The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2008)

Brad Pitt gets a shot at Oscar glory as Button, born an octogenarian and given away by his horrified father to grow up in an old folks' home, getting physically younger while his mind works through childhood. So there opportunity's artificially engineered to show acting chops by going through all the ages and asking us to look beyond the perfectly chiselled features and sparkling eyes. Does he succeed?
Pitt is by no means bad: as a screen persona he's always likable but he really only gets compelling in his doofus or nutjob roles, and this is neither, though thankfully it's no Meet Joe Black either. It's more that the course plotted for the character's life doesn't afford much room for expressiveness, being at first physically and mentally constrained, and then weighed down by witnessing too much death and decrepitude, emphasising his apartness.
It's also seriously overlong, stretched out by a perceived need to be respectful as well as by the pressure to say something meaningful about the human condition. This can easily end up fatuous.
Yet. There are moments of real poignancy all the way through, which are given a huge helping hand by the fact that it's visually so stunningly assembled. And assembled is the word, rather than just shot: it mixes a faded sepia for the early years to a sudden leap with a bang to visceral rapid cuts for a war scene, before moving through Sirkian garish in the '50s to a surfy glow in the '60s. The strong cast also help to engage with the protagonist who might just be sleepwalking to his destiny otherwise.
Close then, but only a cigarillo.

6/10

Perrier's Bounty (Ian Fitzgibbon, 2009)

There's simply too much typecasting going on in Fitzgibbon's stock gangland piece, with Cillian Murphy as an opportunistic waster on the lam from Brendan Gleeson's mob boss, after money and revenge for Murphy accidentally whacking one of his goons. Jim Broadbent's inclusion as Murphy's deceptively batty father, convinced he'll die the next time he sleeps, redresses the balance a tad, but it all goes south of credibility and surprises from the word go, with the usual array of token feisty female support, shaven-headed nutters with tats and dogs, and only just short of gypsies with fiddles for stereotypes. Uninvolving.

5/10

Amintiri din Epoca de Aur (Hanno Höfer, Razvan Marculescu, Cristian Mungiu, Constantin Popescu & Ioana Uricaru, 2009)

Five directors each direct segments on urban myths related to goings-on in Ceaușescu's Romania. Each part of Tales from the Golden Age is a satirical snapshot of the cause-and-effect mayhem resulting from a simple slip: a harassed party photographer makes a mistake in a photo, a village's panicky preparations for an official visit go off the rails, a gluttonous policeman plans making a feast of a whole pig in the family flat. The tone, despite having five different directors behind it, is remarkably unanimous. If striving for comparisons, it could be said to approximate Kusturica crossed with Kieslowski, but it's less knockabout than the former without the sadness of the latter. It should really just be seen in its own right as a black comedy that has satisfying pay-offs in terms of real points to make about the absurdity of the system of the time, paced at regular intervals. A minor delight.

7/10

Unknown (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2011)

As with Taken, Liam Neeson is chucked once more into Euro-intrigues he's duty-bound to cover since Harrison Ford is clearly too over the hill to be credible as the grumpy old leading man who can still garotte a hitman or two. The mould for this outing is more or less Bourne with some of the octane taken out and indignation added as Neeson's biotechnologist wakes after a car crash in Berlin to find his identity stolen by an impostor, with his wife and contacts refusing to recognise him. Of course it's all part of a whale of a cover-up with layers to peel back.
Not taken seriously, it's a zippy enough affair along the lines of The Long Kiss Goodnight, which it ransacks with impunity amongst other sources, but the logic behind the shady motives eventually revealed is fairly flimsy, much like the idea of Diane Kruger as an immigrant taxi driver. God knows what Bruno Ganz and Frank Langella are doing either, besides running down their final easy paydays.

5/10

Bronson (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2008)

Dealing with Britain's self-styled 'most notorious prisoner' and made with his approval, this can only go one of two ways: it either glorifies or stabs in the back. It does go the first route, but Refn is a more subtle director when he's working with a genre he grasps than you might expect from that reduction. Valhalla Rising was a mistake, but understandable after the gruelling work that must have gone into the Pusher trilogy.
And, as with picking Mads Mikkelsen as the centre of those films, this is a director who understands the value of a proper actor. Tom Hardy is possibly nearly as mad as the institutionalised serial offender he plays, and therefore ideal for the part. Commitment screams out loud with every scene. You at once feel for his dumb recalcitrance in the face of a system that just wants to throw away the key, and are also glad that he's safely tucked away with his alternating preening and headbutting, like an impotent and therefore more comic version of the protagonist of the superficially similar Chopper.

