Duo Luo Tian Shi (Wong Kar-wai, 1995)

Wong Kar-wai's fifth feature, Fallen Angels, picks up from the massive success of the previous year's Chungking Express in mood and theme, reinforcing the continuity by having Takeshi Kaneshiro reprise his character in name and quirkily memorable motif from that film: he has now actually gone mute from eating a tin of pineapples past its sell-by. That this only superficially ties the character to his previous incarnation is in keeping with the mercurial, ephemeral nature of the quintet of the unrequited fallen in this episode. They flutter around each other and Christopher Doyle's hyperreal rain-and-neon Hong Kong like moths, detached yet feeling a longing for something they can't pin down. 

Doyle's camera wheels and tilts as restlessly as the gratingly ADHD women that populate Kar-wai's films and there's a crutch-like reliance on voice-over narrative and a driving soundtrack to pressgang responses. But, out of the stylised sensory overload, real content does emerge unexpectedly and curiously: it leaves emotional echoes like a retinal imprint of fireworks, that linger after the flimsy plot of hawkers and hitmen has been washed away.

6/10

Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008)

Clint has been refining his gruff curmudgeon with a heart of gold screen persona for quite a while now, and here gives us a full helping of nothing but as Walt Kowalski, a widowed Korean war veteran besieged by a whole menagerie of humanity to snarl disbelieving disgust at, from his son's vampirically self-serving family to babbling Orientals, street hoodlums, feckless young people and the presumptiously intrusive naive local priest. This is all well and good, as no-one does a grumpy old sod quite like Clint does, and it works nicely for laughs to line them up and have them knocked down with his Lurch-like groans.

Then, just as in Million Dollar Baby, he's forced to come out of his shell through external circumstance and the persistent attentions of an idealistic youngster, respectively in this case a gang making the mistake of encroaching on his peace and quiet and his Hmong (roughly, Vietnamese) neighbours' perky daughter. So he's reeled in to rejoin the rest of humanity, although the script gamely tries to maintain that he's still the same old git by not letting him ease up on the racial slur overbombing in every other sentence. But then his illness is introduced, there's a flash of the vigilante fury of old and we're well on the way to a certain sticky end.

Frequently, the script can think of no more subtle way to have Walt voice his dismay than talking to himself. Some of the supporting actors seem to have been picked more for their authentic backgrounds than required contribution or ability to act, and the depiction of the punk-ass gang that starts terrorising his neighbours is even more irritatingly cartoonish. But Eastwood is such a natural fit for the elegiac elements of a man reluctantly re-exposing his humanity, and the moments where his spiky bluff is called to comic effect, that it's tempting to forgive a lot of these glaring weaknesses.

6/10

Nói Albínói (Dagur Kári, 2003)

Nói, a 17-year-old hairless albino, has issues with authority in a remote Icelandic town in the shadow of a mountain and immerses himself in fantasies of faraway lands until the arrival of a girl closer to home, in a cafe where he systematically loots the fruit machine on a daily basis.
Kári's best-known film to date really exploits the alien feel of the snowbound landscape, populating it with skewed but good-hearted eccentrics, all accentuating the dissociation felt by its protagonist, whose Martian appearance is complemented by his sardonic intelligence. But at heart he's still a teenager with a teenager's impulses, frustrated at having no clear target to rebel against, lashing out in various aimlessly pathetic ways.
The lifelessly impassive environment, a prison without walls, is used to hold a mirror to his impotence, and so the film's universal theme, albeit a well-worn one, i.e. the oppressive nature of small-town life and the insignificance of the individual, is conveyed effectively to any audience beyond its mere geographical specifics. But because it's also done with a lively wit and a genuine fascination with the minutiae of its characters' doings, that sense of oppression never becomes overwhelming to the observer.

