Kino Runner

Apollo 18 (Gonzalo López-Gallego, 2011)

2012-02-17T21:22:00.000Z

Making a space film with the budget of a home video is certainly a bold challenge, and the director has to be applauded for making such a decent fist of it. The original footage slots in quite neatly around stock images from the moon landings, with a creepiness factor accentuated by the claustrophobic setting as two astronauts find themselves haunted by increasingly troubling events around their marooned lunar module. The mash-up concept aside, there's unfortunately nothing else innovatory in the mix, but the execution is solid nevertheless.

5/10

Potiche (François Ozon, 2010)

2012-02-17T20:59:00.000Z

Getting Deneuve and Depardieu in the same billing must have been too much to resist. Of course, being troupers, they provide value for money, but this is a limp vehicle for their talents. The premise is basically Made in Dagenham turned into a farce, set in the '70s in an attempt to lend some verisimilitude to the anachronistic notion of Deneuve as a trophy wife neglected by her philandering husband. She takes over his factory when a union dispute drives him to ill health, and soon has the whole shebang wrapped around her little finger. The principal interest of the piece is seeing the director avoid all his customary misanthropy, but at the cost of creating nothing but fluff. Ozon does complex angst proficiently, and should stick to his knitting: this just gets far too silly long before the singalong finale.

4/10

Angel-A (Luc Besson, 2005)

2012-02-16T23:20:00.001Z

A loser con artist in Paris has an unorthodox angel sent to him when he's at his tether's end. This being a Luc Besson film, she is a statuesque gamine model and can kick butt with the best of them. She proceeds to sort his life out in next to no time with scant attention paid to plot continuity or feasibility, with the icing on the cake being falling in love with the little gimp, played by the mystifyingly popular Jamel Debbouze, who seems to have it written in for every part that no-one refers to his lame right hand. It wouldn't be a problem except that here he's called to undergo some sizable physical challenges.
It's not that the film is unentertaining: Besson has enough tricks in his locker that he could probably direct this in his sleep. It just suffers heavily in comparison with the likes of Wings of Desire in every emotional sense and the low-brow comedy doesn't do enough to compensate for the absence of magic.

4/10

I Am Number Four (D.J Caruso, 2011)

2012-02-14T19:14:00.000Z

Squarely aimed at the Twilight demographic, and also yet another attempt (see Stormbreaker) to launch a teen franchise around Alex Pettyfer's moppy pout, I Am Number Four posits photogenic surfer-dude aliens amongst us being hunted down by non-photogenic, leery ones. Fortuitously the former all have their own superpowers, which they seem to learn to use with some rad effectivity in the space of an afternoon, much as they would the controls to a console RPG. It's thoroughly undemanding fare, slipping down the gullet frictionlessly, and leaves no nasty aftertaste. There's no need to make the lead such a fence post, though - even the target audience might have been able to cope with some acting.

3/10

Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim, 2008)

2012-02-14T15:18:00.000Z

In this low-key Ozuesque Korean drama, a mother goes off to try to find her husband, leaving her two daughters with their callous aunt. The girls are too young to fully grasp what's going on and go from day to day imagining that they'll be soon reunited with their mother, turning with the pragmatism innate to the very young and innocent to displacement activities such as catching grasshoppers to occupy their time.

So Yong Kim's film contains no dramatic events beyond this but passes amiably enough, with the two waifs independent more than sentimentalised, and there are no great pretensions to do more than tell things as they are. It's of interest to note that men are wholly absent from the film, only ever seen at a distance if at all. The only close-up exception is a stranger who tells the children that their aunt's number is disconnected; the allusion to masculine abandonment is obvious.

6/10

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011)

2012-02-11T20:52:00.002Z

A laconic, detached stunt driver moonlights as a getaway driver par excellence for robberies in an LA of nocturnal freeways. His life is spartan and compartmentalised, and his success assured until another factor enters the equation...
Drive unabashedly draws from the seminal 1978 noir, The Driver: even if Winding Refn's claim not to have seen Walter Hill's film until having started work on this one is to be believed, he has acknowledged its influence on the writer of Drive's source novel. By a bizarre and surely unintentional coincidence, the antihero is even played by another Ryan; Gosling instead of O'Neal, and they share a mix of cockiness tinged with melancholy. But the two films are still different animals: whereas Hill's was a more straightforward cat-and-mouse thriller with Bruce Dern's cop determined to reel the rogue in, Winding Refn, as always, is more interested in the existential angle. In that, while both filmmakers are obviously indebted to Le Samourai, it's the latter who is more in line with the Melvillian philosophy. Gosling's character is a self-contained robot who is later forced to feel.
The spark for the transformation is affection for Carey Mulligan's single mother, but there's no stock physical consummation between them: the relationship retains the idealised distance of a fairytale. The rest of the film is consistent with this ethereal air: neon lights flash by, a determinedly '80s retro synth soundtrack pounds away and conversations fade out with more implied than said. It's brazenly stylised, übercool, and yet in the end, unexpectedly sad.

7/10

Kukushka (Aleksandr Rogozhkin, 2002)

2012-02-10T21:57:00.000Z

A small and unpretentious gem of a film, The Cuckoo is something like what you'd get if you crossed Hell in the Pacific with Down by Law, and added a dash of Jules et Jim. In Lapland during the dying days of the Russo-Finnish war, a Russian political prisoner and a condemned Finnish sniper find themselves under the roof of an independent Lapp woman, at each other's throats and eventually with a begrudging mutual tolerance.
None of the trio speak each other's languages and the film exploits this to rather sweetly comic effect as they continue to yammer on regardless, with no end of talking at cross-purposes even as they fully believe to have understood each other. It works as a neat metaphor for the barriers of mutual comprehension that lead to wars without labouring the point unduly.
The characters are attractively drawn, too, from the coquettish but gutsy woman to the motor-mouthed and pragmatic Finnish soldier and the distrustful but fundamentally decent Russian. They are all fallible and likable without becoming caricatures. Add some evocative Arctic landscapes and a sparing reliance on soundtrack or histrionics, and the end result is a breath of fresh air.

7/10

Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007)

2012-02-10T20:16:00.000Z

Another zero-budget horror that spawned a monster of a franchise for writer-director Peli, Paranormal Activity is workmanlike and wholly unexceptional with the usual set-up of a couple believing their house to be haunted. The wife is of course the one who gets the brunt of it, and what twist there is to distinguish the product from legions of clones is that the husband, rather than go through the standard disbelief-denial-acceptance cycle, takes on the situation with breezy gusto, setting up a video camera straightaway to film themselves sleeping and hopefully catch sight of supernatural phenomena. But that's about all. The popularity of the format rests wholly on America's rather easily psychoanalysable sense of discomfort with violation of the home and widespread belief in demonic forces.

4/10

Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980)

2012-02-05T17:24:00.003Z

I break a rule in reviewing a TV series, but Fassbinder's 14-part telling of Alfred Döblin's novel has more in common with cinema despite its small-screen origins. It has aspirations far beyond the medium's norm in its epic scope, deliberately stagy and hypercoloured scenes, surrealist overtones and self-referential structure. It purports to speak not just about petty criminals in depressed Weimar Berlin, but about the human condition, and to this aim uses portentous obscurantist poetry not just in intermittent cuts to a sage-like narrator but places the words in the mouth of the protagonist himself. It's in turn hypnotically beguiling and absolutely infuriating and often both at the same time.
The story is that of Franz Biberkopf, released from prison after killing his girlfriend in a fit of rage into a city where everyone seems to be jobless or on the make. He's a bear of a man, flickering between joviality and jealous fury, assured worldliness and helpless despair. He's a simpleton and a philosopher. He brags to feeble women and is fed on by unscrupulous men. He is clearly meant to be Everyman, and it's to the credit of Günter Lamprecht's empathic performance that the massive conceit almost works.
Everywoman, on the other hand, gets a raw deal in Fassbinder's Weltanschauung. It's a more thorough reductionism than the usual chauvinist virgin-whore dichotomy: women are simply insane. Each female character flips out in some unfounded way over the course of the story, even Hanna Schygulla's character, who plays a sort of a tarty big sister to Franz. In the case of Franz's eventual love, the childlike Mieze, the narrator's harping on her sweetness and homely innocence grates almost as much as her twittering repetition of simple lines over and over again.
In the absence of the strong female, the most interesting character besides Franz ends up being the small-time gangster Reinhold, who Franz is helplessly drawn to and whose bitter misanthropy drags Franz to his perdition. Gottfried John plays him as a sneering, stammering lizard of a man seething with a self-loathing he doesn't quite understand. Fassbinder said that he saw himself in the story as a composite of Franz, Reinhold and Mieze, and that comes across clearly when you read about the troubled and contrary director's life.
It's an ordeal of a film with its perverse fixations and wilful unnaturalism, not least in the epilogue, which is an addition to Döblin's story by Fassbinder and consequently the worst of the episodes, being a deranged hallucinatory deconstruction of Biberkopf's whole life in the throes of his eventual madness. It may well make you never watch another of the director's works again. It is also fascinating, and there is no contradiction between the two.

7/10

Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance, 2010)

2012-02-05T15:48:00.002Z

A chronicle of the rise and fall of a relationship, Blue Valentine benefits from strong casting with the perennially excellent Ryan Gosling and a solid turn from Michelle Williams, and scuppers a lot of the good work they do in developing a credible picture of how love turns sour by using the modishly overused multiple flashback method. The film jumps hyperactively from the present to various points in the couple's past without deigning to provide adequate signposting beyond the length of Gosling's hair and gains nothing in terms of layering, only dissipating the emotion built up. There are some things to be said for Dogme after all.
The characters are true to life, even if Gosling can do the hangdog loser in his sleep and the frustrated wife is a fairly standard sounding board for the aimless husband's draining presence. Their interaction, when whether mawkish, domesticated or end-of-tether, hits many painfully true notes. There are all the seeds of a wonderful film here. If only someone other than the director in question could reassemble it.

6/10

Perfect Sense (David Mackenzie, 2011)

2012-02-05T15:02:00.000Z

Perfect Sense transcends the global epidemic genre by having little interest in the thriller or even science angles. It's a love story between a chef and a scientist who keep going through the world first losing its sense of smell and taste, and then incidents of complete deafness start occurring. Its starting premise may therefore be akin to Fernando Meirelles's accomplished Blindness, but the pandemonium that rises does not take in apocalyptic panoramas: it's internalised within the sufferers' minds.
There are shortcomings: the mere casting of inveterate self-exposers Ewan McGregor and Eva Green as the lovers promises a surfeit of kitless scenes, and these result in some longueurs. Then there are other scenes which pitch perilously close towards pure daftness. But the elegiac poetry that director Mackenzie brings to a crumbling world is classy.

6/10

YellowBrickRoad (Jesse Holland & Andy Mitton, 2010)

2012-02-05T13:20:00.001Z

In The Blair Witch Project fashion, a motley crew set out into eerie backwoods to try to get to the heart of a local mystery. This time it's not a witch legend but an entire 572 locals who walked off one day in 1940 and disappeared off the face of the Earth, and the seekers aren't film students but have pretensions of being scientific investigators. Nevertheless, the influence of the 1999 zero-budget hit is blatant. Unexplained noises emanate from the woods, a hallucinatory atmosphere takes over and members of the party soon starts to get unhinged.
It's not actually as inept as such a summary dismissal may indicate, just badly in need of its very own ideas. The very last scene seems to belong to another film altogether, being the stuff of real nightmare, and makes you wonder what might have been done with a tad more inspiration.

