Breaking and Entering (Anthony Minghella, 2006)

Minghella's final film is another set of musings on the vagaries of relationships, this time set around London's King's Cross, the station clearly symbolic of characters in transit between national identities and emotional attachments. Jude Law is an architect with grand plans for redevelopment of the area, his partner a Swedish-American drifting away from him, preoccupied with their ADHD-afflicted daughter. His offices are burgled by a gang of Bosnians, and he tracks one of them, a parkouring urchin, to his home where he falls for Juliette Binoche, the burglar's mother.

This has the makings of something wider to say. Certainly, you could never accuse Minghella of short-changing us intellectually, and the script does well to sidestep the more predictable narrative twists. But...the displaced immigrants set-up can't avoid unfavourable comparisons with, say, Frears's Dirty Pretty Things (casting Binoche as a Bosnian inevitably brings Tautou as a Turk to mind), which developed emotional depth in sticking to one main theme, rather than just using the characters' varied backgrounds as a gloss. Law's character in particular is also disgracefully shallow, considering the actor's limitations, and it's asking a lot to rest our sympathies on his self-involved flitting. It ends up less than the sum of its parts, much like other pieces aspiring to profundity on urban life through interlinking disparate players, such as Paul Haggis's Crash.

5/10

Vals Im Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)

Waltz with Bashir is a rare beast: an animated documentary which got a Best Foreign-language Film nomination at the Oscars, on a particularly fraught political subject, namely massacres of civilians in the Lebanon War in 1982, which were facilitated by the compliance of the Israeli army.

It's told from the Israeli perceptive, Folman playing himself as a veteran of the war, now trying to piece together the entirety of what transpired through interviews with other witnesses or participants. This angle helps to unshackle the story from the customary ball-and-chain accusations of anti-Israeli bias and the animation technique employed further wrenches the viewer from their comfort zone, where images of Middle Eastern conflict might otherwise have lost their impact through over-familiarity. The technique used here is not rotoscoping, as in A Scanner Darkly, but has a similar effect: it induces a sense of hyper-reality, and really plunges you into the midst of events.

If there's a critique to be made, it's that Folman doesn't ever get round to showing the Arab resistance or civilians in any other light than as unseen snipers or nameless victims, being wholly preoccupied with the invaders' agonised hand-wringing after the event. But it could also be argued that such an alienating dissociation between the abuser and the abused is part and parcel of the nature of modern wars.

7/10

Knowing (Alex Proyas, 2009)

In which astrophysicist Nicolas Cage is the only person in the world to be gifted with the foreknowledge of every coming world disaster, revealed through mystical numbers (shorthand for science). The dreadful burden of this drives him somewhat anxious, so that he gets to do some acting in that anguished gurn style that keeps the world's cinema audiences flocking back for more. This is a pity, as his air of dumb vulnerability can be worked to good effect by an astute director - for comic effect, as in Raising Arizona, or the angst-stricken, as in Leaving Las Vegas or Adaptation. Likewise this script, which bamboozles religious orthodoxy by mixing up aliens with angels and is brave enough to actually end the world, also has a seed of something more substantial buried within it. That seed remains ungerminated, however, and all it really gives up is a series of increasingly impressive shots of big things blowing up.

4/10

Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)

The fourth film about the IRA activist Bobby Sands, who died a political martyr through his 1981 hunger strike in the Maze prison, does away with any preambles as to what he was culpable of and concentrates solely on his final protest. In this way, the director McQueen is effectively electing to avoid becoming embroiled in the background facts of Sands's individual case and letting the human aspects of brutal incarceration and blindly unshakeable determination come across instead, unimpeded by the baggage of terrorism. Some would see this as a tacit condonement of the republican cause, and certainly juxtaposing Sands's pitifully wasted body with the voice of Margaret Thatcher condemning the strike gives the latter a heartlessly inhuman air. But the contrast intended is not so much between the IRA and the British state, rather than between fragile humanity and impersonal government: McQueen's film is not an outright espousal of Sands's cause, as the opinions voiced by the prison priest in the bravura 17-minute one-take scene in the middle of the film make clear.

