The King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson, 1972)

The second of Rafelson's collaborations with Jack Nicholson suffered from the expectations raised by the previous year's seminal Five Easy Pieces. To be sure, it doesn't deliver as much resonance or depth as its predecessor's melange of emotional stiflement and laconic humour, but radiates a skewed froideur of its own nevertheless, with the weathered boardwalks and derelict music halls of a wintry Atlantic City as much the star as Nicholson's melancholic talk radio host and Bruce Dern as his pipe-dreaming speculator brother. The dialogue retains a perceptive crispness that some of its more flaked-out surreal interludes have rather lost with the passage of time.

6/10

Vatel (Roland Joffé, 2000)

The ludicrous excesses of the court of Louis XIV, the sun King, continue to exercise a powerful hold on the popular imagination more than four centuries on, not least in cinema. It's not hard to see why: the mind-bogglingly lavish feasts and entertainments make for sumptuous eye candy on screen, and then there's the social comment angle ready-made too, with a claustrophobic circle of decadent toadies and back-stabbers, preening and conducting intrigues behind locked doors while the hoi polloi starve. Given all the ingredients for a complete package, all that a filmmaker has to do with them is avoid being seduced by the artifice themselves and fall prey to cliche.
The figure of François Vatel, the maître d’of the most prominent Bourbon prince, is a captivating one too. A perfectionist to a nigh-crippling degree, he was to commit suicide upon the failure of his ultimate royal banquet. Being the focal point of Joffé's English-language film, he gets to be played by an actual Frenchman amongst a host of English costume drama regulars, this rather predictably being Gérard Depardieu (Daniel Auteuil being the other default option). He does this as dependably as ever, despite being hindered with having the only non-RP accent in the house, portraying a commoner walking a tightrope between servile deference and barbed indignation. Depardieu is not the problem, and neither is the pageantry, which is spectacular. The rub lies in the other figures, from Tim Roth's carbon copy of his villain from Rob Roy, Uma Thurman uncertainly halfway between her character and Glenn Close's from Dangerous Liaisons, and a horde of tedious fops twittering sub-Ridicule bons mots. This is Vatel in a nutshell: it would be perfectly charming in large parts, were it not for the irritation caused by its constant derivativeness.

5/10

Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010)

Regardless of whether a reimagining of the legend was called for, an increasingly imaginatively bankrupt Ridley Scott gives us one anyway. To begin with, the transposition of the figure as Robin Longstride, a commoner returning from the Crusades to deliver a fallen knight's sword to his father in Nottingham, the father then pragmatically handing his estate to Robin's keep so that it may stay in his daughter-in-law Marion's hands, at least shows signs of trying to come at the worn-out tale from a fresh angle, even if scene after scene never rises above the pedestrian.
Then it gets worse, much worse, as director and scriptwriter alike lose all sight of all the trademark elements of the myth, and eventually we're headed for a climactic battle against French invaders in wooden versions of WWII landing craft, which is equal parts Henry V without the stirring rhetoric and Hastings with the English winning the day instead. If this came from a historically pick'n'mix American action director it would still not be forgivable, but at least understandable. Coming from Scott, it beggars belief. It's not even as if the blockbuster treatment requires the wedging in of a mass melee. The merry men are consequently hopelessly lost in the fray amongst the extras, as are all the other distinguishing characteristics in the irredeemable mess of a plot. All that remains in the last five minutes is the delivery of the upsetting message that this was just an origin story after all, and that means the impending threat of a sequel.

4/10

Dreamcatcher (Lawrence Kasdan, 2003)

The litany of Stephen King screen adaptations has been as lucrative as prone to resulting in indigestible dross, and it would be foolish to expect anything artful when the King source isn't one of his all too rare excursions outside the sci-fi/horror field. For every landmark The Shining he turns out a dozen disposable variations on The Children of the Corn, and Dreamcatcher is very much in the latter category, even crapping on the kudos he acquired with Stand by Me by taking the template of four stock childhood mates (the ginger one, the speccy one etc.), giving them a secret to keep and revisiting them twenty years later. To chuck aliens that come out of your arse at them. Actual dreamcatchers don't come into it at all: the film's too busy trying to force graveyard laughs out of unimaginative CGI Grand Guignol assaults by the extraterrestrial turdworms on a succession of actors who should have known better, Damian Lewis in particular a sinner just by having so much more to squander than the likes of, say, Timothy Olyphant.
Far more baffling and disheartening, though, is the estimable William Goldman's involvement as screenplay writer. If the bills need to be paid this badly, wouldn't you do it incognito out of sheer shame?

3/10

The Whistleblower (Larysa Kondracki, 2010)

This is an earnest account of real-life events in '90s Bosnia, where a female employee of an American private security contractor given a policing mandate over the war-torn land discovers that her colleagues are complicit in  trafficking young women for prostitution. She subsequently finds her attempts to expose them are slighted and blocked by local gangsters, the police and her employers alike.

It's inevitable that a relatively non-histrionic tract for such a worthy cause will earn some critical dispensation, and there's a reasonable verisimilitude to the events, even if Rachel Weisz, while an able enough actress, is somewhat too Famous Fivey to convince fully in the role of the determined crusader. On the downside, it's too flat to sustain interest though tension or stand-out dialogue, and while the Balkans are without a doubt rife with institutionalised corruption and scummy gangsters, neither aspect rises above the complexity of the Eastern European villain stereotype at any point.

So it might as well have been a documentary, though that would have meant even fewer members of the public discovering that the real company, DynCorp, on whose thorough rottenness the story is based, is in fact still doing very nicely for itself in other troublespots around the world.

