Monday 15 December 2014

Nebraska (Alexander Payne, 2013)

Payne may have been behind the script of the atrocity that was I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, but as a director he shows no sign of faltering and returns to a more naturalistic and understated mood with the story of a borderline-delusional old man and his put-upon son in a nowhere town, the father becoming determined after receiving a mass-mail letter telling him he's won a million to make it to Nebraska to collect his fortune. It turns into a road movie for a while, with the duo bickering all the way, taking in their stay with excruciatingly brain-dead relatives, until a fairly inescapable conclusion: no fairytale, this, despite some sumptuous black-and-white photography of endless flat prairie vistas.
As the lead, Bruce Dern snarls and sulks to maximum effect, while also conveying wounded pride with great economy, and the underlying gallows-black humour doesn't swamp the basic pathos of the characters' small lives. At a stately two hours, it could probably have done with a little trimming, but then it might have ended up a standard modern product rather than a welcome blast from a bygone era of slow, thoughtful cinema. File alongside Lynch's The Straight Story.

7/10

RoboCop (José Padilha, 2014)

Cop will eat itself. Once again, a reboot for no other purpose than having a safe product, and sod consumer goodwill; it's there to be exploited if they're undemanding enough to want nothing more than more of the same. Somehow, while Michael Keaton and Samuel L. Jackson clearly don't have ethical compunctions about getting their paycheque for this kind of thing, you expected better of Gary Oldman. It's largely irrelevant that this takes a slightly different tack to the original, with more politics and the hero's family in on what's happened from the start: these things can only be justified by improving on the source, and the satire here is toothless in comparison, seeming to be attempted only tokenistically, but so too are the generic teched-up action scenes, which really is beyond the pale.

3/10

Monday 1 December 2014

Pietà (Kim Ki-duk, 2012)

A brutal debt collector, preying on the owners of failing machine shops, is visited by a woman who claims to be his mother. After his initial rejection of her, their relationship takes on sickly tone which is both Oedipal and parodic of a happy family.
This did very well at the international festivals, and the reason is clear: it is relentlessly grim in its outlook and prospects, and mulls heavily over the meaninglessness of anything except emotional attachment, which is then also shown to be an Achilles heel. This means it cannot be mistaken for a cheap thriller, and critics like that. But it also means that the characters are nigh-on impossible to empathise with, and as the Shakespearean revenge adage 'blood will have blood' is followed to the bitter end, contrivance takes over substance, which is something a film this bleak cannot really allow to happen.

5/10

Sunday 30 November 2014

L.A. Without a Map (Mika Kaurismäki, 1998)

David Tennant stars as an undertaker in Yorkshire who takes off for Los Angeles in pursuit of an American tourist he's smitten with. He is naturally a fish out of water there and much of the film's comedy mileage comes from him being either patronised or clocked or both by the horrid locals, punctuated by some odd random cameos from the likes of Johnny Depp. It's not without some moments of amusement, but the satire of the vacuous film world is not much less shallow than its target and the love interest of the sadsack main character so charmless that it's quite hard to see any point to it all.

4/10

Paddington (Paul King, 2014)

Michael Bond's much-loved books finally hit the big screen, but in a much-altered form from the hand-crafted BBC series of yesteryear. The bear is CGI and now has the obligatory action adventures with breakneck chases and a murderous villain, which is all a great flattener of character, reducing the charm of its uniqueness as it competes on an equal tech and thrills footing with the droves of other computer-rendered fare aimed at grabbing the increasingly short attention span of children. Not that anyone much younger than 40 will know or care, and it does have plenty going for it, with some hilarious sequences of Mr. Beanesque bumbling, knowing asides for the adults and a broad cast of British stalwarts all clearly having a whale of a time. If you have to take the sprogs to something this Xmas, you won't do better, even if it does leave you sighing with nostalgia for a simpler time.

6/10

Friday 28 November 2014

Todos tenemos un plan (Ana Piterbarg, 2012)

Everybody has a Plan takes Viggo Mortensen back to Argentina, where he spent a part of his childhood, and I consider this of note simply because it highlights how few Hollywood stars can actually operate credibly in other languages. The film itself, however, doesn't offer much else of value. In it, Mortensen plays twin brothers of contracting personalities and lives, one of whom dies and whose life is then assumed by the other. It's a wearyingly downbeat affair in a bayou-like setting, serving up existentialist grief, but not quite managing to get to a point. Mortensen is always watchable, of course, but the whole chokes under its sombreness. The arch lunacy of another film which starts with a similar premise, Dead Ringers, is missed. 

5/10

Sunday 16 November 2014

Inside Llewyn Davis (the Coen brothers, 2013)

The Coens take time out to make a more single-genre film than they have for years, seemingly just to put live music on screen with the story of a hapless and truculent folk singer-guitarist living on the sofas of his acquaintances in early '60s New York. Oscar Isaac, as the feckless eponymous lead, does convince as a musician in a way few actors manage, the support is strong, from Carey Mulligan as Davis's former flame who can no longer stand his aimlessness to John Goodman as a pompously supercilious jazz player, and the creation of the period is as lovingly crafted as ever from the Coens. But it is also a very small story, and how much time you have for it ultimately comes quite largely down to how much self-important folk music you can stomach. A specialist interest, then.

