Centurion (Neil Marshall, 2010)

The sword-and-sandal revival trudges on like a tired legionnaire in the wake of the success of Gladiator back in 2000, with TV series mostly going for backstabbing soap operas with forced modern political parallels while movies centre on hack-and-slash action. Centurion managed to nab the story of the Ninth Roman Legion annihilated by native Britons before the following year's The Eagle, but both are rather unsatisfactory exercises that understretch a fine cast, this one squandering the likes of Michael Fassbender, David Morrissey and Ulrich Thomsen. You can see both the budgetary and local appeal of setting a Roman epic in Britain, and the landscapes are impressively utilised, but the battles are a poor cousin of their Gladiator counterparts, inviting unwelcome comparison through using a similar multiple-frame rate filming technique of the plentiful gore on show, while the story and characterisations themselves have little meat on them.

4/10

Zwart Water (Elbert van Strien, 2010)

A mild Dutch haunted house film of the common garden variety, Two Eyes Staring has a family move into an inherited country mansion which turns out to be a repository for buried events in the mother's family history, manifesting as ghostly visitations to her daughter. The film is tidily shot and well cast, but manages little sense of menace as the wheels begin to fall off the narrative logic of the plot, and musters no more originality than its Hollywood slasher cousins for all its psychological aspirations.

4/10

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

Much panned by Hergé aficionados for the cardinal sin of not being the comic books of their childhood, Spielberg's effort is actually a rather successful one until the plot settles into a sanitised Raiders of the Lost Ark non-stop chase groove, complete with motorcycle sidecars and Arabic markets to trash. The motion capture is fluid and the renditions of the characters' faces nicely perched halfway between their cartoon versions and real people, with a painstaking amount of attention paid to incidental period details and object textures around them as well. The dialogue, the fruit of the loving labours of the Moffat/Wright/Cornish partnership, is also crisp and humorous in the fashion of the books, supported by solid voice casting, Andy Serkis's Captain Haddock being a particular treat. If it feels lacking in substance, this is probably just because you haven't read the books since you were 11 years old.

6/10

The Thing (Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., 2011)

The concepts of cult horror films do indeed not grow on trees, and the director of this reprocessing of the 1982 John Carpenter classic must have thought he'd hit on a brainwave when he realised that this could actually be sold as a prequel, with the original allowing plenty of room for a lead-up story, rather than just another tawdry remake. Regrettably he then wastes the licence afforded by duplicating the storyline virtually scene by scene, including the one where the beleaguered party has to devise some kind of test to separate the bogeymen from the good guys. It soon gets too frantic, as is the tendency with remakes, with characters we have scarcely met dying in droves and an abundance of digital FX monstrosities diluting rather than complementing the fear. The film's principal merit ends up being linking to the original pretty seamlessly, with no glaring continuity errors, which is a rather modest achievement and hardly worth box office business in itself.

4/10

Chronicle (Josh Trank, 2012)

Three teens find a strange object in the woods and subsequently begin exhibiting an increasing range of superpowers. However, the tone in the set-up is tense enough that it comes as no wonder that the one of them who is a bullied social outcast at the beginning is the one who starts abusing his powers.
What distinguishes Chronicle from the horde of superhero films is not that it shows the individuals with suddenly vastly expanded possibilities as imperfect or troubled, but rather implies that power corrupts, and that corrosion of the mind increases with enhancement of the body. No masterpiece, this, but maybe for teens with testosteronal delusions, a healthy antidote to the usual chest-beating positivity of the genre.

6/10

Une Vie de Chat (Jean-Loup Felicioli & Alain Gagnol, 2010)

A Parisian cat is a burglar's partner by night and a little girl's pet by day. When the girl falls into the clutches of a bunch of gangsters, the burglar decides to come to her aid. The simple storyline of A Cat in Paris is just about enough to sustain the 70-minute running time and the nocturnal Parisian backdrops are luminously painted. But the characters themselves are positively dull, sloppily and unappealingly drawn, including the cat itself. It'll do for undemanding young children but there's little for an adult audience here when compared to the best examples of the genre, such as the work of Sylvain Chomet.

4/10

Barbara (Christian Petzold, 2012)

Barbara, a doctor from Berlin, arrives in a provincial East German town in 1980, banished for some slight against the authorities and now continually harassed by the Stasi. She cuts a spikily guarded and nervous figure at first, until a doctor and a troubled young patient at her new hospital begin to melt her barriers. Nevertheless, all the while she is plotting to escape to the West with the aid of her wealthy lover on the other side.
Barbara is a solid accompaniment to the other internationally successful film of recent years about the oppressiveness of the DDR regime, The Lives of Others, but very much its own creature. While the eventual softening of the main protagonist and denouement may be foreseeable, the route there is roundabout and takes unexpected turns, with the dialogue in the interplay between the two doctors in particular laced with a fine subtext and numerous scenes making subtle allusions to larger themes. Nina Hoss is also excellent as the lead, understatedly emoting the pain within.