4/10

Retreat (Carl Tibbetts, 2011)

2012-01-31T13:37:00.000Z

A married couple at a crisis point take themselves away to try to refind their spark and then a disquieting stranger is imposed on them who soon starts messing with their heads. Yes, it's Dead Calm transposed to the Highlands and Islands, with an additional overlay of 28 Days Later with the suggestion of a pandemic having taken over the rest of the world. Newbie director Tibbetts may want to defend himself against that charge, but Polanski's Knife in the Water had already got the penetrating psychological angles down pat 50 years ago and Phillip Noyce's underrated 1989 slasher worked the more overt violence to its limits. What could possibly be left to say? It's not that this is an incompetent work, just stale, and seemingly unaware that merely changing the setting does not make for a pointful exercise. Additionally, you really start wishing for a gutsy Nicole Kidman instead of the insipid Thandie Newton as the conflicted wife, and this is the crux of the problem: it's watered down despite its pretensions at grittiness.

4/10

Notre Jour Viendra (Romain Gavras, 2010)

2012-01-29T12:16:00.003Z

Our Day Will Come occupies the same social milieu of a bleak industrial Northern France that Gustave de Kervern and Benoît Delépine have mined with some success, and its initial tone is the same blend of comic-tinged drama revolving around a pair of loser protagonists too. Furthermore, like de Kervern and Delépine's trademark pieces, it develops into a road movie, with the logical corollary of having to live in Pas-de-Calais being that it's somewhere to escape from as soon as possible. In this case the duo get additional impetus to run off from a sense of being persecuted for being ginger, so Ireland becomes their promised land.
The problem that road movies can often run into is that the aimless journey itself can start to mirror narrative lack of direction, and Our Day Will Come falls prey to this weakness as the wit runs out of steam. It then veers off towards a vague existentialism, but doesn't quite manage the poignancy of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which it's heavily influenced by, having neglected to make its principals likable. Vincent Cassel may be a heavyweight actor given the right part, but he brings too much spiky baggage to the role of the enfant terrible psychiatrist, and overacting manically doesn't make the character any more endearing.

5/10

Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec (Luc Besson, 2010)

2012-01-25T13:58:00.001Z

After a decade mostly spent writing substandard action screenplays for the legions of his directorial proteges, Luc Besson now seems to have taken the reins again. It's uncertain how much of a blessing this is: it's years since the prime of his deft if daft high-octane signature pieces like Nikita or Leon, and on the evidence of this comic-book adaptation, while the zippiness is still there, the punch is missing.
Louise Bourgoin plays Adèle Blanc-Sec, a sort of a proto-Indiana Jones with a feminist twist in the Paris of 1911, feistily excavating Egyptian mummies and cocking a snook at the patriarchal authorities as they bumble after a pterodactyl on the loose. It's certainly jaunty, but although the bande dessinée series may have preceded Raiders of the Lost Ark, the film feels a rip-off of Spielberg's blockbuster at every turn, from the cod Egyptology through the supernatural elements to Adèle's grotesque archrival. There may be more emphasis on comedy, but unfortunately this is not Besson's forte and the pratfalls mostly pall.

4/10

Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011)

2012-01-25T12:29:00.001Z

Wheatley's debut feature Down Terrace met with considerable acclaim for its inventive melange of kitchen-sink drama and gangland brutality, and at first Kill List seems to pick up the same thread, presenting traumatised Iraq veteran and family man Jay clashing repeatedly with his wife over the parlous state of their finances. It's composed in an intelligently spliced verite style, somewhere between Shane Meadows and Andrea Arnold, and promises much. When the beleaguered man's former army buddy comes to him with a job offer involving carrying out a series of contract killings, the train is set in motion along a more constricting hitman thriller track, but enough uncertainty lingers to retain interest, through the ambiguity of their sinister employers' motives and Jay's mental unravelling. Sadly and inexplicably, this train is comprehensively derailed in the last reel with the bizarre decision to go all-out Wicker Man. There'll undoubtedly be a future occasion when this director gets all his ideas to gel; unfortunately here the good work is undone by the superposition of too many genre filters.

5/10

Banlieue 13:Ultimatum (Patrick Alessandrin, 2009)

2012-01-23T17:50:00.000Z

The continuation to District 13 recycles the story of the first film but omits too much clean footage of its only USP, namely the incredible parkour displayed by its actual originator, David Belle, in favour of a lot of chopsocky and wire work. Once again the lawless walled-in Parisian ghetto is under threat of destruction by the forces of authority and big business and it's up to the dynamic cop-homeboy duo to foil their plans by, er, punching and jumping around incessantly. The action is efficiently shot, but reaches saturation point so early on that no choreographer on Earth could sustain interest in the proceedings, with a strictly perfunctory plot lending no assistance.

4/10

Rare Exports (Jalmari Helander, 2010)

2012-01-20T14:17:00.000Z

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale hijacks the Santa Claus myth much as that other Finnish horrorshow Lordi ran away cackling with the Eurovision festival. The idea is that the real Santa is a child-eviscerating monster buried under a mountain centuries ago by fearful Lapps. Now he's got out, and it's down to one little boy to stop him. It's a slight conceit, but executed neatly with laconic humour and makes the most of its barren, snowy locations. The intrepid boy hero is also refreshingly matter-of-fact and kick-ass rather than cutesy or squealing. Lastly, the director seems to be aware that he's only got one point to make and accordingly doesn't labour it. You do wonder who it's made for, though, being too slapstick to work as horror and yet too creepy to serve as children's entertainment.

5/10

Insidious (James Wan, 2010)

2012-01-20T13:33:00.000Z

Saw director Wan won't be inspiring any imitators with this one, which may be no bad thing considering the deluge of torture-porn that has followed his 2004 breakthrough film. This is basically a mish-mash of Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror, with the usual middle-class family haunted by malevolent forces after their comatose son. The wife is the hysterical one who has to convince her bloody-mindedly sceptical husband that she's not losing her marbles, then there's a campy seance and the father finally faces up to the evidence of his own eyes to go and rescue his son's soul from the underworld. It's not badly assembled by any means, just that the raw materials are so stolid. The chief virtue of it all has to be the frugal $1.5m budget.

4/10

The Bucket List (Rob Reiner, 2007)

2012-01-20T13:09:00.000Z

Two old codgers with terminal cancer decide on a list of things to do before they croak and promptly run off and do the lot. Early on, as Jack Nicholson (cast to type as the sarcastic, impulsive curmudgeonly one) ridicules the triteness of the list produced by Morgan Freeman (who is of course the virtuous, salt-of-the-earth cautious one) there's a glimmer of the prospect of a departure from feelgood staples, but this is a Rob Reiner film and saccharine life-affirmation is what you'll get. It would have been interesting to see what they would have done had Nicholson's character not been loaded, but happiness is completely dependent on money in the MOR Hollywood universe and the duo's idea of really living amounts to nothing more than an unimaginative rich man's whistle-stop tour of picture-postcard locations and fine dining. Only the indulgence imbued by the easy interplay of the veteran leads saves it from drowning in schmaltz.

4/10

The Signal (David Bruckner, Dan Bush & Jacob Gentry, 2007)

2012-01-20T12:27:00.001Z

On paper, the premise is a promising one compared to the horror B-movie norm: three directors showing three different perspectives of events. This largely turns out to be false advertising, however: no Rashomon, this. The three perspectives only consist of following a different character in each segment: there's no actual uncertainty as to the reality of the situation, and what we're left with is a fairly bog-standard variation on the survival-zombie epidemic genre, with TV and radio signals turning the populace psychotic. There's an attempt at wringing gallows humour out of the splatter, but it's leaden-footed fare.

4/10

Black Death (Christopher Smith, 2010)

2012-01-14T20:30:00.001Z

Northern Germany comfortably stands in for a plague-ravaged medieval England as a band of mercenaries on a church-sanctioned mission to capture a necromancer draft in a young monk to guide them. When they finally reach the village of their prey, they find an untouched idyll. Nothing, of course, is as it first seems.
Black Death is a curious mix of trash and high concept. On one hand, Sean Bean as the mercenary leader seems to have taken his Boromir get-up off the rail gritting his teeth, the dialogue frequently grates even when it's not being wilfully anachronistic and a lingering air of Blackadder is only reinforced when Tim McInnerny turns up. On the other, there's actually some kind of thought process going on in the conflict between the bloodthirsty Christian crusaders and haughty village pagans, with the young monk struggling with his faith in between the two. Overall, still a failure, but a qualified one.

4/10

À Bout Portant (Fred Cavayé, 2010)

2012-01-14T19:51:00.002Z

Point Blank, which bears no resemblance to the Lee Marvin revenge flick, starts with the thoroughly Hollywood scenario of a happily married nurse rescuing the wrong patient, whose associates kidnap the nurse's wife to pressgang him into delivering the crook to safety. This is rather complicated by having half the Paris police force on their tail, corrupt and thinking nothing of popping a cap in anyone between them and their target.
It may have breakneck pace aplenty but the concept is too overused to excite, and the surprises that come are rather through stretching credulity in ever more sketchy ways than through actual inventiveness on the part of the scriptwriters. It could actually have done with jacking up the ludicrosity to the gleeful level of a Statham vehicle.

4/10

127 Hours (Danny Boyle, 2010)

2012-01-14T19:11:00.001Z

Danny Boyle may be on the right side of the hit-or-miss equation with a large part of the credit due to Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire and Sunshine bolstering a record too strong to be brought down by the occasional A Life Less Ordinary. At least you know what he presents will take risks, and that's usually worth the price of admission. Taking on the Aron Ralston story is a bigger gamble than before, though. A man will spend 5 days trapped under a desert rock, alone, and then saw his arm off to survive. Every development is already in place, and it's just an inexorable, agonising grind towards that cathartic moment.
Boyle ducks out of putting the viewer through the same torment as that of the protagonist by inserting dream sequences, flashbacks and dramatic interludes that provide some respite in the form of other situations and characters, and some of the phases move a little too far in the direction of the mystical or showy, but then we are dealing with the inside of one man's head and with the knowledge that Ralston gave the end result his seal of approval. It can't be the director's most satisfying work, being compromised by having to make an unpalatable event with little wider message into entertainment of a fashion, but to its credit it does steer the right side of exploitation.

6/10

Daylight Robbery (Paris Leonti, 2008)

2012-01-03T15:09:00.003Z

Geezers United like to rob a bank or two, no lie! All is not well when you find yourself wishing you were watching a Guy Ritchie underworld film instead of this, yet another piece of inept formula toss in the British heist genre that even has none of the saving quirks of Ritchie's codfather works. All the usual Laahndahn hooligan/gangster suspects are there, from Geoff Bell through Leo Gregory to Vas Blackwood, and sure enough director Leonti hits on the masterstroke of twinning the two by having the lads use the World Cup as a cover to bust a bank. There's no tension at all, the crew are wankers to a man where presumably cheeky chappies was the objective, and the robbery contains no feasible or inventive details whatsoever. At least The Bank Job was based on a true story. This just has the forces of law and order represented by Barry from EastEnders. Daylight robbery indeed.

3/10

Celda 211(Daniel Monzón, 2009)

2012-01-03T13:58:00.001Z

Cell 211 takes us straight into the outbreak of a riot in a Spanish prison, as a warden on his first day at the job is caught on the wrong side of the fence and forced to make up a criminal past to stay in one piece. It's a delicate balancing act between credible complicity with the prisoners and trying to transmit information about what's occurring inside to the prison authorities. In the meanwhile, the leader of the rioters takes him under his wing and an understanding between the two is formed as the idealistic newbie learns what conditions prevail inside the prison system.
Comment on the unproductive brutality of the status quo could easily have got too heavy-handed here, but Monzón seems to have realised that political campaigning about such glaring targets can make for an unhappy marriage with the thriller framework and the decision to focus on action and the relationship between the two leads is a prudent one. Less successful, however, is the incorporation of the complicating element that is the warden's pregnant wife on the outside, who flips for no other reason than plot requirements.
Nevertheless, there are more positives than negatives. As the lead, Alberto Ammann convinces as his character shifts from bravado to anger and despair, and the end comes as quite a shock too, with the director making the most of fairly stock ingredients.