6/10

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Stephen Daldry, 2011)

Based on Jonathan Safran Foer's best-selling novel, this retains the bones of the story but replaces the flesh with blancmange. It's not that the lead, playing the quasi-autistic nine-year-old who, unable to accept the death of his father in the 9/11 attack, goes on an obsessive treasure hunt to find some hidden remainder of him, is a bad actor per se, but when you're exposed to him on screen rather than paper, his shrill and mechanical tone does not take long to start grating. Neither does having Sandra Bullock as the weepy mother help matters, which then makes relegating the estimable Max Von Sydow to a mute role a criminal waste of resources. It's not without certain finesses and subtleties, but ultimately wallows far too much in its cuteness and pathos to be wholly digestible.

5/10

Divergent (Neil Burger, 2014)

Hot on the heels of The Hunger Games trilogy, comes another teen-targeted dystopian trilogy based on books with a plucky young heroine fighting the system. Ostensibly, the setting is a utopia instead, following an unspecified (naturally; actual plausibility of background is both hard and boring to do) global apocalypse, but as sure as eggs is eggs, this will prove false. Here, the new society is divided into high-schoolish cliques of jocks as the law enforcers, geeks as the intelligentsia and several others to fill in the basic societal functions, with the set-up showing its fundamentally reactionary credentials by making the compassionate segment the polar opposite of the brainy ones. This is to say that you can either be a Democrat with feelings but no drive, or a Republican with vision but no altruism.
The young in this world are made to join one of the factions in a public ceremony upon maturity, a la Harry Potter. The heroine, who is of course secretly uncategorisable ('divergent'), which is unacceptable to the status quo but very palatable for confused teen audience identification, chooses the gung-ho one, because it is the easiest to script and allows for the maximum amount of action scenes. All this being in place, the plot then goes down the fascist coup route of least resistance and soon stops making much sense at all, the least of which is once again perpetuating the daft and frankly dangerous notion that women can be as physically hard across the board as men.

4/10

Monday 10 November 2014

Outpost 11 (Anthony Woodley, 2012)

Ok, so World War I (presumably) has gone on for 40 years and there are three British soldiers in protracted isolation at an Arctic listening station. There is the weary officer, his veteran King-and-Country No 2, who is also addicted to drugs and wanking, and of course the timid rookie to round it off. Then they all go insane under psychotropic chemical attack.
Outpost 11 cannot be faulted for ambition, including its camerawork, which has positively arthouse aspirations. Unfortunately, it can be faulted for everything else. The script has all the hallmarks of having been written on a mucky Kleenex by an FPS-addled teen, its 'the horror of war' musings notwithstanding, and the inevitable eventual gore is to little purpose but to arouse distaste. Even Danny Dyer, Sean Pertwee and co. must have viewed this with suspicion if approached to come on board.

3/10

Saturday 8 November 2014

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Francis Lawrence, 2013)

The director may have changed for the second instalment, but it's more of the same with Katniss Everdeen forced once again into the arena to fight for her life by the fascist authorities. The first part of the lengthy film does make an attempt to flesh out the regulation dystopia as the two leads find themselves puppets of the state, but it's at a strictly cartoon level, with the villainy impossibly evil and the heroine every teenage girl's wish-fulfilment fantasy, one moment sporting fabulous dresses and stealing the gala and the next slaying men left, right and centre with her inexhaustible supply of arrows. At least the likes of Donald Sutherland, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Woody Harrelson are present in the wings to provide some interest for adult viewer too.

5/10

The Look of Love (Michael Winterbottom, 2013)

Winterbottom collaborates again with Steve Coogan on the biopic of English porn impresario Paul Raymond, although the focus is as much on Raymond's damaged daughter Debbie as she lurches from overdose to overdose before her doting father. This has the effect of making Raymond a rather sweet figure: a 'character' rather than just a seedy exploiter of women. There are good lines and scenes on display, but overall the film seems uncertain of how far to go down the comedy route in its rose-tinted depiction of an era where, pre-Aids, the biggest danger in the industry is shown as individuals getting a bit carried away with all the hedonism. Perhaps the look Coogan sports doesn't help here either, as he looks uncannily like an older version of his lothario crooner Tony Ferrino.

5/10

Saturday 25 October 2014

Nymphomaniac (Lars Von Trier, 2013)

Four hours in the convivial company of his muse Charlotte Gainsbourg as she recounts her history of sexual addiction to a sympathetic ear in the form of Stellan Skarsgård is probably Von Trier's biggest test of the tolerance of his audience to date. He proves beyond any doubt this time, with the almost autistically abrasive and damaged woman's actions through the encounters of the years, that the misogyny he has so often been accused of is real, seeing women as both victims and predators, but the misogyny is exceeded by his misandry. Skarsgård comes out best with his attempts to understand her behaviour through fishing metaphors, but essentially all the men involved are dumb animals completely in thrall to their cocks. Von Trier understands some fundamental and unpalatable things about human nature, but you really wouldn't want to live life through his eyes.

