Heaven (Tom Tykwer, 2002)

At first, this comes across easily enough as a companion piece to Tykwer's The Princess and the Warrior from 2000, the similarities obvious as a pair of star-crossed lovers strive to get away from a system that would seek to imprison them, and a hint of crossover into unreality hovering just out of sight. But with the knowledge that the director just picked up Kieslowski's last ever script, a different interpretation forces itself onto the film. You start looking for the late Polish auteur's moral outrage, steeped in black humour or bleak pathos. This is to do Tykwer an injustice, however: he's capable of more changes of pace than just breakneck, and brings his own slant to the story without steamrollering.
Cate Blanchett's Englishwoman in Turin, devastated to find that in seeking to kill a drug baron, she's accidentally wiped out innocent bystanders instead, presents a morally compromised protagonist and it takes some doing on both the writer's and director's part to allow empathy with her to live on. When Giovanni Ribisi's policeman falls for her at first sight, a suspension of disbelief is required, and by his own admission Tykwer got similarly swept away by the opportunity to use his aerial camera toy on lush Italian landscapes. But it's worth it in the end for sheer ambience, and aficionados of either director can't feel cheated.

7/10

The Expendables (Sylvester Stallone, 2010)

Stallone, Statham, Li, Lundgren, Rourke, Roberts, Schwarzenegger, Willis. And a few more apparently famous meatheads from MMA/WWF. It's almost the full set. One wonders what Norris, Van Damme, Russell and Seagal did wrong to be left out of a last big payday-come-love-in for the now creaky-jointed and gaffer-taped action hams of the '80s and '90s (ostensibly, this seems like a passing on of the baton to Statham and Li, but they're getting long in the tooth too). If it was out of meanness, it seems particularly churlish, as they've proven at least as much as any of the ones present that they belong in a sandbox of smashing things and walking stone-faced away from giant explosions, with all that noise clearly putting Stallone into such a daze that he forgot to get a scriptwriter. Oh, crack mercenaries, South American dictator. Ok, that'll do.
It could have actually been fun, maybe if it had been as OTT as Crank or Predator. As it was, I swiftly realised that if you just put all dozen or so into a ring and had them kick seven shades of shit out of each other for 2 hours it would have made for a vastly more gratifying piece of entertainment.

3/10

The Men Who Stare at Goats (Grant Heslov, 2009)

I don't know know about you, but when I hear Ewan McGregor's cod-American voice pipe up as the film's narrator, it bodes ill for quality control from thereon. And so it proves, when his journalist character takes himself off to Iraq to seek out a big scoop and gets one in the shape of psychic experiments taking place within the US military. That it's all loosely based on real facts is by-the-by since it veers unsteadily like a truck on a potholed desert road from comedy to political comment to pathos, none of which it does convincingly.
Clooney, Spacey and Bridges are also there with a selection of their stock personages, and you wonder why except to conclude that it must have been a quiet time of year and maybe the shoot was a blast. Meanwhile, for the viewer, it's all about as diverting and pointful as doing the crossword.

4/10

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

Hollywood is far from done with the Western, but now it only lives on as a kind of procession of the walking dead, in savage meditations on the decline of the age of the outlaw and the disappearance of the frontier. It's been swinging towards this for forty years, of course, since Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which really set the template that the likes of Unforgiven and all lesser derivatives have to nod to. So you can't really call modern Westerns revisionist in any meaningful sense: they're just revisitors to a familiar country where the heroic myth is already taken as a sham anachronism.
All this doesn't mean that there isn't still room for a great Western. The Assassination of Jesse James is very nearly one: Brad Pitt occupies the centre assuredly as the increasingly beleaguered bandit with whom it stretches your kindness to see him as merely utilitarian rather than just sociopathic, and the film's dialogues feel genuinely fresh, which is a hard enough act given the weight of genre convention. Ultimately, though, it all has to serve second fiddle to Roger Deakins's cinematography: I'm hard pushed to remember anything in the same class in recent years and certainly nothing to surpass it. Frame after frame just seems like a painting.

8/10

Un Prophète (Jacques Audiard, 2009)

Following hard on the heels of the international success of Mesrine, A Prophet is another slice of French prison and underworld life, this time without a biopic backdrop. Audiard gives us an Arab everyman who has fallen through society's security net and for whom prison serves primarily as a means to becoming more efficient and focused as a criminal. Taken by force under the wing of a brutal Corsican gangster as soon as he steps through the prison doors to start a 6-year sentence, 19-year old Malik soon has emotional baggage in abundance as he's given the choice to either kill a stool pigeon or be killed himself.
You can see why critics swooned: it's unglamorous and uncompromising, without treacly redemptions, and yet also suffused with moments of bleak poetry in glimpses of what might have been. But the constraints of the subject matter never give room for anything truly revelatory, and the potential politics of the culture clash within its compromised protagonist are largely neglected too.
There is plenty to applaud too: Tahar Rahim as the natural survivor in the lead role and Niels Arestrup as the posturing gangland boss present compelling performances, and the rife violence is played out far more in the mind and suggestion than in salacious graphic detail. All this makes for a honest and tense low-key crime drama, but there's insufficient additional depth to justify the film's epic running time.

6/10

Cargo (Ivan Engler, 2009)

The motley crew of a grungy cargo ship in 2070, en route to a distant star, gradually discover that the faceless corporation that employs them has other plans for them. Calling the firm Weyland-Yutani would of course be copyright infringement, but the rest is there for the taking.

It may be mean-spirited to pick up Cargo for being so derivative, so many rip-offs down the line from Alien, Dark Star, 2001 et al, but the prospect of a German perspective on the standard future dystopia populated by bleary dreamers and zealous bureaucrats held out some promise: after all, French directors have demonstrated a knack of adding new elements to the brew on numerous occasions over the years.
No such luck: it's woodenly-acted freeze-dried rations from beginning to end and distinguishable from a Hollywood B-film by language only. Late on, having blundered through several glaring plotholes, Engler does hit a single poignant idea, but then has to stub it out at once to end the film post haste.

3/10