7/10

Efter Brylluppet (Susanne Bier, 2006)

Here, Danish director Susanne Bier turns out another Dogme-inflected ensemble piece on the vagaries of the human heart. Mads Mikkelsen is affectingly vulnerable as a former wastrel who seems to have found a redemptive mission as he returns to Denmark from Mumbai to seek funds for an orphanage, only to find that fate has other plans in store for his emotional centre.

What follows is a sensitive exploration of imperfect people and their conflicting passions. Its fairly standard plot - a father meeting the daughter he never knew he had - is rescued from mediocrity by the performances of Mikkelsen and Rolf Lassgård as his millionaire financier with ulterior motives, and Bier's direction, which, although curiously fond of milking close-ups of people's eyes for all the deeper truth that might be wrung out of them, succeeds in conveying how people really behave when pushed into a corner.

The only real bum note is the sloppily tacked-on (pre-Slumdog) cutesy waifs-in-India subplot, which casts a lingering doubt as to whether Bier was looking for a breakthrough into the realm of the Hollywood zloty along with the Oscar nomination. It worked, anyway - she was directing Halle Berry by the following year.

7/10

Taken (Pierre Morel, 2008)

Continuing in a filmic trend (see Hostel et al.) that's rather too easily attributable to America's current sense of being under siege, Taken cuts the crap of bothering to set the scene of the foreign and dangerous by having a couple of teenage girls abducted into slavery the moment they step off the LAX-Paris flight. Unfortunately one of them has Liam Neeson for a dad, and, wavering accent to the contrary, he's a former U.S. government 'preventer'. All the unshaven Albanian and Iranian rent-a-thugs in Paris have therefore signed their own death warrants in one fell swoop. From there on, Dad alternates between Jason Bourne and The Hulk, cutting a righteously relentless swathe through the hordes standing between him and the 'Daddy, I love you' scene.

There are a few nice touches of spy trickery, but the one gadget the film fails to provide is a bodycount meter in the corner of the screen. Apparently Luc Besson shared scriptwriting duties. Maybe he was the one with the photocopier.

4/10

Kurochka Ryaba (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1994)

Konchalovsky returned to post-Soviet Russia after a drawn-out sojourn in the West, and not a moment too soon, as by that stage he had sunk to directing Stallone and Russell in Tango & Cash. Here, he completes the circle by revisiting the village of Bezvodnoye, the scene of Asya's Happiness, which was banned by the authorities for 20 years for its less than paradisiac perspective on life in Soviet society.
Absence has not made the heart grow fonder. In a blackly satirical dissection of the collision of the capitalist juggernaut with a way of life that the main protagonist, a firebrand peasant also named Asya, describes as being unchanged for a millennium, no stratum of society really escapes unscathed. There's little of the warmth of, say, Kusturica's broadly sketched yokels and opportunists: it's all too close to the bone. Konchalovsky has again used a mostly amateur cast of locals, but now one wonders if they realised what a hatchet job was being done on them. Russia's peasantry are depicted as a gullible, vindictively reactionary mob, ready to follow anyone who'll ply them with enough vodka, and the officials as amorally corrupt. And in the world beyond there are only gangsters.

Konchalovsky occasionally seems to sense that something's not right in the mix, and inserts a moment of comic mania out of the blue, such as a stop-motion chase scene, or Asya's chicken talking back to her, but these feel forced amidst the overall nihilism of the scenario.

5/10

Párpados Azules (Ernesto Contreras, 2007)

This is a sparse little piece centred on two lonely wallflowers in unimportant jobs, unrecognised by their colleagues, unrespected by their few kin, who come together out of a recognition of their shared plight. This pretty much covers what happens. But the amount of time that Contreras gives for his wary characters to let their guards down, and the fearful blankness of their interactions, against which subtle touches such as the defensive spikiness of Cecilia Suárez's Marina stand out, mean that their relationship unfolds unforcedly, organically.

This approach is also parallelled in the visual aspect. It's mostly shot as flatly as a documentary, which makes a few moments when the director really wants the image to do the work with an unexpectedly crafted composition suddenly strike with captivating effect.