6/10

Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993)

2012-01-01T23:38:00.000Z

Mike Leigh's directorial pinnacle was also the making of David Thewlis, and his is a mesmerising performance as Johnny, a sorry sack of suppressed rage fleeing to London after effectively committing rape in Manchester. He uses verbal dexterity and erudition as much as a self-amusing control mechanism for his own manic depression as a weapon against all and sundry, from his former girlfriend to her flatmate and random strangers he accosts, and ends up going over the edge over several nights of sleeping rough and increasingly aimless railing. In Johnny, Leigh has created an iconic figure, an anti-hero with a crippling flaw set against each redeeming feature, and Thewlis's portrayal hits the balance between the two with an intuitive precision.
It's a far angrier film than any that Leigh has made before or since, its humour more bitter, and is also separated from the others by having so little focus for its anger, mirroring Johnny's utter lack of direction. The virulence of the class system is omnipresent, and there are other digs at the state of society which contextualise the characters' attitudes and the broken world around them, but none is presented as an overt cause of the fall. There are only glimpses of warmth: all the principals have their guard up too much to let anyone in.
There is one major false note, shoehorning in a villain, a cartoonishly misanthropic upper-class counterpart to Johnny, who seems to be included just to crudely underline that the message isn't merely that social deprivation produces dysfunctional men. Nevertheless, the rest hits with such raw force that the impact of that intrusion is negligible.

8/10

The King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson, 1972)

2011-12-30T17:24:00.000Z

The second of Rafelson's collaborations with Jack Nicholson suffered from the expectations raised by the previous year's seminal Five Easy Pieces. To be sure, it doesn't deliver as much resonance or depth as its predecessor's melange of emotional stiflement and laconic humour, but radiates a skewed froideur of its own nevertheless, with the weathered boardwalks and derelict music halls of a wintry Atlantic City as much the star as Nicholson's melancholic talk radio host and Bruce Dern as his pipe-dreaming speculator brother. The dialogue retains a perceptive crispness that some of its more flaked-out surreal interludes have rather lost with the passage of time.

6/10

Vatel (Roland Joffé, 2000)

2011-12-30T10:15:00.001Z

The ludicrous excesses of the court of Louis XIV, the sun King, continue to exercise a powerful hold on the popular imagination more than four centuries on, not least in cinema. It's not hard to see why: the mind-bogglingly lavish feasts and entertainments make for sumptuous eye candy on screen, and then there's the social comment angle ready-made too, with a claustrophobic circle of decadent toadies and back-stabbers, preening and conducting intrigues behind locked doors while the hoi polloi starve. Given all the ingredients for a complete package, all that a filmmaker has to do with them is avoid being seduced by the artifice themselves and fall prey to cliche.
The figure of François Vatel, the maître d’of the most prominent Bourbon prince, is a captivating one too. A perfectionist to a nigh-crippling degree, he was to commit suicide upon the failure of his ultimate royal banquet. Being the focal point of Joffé's English-language film, he gets to be played by an actual Frenchman amongst a host of English costume drama regulars, this rather predictably being Gérard Depardieu (Daniel Auteuil being the other default option). He does this as dependably as ever, despite being hindered with having the only non-RP accent in the house, portraying a commoner walking a tightrope between servile deference and barbed indignation. Depardieu is not the problem, and neither is the pageantry, which is spectacular. The rub lies in the other figures, from Tim Roth's carbon copy of his villain from Rob Roy, Uma Thurman uncertainly halfway between her character and Glenn Close's from Dangerous Liaisons, and a horde of tedious fops twittering sub-Ridicule bons mots. This is Vatel in a nutshell: it would be perfectly charming in large parts, were it not for the irritation caused by its constant derivativeness.

5/10

Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010)

2011-12-29T17:52:00.002Z

Regardless of whether a reimagining of the legend was called for, an increasingly imaginatively bankrupt Ridley Scott gives us one anyway. To begin with, the transposition of the figure as Robin Longstride, a commoner returning from the Crusades to deliver a fallen knight's sword to his father in Nottingham, the father then pragmatically handing his estate to Robin's keep so that it may stay in his daughter-in-law Marion's hands, at least shows signs of trying to come at the worn-out tale from a fresh angle, even if scene after scene never rises above the pedestrian.
Then it gets worse, much worse, as director and scriptwriter alike lose all sight of all the trademark elements of the myth, and eventually we're headed for a climactic battle against French invaders in wooden versions of WWII landing craft, which is equal parts Henry V without the stirring rhetoric and Hastings with the English winning the day instead. If this came from a historically pick'n'mix American action director it would still not be forgivable, but at least understandable. Coming from Scott, it beggars belief. It's not even as if the blockbuster treatment requires the wedging in of a mass melee. The merry men are consequently hopelessly lost in the fray amongst the extras, as are all the other distinguishing characteristics in the irredeemable mess of a plot. All that remains in the last five minutes is the delivery of the upsetting message that this was just an origin story after all, and that means the impending threat of a sequel.

4/10

Dreamcatcher (Lawrence Kasdan, 2003)

2011-12-29T14:40:00.001Z

The litany of Stephen King screen adaptations has been as lucrative as prone to resulting in indigestible dross, and it would be foolish to expect anything artful when the King source isn't one of his all too rare excursions outside the sci-fi/horror field. For every landmark The Shining he turns out a dozen disposable variations on The Children of the Corn, and Dreamcatcher is very much in the latter category, even crapping on the kudos he acquired with Stand by Me by taking the template of four stock childhood mates (the ginger one, the speccy one etc.), giving them a secret to keep and revisiting them twenty years later. To chuck aliens that come out of your arse at them. Actual dreamcatchers don't come into it at all: the film's too busy trying to force graveyard laughs out of unimaginative CGI Grand Guignol assaults by the extraterrestrial turdworms on a succession of actors who should have known better, Damian Lewis in particular a sinner just by having so much more to squander than the likes of, say, Timothy Olyphant.
Far more baffling and disheartening, though, is the estimable William Goldman's involvement as screenplay writer. If the bills need to be paid this badly, wouldn't you do it incognito out of sheer shame?

3/10

The Whistleblower (Larysa Kondracki, 2010)

2011-12-28T20:16:00.000Z

This is an earnest account of real-life events in '90s Bosnia, where a female employee of an American private security contractor given a policing mandate over the war-torn land discovers that her colleagues are complicit in trafficking young women for prostitution. She subsequently finds her attempts to expose them are slighted and blocked by local gangsters, the police and her employers alike.

It's inevitable that a relatively non-histrionic tract for such a worthy cause will earn some critical dispensation, and there's a reasonable verisimilitude to the events, even if Rachel Weisz, while an able enough actress, is somewhat too Famous Fivey to convince fully in the role of the determined crusader. On the downside, it's too flat to sustain interest though tension or stand-out dialogue, and while the Balkans are without a doubt rife with institutionalised corruption and scummy gangsters, neither aspect rises above the complexity of the Eastern European villain stereotype at any point.

So it might as well have been a documentary, though that would have meant even fewer members of the public discovering that the real company, DynCorp, on whose thorough rottenness the story is based, is in fact still doing very nicely for itself in other troublespots around the world.

5/10

Tron: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010)

2011-12-27T18:33:00.001Z

Disney revisits another groundbreaking moment in its past with a wholly unnecessary sequel to 1982's conceptually throwaway but stylistically seminal computer-graphic trial run, Tron. There is a plot of sorts, with the son of Jeff Bridges going on a rescue mission into the virtual world where his father got trapped at some point since the first film, but really it's just a conveyor belt for the transmission of vast amounts of Disney's money into FX which may be far more polished than those of its predecessor, yet singularly fail to stand out of today's crowd simply because of adding nothing in terms of ideas.
Beyond this shortcoming, Tron: Legacy also seems to entertain notions of having a message, mistaking the technical innovation of the first film for thematic prescience, and consequently ends up losing sight of the fact that it only ever worked on a sinister kiddie quest level, and certainly not as full-blooded kicks. The sum total is as efficiently soporific as Daft Punk's incessant muted soundtrack.

3/10

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Oliver Stone, 2010)

2011-12-25T13:00:00.001Z

Oliver Stone unwisely returns to the scene of the crime twenty years later with the iconically unscrupulous trader Gordon Gekko seemingly a new man upon his release from prison, albeit still spouting aphorisms on the nature of greed. Shia LaBeouf takes the Charlie Sheen role this time round as a junior stock broker with delusions of ethics taken in by the meretricious patter of his prospective father-in-law.
It's difficult to say what Stone thinks he's doing with this reconstituted piece, bar coming back to cash in one more time on the instant of his success as Gekko ends up doing when he inevitably shows his true colours. There's an attempt to justify the continuation by having a half-baked go at the subprime market crisis, but it's severely undermined first and foremost by Stone's worship of power in all its guises. It's just a bit of a handicap when you're meant to be attacking the ruthlessness of speculative capitalism to devote so much time to making the splurging and cock-waving lifestyles of its proponents look desirable. Not that it helps when the forces of 'good' are represented by the couple of a badly miscast and simpering Carey Mulligan as Gekko's vaguely activist daughter and the charisma vacuum that is LaBeouf, a walking piece of hissy bumfluff who could probably ruin any film single-handed even without the help of a script scribbled on bog roll and pitifully posturing dialogue alternating with David Byrne's whining coffee-table soundtrack.

3/10

The American (Anton Corbijn, 2010)

2011-12-22T16:16:00.000Z

If you've seen Jim Jarmusch's somnambulent The Limits of Control from the previous year, you'll know half the formula, with a displaced and superficially dispassionate hitman moving from place to place exchanging as few words as possible with those around him to avoid emotional involvement as much as visibility. The other half of the formula is the cold-blooded professional wanting to hang up his boots at last, upon finding the solitude and detachment too much to bear after all.
Thankfully, The American is more than the sum of those parts. This owes less to former star photographer-turned-director Corbijn's visual sense, not that having every shot so elegantly framed and lit is unwelcome by any means, than to mature sense in throttling back the pace from the frenetic norm for the hunted hunter genre, which is mirrored closely by George Clooney's performance. He's always been more than just an OTT Cary Grant impersonation and understands that less is more when working with such off-the-shelf ingredients. To be sure, without much novelty, the end result can be no timeless classic, but it's handsomely executed all the same.

6/10

The Reader (Stephen Daldry, 2008)

2011-12-22T12:50:00.002Z

In a self-fulfilling prophecy after her ostensibly satirical remark in the TV series Extras, regarding needing that Holocaust film under her belt to bag an Oscar, Kate Winslet did indeed walk away with one from this. If the alarmingly mechanical correlation between the genre role and the award has to be explained in some way, it probably boils down to an overvaluation of pretty actresses doing ugly characters. Her former concentration camp guard living in denial of personal culpability and illiteracy to boot is too teflon-coated to like, and further encumbered with some truly cringeworthy verbal tics, but Winslet at least does a decent job in conveying enough conflict within her denial to allow for some understanding to grow.
It's just that the rest of it has so little to say, about either guilt or responsibility. Ralph Fiennes, as a lawyer in the near-present, hasn't much to do besides mulling over his teenage affair with the reclusive older woman years after she has been exposed and sentenced to life imprisonment for her crimes. A Fiennes left running on empty churns out not much more than clipped hand-wringing. And in turn David Kross, as his teenage self, only gets the staples of any adolescent infatuation drama to work with, and so it's hard to say if there's any more range under his hood. Ultimately, though being preciously assembled, The Reader runs aground on the same shoals of aimlessness as its cast.