5/10

Tron: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010)

Disney revisits another groundbreaking moment in its past with a wholly unnecessary sequel to 1982's conceptually throwaway but stylistically seminal computer-graphic trial run, Tron. There is a plot of sorts, with the son of Jeff Bridges going on a rescue mission into the virtual world where his father got trapped at some point since the first film, but really it's just a conveyor belt for the transmission of vast amounts of Disney's money into FX which may be far more polished than those of its predecessor, yet singularly fail to stand out of today's crowd simply because of adding nothing in terms of ideas.
Beyond this shortcoming, Tron: Legacy also seems to entertain notions of having a message, mistaking the technical innovation of the first film for thematic prescience, and consequently ends up losing sight of the fact that it only ever worked on a sinister kiddie quest level, and certainly not as full-blooded kicks. The sum total is as efficiently soporific as Daft Punk's incessant muted soundtrack.

3/10

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Oliver Stone, 2010)

Oliver Stone unwisely returns to the scene of the crime twenty years later with the iconically unscrupulous trader Gordon Gekko seemingly a new man upon his release from prison, albeit still spouting aphorisms on the nature of greed. Shia LaBeouf takes the Charlie Sheen role this time round as a junior stock broker with delusions of ethics taken in by the meretricious patter of his prospective father-in-law.
It's difficult to say what Stone thinks he's doing with this reconstituted piece, bar coming back to cash in one more time on the instant of his success as Gekko ends up doing when he inevitably shows his true colours. There's an attempt to justify the continuation by having a half-baked go at the subprime market crisis, but it's severely undermined first and foremost by Stone's worship of power in all its guises. It's just a bit of a handicap when you're meant to be attacking the ruthlessness of speculative capitalism to devote so much time to making the splurging and cock-waving lifestyles of its proponents look desirable. Not that it helps when the forces of 'good' are represented by the couple of a badly miscast and simpering Carey Mulligan as Gekko's vaguely activist daughter and the charisma vacuum that is LaBeouf, a walking piece of hissy bumfluff who could probably ruin any film single-handed even without the help of a script scribbled on bog roll and pitifully posturing dialogue alternating with David Byrne's whining coffee-table soundtrack.

3/10

The American (Anton Corbijn, 2010)

If you've seen Jim Jarmusch's somnambulent The Limits of Control from the previous year, you'll know half the formula, with a displaced and superficially dispassionate hitman moving from place to place exchanging as few words as possible with those around him to avoid emotional involvement as much as visibility. The other half of the formula is the cold-blooded professional wanting to hang up his boots at last, upon finding the solitude and detachment too much to bear after all.
Thankfully, The American is more than the sum of those parts. This owes less to former star photographer-turned-director Corbijn's visual sense, not that having every shot so elegantly framed and lit is unwelcome by any means, than to mature sense in throttling back the pace from the frenetic norm for the hunted hunter genre, which is mirrored closely by George Clooney's performance. He's always been more than just an OTT Cary Grant impersonation and understands that less is more when working with such off-the-shelf ingredients. To be sure, without much novelty, the end result can be no timeless classic, but it's handsomely executed all the same.

6/10

The Reader (Stephen Daldry, 2008)

In a self-fulfilling prophecy after her ostensibly satirical remark in the TV series Extras, regarding needing that Holocaust film under her belt to bag an Oscar, Kate Winslet did indeed walk away with one from this. If the alarmingly mechanical correlation between the genre role and the award has to be explained in some way, it probably boils down to an overvaluation of pretty actresses doing ugly characters. Her former concentration camp guard living in denial of personal culpability and illiteracy to boot is too teflon-coated to like, and further encumbered with some truly cringeworthy verbal tics, but Winslet at least does a decent job in conveying enough conflict within her denial to allow for some understanding to grow.
It's just that the rest of it has so little to say, about either guilt or responsibility. Ralph Fiennes, as a lawyer in the near-present, hasn't much to do besides mulling over his teenage affair with the reclusive older woman years after she has been exposed and sentenced to life imprisonment for her crimes. A Fiennes left running on empty churns out not much more than clipped hand-wringing. And in turn David Kross, as his teenage self, only gets the staples of any adolescent infatuation drama to work with, and so it's hard to say if there's any more range under his hood. Ultimately, though being preciously assembled, The Reader runs aground on the same shoals of aimlessness as its cast.

5/10

Brüno (Larry Charles, 2009)

In probably his last throw of the dice at punking the dimmer end of the American public, Sacha Baron Cohen ups the stakes from his Ali G and Borat outings by presenting a character who's bound to rub his targets up the wrong way from the off. Brüno, his 19-year-old preening and screeching Austrian queen has none of the matey bonhomie of the former or wide-eyed enthusiasm of the latter, being outright abrasive enough at one point to bait a black TV audience with his purchase of a black baby in Africa and then show off his collection of worryingly paedophilia-tinted family album snaps to them. Besides, the conservatives he zeroes in on may have been taught to hold their tongue as regards their racism, but having aggressive homosexuality thrust in their faces pushes them too far. Baron Cohen exploits this to full effect, of course.
There remains a doubt over much of it whether he's being braver than ever, exposing what needs to be exposed, or just shooting fish in a barrel for the sake of extending his comic life, with a lot more obviously staged scenes than before. While the disappointing fact that the basic plot and many of the scenes are just rehashes from Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan does point towards the latter interpretation, neither can the other readings be denied.
It's funny to note here, though, that despite setting its stall out so blatantly as a vehicle for homophobe-baiting, not only does Brüno get a lot of mileage out of ridiculing the screaming end of the gay spectrum, but also scores more points when laying bare wholly other glaring hypocrisies and excesses. If Baron Cohen does go back to the medium for a fourth crack, he might want to consider taking these moments on board and go for something more focused and understated.

6/10

Punishment Park (Peter Watkins, 1971)

A faux-documentary that freezes a moment in history like a fly suspended in amber, Punishment Park could only be a product of Vietnam-and-civil-rights-protest era America. It posits the creation of correctional facilities in the desert where political offenders of assorted ilks are sent on a brutal hike towards the hope of a pardon. This is all purportedly filmed by European documentary crews, and intercuts the sham trials of the accused with their hopeless trek and the growing blood thirst of the law enforcement officers on their trail.
For all the accusations it predictably met with of being a political assault by European hippies on the American right, it actually presents a surprisingly plausible set of characters on both sides of the divide, the prisoners as frequently reduced to frothing away and sloganeering as their accusers. Furthermore, despite being unmistakably a child of its time, it's not anachronistic at all: it's chilling to realise how little has actually changed for the better. It remains relevant.