It doesn't actually say much in the end. Nevertheless, it's refreshing to come across a film that has the courage to be truthfully small.

7/10

Gwoemul (Bong Joon-ho, 2006)

As in the early movies of Japan's Godzilla franchise, in The Host the monster that emerges out of a river to terrorise the city populace is created as a result of man-made contamination of the environment. But in this Korean take on nature's revenge on mankind, instead of springing on the counteroffensive, the army sits back and declares the river a biological hazard zone, so it's left to the plucky Park family (the choice of the commonplace name underlines the Little Guy vs. The System-aspect of their quandary) to slay the dragon.
The monster, whilst rendered handsomely in slinky CGI, crops up rather too often and in the open to retain any sense of menace, so that the eye's drawn to dissect which cinematic or mythical forebears it's been put together from, and the family's quest takes no particularly novel turns. Nevertheless, a hovering sense of political frustration at circumstances (the Government and its scientists prove to be either inept, corrupt or insensitive in the crisis, and numerous background news reports refer to Big Brother Uncle Sam's taking charge since South Korea's proved incapable of handling the situation), and some striking inky-toned slow-mo photography help to retain the interest.

5/10

Bian Lian (Wu Tianming, 1996)

Tianming has been referred to as 'The Godfather of the Fifth Generation' of mainland Chinese directors, which includes the likes of Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, and if his works may be said to share anything with these two directors, it's a bond of traditional sentimentalism married to social realism - chronologically distanced from the current regime, for obvious reasons.

Here, the bare bones of a Disney-style heartwarmer plot about the travails of a poor street performer (complete with monkey) and the orphan he adopts as his heir and apprentice, are fleshed out with a carefully applied sense of indignation at social injustice, particularly relating to the lot of women in Chinese society, which is communicated all the more effectively for being presented through such a disarming medium. Beautifully shot with affecting performances, it makes the most of its simple ingredients.

7/10

Julia (Erick Zonca, 2008)

Superficially based on John Cassavetes's Gloria (1980), in which Gena Rowlands goes on the run with an orphaned boy, Zonca's first English-language foray is a far bleaker affair in which Tilda Swinton, as a train wreck of an alcoholic, hijacks a fellow AA attendee's scheme to kidnap her own son and swerves off to Mexico in a haze, never managing to think more than one step ahead. It's apparent early on that Julia's entirely at the mercy of fate since few redeeming characteristics are displayed that might point towards growth and through it, salvation. What we get instead is a future impossible to foretell, which works to sustain the narrative momentum on its predictably downward trajectory.

Zonca's strategy is a risky one: the film revolves around a character who's virtually impossible to sympathise with. Besides Julia's complete inability to see the bigger picture, she's perpetually inventing swathes of fabrication, more for her own benefit than to those she's addressing, like an outwardly destructive Blanche DuBois, and any gloss of morality plays second fiddle to her hunger. But Tilda Swinton imbues her with so much humanity expressed through desperation and intellectual scorn that it just about holds together.

6/10

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Tom Tykwer, 2006)

It was always going to take either a very brave or a very foolish director to attempt to adapt Patrick Süskind's tour-de-force novel about a man born in 18th-century France with no personal odour and a supernaturally developed sense of smell, whose apartness from the rest of mankind flips him with autistically driven self-justification from pariah to sociopath. Tom Tykwer, previously best known for the showy but undeniably electrifying Lola Rennt, is perhaps a dash of both brave and foolish.

No-one was ever going to manage to bring a text centred on the interior life of an utterly dehumanised protagonist and a world consisting of overpowering scents across the functional divide between the literary and cinematic media in an intact state. Tykwer's decision - that the visual and audial attributes of the seventh art would have to be accentuated to synthesise the sensory impact of the novel's olfactory descriptions of a rancid Paris or sublime blends of fragrances - was a logical admission of the compromise required. And the casting of an unknown, Ben Whishaw, as the alien-like Grenouille, apparently with directorial orders to suppress any acting urges, may at first seem like a grave error - surely, without the novel's access into his thoughts, we must be given some way to connect with him? - but in fact works to amplify the character's uniqueness: he is both blank slate and consuming void, and therein becomes magnetic long before he actually alchemically makes himself so.