5/10

Brüno (Larry Charles, 2009)

2011-12-19T09:40:00.002Z

In probably his last throw of the dice at punking the dimmer end of the American public, Sacha Baron Cohen ups the stakes from his Ali G and Borat outings by presenting a character who's bound to rub his targets up the wrong way from the off. Brüno, his 19-year-old preening and screeching Austrian queen has none of the matey bonhomie of the former or wide-eyed enthusiasm of the latter, being outright abrasive enough at one point to bait a black TV audience with his purchase of a black baby in Africa and then show off his collection of worryingly paedophilia-tinted family album snaps to them. Besides, the conservatives he zeroes in on may have been taught to hold their tongue as regards their racism, but having aggressive homosexuality thrust in their faces pushes them too far. Baron Cohen exploits this to full effect, of course.
There remains a doubt over much of it whether he's being braver than ever, exposing what needs to be exposed, or just shooting fish in a barrel for the sake of extending his comic life, with a lot more obviously staged scenes than before. While the disappointing fact that the basic plot and many of the scenes are just rehashes from Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan does point towards the latter interpretation, neither can the other readings be denied.
It's funny to note here, though, that despite setting its stall out so blatantly as a vehicle for homophobe-baiting, not only does Brüno get a lot of mileage out of ridiculing the screaming end of the gay spectrum, but also scores more points when laying bare wholly other glaring hypocrisies and excesses. If Baron Cohen does go back to the medium for a fourth crack, he might want to consider taking these moments on board and go for something more focused and understated.

6/10

Punishment Park (Peter Watkins, 1971)

2011-12-18T18:14:00.000Z

A faux-documentary that freezes a moment in history like a fly suspended in amber, Punishment Park could only be a product of Vietnam-and-civil-rights-protest era America. It posits the creation of correctional facilities in the desert where political offenders of assorted ilks are sent on a brutal hike towards the hope of a pardon. This is all purportedly filmed by European documentary crews, and intercuts the sham trials of the accused with their hopeless trek and the growing blood thirst of the law enforcement officers on their trail.
For all the accusations it predictably met with of being a political assault by European hippies on the American right, it actually presents a surprisingly plausible set of characters on both sides of the divide, the prisoners as frequently reduced to frothing away and sloganeering as their accusers. Furthermore, despite being unmistakably a child of its time, it's not anachronistic at all: it's chilling to realise how little has actually changed for the better. It remains relevant.

7/10

The Way Back (Peter Weir, 2010)

2011-12-18T17:33:00.000Z

Covering pretty much the same ground as the German As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me, thematically and geographically, Weir's fuller-budget story of POWs sent to a Siberian labour camp making their escape on foot across thousands of hostile miles has the obligatory big names but thankfully avoids the additional histrionics that usually come with the Hollywood version. In fact, the German film, while more credibly based on a real figure, suffered a lot from disbelieving the strength of its own premise and ended up daubing on an archvillain, improbable coincidences and a spurious love interest to boot.
By having a whole band of escapees rely on each other, this one bolsters itself in feasibility and thereby gives itself the room to develop more human interest through their interrelationships, which thankfully remain as unsentimentalised as the vast landscapes, stunning though they are. It's still not on an emotive or visceral par with Weir's best work, such as his last, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, but respectable enough, and ironically so when you consider that a piece of pure fiction has on this occasion trumped one of historical fact.

6/10

Anuvahood (Adam Deacon, 2011)

2011-12-18T15:57:00.000Z

Ho hum, it's a low-budget British Ali-G derivative spoof of gritty street culture films, most obviously Kidulthood or Bullet Boy. This already does not bode well, and then you see that Paul Kaye and Richard Blackwood have cameos, which is a twin kiss of death. The only thing that might stop you using the DVD for target practice at once is bumbling director Deacon making a better fist it as an actor, investing his utter tool of a wannabe gangsta with at least a smidgeon of likability. It's not much to cling on to, though.

3/10

Snarveien (Severin Eskeland, 2009)

2011-12-18T15:34:00.000Z

A couple driving along the backroads across the Norwegian-Swedish border in order to avoid excessive scrutiny of their boozy cargo are forced to divert onto an even smaller road, where, as we know from time-honoured convention, only bad things will happen. More specifically, attack by murderous hick nutjobs, since the leads are (a) a happy couple and (b) to be punished for sneaking away the means to chemical debauchery, and Scandinavian morality in horror films follows closely along American lines in these aspects. Not that Scandinavian horror has a wholly bad track record, even when recycling U.S. products this shamelessly, sometimes managing to add refreshing local flavours to the formula.
Detour, however, does not, adhering to the blueprint so depressingly closely that it even induces no winces, since you can always plot every start and development ten minutes ahead.

3/10

Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston, 2011)

2011-12-11T17:39:00.003Z

The latest Marvel adaptation sees the Star Wars FX supremo Joe Johnston take on the task of making the stable's most politically suspect and superannuated hero a viable product to be milked for screen and merchandising bucks, whilst having to juggle with the need to lay down the groundwork for next year's superhero combo behemoth The Avengers. This may sound too painful to behold, but Johnston has at least realised the utter ludicrousness of the character and so we get no loftier ambitions than that of a humour-laced rollercoaster, with an earnest simpleton in a laughable costume at first used just as a wartime propaganda poster boy until proving his gumption by saving the world from cartoon Nazis, first and foremost Hugo Weaving determined to outham his own estimable previous hammings. It's strictly for kids despite the satirical winks, but thankfully unlikely to make them walk out of the cinema advocating U.S. intervention in foreign countries, probably by virtue of being so inoffensively forgettable.

4/10

X-Men: First Class (Matthew Vaughn, 2011)

2011-12-03T11:58:00.000Z

The fifth instalment in the X-Men franchise rewinds the action back to 1962 and the environment of the Cuban missile crisis. This brings benefits and drawbacks: it's fun to piece together the seeds of later character developments and how their actions fit in with officially recorded history, and it does not require an anorak's knowledge of the comic series to manage either aspect. On the other hand, with most of the heroes now teens, there's always the risk of going all Glee with the banter and homilies.
In respect to the latter, Vaughn was a reassuring choice of director, with his previous in handling juvenile action leads without the customary cutesiness, i.e. Kick-Ass, and duly the cheese is mostly kept to a minimum. The adult casting is also as strong as you might expect from the series, with Michael Fassbender's Magneto a more complex character than it's reasonable to expect of a popcorn product. Naturally, subservience to the franchise is still inescapable, and the continuity dots with the other parts have to be joined up as best managed, but it breezes along surprisingly lightly for all that burden.

5/10

Green Lantern (Martin Campbell, 2011)

2011-11-30T19:06:00.001Z

Bucking the prevailing trend for Marvel/DC superhero adaptations, Green Lantern went resoundingly arse-over-tit not just with the critics as is commonplace but even at the box office. This is gratifying, as by any criterion it's a feeble effort. The comic book source is an inexplicably enduring one considering the lameness of the concept, i.e. that there's a corps of guardians of the universe who have magic rings that they can use to make all manner of gadgets materialise from their imaginations, provided they're all green. Oh, and they can fly at the speed of light and anything yellow is evil.
This might have produced a bearable film adaptation if it were purely played for The Mask-style hijinks, but it still seems to want to say something Star Trekky about overcoming your fears and just how neat the plucky humans are with their maverick individualism even if they might not be as old or smart as all those older civilisations. Yes, once again it's how Americans like to see themselves and I suppose hence having Ryan Reynolds as the titular hero fits in nicely with this, leading the charge as a blandly beefy and earnest lunkhead of a quarterback. It's incredibly boring, probably even for 10-year-olds.

3/10

Solomon Kane (Michael J. Bassett, 2009)

2011-11-29T17:15:00.000Z

James Purefoy dons the stubble and tortured mean mofo attitude of his lookalike Hugh Jackman, as Wolverine/Van Helsing, as a 17th century mercenary who roams the land having renounced violence in exchange for a temporary reprieve from eternal damnation. Naturally, like his homonymous namesake Caine in Kung Fu, the forces of evil won't leave the man of peace alone and the slaughter of a pious family by unsavoury hordes soon has him back to limb-chopping like he'd never stopped.
It's complete action twaddle by numbers, of course, but given enough of a gloss by a decent stab at historical design and some rather lovely snowbound landscape photography that it'll do to while away the hours.

5/10

White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)

2011-11-29T00:53:00.001Z

The title refers to the residue left behind by departing colonials, in terms of both infrastructure and cultural baggage. Here it's in an unspecified African country, and the director's choice of leaving it open is a double-edged sword: it may make statements about the repercussions of the fall of the colonial system more universal, but at the same time divorced of real context.
Isabelle Huppert and Christophe Lambert play plantation owners under pressure to leave the country and their possessions with the impending approach of rebel forces. Lambert's moderated character is a surprising inclusion considering his OTT portfolio, but he's strictly second fiddle to Huppert's in any case, as she grows increasingly unstable in her frenzy to cling on to what she considers her birthright.
It's a deconstructed narrative, presumably for the purpose of creating disorientation. Huppert, as usual, fills the centre of the film with a performance of quiet but feverish intensity. However, the problem is that that's all you expect of a Huppert character, and her character's illogical intransigence does not surprise as a result, particularly as she already played the same character in the same set-up, even if in Cambodia, in Rithy Panh's more affecting The Sea Wall, just the year before. Meanwhile, the Liberia-set Johnny Mad Dog was more effective at conveying the horror at what had come to pass.
It's hence a very mixed bag, with the child rebels also feeling like little more than ciphers, with the focus as usual on the Europeans, despite what the Africa-raised director's intentions might have been. What probably got the critics raving and what, after all's said, deserves credit is Denis's uniquely poetic eye, full of telling details, and the absolute refusal to give in to simplification of the issues.

6/10

The Mechanic (Simon West, 2011)

2011-11-28T23:02:00.001Z

A Jason Statham film that's perfunctory and generic even by the standards of his body of work, the remake of the forgotten Charles Bronson-led The Mechanic has The Stat as an elite hitman who finds himself emotionally compromised by his latest job and ending up training a young hothead to fill his shoes. The presence of Donald Sutherland alongside at the start may raise hopes of something more interesting occurring, but these days he only crops up to get himself out of the house for a bit and it's no different here.
Statham's character is of course endowed with a sense of ethics about his choice of targets, gets it on with a woman in the first ten women just so we know it's not kinky when he starts getting his shirt off at any old excuse, and demonstrates depth with the stock device of first choice, i.e. listening to classical music after each hit. The only things that elevate it above a Steven Seagal vehicle are superior production values and the star's honestly workmanlike approach to the pointlessness of it all.

4/10

Somers Town (Shane Meadows, 2008)

2011-11-19T14:36:00.000Z

Meadows's featurette is the first one he didn't have a hand in writing, the first set outside his Midlands home turf, and furthermore, disconcertingly for a director synonymous with independent and community-centred British film, financed wholly by Eurostar.
There was no need to worry about any of this. His backers have wisely given him free rein to make the kind of low-key drama he's always made, with little apparent requirement to big up their product or tart up the grimy area around their rail terminal, the combination of Paul Fraser's script and improv by the two teenage leads works a treat and Meadows proves to be as at ease at finding little nuggets of pathos from London estates as from Nottingham ones. The two boys who become friends, Thomas Turgoose (from Meadows's This Is England) as a cheeky urchin who's run away to London, and Piotr Jagiello as the shy Polish boy who gives him a place to stay, put in unaffected performances and some lovely moments of unforced humour crop up through their harmless shenanigans.
All the same, it is a very slight creation, and not only because of its 71-minute running time, ending with a vague fizzle before anything of consequence has actually transpired. If Meadows had realised from the off that he had all the parts required for an urban drama of substance at his disposal instead of just setting out to slap together an organic short, who knows how good it could have been?