7/10

The Way Back (Peter Weir, 2010)

Covering pretty much the same ground as the German As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me, thematically and geographically, Weir's fuller-budget story of POWs sent to a Siberian labour camp making their escape on foot across thousands of hostile miles has the obligatory big names but thankfully avoids the additional histrionics that usually come with the Hollywood version. In fact, the German film, while more credibly based on a real figure, suffered a lot from disbelieving the strength of its own premise and ended up daubing on an archvillain, improbable coincidences and a spurious love interest to boot.
By having a whole band of escapees rely on each other, this one bolsters itself in feasibility and thereby gives itself the room to develop more human interest through their interrelationships, which thankfully remain as unsentimentalised as the vast landscapes, stunning though they are. It's still not on an emotive or visceral par with Weir's best work, such as his last, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, but respectable enough, and ironically so when you consider that a piece of pure fiction has on this occasion trumped one of historical fact.

6/10

Anuvahood (Adam Deacon, 2011)

Ho hum, it's a low-budget British Ali-G derivative spoof of gritty street culture films, most obviously Kidulthood or Bullet Boy. This already does not bode well, and then you see that Paul Kaye and Richard Blackwood have cameos, which is a twin kiss of death. The only thing that might stop you using the DVD for target practice at once is bumbling director Deacon making a better fist it as an actor, investing his utter tool of a wannabe gangsta with at least a smidgeon of likability. It's not much to cling on to, though.

3/10

Snarveien (Severin Eskeland, 2009)

A couple driving along the backroads across the Norwegian-Swedish border in order to avoid excessive scrutiny of their boozy cargo are forced to divert onto an even smaller road, where, as we know from time-honoured convention, only bad things will happen. More specifically, attack by murderous hick nutjobs, since the leads are (a) a happy couple and (b) to be punished for sneaking away the means to chemical debauchery, and Scandinavian morality in horror films follows closely along American lines in these aspects. Not that Scandinavian horror has a wholly bad track record, even when recycling U.S. products this shamelessly, sometimes managing to add refreshing local flavours to the formula.
Detour, however, does not, adhering to the blueprint so depressingly closely that it even induces no winces, since you can always plot every start and development ten minutes ahead.

3/10

Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston, 2011)

The latest Marvel adaptation sees the Star Wars FX supremo Joe Johnston take on the task of making the stable's most politically suspect and superannuated hero a viable product to be milked for screen and merchandising bucks, whilst having to juggle with the need to lay down the groundwork for next year's superhero combo behemoth The Avengers. This may sound too painful to behold, but Johnston has at least realised the utter ludicrousness of the character and so we get no loftier ambitions than that of a humour-laced rollercoaster, with an earnest simpleton in a laughable costume at first used just as a wartime propaganda poster boy until proving his gumption by saving the world from cartoon Nazis, first and foremost Hugo Weaving determined to outham his own estimable previous hammings. It's strictly for kids despite the satirical winks, but thankfully unlikely to make them walk out of the cinema advocating U.S. intervention in foreign countries, probably by virtue of being so inoffensively forgettable.

4/10

X-Men: First Class (Matthew Vaughn, 2011)

The fifth instalment in the X-Men franchise rewinds the action back to 1962 and the environment of the Cuban missile crisis. This brings benefits and drawbacks: it's fun to piece together the seeds of later character developments and how their actions fit in with officially recorded history, and it does not require an anorak's knowledge of the comic series to manage either aspect. On the other hand, with most of the heroes now teens, there's always the risk of going all Glee with the banter and homilies.
In respect to the latter, Vaughn was a reassuring choice of director, with his previous in handling juvenile action leads without the customary cutesiness, i.e. Kick-Ass, and duly the cheese is mostly kept to a minimum. The adult casting is also as strong as you might expect from the series, with Michael Fassbender's Magneto a more complex character than it's reasonable to expect of a popcorn product. Naturally, subservience to the franchise is still inescapable, and the continuity dots with the other parts have to be joined up as best managed, but it breezes along surprisingly lightly for all that burden.

5/10

Green Lantern (Martin Campbell, 2011)

Bucking the prevailing trend for Marvel/DC superhero adaptations, Green Lantern went resoundingly arse-over-tit not just with the critics as is commonplace but even at the box office. This is gratifying, as by any criterion it's a feeble effort. The comic book source is an inexplicably enduring one considering the lameness of the concept, i.e. that there's a corps of guardians of the universe who have magic rings that they can use to make all manner of gadgets materialise from their imaginations, provided they're all green. Oh, and they can fly at the speed of light and anything yellow is evil.
This might have produced a bearable film adaptation if it were purely played for The Mask-style hijinks, but it still seems to want to say something Star Trekky about overcoming your fears and just how neat the plucky humans are with their maverick individualism even if they might not be as old or smart as all those older civilisations. Yes, once again it's how Americans like to see themselves and I suppose hence having Ryan Reynolds as the titular hero fits in nicely with this, leading the charge as a blandly beefy and earnest lunkhead of a quarterback. It's incredibly boring, probably even for 10-year-olds.

3/10

Solomon Kane (Michael J. Bassett, 2009)

James Purefoy dons the stubble and tortured mean mofo attitude of his lookalike Hugh Jackman, as Wolverine/Van Helsing, as a 17th century mercenary who roams the land having renounced violence in exchange for a temporary reprieve from eternal damnation. Naturally, like his homonymous namesake Caine in Kung Fu, the forces of evil won't leave the man of peace alone and the slaughter of a pious family by unsavoury hordes soon has him back to limb-chopping like he'd never stopped.
It's complete action twaddle by numbers, of course, but given enough of a gloss by a decent stab at historical design and some rather lovely snowbound landscape photography that it'll do to while away the hours.

