Rukajärven Tie (Olli Saarela, 1999)

The Road to Rukajärvi, lumbered with the hopeless video game-style title Ambush 1941 for the English market, is one of those platoon-scale Cross of Iron perspectives on WWII (as opposed to the massed battle more typical to the WWI trench set-up) that allows room for character development and less emphasis on the futility of war or the idiocy of generals. Not that a Finnish director would have much truck with the latter anyway, the overwhelming opinion on the country's experience seeing it as a victim rather than a guilty party.
Nevertheless, you can't keep a liberal agenda out of a Finnish war film, so it's no surprise the first casualty of the platoon's foray ends up being a Russian civilian. This is also a fair way into the film, and the tension keeps on building with little happening and the forest itself potently taking on the role of lurking adversary, until a thankfully short finale of slow-mo carnage.
Saarela's film doesn't really kick up anything new besides a setting novel to foreign audiences, but the parallel story of the lieutenant lead and the loss of his fiancee is nevertheless surprisingly affecting, and the mise-en-scene makes the most of a fragile band in a dizzifyingly endless and vacant landscape.

6/10

Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010)

Leonardo DiCaprio might have been well advised to leave some space between this and Inception, since it's clear early on in both that his character is beginning to doubt his own sanity. He's in danger of becoming a rent-a-breakdown. But then, given the menace that Scorsese hits you with from the start, and Ben Kingsley as a psychiatrist, you can hardly expect anything other than tears.
This time, DiCaprio plays a federal marshal charged with investigating a disappearance on an asylum island. He's hit from the outset with migraines and unsettling visions of his dead wife, and things can only deteriorate from there, with Kingsley and the wardens of the facility dropping increasingly provocative hints.
The whole owes a rather large debt to Samuel Fuller's seminal Shock Corridor, in which an investigative journalist undercover at a mental asylum loses his grip on reality, and so the eventual twist, heavily signposted, hardly raises an eyebrow. But this being Scorsese, the execution is of sufficient quality that you'll still keep watching until the denouement.

6/10

Jadesoturi (Antti-Jussi Annila, 2006)

Jade Warrior has the distinction of being in a genre on its own, and this will remain so.Who would have known the world needed a cross-over between the Finnish Kalevala and Chinese Wuxia epics, with wire-work and demons thrown in?
The drunken premise is basically a warrior-monk being reincarnated as a depressed smith in modern-day Finland, having to face up to his true identity to save mankind from his eternal foe. It's far too derivative to serve as anything other than a daft curio: the Pandora's Box the smith is suckered into forging is straight out of Hellraiser, The Fifth Element, or any number of other sources, the chopsocky inferior to the full-blown havoc of fully Chinese films, and the hero a muddled doofus who spends a great deal of time swooning over the revelations he keeps on getting hit with. Finnish cinema will some day get round to producing a border-crossing blockbuster instead of just black comedies or grim war films, but this isn't it.

4/10

Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

Denis Lavant, perhaps best known as the chimp-faced fire-eating street urchin in Leos Carax's ethereal Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, is cast here as a troubled former Foreign Legionnaire, the backstory of his self-torment forming the bulk of the film. On service in Djibouti, in a unit caught in a stasis of drills, whoring and ablutions, Lavant's character takes umbrage at the rise of a new arrival, popular and heroic, into the affections of his commanding officer.
This is no war film, probably largely due to a female director more concerned with the mechanics of backbiting and jealousy in a hierarchical structure than with derring-do. Not a Kathryn Bigelow soldier piece, in other words. It's soon apparent that entire hyperreal scenes serve to create an atmosphere of homoeroticism through which we come to understand that Lavant's bitterness is wholly driven by his repressed sexuality.
The plot itself could be written on a handkerchief. Denis's intention was to create a visual poem, not a conventional linear feature. To this end, there are instances of a captivating marriage of image and soundtrack. Unfortunately, it also suffocates under the inertness and impotence of its protagonist: a portrait of self-denied obsession will always run the risk of shutting the viewer out.

5/10

Valkyrie (Bryan Singer, 2008)

It's imperative for a historical biopic to bring something more to the table than just a straightforward retelling of events, when the eventual outcome is already well known. This becomes doubly vital if there's a loss of veracity with a change of language, and if there's any inkling that what we're getting is a vanity project, a star vehicle more than a dramatisation actually interested in the facts or participants.
It wasn't hard to suspect Tom Cruise as Claus von Stauffenberg, Hitler's would-be assassin, would fall prey to these failings. The usual boxes of the Hollywood WWII epic are ticked, of course: a rotation of British heavyweights as the top-ranking staff, a lot of terse secret rendezvouses and the obligatory sense of portentous urgency with a smattering of Wagner thrown in. But Cruise never really steps out of his dogged Mission: Impossible mode, with scowling and flashbacks filling in for character depth.

