Thérèse Desqueyroux (Claude Miller, 2012)

The last film made by Miller before his death, Thérèse Desqueyroux is a period drama set in the Landes region of France in the late 'twenties, in the milieu of land-owning families concerned above all else with maintaining their power and status. They are a tedious lot altogether, with their interminable talk of hunting and weather, and Audrey Tautou's Thérèse has the misfortune of being a free thinker in their midst. Her life of silent endurance is irrevocably changed when she then decides to start poisoning her boorish husband.
What lends a rather slight story some interest is the ambivalence of the characters and situations: far from being a driven and decisive revoluionary, Thérèse does not actually know what she wants so much as what she doesn't want, and is even inconsistent in this, while the husband for all his stifling banality is no simple male oppressor. Neither does it appear that we are to take the characters' second-hand philosophical musings at face value. Overall, the film generates a sense of disquiet without providing pat exit avenues.

6/10

Clone (Benedek Fliegauf, 2010)

Also known as Womb, this is essentially a story of emotional obsession, with science fiction trappings, strongly reminiscent in tone and pace of the same year's Never Let Me Go. Eva Green stars as a woman who raises the clone of her dead boyfriend up as her son, in a part that could pretty much have been tailor-made for her, with the air of underlying emotional instability that saturates all of her roles and range of speechless suffering looks. Doctor Who's Matt Smith, has a game attempt at doing the boyfriend/son, although there is basically no behavioural distinction between the two juvenile personae he has to portray, which is perhaps more a shortcoming on the director's part.
This is never a film to opt for jump-cuts when lingering on a stationary tableau is available, but this does give the viewer time to consider the full implications of the ethical and emotional complexity involved, and to the film's credit its intentions are wholly serious in this regard.

6/10

Dark Shadows (Tim Burton, 2012)

The Burton-Depp-Bonham Carter love-in is on all too comfortable ground in this comic Gothic horror piece based on a little-known but extremely long-running 'sixties TV series. Depp, as the tormented vampire Barnabas Collins, released from his grave after 200 years and pining after his lost love, is basically Edward Scissorhands in packaging and Sweeney Todd in delivery and murderous tendencies. Whilst his bafflement at the ways of the modern world and ludicrous period speech (also see Sleepy Hollow) provide some witty vignettes to begin with, it soon grows tiresome through sheer familiarity and the elephant in the room that is the shadow of The Addams Family cannot be ignored. Someone really needs to give Burton ten commandments of things he should no longer be allowed to touch, supernatural whimsicality being the first.

4/10

The Wolverine (James Mangold, 2013)

Hugh Jackman gets a sixth outing as the unkillable berserker, and this time the action has been moved to Japan to try to breathe some life into the hack-and-slash formula, although unfortunately this turns out to be a Japan for beginners, with every cliche in the book explained to and even more beefed-up Jackman, who has to stoically feign ignorance of yakuza and the like. While there is an attempt to inject depth into the character through making him even more tortured by his past than before, and also temporarily mortal, breakneck action is the film's overriding concern and predominant asset. It passes muster, but it's doubtful whether there is any mileage in another instalment after this, even though Jackman is an exemplary fit for the role and the character is at least more interesting in terms of unpredictability, as superheroes go, than Superman or James Bond.

5/10

Gambit (Michael Hoffmann, 2012)

A remake of a 1966 Michael Caine-Shirley MacLaine screwball heist caper, Gambit is another of the Coen brothers' script tweaks that brings the story ostensibly into the present day, with costumes, cursing and prices updated, but in fact adds little else and therefore feels somewhat cackhandedly anachronistic, not least in its U.S.-pandering depiction of London and the English. It is a pity that the Coens, on their day amongst the wittiest and most distinctive filmmakers around, have to be this lazy from time to time, but then we already saw this with their version of The Ladykillers. Yes, they may not have directed here, but it is their responsibility nevertheless. The interplay between Colin Firth as the stifled employee seeking to fob a fake artwork off on his bastard millionaire boss, Alan Rickman, is perfectly enjoyable, but it feels too used to do much more than raise the occasional chuckle.

5/10

Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

Tarantino finally gets around to doing his first actual Western, although in truth many of his films were already Westerns in all but era - Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds - being pinned as they were on moving from one drawn-out stand-off to another in Leone style. So, knowing that Tarantino has to reference like a shark needs to keep moving, why not draw on Leone explicitly? Perhaps he was too much of a sacred cow to touch, whereas Sergio Corbucci's Django was a safer beast to milk, given cult status by virtue of some deranged confrontation sequences and not much else, a poor cousin of the Leone films in every aspect.
The story is nothing to do with the original, in any case, with the hero a slave freed by a jovial German bounty hunter who then helps him to set about rescuing his wife from a slave-owner. The plot is functional, serving just to go from one bloody crescendo to another, but the cast is as strong as you habitually get with Tarantino, from Christoph Waltz as the philosophising helper to Leonardo DiCaprio's monstrous plantation owner and Samuel L. Jackson's even more loathsome character as the head of the plantation staff, full of contempt for his own race. Surrounded by these elemental forces, Jamie Foxx's gunslinger is actually somewhat of a soft centre, there are longueurs in the course of going on three hours, and you may wince at the 110 uses of the word 'nigger', as well as having reasonable grounds for doubting whether the director really manages to say anything of depth about race and the slave trade or if he is rather guilty of disingenuity. However, as ever, there's no denying Tarantino's panache, though, or mastery of turns of phrase.