6/10

Monday 20 October 2014

The Monuments Men (George Clooney, 2014)

The previous collaboration of co-screenwriter and co-producer Grant Heslov with Clooney, 2009's The Men Who Stare at Goats, was something of a mess: a war comedy setting its stall out as being inspired by real events and characters, aiming for satire and largely missing the mark. The historical foundation here, with a bunch of ageing art specialists put together by the Allies to save treasures looted by the Nazis as the war draws to a close,  is certainly closer to fact, and the humour less forced, but it's far from the required verisimilitude all the same, either in detail or gravity. This also means it doesn't provide a convincing answer to the question it puts forward at the end, i.e. who will remember or care thirty years later what they did. And unfortunately once again, with Americans at the helm, the role of the other Allies ends up being slighted, a few token figures thrown in briefly to make up the numbers. It seems to want to allude to the irreverent fun of Inglourious Basterds while having an earnest message, and just ends up falling between the two stools.

5/10

Sunday 19 October 2014

Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013)

There was no need for Jarmusch as well to hop on the vampire bandwagon, but the results are nevertheless entertaining.Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton make an engaging pair of louche immortals and the film oozes style as well as humour, with their core problem reduced to run-of-the-mill domestic disputes. Most refreshingly, not only are the usual religious or super-powered stock ingredients completely absent, but so too is gore, as the couple have seized on the availability of black-market blood with evident relief, so they no longer have to do something as uncivilised as killing people. It's a shot in the arm to a tired genre.

7/10

Transcendence (Wally Pfister, 2014)

The Dark Knight cinematographer Pfister has the support of Christopher Nolan behind the scenes for his directorial debut, but this is an anaemic affair by comparison, with ransacking aplenty of Lawnmower Man, Demon Seed and Her, while falling short of all three because its pretensions overreach its logic. Much is made of the logic of machines versus the contradictory nature of  humankind as Johnny Depp is uploaded into a computer before his death, but there is nothing logical about the story arc from there on, with the now-omnipotent Depp setting out to rule the world through nanotechnology. In a rather reactionary twist against technology as an affront to God, it falls to survivalist rednecks to bring him down.

4/10

Wednesday 15 October 2014

Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012)

Haneke's grim tomes are somewhat of an acquired taste with their relentless pessimism about the state of the world, pervasive estrangement and man's inhumanity to man, but this is different. Yes, an old man having to look after his wife after she suffers a stroke does not invoke cheer, but it is a genuine representation of the love of the title nevertheless and rings true, most likely because it's actually largely based on the director's own experience.
Jean-Louis Trintignant, coaxed out of retirement for this, puts as much commitment into the role as the husband does to his wife's care in the face of her inexorable decline. There is a drawn-out focus on the minutiae of life as being both part of what makes it worthwhile and also its banality. When even these minutiae are not manageable any more as another stroke reduces her to a helpless baby, it's an unbearable assault on human dignity. It is a sincere attempt to make us see people's real pain, and for once Haneke cannot be accused of sensationalism. See it when you feel sorry for yourself over trifles: it won't cheer you up, but it does lend a sense of perspective few films manage.

8/10

Monday 13 October 2014

Locke (Steven Knight, 2013)

Tom Hardy plays Ivan Locke, a construction manager hitting a crossroads in his life the night before a huge project, as he discovers an extramarital one-night stand he had the year before has come back to haunt him. The whole film is the camera pointed at him and no-one else, as he drives through the night trying to put things right even as they unravel. it sounds like the stuff of filmic nightmares, with not even the manoeuvering room of a stage play, and it is, but only in that there's no way of honestly making a man's disintegration pretty. This is Hardy's best role to date, with real meat: his attempts to justify his work and personal lives to each other with increasingly pained comparisons between the two are quite heart-breaking to watch before long.

8/10

The Zero Theorem (Terry Gilliam, 2013)

Gilliam goes back to his personal dystopian near-future where all things around the protagonist are grotesquely distorted to satirise modern life in extremis. The estimable Christoph Waltz is somewhat wasted in the midst of the pandemonium as a reclusive computer genius tasked with working out the equation that holds the meaning of life: it's not that there aren't touches of Gilliam's trademark imaginings which just about keep it going, but rather that the question is whether the film deserves to. It's Brazil all over again, even down to stand-ins for all the personae around the appalled little guy caught in the cogs of a giant machine, and as such can only frustrate.

5/10

Saturday 4 October 2014

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (Marc Webb, 2014)

Not so much as sequel of the reboot as a retread, this has Peter and Gwen continuing their interminably on-off relationship while a new villain in the form of Jamie Foxx's Electro turns up. There's some guff about what really happened to the hero's parents, i.e. the corporate conspiracy model, and then it's to wisecracking which is barely audible at times over the thunderous CGI. The fights seem to be capable of reducing all supposedly diverse superpowers to roughly the same: everyone has ultra-fast reflexes, unnatural strength and things to shoot at each other. It's the same as everyone in the movies knowing martial arts these days and would be such a nice change if the villain were a myopic weed or something. I digress, but then there's really nothing more to say about these films. It's as efficiently put together as its counterparts, the quips are fine and the two young leads soldier on gamely. Nuff said.

