I'm Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)

Haynes's film on Bob Dylan is more an impressionistic portrait than a biopic. As such, it requires the viewer to buy into the director's assertion that Dylan is too elusive and multi-faceted as a persona to be presented as simply a single character. Without following Haynes on this, digesting six different actors representing phases in the troubadour's life, under even more aliases, is hard work.
The heavy use of Dylan's songs throughout facilitates this accommodation a great deal: rarely does a soundtrack support the actual structure of the film in this way. The lyrics, working in juxtaposition with contemporary newsreel footage, constantly send trains of thought down new tracks, which in turn justifies the sudden leaps in scene or characterisation. This mostly works to good effect, until a gnawing feeling arises that nothing except Vietnam and civil rights marches actually took place in the whole era covered.
As for the performances, the stand-out one is, predictably, Cate Blanchett's much-vaunted turn as the snotty '65-'66 period Dylan, all jittery railing at convention, and just about staying on the right side of parody, probably because that Dylan was the closest to a parody anyway.
Overall, an honourable stab at breathing new life into a subject in danger of becoming fossilised by popular veneration.

7/10

Ondskan (Mikael Håfström, 2003)

While Evil's theme of bullying at school may be commonplace, its setting of a Swedish boarding school in the 1950s lends the topic a wider scope of interest. As much as Andreas Wilson's young individualist, Erik, is assailed from all sides by the powers-that-be, whether his sadistic father at home or the tyrannical class-system enforcing council of head boys at the school, we're determinedly spared the likes of either Bergman's philosophical resignation to the brutality or Von Trier's typical redoubling of the torment. Håfström is uninterested in victims, and more in Hollywood-friendly revenge, and this is what Erik methodically carries out, with righteous fury. This might be cloying if Wilson's performance wasn't so singular in its brooding, isolated intensity, and despite the script scampering a little too frantically to right all wrongs at the end, it's difficult to feel cheated.

6/10

The Human Stain (Robert Benton, 2003)

Based on Philip Roth's novel on the significance of racial identity, the story here is of the life of a mixed-race academic, Coleman Silk, who chooses early on to pass for white because he can, and the damage this eventually causes to his sense of self.
Benton's adaptation, while sensitive to the source material, is also frequently too faithful in terms of having characters voice overly formulated and insightful dialogue on their situation. This works better in print, where part of the tone can be attributed to the novelist articulating the characters' interior monologues at the same time, and the reader has time to dwell on each line. But cinema demands more naturalistic dialogue for characters to be credible, and while credibility may not matter a great deal in slasher films or screwball farces, social analysis depends on believable personae to have any meaning at all. This error is compounded by the careless casting of two blatantly white-looking actors as the lead character at different ages (it is irrelevant that Wentworth Miller, as the younger Silk, is actually of a multi-racial background; what matters is what rings true on screen). Doubtless the lure of having Anthony Hopkins in the lead role overwhelmed such compunctions, and he does bring his customary terse immediacy to bear. He really could have bothered more with the accent, though. And any scene where a man tells his lover to dance for him is never sexy, only ludicrous, and casts doubt on the sensibilities of the director responsible. Roth's ideas deserved better.

5/10

The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999)

It was appropriate, I suppose, to cast two aging emblems of the 60s cinema counter-culture in what is essentially Soderbergh's take on the revenge thriller in the style of Point Blank, John Boorman's ultra-hardnosed classic of the genre from 1967, in which Lee Marvin bludgeons his way through to remorseless retribution. Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda clearly enjoy hamming up their respective typecasting as a rough East End lifer and a millionaire Hollywood hippie, which is regrettable as both parts are so thinly written. Stamp quite bizarrely reveals himself unable to do an actual cockney accent or bother with his script enough to weed out its Americanisms. Fonda, meanwhile, seems to be recycling his Easy Rider layabout.
Any Soderbergh film will always contain at least a smattering of choice dialogue and punchy editing. Certainly, the comedy angle of the film, with Stamp spouting rhyming slang to the bewilderment of all and sundry, works far more effectively than the fragmented flashbacks advancing the actual plot, aiming rather uncertainly for an elegiac tone and missing the mark in the end.

5/10

Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007)

This reviewer grew up on classic pre-70s Disney and is therefore deeply wary of anything produced thereafter as anything other than a singalong merchandising weapon of mass destruction aimed at the minds of our kids, a la The Lion King, The Little Mermaid et al. This reviewer also found himself thoroughly captivated by The Incredibles, and taken aback to have the same happen again, within minutes of immersion into this tale of the rat who becomes the greatest chef in the land.
Like with Bird's previous feature, the well-worn cliche of a cartoon appealing to children and adults alike holds true here, and exceeds the formula of that cliche, i.e. that the animation is the bit for the kids, and the wit of the script is to keep the parents happy. The animation is vivid, imaginative and lovingly crafted, with enough trick-shotery to keep the adult cinephile constantly on their toes. The plot, likewise, is primary-coloured and easy to follow, but peppered with a delicious range of asides and grotesques, which keep it anchored enough in reality to work as satire. This is no mean feat, but then Bird does have The Simpsons on his CV. Enough said.