8/10

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (Guy Ritchie, 2011)

Ritchie's sequel takes up the story with more of the same blend of comically tinged derring-do and improbable deductions, and it seems that after years of being ridiculed for his mockney gangster business, Ritchie has finally found his niche. It's much the same film as the first, even if there's a Moriarty lurking about, but this is no bad thing, since it ensures a rather stunningly realised Victorian London and crisp use of the Holmes bullet time technique. The chemistry is also nice between the fidgety Downey Jr. and Jude Law, who on showings like this is much better as a comic sidekick than as a stiff dramatic lead. There's far too much explosive action for Rathbone traditionalists, of course, but it rolls along entertainingly all the same.

6/10

The Dictator (Larry Charles, 2012)

The good call The Dictator makes is to give up on the device of Sacha Baron Cohen's faux-naif persona, duping members of the public, which was clearly running out of mileage even before Brüno. So one hand hand we do get a more standard comedy. On the other, the plot arc is exactly the same as before, with the title character arriving in America, ending up on the skids and then working to an epiphany of sorts. The problem here is two-fold: the deposed Third World despot is just not that funny a character, with the innate warmth of Baron Cohen's first few creations replaced by tasteless callousness and swearing, and there isn't nearly enough satire considering the wealth of real-world sociopathic buffoons that there is to draw from. A sprinkling of bon mots does not generate enough mirth to elevate the film to satisfying entertainment.

4/10

The Divide (Xavier Gens, 2011)

Armageddon days are here again and an assortment of characters find themselves stuck together in a cellar to weather the storm. As per regulations, there's the tough bastard, the sleazebags, the coward and the woman who has a nervous breakdown. The one thing they do all have in common is being thoroughly self-interested and as they lose the plot and go for each other while slowly dying of radiation, you really wish they'd just get on with it.

3/10

Avengers Assemble (Joss Whedon, 2012)

Chucking together the biggest superhero money-spinners that Sony hasn't managed to get its paws on and that comics had at least set the groundwork for in terms of background, Avengers Assemble promises much in the way of rollercoaster thrills and certainly delivers on an FX level, with a few character interaction interludes in the midst of the fray gamely trying to tie all the disparate personages together and give them all individual agendas. What the film really fails to do, though, with three demigod-powered types amongst a band of mere mortals, is convincingly give the lesser ones much of interest to contribute as Earth gets invaded by an army of aliens. The impending sequel will have to deal with the same problem and will probably also fail in the attempt.

5/10

Wer wenn nicht wir (Andres Veiel, 2011)

Let this film lay the German obsession with the Baader-Meinhof Gang to rest. If Not Us, Who? does spare us another full exploration of the addled middle-class lefty terrorists and thereby any fear that they will be depicted as revolutionary anti-heroes, as they veered dangerously close to being at times in 2008's Baader Meinhof Complex, by concentrating almost exclusively on the earlier years of Baader's eventual girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, and her partner of the time.
They are quite clearly pathetic figures, carrying far too much baggage to do with their parents' actions in the war years and finding a childishly inadequate outlet in free love and political ranting. This much is good, and at least gives credence to the notion that the director is burying their whole tribe's ethos. But there is also so little to empathise with in them that the film eventually suffocates under their self-involvement.

5/10

Chernobyl Diaries (Bradley Parker, 2012)

Hot on the heels of The Darkest Hour, another batch of young Americans head for the slaughter in the spooky former Soviet Union, the outcome this time somewhat more predictable as they will insist on sneaking into Chernobyl where there be mutants, of course. Oren Peli, the director of the thoroughly meh Paranormal Activity, is behind the script, but one of the mutants or indeed main characters would also have had sufficient brain activity for the task. It all ends in screamy tears and only the eerily decayed Hungarian and Serbian locations chosen to double for the disaster site stand out.

3/10

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011)

You can take the man out of body horror but you can't take body horror out of the man, even if here Cronenberg has disguised his singular preoccupation by wrapping it inside human psychology instead. Ostensibly we're watching the story of the relationship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud and the birth of modern psychoanalysis, but any such agendas are subsumed by the illicit affair Jung has through the story with one of his patients who happens to be a masochistic nympho. The habitually formidable Michael Fassbender as Jung cuts a tepid figure, Viggo Mortensen does Freud as a caricature and though one may not expect much of Keira Knightley, she manages to outdo the irritation quotient of any of her previous roles with her gurning Russian headcase. Peppered with split focus in every second close-up to self-neutralising effect, this is Cronenberg's poorest drama by some distance, and in fact inferior to his jerry-built '70s horror B-movies, which at least did not take themselves seriously.