6/10

True Grit (the Coen brothers, 2010)

2011-11-17T23:42:00.001Z

Is this the way it's going to be with the Coens from now on, alternating original work with the scripts of others to keep up their a feature a year output? True Grit is a class apart from their hammed-up The Ladykillers remake, and indeed element-by-element superior in almost every way to the John Wayne original, not least Jeff Bridges having just a tad more control over his delivery than The Duke did, but it's still a shame to get something which is only a technical refinement and not wholly new.
That said, the virtuoso regular Coen photographer Roger Deakins gets to show how he's effectively claimed ownership of the sombre beige-wash palette for the revisionist Western since The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, with some images of quite remarkable tonality. The shift of emphasis away from the gruff drunkard marshal to the determined teenage girl who hires him to find her father's killer allows other characters to breathe too, including Matt Damon's sniffily precious Texas Ranger who wants in on the manhunt, and the outlaws they chase. As entertaining as the 1969 original was, it was far too much in thrall to the Wayne mythology to accommodate the complexity or elegiac darkness of this retelling.
This being a Coen film, the spot-on casting is no surprise, not least the self-assured Hailee Steinfeld as the young avenger, and the dialogue is as quickfire and ornate as usual while also fitting the Bible-encumbered culture of the 1870s frontier. It's just hard, despite all the craft, to blank out how often we've been here before, at the death of the old west.

7/10

Made in Dagenham (Nigel Cole, 2010)

2011-11-17T20:31:00.001Z

The subject of the women machinists' 1968 strike at Ford's Dagenham plant would seem tailor-made for Ken Loach, having been a defining moment in the history of gender equality, with the women's stand against wage discrimination leading shortly after to a permanent change in legislation. If Loach did choose to sidestep it, it's understandable: even activists have to take a breather sometimes. So we get Cole as the helm instead, who brings pretty much the same bag of ingredients to this as he did with Calendar Girls, with a cast of mutually supportive women from all parts of the age and class spectrums united in a common cause.
It's all very chest-swellingly feelgood and full of comic-tinged turns designed to gratify, from Miranda Richardson's ballsy Barbara Castle to Bob Hoskins as a token male old Trot thrilled at the women's politicisation. On the other hand, as the leader of the protesters and focal point, Sally Hawkins is required to carry the scenes of human interest drama too, and unfortunately has to get by on a lot of squeaking bravely when the script lets her down. Still, you'd have to have a heart of stone to remain unstirred by the message.

6/10

The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh, 2009)

2011-11-16T12:32:00.000Z

Based on the story of corporate whistleblower and embezzler Mark Whitacre, The Informant! is in essence a continuation of Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven streak, right down to the casting of Matt Damon as the titular double-dealer. It opts to turn Whitacre's delusional tale, which involves him playing the FBI and his employers off against each other to make himself appear a crusader against big-business corruption while pocketing millions, into a comedy crime caper, complete with a whimsical retro Marvin Hamlisch soundtrack, intentionally redolent of what he did for The Sting. Matt Damon does do a good weasel, a kind of an amiable nerd version of his sociopathic Tom Ripley, but it's not half as endearing or funny as it thinks it is while attempting to wring satire out of its protagonist's rather sad compulsive lying.

5/10

Chloe (Atom Egoyan, 2009)

2011-11-11T12:07:00.001Z

When Julianne Moore, queen of the highly-strung relationship drama, is cast as a wife who suspects her husband of infidelity, you know things will get nebulous and pear-shaped sooner or later. Accordingly it's clear that when she pays a high-class call girl to test his limits, the complications due are to be self-inflicted.
Egoyan has always been fixated with kinkiness, but at least this time round it's hardly a strong suit, soft-focus, soft core and rather cringeworthy altogether. Where the film scores far higher is on fine detail in the characterisation, conveyed by a solid cast, even if Amanda Seyfried as the call girl looks too much like an adolescent frog to convince as a sexually irresistible force. The twists that come as the film slides into thriller territory are also quite nifty, provided you're prepared to forgive the cheat technique of withholding vital information from the viewer.

5/10

Kak ya provel etim letom (Aleksey Popogrebskiy, 2010)

2011-11-10T23:49:00.003Z

How I Ended This Summer reeks of Tarkovsky with its dragged-out takes and metaphysical saturation. This cannot possibly be a bad thing in itself, although it needs to have a driving purpose behind the tableaux.
On one level, the barren and forbidding landscape of the Russian Arctic is the subject, but also how it impacts on the human psyche, here that of two researchers stuck on a remote island through a summer of never-ending day. The protracted silence and longueurs serve to highlight the slightest word or gesture from the protagonists, creating a brittle tension that lends plausibility to their overreactions when the junior partner gets some news from the mainland that he's afraid to pass on.
Along the way, the film does fall foul of plot logic in other ways that the characters' mental instability can't quite explain. Nevertheless, the two actors put in powerfully modulated performances and the soundtrack of mostly ambient sound and ethereal photography combine to a hypnotic effect.

7/10

Skeletons (Nick Whitfield, 2010)

2011-11-09T21:21:00.000Z

A quirky low-budget British comedy that's got a whole lot more going for it than that categorisation might threaten, Skeletons is an unassuming charmer of a film, with two exorcists of sorts trudging from house to house in the northern countryside like bickering insurance salesmen to purge clients' lives of psychic knots. Then they come up against a real hurdle with a family odder than their metier is.
It could be truly irksome if it played up the life-lesson sentiment any more or broadened the humour, and you can bet your bottom dollar a US remake would fail on both counts, but its very Britishness keeps both in check and it ends up rather sweet instead, even if it raises no more than the occasional smile or eyebrow.

6/10

Romper Stomper (Geoffrey Wright, 1992)

2011-11-09T20:41:00.000Z

The film that gave Russell Crowe his first big break, Romper Stomper is a raw kitchen-sink precursor of American History X centring on a pack of Neo-Nazi skinheads in Melbourne, who pick the wrong target for their aimless rage when their local haunt falls into Vietnamese hands. Unlike in the American retread, there's little promise of redemption here: the pathetic lowlifes are too unanalytical to learn anything from their own suffering, let alone from that which they inflict on others. This is both virtuous by dint of being truthful and thoroughly depressing to the point of risking alienating a cinematic audience. The refusal to slap on gloss is admirable, but leaves little room for interpersonal drama when all the characters are so utterly devoid of saving graces. Still, some consolation is to be had in knowing it'll all end in tears.

5/10

Revanche (Götz Spielmann, 2008)

2011-11-06T12:40:00.000Z

Modern Austrian cinema does not reflect well on the nation as a carefree place: there is a pervasive tendency for an existential malaise that outdoes even the excesses of Swedish directors, too often not tempered with hope or warmth. Revanche begins very much in this milieu, with a pimp's lackey dreaming of an escape to Spain with his Ukrainian prostitute girlfriend, and when the bank robbery that he ineptly attempts to give them the means to start a new life goes badly wrong it seems we're in it for the long haul, with no glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Suddenly though, and wholly unexpectedly given the tortured and ascetic character of the lead and the pared-down and hard-boiled nature of the plot and dialogue, a layer of emotional complexity is added and there is a glimmer after all. It feels oddly spiritual for coming so unforeseen.

6/10

Direktøren for det hele (Lars Von Trier, 2006)

2011-11-06T12:09:00.006Z

With The Boss of it All, Von Trier tries his hand at making a comedy and almost spoils the fun by being so antsily self-conscious about it that he has to butt in several times to tell us not to take it seriously. There was just no need: the admittedly overused notion of a klutz of an actor hired by a cowardly IT company boss to play the part of the CEO in takeover talks with a hilariously truculent Icelander is still jolly enough to sustain interest, even with Von Trier doing his best to sabotage the flow with frenetic jump-cutting throughout, so clearly lacking confidence in how to judge comic timing. Contentwise, it only has the potential to be a slight addition to the idiosyncratic director's oeuvre, but would be a welcome diversion from his usual portentous melancholy and misanthropy nonetheless, if only its maker had any faith in letting it breathe.

5/10

Mr. Nobody (Jaco Van Dormael, 2009)

2011-11-06T11:29:00.000Z

In a 2092 where the human race has conquered ageing, the last living mortal man recounts his life story to a reporter. He's an unreliable narrator, giving three alternative courses of events with different wives, branching out from butterfly wing-effects at critical junctures.
The deus ex machina is represented beguilingly as a falling leaf and the film is packed with similarly telling images. It rewards attentiveness on the part of the viewer and is exquisite to look at. It also plunders ideas and scenes, in no particular order, from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Truman Show, Sliding Doors, Rashomon, Little Big Man, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Fountain, Dark City, Requiem for a Dream and Slaughterhouse-Five, and this list is by no means exhaustive. It seems to admit defeat under the weight of filmic history by resorting to a salvage-by-collage technique and frequently falls prey to whimsy, and its protagonist, Nemo, is an emo even by name.
And yet it captivates too. Jared Leto may not be the most charismatic casting as Nemo - the more intense Jake Gyllenhaal would probably have been first choice - but he's no hammy Jim Carrey either. And Van Dormael can just about be forgiven in the final analysis for his looting, since all the splicing is executed so adeptly that some moments of real beauty are engendered. It has a poetic impact Michel Gondry has never achieved and Darren Aronofsky only managed with his first outings. Bizarrely, it has received almost no international distribution since its release.

7/10

In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007)

2011-11-02T17:11:00.002Z

In Crash, Paul Haggis had a go at tackling the pickle of racism and was awarded a Best Picture Oscar for it. With In the Valley of Elah he turns to the Iraq war, a topic less palatable for the Academy voters' consumption, and accordingly misses out on the prize. This is a shame, as Haggis should garner recognition for his consistency: the film is every bit as lunk-headedly earnest as Crash, pushing kneejerk buttons over misplaced patriotism and the dehumanisation of the combatants, but rarely saying anything illuminating about either aspect.
It doesn't help that it uses the plot framework of an investigative thriller as a crutch, with Tommy Lee Jones as the father of a missing soldier trying to establish what happened to his son, or that Charlize Theron has to be wedged in there as the one cop who'll help him. Another director might have thrown caution to the wind to hit the target head on and for once presented America's grubby wars as wrong in themselves rather than just because American boys come back mentally scarred, but Haggis is not that brave.
Jones is very good here, conveying denial, wounded pride and pain with some subtlety. It's a performance frustratingly wasted amidst the stodge.

5/10

Madeo (Bong Joon-ho, 2009)

2011-10-31T21:06:00.000Z

The title Mother alludes concisely to 'mother's pride' or 'mother knows best', and these are amongst the notes touched on in a story of a poor herbalist mother who cossets her child-minded adult son to the best of her ability until he's accused and convicted of the murder of a local schoolgirl after a drunken night's blackout. With the police unhelpful, she then sets about playing detective and finding the true culprit.
Bong Joon-ho, perhaps best known for 2006's tongue-in-cheek monster eco-horror The Host, is an odd fish as directors go: he wilfully mixes up registers and throws in non-sequitur incidents, which at the worst of times leads to an adulteration of all the colours on the palette, as seen here in the opener which is far too comic in relation to what follows. Yet later on we get the benefits of his method, as it works to throw the viewer off balance and liable to be genuinely unprepared for the twists that occur. Supported by Kim Hye-ja's powerful performance as the frantically possessive mother, it ends up as a thoroughly unconventional thriller and all the better for it.

7/10

Splice (Vincenzo Natali, 2009)

2011-10-31T19:07:00.001Z

Natali's first, the 1997 Cube, may have been a B-movie with cardboard characters and clunky dialogue, but the concept was high enough to make it riveting regardless. Not so with Splice, which features the still-plummeting Adrien Brody and the replaceable Sarah Polley as two hotshot genetic researchers who aren't content with creating ridiculously phallic blobmonsters that provide a cure for everything from the common cold upwards and so move on to secretly concoct a human-something hybrid. The 'something' part is never specified, which conveniently allows the creature to sprout all manner of random freaky animal attributes, whilst basically remaining a telegenic bald woman with odd legs and a stinger tail.
It can only be taken as the director taking the money and running off on a spree of FX, since it doesn't satisfy any other purpose: the science is laughable but not satirical, the relationship dilemmas between the couple paper-thin, and even the thriller/horror element falls flat on its face when called on.

