Cracks (Jordan Scott, 2009)

The setting of Scott's debut feature is a 1930s girls' boarding school, which we know will be a hothouse of burgeoning passions, and the teacher is Eva Green, who we know as a player of women with hidden psychoses. An exotic new girl, Maria Valverde enters the school, and the rule of lead girl Juno Temple over her roost is threatened as Miss takes an unhealthy interest in the new arrival.
It's not that Cracks is an unseemly stab at a period psychodrama, managing to generate a sense of disquiet in keeping with the unstable personalities of its immature coven, and it's artfully shot. But the ease of joining the dots in the above resume is disappointing, with Temple soon playing Thora Birch to Valverde's Keira Knightley: essentially a junior retread of The Hole, except without the real clencher.

4/10

A Perfect Getaway (David Twohy, 2009)

A five-year hiatus after his misbegotten budget-blowing The Chronicles of Riddick, director Twohy returns apparently having decided on more modest settings, and also venturing outside the sci-fi umbrella for the first time. Hawaii, then, with a couple of honeymooning hikers becoming increasingly spooked by reports of a double murder on the neighbouring island and by the opinionated, and at least borderline unhinged, stranger who latches on to them on the remote trail. A few more abrasive fellow travellers have already been introduced, and since we know we're in psycho slasher territory, the game's afoot to deduce who the killers are.
The choice of multiple sets of potential perpetrators is probably the film's only unique selling point in a jaded genre, and there's a hefty dollop of cheese in the reveal and finale, but at least Twohy keeps things ticking along efficiently until then.

4/10

The Lovely Bones (Peter Jackson, 2005)

An adaptation of Alice Sebold's novel about an adolescent girl continuing to witness her family's grief after her brutal murder, Jackson's film is a mixed bag: the fantastical vistas in the afterlife and tension in the real-world thriller scenes are in keeping with what you'd expect from the Lord of the Rings director, but so too is the overpowering mawkishness, as our fresh-faced heroine gazes with fear or astonishment upon sights of wonder with tears welling up in her wide-open blue eyes. In other words, she's Frodo.
One can only hope that Sebold's novel had more substance than the film reduction, with its potted folk-spiritual wisdom and frustratingly illogical narrative developments, such as when the mother's reaction to her loss is to take flight from her family, or when the director seems to have forgotten what the symbolic props that he established earlier on were actually supposed to represent. But one supposes not.

4/10

Neco z Alenky (Jan Svankmajer, 1988)

If you're at all familiar with Czech animator Svankmajer's dark and twisted visions, such Little Otik, in which a bereaved couple adopt a tree root that turns demonically voracious, you'll know not to expect Disneyesque cutesiness from his version of Alice in Wonderland. Accordingly, the stop-motion creatures that populate the world of her adventures are cobbled together from bizarre materials such as false eyes, Wonderland itself a dank and claustrophobic old house, and Alice, who provides the voices of the other characters in precocious tones as narrator, at turns insufferable brat and amoral vandal. You couldn't warm to any part of it, but the remarkable technical inventiveness and lack of sentimentality-by-numbers are undeniable. I'd take it over Tim Burton's bloated mess of a production any day of the week.

6/10

Aaltra (Gustave de Kervern & Benoît Delépine, 2004)

Two Belgian feuding farmers find themselves both confined to wheelchairs after being mangled by the harvester that was the focal point of their enmity. Aggrieved and still backbiting, they set out across Europe to confront the manufacturer of the culpable machine.
Aaltra is a small film with an idea probably only broad enough to cover a short, but it's still filled out with enough fun interludes, such as when the grumpy duo massively outstay their welcome with a benevolent German family or attempt to rob anyone who'd choose to aid two poor cripples. Culminating with just a surly Nordic/Gallic shrug of the shoulders - including the apposite cameo by a certain poker-faced director - is a fitting end for a black comedy that resolutely avoids either forcing its protagonists to learn to love each other or giving their quest a redemptive end.

6/10

Funny Games U.S. (Michael Haneke, 2007)

The arch title of Haneke's remake of his own film from ten years before instantly raises the suggestion that we'll get the same package, only sweetened at the finale to keep the U.S. consumer happy. George Sluizer's bastardisation of The Vanishing, in other words, except pre-stamped with a warning that we are about to be served up shit.
But that would be too hackishly utilitarian for Haneke's idiosyncratic approach. Instead we get exactly the same film, shot by shot, right down to the screaming soundtrack, just with American duplicates of the original Austrians, including the house, the lake and boating neighbours. The dawning realisation that nothing is different is both a relief, since the original was at least an uncompromisingly gripping piece, and also a form of torture of the returning viewer by the director, much like the abuse inflicted on the captive family by their psychopathic visitors.