4/10

Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki, 2011)

Some years ago, when asked about the period in which his films take place, Kaurismäki replied with uncustomary seriousness that it was between 1950 and the present day, and this is always more evident when he makes a film abroad and the hunt for anachronistic locations is evident. At any rate, you know he'll find the biggest toilet in any given country and Le Havre is no exception. The main character, too, has a profession transposed from yesteryear, being an elderly shoeshiner. In a slight divergence from his norm, Kaurismäki does add a contemporary element with the topic of illegal immigration, but the rest is the usual laconically told fairytale as the shoeshiner takes an African boy sought by the authorities under his wing and goes about arranging the boy's safe passage to his family.
There are cameos by deadpan regulars, the props, colours and expressionist lighting are all determinedly trademark retro and space is found to jam in a rock'n'roll musical number in its entirety. It's perfectly as sweet as ever, but really smacks of the director just going through the motions, with numerous scenes replicating ones from his earlier work.

5/10

Four (John Langridge, 2011)

A husband hires a detective to kidnap his wife's lover to beat a confession out of him in an abandoned warehouse, and the detective promptly kidnaps the wife too. Naturally it's not as simple as that, but it's a bit worrying how easily actors like Kierston Wareing and Sean Pertwee, who should have smelt a pseud crime wank fantasy from a mile off, have allowed themselves to get suckered into such vicarious little film-student exercise, complete with having one of the characters spout film references at every conceivable turn. The f-words fly, because that's how you make gritty authenticity, and you know all four characters will be revealed as being just out for themselves, because apparently that's life. This is really very bad indeed.

2/10

We Need to Talk about Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011)

Based on Lionel Shriver's novel, We Need to Talk about Kevin features the stand-out performance you know Tilda Swinton has in her but which seldom surfaces amidst all the wilfully quirky or perverse roles she chooses. She is the mother of a boy who she tries to love and who in return plays his parents against each other from earliest infancy with an eerily manipulative intellect and complete lack of emotional involvement. The story holds its cards close to its chest, leaving the viewer guessing as to whether we're dealing with an autist or a sociopath, and shows occasional flashes which turn out to be false dawns in his development which bring us in as much as they bring the beleaguered parents hope.
It moves forward with a heavy reliance on time dislocation as a technique, Swinton's haircut changes initially the only reliable beacon to indicate the timeframe of the moment, but for once the overused device isn't just a modish trick: it underlines the unreliable nature of a single perspective's memory and thereby the gap between the past as we'd like to see it and how it really was. When the denouement comes, making a claim for relevance in a topical event context, it has been built up logically and therefore convinces.

7/10

War of the Dead (Marko Mäkilaakso, 2011)

Right from the outset, this is a shaky battleground: to shoehorn in some American actors and thereby make English the primary language of the pic for international flogging purposes, the script posits the ludicrous idea of a joint Finnish-U.S. mission behind Russian lines to investigate secret German shenanigans. What would these be? Why, making zombies of course. Cue lots of biting, rising from the dead and shooting of heads, almost as ineptly realised as the premise. Not good at all.

3/10

Unthinkable (Gregor Jordan, 2010)

Unthinkable would be a significantly flimsier film without the casting of Samuel L. Jackson on top menace setting and Michael Sheen on full squirm, playing respectively the interrogator and the terrorist. The former will do anything necessary to squeeze the truth out of the latter about the bombs he claims to have planted in various cities; the latter anything to hold fast to his impending martyrdom, which is as a fanatical converted Muslim, just to make things straightforward. Of course, the film would not have to be so reliant on the magnetism of the pairing if it had any real political depth vis-a-vis the scenario. As it is, it holds up as a workmanlike thriller with what subtleties there all arising from Sheen's character grappling with his motivation while Sheen skirts around what his actorly motivation might be.

5/10

The Adjustment Bureau (George Nolfi, 2011)

Where would Hollywood sci-fi be without Philip K. Dick? Short of quite a few reality-bending puzzlers, at the very least, also including the films like Inception that would not have been conceived without their Dick-adaptation forerunners.
The Adjustment Bureau is another one of the plethora based on one of Dick's short stories, and the fleshing out leaves a thin meal, if still one carrying enough tinkering with perception and causality to keep things rolling. Matt Damon is an aspiring politician this time instead of some super-agent, told by sinister men in hats that his lot is not to be with the woman he has just fallen for through a chance encounter. This of course he refuses to accept, and a great deal of chasage follows, with the temporal agents trying to force him back in line with his destiny. It's far more lightweight than it might suppose, but diverting enough, and refreshingly free of the macho ultraviolence that otherwise comes as standard with the genre.

5/10

The Darkest Hour (Chris Gorak, 2011)

Take four young Americans living it up on a night in Moscow and add an invasion by invisible aliens who pulverise people on contact. Leave to ferment. The Darkest Hour is produced by the director of Night Watch and Day Watch and although there are no plot similarities, the tone is very much the same ilk of horror viewed through flippant eyes. Regrettably, considering that this is what sets its stall out to do, the film does not scare with any great degree of success. Once the aliens have wiped out most of the millions of Muscovites overnight, they really should be capable of dealing with gormless tourists in a thrice. Blah.