4/10

13 Tzameti (Géla Babluani, 2005)

A young builder overhears his employer planning to undertake 'one last job' before dying inadvertently and leaving him out of pocket for the work done. So, the callow youth assumes the boss's identity, unaware that he's heading into deep trouble with an underworld gambling ring revolving around Russian roulette.
Interestingly for cinematophiles, Babluani's film starts so fumblingly on a technical level before moving on to a surer-footed noir style that it's tempting to view this as possibly the first ever example of levels of competence in direction being used as a mirror of the protagonist's progression. There's also a detached Melvillesque nihilism to the dramatic arc which reassures you against patness.
However, 13 Tzameti doesn't have much to say beyond that, and Babluani might have well have admitted as much when he took the Yankee dollar five years later to remake it. With Jason Statham, bien sur.

5/10

Valhalla Rising (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2009)

Winding Refn may be best known as the director of the admirably uncompromising Pusher trilogy, which first brought him together with Mads Mikkelsen, an actor of formidable range and subtlety. For them to reunite to present an arthouse Conan the Barbarian is surely taking the piss.
Valhalla Rising, then is basically Lars Von Trier going straight into reworking The 13th Warrior to unwind from Antichrist. It's even divided into chapters with foreboding titles as Antichrist was. Mikkelsen's mute One Eye is a Viking era superhero kept in chains to fight without respite. A flaxen-haired waif attaches himself to the killing machine and then they're launched into a ill-conceived crusade with a band of Christians on a mission to convert heathens.
It is strong on atmosphere, particularly in some startlingly eerie photography and stiflingly disorientating setpieces. But it doesn't at any point really seem interested in injecting more thematic depth to the world it has visually managed to capture to an impressive degree, and hence leaves just disconnected moody images in the mind.

5/10

Rambo (Sylvester Stallone, 2008)

As James Bond spends an inordinate amount of time underwater, so with Rambo and jungles. Stallone claimed that it took this long for another sequel because of having to find a worthy contemporary adversary. For that read: a contemporary jungle-based adversary.
So, Burma it is, with our by now unfeasibly ossified and mumbling hero reluctantly taking a bunch of do-gooders up river and before long showing all and sundry how wholescale slaughter is done, dressed up with Stallone's own brand of pensive aphorism ("Live for nothing, or die for something"). Meanwhile, with the Burmese Government forces serving only as target practice between bouts of cartoon villainy, the educational level of the enterprise is limited to revealing that where most soldiers merely die when hit, in Burma they actually explode into mush.

3/10

The Killing Room (Jonathan Liebesman, 2009)

Four disparate individuals are invited to a secret facility to take part in psychological testing of an increasingly disturbing nature, monitored all the while by hidden profilers.
I was hoping here for either a serious attempt to engage with the theme of the ruthlessness of unfettered governmental mindgames on guinea pigs, in the mould of Das Experiment - after all, just as that film was based on real events, so The Killing Room flippantly makes direct reference to the CIA's MKULTRA Cold War project. Failing that, turning the set-up into out-and-out survival mayhem a la Cube would have probably done the trick too. But Liebesman is a hack, and manages neither successfully. Chloë Sevigny and Peter Stormare, as the morally compromised testers, do play edgy cat-and-mouse for a while, but the eventual resolution is badly undermined by the weakness of the underlying premise.

4/10

Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee (Shane Meadows, 2009)

A verite comedy this time from Meadows, shoestring in budget and shooting time even by his spartan standards, built almost wholly on improvisation from Paddy Considine playing up the bragging arsehole aspect of many of his characters in Meadows's films. What story there is involves loser Considine driving around the North, bigging himself and his blobby rap protege Scor-zay-zee up to anyone who'll listen, whilst trying to deal with impending fatherhood with his ex-girlfriend and whining at Meadows, who's following him to make a documentary. It's really just a pal exercise for the makers, no more than a middling TV comedy in substance, and depends heavily on Considine's ability to wring warmth out of the most hopeless saddoes for a sympathetic reception.

5/10

Daybreakers (the Spierig brothers, 2009)

Vampires, with a Matrix twist: in the near future (as it always is) they constitute 95% of mankind and the rest serve as a dwindling supply of food for the mass. Ethan Hawke, as in Gattaca, is the humanistic dissenter who seeks to reverse the tide, while Sam Neill more or less recycles his evil megalomaniac from Event Horizon as head capitalist bloodsucker who just wants to milk the status quo.
There's plenty of room here for black critique of the destructiveness of market forces, and more space to manoeuvre within the confines of a crowded genre is made by the upside-down premise of the human as the outsider. Both opportunities are largely wasted, and the whole collapses under the weight of having to engineer a resolution from a very half-baked set of internal scientific rules. All that doesn't preclude a sequel, of course.

5/10

The Invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2007)

The umpteenth filming of The Body Snatchers drafts in the director of the sporadically estimable Das Experiment and Downfall, and it's difficult to see what the aim was with either yet another act of remastication or getting an ostensibly serious director to helm it, particularly as the studio then promptly disembowelled Hirschbiegel's darker original version in favour of a formulaic progression to eventual salvation. Philip Kaufman's nihilistic 1978 version with Donald Sutherland and a choking air of irreversible, creeping encirclement should have been the last word on the concept. Here, we get police cars getting trashed in place of actual suspense, and Nicole Kidman dragging her blonde beagle-eyed boy around while trying to avoid sleep, as the audience simultaneously fights the same losing battle against somnolence.
On a positive note, Warner Bros. lost $40m at the box office on this mess, and Hirschbiegel will probably be able to sweep it under the carpet as a case study in studio interference. A cautionary tale to all involved, then.