8/10

Seraphim Falls (David Von Ancken, 2006)

Pierce Brosnan. Liam Neeson. Big beards. The Rockies. Surely nothing can go wrong...
This revenge western starts with a shot and then the protagonists don't stop running and riding for the next two hours, though you'll be wishing for your dear life that they would.
It would be pointless to start cataloguing the dozens of points at which the viewer is asked to provide a helping hand to a plot which actually becomes amusing in its cack-handedness, stumbling from one implausibility to the next. Not that this would matter so much if there was actually a point to any of it, besides showing us a fair percentage of the land area of the western States in handsome pans. Belatedly, after a succession of hope-dashing false denouements, Von Ancken decides to wedge in some ridiculous allegorical figures (yes, Anjelica Huston does turn up eventually, albeit long after the whole shebang has already turned into a cartoon) and thereby sloppily paste on the moral of the story. But what do I know.

3/10

Tideland (Terry Gilliam, 2005)

We're back in the wacky world of Uncle Terry, where no shot can be left untilted, and all characters are contractually bound to be on looney overdrive throughout. This has worked to quite wondrous effect on occasion for Gilliam, notably in Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where it served as an apt delivery system for the visions of, respectively, an oppressive dystopia, a compulsive fantasist and the paranoid bender to end all benders. Here, however, it merely becomes irritating before long, much like a rollercoaster-and-candy floss combination the third time around. The grim subject matter of Jeliza-Rose, a girl orphaned by parental drug abuse, is given an arrestingly fresh spin, but the film's retreat with her into the cocoon of her fantasies is such a complete withdrawal from the horrific reality of the situation that after a while it's difficult to care deeply about the impregnable protagonist in her twittering armour. This is a pity, as Jodelle Ferland's performance in the role is breath-takingly assured, so much that one worries for her future, considering what the Hollywood system routinely does to its child stars.

5/10

Auf der Anderen Seite (Fatih Akin, 2007)

Released in the English market as The Edge of Heaven, this examination of lives straddling the barbed fence between the EU and non-EU worlds, here Germany and Turkey, rarely goes for pat answers in either characterisation or plot.
The film opens in Bremen with a widowed immigrant's offer to a compatriot prostitute to share his loneliness. Their respective situations are neither sentimentalised nor overly bleakened. Throughout, the film benefits from a matter-of-fact approach to the admittedly over-familiar subject matter, which allows the central concerns of the director - split cultural identity, the attachment between people, and the iniquity of systems which hinder these attachments - to come crisply through the simple interplay of situations with the characters' desires.
Akin's script treads the tightrope between moralising and reportage with an assured style, somewhat reminiscent of Michael Winterbottom's, and serves up perhaps its greatest rewards in its depictions of how people deal with personal loss.

8/10

The Good Shepherd (Robert De Niro, 2006)

Superficially a potted history of the background to the formation of the CIA, De Niro's second stab at directing gives us instead the story of a single cipher-like figure at the heart of the process. Matt Damon's Edward Wilson moves up the ranks from post-war Berlin to the Bay of Pigs debacle at a stolidly conscientious pace, his devotion to his country more a matter of keeping his word than a product of patriotism. The character forms scant human attachments along the way and Angelina Jolie's incredulous and then despairing wife is hardly required to hammer home the point that Wilson is basically a blank space, a compliant cog in the superpowers' spy game intrigues. And therein lies the problem: it's ultimately hard to care about Wilson, the focus of the film, with his passionless and inexpressive self-denial, and harder still for De Niro to justify dragging the telling out to nearly 3 hours. Sure, abundant cameo spotting opportunities and Robert Richardson's frequently sumptuous photography help to pass the time on the way, and the modish disorientation caused by the rarely signposted jumping back and forth in time is diverting, but at the end one is left feeling as empty as the net result of Wilson's accomplishments.

5/10

Pusher 2 (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2004)

We're back amongst the hopeless underworld menagerie established by Refn in 1996, a world where characters lurch from threat to threat, pushed and pulled along by the twin intoxicants of coke and porn. The film's spartan dogme style, all natural light and hand-held camera, never comes across as an affectation or a nagging reminder of budgetary constraints (or indeed the limitations of Refn himself, who admitted last time round that scenes were shot in the order they appeared in the end product because to do otherwise would have confused him), but rather as the only medium suitable for the fragile and desperate predicament of the characters.
Modern Tarantino-aping British crime cinema, even when it seeks it, rarely achieves this level of truthfulness or immediacy: the sex and violence depicted are stark, flailing and stripped of all glamour, the principal players downright ugly. Mads Mikkelsen, later to get his share of the big bucks as the villain Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, is simply astonishingly compelling as the no-hoper Tonny, who stumbles and bluffs his way in the world outside prison to an epiphany of sorts.

