The Infidel (Josh Appignanesi, 2010)

Omid Djalili stars as Mahmud Nasir, a regular Joe East End Muslim, albeit with some anger management issues, who gets rather upset the day he discovers that he's in fact adopted and was born Jewish. This when his son is about to marry the daughter of a fundamentalist preacher.
The combination of cheeky roly-poly Djalili and David Baddiel as writer leads one to expect a barrel of bellylaughs, which never really quite materialises as the script simultaneously wrestles with The Big Issue it has taken on, namely ethnic/religious identity and tolerance. To be fair, it gives this a fair bash until feelgood needs take precedence and we're on our way to a fairytale ending. You also can't help feeling that knowing that there's an Iranian and a Jew behind it makes it rather to easy for them to safely indulge in a swathe of cheap stereotyping of both sides for titters. Still, Djalili's indignant irascibility makes the most of the neater one-liners.

6/10

Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009)

Slow-mo boxing scenes with a sardonic voiceover set to Irish gypsy fiddling. Yes, it's a Guy Ritchie film. It's also a reboot of Sherlock Holmes, purportedly closer to the buccaneering spirit of the original than all the world's cerebral and mannered Basil Rathbones.
Robert Downey Jr. hams up the lead for all it's worth with a jittery eye-rolling performance, delivering his lines in a nearly indecipherable faux-Shakespearean accent which at times threatens to spill over into the Fast Show's 'I was very, very drunk indeed' character, while Jude Law clucks around him like an exasperated mother hen as his long-suffering sidekick. They kick some ass, bicker and then kick more ass. Oh, and save England from an occult master criminal's hokum scheme in the meanwhile.
It should all be terrible; there's far too much reliance on action to shunt the plot forward whenever Ritchie panics at the prospect of having more than a few consecutive minutes of actual detective exposition on screen. So it's with some shame that I confess to having been quite entertained and able to put up with Ritchie's large-looming foibles for the first time since his debut features. Downey Jr. is never less than watchable, the eccentricities in the re-imagining of the characters and the frenetic music, apparently frequently nicking Kusturica's orchestras, are cute rather than just irritating and the fantastical recreation of Victorian London looks amazing. Overengineered fluff, sure, but at least the thrills work for once.

6/10

El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970)

This is probably one of the most insane features ever made. Lest that sound too much like a recommendation, it's also muddled with its targets and shot through with a Russ Meyer approach to editing and production values. It's from the era of Zabriskie Point, after all.
Picture a cross between a spaghetti Western and a Christ allegory, with Tod Browning's Freaks and some Nicolas Roeg outtakes thrown in, all drenched in Mexican Christian mysticism. There, you have Jodorowsky's self-indulgent pontifications when he gets to direct and act at the same time. You can read it as a critique on Mexican history or organised religion or on blind faith or see it as a religious parable for our times, albeit one which is wilfully obtuse and gleefully mental, camping it up at unexpected moments. Jodorowsky, the imp, would probably be happy with any of these interpretations. It's never less than interesting just because you don't know what's coming next, and never more than disjointed for its farting about.

5/10

Wolke Neun (Andreas Dresen, 2008)

An elderly East German woman finds a passion she had forgotten after 30 years of marriage to a staid train enthusiast through an affair with another pensioner. This causes no end of hand-wringing as she attempts to reconcile her own needs with her sense of guilt.
With this type of small-scale drama the virtues are also limitations: character depictions are life-like and there's no resorting to histrionics, but an adherence to realism can stunt dramatic structure as well. Yes, it's rare that we see pensioners having sex and it's a worthy point to make, but Cloud 9 frequently forgets to move on to the next point.
Nevertheless, it is a serious piece, well acted, and on balance makes a virtue of reminding us what crises lie just under the surface of small, everyday lives.

6/10

Das Trio (Hermine Huntgeburth, 1998)

For German viewers, the sight of Götz George, hard bastard detective Schimanski on the long-running crime series Tatort, as a gay circus compere and pickpocket in a mid-life crisis must boggle the mind as a piece of leftfield casting. For other audiences, it comes across as an engaging performance all the same, in Huntgeburth's slight but charming comedy drama.
George leads the trio of the title as Zobel, a Faginesque patriarch of petty theft, accompanied by his put-upon lover Karl and waifish daughter Lizzie. Their low-grade lives take a turn for the unsettled as Karl is hit by a car and the remaining duo are forced to enlist a novice to their crew. And then the inevitable emotional complications ensue.
I would have liked more on the intricacies of their scams; what we get is handled amusingly but doesn't surprise a great deal. Nevertheless, the director's touch remains light overall and the twist on the traditional menage-a-trois set up is refreshing, as is the unrepentantly amoral attitude to the protagonists.

