Doubt (John Patrick Shanley, 2008)

In 1964, a priest at a Catholic school is accused by the Principal, a nun, of sexually abusing one of the pupils.

Based on Shanley's own stage play, this is a surprisingly morally complex exploration of a topic that could so easily turn tortuous and sermonising. At one point the realisation hits home that we're more in an exploration of hierarchy and character than one of the nature of abuse. To enable this to unfold without the overbearing burden of condemnation, the true nature of events is left clouded. Our doubt at what occurred is therefore unforcedly mirrored by the doubt the principal protagonists feel towards each other, and eventually towards their faith.

This must be Meryl Streep's finest performance in years, as the self-righteous nun and accuser: what could so easily have turned out as an embittered harridan, a fanatical martinet, comes out instead as a woman on a mission that she must believe in in order to be able to go through with it, and it is quite startling to find a degree of sympathy for her zealotry. Meanwhile, Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the avuncular priest, is at his usual standard of excellence. It becomes as easy to believe him guilty as innocent, and this takes some command of nuance.

Perhaps the stageplay origins are betrayed by the verbiosity present, and some gripes might be had in that there is no real interest shown in a conclusive judgement of an odious issue. No matter: this is an outstanding study of character, not a lecture, and all the more life-like for it.

8/10

Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009)

Adaptations of the graphic novels of crusty visionary Alan Moore have not had an entirely happy history, from V for Vendetta to From Hell, and he seems to have disowned this one as a precautionary move. This was a mistake.
Watchmen, published over 20 years ago, is probably Moore's most emblematic work. Set in a parallel 1985, with Nixon still in the White House and the world on the brink of armageddon, it follows a group of former superheroes as a mysterious assassin starts trying to bump them off one by one. A complex plot, at least by the standards of the genre, is held together by the narrative of the vigilante Rorschach, a sort of an unhinged Marlowe with a mask, and contains more darkness than a Batman film could ever hope to entertain. We're firmly in adult territory here: this is an utterly broken world, full of cynical politics, and at the finale the main villain of the piece comes out as far more ambiguous than the mere idea of a superhero film could lead us to expect.
It helps a great deal, of course, that Snyder wisely sticks to the original work, virtually frame by frame, and adds only his one forte: gut-wrenchingly visceral action (see 300). Even the casting is slavishly faithful.
Don't go expecting great depth here, but it will also not insult your intelligence and it's a hell of a ride, far more involving than the much-feted but ultimately lumpy The Dark Knight.

7/10

Burn After Reading (the Coen brothers, 2008)

After a pair of ill-judged adaptations of other people's ideas, the Coens seem to have settled more or less back on track with another of their black comedies. Here, we get something like a butterfly effect of a story on human ineptitude as a stellar cast of characters, each imbued with a single clearly-defined flaw, end up doing each other over in paranoid encounters across Washington, all believing they're somehow caught up in an espionage intrigue. Meanwhile, the CIA watches in bafflement.

So, there's George Clooney as a philanderer, Tilda Swinton as an icy bitch, John Malkovich as an irascible former G-man who's lost his way badly, Frances McDormand as a dippy fitness instructor obsessed with her fading looks and Brad Pitt as her lunkhead friend. The casting itself is wonderful, and the interest of the whole relies a lot on this.

However, unlike in the Coens' last, the searingly dark No Country for Old Men, there's no consistency of tone: it falls between the two stools of relationship-based comedy and thriller, and so requires constant readjustment of viewer response from scene to scene. It's not a painful process by any means, and there's plenty here to entertain, but one hopes that the Coens will take a look at what their knitting is and not hedge their bets next time round.

6/10

Lakeview Terrace (Neil LaBute, 2008)

An interracial couple move into what seems like a suburban haven until their neighbour, a black policeman raising his kids single-handed on a tight rein, starts to turn the screw on their relationship and lives, fuelled by indignation at their co-habiting existence.

LaBute's directorial debut back in 1997, In the Company of Men, demonstrated a keen awareness of the real poisons that can run through people's souls, in a dog-eat-dog framework. In the light of some of the debacles that have followed, most notably the bottom of the barrel that his last film represented, i.e. the godawful remake of The Wicker Man, Lakeview Terrace could charitably be viewed as something of a return towards serious film-making. In this it fails on a big scale.