The dialogue in that scene in particular is constructed with a fierce intelligence and depth and gives the film its purpose. Added to that is McQueen's interest, as a visual artist, in the arrestingly powerful image, which makes the whole a hybrid of sorts between cinematic narrative and video installation art. To its great credit, it never loses itself in the experimental ground between the two.

8/10

Redbelt (David Mamet, 2008)

A mixed-martial arts film from David Mamet? How on Earth is this going to pan out?

No fear. This turns out to be Mamet's standard model, just deceptively transposed into an unexpected setting. There are backstabbing twists, a prevalent sense of fatalism and that trademark mannered dialogue style where all characters repeat themselves like a mantra (see Homicide, in particular). Oh, and Joe Mantegna.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, as the honour-bound jujitsu instructor who gets suckered into the corrupt world of MMA tournaments, makes a decent fist of dragging the script through its hokey philosophising and improbable turns with his understated gravitas, and there is a neat moment when the realisation dawns that while we're still watching a run-up to a final showdown, it's not with a man-mountain opponent but rather with the money-skewed American legal system. Sadly, Mamet seems to lose sight of this by the end.

5/10

WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)

...or how Pixar once again hit the right balance between cuddly and funny for the kids, and satirically pointed for the grown-ups.

The titular hero is a waste disposal robot alone on an abandoned future Earth of garbage-mound skyscrapers, plodding away compacting trash and anthropomorphically picking out sentimental curios until the arrival of EVE, a sleek probe robot sent to find signs of regrowth. So, what ensues is a love story in which the puppyish main protagonist follows EVE to where the departed humans have vacationed for the last 700 years, growing so bloated that they're unable to walk any more. Here's the magic formula: waddling blobs are laughs for the kids, whereas their parents will basically see all of civilisation turned into Americans on sunbeds, drip-fed milkshakes.

It goes without saying that the animation is hugely impressive, and that the appropriate references are made to various stock sci-fi sources. What does come as a surprise, though, is that the lead robots, with their two-word vocabularies and pared-down faces, have somehow been infused with more personality than most of the actual human personae in Hollywood.

7/10

Du levande (Roy Andersson, 2007)

Veteran director Andersson took three years to carefully assemble this series of vignettes, where successive troubled characters such as harassed fathers or troubled hairdressers wander onto screen and express their hopes and fears, frequently in the form of describing their dreams, which are then played out in full. A rare balance is struck in places between the pathetic and the hilarious, the barrier between the two extremes made more fragile by a framing technique that strips the characters bare - there are only prolonged static long shots, so effectively each piece works as a stage soliloquy.

Somewhat stereotypically for a Swedish view on dreams, You, the Living is also dourly heavy-handed at times, but there's a lot of food for thought here nevertheless.

7/10

Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009)

Better to steal than to plagiarise. And if you're going to steal, steal from the best. So, Duncan Jones's debut plunders 2001, Dark Star, Silent Running and both versions of Solaris and somehow comes up with an end result that stands up on its own. Basically, it's the perennially underrated Sam Rockwell as the sole astronaut manning a mining base on the moon and going slowly mad in the process. Things decisively take a turn for the worse when he meets himself.

I'm not at liberty to reveal any more, but, while this never reaches the idiosyncratic or poetic heights of the sources it's indebted to, it's well-meshed together, taut and acute. A fine addition to the cerebral space sci-fi canon, and a whole lot more cohesive than Sunshine.

7/10

The Happening (M. Night Shyamalan, 2008)

After the exceptional use that he put Bruce Willis's pained whisper to in the moody Sixth Sense, then managing to hit the superhero genre from a totally unconventional angle with Unbreakable, great things were rightly expected of Shyamalan as a figurehead for intelligent films on the supernatural. Promptly, he did his damnedest to disabuse us of this notion with a succession of duds increasing in stink, recycled elements growing increasingly threadbare. However here he may have just arrested the slide.