3/10

Jodaeiye Nader az Simin (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)

A Separation tells the story of a Tehran couple seeking to effect a divorce, brought on by the husband's refusal to move abroad as the wife wishes. The husband feels unable to leave his Alzheimer-stricken father behind, and an emotional tug-of-war ensues over their prepubescent daughter. The father's situation is then further complicated when he's taken before the judge for allegedly having hit the carer he has hired, resulting in her miscarriage.
You might not assume such a glum domestic scenario could result in something so riveting, but the devil is in the detail. Farhadi has hit on a great technique, which is smuggled in under the verite guise of the film, and at first seems like a series of amateurish structural errors, namely the partial reveal. Key moments in the events are continually skipped over to allow both the players and viewer to exercise doubt about the true nature of things, which results in suspense as well as a satisfyingly lifelike ambiguity. It's a minor masterclass in how to involve attention and empathy, and Farhadi's film is well deserving of all the international plaudits it garnered.

8/10

One Hundred Mornings (Conor Horgan, 2009)

Society has broken down, and two young couples try to eke out the semblance of a normal life with their dwindling supplies in a cabin in the Irish countryside. Certain aspects of the plot write themselves, of course, with friction setting in between the menage-a-quatre and moments of cosy domesticity growing fewer and further between as the situation gets more desperate. So it's nice that the script uses the dystopian survival set-up not as an end in itself, but rather as a device to depict relationship arcs accelerated as though in time-lapse. The cast of unknowns cope well within its narrow bounds too, not acting through the walls.
Probably thinking the setting was the key, it was to be rather transparently transposed to Wales a few years later by Amit Gupta for his alt-history WWII pic Resistance. The point was missed.

6/10

Super (James Gunn, 2010)

There will probably always be room for one more comedy-drama about an inadequate or deranged individual turning themselves into a superhero, as long as they keep turning out Batman films and make people believe you can right all wrongs with will and some useful tools. Super probably owes more to Harvey Pekar in American Splendor than the previous year's hopeless masked vigilante pic Defendor, though: the hero is not delusional per se, but a virginal middle-aged lump of a man with an infatuation he can't fix who then starts killing minor miscreants with a wrench. It is a better film than Defendor almost solely because of that, because it has a development arc: for all his misdirected rage, the hero has a glimmer of self-awareness that promises a point to the progression.

5/10

Another Year (Mike Leigh, 2010)

A comfortable middle-class couple heading towards retirement are burdened with single friends and family whose lives are less happy. Of these, the nervous wreck Mary takes centre stage, a relentlessly needy and alcoholic victim, self-unaware to such an extent in her flailing that she becomes a nightmare dinner guest on the scale of the tyrannical Abigail in Leigh's best-known TV play. That she avoids becoming a similar caricature at the same time owes much to a complex portrayal by Lesley Manville, though it should be noted that none of the other characters are mere archetypes either, with the otherwise saintly hosting couple not free of an unhelpful tendency to sweep any awkward issues under the carpet. All in all, it's a mature piece on the undramatic difficulties of real life, and as such ranks amongst Leigh's best work.

7/10

O'Horten (Bent Hamer, 2007)

On the day of his retirement after 40 years of service, train driver Odd Horten gets waylaid on the way to his leaving do and goes through a series of whimsical encounters in the dead of the Oslo winter night, leading him to reevaluate his life and what he has left undone through overprudence. It's a slight story, but gently told and the stolid and perpetually bemused Horten makes a likable protagonist, a variant of Monsieur Hulot without the anarchic selfishness.

5/10

Iron Sky (Timo Vuorensola, 2012)

€7.5 million may be a hefty budget for a Scandinavian sci-fi film, which has also benefited from a heap of free online community help to make up the shortfall in technical quality compared to its big-studio competition, and Iron Sky can best be viewed as an exercise in how to wring the maximum bangs out of relatively limited bucks. Unfortunately, bangs are about all it's good for. 'Nazis from the Moon invade Earth' is a passable daft B-movie concept, and the irreverence the makers show towards all and sundry, even their own countrymen, promises harmless fun. If only it wasn't so painfully unfunny. Never mind the English and German of the film, but the language of wit is also a foreign one to the team of scriptwriters. The director and producer's previous online release, a leaden-footed and pointless pastiche of Star Trek, should probably have served as adequate warning.

3/10

Die Kommenden Tage (Lars Kraume, 2010)

The near future: the European Union has disintegrated and a wall has been erected across the Alps to keep out a tide of African immigrants, in the wake of an oil-sparked war in the Middle East. Meanwhile, on the domestic front, a group of international terrorists launches attacks to disrupt the Internet and cast the Government as a villain.
One would guess the idea was to produce a feasible dystopia, extrapolatable from the state of the world as it is now, along the lines of Children of Men. The director must certainly have talked a good game to get some solid actors onboard, including the omnipresent Daniel Brühl. The budget is a fraction of that of Alfonso Cuarón's overblown and singular monster, but that should be irrelevant when ideas rather than FX are the capital. Unfortunately, The Coming Days fails on almost every front that counts. The entourage of self-involved young Berliners is unlikable without exception, the geopolitical scenario criminally infantile and the story arc not only lifelessly flat but riven with illogicalities. It ill behoves a film so uninspired to harbour any pretensions of importance, and yet it does.