7/10

Borgríki (Olaf de Fleur Johannesson, 2011)

How much gangland violence can a placid country with a population smaller than that of Croydon sustain? Quite a lot, as another instalment in the Scandinavian crime drama wave, City State, attempts to convince us. The acting, from the likes of Iceland's go-to man for granite-faced grittiness Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson (Jar City et al.) as a mob boss on edge, is solid enough but there's too much of a feeling that the script is just ticking boxes, with the usual corrupt police and Serbian mafias all out for revenge. The bottom line is that it's hard to care about any of them and so, for once, when Hollywood picked this up for remaking, I didn't lose any sleep over it.

5/10

Die Wand (Julian Pölsler, 2012)

A woman holidaying in the Austrian Alps discovers one morning that the whole valley she is in has been fenced off from the outside world by an invisible, impenetrable wall, and furthermore that the world beyond seems to be in a perpetual state of stasis. This may be a sci-fi starting point, but unlike the genre norm, there is no explanation and therefore no prospect of escape. Instead, the wall serves as a device for reflecting her own thoughts back on herself in a film where the main preoccupation is an existentialist meditation on the meaning of existence in total isolation as she struggles to find a reason to go on from day to day, month to month. The landscapes of The Wall are a particularly effective backdrop for this, pastorally beautiful and yet also inhumanly indifferent in their scale, and Martina Gedeck produces a performance of some power, somehow keeping herself going with quiet determination despite the hopelessness of her situation. This is no Robinson Crusoe story: the incomprehensibility of the prison created denies all exit routes aside from death, and that does make for a fundamentally depressing experience, but the moments of truth and insight that arise as her outlook changes serve as a reward in themselves.

7/10

A Field in England (Ben Wheatley, 2013)

Here, Wheatley astutely realises that what the world needs is a psychedelic spaghetti western in the style of El Topo, set in the English Civil War. Five men wander around a field somewhere to the side of the action of a battle and inside their own heads. Ostensibly, treasure is being looked for, but the real intent seems to be just to bounce the characters off each other with a jarring blend of mannered period dialogue and modern swearing, while throwing in a jumbled bag of ideas about magic and religion. The bombardment of acid-driven rapid cutting mixed with scenes of mogadoned elongation does have a powerfully hypnotic effect, and the beautifully considered monochrome photography achieves a further temporally dislocating effect, but in the final analysis you would be hard pressed to find any point to it all, beyond disorientating the viewer.

5/10

Down Terrace (Ben Wheatley, 2009)

The Wheatley method seems to be to take the trappings of the modern kitchen sink drama, in the semi-comic style of Shane Meadows, and then upset us all of a sudden. It works a treat in his feature debut, which has a bickering father-and-son drug-dealer duo cooped up in their house after narrowly avoiding going to prison, mulling over who might have stitched them up. Since we know that we're dealing with a British crime film, there will of course be violence, but here it comes wholly out of the blue and quite matter-of-factly, which serves well to make it properly chilling. There are a lot of rough edges too, but there is plenty of promise.

6/10

Skyline (the Strause brothers, 2010)

What is it about Los Angeles that makes it such a desirable target for alien invasion? Is the phenomenon of filmmakers continually levelling it to be amateur-psychologically interpreted as them wanting to raze the environment that spawned them to the ground, oedipally, or is it just that it's so much easier to churn out low-budget product on your front doorstep in nice weather? Skyline is probably a combination of the two, just as it is a mish-mash of any number of creature horror and alien attack films, including, but not limited to Cloverfield, Independence Day and Monsters, original in the sense that one sauce in a cheap Indian takeaway may be said to be different from another by virtue of having the same ingredients in different proportions. Picking at holes in its logic is pointless, and the little pleasure that there is to be had boils down to the usual survival-horror fallback of trying to guess which ones of the unlikable cast perish first.

3/10

The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, 1993)

The Merchant-Ivory partnership became synonymous for reasons good or ill with period dramas preoccupied with social class and the stifling effects of its rigid stratification. But you'd nevertheless be sorry if no-one had taken on the task, and Remains of the Day is one of the better examples. This is not so much because of Kazuo Ishiguro's original novel as the source, which I personally found bloodless, but because of Anthony Hopkins, in one of the performances that truly justifies his status as an actor of poise and control and not just the rent-a-thesp Hollywood has so often got him in for to do the nutters. As the butler Stevens, somnambulantly going through the routines through the decades in an English stately home, always too repressed to commit to either affection or opinions, you always get a sense of what is being held back, and he never overplays it. Unusually a film worth seeing for Hopkins alone, then.

7/10

Le Gamin au Vélo (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2011)

Another low-key piece from the veteran Belgian Dardenne brothers, The Kid with a Bike centres on a 13-year-old boy whose feckless father has walked out on him and his lot seems to be to be stuck in a children's home until a local hairdresser takes him in. He remains less than properly appreciative, pining for the father who doesn't want him, and ends up dicing with delinquency too, and this much is stock stuff for the set-up, regardless of how true to life it may be. Nevertheless, the handling is assured and there's a determination to avoid the predictable twists that the cinematic trajectory of the premise usually takes.

6/10

Offside (Jafar Panahi, 2006)

A group of women find themselves in a common quandary being held by soldiers in a pen outside the national football stadium in Tehran, forbidden as they are to get inside and see the World Cup match taking place within. While football may be the catalyst for their protest, and the film contains comic overtones, it's not a football film in any sense, nor is it a comedy except in the sense that the situation is so farcical, that it's easier to laugh than cry. But the director is wise enough to avoid slipping into polemic, when there's really no need to after all, and lets the material speak for itself. Refreshing.

7/10