I'm Still Here (Casey Affleck, 2010)

Actor Casey Affleck follows Joaquin Phoenix around with a camera, with the prodigiously gifted actor in the apparent throes of a nervous breakdown, effing left, right and centre railing at all who would mock him as he becomes progressively more incoherent and dishevelled, having convinced himself to pack in the acting lark and become a ludicrously incompetent rapper instead. That's it in a nutshell, which also serves as a full synopsis.
Except that we now know that Affleck and Phoenix then turned around and declared it all to have been faked, with the intent of picking apart the nature of celebrity as built up and torn down by the tabloid media. All well and good then, and God knows some of the unwitting collaborators, such the terminally self-important and humourless P. Diddy or David Letterman, deserved being taken down a peg or three for their credulity. But if it is satire, it needs to have something perceptive to say, and an hour and a half of Phoenix bumbling and ranting, however convincing he may be at it, doesn't cut the mustard.

5/10

The Disappearance of Alice Creed (J. Blakeson, 2009)

A bigwig's dollybird daughter is kidnapped by two bunglers and taken to a safehouse in a nondescript part of England...hold on, isn't this The Cottage? Where's Andy Serkis as the snarling one in charge? Oh, it's Eddie Marsan. Same difference. Gemma Arterton is perhaps an upgrade on Jennifer Ellison, but this is splitting hairs.
To be fair, The Disappearance of Alice Creed eschews making an outright comedy out of the set-up like the previous year's effort did, with its bludgeoning attempt at wresting guffaws out of grand guignol best forgotten by all involved. Instead of that we get a backstabbing love triangle of sorts, and a modicum of tension as the accompaniment. True, most of the credit is probably down to the editor, but at least it's not embarrassing.

5/10

Krabat (Marco Kreuzpaintner, 2008)

The story of Krabat and the Legend of the Satanic Mill will mean little to audiences outside Germany, who'll be unmoved by tweaks to details such as the precise chronological setting of Otfried Preussler's classic children's novel. So that just leaves judging it against any other effects-laden fantastical fare involving teenagers and evil wizards.
It stands up reasonably well: the story of the cornucopia-like mill powered only by human remains and the sorcerer who operates it with his captive workforce of boys orphaned by the plague raging through the land around them is ripe with potential, and a combination of scenic photography with generally more restrained FX than Hollywood could cope with adds a nice gloss. A shame, then, that it doesn't do anything novel with it all: the bland hero will prevail and love will defeat tyranny. No fiasco, but nothing for an adult audience unless encumbered with nostalgia.

5/10

Colin (Marc Price, 2008)

Purportedly made for £45, though clearly helped along by a lot of freebies, Colin manages one decent twist on the zombie film conventions: the titular protagonist gets turned into one of the walking dead five minutes in, and the rest of the film follows his groaning shuffle through a London gone to the dogs, rather than focusing on the standard set-up of survivors fighting off the ravenous hordes. But that also means that characterisation has to take a back seat, and as neatly assembled, given the constraints, that Price's film is, it is aching to have some streak of colour, such as the humour and pathos Romero managed with the Bub character in Day of the Dead. You can't help suspecting that the set-up is also designed to obviate the need for writing dialogue or really having any destination for the story arc, which is a shame as extra attention paid to both would not have cost the maker a penny more.

5/10

Thirteen (Catherine Hardwicke, 2003)

Much as Larry Clark did with Kids, Thirteen seeks to debunk the rosy cliches of the American teenager film, with a truculent pubescent girl drifting into self-centered bad behaviour and an eventual set-to with her endlessly patient mother. She and her new best friend, a parasitic prima donna, proceed to steal, dress like tarts, take drugs and sleep around and generally make a nuisance of themselves in the manner of all infantile rebels. And that's about all there is. The performances are credible and parents of unruly teenagers can't complain about having been short-changed in terms of realism, but there's little point to it all beyond a rather naive mission to 'tell it like it is' from Hardwicke, and it's easy to lose the will to care amongst all the badly sound-recorded tantrums, mumbling and reliance on whiny soundtrack in place of plot-generated atmosphere.