7/10

The Box (Richard Kelly, 2009)

Well, you could see this coming. Kelly's a director of a few short ideas and no purpose. A Shyamalan without any real hits. Donnie Darko won people over with overloaded crypticism, Southland Tales confirmed there wasn't actually anything behind it, trying badly to compensate with a saturation bombardment of oddness, and now he's just another waste of budget.
It isn't good from the start: cheesy comedy faces given crappy crises that no-one could feel for, that you're still meant to believe in. Only cinematography saves it from being hopeless, but that's the last refuge of the scoundrel in modern-day Hollywood. It goes sci-fi after a thrilller phase, and there's no point to the switch. The boxes are ticked in depressingly predictable order: Saw-lite, alien abduction, Twilight Zone, predestiny. You'll probably want to see it yourself just to confirm the utter slavishness to these conventions.

3/10

Panique au Village (Stéphane Aubier & Vincent Patar, 2009)

'A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing'.
In an animation age overwhelmed by 3D striving to get closer and closer to heightened reality, stop motion seems a blessing. But it's not all Wallace and Gromit out there. A Town Called Panic sets out wilfully naive with its diecast cowboy and farmyard toys as the characters, and runs out of imagination not much sooner than a 5-year-old, not knowing what to do with its soap-opera scenario of amorous anthropomorphic horses and the like, and so resorting to chucking them at walls, accompanied by a lot of pointless screaming. Bits of plastic without any likable traits to latch on to chase each other a lot and occasionally act like everyday humans for no particular reason, and all the good idiosyncratic ideas are given to the incidental details and so largely swamped by the overpowering impetus of wackiness.

3/10

The Tourist (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2010)

Can this really be from the director of the understated and poignant The Lives of Others? Or just a lesson in how the $ corrupts, and the absolute $ corrupts absolutely?
The Tourist is quite possibly the worst A-list carrier of its year, even allowing for whatever Adam Sandler or Martin Lawrence was involved in at the time: it sucks in the capable Depp, Bettany and Dalton and at least occasionally arresting Jolie and the end product is just another turd floating disconsolately down a picture-postcard Venetian canal. There's no chemistry between Depp and Jolie in the implausible romance between her furiously pouting femme fatale and his bumbling sightseer caught up in multiply reheated escapades involving a host of stereotypes not only offensive to fans of the thriller or caper genres but virtually any nationality touched upon as well. There's a painfully raffish soundtrack which only serves to accentuate the impression that Von Donnersmarck thought he was not only being funny but dashing too, as if he were making another The Thomas Crown Affair. Multitudes of male extras are chucked in just to gawp lasciviously at the androidal Jolie in yet another designer gown.
Imagine if the Cinzano adverts of the '80s with Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins had been stretched out to cover a Bond film template? Yes, that excruciating.

3/10

Monsters (Gareth Edwards, 2010)

It starts in the territory of Salvador, with an American photojournalist fumbling around for the killer picture in the midst of a disaster, except that the nature of the disaster, an invasion of Mexico by fleetingly glimpsed giant extraterrestrials, makes it Cloverfield in Central America instead. The journalist is then saddled with his editor's daughter to shepherd back to the States, and the film changes tack again to become a burgeoning romantic drama in the midst of a road movie.
It's understandable why the eclectic blend has seduced a host of critics, particularly when it's presented through a visual and audio filter of a Terrence Malick production, and achieves remarkable results on a relative micro-budget. But the male lead never moves properly beyond his initial obnoxiousness, the creatures generate little menace and the political parallels with the aspirations of real Third World would-be immigrants to the States (the US have built a giant wall to hide from the alien threat) are scantly explored. The plot does contain welcome divergences from the monster invasion norm and it looks beautiful throughout, but there's little substance to it all. It could really have done without the sci-fi backdrop, which just serves as a box-office crutch, and worked harder on character development instead.

5/10

An Education (Lone Scherfig, 2009)

Spanning the divide between coming-of-age drama, kitchen sink and romance, An Education provides a fully rounded portrait of a teenage suburban girl in the '60s with bohemian dreams whose head is sent spinning by the interest of a worldly older man and the escape he offers her from a drab predestined course laid out by her schoolmistresses and parents.

There's nothing remarkable in the set-up itself: the pleasure is all in Scherfig's realisation of a more complex protagonist than merely a naive dippy adolescent or a straightforward rebel against authority, and Carey Mulligan's nuanced performance fully matches the brief. The rest of the cast and the unorthodox handling of superficially run-of-the-mill scenes measure up likewise, and, barring a few uncertain lurches towards parody, mostly centered on Alfred Molina's turn as the pedantic father, it gels together unforcedly.