5/10

White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)

The title refers to the residue left behind by departing colonials, in terms of both infrastructure and cultural baggage. Here it's in an unspecified African country, and the director's choice of leaving it open is a double-edged sword: it may make statements about the repercussions of the fall of the colonial system more universal, but at the same time divorced of real context.
Isabelle Huppert and Christophe Lambert play plantation owners under pressure to leave the country and their possessions with the impending approach of rebel forces. Lambert's moderated character is a surprising inclusion considering his OTT portfolio, but he's strictly second fiddle to Huppert's in any case, as she grows increasingly unstable in her frenzy to cling on to what she considers her birthright.
It's a deconstructed narrative, presumably for the purpose of creating disorientation. Huppert, as usual, fills the centre of the film with a performance of quiet but feverish intensity. However, the problem is that that's all you expect of a Huppert character, and her character's illogical intransigence does not surprise as a result, particularly as she already played the same character in the same set-up, even if in Cambodia, in Rithy Panh's more affecting The Sea Wall, just the year before. Meanwhile, the Liberia-set Johnny Mad Dog was more effective at conveying the horror at what had come to pass.
It's hence a very mixed bag, with the child rebels also feeling like little more than ciphers, with the focus as usual on the Europeans, despite what the Africa-raised director's intentions might have been. What probably got the critics raving and what, after all's said, deserves credit is Denis's uniquely poetic eye, full of telling details, and the absolute refusal to give in to simplification of the issues.

6/10

The Mechanic (Simon West, 2011)

A Jason Statham film that's perfunctory and generic even by the standards of his body of work, the remake of the forgotten Charles Bronson-led The Mechanic has The Stat as an elite hitman who finds himself emotionally compromised by his latest job and ending up training a young hothead to fill his shoes. The presence of Donald Sutherland alongside at the start may raise hopes of something more interesting occurring, but these days he only crops up to get himself out of the house for a bit and it's no different here.
Statham's character is of course endowed with a sense of ethics about his choice of targets, gets it on with a woman in the first ten women just so we know it's not kinky when he starts getting his shirt off at any old excuse, and demonstrates depth with the stock device of first choice, i.e. listening to classical music after each hit. The only things that elevate it above a Steven Seagal vehicle are superior production values and the star's honestly workmanlike approach to the pointlessness of it all.

4/10

Somers Town (Shane Meadows, 2008)

Meadows's featurette is the first one he didn't have a hand in writing, the first set outside his Midlands home turf, and furthermore, disconcertingly for a director synonymous with independent and community-centred British film, financed wholly by Eurostar.
There was no need to worry about any of this. His backers have wisely given him free rein to make the kind of low-key drama he's always made, with little apparent requirement to big up their product or tart up the grimy area around their rail terminal, the combination of Paul Fraser's script and improv by the two teenage leads works a treat and Meadows proves to be as at ease at finding little nuggets of pathos from London estates as from Nottingham ones. The two boys who become friends, Thomas Turgoose (from Meadows's This Is England) as a cheeky urchin who's run away to London, and Piotr Jagiello as the shy Polish boy who gives him a place to stay, put in unaffected performances and some lovely moments of unforced humour crop up through their harmless shenanigans.
All the same, it is a very slight creation, and not only because of its 71-minute running time, ending with a vague fizzle before anything of consequence has actually transpired. If Meadows had realised from the off that he had all the parts required for an urban drama of substance at his disposal instead of just setting out to slap together an organic short, who knows how good it could have been?

6/10

True Grit (the Coen brothers, 2010)

Is this the way it's going to be with the Coens from now on, alternating original work with the scripts of others to keep up their a feature a year output? True Grit is a class apart from their hammed-up The Ladykillers remake, and indeed element-by-element superior in almost every way to the John Wayne original, not least Jeff Bridges having just a tad more control over his delivery than The Duke did, but it's still a shame to get something which is only a technical refinement and not wholly new.
That said, the virtuoso regular Coen photographer Roger Deakins gets to show how he's effectively claimed ownership of the sombre beige-wash palette for the revisionist Western since The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, with some images of quite remarkable tonality. The shift of emphasis away from the gruff drunkard marshal to the determined teenage girl who hires him to find her father's killer allows other characters to breathe too, including Matt Damon's sniffily precious Texas Ranger who wants in on the manhunt, and the outlaws they chase. As entertaining as the 1969 original was, it was far too much in thrall to the Wayne mythology to accommodate the complexity or elegiac darkness of this retelling.
This being a Coen film, the spot-on casting is no surprise, not least the self-assured Hailee Steinfeld as the young avenger, and the dialogue is as quickfire and ornate as usual while also fitting the Bible-encumbered culture of the 1870s frontier. It's just hard, despite all the craft, to blank out how often we've been here before, at the death of the old west.

7/10

Made in Dagenham (Nigel Cole, 2010)

The subject of the women machinists' 1968 strike at Ford's Dagenham plant would seem tailor-made for Ken Loach, having been a defining moment in the history of gender equality, with the women's stand against wage discrimination leading shortly after to a permanent change in legislation. If Loach did choose to sidestep it, it's understandable: even activists have to take a breather sometimes. So we get Cole as the helm instead, who brings pretty much the same bag of ingredients to this as he did with Calendar Girls, with a cast of mutually supportive women from all parts of the age and class spectrums united in a common cause.
It's all very chest-swellingly feelgood and full of comic-tinged turns designed to gratify, from Miranda Richardson's ballsy Barbara Castle to Bob Hoskins as a token male old Trot thrilled at the women's politicisation. On the other hand, as the leader of the protesters and focal point, Sally Hawkins is required to carry the scenes of human interest drama too, and unfortunately has to get by on a lot of squeaking bravely when the script lets her down. Still, you'd have to have a heart of stone to remain unstirred by the message.

