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