In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008)

The picturebook location may have helped to give this Irish crime drama a necessary kick up its arse. No matter. Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, as hitmen out of their depth, ordered to spend a sabbatical in Bruges, stand out as an odd couple and the environment is used to the full to play on their differences. Sure, it's just a B-movie, but one that's sure of itself and leaking dry wit through most scenes. And then Ralph Fiennes turns up and does a fairly good job of giving Kingsley in Sexy Beast a run for his money as the surprise thesp being a horrid Cockney villain.

If McDonagh gets beyond more than moneymaker fare, he may yet go far.

7/10

Parlez-moi de la pluie (Agnès Jaoui, 2008)

Agnès Jaoui has ploughed a single furrow for a while now, ever accompanied by her husband Jean-Pierre Bacri, and the soil may be wearing thin.
Her directorial debut, Le goût des autres, 9 years ago was a breathtakingly fresh slant on the easy-to-sterotype French cinema of middle-class people excessively intellectualising over their lives and relationships, but Comme une image 4 years later had only angst to add to the equation.
Refreshingly, in Let's Talk about the Rain the tack has changed: humour is now on board, and France's leading comic light Jamel Debbouze is on board to bolster this shift, although it's Bacri's stock persona as a misguidedly self-important mid-lifer who gets to carry the laughs. The pair play bumbling documentary makers, Jaoui an aspiring politician who is the butt of their documentary, and various affairs get hatched and discarded along the way. Slight but at least light. Jaoui will have to come up with more the next time around, though.

6/10

Død snø (Tommy Wirkola, 2009)

How could a devotee of schlock horror resist something promising Nazi zombies?

Quite easily, it turns out. The premise is a pale mish-mash of any number of scenarios with young folk stuck in a remote cabin threatened by menacing hordes, with evil Germans undead thrown in for good measure. Sure, there's a dash of wit thrown in and the makers beg for forgiveness for their daylight robbery by including a character who keeps on relating their predicament to The Evil Dead, but once you start watching the whole enterprise through a US teen filter, to leach out the Norwegian and historical facades, precious little remains.

At least in Outpost they had guns.

4/10

La habitación de Fermat (Luis Piedrahita & Rodrigo Sopeña, 2007)

Fermat's Room taps into the popular perception of the obsessive mathematical genius (see A Beautiful Mind), driven into a mania by the hidden truth behind the numbers and liable to form deadly rivalries with their counterparts in the quest for perfection. Much like another group whose work the layperson doesn't really understand, then, i.e. composers.

Four minds are invited by a man hiding behind the pseudonym of Fermat to a deserted farmhouse with the challenge of solving the greatest of conundrums. This promises a great deal, as they find themselves locked in a room with the power to kill them unless they continue cracking a succession of timed riddles.

Except that the link to the actual Fermat is utterly spurious: the makers cop out swiftly at this point in the script and instead present a series of brainteasers familiar from puzzlebooks with no particular relevance to mathematics. Having flaunted the prospect of an intellectual work-out, and then at least the visceral kick of an entrapment horror piece like Cube, they deliver neither.

5/10

Låt den rätte komma in (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)

Let the Right One in comes in the midst of a deluge of re-imaginings on vampirism, given fresh blood as a genre by the teen emo culture, that anaemic take on '80s goth. This is unfortunate, as it's best viewed as a growing-up drama instead, which is only added a chill and frisson by the horror theme.

And it's a superior example of either genre, the sense of confusion and otherness of the alienated pubescent bolstered by the haunted outsider status of the nightstalker. The idiosyncratic two young leads do much to contribute to its power, and the glacial setting of an anonymous mid-winter early-'80s Swedish suburb, beautifully framed and lit, make for a whole that far transcends what may seem to be stock ingredients. There hasn't been a vampire film this good in terms of rising above the genre cliches since Bigelow's Near Dark, and beyond that it holds its own against acclaimed coming-of-age pieces such as Stand by Me or The 400 Blows.

8/10

Tôkyô monogatari (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

Age withers as well as ripens. Tokyo Story, almost always as the sole Japanese representative, save for the occasional Kurosawa, crops up on Western critics' lists of the best films ever made. Do not let this prejudice you.

It's just a simple, well-crafted tale of an elderly couple making their final rounds around their children's preoccupied lives. They're met with irritable tolerance by all but for their widowed daughter-in-law, and their stoic acceptance of how things are when the progeny view their progenitors as just a burden must have struck a deep and shocking chord in a Japan just on the mend from the ravages of the war. That it manages to speak to audiences worldwide is very much down to the beautifully understated performances of the elderly duo, and, above all a prevailing sense that we're dealing with a universal emotional truth.

7/10