Some of the supporting casting, particularly that of Dustin Hoffman hamming away as the perfumer Baldini, and the choice of English (Cockney for all the plebs, of course) as the film's language, both introduce unwelcome false notes into the melange. But what Tykwer's regular cinematograher Frank Griebe has created is a feast of such visual delight, twinned with a potently plangent original soundtrack, that the trance induced is little broken by such jars.

8/10

The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)

Conventional wisdom has it that Hitchcock never made a bad film. Conventional wisdom also has it that you should never revisit the scene of a crime. Here, both are overturned in Hitch's remake of his 1934 film of the same title.

The action of the first part is relocated from Switzerland to Morocco, but to no great purpose as the screen time is largely eaten up with fake backdrops, even when the characters are walking. Then we're launched into a nonsense plot where James Stewart gets told a couple of names by a shot Frenchman, and his son gets kidnapped so that he'll be persuaded to part with his secrets, which are to espionage gold what alphabetti spaghetti is to Italian cuisine. And Doris Day gets to sing Que Sera, Sera, just because she's there. Several times.

Any hope of suspense is undermined by a laughably flimsy plot in which the protagonists trot from A to B for no particular motive. And to add to all this, it isn't even witty. Avoid like the plague and watch Vertigo for the umpteenth time instead, if you must.

3/10

Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)

In some way, Barry Lyndon, an adaptation of Thackeray's meandering novel about the rise and fall of a nobody in 18th-century Europe, has become one of Kubrick's forgotten works in the eyes of the viewing public while remaining high on critics' lists for its singleminded artistry. Kubrick really went method with this one: he insisted on nothing but natural illumination - candles for interiors if needed - and even got his leading lady to stay out of the sun before filming to achieve a period aristocrat pallor without make-up.

And somehow it worked: it's a visually luminous piece, composed of shots every bit as carefully framed and lit as paintings. It turns the otherwise wet blankness of Ryan O'Neal in the lead into a sullen determination entirely in tune with the guarded opportunist of the novel, unreliable and out for his own gain yet sympathetic simply because his aspirations are so understandable, refusing to accept his lowly lot in society and moving through the sneering strata with a dogged sense of purpose. Also, given the change of medium and thus the addition of the visual element to how we see the anti-hero, Kubrick wisely did away with Redmond Barry as narrator of his own life, adding Michael Hordern's avuncular tones instead and with this a degree of welcome wryly detached amusement to his trials and tribulations.
The whole is further enriched by a stately and melancholic score of Vivaldi and Schubert, and while it may leave little emotional residue, three hours slip by quite unmarked.

9/10

Fido (Andrew Currie, 2006)

You know you're not in Kansas any more when you find yourself describing a zombie comedy as perfectly pleasant. But zombie films have pretty much done the whole cycle by now: what started as horrific in Romero's Night of the Living Dead had already become darkly satirical by his follow-up, Dawn of the Dead, until Shaun of the Dead completed the journey into graveyard slapstick. Parallel to this development, the idea of wholesome American suburbia of the '50s teeming with repression and sexual undercurrents has become familiar currency and has proved a rich vein for comedy, such as in the recent Pleasantville.

Fido basically marries the two, and makes the most of the idea of domesticated zombies (read: the non-WASP underclass) amongst the manicured lawns and white fences. Sadly, there's only enough mileage in this for one of those jauntier episodes of The Twilight Zone. Still, it potters along affably, occasionally raising a grin if never a guffaw, and leaving plenty of time to ponder what on earth Billy Connolly is doing shuffling away under all that make-up as the titular faithful homehelp zombie. But it could really have done with the rasping edge of Parents or the more winged fantasies of Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam.

