District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009)

Aliens have come to Earth, and for once it's not New York or L.A. they've ended up over, but Johannesburg. This is just the first of refreshing twists to the usual first contact scenario. More follow: they turn out to be neither unstoppable invaders nor more spiritually evolved, but disempowered dregs of their society, uncultured and ill-tempered, with a cat-food fixation to boot. And humanity's best response to the unwanted new burden is to seek to lose them in the labyrinths of the social security system, an underclass to be bamboozled with legalese and shunted from shantytown to shantytown. The allegory with the apartheid situation of the past is so central that its lack of subtlety is even an asset, enforced by the blackly satirical documentary style.
Then, as a government official assigned the task of relocating the undesirables to an internment camp is exposed to chemicals which cause him to begin transmuting into one of the loathsome 'prawns', the film begins to veer off course. His change is a disintegration straight out of Cronenberg's The Fly, the authorities turn on him as a potential bioweapon to be exploited à la Robocop, and by the end we're in an unending township gun battle which is uncertainly pitched between African militia warfare and Transformers, with a murderous Nigerian gang after all providing the barbaric black villains we thought might have been avoided. It's a pity because the initial premise suggested much more. Marks for novel details, then, but not the final outcome in an uneven ride.

6/10

Yella (Christian Petzold, 2007)

A young woman with a possessive husband in an eastern German backwater wants out, but he won't allow it. This culminates in him unilaterally deciding on their suicide. Yella, however, gets away and finds a new life in Hanover with a private equity company, where her new boss takes a shine to her, as much as for her calculating ruthlessness in their shared predatory moves on ailing companies as for her other attributes. But it becomes evident that her attempt to distance herself from the past has failed...
Petzold's film teems under a thin skin with the supernatural, and there is an effective understated eeriness to the overall tone. But the central characters remain too glacially inexpressive and unsympathetic to ever really engage interest. Also, it's far too easy to deduce early on which Hollywood chiller the plot is clearly drawn from, and it doesn't add anything to the original despite the attempts to create a new focus with the corporate nastiness.

5/10

Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009)

A key question with reboots of megabuck franchises is always whether taking the easy option of capitalising on goodwill and familiarity with a set of characters and precepts is outweighed by what's been added. Certainly, the example set by Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins holds up as a model for what a bold enough director can accomplish, revitalising a character who'd become mired in pointless tongue-in-cheekery  in previous outings. As for the last Star Trek films, a series of recycled TV episode themes with some extra CGI frills pointed to a niggling and inevitable demise.
So, how does Star Trek stack up? Trekkies will probably leave apoplectic and gratiated in equal measure: Abrams has cheerfully plundered anything that took his fancy from the whole existing canon, jumped up the octane level and given half the cast a brief to summon up their best impersonations of the original '60s characterisations, Karl Urban's Bones McCoy the most shameless of the lot. This all works to good effect: the frenetic japery throughout is a welcome switch from the stolid po-facedness of the last Treks. Abrams also sidesteps the pitfall of inconsistency with the established canon quite neatly by recourse to that most traditional Trek MacGuffin, the alternate timeline, and works in additional insurance by having Leonard Nimoy, as the Spock from the future, hand over his blessing to his younger self and the reboot itself.
It's easy to forget amidst such a cornucopia of thrills that a plot might be required too: what substitutes for one is a stock Trek set-up of the growling baddie from the future with a justifiable grievance who wants to destroy Earth. And Abrams also makes a misjudgement common to first-time sci-fi directors, namely that the far-fetched setting does not excuse dramatic implausibility. But the sheer verve on display just about carries the day.

6/10

Volver (Pedro Almodóvar, 2006)

The title Volver, translating as 'coming back', can be neatly read as both the return from the dead of Carmen Maura's mother character in this film, and also Almodóvar's own revisiting of the milieu of What Have I Done to Deserve This?, 20 years earlier, which also starred Maura. There's plenty more overt linkage between the two: both centre around a ballsy but highly-strung mother striving to hold her family together; the setting of a nondescript working-class Madrid suburb is much the same, as is the overall tone which treads a fine line between the kitchen-sink dramatic, fantastical and blackly comic...and the abusive father of the family is killed unintentionally in a domestic row.
What makes Volver superior to its predecessor, however, is Almodóvar's evident mastery of his box of tricks: the signature touches are all still there, including his continuing interest in female solidarity, but less garishly or haphazardly displayed, and the transitions from titters to pathos glide rather than jerk. It's also a revelation to finally see Penélope Cruz command the centre stage with such magnetism: upholstered on Almodóvar's instructions to evoke Anna Magnani or Sophia Loren in similarly strong earth-mother roles, she exudes determination, vanity and sensuality in equal measure.