4/10

The Double (Richard Ayoade, 2013)

After his very assured directorial debut with 2010's coming-of-age comedy Submarine, Ayoade inspires enough trust that it's no surprise to discover his take on Dostoyevsky's hallucinatory parable a highly proficient one. Jesse Eisenberg of The Social Network et al. is good casting, naturally stronger with his gawkishness as the weaker half of the identical pair, though that is fitting too as its the loser who is our eyes and point of entry into the nightmare. But it's perhaps the look of it which is the real star: Brazil without the relief of the brighter interludes, an Orwellian existence hyperrealistically drab enough that the sudden appearance of unironically dreadful Finnish tango stalwart Danny as a nightclub singer stakes overt claim to kinship with Kaurismäki. This makes perfect sense, particularly as the poker-faced auteur started his own career with an adaptation of Crime and Punishment. Anyway, more of the same, please.

7/10

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Anthony & Joe Russo, 2014)

Round two of the super-patriot's own series and there's an inkling that some of the discomfort Americans must feel about their role in the world is seeping in even here. Or perhaps naturally here, since the character is so ludicrously anachronistic, that there's just no keeping out some references to it, even if they do tend to be along the lines of literal comments on the Cap being a man out of his time. Well, the franchise must be protected and so you can laugh with him, as long as he's in on the joke.
That said, this is better than the first part, just because it's darker, with a proper U.S. Government-infesting conspiracy going on rather than just the cartoon Nazis. Of course, darkness does not equal depth, but it does at least occasionally fool willing viewers into believing it might.

5/10

Sunday 28 September 2014

The World's End (Edgar Wright, 2013)

Much as I have a wealth of goodwill towards Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, which is fairly inevitable considering I'm of a comparable age, slacker terms of reference and even used to live around the block from them when they were coming to the fore in their rather delicious Spaced TV series, followed by the thoroughly riotous Shaun of the Dead, it is wearing a little threadbare now. It doesn't really pull the wool over anyone's eyes to present that, Hot Fuzz and this being part of a coherent whole just by calling it the 'Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy'. But maybe I protest too much: this isn't Kieslowski, so is it funny?
Sporadically, yes. But numerous buddy scenes are rehashes reheated too many times over the years, which gives no sense of progression. And there are more derivative than meaningfully referential elements in the whole, which has Pegg's ageing goth, fighting against the dying of the light, frogmarch his friends from twenty years back around their old hunting ground on a pub crawl until they uncover an alien takeover plot. It would have been so much nicer if they'd not bothered with the token go at sci-fi/horror/kung-fu et al, because when the theme of having to face no longer being young occasionally pokes through, it's really quite sweet, just because they are such likable souls.

5/10

Kick-Ass 2 (Jeff Wadlow, 2013)

It is not a good idea to presume that setting your stall out as a superhero spoof gives you the licence to try to milk a franchise out of it yourself. Doubly so when all the wit goes out of the window at the same time: love or hate the first instalment, it had pizzazz and a guilty discomfiting sense of pleasure at having a little girl carve her way through hordes of thugs. This, however, is just hopelessly bereft of new ideas, and has to resort to even higher levels, if that were possible, of dumb violence and gross-out toilet humour. It's not a good sign when you start missing Nicolas Cage's pontificating solemnity from the last time around.

3/10

Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)

An arthouse horror drawn from the premise of 1985's panned Lifeforce, in that an alien female vampire preys on the male populace of Earth, Under the Skin earns a fair amount of kudos for opting to create disquiet rather than going for the jugular. The scenes where Scarlett Johansson drains her single male victims are nightmarish psychic events rather than being saturated with blood and the film is punctuated with longueurs where she's just driving around non-descript Scottish towns which force consideration of all the things we are asked to contemplate.
The Man Who Fell to Earth, on the level of a study in absolute alienation from contemporary society, is a relevant reference point. There are also strong echoes of Tarkovsky and Lars Von Trier in the sense of the character's haunted isolation. The lack of blood is a parallel with, though not a cause of, its bloodless air, just as the nudity is purely surgical: the predator is an autist who is defeated not by the traditional human bacteria as an insurmountable barrier to alien invasion, but her own sheer incomprehension at the complexity of the world. Credit must be given for the film's ambition, but it does succumb to mistaking that ambition for profundity.

6/10

Sunday 21 September 2014

The One Hundred-Foot Journey (Lasse Hallström, 2014)

Director Hallström does not need to break a sweat directing this feelgood fairytale concoction, seeing as he already did outsiders moving into an insular small French town and winning over the locals through the magic of food in Chocolat. This time the outsiders are an Indian family fleeing trouble in Mumbai and led by their obdurate patriarch to set up their restaurant right across the road from a snooty Michelin-starred establishment. This naturally precipitates a clash of cultures.
It's a sure-fire banker, with the Spielberg/Winfrey producers' seal of saccharinity. The trope of food as a font of memory is deemed deep enough to be revisited over and over again, while immersion in either traditional French or traditional Indian cuisine remains strictly superficial and the younger romantic leads rather lightweight. Thankfully, Helen Mirren and Om Puri are there to lend some class as the feuding seniors, and the film's best moments are all to do with them trying to cattily outmanoeuvre each other. It's a shame that an imminent break-out of love will never allow this to continue, just as you know Puri's son will return to his roots after dipping a toe into the world of stardom in nouvelle cuisine. Pleasant and undemanding sustenance, then.

