The Visitor (Thomas McCarthy, 2007)

Journeyman actor McCarthy has only delved into feature directing once before, with 2003's quietly affecting The Station Agent, and delivers something of a similar emotional tone here with a tale of a shy widowed college professor who is drawn out of his shell when he finds an illegal immigrant couple occupying his New York flat, and invites them to stay on. In the traditions of the internationalist scenario where cultures meet and enrich the lives of all concerned, he finds a sense of purpose and attachment along the way.

It would be easy to trip into cheesiness with this set-up, but a combination of Richard Jenkins's sensitive (and Oscar-nominated) reading of the professor warily opening up and McCarthy's lightness of touch with essentially staple material makes for a satisfyingly true-to-life whole, and also an undidactic one, despite its obvious indignation at the status quo. Neither the protagonist nor the illegal immigrants are idealised portraits of nobility or suffering, but believably rounded, vulnerable beings under the impersonally oppressive yoke of US post-9/11 bureaucracy.

7/10

The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009)

Even in the present cinematic climate of apocalypticism, engendered largely by the America vs Islam stand-off and the preponderance of environmental disaster/2012 scenarios, it's surprising to find Oscar consideration touching on a film as utterly devoid of hope as The Road. Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee, as The Man and The Boy, wander through a cursed land, littered with the broken and the dying, and the strength of their relationship forms the only impetus for them to continue on a futile quest for sanctuary.

Like Cormac McCarthy's feted source work, this isn't interested in scientific explanations for the end of the world. This frees the barren land to act as a symbol of impending doom; the death that will eventually separate all sons from their fathers, and the characters remaining unnamed hammers home the symbolism.

Hillcoat's last feature, the gritty Outback Western The Proposition, was already saturated in earth hues, dust and grim senses of purpose. Here, all are taken a step beyond as the remaining colour is drained out, rust and rot coat everything and all motivations become last crutches. The starkly visualised devastation of the landscape is reflected in the ravagement of the characters' faces and souls, bar the untouched Boy, lingering icon of life. Mortensen's performance is agonisingly tender and helps, alongside the plot's avoidance of survival horror cliches in the midst of cannibals, to keep us linked into the universal human theme beneath the potentially overpowering metaphor. Indeed, if there is a criticism, it's that the symbolism is too heavy-handed, the characters just cyphers. But it will get under your skin regardless.

8/10

Johnny Mad Dog (Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, 2008)

Set in Liberia, but in effect in a generic war-torn African country, Sauvaire's harrowing account of a marauding band of boy soldiers bears some echoes of City of God in its depiction of feral anarchy. As in Meirelles's searing masterpiece, the sense of horror arises from manifold sources: the perverse blend of the childlike - one boy sports a pair of angel wings - with the grimly systematic adult military organisation of their assaults, the matter-of-fact way characters intermittently keel over and die, dispatched by unseen enemies, and the utter lack of humanity remaining within the boys, who cannot remember their families and therefore are unable to empathise with the civilians they prey on. It's a hopeless scenario, which leaves even the innocent either dead or emotionally brutalised, but the nihilism is essential to a just portrayal of what news reportage may routinely have to gloss over.

7/10

Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008)

James Gray returns once more to the Russian-Jewish milieu of Brooklyn's Brighton Beach for another story of conflicted characters. Joaquin Phoenix, a nightclub manager caught between gangsters and the police in Gray's sombre We Own the Night, here has a much more internalised struggle as a lonely depressive living with his concerned parents, forced to choose between the nice girl thrust on him by his family and the self-obsessed rich girl next door, who uses him as a dumping ground for her emotional baggage and piques his projected fantasies in the process.

Phoenix may be another Hollywood actor gone doolally under the weight of the expectation placed on the serious craftsman in a fickle medium - there are uncomfortable echoes of Heath Ledger in his intensity - but there's no denying his skill. Gray plays a dangerous game with his understated approach, particularly with the dialogue, which is life-like to the point of deliberate banality, and it takes an exceptionally intuitive performer to breathe life into a character who, on the surface of things, offers little to latch onto besides his pain.

On the evidence of this, Gray's ploughing of a singular furrow seems to be bringing increasing returns: the emotional stiflement that his 1994 debut, Little Odessa, sought to express now comes across with more articulacy and without needing the crutches of physical violence in the plot. The deliberate ambiguity of interpretation is more confidently defined, and there are some artful little touches in gestures and coincidences which reward careful observation, yet remain wholly inobtrusive. This is American independent film at its most mature.

8/10

Aanrijding in Moscou (Christophe Van Rompaey, 2008)

Matty, a tired separated 40-something mother of three in a nondescript Belgian suburb meets a younger truck driver through a motoring mishap and eventually relaxes her guard with his uncomplicated advances. Happiness looms, and then the inevitable complications arise.

The film really belongs to Barbara Sarafian as the woman facing a big mid-life decision. She switches from steely stridency to girlish satisfaction wholly naturalistically in a captivating performance, bolstered by a script of unforced wit. Moscow, Belgium succeeds through a low-key approach in generating a feelgood vibe without having to resort to the stock contrivances of most romcoms, and depicting fundamental feelings and dilemmas without getting mired in navel-gazing. Wholly refreshing.