3/10

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011)

2011-10-30T22:00:00.001Z

Let the Right One In director Alfredson brings his superlative command of mood and tension to the film adaptation of le Carré's definitive Cold War counterespionage novel. Events necessarily have to be compressed from the original Alec Guinness-led 1979 seven-part BBC series, repeatedly bringing the risk of losing the thread, and the temptation to introduce Hollywood spy thriller time, place and character captions must have been there, but thankfully it's resisted: the cliched signposting would have shattered the meticulously crafted sense of time and place of a fusty, repressed and paranoid '70s England that permeates the construct from the peculiar dank locations to the understated and nuanced acting.
If truth be told, the opening half-hour drags with a lot of going in and out of drab buildings and little plot progression, and the search for the Soviet mole has limited resonance with almost everyone a potential Philby and little else concrete of universal interest at stake. But this is to judge it by the criteria of other modern spy films, from which it's a breed apart and not just because of the period: it's about layered atmosphere, not fast pay-offs, and scores highly on the level of the small gesture and single chosen word. It's also gratifying to see Gary Oldman, at the head of an impressive cast, move decisively away from his Hollywood pantomime roles to give a portrayal of the careworn Smiley which nods neatly towards Guinness's version without ever descending into caricature.

7/10

So weit die Füße tragen (Hardy Martins, 2001)

2011-10-30T11:03:00.000Z

The real-life story behind As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me is so mind-boggling that any embellishment can only be gilding the lily. How a German POW sentenced to 25 years' hard labour in a lead mine in easternmost Siberia at the end of the war managed to escape and trek 11,000 kilometres to safety across a land of hostile elements already seems like the stuff of wild fantasy. It would win the audience's indulgence, though, if it displayed a painstaking sense of veracity.
What the director does instead from the outset is to splash on sentimentalised gloop, drowning every scene under an asinine adventure soundtrack, whilst adding stock hero movie characters, including a cackling camp commandant villain who keeps on catching up with the fugitive with supernatural precognition and a nomadic tribeswoman love interest who also seems to be a model. Needless to say, these were strangely absent from Clemens Forell's original biography, along with various other scenes of derring-do involving rescues and chases. It's basically no better than a TV movie, bar the budget that allowed for filming in some beautiful scenery, and a rare justifiable candidate for another remake. The story deserves better.

3/10

Mibu gishi den (Yôjirô Takita, 2003)

2011-10-28T17:07:00.006+01:00

Centering on the end of the feudal era in Japan, When the Last Sword Is Drawn is told in retrospect from a Tokyo at the verge of the 20th century with an old man harbouring a secret history visiting a doctor. Recognising a samurai in a photograph as an associate from thirty years before, the man prompts the doctor to tell the story of his connection to the samurai.
Takita's film is a very mixed bag: it carefully evokes the spirit of a bygone age in which clan loyalty, honour and awareness of status were the guiding precepts of life and the framing device of the flashback is effective in gradually unpeeling the layers of the onion to illuminate the dramatic transition of a culture in a short span. It's also a welcome divergence from the usual bushido-and-swords fare to focus on a character whose plight is one of economic desperation rather than just bound by duty. But there are also many weaknesses: the battles are surprisingly flat for the genre, the lack of signposting when the story slots in flashbacks within flashbacks is disorientating, and the bland soundtrack is frequently detrimental to the mood. It also gets cloyingly protracted and oversentimental in the last act, something that it seems Takita is prone to, judging from his 2008 Foreign Language Oscar winner, Departures.

5/10

Limitless (Neil Burger, 2011)

2011-10-28T12:34:00.002+01:00

This lively if superficial thriller presents Eddie Morra, a wastrel writer paralysed by writer's block, whose luck appears to have turned when a chance meeting with his brother-in-law leads to him trying a cerebral superdrug which gives him the ability of instant recall of everything he has ever subconsciously witnessed. Armed with this power he's soon on the way to finishing his novel, in the black, rebuilding his last relationship and astounding the world of finance with his stock market predictions. But of course there's no such thing as a free lunch and murder of his brother-in-law is only the beginning of his perils, with a gangster and another sinister pursuer after his misbegotten panacea, which predictably also turns out to have unpleasant side effects.
The anodyne Bradley Cooper is cast usefully for once here: his perpetual smirk and glibly slick delivery are a perfect fit for an amorally opportunistic character who weasels his way through challenges without ever turning virtuous. This lack of enlightenment makes a refreshing change from the genre norm. Also intriguingly, the enslaving poison - at least at the outset - disarmingly displays none of the standard downsides, bringing wealth and focus as opposed to penury and derangement, which actually makes the protagonist's chemical dependency rather seductive.
It's still hokum, of course, requiring a ludicrous number of improbabilities to be swallowed, such as Morra's discovery that merely having watched kung-fu films has made him an expert fighter (in Oldboy this also required 15 years of physical training) or that writing a great novel is simply a matter of command of language. But hokum that motors along nicely all the same.

6/10

Jûsan-nin no shikaku (Takashi Miike, 2010)

2011-10-25T17:24:00.000+01:00

Approaching Miike's films is like submitting to a lucky dip. He churns out at least three a year and for every breathtaking Audition there's guaranteed to be an idiosyncratically muddled stinker like The Happiness of the Katakuris. It therefore comes as a great relief that 13 Assassins is actually very conventional, and decently constructed to boot. It's only really The Seven Samurai with killing a psychotic noble instead of marauding bandits and six more heroes, right down to the last one being a disrespectful loose cannon a la Mifune, but the build-up is patient and the eventual 50-minute battle choreographed variedly enough that it just about escapes the debt.

6/10

Les Petits Mouchoirs (Guillaume Canet, 2010)

2011-10-23T16:02:00.000+01:00

Canet's third feature as director is an ensemble piece with a group of friends on their annual holiday on the Gironde coast in the aftermath of the near-fatal road accident of one of their regular party. The comatose absentee is largely forgotten as the band frolic and agonise over their relationship problems.
Little White Lies was a huge hit in France, where pieces revolving around middle-class types without financial cares hopping in and out of each other's beds form a genre of their own. Canet's stab does contain its share of fizz in dialogue and a few scenes that suggest a sense of awareness of the shallowness of its characters. But it suffers throughout from an overreliance on the soundtrack (which is oddly entirely in English too, as if brazenly aiming for foreign sales) to bolster the drama, and then an indulgently weepy finale leaves little doubt that we're still meant to empathise with the self-centered crew. Think The Big Chill, only a reimagining where no-one really learns anything.

5/10

Devil's Playground (Mark McQueen, 2010)

2011-10-23T14:04:00.001+01:00

It's not the rage virus, it's the result of an experimental 'performance enhancer' called RAK-295. The quasi-zombies don't just sprint, they do parkour too, and there's a woman whose unique immunity to the lurgy means the authorities want to get their mitts on her (see Children of Men). So, it's clearly not a carbon copy of 28 Days Later. It is a depressingly shameless downmarket knock-off, though. There clearly weren't the funds for the trademark setpieces of 28 Days utilising picture postcard locations cleared of life for shock effect, so it's mostly scrabbling around at night. The budgetary shortage extends to the soundtrack too, which is genre-generic, and the cast, with Danny Dyer in for Cillian Murphy. It's the absence of invention and even suspense which is really unforgivable, though. After all, ideas cost nothing.

3/10

The Losers (Sylvain White, 2010)

2011-10-21T11:35:00.000+01:00

A crack team of black ops agents get stabbed in the back by their corrupt CIA boss and vow revenge, take 313. The best that can be said of The Losers is that it's superior in terms of editing, wit and acting to the overall identikit The Expendables that came out later in the year. This is of course not saying much. Ok, it was cheaper too, with a cast that's still recognisable prepared to grunt their way through the motions for a fee far short of what Stallone and co. demanded, and hence may be viewed in a favourable light simply for its economy. But indulgence can only go so far when there's such a paucity of imagination at work that the regulation-ethnically assorted protagonists have to wave big guns in each other's faces to punctuate every argument and we're asked to put up with the tiresome bag of playschool-psychotic quips that is Jason Patric as the arch-villain.

4/10

Sommersturm (Marco Kreuzpaintner, 2004)

2011-10-21T11:05:00.001+01:00

Summer Storm was a success in Germany largely because of the casting of household name Robert Stadlober as the lead character, a teenager grappling with his sexuality. For a foreign audience not armed with that context the film is basically just another coming-of-age and coming-out piece, with nothing much in terms of plot trajectory to distinguish it from countless others. The setting of a summer camp and rowing competition for youth clubs does give it a fraction more colour than the normal angsty urban setting, and the accompanying mood is refreshingly upbeat too, but it comes at the price of a pedestrian feelgood moral to the story along the lines of tolerance and accepting what you are und so weiter.

5/10

Todo sobre mi madre (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)

2011-10-19T13:42:00.000+01:00

All About My Mother stands apart in Almodóvar's oeuvre as the film that ticks all the boxes in the ebullient imp's list of interests, and as such works as a crash course in Almodóvarology. It contains: tough but warm female leads, a co-dependently close relationship between mother and son, AIDS, drug addicts, transsexual prostitutes, a self-mythologising actress, nuns and a comic sidekick. If this seems overly reductionist, suffice it to say that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, since by the time he got to this the director had refined the mix through numerous dry runs. The central story of the bereaved mother who moves to Barcelona to get away from her memories takes the weight of all the other elements without obvious encumbrance, and the switches in tone between vivacity and tragedy are executed sure-footedly. Yes, Almodóvar does continue making more or less the same film over and over again, but there's no denying his command of the medium.

7/10

Mr. Nice (Bernard Rose, 2010)

2011-10-17T20:29:00.003+01:00

The biopic of erstwhile major league cannabis smuggler Howard Marks benefits from ideal casting with the versatile (and, importantly, very Welsh) Rhys Ifans as the titular lead. Ifans has a range that accommodates effortless flipping from arch and cocksure to wounded and reflective, which is what Rose's construct repeatedly calls for - Marks is plainly a folk hero through this film's filter, and guilty of not much else except foolhardily expedient associations with ineffectual terrorists and an inability to quit while he's ahead. So the tone determinedly steers clear of the judgemental and skips lightly from one key incident to another in Marks's career without getting bogged down in heavy repercussions. It's wholly anecdotal, and as such as diverting as you'd except from a slightly squiffy bon-vivant raconteur, but also as lightweight as that suggests.

6/10

The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

2011-10-15T11:59:00.003+01:00

The story of the founding of Facebook is largely told in retrospect from the present in which the founder is being sued by his former associates for reasons relating to issues of the ownership of the business, by then already worth billions.
With all the players from an episode of very recent history still around and no real dissent heard as to the film's veracity, it's difficult to view The Social Network as anything other than a jazzed-up documentary with the edges smoothed off and the usual elisions and compressions made for dramatic purposes. Nevertheless, it works efficiently enough as satire on the nature of corporate greed vs private dreams, with the precocious visionary Zuckerberg seen as being motivated by a surfeit of pride in his constructs rather than a lust for money, and the still points interspersed among the technobabble are surprisingly emotive in their bleakness. The casting is good, too: Jesse Eisenberg convinces as the lead, supercilious and yet easy to wound, and even Justin Timberlake fits, though largely by virtue of playing a gabbling asshole in the person of the Napster founder Sean Parker. If the characters remain unlikable and their preoccupations pathetically shallow, then Fincher can only be excused for having captured the essence of the phenomenon accurately.

6/10

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (Werner Herzog, 2009)

2011-10-14T21:14:00.001+01:00

Does any one know what was going through Herzog's mind when he decided to pick up on the protagonist from Abel Ferrara's seminal 1992 odyssey through the sewers of the city and of a man's sense of self-worth, with an utterly corrupt police detective cast as Ulysses? Herzog doesn't do remakes like he doesn't do cop films, and yet here he is doing both.
Of course, it soon becomes apparent we've got quite a different beast on our hands, so different that not even crediting Ferrara makes sense by the end. Gone is the bribe-and-contraband pocketing Catholic's sense of guilt, replaced by just plain mental disintegration under the weight of this incarnation's even more crippling range of chemical and behavioural dependencies. Without even the shadow of faith in the background, there's no 11th-hour redemption on the cards, just a dwindling prospect of getting away scot-free.
And hence the lack of gravitas in the tone, reflected in the casting: whereas Harvey Keitel does haunted and tortured immaculately in the original, here the absence of any spiritual purpose to cling to requires casting in line with the farcical surrealism, and it's fair to say that for once Nicolas Cage fits the bill.
The end result, then, is a ride on its own terms through madness, that sucks you in through sheer unpredictability. But since it's also without a moral compass, once the end credits have rolled it sinks away without trace where Ferrara's version lingered.