3/10

Soul Kitchen (Fatih Akin, 2009)

Fatih Akin, the Turkish-German behind hard-hitting explorations of identity and purpose such as Head-On and The Edge of Heaven, attempts a lighter tack with a simple story of a Greek-German restaurateur in Hamburg whose dreams of success founder on the rocks of his clientele's stodgy tastes, his ex-con brother's indiscretions and his own daft infatuation with a rich girl who sets him unreasonable demands. Then city officials, a gangster and ill health come in to mop up what's left. The film is hard pushed to stagger on with its feelgood tone intact after this unfeasible multiple assault. It just about manages on the strength of being so ebullient, as embodied by the merely incredulous reaction of Adam Bousdoukos's protagonist to each new misfortune where, in an Akin picture in fully existential mode, despair would be the natural response instead. Akin still can't do comedy, though, bless him.

5/10

Tie saam gok (Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark & Johnnie To, 2007)

Triangle is a comic-tinged crime pic in which three friends attempt to run off with buried antique treasure while being pursued by various other interested parties including a corrupt cop, a cheating wife and a bunch of gangsters. It's directed in half-hour chunks by a triumvirate of Hong Kong's biggest action directors, one handing over to the next. The last, Johnnie To, perhaps best known internationally for his punchy 2005 Triad thriller Election, has a lot to wrap up in the last part, which he manages with considerable panache, including a series of bizarre multiple Mexican stand-offs.
As interesting an experiment as it is, the film's shortcomings are pretty much a direct result of the multiple helmsmanship. Hark sets down far too many sub-plots in the first part and thereby lumbers the other two with the unwelcome task of having to resolve them while moving the story on, which doesn't leave much room for build-up of substance or tension. It does look rather stunning, though, having prudently kept the same cinematographer throughout.

5/10

Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)

Malick's second feature was the first to fully embody his signature style, with voice-over narrative giving cohesion to the plot, in which characters wander across a natural world teeming with life and quite indifferent to their concerns. When the characters are given dialogue, it is as artless and unforced as the lighting of the scenes. In Malick's later works, the inimitable style has become so accentuated that it often reaches the level of parody, the pace too languid, the words banal, but in Days of Heaven it was not only fresh but perfectly realised.
The presence of a young Richard Gere and his sullen pout as the nominally main character cannot detract from the luminosity of Néstor Almendros's painterly photography of endless prairie landscapes, the telling detail shots or the perfectly judged score. The story outline, of a dirt-poor itinerant worker persuading his lover to marry a wealthy farmer under false pretences, is minimal. But it's not governed by the laws of conventional story-telling: it's to be imbibed rather than dissected. For once, as Malick has always sought to achieve, all the spirituality and politics are conveyed by the mood, which is utterly hypnotic.

8/10

Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994)

I have been inclined to stave off seeing this Stone-Tarantino collaboration for a long time, suspecting an unholy marriage of sententious cant and puerile trash culture references, which would be the worst that both parties bring to the table. Yet even Stone has turned out some decent films over the years, although one now has to go back quite a way to find them. You still can't help thinking that a Stone script from yesteryear, with an actual polemic core, processed through Tarantino's superior presentational technique, would have made much more sense. As it is, the film, a sort of hypercharged black comedy run-through of Badlands, jostled along frenetically by a barrage of clips and stylistic grabs from cinematic and news history, is like a garish B-movie that tells you off for being a slave to instant gratification and moralises about violence in the media while instantly gratifying you and churning out ultraviolence. It's at once compelling and intensely irritating.

6/10

Colombiana (Olivier Megaton, 2011)

Luc Besson protege Megaton made himself into a brand when he changed his name, promising a payload of massive explosions and sledgehammer violence, and Colombiana continues along this path, investing almost totally in fighting, which is admittedly effectively realised. Attention paid to anything else is at the minimum level required to shunt the viewer from one choreographed setpiece to another, of course, the plot model picked off the rack being the 'revenge for murdered parents' one. Waifish Zoe Saldana does her best to convince as the avenging angel, managing less well when the character is encumbered with a few weepy scenes to underline her pain. I do wonder why co-writer Besson didn't help the director out with a few pointers in providing emotional content too, since Megaton's effort is just a dumber copy of his 1990 action classic Nikita.