It should not have ended up as a psycho stalker pic like Pacific Heights, which it ends up resembling (and to its detriment by comparison, being far more muddled). But any real debate on racial divisions becomes badly lost by the end, probably not helped by the casting of Samuel L. Jackson as the racist cop, set out with instructions to just exude his customary menace throughout until flipping.

4/10

Blindness (Fernando Meirelles, 2008)

In an unspecified city, people start losing their sight in a flash and no cause is found. The epidemic spreads and quarantine centres are set up in the spreading panic. One woman retains her sight in the midst of the contaminated and chooses to hide this to stay with her husband, an eye specialist.

Once you know that Meirelles was behind City of God, a viscerally masterful exploration of the brutality of life in Brazil's favelas, a lot of what follows can only be viewed through that filter: the quarantined detainees swiftly become brutalised by their helpless situation and then by their prison confinement as a group of males amongst them go feral, ignored by a terrified government. It has uncomfortable echoes from early on of Carandiru, Hector Babenco's telling of the mass murder that occurred in an overcrowded and out-of-control Sao Paulo prison.

This is not science fiction: Meirelles is not interested in the causes of the blindness or finding a cure, only in how it can be used as a metaphor of disempowerment. To be frank he never really gets to the bottom of what his metaphor means, or how much of it is a metaphor, and so by the end we're still rather left in the dark as to what we're to have understood by it. But it's easy to forgive a lot in the light of what Meirelles does accomplish: there are stretches along the way which drip with insight into the human psyche and power relationships, and some of the images of desolation take the breath away without lapsing into pornography, which really requires a fine balancing act from a director.

7/10

The Time Traveler's Wife (Robert Schwentke, 2009)

Based narratively as closely as the limitations of the medium will allow on Audrey Niffenegger's phenomenally successful novel about a man who keeps disappearing and finding himself in another part of his life, this goes more explicitly for the romance angle. This is a wrong turn: while the original plot was clearly a reworking of Slaughterhouse-Five, it wasn't without a point in that it replaced the autistic metaphysics with a more universally accessible anguish. Here, this is replaced with an overpowering soundtrack and the blandly pretty Rachel McAdams weeping a lot as the chrononaut's hard-put-upon wife. Eric Bana does make for a watchably stoic lead and it is possible to sympathise with the couple's predicament, but something is lost is the slush: just being able to sympathise is no great shakes.

Overall, it's no disaster, but probably far more palatable to those not familiar with superior examples of the 'great love scuppered by temporal disparity'-genre such as, oh, Somewhere in Time, to pick one out of a hat.

5/10

Franklyn (Gerald McMorrow, 2008)

The director summed this up as a fleshed-out working out of ideas from a short in which a young woman is recovering from yet another suicide attempt. Always beware hacks when they justify what they've done as being through a need to explore everyone's backstories.

McMorrow piles on everything he can think of and it's all derivative: there's a Rorschach clone stalking a futuristic/gothic city overrun by religious fanatics under an obscurely oppressive government, cutting to Eva Green as the would-be suicide going hysterical with her mother in middle-class North London, Sam Riley (he of the excellent Control) seeing the dead and Bernard Hill agonising over his son's whereabouts. Having no confidence in one film, McMorrow gives us four, and then we have to suffer pointless narrative contortions as they're drawn together by hook and crook. A waste of time for all those involved.

3/10

La graine et le mulet (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007)

The English title, Couscous, may seem as hackneyed for a film about North African immigrants in France as calling one on Asians in Britain 'Curry', but couscous is at least heavily present as a concern as ageing boatyard worker Slimane is laid off and turns to setting up a couscous restaurant on a boat, drafting in his extended family. The fulcrum of the story, Slimane is also a diffident presence, prone to panic attacks not unrelated to certain members circling him like vultures. The film owes much of its cohesion, despite its rambling length, to Habib Boufares's performance, which carries much strength in its understatement.

Early on, as he loses his job, there is a key scene in which Slimane explains to his daughter that 'they're only taking on non-French people now' and this really encapsulates what's refreshing about the whole attitude of the film: we're not dealing with a straightforward piece on the hardships of immigrants, but, rather, an ordinary working-class family. And the plot subsequently mirrors this by constantly choosing the less predictable turn. If the director is too fond at times of the realism he's chosen to go with by also letting his actors yammer on freeformly, the end result is still rewarding enough.