6/10

The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh, 2009)

Based on the story of corporate whistleblower and embezzler Mark Whitacre, The Informant! is in essence a continuation of Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven streak, right down to the casting of Matt Damon as the titular double-dealer. It opts to turn Whitacre's delusional tale, which involves him playing the FBI and his employers off against each other to make himself appear a crusader against big-business corruption while pocketing millions, into a comedy crime caper, complete with a whimsical retro Marvin Hamlisch soundtrack, intentionally redolent of what he did for The Sting. Matt Damon does do a good weasel, a kind of an amiable nerd version of his sociopathic Tom Ripley, but it's not half as endearing or funny as it thinks it is while attempting to wring satire out of its protagonist's rather sad compulsive lying.

5/10

Chloe (Atom Egoyan, 2009)

When Julianne Moore, queen of the highly-strung relationship drama, is cast as a wife who suspects her husband of infidelity, you know things will get nebulous and pear-shaped sooner or later. Accordingly it's clear that when she pays a high-class call girl to test his limits, the complications due are to be self-inflicted.
Egoyan has always been fixated with kinkiness, but at least this time round it's hardly a strong suit, soft-focus, soft core and rather cringeworthy altogether. Where the film scores far higher is on fine detail in the characterisation, conveyed by a solid cast, even if Amanda Seyfried as the call girl looks too much like an adolescent frog to convince as a sexually irresistible force. The twists that come as the film slides into thriller territory are also quite nifty, provided you're prepared to forgive the cheat technique of withholding vital information from the viewer.

5/10

Kak ya provel etim letom (Aleksey Popogrebskiy, 2010)

How I Ended This Summer reeks of Tarkovsky with its dragged-out takes and metaphysical saturation. This cannot possibly be a bad thing in itself, although it needs to have a driving purpose behind the tableaux.
On one level, the barren and forbidding landscape of the Russian Arctic is the subject, but also how it impacts on the human psyche, here that of two researchers stuck on a remote island through a summer of never-ending day. The protracted silence and longueurs serve to highlight the slightest word or gesture from the protagonists, creating a brittle tension that lends plausibility to their overreactions when the junior partner gets some news from the mainland that he's afraid to pass on.
Along the way, the film does fall foul of plot logic in other ways that the characters' mental instability can't quite explain. Nevertheless, the two actors put in powerfully modulated performances and the soundtrack of mostly ambient sound and ethereal photography combine to a hypnotic effect.

7/10

Skeletons (Nick Whitfield, 2010)

A quirky low-budget British comedy that's got a whole lot more going for it than that categorisation might threaten, Skeletons is an unassuming charmer of a film, with two exorcists of sorts trudging from house to house in the northern countryside like bickering insurance salesmen to purge clients' lives of psychic knots. Then they come up against a real hurdle with a family odder than their metier is.
It could be truly irksome if it played up the life-lesson sentiment any more or broadened the humour, and you can bet your bottom dollar a US remake would fail on both counts, but its very Britishness keeps both in check and it ends up rather sweet instead, even if it raises no more than the occasional smile or eyebrow.

6/10

Romper Stomper (Geoffrey Wright, 1992)

The film that gave Russell Crowe his first big break, Romper Stomper is a raw kitchen-sink precursor of American History X centring on a pack of Neo-Nazi skinheads in Melbourne, who pick the wrong target for their aimless rage when their local haunt falls into Vietnamese hands. Unlike in the American retread, there's little promise of redemption here: the pathetic lowlifes are too unanalytical to learn anything from their own suffering, let alone from that which they inflict on others. This is both virtuous by dint of being truthful and thoroughly depressing to the point of risking alienating a cinematic audience. The refusal to slap on gloss is admirable, but leaves little room for interpersonal drama when all the characters are so utterly devoid of saving graces. Still, some consolation is to be had in knowing it'll all end in tears.

5/10

Revanche (Götz Spielmann, 2008)

Modern Austrian cinema does not reflect well on the nation as a carefree place: there is a pervasive tendency for an existential malaise that outdoes even the excesses of Swedish directors, too often not tempered with hope or warmth. Revanche begins very much in this milieu, with a pimp's lackey dreaming of an escape to Spain with his Ukrainian prostitute girlfriend, and when the bank robbery that he ineptly attempts to give them the means to start a new life goes badly wrong it seems we're in it for the long haul, with no glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Suddenly though, and wholly unexpectedly given the tortured and ascetic character of the lead and the pared-down and hard-boiled nature of the plot and dialogue, a layer of emotional complexity is added and there is a glimmer after all. It feels oddly spiritual for coming so unforeseen.

6/10

Direktøren for det hele (Lars Von Trier, 2006)

With The Boss of it All, Von Trier tries his hand at making a comedy and almost spoils the fun by being so antsily self-conscious about it that he has to butt in several times to tell us not to take it seriously. There was just no need: the admittedly overused notion of a klutz of an actor hired by a cowardly IT company boss to play the part of the CEO in takeover talks with a hilariously truculent Icelander is still jolly enough to sustain interest, even with Von Trier doing his best to sabotage the flow with frenetic jump-cutting throughout, so clearly lacking confidence in how to judge comic timing. Contentwise, it only has the potential to be a slight addition to the idiosyncratic director's oeuvre, but would be a welcome diversion from his usual portentous melancholy and misanthropy nonetheless, if only its maker had any faith in letting it breathe.

5/10

Mr. Nobody (Jaco Van Dormael, 2009)

In a 2092 where the human race has conquered ageing, the last living mortal man recounts his life story to a reporter. He's an unreliable narrator, giving three alternative courses of events with different wives, branching out from butterfly wing-effects at critical junctures.
The deus ex machina is represented beguilingly as a falling leaf and the film is packed with similarly telling images. It rewards attentiveness on the part of the viewer and is exquisite to look at. It also plunders ideas and scenes, in no particular order, from 2001: A Space Odyssey,  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Truman Show, Sliding Doors, Rashomon, Little Big Man, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Fountain, Dark City, Requiem for a Dream and Slaughterhouse-Five, and this list is by no means exhaustive. It seems to admit defeat under the weight of filmic history by resorting to a salvage-by-collage technique and frequently falls prey to whimsy, and its protagonist, Nemo, is an emo even by name.
And yet it captivates too. Jared Leto may not be the most charismatic casting as Nemo - the more intense Jake Gyllenhaal would probably have been first choice - but he's no hammy Jim Carrey either. And Van Dormael can just about be forgiven in the final analysis for his looting, since all the splicing is executed so adeptly that some moments of real beauty are engendered. It has a poetic impact Michel Gondry has never achieved and Darren Aronofsky only managed with his first outings. Bizarrely, it has received almost no international distribution since its release.