8/10

Man on the Moon (Milos Forman, 1999)

America has a way of lionising as visionaries unconventional figures who cannot be neatly categorised, and this biopic of Andy Kaufman, chiefly known outside the States for his turn as the comedy foreigner Latka in the long-running sitcom Taxi, is a case in point. Jim Carrey's portrayal of his hero, more a self-professed performance artist than a comedian, is fine as a dramatic performance, inhabiting his subject's skin so tightly that one forgets Carrey's own gurns and can readily accept them as the protagonist's very own.
The problem is rather one of why, rather than what or how this is done. The film requires engagement with a figure who achieved national popularity for lowest-common denominator comedy with silly voices (and Carrey is therefore on autopilot here), and respect for Kaufman's real concern, which was a kind of Dadaist reimagining of what a stand-up comic was actually on stage to do. Much like Andy Warhol's soup tins or the anti-melodic assault of the first punk bands, the raison d'etre of Kaufman's deliberately inept mimes or unfunny jokes is gone after their first rendering. Meanwhile, Forman continually turns to audience reaction shots, ranging from incomprehension to disdain to fury at the audacity of the anti-entertainment before them. The director's intention here seems to be to goad the viewer to recognise his subject's genius, for fear of the alternative: being one of the bewildered or outraged audience members on screen; a hick at best.
Kaufman may have deserved better, but Forman's railroading of the viewer's responses doesn't allow us to see what that might have been.

4/10

Thank You for Smoking (Jason Reitman, 2005)

Given the subject matter of the disingenuous propaganda disseminated by the tobacco industry, it comes as a real revelation to find instead of, say, a retake on The Insider, a verbally adroit defence of marketing as much as of anything. Why? Because while it may not be big, it's clever. Aaron Eckhart's slick anti-hero simply dances smoke rings around his plodding opposition. Reitman & co. doubtless draw hostile fire in abundance for having had the gall to not only make us root for an amoral git constantly looking to get the kids hooked on death sticks, but even neglecting to include pat moralising as a counter-balance. This is not to say that The Man gets away scot-free, but that the film's makers have merely decided to avoid the usual knee-jerk stimuli associated with the topic of big tobacco and thereby allowed the satire to breathe. A genuine if guilty delight - much like cigarettes, in fact.

8/10

Mary Reilly (Stephen Frears, 1996)

Doubtless it delighted some to find a take on the Jekyll-and-Hyde story from the perspective of a maidservant. Sadly, there the novelty ends.
We're back in good old murderous, noxious Victorian Britain Town (here, intended to be Edinburgh), mostly rendered lifelessly within a single recreated block at Pinewood, which doubtless beats those unauthentic locations in foreign parts like Prague that at least gave films like From Hell, for all its other faults, a headstart on atmosphere. Insert a goodly scattering of big names with various approaches to the thorny issue of accent: Julia Roberts as the title character manages a generic Irish mumble which is dropped when more articulation is required, whereas Glenn Close's brothel-madame cameo opts for Katherine Hepburn after a fight in a gin-palace. Perhaps wisely, John Malkovich doesn't bother at all as the troubled doctor, nor does he think it necessary to depict more than Valmont's cruder cousin as the doctor's alter-ego, who doesn't even credibly scare the bejesus out of Roberts's rabbit in the headlights.
On the side, you always expect Timothy Spall or Jim Broadbent to be lurking in the wings in these films. Here we get Michael Gambon and Michael Sheen instead.
Married to the flat TV photograhy, the LSO widdles gamely along as incessantly as if we were dealing with a silent film. As is usually the case, such Wurlitzery over-compensation cannot hide a script wholly lacking in insight, for all that the new angle adopted might promise.

3/10

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, 2008)

Allen rouses hopeful murmurs of a return to form with this largely inoffensive piece of fluff, featuring his current flavour of the month in the shape of Scarlett Johansson.
Financed in part by the city of Barcelona, the film amply repays their investment with a seemly travelogue of Gaudis and Ramblas. This is overlaid with a floating narrator, presumably purporting to be faux-naif and sardonic in the style of John Hurt's weighty tones from Lars von Trier's Dogville and Manderlay, but frequently ending up coming across as merely gormless and therefore not acting as a sufficient counterpoint to the impressionability of the two American leads, led along by Javier Bardem's languid libertine.
What we have on display here is familiar territory, with sensuous, unstable, wordly Europeans pulling orderly, conservative Americans in their tow. Allen may stay behind the camera for once, but is sure to project himself into the characters of - as his alter ego - Rebecca Hall's nervy and nebbish Vicky, and, as a wish-fulfilment exercise, Bardem's all-conquering Juan Antonio. We sail sleepily and pleasantly through Allen's usual landscape of inexplicably wealthy creative thinkers until Penelope Cruz enters and finally shakes up the torpor with an abrasive and pyrotechnic turn as Juan Antonio's suicidal ex-wife, albeit also as a broad stereotype of the hysterically passionate Latin.
Still, the characters remain likeable and the pattest of conclusions are avoided. Viewers fearing a repeat of the pontificating triteness of Whit Stillman's Barcelona (1994) may end up breathing a sigh of relief.

6/10