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