4/10

Puffball (Nicolas Roeg, 2007)

Once upon a time, Nicolas Roeg was a filmmaker of singular vision whose works stood out for their air of alienation and psychosexual menace. Walkabout, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Don't Look Now, Eureka and Insignificance all unsettled the senses whilst feeding the intellect.
But that was 25 years ago. Judging from the low-fi smudged carbon copy of his former glories that is Puffball, Roeg should have retired to rest on his laurels long ago. The disquieting eeriness is still there, but the plot of a female architect having her pregnancy remotely meddled with by her batty voodoo-practising neighbour in inbred rural Ireland is derivative of not just Don't Look Now, but Rosemary's Baby amongst many others, uncertain of its tone, and riddled with pointless and clumsy features, not least the sub-standard digital effects, a gratuitous burbling cameo by Roeg's old mucker Donald Sutherland, and a cringeworthily am-dram rendition by Kelly Reilly as the lead in peril.

4/10

Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926)

When presented with an artifact from the history of cinema that comes with the label of being the first of its kind, assessment can go one of two ways. The first is the path of respect: respect towards lack of technical sophistication, towards the cultural foibles and shortcomings of the milieu of a bygone era. Respect easily leads to undue reverence with the assumption that no critical comparison can be made between objects of such disparate provenances as two films 80 years apart.
The second is a cold rejection of such contextual considerations and means using the same yardstick to evaluate each work irrespective of age, budget or other constraints, as just a Ding an sich.
It comes as such a joy to discover that the first ever animated feature, The Adventures of Prince Achmed requires no special dispensation. The technical limitations of shooting stop-motion with paper and metal silhouette figures on an illuminated glass backing, with images of variable quality and fluidity, come across as virtues in a digital age, constantly reminding you of the artisanal effort behind each scene, and you hear the voice of a single auteur rather than the blanded-out orchestra of the 100-strong. And that voice, Reiniger's imagining of stories from 1,001 Arabian Nights, is a fantastically inventive one, full of craft and fantasy, even if the source stories are shown up as being rather simplistic and morally questionable upon being stripped to their bare bones.

7/10

Evil Aliens (Jake West, 2005)

The fact that the title cheerfully holds out a Ronsealesque promise should not suck you in to this pound store-budgeted homegrown comedy horror. By setting its sights on media manipulation of the Sunday Sport variety and pastiching slasher flicks, with an unlikable band of exploitation documentary makers setting off to report on mysterious UFO-related disappearances on a remote isle, it hardly picks the hardest of targets. That it misses most of the time and manages a hat-trick of being inept, unfunny and pointlessly repugnant along the way is quite an achievement. It will satisfy no-one, not even splatter fetishists: there isn't an iota of invention on display, even in the violence.

2/10

Louise-Michel (Gustave de Kervern & Benoît Delépine, 2008)

The aggrieved female workers of a northern French factory, upon learning of the derisory pay-off they're offered on their mass redundancy, decide that the best use for their funds is simply to knock off the boss responsible for their dismissal. The most socially dysfunctional of their number plucks a hitman from a trailer park for the job, who soon proves to be spectacularly inept. With predictable comic results.
Delépine and de Kervern's film isn't interested in commenting a great deal on social issues, so it can't be filed as satire. Neither does it attempt to wring pathos out of the lot of its hapless protagonists, so the sword by which it lives or dies is that of black comedy. This it occasionally manages for a chortle, but you never get the feeling it's going anywhere in particular, just happy to pootle along amiably, throwing more quirky characters and incidents at the screen on the off-chance some of them might stick.

5/10

Rozhovor s nepriatel'om (Patrik Lancaric, 2007)

In a snowbound warzone of indeterminate location, which may as well be Slovakia since that's where Facing the Enemy was shot, a German soldier is charged with taking a Russian prisoner into the woods to shoot him. Since the film really only has a cast of two, it's a case of so far, so Hell in the Pacific - you may remember John Boorman's ironically militaristically titled seminal 1968 drama on enemies becoming comrades once away from the commanding classes, with Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune stuck on a desert island. Game on for suspicion turning to frustration and finally bromance.
But Lancaric has loftier intentions. By making the German a questioning Christian and the Russian (both speaking Slovak, but then when do we question everyone speaking English?) a practical atheist, he develops the film into a debate of some intensity on the nature of motivation, spirituality and morality fit for any posturing Left Bank cafe (Lancaric is aware of this, and tries to deflect charges of pretentiousness by making the characters refer at several junctures to the overly philosophising nature of their discourse).
Whilst, despite the atmospheric backdrops, it feels very stagebound, some nuggets of genuine depth are garnered from the sifting, and though the denouement is a bit of a muddle, it's a work of real merit.

7/10