6/10

Dead Man Running (Alex De Rakoff, 2009)

This lists Rio Ferdinand and Ashley Cole amongst the executive producers, and features ubergeezer Danny Dyer as a weaselly chav along with Tamer Hassan's lead and 50 Cent as a crime lord. Therefore, it does exactly what it says on the tin: aimless London gangstah fare in the Guy Ritchie mould, except lacking the wit that he at least occasionally managed with his first pieces.
On the plus side, it's handled with gusto, but the narrative is riddled with inconsistencies and it's really asking too much to care about two thugs simply because they've been set the usual 24-hour deadline to come up with a wodge of wonga or else they're history; at the end of the day it's just amoral morons robbing and punching their way to an undeserved survival.

4/10

Hundstage (Ulrich Seidl, 2001)

Rarely do you find a film where the director so patently obviously despises all his characters, and seems to think that hate on such a scale makes for social comment. Ensemble pieces of interlocking stories, above all genres, should have a moral centre of some kind to enable the viewer to latch onto whatever point is being made, lest it just all end up as babble. Dog Days contains none, and its gallery of self-centred Viennese suburban grotesques  pointlessly drinking and copulating seems to be making a case for the extinction of the Austrian nation. There's a mentally ill girl who spends the whole film hitching rides with perplexed motorists, an estranged couple who appear to continue living together just to seethe at each other, another woman in a helplessly abusive relationship and a pensioner who loathes his neighbours. Think if Michael Haneke and Werner Herzog had a competition to outdo each other in misanthropy, and it was all edited by a suicidal Finn. Yes, that bad.
Needless to say, it won prizes from those bodies that confuse torturing your audience with depth.

2/10

Barfuss (Til Schweiger, 2005)

In Barefoot, Nick is an itinerant loafer drifting aimlessly from one dead-end job to another until a day's stint as a cleaner in a mental hospital finds an inmate whose suicide attempt he prevented attach herself like a puppy to him. Unable to shake her off through various scrapes, he gradually discovers an attachment to her that he never had to any job or to his moneyed family or their obnoxious hangers-on.
Til Schweiger may be a quite a pin-up in Germany, so it helps that an international audience may know him for little more than a bit part as one of the Nazi hunters in Inglourious Basterds, and he does a surprisingly affecting turn as the misanthropic Nick, though the film probably belongs to Johanna Wokalek as the traumatised but naive waif Leila, who gets the lion's share of the moments of humour scattered through the film with her comically literal interpretations of the external world's mysteries.
Where the film stutters somewhat is in its transitions between this gentle humour and a desire to really jerk the heart strings; it rather wants to have its cake and eat it. It also creaks at times with an overreliance on soundtrack. But it's still a promising debut in solo direction for Schweiger, and rather sweet for all its foibles.


6/10

Surrogates (Jonathan Mostow, 2009)

Mostow's not the worst hack in Hollywood, but his output thus far never even seems to have sought to rise above mediocrity, and rather dismayingly this generic trudge falls short of the similarly-themed The Island, by the generally pointlessly noisy Michael Bay, no less. Ok, we're dealing not with body-part donor clones but avatars for a vaguely future world where the operators of the avatars are barely capable of leaving their homes as their virtual, more perfect 'surrogates' go through fuzzily realised detective intrigue shenanigans in the real world.
The likes of I, Robot and The Matrix also end up getting shamelessly plundered, and Bruce Willis is getting to be so self-parodically cypheresque with his grunting and mumbling that he should really give all this action palaver a rest by now. And then the muddled plotting is further evidenced by a conclusion - and I'm really not spoiling it for you here - in which he ends up effectively committing mass murder.

3/10

Joyeux Noel (Christian Carion, 2005)

The story of the unofficial ceasefire that occurred during the first Christmas of the First World War has passed into folklore as the one with the football match between the lines. Carion's film of the incident does collate that event with details of lesser-known similar breaks in the fighting, and therefore suffers at times from a lack to verisimilitude, not least when a popular female singer rises from the German trenches to perform to the troops of all three combatant parties. But, to his credit, Carion does not seem to intend any deception and whilst there's little originality on offer with the standard sneering officer class vs salt-of-the-Earth working man dichotomy abounding, the facts are just about strong enough to make it a worthy enterprise for its honesty and heart.

6/10