The People vs. Larry Flynt (Miloš Forman, 1996)

Forman has always been drawn to free spirits and outsiders in his biopics, from Amadeus to Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon, but one also can go back further for this to fictitional representations such as R.P. McMurphy in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Here, the re-invention of America's self-appointed pornographer-in-chief, Flynt, as a figurehead in the fight for free speech is a potentially far pricklier take on essentially the same subject matter.
What saves the cause Forman wishes to present is a combination of the casting of the ever-folksy Woody Harrelson in the lead role, whose assured performance turns the real life Flynt's potentially unpalatable inconsistency and truculence into a display of compelling self-conviction, and an easily achievable cartoonisation of the already parodic scenes in Flynt's life story. The handling of his struggles with the authorities lends itself readily to comedy since they were already so polarised; confrontations between a basic civil right and the stolid apparatus that sought to suppress it. Whether any of this faithfully represents Flynt as a real person is by-the-by: it works as drama and in that sense his story has been pressganged to serve a wider point.

7/10

Shoot 'Em Up (Michael Davis, 2007)

Some would dignify boys' own 90-mile-an-hour slaughterfests like this as homages to John Woo and bandy about adjectives like 'balletic' (without personally having any regard for actual ballet, of course). This is plainly foolish: it does however do exactly what it says on the tin, and far more gratifyingly and honestly than the likes of Live Free or Die Hard, which made the fatal twin errors of bothering to pretend it had a plot while being too insecure to revel in its preposterous stupidity.
Clive Owen plays a good man with a gun, basically Dwight from Sin City again. Monica Bellucci is a tart with a heart. Paul Giamatti is a bad man with a gun. All three get a bagful of droll graveyard-humour lines to dip into during the very brief respites in the shooting, and Giamatti's tend to be the best since irredeemable villains always get to have the most fun. It's all so cheerfully tasteless it's impossible to feel insulted. Something to tide one over until Crank: High Voltage comes out, anyway.

5/10

La Zona (Rodrigo Pla, 2007)

The 'Zona' in question is a walled residential compound in Mexico, surrounded by a sea of slums, which is briefly breached by three delinquents during a power cut. Panicked violence ensues, and the residents take it upon themselves to resist police intrusion and hunt down the one surviving intruder.
Pla's debut feature is a cautionary tale that at first may appear to resonate little to Europeans unaccustomed as yet to the gradual creep of US-style self-policing fortresses for the middle class. But the impulses that drive communities to seek to protect what they have hoarded, and the paranoid vigilantism that the residents degenerate into, are all too familiar from any hysterical herd reaction in our societies, whether the threat be the neighbourhood paedophile or the vague menace of terrorism.
Nihilism is always on the horizon here and Pla paints his scenario in broad brushstrokes with archetypal characters, but each stroke nevertheless feels plausible.

6/10

Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2008)

Since 2004's leftfield hit Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, former pop video director Gondry has spun around the theme of the power and fallibility of consciousness and memory in ever-decreasing circles, through La Science des Rêves, which saw Gael Garcia Bernal flit between waking dream and dream-like reality, to this slight tale.
Jack Black and Mos Def play chumps left in charge of a fading video store who somehow contrive to accidentally erase all their stock, and then set about remaking each film guerilla-style, to a wholly unfeasible and presumably intendedly life-affirming groundswell of community support for their hare-brained undertaking. The concept is strong enough, but the execution is as flimsy as the 20-minute botch-jobs they make of the likes of Ghostbusters, and it all really hinges far too heavily on the viewer's unquestioning devotion to Black's usual unlovable mugging of screentime with his array of arched smirks and wacky voices.