Waves of mass suicides erupt across the eastern seaboard of the United States and are believed to be caused by terrorism. Oddly, what saves this disaster movie is Shyamalan's overreliance on the weird, as the environment itself, pushed too far by man, is revealed as the cause. The unconventional nature of the menace hence elevates a B-movie riddled with illogicalities to something the director hasn't achieved for years: it's actually eerie. It's not much to crow about, but I wouldn't write him off just yet.

5/10

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

Some directors, whether by nature or by design, end up as tightrope walkers, constantly skirting disaster, and you find yourself watching partially just for the thrill of seeing the fall or how it's staved off. Wes Anderson is probably incapable of doing anything else. All characters must have quirks and realism is just too dull. In 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums, for example, the wheels definitely came off after a number of interesting wobbles.

Here they just about stay on, even with some rather pointless Finding Nemo-style fish thrown in as Bill Murray does his Bill Murray as Jacques Cousteau on a quest for a big shark and various heavyweight actors such as Anjelica Huston and Michael Gambon ham it up around him. Willem Dafoe gets to try on a camp German accent and Owen Wilson is Owen Wilson. It's about as profound as the toddlers' end of the pool in its meditations on the meaning of life, but at least the dialogue is crisply unpredictable and the wanton quirkiness mostly works for chuckles.

6/10

There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

Paul Thomas Anderson turns out features slowly enough that it becomes a kneejerk response to double-check each release by his hacky namesake Paul W.S. (Resident Evil et al.) for fear of missing out on the next masterpiece on the level of 1999's Magnolia. But it's clearly worth the wait. There Will Be Blood makes a virtue of simplicity, confident enough in the strength of its central theme, consuming greed, to obviate the need for twists, turns or undue pyrotechnics. The setting of the early years of oil exploration and exploitation in small communities in California is absorbing enough, and Daniel Day-Lewis's portrayal of the increasingly solipsistic and maniacal oilman Daniel Plainview at the film's centre is simply astonishing, rivalling anything he's turned out in a sparse but mostly carefully chosen career.

8/10

Gomorra (Matteo Garrone, 2008)

Based on Roberto Saviano's book on the Camorra crime syndicate, this delivers a matter-of-fact and in-your-face slab of life on the grassroots level of crime in Naples. Garrone has little interest in glamourising his subject matter by highlighting cinematic considerations, and this is both to the film's advantage in being taken as vérité reportage and disadvantage in that there's actually very little to engage the onlooker. Characterisation is undeveloped and it's all rather dramatically flat. Worthy, then, but of little interest to the outsider beyond being a documentary in a more easily digestible form.

6/10

Up (Pete Docter & Bob Peterson, 2009)

Disney/Pixar collaborations continue apace, producing adult-friendly children's films in which the cutesy visual elements are leavened with streaks of verbal wit or worldly allusions, and the much-lauded Up is very much in this vein, mixing fantasy and pathos as an elderly widower sticks a finger up at property developers by attaching balloons to his house and sailing off to South America, with a bumbling boy scout in tow.

It's certainly rare to find bereavement handled at all in a kids' film, and the vertigo-inducing aerial scenes in particular are visually stunning. But it all stretches a bit thin at feature-length, and the introduction of some villainous talking dogs feels uncomfortably close to merchandising. Pleasant, but don't go expecting innovation or bellylaughs on a par with Toy Story or The Incredibles.

6/10

Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi, 2009)

Oh dear. One never expected Sam Raimi to become mediocre. Not after such schlock classics as the Evil Dead films, Crimewave or Darkman, or indeed the first two Spider-Man films, which combined wit and brio with fan gratification in just the right proportions. But here it is: the first actual Raimi film (I thought I'd forgive him for Spider-Man 3; keeping a comic-book franchise fresh is superhumanly hard work) which leaves me utterly indifferent. Anyone could have made this.

A loan officer, played by the instantly forgettable Alison Lohman, declines a gypsy a loan and is consequently cursed to hell. Then pursued by spooks and demons of various kinds for 90 minutes, on an unswervingly dull path to the denouement. And I thought horror was meant to have surprises in it. D'oh!