5/10

Submarine (Richard Ayoade, 2010)

2011-10-10T21:29:00.000+01:00

Ayoade's assured directorial debut gives us the insular 15-year-old Oliver growing up in a vaguely '80s South Wales, preoccupied with all the usual problems: school bullying, his worryingly divergent parents, finding a girlfriend.
Although the film is based on Joe Dunthorne's novel, it's hard not to see streaks of Ayoade's public image (by which I mean the rare appearances from behind the mask of Moss in The IT Crowd) in Oliver: cerebral, bookish, geekish, withdrawn and also caustically witty. Either way, Oliver is a great character, played with a wide-eyed disbelief at the state of things around him by Craig Roberts. The supporting cast is excellent too; Sally Hawkins terrifyingly intrusive as his mother and Noah Taylor a study in beigeness as the mousy father.
Submarine's great strength is that it works equally well as comedy as it does as poignant drama. The soundtrack is supporting rather than crutch-like, and unexpected flashes of camera trickery or divergence into unreality are not intrusive but just serve to heighten the sentiment of the moment. The end result is one of the finest British films in years.

8/10

Red (Robert Schwentke, 2010)

2011-10-10T20:48:00.000+01:00

This hotchpotch of equal parts of The Bourne Supremacy, Die Hard and Space Cowboys far too obviously started life as the unhappy offspring of a studio exec brainstorming session, presumably with the brief of getting the last drops out of the tank of a gamut of big names. Or maybe the brief was just 'what if we have Helen Mirren as an assassin?'
The result brings Willis, Mirren, Malkovich and Freeman together as former black ops spooks who now find themselves framed for a crime they did not commit. Which actually makes it The A-Team. Anyway, they band together to find out who's trying to kill them and perform all manner of pulling the wool over the opposition's along the way.
To be fair, the incessant action is crisp and some of the verbal interplay raises a smile, though that's the least that you're paying top-line pros for. It's just that the ideas are so tired.

4/10

Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011)

2011-10-10T18:41:00.001+01:00

Well, here's a novel conceit for a low-budget British horror film: aliens vs. hoodies. It probably helps that first time director Cornish is best known for his lo-fi comedy duo show on late night telly some moons ago in which him and mate Adam Buxton got to indulge their geeky penchant for discussing filmic what-ifs endlessly.
There's not much of a plot beyond what it says on the tin, of course, as a bunch of teenage lowlifes on a Peckham estate find themselves under attack by big growly things, but it's executed zippily with a sense of humour that doesn't impinge on the tension or unexpectedly realistically drawn characters. More, please, though not a sequel of course.

6/10

Thor (Kenneth Branagh, 2011)

2011-10-10T17:26:00.003+01:00

Branagh??? You may find yourself watching (which largely means enduring) this just for that, thus playing right into the studio's hands. Superhero fans watch the films regardless of who's at the helm, but this way they bag even some of the otherwise disinterested. Fiendish.
Anyway, to the film itself. It doesn't take a familiarity with the comics to know that this'll be NMINO (Nordic Mythology In Name Only), with the names and places lifted just to provide a new setting for the standard pagga, but somehow with Branagh you hoped there'd be a soupcon of something extra. As it is, we get a glossy version of Asgard and all with some giant-battling background, which grinds on until Thor is finally banished to Earth and made human for being unbearably arrogant.
I suppose story arc-wise it makes a nice change to at least have the hero start out as an overbearing ass, so that heroic deed would become gaining maturity rather than any act of beast-slaying (we are talking about a god here, after all - as with Superman it's difficult to make the battles themselves the interesting part). Unfortunately, Chris Hemsworth as the lead has quarterback acting skills to go with the physique and so you hardly notice any growing up take place. And the film takes far too long to get to the potentially tasty part anyway, which is the comic culture clash bit when he does finally get down here, and then it's already game over. Yawn.

4/10

Body of Lies (Ridley Scott, 2008)

2011-10-10T16:45:00.000+01:00

Body of Lies is Scott's sixth film since 2000's Gladiator, and while a slight improvement on the others, could still have been turned out by his hack brother Tony. It basically presents itself as a thriller for the geopolitical world of the 21st century as Leonardo DiCaprio runs around the Middle East getting into all sorts of intrigues while being double-dealt by Russell Crowe as his Washington boss. Hence, there are a lot of terse phone conversations and abductions, and Leo even utters a few words of Arabic for authenticity. But there's no depth to the set-up, and with all the old racial stereotypes in attendance, it's no more credible than a Bond film. It does manage to be less entertaining, though.

4/10

The Green Hornet (Michel Gondry, 2011)

2011-10-10T16:25:00.000+01:00

It now seems to be required of not only all actors but also directors, irrespective of background, to make at least one superhero or action film, and whilst Gondry, having displayed a predilection for the fantastical on several occasions, is not as baffling a choice as Branagh for Thor, it's still disappointing to find him helming an adaptation of the second-rate character The Green Hornet, who is a sort of poor man's Batman. When the viewer is then saddled with the charmless Seth Rogen as the hero, who seems to mistake acting like a prick for raffishness, the signs are not good. Car chases, unimaginative shoot-ups, excruciating banter and painfully production-line plot developments are far too much for a paycheque-motivated Christophe Waltz's quirky villain to counterbalance.

3/10

L'empreinte de l'ange (Safy Nebbou, 2008)

2011-10-10T15:34:00.001+01:00

Purportedly based on real events, Mark of an Angel presents Catherine Frot as a mother still unable to come to terms with the loss of her first child seven years previously, facing imminent divorce and estrangement from her son. The situation is exacerbated when she becomes fixated with the sister of one of her son's friends, convinced that the girl is her lost daughter.
From there the film moves into stalker territory, with Frot going further and further off the rails in her insistence on her seemingly impossible conviction, and this is relatively compelling in the way that watching a car crash might be. Unfortunately, the plot itself suddenly crashes too.

4/10

Mammuth (Gustave de Kervern & Benoît Delépine, 2010)

2011-10-10T15:29:00.002+01:00

The French duo de Kervern and Delépine, makers of hand-to-mouth budget black comedies laced with social comment, occupy a niche between Aki Kaurismäki and Shane Meadows. Their downtrodden characters stumble through life's inequities with a laconic sense of resignation, but also with an undeniable humanity. However, thus far their efforts have fallen short of the best of either of their predecessors' peaks, uncertain whether to go all-out for gallows laughs, being tied down by their wish to be seriously political at the same time.
Mammuth promises to go one better, with Gerard Depardieu, more corpulent than ever, playing a slaughterhouse worker finding himself at a loss upon retirement, and forced by his wife to go on a road trip to retrieve vital documentation from former employers to ensure his pension. Depardieu is a predictably perfect fit for the role, filling the screen in every way, and has some marvellously irascible moments. But then the film once again goes astray as the makers try to engineer a sort of hippyish spiritual rebirth for him, which feels forced. The curmudgeon was much more fun.

5/10

Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011)

2011-10-10T13:27:00.001+01:00

Moon director 'son of Bowie' Jones's second at the very at least shows that he won't have a problem getting out of his father's shadow. Source Code may be an actioner, but it's a gratifyingly thoughtful one, as Jake Gyllenhaal, no doubt cast with his haunted breakthrough role in Donnie Darko in mind, wakes up on a train stuck in someone else's body, with eight minutes to live before the train blows up.
The strand that links this with Jones's debut may not immediately be apparent until a sense of existential dread sinks in, with Gyllenhaal forced to relive the same eight minutes over and over, tasked not with altering events - which he finds with increasing despair he's powerless to do - but merely finding out the why behind it all. This gives a film otherwise threatened with being just a rollercoaster composite of its many sources real philosophical clout.

7/10

Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2010)

2011-09-05T13:51:00.001+01:00

Iñárritu's fourth feature moves from the spliced-up multiple-story patchworks that constituted Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel to zero in on a single dad grifting and scrabbling to stay above water in Barcelona. Iñárritu still can't resist a framing device for the main story that only loses its opacity in the coda, but it doesn't appear forced this time, and comes rather as a gratification, unlike a good chunk of the channel-surfing of Babel in particular. And sticking to a single location pays off too: the weight of the drowning man's burden is made all the more solid with an inability to flee from a fixed round of preset haunts. The one time there is a diversion, with a phantasmagorical nightclub scene, it's only to underline the character's brief escape from reality.
It is almost unrelentingly bleak, with the protagonist battered by a succession of blows, not least his terminal cancer, and one real criticism that can be levelled against the film is Iñárritu's apparent determination to keep kicking the man when he's already down just so the audience fully gets how grim some people's lives are. Without the frankly stupendous Javier Bardem in the role, infusing a lost everyman with a desperate spirituality in a quest to put his house in order, the director probably wouldn't have pulled it off. With him in it, the centre holds.

7/10

Soldier (Paul W.S. Anderson, 1998)

2011-09-04T20:31:00.001+01:00

In a standard-issue future dystopia, emotionless purpose-bred supersoldiers are sent out to do a fascistically bent state's dirty work until one falls out of favour, suffering angsty flashbacks of his denied humanity, and becomes the new prey of the rank-and-file.
In other words, Anderson and screenwriter David Webb Peoples had a nerve making this, even with the excuse that they'd be able to improve on Universal Soldier. This they do marginally, with a broodier atmosphere and less execrable dialogue, but it's hardly a Nobel-prize winning achievement from the director of Event Horizon and writer of Blade Runner. Ok, the middling former was undoubtedly the Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil culprit Anderson's career highlight, but Peoples should have resisted the urge of the wads offered to churn out what he claims is a 'sidequel' to his own highlight script. And surely do more than just chuck in nerdy references to everything sci-fi, starting of course with alternatingly constipated and weepy lead Kurt Russell's film career, but even getting round to a The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy one tucked in the corner of a computer screen, FFS.

3/10

Team America: World Police (Trey Parker, 2004)

2011-08-31T14:54:00.000+01:00

Apparently this is rated highly as a comedy film. Seriously though, if you set out to offend everybody from Muslims, homosexuals, the French, the American left, actors who feel the need to use their profile to act conscientiously, Koreans, the makers of the Thunderbirds series, the United Nations, the U.S. intelligence service and your own popcorn-guzzling audience, you'd better be sharper than a surgical scalpel.
Team America is blunter than a dessert spoon and contains only three workable jokes in an agonisingly long hour and a half. It defends what it pretends to satirise, i.e. U.S. foreign intervention, it rides on what it calls cheese and takes great delight in butchering well-intentioned naysayers. It's asking you to participate in fratboys farting in each other's faces for kicks. Thank God it tanked, and if you got anything out of this you have quite serious problems.

2/10

Hobo with a Shotgun (Jason Eisener, 2011)

2011-08-31T14:32:00.000+01:00

Well, you can't accuse this of false advertising, can you? But you can accuse Rutger Hauer, one of the most commanding screen actors of his generation, of doing absolutely anything it'll take to get up our noses. After a spate of outstanding performances in middling Dutch films and then crashlanding in Hollywood with probably one of the most complex villain portrayals ever seen in Blade Runner, the world was his oyster. What he did with it was a succession of bit parts in blockbusters and leads in mostly featureless action B-movies, and this Canadian grindhouse-cash-in has to be a wilful finger to anyone still trying to make an A-lister out of him. It's not that surprising, given that he turned up for the Blade Runner casting for the uberman destroyer role in a pink sweatshirt just to jerk Ridley Scott's chain, all of 30 years ago.
Of course he gives the part of a hobo turned vigilante his all, as always, and you'll watch it just for him, which is just as well because the film itself is completely meritless. The fetishised gore is neither inventive nor well executed, the dystopian setting and bad guys painfully flimsy and even the action violence is devoid of any internal logic, never mind the slapped-on human interest bit. Even the cinematography is inadequate, hiding behind lack of budget and a retro 'In Technicolor' in the opening credits as successfully as Wile. E. Coyote behind a skinny birch.
You just hope against hope that when he hits his seventies someone will offer Hauer the equivalent of Jean-Louis Trintignant's effective swansong in Three Colours: Red and that he'll actually take it.