3/10

The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom, 2010)

A remake of a 1976 adaptation of Jim Thompson's noir crime novel, Winterbottom's film adds nice photography and modern graphic violence and little else to the story of a psychotic Texan sheriff who gradually gets entangled in the web of deceit he has woven. It's a film most out of character for Winterbottom, until now a director of well-intentioned docudramas such as Welcome to Sarajevo or In This World, or entertainment with a brain, such as 24 Hour Party People or Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. You don't expect him to stoop to a remake, go gratuitous with the on-screen brutality - although for all the accusations of misogyny levelled at the film, it has to be understood that depicting a woman-hating sadist is not the same as condoning one - or put Jessica Alba in a film. Casey Affleck does put in an unsettling performance as the softly-spoken killer, but it also feels a less nuanced recycling of his character in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Winterbottom clearly wants to make a serious point about the casualness with which film too often treats real brutality. It's just that here the touch is too heavy-handed.

5/10

The Recruit (Roger Donaldson, 2003)

Basically seeking to replicate the passing of the baton from Robert Redford to Brad Pitt in Spy Game, The Recruit has Al Pacino showing Colin Farrell the CIA ropes in a thriller which passes muster in the first half, involving spy-school training, a safe area for a scriptwriter in that espionnage jargon and running through the tricks of the trade can be chucked in as plot, and then seems to get bored with itself once it inevitably turns on the full thriller mode, with moles and car chases. Bringing in these signallers of high excitement is fine, and in fact helpful of the director, as the viewer is likely to have got stricken with ennui around the same time.

4/10

The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)

Orson Welles's follow-up to Citizen Kane comes to us today as one of the most studio-mutilated works of a major director ever, and to an extent it's easy to see where content has been crudely torn out or scenes refilmed to make them more sentimentally palatable to test audiences. Still, it's routinely cited as one of the masterpieces of American cinema, even in its compromised form, and so begs analysis as to what substance there is to it.
In a nutshell, it's the story of the decline of an old power family, an embodiment of American aristocracy, proving itself unable as the twentieth century begins to adapt to new technology, as represented by the arrival of the automobile, and new values, with the new money car maker seeking to marry the family's widowed matriarch and her son being unable to accept this. But one idea does not an epic make. It hangs massively on the character of the first-born scion of the dynasty, who is a ridiculously arrogant little prick, and should at least have been given a few redeeming characteristics for the sake of complexity, if nothing else. So the family goes down the toilet because of his whims instead of societal change, which surely can't have been Welles's intention.

5/10

Bunny Lake Is Missing (Otto Preminger, 1965)

An American woman, just arrived in London, goes to pick up her daughter from her first day at a kindergarten to discover she's missing and in time-tested psychological thriller fashion, everyone seems wilfully reluctant to help or even acknowledge her distress. Laurence Olivier comes in as an arch police superintendent to investigate the case, and is soon developing doubts about the existence of the girl in the face of the mother's womanly hysterics.
If the premise sounds familiar, it's been used in recent years in The Forgotten and Flightplan, to name two. Bunny Lake Is Missing is substantially superior to either, by virtue of a great supporting cast of creepy eccentrics, Noel Coward's unctuous pervert landlord the stand-out turn of the lot, and smart dialogue distributed amongst them all. A pity, then, that the finale feels so out of kilter: the twist is wholly illogical in terms of characters established so far and its camp execution a badly dated mark of modish '60s far-outness.

6/10

Shiqi sui de dan che (Xiaoshuai Wang, 2001)

Beijing Bicycle tells the story of a boy from the countryside who becomes a bicycle courier in Beijing, toiling away to make the company bicycle his own property until it's stolen by a schoolboy his age whose family is too poor to afford one. The film is essentially about the bicycle itself, as a means of livelihood to one and as a must-have peer group accessory for the other, and consequently the whole story revolves around the courier's attempts to retrieve his vital work tool.
The bicycle attains a larger-than-life status as a symbol of a whole host of things, even down to being a critical factor in relations with the opposite sex in Chinese society, which is an intriguing angle. But the courier's unwavering passivity means he never defends himself against those who take advantage of him, and the schoolboy in turn is just a self-pitying weasel, so ultimately it's hard to sympathise with either protagonist. The director gets lost in arousing pity at the cost of making sense.

5/10

The Navigators (Ken Loach, 2001)

The firebrand gets his teeth into the subject of rail privatisation, from his customary bottom-rung angle. A railway maintenance crew find job security swept out from under their feet when their organisation is privatised and carved up. The workers' mockery of the modish buzz-speak inflicted on them soon turns to disbelief and frustration as corners are cut and long-standing worker rights abused in the new drive to outcompete their former colleagues.
At one point, one of the characters is given a brief speech criticising the laxity of the working atmosphere as it used to be, but this seems tokenistic on the part of the director and writer, and that's fair enough: they make a convincing attack on the revised status quo utilising the double prongs of clearly informed verisimilitude - it might almost be a fly-on-the-wall documentary - and black humour at junctures exposing the farcical and half-baked application of new working practices by the befuddled management. It is a full-blooded polemic, of course, but there is an art to distilling so much prosaic reality into compelling drama.

