The King's Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010)

As with Kate Winslet's self-fulfilling quip about needing a Holocaust part to bag herself an Oscar, stuffing a biopic of a British monarch chock-full of heavyweights is also a rather dependable route to Academy Awards success, and so it proved.
But in this case, it was also deserved, Colin Firth's plaudit in particular. Whilst, being constrained by the closeted milieu of the royal universe, it contains little to address wider human concerns, and also surely taking great liberties with the facts behind closed doors for comic and empathetic effect, it really does engage. Firth as the King-to-be mortifyingly crippled by his stammer and Geoffrey Rush as his irreverent Australian speech therapist are enormous fun to watch in their verbal jousting, and the director knows just when to lay off before this goes overboard to switch seamlessly to a confessional, intimate tone in a portrait of a man imprisoned by birthright and expectation.
Of course, it's all heading towards a triumphalist climax, and the benefit of historical hindsight hardly makes this a spoiler, but it's still curiously poignant when it arrives.

7/10

Harry Brown (Daniel Barber, 2009)

Michael Caine returns to his childhood manor as a bereaved pensioner on a hellish South London council estate, ruled over by feral hoodies. He strives to keep a low profile, but the murder of his best friend by the street trash sends him over the edge and it all goes very Get Carter as Caine wreaks righteous vengeance on all and sundry. Think Death Wish as directed by Shane Meadows.
You can see why Caine was drawn to return to the mean streets: on one level, Barber's film is a wholeheartedly pessimistic depiction of a broken society that the veteran actor fled long ago in disgust. The nihilism must have concorded with, and justified, his world view. Regardless of that, you have to be glad he did: he remains a magnetic screen presence, and impossible not to root for on his mission even though you know all along that he's carving through cartoon ogres, some drawn so evil that they couldn't possibly function in the real world.

6/10

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (Tom Six, 2009)

Oh God, it's even the title that's ominous...dealing with a director versed in the tortureporn series principle who knows that just by leaving a little room for a sequel at the end, there'll be takers for one.
And of course there are. Never mind the capitalistically derivative nature of what the director has chucked up, with teenage Americans in Yuu-Rope being served up as meat to a local denizen gleeful for material for his medical experiments. There's just an arms race in hideous ideas, and endless young directors are being fed money by the barrowload to precipitate MAD first. Ok, a mad German doctor (with overtones of Mengele) wants to surgically attach people, mouth to arse, to create a human chain. Sick? Check. Not something you want done to you? Check. And that's it, really. Superior cinematography and a few mollifyingly idiosyncratic touches unwarrantedly dignify a nasty piece of exploitation where you can't even call on suspense for help when no decision is made between the villain being either a Michael Myers or a bumbler. And it cops out on the biological details, even, when you thought those might have been a bit important.

3/10

La Règle du Jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939)

Some film classics just date worse than others. Renoir's La Règle du Jeu is routinely and lazily considered by scared critics to be an untouchable masterpiece, while when it's seen through later eyes it's a fairly tame melange of upper and lower class types occasionally intermingling, a few splashes of social critique and some farcical comedy. There's nothing innovatory either, even for 1939. If you want cinema as an artform struggling for recognition, instead of just entertainment, Eisenstein et al. had that covered years before. Ditto having a social message.
There are real virtues, of course: swathes of pithy aphoristic observations ('The terrible thing about this world is that everyone has his reasons'), and the indisputable humanism is satisfyingly complex. But Renoir is also a dilettante and has a go at covering all the bases whilst satisfying none to the full. Hence, the film can too easily be reduced to just poshos trying to work out who they want to have affairs with and whether to be kind to their servants, and therefore dramatically weaker than a good episode of EastEnders.

