The Ghost (Roman Polanski, 2010)

Ewan McGregor, once again essaying his estuaries accent and again playing a cocky journo who finds himself in deep water, is commissioned to finish off the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister who's embroiled in accusations of war crimes over terrorist renditions. Then the ghost writer starts to uncover a murkier chain of events that led to the death of his predecessor and the facts behind the allegations against the Prime Minister.
For tone, think Polanski's Frantic; as for the wider plot besides the thriller element, Pierce Brosnan's PM is a barely veiled Tony Blair.
The first element works with Polanski's customary elan and efficiency, and generates a gripping Hitchcockian suspense that's mercifully unreliant on Hollywood's customary guns and chases. The second sticks in the craw too much, though: it's clear that neither Robert Harris, whose housebrick of a Ludlumer the film is based on, nor Polanski, who obviously just has a rather large axe to grind against the US, have a well-thought out notion of how the CIA meddling in another country's political affairs might actually work. So Brosnan's character remains a prima donna pastiche, and the fuzzy development of the background plot leads to some glaring illogicalities in the thriller element by the end.
It would have been nice then, if such a potentially weighty topic hadn't ended up as stylised hokum. But at least it's moody hokum, and some of the terse dialogue really does sparkle.

6/10

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

After showing initial promise, Darren Aronofsky slowly and inexorably disappears further up his own fundament. Black Swan is a horror film without a consistent source of threat, a study of breakdown compromised by both the fantastical horror elements and the shackles of attempting to parallel the Swan Lake plot, a parental abuse drama which is largely left unexplored, and a ballet film for people who don't like ballet but guiltily feel they should. It looks glorious and it's stretched gossamer-thin by hedging its bets on trying to cram in something for everyone. Therefore, it's virtually sure to win the Oscar.
The plot, in a nutshell, is Natalie Portman's ballerina being challenged by Vincent Cassel's ballet director to find her inner passion so that she can play the dark half of the Swan Queen role. This provokes no end of hand-wringing and tears in a Portman character who's single-notedly wimpy even by her febrile standards, and then she starts falling to bits with nasty visions of her dark half under the strain of having to force herself to become sexual. So, it's basically the virgin vs. whore dichotomy.
There are lots of seductive glosses, of course: the photography is lush, the deranged visions subtle and crisply edited enough to be genuinely startling even for jaded horror buffs, and the use of enhanced sound whenever Portman contorts her body, all suggested tears and cracks, is very effective in conveying a sense of the ever-present hazardousness of her metier. But strip away all this varnish and there's very little underneath.

5/10

A Single Man (Tom Ford, 2009)

Based on Christopher Isherwood's novel, fashion designer Tom Ford's debut film tells the story of George Falconer, an English professor in '60s California who starts a day under the multiple shrouds of the loss of his long-term partner, impending Armageddon in the Cuban missile crisis and a crushing realisation of his inescapable decline into lonely old age, surrounded by an increasingly inane world.
There are a lot of directions to go from here. Ford opts for the elegiac route, with flashbacks to happier times in his life, prompted by a heightened feeling of poignancy in Falconer's everyday encounters.
The end result is stunning. It's hard to believe that we're dealing with a director fresh from the fickle world of fashion, albeit that as a gay man a natural affinity with the theme of the repressed outcast may be present, and clearly the original script has resonance beyond the world of a middle-aged homosexual too. But that still leaves work to be done with the adaptation. It's sensuously shot, finely nuanced, and Colin Firth, who many might have seen in the past as the archetype of the stiff upper-lipped inexpressive upper-class Englishman, puts in a remarkable performance. You could actually watch extremes of barely withheld emotion playing across his face for hours. I never though I'd say that.

8/10

Cemetery Junction (Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant, 2010)

Ricky Gervais has stated that he was seeking to compete with the ubiquitous American feelgood coming-of-age romcoms with this piece, rather than ending up with that quintessential British product, the unexportable kitchen sink drama.
He succeeds. Although the kitchen sink is always just out of focus in the background, probably inevitably given both Gervais's sardonic sensibilities and the setting, which carries autobiographical echoes - the location is a fictitious Reading suburb in the early '70s and Gervais even plays the main character's ambitionless father - it engages and warms the cockles while mostly managing to stay clear of the sugariness of most of its US counterparts. The four young principals, dreaming of a life beyond the drab plans the older generation has for them, are refreshingly drawn and played, and cameos by a host of British stalwarts are helpful rather than obtrusive. The outcome is of course never in doubt, but getting there is a pleasant journey.