4/10

Les Triplettes de Belleville (Sylvain Chomet, 2003)

Chomet's first feature, released in the English-language market as Belleville Rendez-Vous, is a near-perfect marriage of painstakingly crafted old-school painting and CGI. Chomet did then go on to perfect the fusion in 2010's The Illusionist.
The story here is fairly unexceptional: a boy grows up dreaming of winning the Tour De France and is coached to that end by his indefatigable grandma, until he's abducted by a nefarious mafioso and she sets out to rescue him. The pleasure is rather in all the incidental detail: each OTT characterisation is imbued with a spark of life and individualism that modern Disney's mass-production wisecracking animals are wholly lacking, and the pacing, even when the action gets frenetic, still allows room for each witty contrivance to breathe before moving on. Chomet also has an acute sense of staging and perspective, which makes for captivatingly vertiginous shots without the crutch of 3-D.
If there's a downside, it's that it's too enchanted with its inventiveness to leave much of an emotional residue. But it's hard to be uncharmed.

7/10

Io Sono L'Amore (Luca Guadagnino, 2009)

I Am Love takes us into the crumbling upper echelon of Italian society, with a patriarchal industrialist formally passing on ownership of his company to his son and grandson. Meanwhile, the son's wife and her secretly lesbian daughter strive inarticulately to break out of the gilded cage of their mansion and the stratified behavioural constraints it represents.
Tilda Swinton, the focal point as the duty-bound and yearning wife, also produced and has talked up a good game about the film as the conflict between stifling tradition and the desire for love bubbling under that. But the film is too taken in by its own cosmetic virtues, with Yorick Le Saux's lambent photography and John Adams's overpoweringly revelatory soundtrack, and so the emotion remains locked in by the veneer of sophistication that Guadagnino purports to strip. Characters are reduced to walking from room to room and flitting nervous glances aside. This should have been a Brideshead Revisited; instead it's a lifeless episode of Dynasty, for all its artful prettiness.

5/10

Defendor (Peter Stebbings, 2009)

Woody Harrelson is a child-man with delusions of being a superhero. It really does write itself.
In the manner typical to these set-ups in Hollywood, Defendor starts quite promisingly, with the perfectly cast Harrelson - no-one does the amiable and earnest buffoon quite as adamantly - getting seven shades beaten out of him with his every attempt at vigilantism. There's a gratifying adherence to the conventions of the superhero genre in details and soundtrack, where the slapstick of Mystery Men might have been expected.
And then you have to conclude that relentless slapstick would have been welcome, instead of a deflating descent into Robin Williams territory, where we're asked to take our sadsack's predicament as a social comment of sorts, whereas it's actually no more equipped to deal with seriousness than were K-Pax and Hancock, of which it's a rough melange.
Don't expect it to be the last of its ilk, in any case. The superhero comic adaptation production line shows no sign of slowing down, meaning a plentiful supply of runts in balaclavas in the real world dreaming of being Batman, consequently generating material for parodies about them. For every electric Kick-Ass, there'll be an inoffensive Defendor. All will be watched by those runts in balaclavas, in any case, just glad to have their lives up on screen.

5/10

Houseboat (Melville Shavelson, 1958)

A blast from an age where romantic comedies had to be served up with an earworm of a silly song, hammered home by the leads with multiple repetitions until each viewer was stuck with it ringing in their ears for weeks. Doris Day vehicles had to be the worst offenders, but plenty more starlets got delegated with the task, as here with Sophia Loren and the 'Bing Bang Bong' song.
For all that, Houseboat is a likeable enough piece of fluff, largely thanks to its dependable typecasting of Loren as a no-nonsense vivacious Italian and Cary Grant as an indignant and put-upon character with a soft centre. So, he's a widowed father of three button-nosed kids who ends up with La Loren as a maid, and of course a thirty-year age gap between the two leads will prove no obstacle at all to romance. If this sounds insufferably twee, at least the dialogue is perky and helps undercut the formula sweetness.

5/10  

Salt (Phillip Noyce, 2010)

In which Angelina Jolie cements her status as the queen of the derivative and forgettable actioner. Milla Jovovich may unashamedly front even greater dross and high-kick more unfeasibly, but Jolie is meant to be an A-list star and a proper actress to boot. Why there's any need to keep on with the scowly macho stuff is unfathomable.
Salt manages to plunder both Bourne and Bond without the decency of throwing a knowing wink, and all it adds is layers of illogicality as Jolie discovers she's in fact (surely anachronistically) a Russian sleeper agent trained to assassinate the President, and then goes on a rampage with lashings of FX-budget gobbling collateral damage. Meanwhile, Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor also run around po-faced, barking instuctions into mobile phones. Thoroughly pointless from start to finish.

3/10