4/10

Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (Tom Tykwer, 2000)

The Princess and the Warrior, Tykwer's follow-up to Run Lola Run, has to be one of the most misleadingly titled films I've ever come across. Surely it's a medieval fantasy? So why are we in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest 10 minutes in? And in a heist scenario some time later?

In a nutshell, the life of Franka Potente's mental hospital nurse is saved after a traffic accident by lowlife Benno Fürmann, who then doesn't want to know when she comes looking for him, convinced it all happened as part of some design. So far, so good. Both leads are arrestingly fragile presences and they're given some psychologically well-crafted dialogue to work with.

However, things go off the rails. The potential stifled romance film turns into a crime one instead, and then fantastical elements creep in after all. It's all very interesting, as you watch Tykwer change his mind repeatedly about what exactly he's making, but a bit of a light meal by the end.

6/10

Ghost Town (David Koepp, 2008)

British TV's comic icons do not have a resplendent track record in crossing over to the movie format, whether here or Stateside (witness as a recent case in point Simon Pegg in Run Fatboy Run, if you can stomach it). So this really comes as a pleasant surprise. Wisely, Ricky Gervais's Brent persona has been tinkered with just enough to leave the misanthropy and neediness while removing the weaselly attributes and the lack of self-awareness.

Gervais is an anti-social dentist in Manhattan who is horrified to discover one day that he can see the dead, and that they all want him to do them a favour. Of course he'll cave in under all the humanity and lose his curmudgeonly ways in the end, as we're firmly in romcom land from the outset, but there are enough witty touches along the way to make the journey to the inevitable agreeable enough.

6/10

Crank: High Voltage (Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor, 2009)

As Jason Statham attempts manfully to outsquint and outsnarl his previous sterling efforts, so too with the writer-directors, who are forced by the exceedingly high bar they set with Chev Chelios's previous rampage outing to take their cheery assault on political correctness to virtually unimaginable levels. Chinks, spics, women, gays - none shall remain unscathed as the indestructible Chev carves his way through all of LA's underworld, this time fitted with an artificial heart requiring constant jolts of electricity instead of the adrenaline last time round. There's really no point in getting offended; it's an equal opportunities bruiser of sensibilities. No-one has a go at rollercoasters for being morally suspect in just offering cheap thrills, after all.

5/10

35 Rhums (Claire Denis, 2008)

It's almost immediately apparent, despite the radical shift in location and culture to a modern-day Parisian outer suburb and a black immigrant family, that we're basically in a remake of Ozu's Late Spring, where all the other characters serve as peripheral gravitational forces acting on the father-daughter pairing at the the centre. To be fair, Denis readily acknowledged the borrowing, so the question has to be what has been changed and whether it's for the better.

The spirited daughter is certainly an update on Ozu's meekly petulant Noriko, as is the world-weariness of Denis veteran Alex Descas in comparison with the stoic good humour of his Ozu counterpart. But the dynamic remains the same: the neediness of the child unwilling to strike out by herself, in the guise of an insistence on nurturing a father who'll be left alone. The theme works because of its universality, and some well-thought out scene set-ups and a liltingly beautiful soundtrack make for a rounded whole. Whether we really learn anything, however, is a different question.

6/10

Banshun (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)

For those familiar with Tokyo Story, the tone and themes of its precursors Late Spring and Early Summer can easily be seen in retrospect as a run-up to the perennial world critics' favourite. There is such a continuity in setting, cast and even character names that it's tempting to view the three as a trilogy and then wonder why Ozu troubled himself with the facade of different characters at all. The constant figures through all three are Noriko, played by Setsuko Hara as a skittish but devoted daughter or daughter-in-law, and Chishû Ryû's genial father. Late Spring differs from its successors in being wholly centered on these two as the father gently tries to persuade the clingy daughter to leave the nest.

It's certainly true to life and moves with admirable restraint, wringing a wealth of meaning out of the slightest gestures. Sadly for this viewer, no amount of cross-cultural or chronological allowance can overcome the rising irritation with 10 minutes of unsubtitled Noh performance or the increasingly terrifying durability of Hara's winsome smile. Horses for courses, then.

6/10