5/10

Thursday 18 September 2014

Kong Curling (Ole Endresen, 2011)

Truls Pålsen is a man hard put-upon by his overmedicated OCDs and bossy wife, trying to make a comeback in the curling rink to win the money his ailing mentor needs for a transplant. Various complications and shenanigans ensue on the way to eventual triumph.
Curling King is a blatant copy of The Big Lebowski, right down to the zoomed face shots, tripped-out cutaways and the composition of the hero's motley crew and bragging rival, with just the thriller bit removed. With that large qualifier, it does however have some genuinely chortlesome moments of its own and an amiable irreverence that makes for a harmless piece of fun. Thank God the Norwegians clearly don't have the need for a fist-pumping Vince Vaughn to rally behind in this kind of thing: the frowning blob that is Pålsen remains endearingly hangdog-like even in victory.

5/10

Der ganz große Traum (Sebastian Grobler, 2011)

Daniel Brühl stars as an idealistic schoolteacher who comes back from England to a stuffy German boys' school in the late 19th century and sets about introducing football to his pupils alongside English and a sense of 'fair play'. Predictably, this meets with the disapproval of the establishment and parents alike.
Lesson of a Dream may be based on a real story, but the liberalism and non-conformity of the teacher is pure fiction, being just a convenient frame on which to hang the usual cycle of tribulations and aspirations found in any Hollywood equivalent. That said, Brühl is always a likable presence and there are some sprightly enough scenes in a film that never strives too far beyond the feelgood level.

5/10

Wednesday 17 September 2014

Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2013)

Frances, a struggling dancer, shares a flat in Brooklyn with a friend who moves out, forcing her to reassess her life. A series of relocations follows, taking in various jobs and probings into relationships, until she ends up more or less back where she started, except living alone.
This is a film heavily influenced by Woody Allen's Manhattan/Annie Hall period, with the use of black and white clearly acknowledging the debt: very little of consequence happens and it is entirely driven by conversations revolving around how to live rather than any actual forward momentum. The character of Frances is symptomatic of this: flippant, irrepressible, flighty, knowing and aimless. It is a vivacious portrayal by Great Gerwig, and there are as many occasions when you laugh with her as you want to give her a kick up the backside, but humankind can only bear so much navel-gazing. Unsurprisingly Gerwig, the film's co-writer, has also worked with Whit Stillman, the uncrowned king of ineffectual and contrivedly quirky American middle-class introspection, now that Allen's output has dwindled to ever-decreasing circles around his original preoccupations.

5/10

Monday 15 September 2014

Song For Marion (Paul Andrew Williams, 2012)

Not yet the swansong of Terence Stamp and Vanessa Redgrave, which is just as well as they'd be going out with a whimper rather than a bang. He's a curmudgeon railing against the world and she is his dying wife, trying to stay spry to the last with a local old folks' choir. The irrepressibility of the well-wishing entourage will of course erode away the fortifications of his grumpiness before long, just as the resistance of the viewer is clinically targeted by singalongs which rely on the idea that pensioners doing Motorhead is intrinsically hilarious. A more cynical mind might suspect sanitised depictions of retirement homes and old age in this well-worn genre to be nothing more than propaganda, but it's really just preaching to the converted.

4/10

Oz the Great and Powerful (Sam Raimi, 2013)

The star of Sam Raimi, once so radiant, seems inexorably on the wane. Nothing for four years after the lacklustre Drag Me to Hell, and now an utterly pointless prequel to The Wizard of Oz, which relies on reproducing elements of the original for all its best moments, such as the transition from black and white, small-screen Kansas to the technicolour and panoramic Oz via another tornado. This scene, in fact, crystallises all that is wrong with the concept: it is quite clear that Oz is a real place and not merely a wish-fulfilling product of the protagonist's feverish mind, and so a vital layer of the story is lost right at the start.
More is quite simply not more: as with George Lucas's ill-conceived revisits to the universe of his youthful imaginings, all sense of wonder is drowned under a wave of vexatious bluescreen fripperies and desperate CGI. The songs are forgettable, the origin stories of the wizard and witches uninvolving and new sidekicks invested with little character. A waste of both the talents of a respectable cast and an unforgivably large budget, resembling Burton's regurgitation of Alice in Wonderland in not only its folly but even its look, with its failure to defile the memory of the classic source its biggest achievement.

3/10

Les Saveurs du Palais (Christian Vincent, 2012)

A comically tinged dramatisation of the story of Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch, the first woman to serve as the French President's personal chef at the Élysée Palace, Haute Cuisine is a fairly self-explanatory confection of basic ingredients, which comprise arcane bureaucracy and formalities, the deeply ingrained chauvinism of the environment and a feisty heroine set on upsetting the status quo. It's whipped up to something more than the sum of its parts by Catherine Frot's no-nonsense take on the character, while having to ride scenes of gastroporn of ludicrous degrees that make Babette's Feast seem homely fare. All in all, a witty and frothy amuse-bouche, but no full meal.