4/10

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Martin Ritt, 1965)

This Cold War spy classic sticks like glue to the plot of Le Carré's novel, and in doing so wisely retains the choicest of the searingly cynical dialogue as Richard Burton's wearied sham defector lays out the facts of life to Claire Bloom's innocent caught in the crossfire, or to Oskar Werner's ideologist on the other side of the fence.
Le Carré's vision of the sordid, murky reality of the hidden conflict between East and West, beyond political ideology, must have come not a moment too soon to an audience in danger of being thoroughly drugged and seduced by the arrival of Bond's glamorous superspy. The decision here to go with black and white when it was already becoming extinct makes perfect sense: it complements the dirtiness and bleakness of the game played out between pawns and those yet to realise they're also pawns. And, at the centre, Richard Burton is simply perfect casting as an emotionally scarred pragmatist, only concerned with damage limitation, yet burning with a fierce morality despite it all.

8/10

Los Cronocrímenes (Nacho Vigalondo, 2007)

The perennial time travel plot in sci-fi involves going back into the past to effect radical changes like killing Hitler or preventing the JFK assassination: big historical events with easy-to-grasp ramifications. This usually also allows for a good deal of expository padding as technobabble, concomitant FX budgets and at least one drawn-out scene of wonderment at the realisation of what has come to pass.
Timecrimes, a low-key Spanish riff on the theme, forgoes all of the above in having a nobody stumble into a personal hell of his own making one afternoon, and set about rectifying matters with a matter-of-fact efficiency that reflects the pared-down structure of the screenplay and rewards any viewer all too familiar with the obligatory quality checkpoints of time travel storylines. It's a breath of fresh air in a genre in danger of going stale.

7/10

Youth Without Youth (Francis Ford Coppola, 2007)

Legendary American directors don't die without first touting their faded wares in Europe, where they know at least the scholarly French will warmly receive them for their past glories. See most blatantly Woody Allen, followed here by Coppola, with a determinedly artful and high-concept history-spanning tale centred on an aged Romanian professor (Tim Roth) struck by lightning in 1938 and subsequently finding himself not only rejuvenated but intellectually supercharged. This then enables him to continue on his meaningful quest for a human proto-language, guided by the reincarnated love of his youth (Der Untergang's naive narrator, Alexandra Maria Lara), who then becomes his muse as she also gets the gift, hers in the form of regression into further and further past lives.
What follows is a bombardment of Roth pontificating in every language under the sun and namedropping a modish spread of philosophical and religious sources to convince us of his erudition, and the story jumping from country to country to convince us of the global reach of its significance. Coppola has effectively gone on a supermarket spree for disparate ideas and tones and this is hammered home in the casting which manages to include several more actors from Der Untergang, including Bruno Ganz burbling on amiably like a Werther's Original granddad as Roth's doctor, not that Roth, reading from autocues between quips, or Lara, offering only beatific or hysterical, fare any better. It all ends up a pretty pseud's mess bewitched by its own sense of profundity. Also see Aronofsky's The Fountain.

5/10

Redacted (Brian De Palma, 2007)

Here, the veteran violence fetishist De Palma puts on his appalled hat to lay down a faux-documentary dramatisation of the Al-Mahmudiyah killings in Iraq.
The medium of choice is a grainy video diary by one of the squad members, interspersed with faceless Al-Qaeda webcast clips and snippets from a mocked-up TV documentary, overladen with portentous music and images. As the title explicitly states, what De Palma is presenting is a redacted, i.e. composite, overview in which all these clashing elements are presumably meant to add up to a balanced whole.
What we get instead is a stew in which all the ingredients are half-baked. The fictionalised plot featuring misguided and brutal GIs is little more than a retread of De Palma's own Casualties of War, right down to pale stand-ins for Sean Penn's xenophobic sociopath and Michael J. Fox's anguished righteous lone voice from that film, but without half of the intensity. As for the Iraqi perspective, it's almost entirely absent, bar one sentimentalised grieving father and a My Lai-style photomontage, not that this comes as any surprise after endless US-centric depictions of Vietnam.
De Palma is so clearly piping up for a worthy cause here in rubbing its more easily encapsulable atrocities in America's face, but with execution this inept he soon found that America's face had chosen to turn to jingoistic actioners like The Kingdom instead. Opportunity missed.

4/10