7/10

Omar m'a tuer (Roschdy Zem, 2011)

Based on the true and sadly ongoing saga of the persecution of Moroccan immigrant Omar Raddad by the French judicial system, Omar m'a tuer (literally, 'Omar to kill me', which is significant in the plot) is the second feature by the actor Roschdy Zem, perhaps best known for his role in the war drama Indigènes. Considering he also has Moroccan roots, the tyro director manages to contain his rage at the travesty of the story with admirable discipline. The accumulation of instances of evidence mislaid or bent, proper procedure disregarded and suppositions taken as fact by the authorities seeking to pin the murder of a wealthy white woman on her naive and illiterate Arab gardener beggars belief. The directorial approach to this is as cool-headed as outrage will allow, also extending to the understated performance of the accused, and if this results in some longeurs in the telling, it's a price worth paying when the actual priority is to try to effect change in the real world.

6/10

Tell-Tale (Michael Cuesta, 2009)

A heart transplant patient begins to suffer flashbacks to the last moments of the organ's previous owner and is impelled to seek out the donor's killers and wreak vengeance. Thus the basic concept of the Pang brothers' 2002 horror hit The Eye, already premasticated for US consumption in 2008 and cannibalised freely by numerous other films, is wheeled out yet again and jump-started back to life, sputtering with confusion. The director may think he's pulled the wool over the retreading police's eyes by having the title allude to Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Tell-Tale Heart, in which a murderer is driven to confess by a belief that the victim's heart beats on, a symbol of guilt, but the similarity ends there and fumbling attempts to say something about the ethics of euthanasia are quite scuppered by a salacious championing of vigilantism. A botched operation altogether.

4/10

Raining Stones (Ken Loach, 1993)

Hapless unemployed family man Bob stumbles from one paltry scam to another in a desperate attempt to scrape enough money together for his daughter's first communion. This being baseline Loach, the outlook is poor and misfortunes will come in droves. You can't fault the director for his honesty and indignation, but they do tend to detract from the drama, by sheer dint of making the chain of events rather predictable, i.e. going from bad to worse, with the supporting turn by the omnipresent Ricky Tomlinson adding the usual instances of earthy humour but not allowed to deflect the downward trajectory. Still, it's nice that Loach restrains himself from shooting fish in a barrel with the giant target of the Catholic church, Bob more a victim of his own subservience to it than the indoctrination of the institution itself, his half-cooked schemes similarly the main cause of his downfall above and beyond crippling societal circumstances, which are usually Loach's primum mobile for all evil. The plot also veers away from pat determinism in the end, good being as likely to transpire as bad given enough time.

6/10

Tehroun (Nader T. Homayoun, 2009)

Depicting the harsh reality of a hand-to-mouth urban existence in Iran, with lives quite at odds with the orthodox image of the country, is enough in itself to lend interest to Homayoun's film, at least from the perspective of the western viewer. However, Tehroun manages perfectly well as a drama without any such qualifier. The basic plot of a man down on his luck and trying to keep the loan shark who he's heavily in debt to off his back is nothing novel, but the slow reveal of the particulars of his situation is handled with assurance, pacing out the pivotal points with thought-out economy. Furthermore, beyond the fact that the director had to pretend he was making a documentary to get the film past the censors, the intent really is to document and not to entertain, the director resisting the urge to get vicarious or melodramatic with the crime or human interest angles.

6/10

Kika (Pedro Almodóvar, 1993)

Almodóvar's style has settled down in more recent years, and while the results can still be audacious or mischievous forced marriages of clashing elements, he no longer tries to cram in every eclectic idea possible as if he were living out his last day. Kika is still very much of that mindset, though. It revolves a bubble-headed cosmetologist, a sinister novelist, a murder-exploitation TV show presenter and a priapic ex-porn star who's broken out of prison, with a supporting cast each endowed with personalised pecularities. Almodóvar's script methodology largely consists of clattering them like pebbles against each other and recording the resulting sparks.
You can be exasperated by such a blase disregard for the conventions of cinematic construction or disinterest in having a moral centre or relish the resultant jumble for the pearls of repartee or set-piece it throws up, and what pearls they are sometimes. For example, when one woman tells another about having submitted to incest with her sub-normal brother to preserve the neighbours from his carnal urges. The irresistible humour springs from Almodóvar's matter-of-fact handling of such notions. He may try too hard to discomfit in these early pieces, like a naughty schoolboy, and sometimes the plot is just an afterthought, which is pretty much the case here too, but it is fun.

6/10

The Resident (Antti Jokinen, 2011)

Hilary Swank stars as a doctor who moves into a new flat and slowly becomes aware of her landlord's unhinged infatuation with her. The scenes of him spying on her through numerous holes in walls are straight out of Psycho, except that nothing is left to the imagination as regards his identity or motives, and the camera lingers in a more seedily prurient way than we ever see him do until he totally loses the plot and comes clean as a standard rejected ogre. Then it's time for the formula slasher finale, which doesn't even manage tension. The director's background is in pop videos and that's clearly where he should have stayed.

