Nunta Muta (Horaƫiu Mǎlǎele, 2008)

Silent Wedding takes place in Romania in 1953, when the whole country is officially in mourning following the death of Stalin. And it's also a hoot. As with Kusturica's black comedy romps through the communist era in Yugoslavia, Mǎlǎele's film jigs a merry dance between tragedy and celebration with irrepressible zest.
In a nutshell, a small village decides that a local wedding will go ahead regardless of the silence imposed on the country...in absolute silence. Needless to say, this proves a tall order for the chirpy villagers.
Satire and pathos are blended in without overwhelming the joie-de-vivre of a rumbunctious and likeable cast who have the naturalistic air of lay actors. Some of the humour is too broad, to be sure, and the more absurdist moments occasionally have a randomised feel, but overall, like with Kusturica, it'd take a heart of stone to resist getting pulled along with the mood.

7/10

The Taking of Pelham 123 (Tony Scott, 2009)

Well, another pointless remake of a reasonable Golden Age of Hollywood heist film with Tony Scott, a hack of medium standing who somehow always commands a hefty budget despite a singular failure to ever deliver anything memorable with it, unless you count the pace-setting homoerotics of Top Gun. Add the dead certs that Travolta will ham it up something rotten as the villain and Washington will provide the compromised but surprisingly tough everyman angle. Expectations duly lowered by this combination,  the efficiency of the dialogue and set-up in the first half hour come as a pleasant surprise. Then Scott realises at the same time that there's not much more dialogue to be had between his two principals, and there's still half an hour until the train hijackers' deadline to fill up somehow, and that his goldfish audience might be drowsing without screeching cop cars or machine guns, so it's time for some wholly gratuitous crashes in scenes quite redundant to the actual drama at hand. We just about make it to the end before the cliche and plothole count has gone through the roof, but it's a close-run thing.

4/10

Doomsday (Neil Marshall, 2008)

After Dog Soldiers, The Descent, this heap and Centurion it would be decent of Marshall to Ronseal it and change his surname to 'Generic Survival Horror'. Although, to be fair, the first two films at least met their undemanding brief with some fun and pizazz. Whereas with this one the soldering of source materials is just too glaring to be anything other than embarrassing. Appropriately, since cannibals feature somewhere in the leftover stew of a plot, the whole thing is shamelessly cannibalised from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and 28 Days Later, cobbled together with some double-sided sticky tape in the form of lesser pilferings from Resident Evil and Escape from New York.
In a sentence: Rhona Mitra does Kate Beckinsale as a foxy hardnut, Scotland is isolated because of a plague that makes all it doesn't kill sprout mohicans, and Bob Hoskins and Malcolm McDowell breeze by to pick up their paycheques. Meanwhile, Marshall spends $30m on petrol bombs. That's your lot.

3/10

Antichrist (Lars Von Trier, 2009)

Von Trier has stated that this protracted nightmare arose from his continuing battles with depression, and Antichrist certainly manages to ferry the viewer to the land of the unwell with some panache. Viewed as a psychological horror film, its air of looming menace is leagues ahead of the slasher pack. Viewed as a dissertation on the disabling effects of grief, it's far less effective, as Charlotte Gainsbourg's bereaved mother gets increasingly hysterical and takes it out with escalating severity on her psychiatrist husband, Willem Dafoe. It's not that her delusional mania is unfeasible per se as a depiction of mental illness brought on by trauma, it's just that it's difficult to see the loss of a child as the catalyst for not only the self-loathing but also the misandry that follow. In seeking to communicate his blackest moods, Von Trier seems to have chosen the wrong narrative vehicle.
Then there's also his familiar and unresolved preoccupation with women as victims, though here Gainsbourg's character has in effect become her own victim, and that in turn raises an uncomfortable air of women seen as both ultimately unfathomable and prey to insanity in their vulnerability.
Overall, Antichrist is best taken without concessions to whatever red herrings of psychological analysis Von Trier may dangle before us, and with a refusal to read any more than a habitual provocateur's brief to shock into the scenes where he starts mutilating his actors. It works beautifully as eerie, satanically tinged horror, the performances scarily committed and the photography in particular of exceptional nuance and vividity.