6/10

Buried (Rodrigo Cortés, 2010)

In which Ryan Reynolds wakes up to find himself trapped in a coffin somewhere under the sands of Iraq. The concept is hardly new, with the claustrophobic nightmare of interment notably covered in George Sluizer's two versions of The Vanishing. But whereas in those films, their respective European arthouse and Hollywood thriller models already pointed fairly reliably to the nature of the protagonist's eventual fate, here Spanish director Cortés has cleverly cast a Hollywood A-lister in the role and, with that dichotomy, all bets are off from the outset.
The script does of course get constrained by a lack of room to manoeuvre a great deal, with Reynolds's character dutifully going through the five stages of grief. But there's a gratifyingly mordant political wit at work in his increasingly desperate mobile phone pleadings with blandly officious and uncomprehending American governmental bodies and call centre operatives, and the filmmakers' ingenuity coping with the technical demands placed on them by the brief makes Buried a riveting exercise to follow.

7/10

Sezon Tumanov (Anna Tchernakova, 2009)

The Season of Mists is a rarity as an Anglo-Russian co-production and unsurprisingly takes a bridging of the gap between the two cultures as its theme. Crossing and re-crossing the divide is Marina, a 40-year-old Russian married to an Englishman, feeling increasingly trapped in a Leicestershire village until the arrival of a band of Russian musicians gives her outlet for her longings in the form of a tempestuous affair.
The emigre's saudade for an idealised homeland has a universality of appeal, and Tchernakova handles the emotional content sensitively. A pity, then, that the film is let down on so many fronts: cringeworthily inept acting from Marina's daughter, a minuscule budget making a mess of chunks of the English synced dialogue, and some half-baked side characters, including a trio of semi-comic biddies in Marina's hairdressing salon, and Dudley Sutton stumbling around burbling about aliens having abducted his wife, which is clearly meant to lend mystical pathos to the themes of outsiders and events beyond one's control, but just strikes a daft false note.

4/10

Oorlogswinter (Martin Koolhoven, 2008)

Winter in Wartime covers similar ground to a wide swathe of other WWII resistance flicks, comparisons to Paul Verhoeven's recent Black Book inevitable due to the Dutch country setting. The focus here is on adolescent  disillusionment, though, as its protagonist, a teenage boy who helps a downed British airman, gradually realises the complexities of what actually constitutes heroism in the compromises created by occupation.
You can't fault the sincerity of the enterprise, based on Jan Terlouw's autobiographical novel, and there are some taut setpieces as well as decent acting. But we've been here so many times before, that something more is needed, and Koolhoven lets us down on that score with some overly glossy stock scenes. Just one German who wasn't just a faceless menace wouldn't have done any harm, either.

5/10

The Bank Job (Roger Donaldson, 2008)

Loosely based on the events of the Baker Street bank robbery in 1971, the haul of which was never recovered, The Bank Job also overlays a governmental corruption angle which plays with the urban myth that the stolen deposit boxes contained sensitive material relating to the monarchy.
Jason Statham is his usual grimacing geezer as the gang leader, visibly at a bit of a loose end as Clement and La Frenais's script will provide him with no opportunity to chin his way through to the jackpot. So it's left in a limbo between heist thriller and bumblers' farce, and doesn't really satisfy on either count, while chucking Soho porn kings and black power activists into the blender too in an attempt to alchemise a filling meal.
Full marks for rose-tinted Sweeney-ish '70s period detail, though.

5/10

Det Sjunde Inseglet (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

Some films are crystallised in popular culture in a single iconic image. With The Seventh Seal, it's Max Von Sydow sitting on a beach playing chess with Death. It's a fair summation: the game in effect forms the framework for the whole film, mirroring the inexorable march of the plague across medieval Sweden and Von Sydow's crusader knight's metaphysical struggle with divine will in the face of the apparent randomness of the world.
For all the nihilism, Bergman still manages to work in counterbalancing light interludes with a sprightly troupe of travelling players, and the laconically self-deprecating pronouncements of the knight's squire also serve to alleviate a critique of human cruelty and stupidity, whether that of the church or of the merely fearful, which could otherwise so easily have been stifled under the weight of the indignation Bergman obviously feels.
It's not Bergman's most rounded work, being overly fond of the Greek chorus and the pat solution, but earns its role in cinematic history nevertheless for the sheer force of some of its imagery.

