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