7/10

In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007)

In Crash, Paul Haggis had a go at tackling the pickle of racism and was awarded a Best Picture Oscar for it. With In the Valley of Elah he turns to the Iraq war, a topic less palatable for the Academy voters' consumption, and accordingly misses out on the prize. This is a shame, as Haggis should garner recognition for his consistency: the film is every bit as lunk-headedly earnest as Crash, pushing kneejerk buttons over misplaced patriotism and the dehumanisation of the combatants, but rarely saying anything illuminating about either aspect.
It doesn't help that it uses the plot framework of an investigative thriller as a crutch, with Tommy Lee Jones as the father of a missing soldier trying to establish what happened to his son, or that Charlize Theron has to be wedged in there as the one cop who'll help him. Another director might have thrown caution to the wind to hit the target head on and for once presented America's grubby wars as wrong in themselves rather than just because American boys come back mentally scarred, but Haggis is not that brave.
Jones is very good here, conveying denial, wounded pride and pain with some subtlety. It's a performance frustratingly wasted amidst the stodge.

5/10

Madeo (Bong Joon-ho, 2009)

The title Mother alludes concisely to 'mother's pride' or 'mother knows best', and these are amongst the notes touched on in a story of a poor herbalist mother who cossets her child-minded adult son to the best of her ability until he's accused and convicted of the murder of a local schoolgirl after a drunken night's blackout. With the police unhelpful, she then sets about playing detective and finding the true culprit.
Bong Joon-ho, perhaps best known for 2006's tongue-in-cheek monster eco-horror The Host, is an odd fish as directors go: he wilfully mixes up registers and throws in non-sequitur incidents, which at the worst of times leads to an adulteration of all the colours on the palette, as seen here in the opener which is far too comic in relation to what follows. Yet later on we get the benefits of his method, as it works to throw the viewer off balance and liable to be genuinely unprepared for the twists that occur. Supported by Kim Hye-ja's powerful performance as the frantically possessive mother, it ends up as a thoroughly unconventional thriller and all the better for it.

7/10

Splice (Vincenzo Natali, 2009)

Natali's first, the 1997 Cube, may have been a B-movie with cardboard characters and clunky dialogue, but the concept was high enough to make it riveting regardless. Not so with Splice, which features the still-plummeting Adrien Brody and the replaceable Sarah Polley as two hotshot genetic researchers who aren't content with creating ridiculously phallic blobmonsters that provide a cure for everything from the common cold upwards and so move on to secretly concoct a human-something hybrid. The 'something' part is never specified, which conveniently allows the creature to sprout all manner of random freaky animal attributes, whilst basically remaining a telegenic bald woman with odd legs and a stinger tail.
It can only be taken as the director taking the money and running off on a spree of FX, since it doesn't satisfy any other purpose: the science is laughable but not satirical, the relationship dilemmas between the couple paper-thin, and even the thriller/horror element falls flat on its face when called on.

3/10

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011)

Let the Right One In director Alfredson brings his superlative command of mood and tension to the film adaptation of le Carré's definitive Cold War counterespionage novel. Events necessarily have to be compressed from the original Alec Guinness-led 1979 seven-part BBC series, repeatedly bringing the risk of losing the thread, and the temptation to introduce Hollywood spy thriller time, place and character captions must have been there, but thankfully it's resisted: the cliched signposting would have shattered the meticulously crafted sense of time and place of a fusty, repressed and paranoid '70s England that permeates the construct from the peculiar dank locations to the understated and nuanced acting.
If truth be told, the opening half-hour drags with a lot of going in and out of drab buildings and little plot progression, and the search for the Soviet mole has limited resonance with almost everyone a potential Philby and little else concrete of universal interest at stake. But this is to judge it by the criteria of other modern spy films, from which it's a breed apart and not just because of the period: it's about layered atmosphere, not fast pay-offs, and scores highly on the level of the small gesture and single chosen word. It's also gratifying to see Gary Oldman, at the head of an impressive cast, move decisively away from his Hollywood pantomime roles to give a portrayal of the careworn Smiley which nods neatly towards Guinness's version without ever descending into caricature.

7/10

So weit die Füße tragen (Hardy Martins, 2001)

The real-life story behind As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me is so mind-boggling that any embellishment can only be gilding the lily. How a German POW sentenced to 25 years' hard labour in a lead mine in easternmost Siberia at the end of the war managed to escape and trek 11,000 kilometres to safety across a land of hostile elements already seems like the stuff of wild fantasy. It would win the audience's indulgence, though, if it displayed a painstaking sense of veracity.
What the director does instead from the outset is to splash on sentimentalised gloop, drowning every scene under an asinine adventure soundtrack, whilst adding stock hero movie characters, including a cackling camp commandant villain who keeps on catching up with the fugitive with supernatural precognition and a nomadic tribeswoman love interest who also seems to be a model. Needless to say, these were strangely absent from Clemens Forell's original biography, along with various other scenes of derring-do involving rescues and chases. It's basically no better than a TV movie, bar the budget that allowed for filming in some beautiful scenery, and a rare justifiable candidate for another remake. The story deserves better.