3/10

The Stepford Wives (Frank Oz, 2004)

2011-08-30T00:49:00.000+01:00

Oh, Mr Oz, voice of Yoda, why so little shame have you? Granted, Hollywood has eviscerated enough genuine classics in its relentlessly priapic remake mania that defiling a merely efficient chiller from the seventies may seem a trivial crime by now, but it's the utterly systematic nature of the gutting performed here that really impresses and sets the film apart. All air of menace is lost in the translation of the basic plot into what the director imagines is actually functional as black comedy, but that's small potatoes compared to the braindeadness of the thought process behind the politics of the film. Whereas Katharine Ross in the original was a gutsy free spirit threatened by still extant residues of a suffocating 1950s conservatism, and the men pathetically threatened country clubbers of a real dying era, here Nicole Kidman starts out as a soulless TV exec and we're somehow meant to feel for her just as a strong woman, regardless of her own vapidity. And conversely, compounding the mess, the forces of sinister conformity opposing her have remained totally unchanged from their '50s pastel homemaker models and so make no sense at all in a modern context.
Finally, as a coup de grace, Oz even cuts off the balls of the gratifyingly chilling ending of the 1975 film with a twist just for the sake of a twist, as Burton did with Planet of the Apes, so as to feebly try to dupe the viewer into thinking there was some added value in their remake after all.
God knows Kidman, Midler and Walken have all been guilty on numerous occasions of crimes against principle and intellect with their role choices. When even they're unhappy with what they've been party to, we really are up the creek.

2/10

Donkey Punch (Oliver Blackburn, 2008)

2011-08-27T11:15:00.000+01:00

You might call this low-budget Britflick a cautionary tale for the E-d up Ibiza generation. Alternatively, it's just another carbon copy of any other schlocker in which a bunch of young morons hedonise away until it all goes sour and turns into dog-eat-dog. And then there were none.
Blackburn's debut covers its bases against charges of implausibility of motive by having its characters stoked to the gills on pills and gives the viewer licence to moralise by making nearly all of them both amoral and unlikable. Unfortunately this also means that, when they start knocking each other off on their purloined pleasure boat with escalating levels of gore, you're hard pushed to care one jot.

4/10

Push (Paul McGuigan, 2009)

2011-08-25T18:27:00.001+01:00

The costumed superhero genre may eventually wind down with the whimper of derivatives and sequels, but the enduring success of TV series such as Misfits or Heroes proves the idea of any old Joe discovering out of the blue that they have cool powers will be far harder to kill off. Hence Push, in which The Division (read 'The Man') is hunting down assorted precogs, telekinetics, telepaths and the like for the usual nefarious purposes.
It's hardly inspired stuff, but surprisingly well executed, without an excess of showy FX until the finale, at least half an intent to stick to its own world's physical laws and a merciful minimum of 'Wow! Did they just do that?' reaction shots. The Hong Kong location makes a nice change from the usual U.S. product too. Complete fluff, of course, but daft harmless fun all the same, until it becomes depressingly obvious that we have just another franchise-launcher on our hands.

4/10

Der Tunnel (Roland Suso Richter, 2001)

2011-08-24T12:59:00.000+01:00

You would think that the story of a former East German swimming champion who escapes to the West as The Wall is going up, and then takes it upon himself to bring out as many of his captive countrymen as possible with an ambitious tunnel-digging scheme, would require little dramatic embellishment. All the requisite elements are already in place, after all: absolute moral imperatives, the fear of betrayal, an unambiguous oppressor and the prospect of freedom as reward.
A pity, then, that Richter's film is a hack-job: it simplifies the bad guys, improbably collates and compresses its plot milestones and turns a desirable verisimilitude of events into cartoonish hokum. None of which, you might say, is exactly uncommon in the documentary facsimile field. But it really wasn't needed here.

4/10

Battle: Los Angeles (Jonathan Liebesman, 2011)

2011-08-23T16:45:00.002+01:00

The American public's appetite for gung-ho military porn has become deeply frustrated with the lack of a decent enemy to fight on a traditional battlefield, with those cowardly terrorists choosing to hide in holes instead of submitting to duking it out mano-a-mano. So they're now having to invent opponents, and alien invasion is the option of last resort.
It's still depressing, though, to come across a dollar mountain burner that makes Independence Day look like a paragon of feasibility and subtlety. Naturally, you expect the platoon of tokenistically multiethnic grunts to go tortuously through the lock'n'loady motions and male bonding exercises, but there's an unforgivable absence of any tension in the interminable demolition by meaty munitions of piles of concrete, cars and hopelessly unimaginative CGI monsters. And even the strategic aspects of the battle hit new peaks of illogicality, with the Transformer/Predator-lite bogeymen for some unfathomable reason choosing to engage our brave heroes on the ground like insurgents instead of using just a smidgeon of whatever technology might have actually got them here in the first place.
It's not good when you start giving consideration to the campness of the execrable Battlefield Earth in comparison to the square-jawed humourlessness on display here. It's staggeringly dull.

3/10

The Bridges of Madison County (Clint Eastwood, 1995)

2011-08-21T17:55:00.000+01:00

Meryl Streep gets to essay another accent as an Italian housewife with unfulfilled dreams, cooped up on a farm in 1960s Iowa. Clint Eastwood, meanwhile, gets to move decisively away from Magnums and orang-utans as the world-worn but poetic photographer who comes into her life for four days and changes it forever.
The soulful stranger who sweeps you off your feet is the mainstay of chick-flicks, of course, but there is a lot more to this film, at least in the first half as their relationship develops. Streep and Eastwood have an easy familiarity and the dialogue is similarly unforced, making for an affecting whole.
Later on, as is Eastwood's regular fallibility when he helms, the transition into the aftermath drags under an overly reverential air, and could probably have done with having half an hour lopped off. Still, a wistful charm aids it to amble over the finishing line without stretching patience.

7/10

Sin Nombre (Cary Fukunaga, 2009)

2011-08-21T16:28:00.001+01:00

In Mexico, two boys got through a violent initiation rite into a gang. Meanwhile, a family leaves their home in Honduras to head for the U.S. border and an imagined better life.
Fukunaga's film doesn't bring anything new per se to the ever-growing illegal immigration quasi-documentary genre, but it is unflinching in its expose of fragile hopes in the face of the characters' brutal reality, and this includes a refusal to romanticise the subject. There's scant soundtrack or dramatisation because there's no poetry in being downtrodden, Fukunaga seems to want to drill home. Not a radical refrain, then, but still a potent one and effectively delivered.

6/10

Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie, 2007)

2011-08-21T15:48:00.000+01:00

Ryan Gosling plays a socially maladroit man who lives alone with only his brother and sister-in-law as visitors when they make attempts to draw him out of his shell. Then, one day, things finally seem to be looking up when he announces that he has met someone on the Internet. It proves a false dawn, though, when this is revealed to be an anatomically accurate bespoke doll.
Gosling is a fine actor, capable of investing his maladjusted characters with genuine pathos. Still, here he has an uphill struggle: it never ceases to exasperate how U.S. audiences and filmmakers in 'gentle' leftfield dramas such as this are so sold on the proposition that a bag of personal eccentricities and their improbable indulgence amount to a meaningful statement on life's rich tapestry. The fact that the town colludes in Lars's delusion is not evidence of tolerance, but just pure wish-fulfilment on the part of the director, on a par with the protagonist's dream relationship.
Still, it's hard to get angry about a film that at least has its heart in the right place, and some of the turns by which Lars maintains the integrity of his mental concoction are neatly crafted.

5/10

It's a Wonderful Afterlife (Gurinder Chadha, 2010)

2011-08-21T14:29:00.000+01:00

Since Bend It Like Beckham, Chadha has continued to live on its dividends with changes of setting failing to disguise that she's churning out the same romcom. Granted, here the mother obsessed with seeing her chubby daughter respectably married off has also turned into a serial killer who has knocked off anyone slighting her progeny, but it's still Southall and the perennial British Asian comedy's or drama's fixation with the expectations of parents from the old country versus the next generation's desire for independence. The record really needs changing: by now all bases have been covered and these directors aren't doing their community any favours.
That said, Chadha could probably have earned a reprieve if the horror comedy within, with the mother's limbo-trapped victims hounding her as a pack, had been either original or funny. But it struggles to manage more than hackneyed throughout.

4/10

Pranzo di Ferragosto (Gianni Di Grigorio, 2008)

2011-08-21T13:50:00.000+01:00

Mid-August Lunch, Di Grigorio's debut feature well into middle age, has the director more or less playing himself as he potters about trying to cater for the needs of a home invasion of babbling grannies when he already feels swamped by his nonagenarian mother alone. He turns to frequent liquid refreshment for refuge but there's no getting away from his sprightly housepests.
Nothing of great dramatic import occurs thereafter, but the pleasure of the film is just in its unhurried pace married to a lightly comic and empathetic observation of the mundane foibles and tribulations of real life.

7/10

Un Secret (Claude Miller, 2007)

2011-08-16T20:25:00.002+01:00

What really works for this real-life-based dissection of a family history on The Holocaust is the focus on the survivors. For a long spell, we're not aware it's to do with the war at all, or Jews, or even the past. An onion is peeled down layer by layer until the heart is finally reached.

What works less well is the superimposition of the modern era framing device - we don't need to see the repercussions to an adult if his past is engraved with such attention. But that's a small quibble, alongside the stretching of characters' ages so the lead's father looks the same in 1962 as he did in 1936: Un Secret manages to bring a life history of an over-visited period alive with a force that documentaries often fall short of. None of the characters are just victims, devils or saints, but fully rounded people.

7/10

A Guide to Recognising Your Saints (Dito Montiel, 2006)

2011-08-15T17:52:00.001+01:00

You can't knock this semi-autobiographical piece on the director's own youth in a Queens ghetto for lack of sincerity, and it's well acted too, with even the inexplicably popular Shia LaBeouf as the young protagonist not proving a hindrance for once.
But 'telling it like it is' can only get you so far. The young Montiel's gormless friends and self-deluding family are even more inarticulate than he is, and unlike in the well-worn genre's better specimens such as Boyz n the Hood there are no moments of catharsis or rough poetry to latch on to. Some die, some go to jail, and the central character does a runner and then mulls over whatever it meant to him years later, now in the form of the underused Robert Downey Jr. It's not a bad film, just of little original interest to a wider world.

5/10

Glorious 39 (Stephen Poliakoff, 2009)

2011-08-15T10:46:00.000+01:00

When a heavyweight playwright directs, you can prepare to make allowances for the cinematic side, but the script really has to be watertight. Glorious 39 does the opposite, and it's infuriating. Romola Garai does fine as the adopted scion of a posh MP, growing hysterical about dark dealings in the summer of 1939 as the rumble of approaching war grows harder to ignore, and she's supported by a cast fit for the purpose.
But Poliakoff just doesn't have an adequate command of historical detail, in particular the feasibility of the appeasement conspiracy main plot, and this seems to unbalance the rest of the tone as well, which ends up as supernatural horror instead of the disturbing thriller he must have been aiming for. Narrative improbabilities pile up at an alarming rate and thus the political point, which seems to be about the evils of preserving the status quo at all costs, is lost in the pandemonium.

4/10