7/10

The History Boys (Nicholas Hytner, 2006)

Alan Bennett's award-winning play is, for the most part, successfully transferred to the screen by Hytner, previously best known as a director for The Madness of King George: that is to say, it rarely feels stagebound until the postscript, by which stage the shift in tone seems natural.

Eight boys at a public school in '80s Yorkshire are being coached towards Oxbridge, and the headmaster, a dunce masquerading as a martinet, decides that their chances need to be beefed up by more rigorous training than that provided by Richard Griffiths's poesying blimp (basically, his Uncle Monty reworked), whose 'general studies' lessons indulge the boys' playing out of musical numbers and old movie scenes. So, in comes a young new recruit to the staff, who proceeds to tell the boys at once that competence alone will not make them stand out: tactics are called for, from playing devil's advocate to outright lying.

It's not reality by a long chalk: almost every character in turn is employed as a mouthpiece for whatever quip or observation Bennett wants to chuck our way, which frequently jars with most of them, after all, being just teenagers. Griffiths's tentative molestation of his wards is also treated rather too lightly for comfort, as if it were just an endearing foible. But there's no denying the wit at work: it's frequently very funny and also comes with an understated, unsettling undercurrent concerning what it takes to succeed in a class-centred society.

7/10

The Walker (Paul Schrader, 2007)

Woody Harrelson gets to flex his acting chops further as a preening professional companion to a host of Washington politicians' wives, moving further than ever before from the lovable country doofuses of his earlier films.

Carter Page III is a man constantly overshadowed by the looming legends of his forefathers and taking refuge in the superficiality of his chosen milieu, where bon-mots serve as currency, until the murder of an acquaintance, the lover of one of the wives he ferries around social functions for his living, forces him to examine what values he actually has.

The setting of the glass cage that is D.C. high society might at first also seem a departure for Schrader, who as a screenwriter has repeatedly plumbed the depths of breakdown and despair, particularly through his work with Scorsese on Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and, most recently, Bringing out the Dead. But at heart the song remains the same: a man comes to realise that he stands alone and can either sink or swim. The Walker doesn't in truth have a great deal to add to this refrain, but gets by creditably enough on dialogue of superior intelligence and a heavy-calibre cast, including Lauren Bacall as an armour-plated society queen. Harrelson, meanwhile, just keeps getting better and better: southern gent pomposity, flamboyant campness and a quiet moral determination are all delivered without a false note.

6/10

Things We Lost in the Fire (Susanne Bier, 2007)

Bier's first Hollywood film sees her pick up on much the same themes as her last Danish piece, Efter brylluppet, that is, the pain of loss and how we come to terms with it in our individual ways. Here, Halle Berry is abruptly widowed and pulls her husband's best friend, junkie-in-precarious recovery Benicio Del Toro, into her orbit to fill the void left by his death.

On the technical side, there's absolutely no need for the modishly deconstructed narrative structure, and it's becoming apparent that Bier will keep trying to squeeze emotional content out of those eye close-ups. Also, both leads are perilously close to being typecast: Berry as the strong but damaged mother in denial of her pain, Del Toro as a mumbling mess just one wrong turn away from the gutter; Monster's Ball and 21 Grams respectively. But at least these are proven parts, and so both are used to their strengths, Del Toro particularly convincing in his instability.

Not a step forward for Bier, then, but still streets ahead of most Hollywood competition in terms of empathic depth.

6/10

The Last Horror Movie (Julian Richards, 2003)

Director Richards at least makes no attempt to deny having been 'influenced' by C'est arrivé près de chez vous, otherwise known as Man Bites Dog, in what is basically a North London retread of Rémy Belvaux's seminal Belgian shocker. So, we follow a serial killer amiably chatting away, documentary cameraman in tow, as he despatches a broad assortment of victims in a range of banally clinical ways. Richards does adopt a slightly different tack - and this would have to be the overriding justification for the plagiarised framework - to Belvaux, in that his killer is actually the instigator of the documentary and as such exercises editorial control, which enables him to dwell over several points about the nature of the voyeurism of the media and, by extension, us, the viewers.

However, his philosophising to camera hits a film-schoolish note far too often, directorially too insecure to proceed without constantly trying to second-guess the critical viewer. In the end it's actually far more effectively black and satirical, as Belvaux seemed to have instinctively grasped with Man Bites Dog, when it lets its sociopath's actions speak for themselves, and our presence as witnesses isn't even acknowledged.

5/10