6/10

Chocolat (Lasse Hallström, 2000)

Chances are that if you were in the market for this, you'll have seen it already, seeing as it has chick-flick stamped so solidly through it as a stick of Blackpool rock. Not that any adaptation of a novel by the superlatively imaginative Joanne Harris should be dismissed out of hand as serving only that market.
The basic structure of the source material has survived in the film version: Vianne Rocher, with precocious daughter in tow, causes turmoil on arrival in a tight-lippedly conservative French town little adapted to the post-war world with her sensuous confections and forthright interventions, soon leading to the mayor plotting to have her sent packing. The allusions to the conflict between church and atheism/paganism are still there too, and the main characters are well served by dependable casting, from Juliette Binoche to Judi Dench, Alfred Molina as the scheming mayor and Johnny Depp in a vanity cameo as a roguish traveller and Vianne's love interest.
But Hallström's film fails on one critical count: it's too flat to convey the magic of the bewitching chocolatier's alchemy, and so the ecstatic conversions she brings about in the repressed villagers just come across as instances of ludicrous gluttony whereas it should be apparent that there's real witchcraft at work. It's all perfectly charming and light, but leaves too sugary an aftertaste. Something more along the lines of Tom Tykwer's painstaking working of Perfume was called for.

6/10

Tokyo Sonata (Kyoshi Kurosawa, 2008)

This starts with a premise akin to that of Laurent Cantet's Time Out, in which a businessman made redundant continues a sham routine of going to work in shame at having to reveal his situation to his family. However the Japanese setting lends Tokyo Sonata an extra dimension, given the enormous stigma attached to unemployment in a culture accustomed to employment guaranteed for life, with redundancy therefore carrying the baggage that the jobless are at fault for their own circumstances.

Kurosawa's film is a sensitively nuanced mix of black comedy and social critique. The characters are perceptively drawn too, from the self-pityingly hypocritical father and atypically blunt mother to the idealistic older son. It does go OTT at the point of maximum catharsis, with all the principals temporarily losing their marbles, but thankfully recovers its bearings for a rather salutary and moving end.

7/10

RocknRolla (Guy Ritchie, 2008)

Can anyone explain why Ritchie did this? Was a repro simply called for by the bank? We know the man is no Eisenstein, but his patented snatch-and-grab formula of geezers, shootahs, comedy grotesques, flashbacks, slo-then-superquick mo and Laahndahn at least put him ahead of the Michael Bays et al. But he was meant to move on from there. This is a bad, bad regression to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, where you might have thought that Ritchie had got the gangland thing out of his system with the garbled Revolver.
There's not much point in summarising the plot, except that this time a flimsy Roman Abramovich caricature is the worst of a bad lot. There's also a Pete Dohertyesque rock star and Mark Strong narrating in a hackneyed voiceover whilst playing on his increasingly strong resemblance to Andy Garcia when called to act. That it's still more fun and inventive than many of its Hollywood counterparts is just a pyrrhic victory.

4/10

Feux Rouges (Cédric Kahn, 2004)

Red Lights kicks off with the conventional French family drama set-up of a bickering couple driving off to pick their kids up from summer camp. But, being armed with the knowledge that it's based on a Georges Simenon thriller, transposed from its original American setting, the rapidity with which their trip disintegrates unsettles from the first minutes, even before a series of hallucinatory interludes intrudes.
The allusions to Hitchcock are evident, but unlike in the case of of ineptly aping thriller hacks like De Palma or a host of other directors' winking pastiches, there's a genuine freshness about Kahn's selective referencing. He doesn't plunder scenes or characters, just techniques, and the effect becomes quite startling, as the husband spirals through a night of scotch-gorging madness on the eerie side roads of rural France.
In consequence, you end up as much without a road map through the film as the directionless driver, a neat mirroring effect which then makes you question what is really going on, to far more disquieting effect than any number of road-cum-slasher flicks. Furthermore, after all that, Kahn's film actually has the audacity to say something. It certainly falls short of the profundity that it fancies itself for having, but it's still quite a juggling feat.