7/10

Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)

Wes 'Quirky' Anderson populates his films with strong ensembles, who are then under instructions to approach the comical vicissitudes thrown at their characters with a philosophical raised eyebrow. This worked to a degree in The Royal Tenenbaums and A Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, probably becuse the principal protagonist wasn't such a self-centred and conniving little nerdlinger, as is the case with Jason Schwartzman's character here.
Max Fischer is about to get himself ejected from Rushmore, a posh American school existing in some period between the '30s and the present, for poor academic performance brought on by using the school as a personal playground through running every single off-curricular society. Then an English teacher turns up (the insipid Olivia Williams) and a crush on her becomes his new project. Bill Murray wanders in and out depressed with that philosophical raised eyebrow.
It's clear, as with Anderson's other efforts, that the accumulation of nonsensical interludes and random character foibles is intended to produce a composite which speaks out about Life. This kind of approach usually works on an American middlebrow audience. So, Fischer's machinations are to be seen as victories for the Everydweeb, and their outcomes as bittersweet life lessons.
But Fischer learns nothing, and is just as unpleasant at the end as at the start, which would be ok if it wasn't so clear that learning was intended. And a succession of interludes along his circular journey, such as the awful plays he produces, keep promising a point but work neither as satire on pseuds, knockabout fun or anything deeper.

4/10

Predators (Nimród Antal, 2010)

But for a few oblique references to the Arnie original, this is basically a total retread of the hunter-prey jungle rampage (with a few added aliens, since you can only ever go bigger). To fill in for the Guvernator's rippling pecs not only has the unlikely figure of Adrien Brody (as a grunting hardass mercenary!) had to buff up, but Laurence Fishburne suddenly appears too, puffed up out of recognition. The carefully ethnically-mixed cast are whittled down at a rate very much in keeping with the mathematical formula for the genre. And that's about it. The best you could say is that it's efficient.

4/10

L'Enfer (Danis Tanovic, 2005)

The second part of the Kieslowski-scripted loose trilogy, following on from the Tom Tykwer-helmed largely accomplished Heaven in 2002, Hell continues with themes familiar to the late Polish director's perennial preoccupations with past transgressions causing personal cataclysms in the present.
We're in France this time, with a trio of sisters all caught up with bourgeois family and relationship dilemmas. That could already be the crux of the rub: the mannered setting sets it at a remove from Kieslowski's masterful ability to create engagement with the characters. Although the casting of the sisters may not help too: one's a petulant loon, another a doormat, and the third the blankly pouting arthouse Bardot, Emmanuelle Béart. Carole Bouquet as the spitefully taciturn mother of the three does redress the balance but is seen too briefly.
There are still some wince-inducingly catharctic scenes, but it's a disjointed piece and doesn't augur well for Kieslowski's former scriptwriting partner Piesiewicz cannibalising what scraps he can find so that Purgatory ever gets made.

5/10

Triangle (Christopher Smith, 2009)

Some films are so dependent on their plot contortions that an effective representation in a review becomes impossible, for fear of violating the spoiler rule. The evaluation is then simply a thumbs-up or down.
Triangle may start in standard supernatural slasher territory, with a bunch of blandly good-looking friends coming across a ghost ship on a boating trip. The ship of course turns out not to be deserted, and the heroine, played by the instantly forgettable Melissa George, gets trapped in a personal hell.
That the film then turns into a rather blatant rip-off of 2007's Spanish psychological thriller Timecrimes actually turns out to be its salvation. At least it guarantees rewards in terms of piecing it all together.

6/10

Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1999)

Here The Crow director Proyas throws detective film noir, The Truman Show and The Matrix into a mangle and then cranks for a while until a paste of passable consistency emerges.
This is a slightly cruel reduction: being contemporaneous with the two blockbusters mentioned, there's no concrete evidence of any idea theft from either. What it is, though, is suffering by comparison with either: the '40s gumshoe patina doesn't make the idea of a fake world outside the city as universally appealing as in Truman, and the aliens responsible for the shifting reality, being led by arch-cheesemonger Richard O'Brien, don't have the chilling vim of The Matrix's tyrannical computer program as the antagonist.
Rufus Sewell does well enough as the eventually messianic hero on the run, but William Hurt's cop is stolid rather than stoic and Kiefer Sutherland's pseudo-Mengele mumbling doctor is just plain silly. Its prettiness is also offset by some grave gaps in narrative logic and an ADHD 1.8-second average shot length. Taken on its own merits, then, it just about bears up, but refinements on the ideas by other films have made it a bit superfluous.

5/10

Precious (Lee Daniels, 2009)

Black American kitchen-sink drama has seen a surfeit of films centring on gangs or teenagers getting themselves out of a hole with edukeishon over the years, and at first glance Precious would fall squarely into the second category: pregnant teenager Precious, a surly illiterate blob, is weighed down with an abusive mother whose sole mantra is 'you ain't never gonna amount to nuthin', until she starts finding her own voice under the wing of an inspirational teacher. It could be right royal crap, with J-Lo or Michelle Pfeiffer as the saintly motivator, and the fat girl finding the holy feelgood trinity of money, love and skinniness.
Thankfully, we're spared that: the bar's simply been set too high and you know Precious's filmstar fantasies will, for once, remain just that. Instead, the goal becomes a more attainable and universal one; simple self-determination. There are no real surprises along the way towards that end, but a strong cast and unpatronising script raise it above the worthy-but-dull mean.

6/10