Raising Cain (Brian De Palma, 1992)

There's cheerfully wanton stealing, like Tarantino's, which can be said to be a craft in itself, the massing of references in a collage offering an added reward for the cinephile viewer. The often-cited comparison to Shakespeare's cannibalising of existing plots may be a hackneyed one, but nevertheless contains a grain of truth. Closer to the mark might be T.S.Eliot's saturation bombardment of allusions to, and snatches from, a vast range of texts across the centuries in The Waste Land. The main difference is just that Tarantino has a shallower pool to draw from and, in Eliot's shoes, would probably have used a great deal more from penny dreadfuls and showtunes.

Then there's the smudged carbon-copying of Brian De Palma, usually of Hitchcock and here almost entirely so. He adds nothing but a patina of contemporary-strength gore to the Marnie/Psycho-reworking of the split personality killer and goes one worse by seemingly having decided, following decades of being ridiculed for his hero-worship, to parody himself. 

The end result is just awful. John Lithgow, as the titular headcase, is an actor with a wide range and an effortless command of modulated performances, but ends up in this morass of grand guignol campery just mugging the camera with gurns, basically Dick Solomon with a carving knife. Preposterous plotholes abound, the photography pokes you in the eyes with pointless split-focus shots and hypercoloured close-ups, and there isn't even the germ of an original idea to latch onto. It's a truly damning indictment of quality control in the studio system that some still see De Palma as an auteur. You can build the whole of the case for the prosecution on this film alone.

2/10

Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006)

In Glasgow, a widowed police CCTV operator leads a solitary and mechanical life until she chances upon the man responsible for her loss, released early from prison, and becomes fixated on his movements.

Andrea Arnold's low-budget film won a host of awards, including the Jury Prize at Cannes, and her follow-up, Fish Tank, is set to garner equal acclaim. It's not hard to see why: this is a deeply serious work, demanding of immersion in the head of the damaged protagonist and forcing it by cutting repeatedly from watcher to watched, until the viewer has no choice but to see through her eyes.

Kate Dickie and Tony Curran make for true-to-life leads as victim and evildoer, occupying their characters so naturalistically that the eventual switch in their roles comes entirely plausibly as a form of Stockholm syndrome develops. The focused blacks and whites of self-righteousness blur and all that's left is a targetless sorrow, which might finally allow tenderness in.

It's by no means an easy ride as Arnold is clearly intent on dragging the audience through the same mill of anguish, and there are longeurs when the technique insists on hammering home the point of emotional disconnection through repetition. But these are necessary evils: rarely does a film capture blame, guilt and forgiveness with such raw immediacy.

8/10

Palindromes (Todd Solondz, 2004)

When is an apparent fixation just a bluff on the part of the filmmaker? Does Lars Von Trier really have a problem with women, and was Todd Solondz's childhood in fact entirely free of molestation? Because that's where we are again, although ostensibly the main focus is on abortion. 

The main character of Aviva, a plain teenager stubbornly set on having a baby, is played by eight actors of varying sizes, ages and races, one even male. This fragmentation made sense in, for instance, Todd Haynes's recent Dylan biopic I'm Not There, where each change of actor came with a change of directorial style to highlight a different aspect of the Dylan persona. Here, however, it can only be meant to bring across the universality of the protagonist's aspirations. It's a pretty clumsy device, not to mention an unnecessary one. 

And there are also other elements which jar badly, like the Christian fundamentalist family that takes Aviva in at one point, who do musical numbers on Jesus and basically come across like the cast of Freaks, as in Tod Browning's 1932 circus sideshow film. It's all very close to a perennial fallacy in American storytelling, i.e. that if you populate the story with enough disparate and outlandish elements and lace it all with pain (as in the hoax novels of JT LeRoy), what comes out will be some kind of more holistic truth. Instead of a smashed kaleidoscope, which is unfortunately the case here.

Solondz's modus operandi is to cut close to the bone, so the fact that here it just hacks to and fro and mostly misses shouldn't be too disheartening, for all the attempts at balance by coming at the subject from both extremes, and trying to shake us by placing deliberately adult notions in the mouths of babes. His is a preciously singular voice, and there's certainly another Happiness or Storytelling in his tank.

5/10

The Hit (Stephen Frears, 1984)

Stephen Frears's directorial career has been uneven, to say the least, swinging from comprehensive hits such as My Beautiful Laundrette, Dirty Pretty Things and The Queen to directionless dross of the ilk of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid or Mary Reilly. This gangland thriller is thankfully one of the former, i.e. where Frears gets the angle of approach of his take right.

What we get is John Hurt, an impassive streak of nicotine and dull malice as a hitman, and Tim Roth, still fairly freshly out of Made in Britain's juvenile thug boots, as his hooliganish little sidekick, escorting Terence Stamp's cryptically self-assured grass across the plains of Spain to meet his maker. 

