Robot & Frank (Jake Schreier, 2012)

A quirky blend of buddy comedy, heist film and serious drama, Robot & Frank gives the criminally underused Frank Langella undisputed top billing in a worthwhile project for perhaps the first time ever as a retired burglar whose son decides he needs help and thus acquires a robot servant to set him routines. Frank is resistant at first until cottoning onto the potential of the helper to allow him to carry out a few last jobs.
The setting is the near future, but it would be a stretch to call this sci-fi, and neither the gentle comic aspects or the bumbling crime angle quite characterise the whole either. What unexpectedly emerges, instead, is a rather poignant study of ageing as Frank gradually starts to give in to dementia.

7/10

Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes, 2011)

Ralph Fiennes takes the Olivier/Branagh route of directing and starring in a Shakespeare, but with some considerable advantages over either. As an actor, he may be as posh as either, but has none of the mannered air, and while the play could be considered one of the lesser of the tragedies, his searing performance reaches out through barriers of time and place. The same principle applies to the rest of the casting - no freeloading luvvie pals here: Gerard Butler is hardly in that category, and Brian Cox and Vanessa Redgrave are towers of support.
The plot sticks fairly faithfully to the outline of the source, with the Roman general Caius Martius, a blunt man only suited for war, exiled for his undisguised contempt for civilians, and then returning to wreak revenge. In the manner that Shakespeare is somewhat mechanically still being done, i.e. updated to the contemporary world to milk out universal parallels, while retaining the language, it's shot largely in Serbia with the cast in Chetnik uniforms, gun battles in ruined Balkan cityscapes and TV reports on the background action. This works for the most part by sheer shock effect, yet occasionally overdoes it and descends into silliness, as when a key battle ends up with the generals Fiennes and Butler brawling before their troops or Jon Snow delivers the news in blank verse. But it is worth seeing for Fiennes alone: rarely has he displayed so much range and manages to invest a basically unlikable character with surprising pathos.

7/10

La Grande Bellezza (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013)

Sorrentino's meander through the life of an ageing Roman socialite, a flâneur with an arch wit drifting through the nightlife of the rich, wears its debt to La Dolce Vita explicitly, even though many other sources are also referenced. But it is the Fellini which looms the largest over The Great Beauty, not just for the character being a becalmed and wistful version of Mastroianni's lothario, but for the fantastical air pervading the endless parties and the social subtext of the vacuity underlying the hedonism. It looks stunning and the heady musical pieces sweep you off your feet repeatedly. Rome appears empty outside the high-society circuit, as if it's just a playground for them. Perhaps in the end it doesn't quite manage to escape the glitz to deliver its existential message, but the style and vitality is undeniable.

8/10

The Selfish Giant (Clio Barnard, 2013)

This is supposedly based on the short story by Oscar Wilde, but this is really a case of the director leading the audience a merry dance in a search for any possible parallels as the gap between fairy tale and gritty social realism is the smallest hurdle to tackle. So the allusion is best ignored.
This is bleak northern Shane Meadows country, but a sunless version where even the bitter humour has been leached out. Two young lads, one of whom has some form of ADHD, get themselves expelled from school and turn full-time to thieving scrap metal for an exploitative dealer while trying to stay out of the way of their fractured families. The kitchen sink imprint on the film goes all the way through like a stick of rock, except here an actual kitchen sink would not survive a minute before being melted down for a fiver.
It is vital that the pair of leads are naturalistic, and they are, as is the dead-end setting, but it's not quite enough to elevate the whole above worthiness: they are doomed from the start and watching the inevitable unfold is no education.

6/10

Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012)

This was seized on by critics all over in some desperation as Spielberg's return to form, but it's really just further evidence of irreversible flabbiness and sentimentality, in which the cracks are papered over by committed performances from Daniel Day-Lewis as the titular character and Tommy Lee Jones as a righteous firebrand.
It's basically the last three months of Lincoln's life, as he tries to force an anti-slavery amendment through an intransigent Congress in the dying days of the Civil War. We see a lot of politicking with countless grey-bearded men for most of the two and a half hours, punctuated by Day-Lewis delivering metaphorical anecdotes, quotations from a wealth of literature and parables in a voice which is probably higher-pitched and softer than what one would associate with previous stentorian depictions of the iconic character. He's as great as ever in his chameleon-like abilities, and if it at any point comes across parodically, it will be the director's fault. As it is, the director's great fault is the structure: too much time spent on trying to juggle legal process with private life, too much sugar-coating of a flawed hero and a very flat and sudden end that has less panache than a real-life story from the History Channel. This is a massively overrated film that only owes its status to a few key actors and U.S. critics in fear and awe.

5/10  

Red 2 (Dean Parisot, 2013)

The sexagenarian black ops crew are being hunted again, having been framed as terrorists for knowing too much, though clearly this doesn't extend to knowing when to call it a day. Morgan Freeman has now dropped out, presumably on account of explosion overload, so it's up to Bruce Willis and John Malkovich as his Mad Murdock-alike sidekick to jet around various touristically signposted world locales trying to evade a chasing pack of assassins and corrupt CIA while also seeking to prevent World War III, rather too many years since that was a credible proposition. But then the credibility gap is so gaping in every department that the anachronism of the scenario is really a side issue, with countless elisions in the plot for the sake of convenience, not least of which is believing poor old Bruce can hold his own against the world's most dangerous martial artist. Some jolly quips between the doddering duo, and Willis's feisty wife who is in tow, do keep things light and breezy in the brief intervals between the shoot-outs and chases, but it really is very thin stuff indeed.

4/10