3/10

Mibu gishi den (Yôjirô Takita, 2003)

Centering on the end of the feudal era in Japan, When the Last Sword Is Drawn is told in retrospect from a Tokyo at the verge of the 20th century with an old man harbouring a secret history visiting a doctor. Recognising a samurai in a photograph as an associate from thirty years before, the man prompts the doctor to tell the story of his connection to the samurai.
Takita's film is a very mixed bag: it carefully evokes the spirit of a bygone age in which clan loyalty, honour and awareness of status were the guiding precepts of life and the framing device of the flashback is effective in gradually unpeeling the layers of the onion to illuminate the dramatic transition of a culture in a short span. It's also a welcome divergence from the usual bushido-and-swords fare to focus on a character whose plight is one of economic desperation rather than just bound by duty. But there are also many weaknesses: the battles are surprisingly flat for the genre, the lack of signposting when the story slots in flashbacks within flashbacks is disorientating, and the bland soundtrack is frequently detrimental to the mood. It also gets cloyingly protracted and oversentimental in the last act, something that it seems Takita is prone to, judging from his 2008 Foreign Language Oscar winner, Departures.

5/10

Limitless (Neil Burger, 2011)

This lively if superficial thriller presents Eddie Morra, a wastrel writer paralysed by writer's block, whose luck appears to have turned when a chance meeting with his brother-in-law leads to him trying a cerebral superdrug which gives him the ability of instant recall of everything he has ever subconsciously witnessed. Armed with this power he's soon on the way to finishing his novel, in the black, rebuilding his last relationship and astounding the world of finance with his stock market predictions. But of course there's no such thing as a free lunch and murder of his brother-in-law is only the beginning of his perils, with a gangster and another sinister pursuer after his misbegotten panacea, which predictably also turns out to have unpleasant side effects.
The anodyne Bradley Cooper is cast usefully for once here: his perpetual smirk and glibly slick delivery are a perfect fit for an amorally opportunistic character who weasels his way through challenges without ever turning virtuous. This lack of enlightenment makes a refreshing change from the genre norm. Also intriguingly, the enslaving poison - at least at the outset - disarmingly displays none of the standard downsides, bringing wealth and focus as opposed to penury and derangement, which actually makes the protagonist's chemical dependency rather seductive.
It's still hokum, of course, requiring a ludicrous number of improbabilities to be swallowed, such as Morra's discovery that merely having watched kung-fu films has made him an expert fighter (in Oldboy this also required 15 years of physical training) or that writing a great novel is simply a matter of command of language. But hokum that motors along nicely all the same.

6/10

Jûsan-nin no shikaku (Takashi Miike, 2010)

Approaching Miike's films is like submitting to a lucky dip. He churns out at least three a year and for every breathtaking Audition there's guaranteed to be an idiosyncratically muddled stinker like The Happiness of the Katakuris. It therefore comes as a great relief that 13 Assassins is actually very conventional, and decently constructed to boot. It's only really The Seven Samurai with killing a psychotic noble instead of marauding bandits and six more heroes, right down to the last one being a disrespectful loose cannon a la Mifune, but the build-up is patient and the eventual 50-minute battle choreographed variedly enough that it just about escapes the debt.

6/10

Les Petits Mouchoirs (Guillaume Canet, 2010)

Canet's third feature as director is an ensemble piece with a group of friends on their annual holiday on the Gironde coast in the aftermath of the near-fatal road accident of one of their regular party. The comatose absentee is largely forgotten as the band frolic and agonise over their relationship problems.
Little White Lies was a huge hit in France, where pieces revolving around middle-class types without financial cares hopping in and out of each other's beds form a genre of their own. Canet's stab does contain its share of fizz in dialogue and a few scenes that suggest a sense of awareness of the shallowness of its characters. But it suffers throughout from an overreliance on the soundtrack (which is oddly entirely in English too, as if brazenly aiming for foreign sales) to bolster the drama, and then an indulgently weepy finale leaves little doubt that we're still meant to empathise with the self-centered crew. Think The Big Chill, only a reimagining where no-one really learns anything.

5/10

Devil's Playground (Mark McQueen, 2010)

It's not the rage virus, it's the result of an experimental 'performance enhancer' called RAK-295. The quasi-zombies don't just sprint, they do parkour too, and there's a woman whose unique immunity to the lurgy means the authorities want to get their mitts on her (see Children of Men). So, it's clearly not a carbon copy of 28 Days Later. It is a depressingly shameless downmarket knock-off, though. There clearly weren't the funds for the trademark setpieces of 28 Days utilising picture postcard locations cleared of life for shock effect, so it's mostly scrabbling around at night. The budgetary shortage extends to the soundtrack too, which is genre-generic, and the cast, with Danny Dyer in for Cillian Murphy. It's the absence of invention and even suspense which is really unforgivable, though. After all, ideas cost nothing.

3/10

The Losers (Sylvain White, 2010)

A crack team of black ops agents get stabbed in the back by their corrupt CIA boss and vow revenge, take 313. The best that can be said of The Losers is that it's superior in terms of editing, wit and acting to the overall identikit The Expendables that came out later in the year. This is of course not saying much. Ok, it was cheaper too, with a cast that's still recognisable prepared to grunt their way through the motions for a fee far short of what Stallone and co. demanded, and hence may be viewed in a favourable light simply for its economy. But indulgence can only go so far when there's such a paucity of imagination at work that the regulation-ethnically assorted protagonists have to wave big guns in each other's faces to punctuate every argument and we're asked to put up with the tiresome bag of playschool-psychotic quips that is Jason Patric as the arch-villain.

4/10

Sommersturm (Marco Kreuzpaintner, 2004)

Summer Storm was a success in Germany largely because of the casting of household name Robert Stadlober as the lead character, a teenager grappling with his sexuality. For a foreign audience not armed with that context the film is basically just another coming-of-age and coming-out piece, with nothing much in terms of plot trajectory to distinguish it from countless others. The setting of a summer camp and rowing competition for youth clubs does give it a fraction more colour than the normal angsty urban setting, and the accompanying mood is refreshingly upbeat too, but it comes at the price of a pedestrian feelgood moral to the story along the lines of tolerance and accepting what you are und so weiter.