It's a brutal, po-facedly laconic road movie that would be happy with Peckinpah at the helm and Warren Oates as the lead, and would hardly seek to deny the influence. An existential undercurrent constantly tugs at the foundations of the dialogue, and while it never really ends up delivering on what that promises, the journey is studded with enough craftmanship and invention to reward sticking along.

7/10

Intermission (John Crowley, 2003)

This otherwise unassuming ensemble piece seems to betray a lack of conviction in being able to generate enough interest by virtue of its ideas alone, and so we get an overkill of Ireland's big guns in Cillian Murphy, Colm Meaney and Colin Farrell, respectively as a hapless chancer, swaggering crimebuster and narcissistic scumbag.

It all turns out to be fairly standard fare, with the stories of various quirkily bungling characters, whose lovability is rather taken for granted, intersecting in unsurprising ways which at least allow for the delivery of some choice lines, of which Meaney's borderline nutcase cop probably gets the lion's share. 

In short, it's inoffensive and not unintelligent, but ultimately insubstantial, and will hardly shake up anyone's stereotypes of Ireland with its fecks, street urchins and folk music.

5/10 

Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (Hans Weingartner, 2004)

The Edukators hits the ground running with a well-to-do family arriving home to find they've been targeted by politically motivated intruders. This leads in neatly to the trio of young revolutionaries behind it plotting a bigger statement: to kidnap a businessman who, in their eyes, embodies the fat cats of the world by being indirectly responsible for the crippling debt under which one of them labours.

German cinema's everyboy of the decade Daniel Brühl, Julia Jentsch and Stipe Erceg make for an engagingly naive band, who get stumped by the effortless arguments of their captive, and completely fail to see their imminent ménage à trois until they're stuck with it. The space and clarity of the mountain-meadow Austrian setting of their hideout and the deceptively naturalistic photography work in concert to accentuate and lay bare the rawness of their convictions.

The story may be closely tied to the Red Army Faction-tinged anti-capitalist movements that have lingered in the background of German society since the war, but it has real universal application in its cool assessment of idealism against reality; the untested principles of youth worn down by the lures and obligations through the years. However, I'd advise against Weingartner, who's now in the process of remaking his own work for Hollywood, drawing any flippant ironic parallels between these themes and what he's actually doing. And then to drop it, pronto: does anyone remember George Sluizer?

8/10

Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006)

Cuarón caught the world's eye big time in 2001 with Y tu mamá también, one of those rare films that capture the actual feeling of being alive on dead celluloid. No such luck this time round, which might be deemed fitting to the initial set-up of a future dystopia in which there are no more births and society is going to bitter ruin with the nihilism that deadening apocalypse has engendered. That, however, is no excuse for conversations which would seem wooden and ham-fisted in translated video games (I draw your attention, in particular, to Julianne Moore and Clive Owen attempting to convey that they're having a heart-felt argument in the scene on the bus). And the lack of a spark becomes unforgivable when new life in the form of the first pregnant woman in 18 years, whom stoic Clive has to shield from the machinations of the evil Government, enters the fray. From there on, it's largely explosions and ethnic stereotypes.

It's a great pity as there's a lot to admire here: the metallic-tinted photography paints a grimy future of intricate details, and the action scenes, albeit totally OTT, are also viscerally compelling. A few too-brief cameos, especially that of Michael Caine's jaunty old hippy, also help to breathe a bit of life into the grim proceedings. But it's not enough: before long it's hard to care about a world which is too unconvincingly skewed to generate empathy or deserve redemption.

5/10

Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, 2007)

As with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, causing a furore amongst uptight communities is easy, particularly as they seldom go to the trouble of acquiring any first-hand experience of what's caused them to bay for blood or have an understanding that fiction means it's not a bloody documentary. It also obfuscates a normal response to the work in question, so when you finally get to the troublestarter, it can't help seeming innocuous compared to the hype. 

And so with this version of Monica Ali's novel, which had to find a host of locations to replace the out-of-bounds real Brick Lane despite containing little we haven't seen before in a host of other literary and filmic takes on a traditional, oppressive Asian way of family life being challenged in a modern Britain. The only major variation is that the conflict is wholly acted out within the Bengali community itself and doesn't rely on white British characters to bring in a range of values threatening to their conservatism. More specifically, the conflict is for the heart and mind of its narrator, Nazneen, torn between her arranged marriage to a feckless lump and a fling with a hunky Anglified idealist. 

It's full of beautiful images and moves, like its protagonist, with a careful sensitivity, but suffers heavily from its literary origins, leading to a lot of Paulo Coelhoesque internal monologue and not much for the actress to do but look anxious or melancholy. And when the moment of catharsis finally comes, clunky lines show the fuzzy grasp the script has on its characters as real entities.

