Lilja 4-ever (Lukas Moodysson, 2002)

You may criticise this for being a lecture instead of a film. But the devices of film are nevertheless integrated; there's a splash of Fellini, another of Satyajit Ray. It's uncertain whether Moodysson, with his autodidact attitude, has ever seen those potential influences. So much the better.
It's harsh. Harsher than harsh. A teenage Russian girl in a suburb of Tallinn gets shat on by her mother, her family and a succession of men. But the great angle that Moodysson pulls on the whole sorry tale is for once making us look at an incredibly foul issue, enforced prostitution, from the victim's point of view, and taking us so deep into her life that we see from her perspective. The average sincere documentary only looks at it from our viewpoint. Here, we become the viewpoint. Von Trier may be outraged at how women are treated by abusive patriarchal society, but he metaphorises. This actually feels real. It's quite an accomplishment.

8/10

Mýrin (Baltasar Kormákur, 2006)

Hooked on Wallander? Fixated with Stieg Larsson? Then you may feel that you are the target market of another helping of Nordic police grit, including one from Iceland. Surely the unforgivingly bleak landscape and off-kilter denizens will add existential import to the inevitable succession of repressed perversions and gruesome acts?
Yes and no. Jar City gratifies in serving up all of the above with a grim efficiency, and Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson, as the grizzled world-weary policeman Erlendur investigating deaths separated by thirty years while trying to cope with his drug-addicted daughter, does a fine job with investing his tough and acerbic character with some interest. The script also contains enough ingenuity that detective genre twist requirements are well met.
But Kormákur, perhaps best known for his 2000 directorial debut, the nicely quirky 101 Reykjavik, ultimately leaves a void where pathos should be and where it is in either of the Henning Mankell adaptations, by comparison. And does Iceland, if it really has that many lowlifes, not understand the concept of a high-security prison?

6/10

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Mark Herman, 2008)

John Boyne, the writer of this depiction of the Holocaust from the perspective of a concentration camp commandant's family, has reiterated the oft-used rationale that what went on in Nazi Germany needs to be told and retold for successive generations, 'lest we forget'.
Although burdened with the baggage of that familiarity, Herman's film nevertheless manages a certain freshness through making the focal point the friendship between the camp commandant's 8-year-old son and a camp inmate of the same age, and the story arc becomes both the boy's dawning discomfort with what is actually going on, from a state of utter innocence where he only wonders why the sickly farmers next door all wear pyjamas, and the parallel disintegration of his idyllic Nazi family.
This could all be insufferably twee, but a combination of deft script and wholly natural performances from the two boys, backed up by David Thewlis as the fanatical father and Vera Farmiga as the model mother gradually forced to confront the nightmare, keeps it compelling. A slight pity then, that some authenticity is once again lost through the imposition of an English language and culture filter on a tale very much in need of its actual historical milieu.

6/10

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

Whenever you think QT may be growing up, his inner and outer nerds trip him up and you're left baffled as to whether there were more steps forward than back. Here, he handles a pan-European cast with quite some panache, shows a reasonable degree of restraint on the ultraviolence, and holds back from being sucked in by the less interesting part of his set-up, the Brad Pitt-led Nazi-hunting Basterds. But then he plunders one war film soundtrack too many, and can't resist the pointlessly parodic scenes, most notable an obligatory ranting Hitler.
Still, even Tarantino having a laugh is more interesting than most directors being serious. What always saves his bacon is the way his fanatical love of cinema shines through. Also, the ample screentime given to Christophe Waltz's cheerfully amoral SS bastard Colonel Hans Landa was a perceptive move: you can't take your eyes off him, even while squeamishly watching through your fingers, aware of another imminent act of brutalism.

7/10

I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007)

I had to keep pinching myself as a reminder that I wasn't watching I, Robot again. Will Smith is effectively the same character, for all his lack of cyborg parts, and there's even an identically wrecked Brooklyn Bridge. Nevertheless, it could have been a lot worse. The first half of the film, where our hero wallows in the isolation of being the last man alive, is actually curiously affecting and engages far more than Charlton Heston's nihilist take in The Omega Man. But that soft centre also turns out to be the film's undoing: you start to feel we're headed for Christ-like martyrdom again and the scenario unravels in a progression of misapplied CGI. The mutants may be more feral than the earlier adaptation's daft pseudo-vampires, but the hammy creepiness of those shuffling neophytes was actually more chilling, with the cultish overtones recalling the irradiated bomb-worshippers of Beneath the Planet of the Apes. What we end up with here is saviour against beasties, as opposed to hedonist against lunatics. I know which is more psychologically involving.

5/10