5/10

Todo sobre mi madre (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)

All About My Mother stands apart in Almodóvar's oeuvre as the film that ticks all the boxes in the ebullient imp's list of interests, and as such works as a crash course in Almodóvarology. It contains: tough but warm female leads, a co-dependently close relationship between mother and son, AIDS, drug addicts, transsexual prostitutes, a self-mythologising actress, nuns and a comic sidekick. If this seems overly reductionist, suffice it to say that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, since by the time he got to this the director had refined the mix through numerous dry runs. The central story of the bereaved mother who moves to Barcelona to get away from her memories takes the weight of all the other elements without obvious encumbrance, and the switches in tone between vivacity and tragedy are executed sure-footedly. Yes, Almodóvar does continue making more or less the same film over and over again, but there's no denying his command of the medium.

7/10

Mr. Nice (Bernard Rose, 2010)

The biopic of erstwhile major league cannabis smuggler Howard Marks benefits from ideal casting with the versatile (and, importantly, very Welsh) Rhys Ifans as the titular lead. Ifans has a range that accommodates effortless flipping from arch and cocksure to wounded and reflective, which is what Rose's construct repeatedly calls for - Marks is plainly a folk hero through this film's filter, and guilty of not much else except foolhardily expedient associations with ineffectual terrorists and an inability to quit while he's ahead. So the tone determinedly steers clear of the judgemental and skips lightly from one key incident to another in Marks's career without getting bogged down in heavy repercussions. It's wholly anecdotal, and as such as diverting as you'd except from a slightly squiffy bon-vivant raconteur, but also as lightweight as that suggests.

6/10

The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

The story of the founding of Facebook is largely told in retrospect from the present in which the founder is being sued by his former associates for reasons relating to issues of the ownership of the business, by then already worth billions.
With all the players from an episode of very recent history still around and no real dissent heard as to the film's veracity, it's difficult to view The Social Network as anything other than a jazzed-up documentary with the edges smoothed off and the usual elisions and compressions made for dramatic purposes. Nevertheless, it works efficiently enough as satire on the nature of corporate greed vs private dreams, with the precocious visionary Zuckerberg seen as being motivated by a surfeit of pride in his constructs rather than a lust for money, and the still points interspersed among the technobabble are surprisingly emotive in their bleakness. The casting is good, too: Jesse Eisenberg convinces as the lead, supercilious and yet easy to wound, and even Justin Timberlake fits, though largely by virtue of playing a gabbling asshole in the person of the Napster founder Sean Parker. If the characters remain unlikable and their preoccupations pathetically shallow, then Fincher can only be excused for having captured the essence of the phenomenon accurately.

6/10

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (Werner Herzog, 2009)

Does any one know what was going through Herzog's mind when he decided to pick up on the protagonist from Abel Ferrara's seminal 1992 odyssey through the sewers of the city and of a man's sense of self-worth, with an utterly corrupt police detective cast as Ulysses? Herzog doesn't do remakes like he doesn't do cop films, and yet here he is doing both.
Of course, it soon becomes apparent we've got quite a different beast on our hands, so different that not even crediting Ferrara makes sense by the end. Gone is the bribe-and-contraband pocketing Catholic's sense of guilt, replaced by just plain mental disintegration under the weight of this incarnation's even more crippling range of chemical and behavioural dependencies. Without even the shadow of faith in the background, there's no 11th-hour redemption on the cards, just a dwindling prospect of getting away scot-free.
And hence the lack of gravitas in the tone, reflected in the casting: whereas Harvey Keitel does haunted and tortured immaculately in the original, here the absence of any spiritual purpose to cling to requires casting in line with the farcical surrealism, and it's fair to say that for once Nicolas Cage fits the bill.
The end result, then, is a ride on its own terms through madness, that sucks you in through sheer unpredictability. But since it's also without a moral compass, once the end credits have rolled it sinks away without trace where Ferrara's version lingered.

5/10

Submarine (Richard Ayoade, 2010)

Ayoade's assured directorial debut gives us the insular 15-year-old Oliver growing up in a vaguely '80s South Wales, preoccupied with all the usual problems: school bullying, his worryingly divergent parents, finding a girlfriend.
Although the film is based on Joe Dunthorne's novel, it's hard not to see streaks of Ayoade's public image (by which I mean the rare appearances from behind the mask of Moss in The IT Crowd) in Oliver: cerebral, bookish, geekish, withdrawn and also caustically witty. Either way, Oliver is a great character, played with a wide-eyed disbelief at the state of things around him by Craig Roberts. The supporting cast is excellent too; Sally Hawkins terrifyingly intrusive as his mother and Noah Taylor a study in beigeness as the mousy father.
Submarine's great strength is that it works equally well as comedy as it does as poignant drama. The soundtrack is supporting rather than crutch-like, and unexpected flashes of camera trickery or divergence into unreality are not intrusive but just serve to heighten the sentiment of the moment. The end result is one of the finest British films in years.

8/10

Red (Robert Schwentke, 2010)

This hotchpotch of equal parts of The Bourne Supremacy, Die Hard and Space Cowboys far too obviously started life as the unhappy offspring of a studio exec brainstorming session, presumably with the brief of getting the last drops out of the tank of a gamut of big names. Or maybe the brief was just 'what if we have Helen Mirren as an assassin?'
The result brings Willis, Mirren, Malkovich and Freeman together as former black ops spooks who now find themselves framed for a crime they did not commit. Which actually makes it The A-Team. Anyway, they band together to find out who's trying to kill them and perform all manner of pulling the wool over the opposition's eyes along the way.
To be fair, the incessant action is crisp and some of the verbal interplay raises a smile, though that's the least that you're paying top-line pros for. It's just that the ideas are so tired.

4/10

Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011)

Well, here's a novel conceit for a low-budget British horror film: aliens vs. hoodies. It probably helps that first time director Cornish is best known for his lo-fi comedy duo show on late night telly some moons ago in which him and mate Adam Buxton got to indulge their geeky penchant for discussing filmic what-ifs endlessly.
There's not much of a plot beyond what it says on the tin, of course, as a bunch of teenage lowlifes on a Peckham estate find themselves under attack by big growly things, but it's executed zippily with a sense of humour that doesn't impinge on the tension or unexpectedly realistically drawn characters. More, please, though not a sequel of course.

6/10