7/10

Luftslottet som sprängdes (Daniel Alfredson, 2009)

At last, the final instalment of the Lisbeth Salander saga: The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Mind you, the heart rather sinks with the realisation that it's still the same director at the helm as for the messy and flat second part, where half the edits necessary to bring running time to a manageable length obfuscated and drained the story of character rather than streamlining Larsson's occasionally turgid prose. And if you've read the third book, you know that it'll be easy to get swamped with its reams of dry exposition of the evidence-gathering and investigations to uncover the institutionalised corruption that built up over the course of the preceding parts.
So it's a relief to find that Alfredson either seems to have learnt his lesson, or anyway had lots of professional help. It's still way too bulky and unevenly paced, of course, but that now seems to be down to the more forgivable sin of wanting to stay faithful to the original novel lest fans object: what's been removed this time is, as a rule, just dead wood. Noomi Rapace really makes the film this time too, as the punky bisexual hacker who refuses to lie down and play victim: she scarcely utters a word until the finale, a defiant wall of silence with an occasional twitch on her face communicating volumes, until when she eventually, tremulously, steps out from behind that barrier and her revenge becomes gratifying indeed.

6/10

Four Lions (Christopher Morris, 2010)

Morris's recent output certainly couldn't be called prolific; his debut feature has been 5 years in coming after his last satirical pennings. It therefore has to come with raised expectations; is Morris running out of things to lampoon after caustic attack upon attack on the idiocies of popular culture throughout the '90s?
Not many satirists could be accused of mellowing out in picking a Muslim terrorist cell as a target for black humour, but there's a degree of affection on show towards the bumbling protagonists which Morris's darkest works have largely eschewed as counterproductive to really getting stuck in to the chosen targets of ridicule. By making the Sheffield Jihadists more daft and directionless than dangerous or vicious, Four Lions runs the risk of coming out as toothless as its wannabe suicide bombers. It seems that Morris may have held back out of a desire to avoid aggravating an incendiary situation. Though he probably also didn't particularly want death threats.
Nevertheless, Morris's ear for the finely turned nonsense phrase remains acute and there are plenty of decent comic scenes. It actually manages to be quite poignant by the end, too. So, whilst some more barbs might not have been amiss, it does get marks for being more fully rounded than just a piece of slapstick.

7/10

Legion (Scott Charles Stewart, 2010)

Assault on Precinct 13 with warring archangels? How could that not float your boat?
Quite easily, it seems. This is a clunky piece that steals the ideas of better films and tries to pass them off as its own. Paul Bettany, in nicking his Hollywood dollar, could have chosen better than as a tooled-up archangel Michael; this may turn out to be a career-wrecker. None of the rest of the cast have to worry, though: they're either nobodies or if you want Dennis Quaid in your film, you probably already have his agent's number.
As with so many failures in the pseudobiblical genre, there was the germ of a good idea - the second coming, and a war in Heaven. It all gets lost along the way, and turned into inferior survival horror.

3/10

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008)

Bigelow is a Man's Woman of a director. She likes male bonding and guns. Former husband James Cameron probably felt a bit womanish in comparison. This is not to say she hasn't made decent films; a few she turned out in the '80s, primarily the vampires as burning junkies Near Dark, were near classics.
The Hurt Locker gives a bomb disposal team in Iraq going about finishing their tour of duty. It got the Oscar for best film for being about Americans in a contemporary hard situation. It's nicely shot, with decent cutaways and asides to allow for other audiences to find something too, and not as xenophobic as you might have feared. But once you take that away, there's nothing left. It's a documentary masquerading as a film, where the only trick is to kill its big name-actors as soon as they appear.

5/10