7/10

Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004)

Operating on a budget of change found down the back of the sofa, Primer takes the wise step of focusing on dialogue and editing over special effects in tackling the time travel conventions. So, there's a lot of unusually credible-sounding pseudoscience and a wildly deconstructed plot structure to give the viewer plenty to chew on, and it's no surprise that the film has generated fansites where causality et al. are hotly debated in circles. Carruth's debut makes a few good choices in making the two geeks who invent the machine refreshingly uninterested in using it beyond facilitating their own material advancement, and not having them fall prey to the standard traps awaiting the novice time traveller. But the frenetic cut-and-pasting of scenes is too badly signposted to allow for full deciphering without the indulgence of a saint: it feels like the director has fallen back on the resort of the aimless helmsman; namely, wilful obscurantism.

5/10

The Village (M. Night Shyamalan, 2004)

With Shyamalan seemingly hell-bent on exhausting his goodwill credit with the likes of The Last Airbender, it's worth remembering how he got any kudos in the first place.
The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable married a patient build-up of character and developments with luminous photography, but it was the ingenious twist ending that proved the clincher. The Village starts with the same ingredients, with a cast of stalwarts and no less than Roger Deakins behind the camera, and also an intriguing change of setting to a turn-of-last-century Quakerish village seemingly isolated from the rest of the world by woods populated by 'those we don't speak of'.
For a moment, when the bogeymen first appear on screen, the worry arises that Shyamalan may be going down a disappointingly conventional siege horror route but...but you know that a freight train of a twist is on its way. The certainty of this is both the film's saving grace, in that it keeps you watching, and ball-and-chain, since it requires a degree of skill in camouflage that the script simply doesn't manage this time. The illogicalities pile up badly towards the finale.

5/10

The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, 2008)

The trailer-trash scrag-end of the American social spectrum makes a fertile hunting ground for '80s A-list pin-ups looking to prove their acting chops for once and for all. Think Kim Basinger as Eminem's grotesquely self-centered mother in 8 Mile. But casting Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler goes one better: he not only looks like 40 miles of rough road without the need for any make-up, but has also, with his fall from stardom and ruinous attempt to reinvent himself as a boxer, actually travelled quite a way in the shoes of his character, an ageing showboating wrestler held together by bits of tape and a fragile pride.
No Rocky, this: his only relationship, barring an estranged daughter who hates his guts and various backslappers with long memories, is with a stripper whose understanding of the similarity between them, i.e. a dependence on their bodies for their sustenance, doesn't patly lead to a meeting of hearts. And to cap it all, it's made abundantly clear that while we're dealing with entertainers of moronically baying crowds, there isn't even sporting excellence at stake: the wrestlers are just minimum-wage baited bears doomed to agree tenderly to bloodily mangle each other as little as the punters will let them get away with.
None of this is exactly surprising; not the truths behind the meat-headed spectacle or, least of all, the trajectory of the down-at-heel former champ out for one last shot at glory or redemption. What does save its bacon is a merciful refusal to sentimentalise, and Rourke himself. You really can't imagine anyone else being able to make it work.

6/10

Was Tun, Wenn's Brennt? (Gregor Schnitzler, 2001)

What to Do in Case of Fire revisits a Berlin anarcho-terrorist squatter group a dozen years after their idealistic salad days, reluctantly brought together again by the need to eliminate evidence of their former dabbling in bomb-making. By now, of course, most have abandoned the faith and there's a potential tension to be explored between the dream and the reality, particularly with one of the crew perfectly happy in the cynicism of his switch to an advertising career.
However, the director finds himself juggling too many balls to go into personal or societal politics in sufficient depth. The film wants to work as a quirky comedy too, as well as a glossy thriller and wistful relationship drama, and whilst the mix ensures there's rarely a dull moment, with a jaunty pace and likable cast, it ends up fairly well as muddled as the aims of its protagonists.

5/10

Somos Lo Que Hay (Jorge Michel Grau, 2010)

We Are What We Are falls squarely into the bracket of social drama crossed with gore horror. Given the right mix, recently most notably in the case of Let the Right One In, overblowing a character to horrific effect can be highly potent as a vehicle for conveying separation and alienation from societal norms. Get the mix wrong, however, and you're left with unlikeable freaks.
It probably doesn't help that Grau's shot is centered on a family of cannibals in Mexico, suddenly aimless at the loss of their patriarch. Cannibalism may seem, being rooted in feasible reality, a stronger packmule to carry political subtexts than the supernatural recourses to zombies or vampires. But it's precisely because there aren't the freedoms of the otherworldly context that the job in hand actually becomes harder. Having to deal with reality as a framework, creating empathy for the personae becomes of principal importance, and this film seems to forget that, much as the previous year's bizarrely feted misanthropic Dogtooth did, with which it shares more than a few structural elements. You will want the whole family to die long before the inevitable end.

4/10