5/10

The Oxford Murders (Álex de la Iglesia, 2008)

Every so often there comes a film with ideas so laughably above its station that it can only be designated a curate's egg. This particular one never made the UK cinemas but could just as well have, since its determined attempt to cultivate an air of intrigue amongst the fusty backdrops of a picturebook Oxford and relentless namedropping of philosophers and mathematicians, the protagonists selflessly summarising such references for our benefit alone, would make a Da Vinci Code viewership feel right at home.

Elijah Wood reprises his feisty and nervous Yank at sea from Green Street as a student attempting to curry favour with his crotchety academic idol, John Hurt, amidst a chain of murders which apparently have a higher design (cue the theorems). Various women proceed to throw themselves on him for inexplicable reasons, only pausing for breath to deliver already lumbering lines even more woodenly than our hero. Yes, it's a rare treat to watch an Elijah Wood film in which he stands out as positively multifaceted. Or an atrociously ham-fisted murder yarn set in Oxford which wasn't made by a British director.

De la Iglesia and his writing partner-in-recidivism Jorge Guerricaechevarría (remember Acción Mutante?) must be in cahoots with the likes of Woody Allen in some fifth column aiming to thoroughly mangle Britain as a setting for whodunnits for once and for all. Is this finally revenge for what Michael Winner did on his Godzillaesque stomps across Europe in the '60s and '70s? Mercy!

2/10

El Orfanato (Juan Antonio Bayona, 2007)

Bayona's directorial debut treads well-worn terrain with the story of a child's mysterious disappearance from the house that was his mother's childhood orphanage. The mother becomes progressively more obsessed with recovering her son, and open to supernatural suggestion. What follows is a refined execution of a staple horror formula, the key emotional trigger the refusal to accept the loss of a child, and the narrative impetus a chain of discoveries that all is not as it seemed.
It's beautifully shot and sharply edited, without excessive recourse to histrionics, and Belén Rueda (who also stood out in Alejandro Amenábar's Mar Adentro) as the mother makes a captivatingly driven focal point. Unfortunately, it lacks the defter surprises of Amenábar's The Others, with which it strongly shares its setting, and therefore rarely unsettles as the best in psychological horror can.

6/10

Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2004)

Araki continues to dissect the dramas of ordinary lives through the filter of sexuality as two boys undergo a traumatic experience at an early age and recoil from it in vastly differing ways, one by treating his body so cheaply as to prostitute himself, the other through an obsessive belief in having been the victim of an alien abduction.

The drama is low-key and the set-ups of violent clients and moments of erotic catharsis are familiar from numerous gay and straight takes on alienation and prostitution. But the director's touch is pleasingly light and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, once the sarky little teenager in Third Rock from the Sun, gets to display a growing control and maturity in the role of the emotionally deadened Neil. Comparisons to Heath Ledger might already have been touted even without the uncanny physical resemblance: it's an impressive performance of cocksure fragility.

6/10

Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959)

This is a superior court-room drama that wears its age well, greatly aided by the worldly cynicism permeating every level of the proceedings.

James Stewart plays a subtle variation on his standard Voice of Decency as a lawyer defending an army officer attempting to evade a murder charge following his wife's rape by the victim. Stewart's golden boy screen persona was already so dyed-in-the-wool by this stage that it comes as a creeping feeling of discomfort to realise that here he's really only out for sticking it to George C. Scott's big-city prosecution counterpart rather than having any interest in justice being done. The script, too, treats the potentially grim topic with flippant insouciance and without ever encroaching on melodrama, far more concerned with milking the interplay amongst an array of equally witty characters for alll the laughs it can squeeze out. It's actually very funny in a gallows-type way and well served by a fine cast, rounded off by Ben Gazzara as the calculating accused and a young Lee Remick as his coquettish wife.

8/10