7/10

Dorian Gray (Oliver Parker, 2009)

Oscar Wilde's best-known foray into the novel has been filmed umpteen times, its central theme of the corrupting influence of hedonism on the soul continuing to exert a powerful pull which transcends the original setting of genteel Victorian high society. But it's important to understand that it's the necessarily unspoken subtext - The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name - that gives the story its dramatic rationale. A literal reading will fall flat, and more so with each passing generation, for whom a life of irresponsible sex and opium use will not readily equate to an irredeemable tainting of the spirit, and unfortunately this is the trap that Parker's film falls unwittingly into.
The teen-friendly casting of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian's admirably cheek-boned but tonally rangeless Ben Barnes in the lead role does not help matters, but neither does Colin Firth's decision to swallow even more of his lips and vowels as Gray's vicarious mentor-in-cynicism and aphorisms, Wilde's alter ego Henry Wotton, or the superfluous addition to the story of Wotton's daughter as a potential beacon of hope. Also, the normally reliable Roger Pratt's cinematography lurches from high art to TV soap, though the jarring insertion of unnecessary flashbacks hardly aids him in establishing a stylistic continuity.
So, it ends up suffering in comparison not only with another recent adaptation of a great novel about a period sociopath, to wit Tom Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, but also with Albert Lewin's 1945 rendering, which may seem stiflingly mannered now but did have the virtue of letting our imagination do the work instead of the stock footage decadence on show here.

5/10

¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!! (Pedro Almodóvar, 1984)

What Have I Done to Deserve This? may be early enough in Almodóvar's portfolio that the unique formula is as yet unrefined, but all the ingredients are in place: a medicated housewife harried to hysteria (Carmen Maura, in the first of many Almodóvar lead roles), hypocritical artists, sexually precocious kids, a whore with a heart of gold and a folkwise long-suffering grandma. All of the above yammer incessantly at each other, and the parrot house effect is accentuated by there seeming to be no-one in Madrid besides the dozen characters, whose paths keep on crossing in unlikely ways. So it's hardly surprising when Maura's character, less stress-proofed than in her later roles, does eventually flip, and this just irons out a kink in the fabric of the story.
The dialogue and set-ups are also good for intermittent nervous laughter, and if in the end Almodóvar clearly hasn't decided whether he was making a black comedy or a serious drama, it's no great dereliction of directorial duty as we're nevertheless guided quite logically to a close securely in the realm of urban parable.

6/10

Changeling (Clint Eastwood, 2008)

In one sense, Dirty Harry comes full circle like a snake biting its tail, with a piece which in no uncertain terms presents the LAPD of the ‘20s as a bastion of corruption and intimidation. Meanwhile, in a wider thematic context, we’re still with Eastwood’s perennial loner struggling against the injustice of a prejudiced system. In this case, it’s Angelina Jolie, a single mother whose child vanishes. The police and state apparatus, amidst much self-congratulatory fanfare, duly present her with another child and pressure her into accepting the stranger as her own. When she repeatedly denies parenthood of the boy, the irritation of the police turns to ire and then results in her committal to a mental institution.

The sheer insanity of a set-up in which the authorities, being experts, assert their identification of the child over the febrile female capacity of the actual mother, would be cartoonishly unfeasible without the certitude that we’re dealing with real-life events here. Accepting their factuality gives Eastwood a strong hand indeed with which to make a double assault on both self-serving bureaucracy and the disenfranchisement of women. 
But adherence to the facts of the case also pushes the film structurally badly off course: everything is effectively resolved with an hour still to go, and then we’ve just got a succession of stolid epilogues to wade through. And, as for Jolie, irrespective of her public image as a serial maternalist, and Oscar-nominated though she was – presumably for the feat of working outside gunplay or vamping – she’s an ill fit for the role of a vulnerable everywoman, too glam and too steely: it’s all too easy to envisage her pushed over the edge and beating the crap out of her institutional oppressors.

5/10

Largo Winch (Jérôme Salle, 2008)

It's a risky venture for an action film to aim for emotional resonance, and the Daniel Craig Bond reboot franchise seems to have given up on the attempt just two films in, settling for duelling with the Michael Bay juggernaut in the skid-bang-wallop stakes instead, falling between two stools and thoroughly mangling its assets in the process. But the first Bourne film managed it, so the golden formula must exist...
The ludicrously-monikered Largo Winch is the hero of a long-running series of bande dessinée, a medium which has bafflingly broad popularity across the adult Francophone world, unmatched anywhere else, barring Japan, regardless of  any 'graphic novel'-rebranding attempts. This tells you what to expect: glossy violence, with affectations towards back stories and concerns with character psyches. This is, of course, pretty much what Bond adds up to, and large parts of the film are a smudged carbon copy of a Bond, right down to the soundtrack, with vulpinely smirking male model with sticky-up rebel hair Tomer Sisley scampering his way to gaining control of the multi-national bequeathed to him by his late adoptive father whilst Kristin Scott-Thomas and assorted mafia machinate away against his rise.
You might see the fairly sparing use of action, as far the genre goes, as a sign of a mature hand at the helm, but bear in mind that for the target audience this is the 'origin' part, getting the necessary evil of exposition out of the way to let the inevitable sequels run amok. As it is, the action actually provides some relief from the hackneyed back story, if only by virtue of at least being efficiently handled.

4/10