Chan-wook Park, Korean auteur of stylish and bloody revenge and horror films, got on the vampire bandwagon. And Thirst is stylish and bloody, with a garnish of religion and self-analysis, as Park regular, Kang-ho Song, a Catholic priest turned vampiric through a blood transfusion, agonises over what his God-given needs are now that they mostly consist of blood. Gradually, of course, his appetites start getting the better of him, though more in that sexual desire now proves overwhelming.
While Park's films are always value for money in so far as you never quite know how the next scene will play out, he may have made a mistake in choosing such a depleted genre. Nausea, sunlight, enhanced powers - the formula's growing stale and it takes more than this to revitalise it. And the director seems to have taken a step backwards with the denouement too, which is nicked wholesale from an otherwise inferior Hollywood vamp flick. Perhaps Korean cinema exists in a bubble too.

5/10

Le Temps du Loup (Michael Haneke, 2003)

A widowed and grieving parent wanders with her children through a landscape in rapid decline following an apocalyptic event of undisclosed nature, and isolated encounters with other survivors only underline how rapidly civilisation has broken down. Familiar? Yes, The Time of the Wolf is a largely unacknowledged source for the hyped-up The Road, with all the feral self-interest of those who remain, the parent's fierce instinct to protect her children and the inescapable atmosphere of hopelessness. But, for once, the plagiarism proves justified: Haneke's vision may tell it straight, but it's also lacking an empathetic core. Isabelle Huppert as the mother is her usual tight-lipped cold fish and the introduction of a host of other desperate victims just serves to further muddy whatever engagement there was with the protagonists.

5/10

44 Inch Chest (Malcolm Venville, 2009)

The title, as with the same scriptwriters' Sexy Beast, is presumably just to sucker unwary punters into the land of the geezer gangstah once more. Ray Winstone is the main lummox again, here crying his eyes out over being cuckolded whilst various gangland cohorts urge him to do the time-honoured thing by offing his wife's lover. It's extremely stagebound, bar the occasional flashback and fantasy interlude, with messieurs Hurt, McShane, Wilkinson and Dillane hovering around a static Winstone in an East End safe house, trading fs and cs like they were going out of fashion. The writers rely too heavily on the mere presence of such big guns in the same room being a guarantee of Reservoir Dogs-calibre wit, and any pretensions the film may have towards actually saying something revelatory about love, jealousy and relationships would be rather misguided. But Winstone does get to do earthy angst in at least one scene in his own inimitable way, so it's not a complete waste of time by any means.

6/10