5/10

Thursday 11 September 2014

Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (Rodrigo Gracia, 2000)

Five loosely connected vignettes of women in Los Angeles, this is a product of quality as uneven as its range of acting talent, which goes from Glenn Close and Holly Hunter at one end to Cameron Diaz and Calista Flockhart at the other, with nothing in between. The latter two are given the most contrived characters, respectively a pontificating blind woman and a lesbian fortune-teller with a terminally ill partner, signalling the director's lack of confidence in their ability to sustain interest without props, and their episodes are accordingly of little interest. The only story with real legs in a male director's rather blatant attempt to make a gesture for wimmin is the Holly Hunter one, where she plays a bank manager seeking an abortion who is repeatedly accosted by a pushy homeless woman. The rest is largely unexplored and therefore remains inconsequential chaff, even if scattered with a few perceptive touches.

5/10

Sunday 7 September 2014

Pain & Gain (Michael Bay, 2013)

Bay takes a small break from playing with his giant robots to present a caricaturisation of a true story of three muscle-bound dimwits kidnapping a rich Miami businessman. Of course, it all goes belly up pretty swiftly through a combination of their steroidal delusions of grandeur, dependence on ludicrous motivational mantras and inability to lie low once they're in the money.
By Bay's standards, this is a thoughtful film, which is to say that the crass tastelessness and pop video style is leavened by some kind of satirical agenda revolving around the American dream and having slightly fewer explosions than normal. For me, though, it's only the scenes with The Rock, who is great value for money as a child-like cokehead Christian man mountain, that make the whole enterprise halfway palatable.

4/10

Saturday 6 September 2014

Ha-Mashgihim (Meni Yaesh, 2012)

In God's Neighbours, a young Jewish fundamentalist and his comrades violently enforce the Sabbath laws in their community, in between having skirmishes with Arabs. His single-minded life gets complicated when he falls in love with a girl who doesn't fit his extremist position. It's therefore a classic trajectory, in which the path to self-awareness and moderation has the usual pitfalls and way stations, but the characters are drawn with both care and a cool distance, and the artless principal performances in a courtship that is almost archaic in its sense of restraint make their story an involving one.

6/10

Friday 5 September 2014

Zaytoun (Eran Riklis, 2012)

Beirut, 1982 and an Israeli fighter pilot is shot down and taken prisoner by the PLO. He escapes with the aid of one of his captors, an adolescent refugee to whom he promises passage to his dead father's house in Israel. They start the trek towards the border and go through the seven stages of enemies becoming friends on the way as if they were mere formalities and they had no reason for antipathy beyond force of habit. The film is nicely shot and feelgood, and it really shouldn't be. Digging a little into its making reveals what you would probably suspect anyway from the liberties it takes with logic, let alone its caricatures of comic and shifty Syrians and woman-murdering Arab militias, i.e. that the script was systematically purged of any meaningful attribution of guilt upon Israel by the country's censors. Any enjoyment had from the light interplay between the two protagonists is therefore hopelessly tainted.

4/10

Like Someone in love (Abbas Kiarostami, 2012)

A Tokyo student moonlighting as a high-class prostitute to fund her studies is sent one day to a client who turns out to be an elderly widowed professor, with whom she forms an unexpected bond. Meanwhile, she has a possessive boyfriend in the wings, who forms the latent threat to their connection.
It's clear from his previous work that Kiarostami has a fixation with cars, not as a fetishist or as a road movie devotee, but instead as a stage where characters are at once enclosed and trapped in duologue, while the oblivious world goes on in plain view around them. So here too, the key incidents such as the professor's encounter with the boyfriend and then with someone who compromises his identity take place in cars. It's an example of the undercurrents to be found throughout the director's superficially mundane accounts, paralleled by the frequent recourse to pregnant silences in exchanges.
This is not the director's most focused work, having only one substantial idea and being somewhat uncertain about how to bring the episode to a close, but is nevertheless to be valued for allowing the viewer time to think, which is rare in most cinema.

6/10

Staub auf unseren Herzen (Hanna Doose, 2012)

In her last film, Susanne Lothar plays a domineering mother seeking control over her daughter, a budding actress, to the extent of  trying to take her grandson from her with claims of parental irresponsibility. She is at once a monster and yet one that is very true to life, getting her own way through passive aggressiveness. She also harbours a deep well of bitterness towards her ex-husband, who turns up in Berlin seeking reconciliation in vain, and the end result is that she drives everyone away from her.
Dust on Our Hearts has the production values of a TV movie, but doesn't need any more to get its message across. There is an acute emotional intelligence at work here from writer-director Doose, and while the actress playing the daughter is too listless for the demands of her role, this is more than made up for by Lothar, who effectively humanises a petty tyrant. Damaged family stories are rarely this perceptive.

7/10

Thursday 4 September 2014

The Spikes Gang (Richard Fleischer, 1974)

Uncertain in tone, starting as a comedy western and then trying its hardest to turn gritty and sombre, and uncertain in location, being filmed in Spain to no great effect, this is a forgettable episode for both the director of cult classics like Soylent Green, and the formidable screen presence that is Lee Marvin. He plays a brusque aging bank robber who takes three pipsqueaks fancying a shot at the romantic life of the outlaw under his wing. The fact that one of them is Ron Howard just before Happy Days may give some advance warning of how credible the juvenile gunslingers are, and Marvin's worldly gruffness cannot save the film from slowly fading out of sight through a succession of drab shoot-outs, culminating in a contrivedly cynical ending.