3/10

Repo Men (Miguel Sapochnik, 2010)

Dear oh dear. It's not that you'd expect Jude Law to have the sense to avoid generic dystopian sci-fi product, but decent actor Forest Whitaker's decision to take part makes you wonder whether his appearance in Battlefield Earth was actually deadly earnest. Repo Men is assembled in a workmanlike fashion, and that's about all. Having the characters watch the Monty Python organ donor sketch at one point is a shoddy excuse for making a whole unfunny film out of it, with legally sanctioned agents murdering members of the public who have received organs and then defaulted on their payments. It tries charmlessly and cynically to have a foot in both the black humour and political critique camps, while pandering to aficionados of gratuitous blood and guts. The pace is Michael Bay, the principal characters have no chemistry at all, their motivations and Damascene conversions embarrassingly nonsensical, the imaging of the future is straight off the shelf and the script is similarly wholly devoid of original thought and logic. The final insult is added when the writers go back to the scene of their theft from the Python camp to steal the entire ending of Brazil. Even Equilibrium was better than this, and Lord knows that was shit.

2/10

The Runaways (Floria Sigismondi, 2010)

Rock biopics most often live or die on the strength and longevity of the music of their subjects, and this is a problem right from the outset in this case. The Runaways were a proto-Riot Grrrl band in late Seventies America who were doubtless influential for their lairy trailblazing, but have left no musical legacy, at least on this side of the pond, beyond founder member Joan Jett's one international hit during her later solo career. The songs are Sex Pistols performed by a Suzi Quatro with teenage anger-management issues, and nowhere near as good as either of those influences.
But then Andy Warhol was an artist in name only, and yet still worthy of a retrospective simply for the circus built up around him, and so it is with these protagonists. The film does realise that the point of interest is the phenomenon and not the creation, and handles the vicissitudes of an exploitative industry and the damage wreaked on girls ill-equipped to handle the whole rock star package with an assured touch, but there's really little to detain the casual passer-by.

5/10

Na kometě (Karel Zeman, 1970)

The Czechs do absurdist fantasy unlike anyone else, stamped through like a stick of rock with a tone that often manages a sense of delight without stumbling into inanity and underlying cynicism without turning morose. The darkly comic output of Jan Svankmajer would perhaps be the internationally best-known of the lot, but he's by no means alone. When veteran animator-director Zeman turned to adapt one of Jules Verne's particularly whimsical works for the screen, the outcome was foreseeable, and so it proves. Off on a Comet, featuring an assortment of posturing colonial-era factions making war on each other on a piece of North Africa knocked into space by a comet, is a visual feast, the style Python-era Terry Gilliam laced with Lotte Reiniger arabesque trimmings. It is also utterly daft and throwaway, with scant regard for logic or continuity, plasticine dinosaurs being the least of its follies. Along the way it slips in as many anti-imperialist statements as the communist censor will allow. Decent stuff for kids who can read subtitles, then.

5/10

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2010)

Shaun of the Dead helmsman Wright tries his hand at the Transatlantic college slacker comedy and the result is enough of a smorgasbord to garner cult status, which is rather often another way of saying that a film is an idiosyncratic mess delivered with conviction. Michael Cera of Juno and Superbad fame is once more a smart-alec twerp with self-generated girlfriend trouble, which is stepped up a gear when  it's decreed that he has to vanquish his desired squeeze's seven exes mano a mano. The consequent duels then take up most of the rest of the film, in an easily scriptable Street Fighter video game format, naturally caked in oodles of FX. It may be the computer geekiest movie ever made, and quite brazenly happy with its inanity. It also wears its ADHD affliction with pride, and this runs all the way through the dialogue as well, which consists of relentless verbal jousting with cheesy cameo stars like Chris Evans and Brandon Routh. All this would probably stack up to just cause for murder if it wasn't so good-natured.

5/10

Gangster No. 1 (Paul McGuigan, 2000)

A host of cultish English actors essay cockernee accents and test out their hard man snarls as two gangs lock horns in 1960s London. Not that we see much of what dodgy dealings their businesses are built on: the focus is mostly on Paul Bettany's psycho aspiring to the crown and the subsequent unravelling of his kingdom. In the manner of an insecure teenager believing a foul mouth proof of manhood, it goes totally overboard on the f- and c-counts and takes a worryingly deep interest in ultraviolence. And yet, once it has thereby established its deadly serious 'gritty and brutal' credentials, it seems to feel apologetic and swings towards a surprisingly mature ending, with Malcolm McDowell as the gone-to-seed older version of the upstart finally losing the plot in a non-formulaic way that isn't even hammy, which is a rarity for the actor. A very mixed bag.

5/10