7/10

Okuribito (Yojiro Takita, 2008)

Departures, the winner of the 2008 Foreign Language Oscar, is built on a promising enough proposition: a young man, giving up on his career as a cellist, applies for what he thinks is a travel agency job to find himself thrust into employment as an 'encoffiner' instead, charged with ceremonially preparing the dead for burial. His fiancee, given the traditional stigma attached to handlers of the deceased as the work of the underclass, is mortified at the discovery of his new position.
Takita's film has a choice to make at this point: to go all-out with the gallows humour at the protagonist's awkwardness, which it initially toys with to reasonable effect, or to probe deeper from the social critique angle. It fumbles the ball at this point and smoothes both out by opting for sentimentality instead, which proves its intellectual undoing even as it concomitantly guarantees the product's appeal to the saccharine-seeking Academy Award audience. It's never a good sign when a director attempts to convey soulfulness by having a camera encircle a man passionately playing a cello in the open air. You may recall this as shorthand for Jan-Michael Vincent's emotional depth in the dire '80s gadget action series Airwolf.

5/10

La Grande Séduction (Jean-François Pouliot, 2003)

The tiny Quebecois fishing village of Ste. Marie-La-Mauderne hits upon the idea of attracting a factory to provide much-needed employment for its welfare-dependent population. There's just one catch: for that, they need a doctor in residence, something they have singularly failed to achieve to date. Then they do find a candidate, but have their work cut out in conniving to reel the city slicker in.
Seducing Doctor Lewis rather fancies itself as an old-fashioned comedy of foibles, with Monsieur Hulot overtones, if the soundtrack is anything to go by. The humour is accordingly more often broad than subtle. The collection of gently observed quirky hicks is straight off the shelf too, and the set-up pretty much directly a transposition-as-farce of Local Hero. Nevertheless, it's cute enough to endear by virtue of zest alone, and raises a frequent warm chuckle.

6/10

The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, 2002)

As an actor, Peter Mullan has a wide oeuvre, but it's particularly his characterisation in Ken Loach's bleakly gritty My Name is Joe that seems to sum up the best of what he brings to a role, and so perhaps appropriate that as director he's so far ploughed a similar furrow of uncompromisingly harrowing real-life stories.
For all its well-meaning critical acclaim, though, The Magdalene Sisters is not his best. That it takes a few liberties in splicing together various real people to create a dramatic composite isn't the problem: the rub is, it's not dramatic enough. The history of the decades of cruelty of Ireland's nun-run Magdalene workhouses-come-prisons for women fallen by the wayside or undesirables just interned by their families has abundant potential, but Mullan's direction falls flat in its earnestness, the script containing little to surprise, also including Geraldine McEwan's stock sadistic Mother Superior. And if the quartet of girl-victims aren't actually biographical, do they need to be so gormless in their attempts to flee their plight?

5/10

Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek, 2010)

Faithfully adherent to Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 dystopian novel, Never Let Me Go posits a modern-day England in which clones are nurtured to adulthood to be farmed in stages for body parts.
It starts off in a generically post-war boarding school setting, and it's apparent that since the biggest question that must be addressed is why the battery humans are so resigned to their fate, Ishiguro always intended the institutionalisation of that form of establishment to be a justification for their passivity. It still remains the biggest weakness of the set-up, though, when transferred to film: what can be accepted without question in the hermetically sealed universe of a novel, where suspension of disbelief is facilitated by an awareness that we're only seeing what the novelist as God allows us to see, becomes trickier to take in in the cinematic medium where it's difficult to treat a world that looks like reality as not functioning like reality. The same applies to a fudged justification of why a society breeding stock just for spare parts would really bother to educate any of them.
Of course, down the route of rebellion against their destiny lies the action and chase scene version, namely Michael Bay's The Island. It is preferable to that to comply with Romanek in taking a great deal of what transpires as metaphor for other forms of institutionalised oppression, even if a little more attention to suspense would not have gone amiss, with the film letting the cat out of the bag too early. The remainder is heart-rending and beautifully acted (barring Keira Knightley's stage-school turn, as usual), but also a drainingly sheep-like march towards the inevitable.

6/10