4/10

Försvunnen (Mattias Olsson & Henrik JP Åkesson, 2011)

A woman driving across Sweden to a new life after her brother's suicide is followed and then abducted by an off-the-shelf loon. She manages to escape and is then pursued through the woods, the directors ticking off the genre boxes dutifully from the false dawn when a stranger offers a way out, through the stranger's immediate summary execution and the heroine's unlikely resistance to having lead in her. Storywise, there is nothing in Gone beyond joining the dots and the only points of interest are the relative absence of hysterical screaming and effective use of the austere forest environment, where danger can lurk in any direction.

4/10

Tuesday 2 September 2014

Kriegerin (David Wnendt, 2011)

A twenty-year-old girl lives in a dead-end eastern German town, in adulation of her dying grandfather and his Nazi past. She duly falls in with a gang of Neo-Nazi thugs and, like them, covers herself with fascist tattoos. Then her beliefs are compromised by meeting an Afghan refugee, and an eventual renunciation of her delusions is set under way.
Combat Girls is a bleak and pessimistic piece with little of the faith in redemption present in the similarly-themed American History X, for example. In comparison, it benefits from the stark reality of its setting - Dessau, where it was filmed, is notorious for the not-too-distant murder by the authorities of a failed asylum seeker - and the committed performance of its lead. Its principal asset, showing things as they really are, is also inescapably its failing as a film: it's hard to sustain interest or involvement with so incorrigibly repugnant personages and such a hopeless environment.

5/10

Citadel (Ciaran Foy, 2012)

A young father on a condemned estate in an unspecified British city suffers from agoraphobia after the murder of his wife by juvenile hoodies. They continue to hound him until their abduction of his baby daughter forces him to face up to his fear.
The Glasgow tourist board may count themselves lucky that the filming location is not expressly given, for this is effectively hell on Earth, a place too desolate to exist even in the grimiest inner-city or kitchen sink stories. It is clearly meant to be a projection of the character's mental state, and is an element of the film that works relatively well, twinned with the camera's limited field of view at moments of stress, sowing anxiety outside its margins. However, it is over-reliant on this mood and its protagonist's constant petrified whimpering, becoming mired in a single track, and there was really no need to make the faceless gang that torments him supernaturally inhuman: it detracts from any social point the film might otherwise have been able to make alongside the psychological horror, and what remains is a licence for reactionary demonisation of the dregs of society.

4/10


Monday 1 September 2014

Two for the Road (Stanley Donen, 1967)

Primarily of interest these days for film students for being an early example of Hollywood experimenting with non-linear narrative, musical and comedy director Donen's attempt to incorporate personal and serious themes is the story of twelve years in a couple's relationship, from when they first meet to when divorce seems imminent. It's related as four separate trips they made through France and the jumps from one timeline to another are frequently signposted by a passing car from the former continuity, which is a neat device that is missed when the scenes don't allow for it, as changes in the couple's hair and attire aren't stark enough, and Albert Finney's demeanour in particular remains fossilised.
He seems to have been cast because the director's favourites Gene Kelly and Cary Grant were too old and too comedy-bound, and having him as a romantic lead nearly sinks the film, for all of Audrey Hepburn's lightness, some funny catty scenes and moments of perspicacity regarding love and marriage. He barks out all lines in a pompous and flat drone, as if issuing orders to colonial servants, and it's quite impossible to believe, even if allowing for period tolerance of hectoring pricks as charmers, what anyone would see in him.

5/10

Friday 29 August 2014

Tokyo! (Michel Gondry, Leos Carax & Bong Joon-ho, 2008)

A triptych set in Tokyo with three foreign directors, Tokyo! is more cohesive than most city-centred anthologies by virtue of all three pieces having a surreal element at their core. Gondry's is probably the most accessible, with a couple coming to the city and searching in vain for a place of their own, the woman's aimless existence allegorically resulting in a startling physical transformation. Bong Joon-ho's one also has a certain idiosyncratic interest, featuring the Japanese labelled phenomenon that is a hikikomori, i.e. an extreme social recluse, who is forced out of his shell by sudden earthquakes. Between the two, Carax's piece cuts a raucous and anarchic air with Denis Lavant as a sort of human sewer-creature Godzilla, going on a rampage through the city until put on trial, babbling in a language only his lawyer understands about his contempt for the Japanese. While initially arresting, it's the weakest of the three simply because Carax seems to have little faith in saying anything meaningful in just half an hour, and so resorts to shock tactics instead of properly developing the story's latent themes of terror attacks and xenophobia.