5/10

Buda as sharm foru rikht (Hana Makhmalbaf, 2007)

Buddha Collapsed out of Shame is the second film from Makhmalbaf, whose father Mohsen could aptly be described as a one-man national film industry for Afghanistan. She, in turn, made her first feature (Joy of Madness) at the age of 14, and here again makes the most of every penny with a judiciously edited digital piece featuring non-professionals and using symbolic stand-ins, such as kites for planes, when called to by the budget. In the best instances, though, necessity does prove the mother of invention and some startlingly apposite images arise as a result.

In short, it's about an indefatigably determined 6-year-old girl who has set her sights on getting an exercise book and going to school. Her path is beset by a gang of feral boys playing at Taliban footsoldiers, and while using children's bestial behaviour as a crooked mirror to reflect the ludicrousness of the adult world is hardly a new conceit, ever since Lord of the Flies,  it's handled to maximum effect and throws the corrosive illness of fundamentalism into sharp focus. It's just a pity that its likely audience is not the one the director would hope to influence.

6/10

A fost sau n-a fost? (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006)

Film circles love to talk of 'waves' of national cinemas, in which case Romania is certainly staking a claim for being in the middle of one. 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days may have grabbed the lion's share of the attention with its Palme d'Or and Oscar nomination, but there have been plenty of supporting acts, of which 12:08 East of Bucharest is a worthy example. 

It revolves around three characters in the nondescript small town of Vaslui, pottering about during the course of a day, leading up to their sitting down on a local TV programme to discuss the events of the day on which Ceauşescu was deposed 16 years earlier, and, specifically, whether the revolution actually happened. 

Nothing in the cantering pace of the film up to this point prepares the viewer for an abrupt realisation that what we've been watching all along is a deeply pointed, absurdist satire. The balsa-thin little talkshow disintegrates rapidly as caller after caller phones in to denounce the veracity of the guests' eye-witness testimonies and the presenter starts sweating over legal issues. Does this kangaroo court prove that nothing has changed? Porumboiu's film drops some heavy clues as to what's meant, but avoids hectoring and delivers its message with a good dose of wry humour.

7/10

Transsiberian (Brad Anderson, 2008)

Much as Far Eastern horror has proved to be a treasure trove of eviscerating scripts for Hollywood to pillage and rehash, the fall of the Iron Curtain has opened up a cheap new playground of backdrops steeped in menace, being culturally close enough to the West to make for an easy bridge to cross for the imagination, but on the other side of which lurks a Transylvanian-inflected parallel universe stuck in some vague past, with limitless dark forests teeming with gangsters, prostitutes, satanists, perverts and psychopaths. Deliverance-land, then, but with added strange languages and murky history. It helps that you can always throw in a few shots of opaquely expressionless toothless babushkas and nicotine-steeped cackling peasants, because that adds local flavour and we've all seen them on our weekends in Prague or Tallinn. 

Hence Outpost, Severance and Hostel, to name a few, and now Transsiberian, in which Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer are American Christian Aid workers returning from China via Siberia by train, for a bit of adventure to add to their bland lives. Then a couple with an obvious hidden agenda moves on them and danger looms.

On the plus side, it slots in some arresting shots in the interludes, and the set-up, for all its stereotypes, is actually quite adroitly handled and holds off drawing blood for an admirable while. A shame then, that when it does play its hand, it utterly falls apart in both pacing and credibility and becomes an altogether more natural medium for Ben Kingsley to take over with his latest gimlet-eyed hard bastard, this time a Russian police investigator. Blah.

5/10

Flammen & Citronen (Ole Christian Madsen, 2008)

Continuing in a recent trend to bring the stories of WWII resistance heroes in less-known settings before the public eye (Jews in Defiance and German officers in Valkyrie, amongst others), this is an account of two leaders of the Holger Danske resistance group in Denmark. Having seen their country accept German occupation without a fight, they set about systematically eliminating collaborators. The sheer volume of summary executions covered here would seem inflated for cheap shocks without the knowledge that their group alone accounted for 200 such acts. 

The certitude that they're on a rational mission sustains them until, inevitably, doubt seeps in  as to whether they're killing the real enemy and whose interests they're actually serving, and structurally this is made to mark the beginning of their road to doom.

Madsen's film adds little to the conventional Nazi-fighter framework in terms of an angle and never really generates a sense of edgy paranoia: for all the violence, it seems easy enough for the underground to go about their daily business. But it's crisply shot and tautly acted, and contains a fair deal of exploration of the moral ambiguities of the resistance's actions, and in that satisfies what can be expected of a decent treatment of the subject.

6/10