8/10

Entre les murs (Laurent Cantet, 2008)

The Class continues Cantet's analysis of big societal issues, having covered labour relations, unemployment and exploitation of the third world in his previous three films. Based on François Bégaudeau's semi-autobiographical book, it uses a cast mostly consisting of Parisian inner city schoolkids under their real names, and is shot in a loosely documentary style, covering several weeks in the life of a class taught by Bégaudeau. Whilst the topics that arise - those of teenage and ethnic minority resistance to authority figures - are staple fare in the territory of the inner city classroom drama, what lifts Cantet's piece onto a higher plane is its refusal to sink into histrionics and it remains perfectly possible to see conflict between pupils and with their teachers from both sides, which makes the impact of the realisation that there's not necessarily a solution at hand all the more unsettling. The Class justifiably won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2008.

7/10

Interview (Steve Buscemi, 2007)

Steve Buscemi, likeable cult figure in his incarnation as a quick-talking cerebral weasel in 120 films, mostly in the supporting ranks, puts himself centre-stage in his fifth directorial work as yet another cerebral weasel. Sienna Miller, as the coquettish and nervy starlet being interviewed by Buscemi's journalist, is also basically playing her public image, and therein lie both the strengths and weaknesses of this stage-bound duologue. It's fun for a while following the manoeuvres of their psychological chess game, as the primadonna and noncompliant interviewer are forced to engage with each other, but it spins into the realm of the overly contrived before too long, as their jousting takes precedence over lifelike characterisation. To be filed alongside Richard Linklater's Tape.

5/10

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Steven Spielberg, 2008)

Bigger, faster, louder. So much worse. Spielberg does his damnedest to drag our memory of the adventure yarn classic Raiders of the Lost Ark, and of Harrison Ford as an actor, down the u-bend in a pale line extension, even failing to find an object of interest for the quest. You knew where you were with God and Nazis. Sketchy aliens in a sketchy Latin America? Blah.

The implausibility factor is also cranked up to 11+ as a worryingly geriatric Indy dodges a crack Soviet platoon's machine guns by running a bit and then survives a nuclear blast at ground zero by hiding in a fridge. In the first twenty minutes, for the love of God. Presumably Spielberg intended to induce chortles of incredulity at his audacity, not at the amount of resources or acting talent being wasted here. The habitually excellent Cate Blanchett and Ray Winstone, as the principal baddies, now get strike one against their name. At least the strike count is long over with John Hurt, a veteran big-buck whore, as a loopy professor, and you expect nothing from teen squirt of the month Shia LaBeouf as Indy's sidekick, nothing being what is summarily delivered.

It's even visually uninteresting, the fight choreography scattergun and antsy, the sets derivative rather than evocative, the photography right down to the level of TV-movie flat at times. Could it only be 3 years on from Spielberg's coldly gripping Munich?

3/10

Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007)

The American independent film is alive and well, as long as operators of Reitman's calibre can earn a crust from works so finely tuned that they accommodate comedy alongside tragedy; mass appeal co-existing with a real point.

Here, the comic element is moved away from the headily caustic satire of Reitman's last outing, Thank You for Smoking, and into the mercurial dialogue of the titular character, a precociously worldly 16-year-old who becomes pregnant and promptly sets about finding foster parents for her untimely load. There's a real art in crafting her wise-cracking armour so that we remain aware of its brittleness and the fact that there's still just a bluffing, vulnerable teenager under it all. Ellen Page is a revelation in the role, but there's plenty more astute casting on show, and , importantly, no character is left a mere butt of ridicule or cypher. Despite being heavily centered on Juno, the supporting parts all get a moment to live, which in turn breathes verisimilitude into the whole picture. An unpretentious gem of a film.

8/10

L'instinct de mort & L'ennemi public n°1 (Jean-François Richet, 2008)

Released weeks apart, these form a two-part biopic of France's most notorious bank robber of recent times, Jacques Mesrine, who rampaged through France and Quebec in the '60s and '70s, escaping captivity time and time again until his eventual summary execution in the midst of Paris traffic by the French police.
The story has been filmed before; in a leaden-footed form in 1984, which gave us the basic sequence of events in Mesrine's last act and along the way forgot to include any motivational background or characterisation to explain why an amoral thug would have continued to exert such a Robin Hood-like fascination on French society. Richet's films certainly rectify that, and more: the combination of casting the magnetic Vincent Cassel, switching from avuncular to ruthless in the blink of an eye, and alluding to Mesrine's formative, brutalising experiences in the Algerian war steers dangerously close to adulation of the protagonist as an anti-establishment icon, for all that Richet is careful to include detail of Mesrine's throwaway espousal of any radical cause of the day or incidence of self-centred brutality.

Still, as biopics go, it's tautly punchy and benefits from a sense that what we're seeing is pretty close to the facts, as Mesrine and authorities alike bungle repeatedly in their assigned labours, stripping away the staple gloss of the Hollywood heist film.

7/10