6/10

The Angels' Share (Ken Loach, 2012)

Loach continues his slow mellowing, starting in an familiar down-at-heel urban environment with a young Glaswegian man narrowly escaping a prison sentence for GBH, and ending in more optimistic climes. There isn't the usual polemic against the system as such, given that the miscreants sentenced to do community service with him are all victims of their own device: instead, Loach is now content to just set the course for a better tomorrow.
It might be pointed out that fundamental pragmatism still lingers, as it is only through theft that the protagonists are able to win against their circumstances. But then you can never take the social realism wholly out of Loach, and here its background presence really is needed in the blend as the plot relies on some serendipitous licences to have its quartet of bumblers manage to run off with a share of the world's rarest whisky. The director's latest batch of non-professional actors come across naturalistically too, so you sincerely want them to succeed in their little caper.

6/10

Arrugas (Ignacio Ferreras, 2011)

Wrinkles, a gentle portrait of a man entering a retirement home and succumbing slowly to Alzheimer's is not a typical subject matter for animation, but the medium allows a crystallisation of the internees as, first and foremost, human beings, that casting of live actors might obfuscate. The director worked on Chomet's The Illusionist of 2011, and  this shows, with the same tone of wry comedy complementing rather than swamping the immanent pathos. It's not a complex piece and the subject matter allows only one outcome, but its characters are drawn with warmth and sympathy.

6/10

Upside Down (Juan Diego Solanas, 2012)

A romance positing the idea that two planets with opposing gravity exist side by side, Upside Down invests massively in its visuals and makes do with loose change for plot. The opening titles, over which Jim Sturgess has to explain the set-up's pretend physics while clearly struggling with sounding both American and an adult at the same time, do not bode well, and the later additions of a simpering Kirsten Dunst as his love interest in the topsy-turvy other world and an avuncular Timothy Spall, also occasionally essaying an accent, do not improve matters. She's an Uptown Girl, living in an Uptown World, and indeed the whole shebang has the intellectual sophistication of a Billy Joel song, with dialogue written by a child and heavy-handed symbolism. Most unforgivably, it frequently fails in its sole real selling point when the ludicrous physics become too much for the scriptwriter to deal with. It's a shame so many beautiful images are sullied by the bothersome requirement to tell a pointful story at the same time.

4/10

Thursday 28 August 2014

Hard Times (Walter Hill, 1975)

This is most definitely not a Dickens adaptation, but Walter Hill announcing his trade as a maker of films for men on his debut, with a straightforward story of a drifter in the Great Depression years whose bareknuckle boxing skills attract the attention of a chancer indebted to the gills to loan sharks. The knowledge that Charles Bronson as the former and James Coburn as the latter are cast pretty much according to type gives a fairly accurate idea of how the dynamics between them work out and consequently how the plot will pan out too, the decent and taciturn Bronson stoically soldiering on to save his manager's bacon after the showy Coburn's big mouth and gambling keep landing them in trouble. It's fully populated by archetypes and stock scenes, but it does have a certain no-nonsense cool that Hill would go on to develop later in his directorial career.

5/10

Age of Consent (Michael Powell, 1969)

Michael Powell's penultimate feature, Age of Consent stars James Mason as an Australian painter who takes refuge from the rat race of the art world on a small island on the Great Barrier Reef. An adolescent local girl becomes his new muse and revitalises his creativity.
The semi-autobiographical source novel was banned for decades in Britain for supposed indecency; Powell might have cast a 22-year-old Helen Mirren in the role of the girl but could not escape censure either, with reference made to her being under-age and shown nude at the same time. Mason, on the other hand, seems to have been cast with deliberate reference to Lolita, as if the director were needling the actor. If one is prepared to give the film the benefit of the doubt as regards its prying eyes, with no physical relationship actually occurring, it is engagingly acted and as sunny in disposition as its paradisiacal setting, with some deft verbal exchanges. At times, Powell does seem somewhat at sea in trying to adapt his style to the late 'sixties free love vogue, and consequently things get a tad too silly, but it does feel like a breath of fresh air from the man who provided a light in the stifling wartime years with his imagination.

6/10

Tuesday 26 August 2014

Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen, 2013)

The collective sigh of relief felt across the media and viewing public these days when Woody Allen manages to turn out a film that isn't a total embarrassment is quite palpable. However, for this to be achieved, it takes heavyweight help and a huge debt of gratitude is owed to Cate Blanchett here.
The story is basically a not too subtly disguised ransacking of A Streetcar Named Desire with a delusional and self-medicating snobbish woman coming to stay with her younger sister, who has a blue-collar life that she can't abide. There is a back story of how she came to lose her New York socialite lifestyle, and her mental stability in the process, which is visited too often in intrusive flashbacks featuring Alec Baldwin as her ex-husband, turning in another of his trademark womanising sleazebag performances. The story would have been better served by sticking just to her fallen life as she tries to start out afresh in San Francisco, all too evidently having learnt nothing.
Allen is clearly still petrified of contemplative moments, which is hardly likely to change any more, and so any second which is not taken up by verbal diarrhoea has to be filled with his usual recourse to plodding old-time jazz. The realities of the world beyond the cloistered one of the rich and comfortable are also only nervously guessed at, and therefore wholly unconvincing. But at least he's not in front of camera this time, and when he does, just occasionally, let Blanchett have a proper scene, she shows what the film could have been with a more daring helmsman. It's just a pity she's probably scuppered her chance at doing the actual Blanche DuBois character ever again with this act of charity for Allen.

5/10