6/10

The Brothers Bloom (Rian Johnson, 2008)

Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo play a pair of con artist brothers scamming their way with schemes of increasing deviousness across Europe. When they undertake to do Rachel Weisz's eccentric rich heiress out of her millions,  the plot starts reeling with its determination to pile twist on top of twist.
A film with so many turns can't fail to be entertaining, but the kookiness of the characterisations, with their anachronistic get-ups and self-consciously quirky foibles makes it wear thin after a while. Like the feats of legerdemain that it accumulates, it's too much top show with nothing underneath to grasp on to. And naming the duo after James Joyce characters is just an example of another gloss that doesn't add substance.

5/10

Rudo y Cursi (Carlos Cuarón, 2008)

A rags-to-riches-to-rags morality tale with a comic slant, Rudo y Cursi reunites the stars of Y tu mamá también with its writer to charming if slight effect. They play two poor hick brothers in the Mexican boondocks this time, one dreaming of a singing career, the other preoccupied with finding the perfect gambling system, taken to the big city by a footballing impresario where their heads are soon sent spinning by its parasitical glamour mill. The plot is strictly join-the-dots, as they develop disenchanting problems after a spell in the limelight, but vivacity of directorial touch and the squabbling twosome's happy-go-lucky characterisations make for a pleasantly jaunty ride back to where they started from.

6/10

The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003)

Bertolucci has been in unofficial retirement since this, and it would be a pity for a sporadically grandiloquent directorial career to fizzle out in this way. Yet it would also be entirely apposite as a summary of his arc: The Dreamers recycles the themes he was making his name on in his heyday, after which returns have been diminishing. Sexual tension and bohemian non-conformism in particular loom large, immediately bringing Last Tango in Paris to mind, even without the identikit setting, and not much is added by forcing the preoccupations into the structural mould of Melville/Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles.
Just as in Les Enfants, spoilt young siblings play out an incestuous relationship of infantile power games into which a selected innocent outsider is admitted to play a pawn's part rather than serve as a release from their stifling mutual interdependence. The explicit sexual experimentation of Last Tango is then daubed over this framework.
The main saving grace of the film, the one that makes considerable amends for the plundering of even entire scenes from the former films, is the distance that an older Bertolucci puts between his protagonists and our sympathies. The self-obsessed youths are cocooned from the radicalism of the Paris of 1968, spending their days in a dreamland of masturbatory film debate, and this bubble will be burst. It's just that Bertolucci also neglected to give them enough redeeming qualities to make us care either way.

5/10

Idi i smotri (Elem Klimov, 1985)

The mantle of the best ever war film is a heavy one to bear, and Come and See does suffer under the yoke: the categorisation imposes a host of quality control checks to do with verisimilitude, humanism and evenhandedness that it frankly doesn't pass. Klimov's partisan tale is very partisan, full of incomprehension at the inhuman invaders laying waste to all before them, and resorting in defeat to viewing it all through a smoky lens, a filter of symbolism. It's a coping mechanism born of absolute exigency: the Belarussian landscape has become so post-apocalyptic that normal colours, sounds and behaviours can't apply any more. We don't see most of it directly through the teenage protagonist's eyes, but the effect is the same as scene upon scene leads to centering on his face in horrified close-up.
It doesn't serve as documentary, then, being too caught up in its single, unreliable roaming perspective, increasingly surrealistic images coming thick and fast. But this also allows it to convey the horror of total war, by way of its impact on the vulnerable onlooker trying to look away, instead of the standard saturation bombardment of blood and guts. It has all the harrowing power of a nightmare you can't wake up from.

8/10

L'armée du crime (Robert Guédiguian, 2009)

The Army of Crime centres on a Parisian resistance movement in 1943, composed almost entirely of émigrés with nothing much left to lose in combating the occupiers. As is usually the case with history-based works, the constant awareness of seeing what actually took place plays first fiddle and judgements on the end product as a piece of cinema can feel churlish. But it's too flat: reverential towards its subjects, containing nothing that leaps out to bring a well-worn theme to life, and whilst its good intentions with an obvious desire to avoid stereotyping are painstakingly declared, there's just too much adherence to completing the full martyr roll-call. Plus, Virginie Ledoyen is clearly only on board for her name, and remains one of the most hopelessly inept actresses of recent French film, conveying most emotions by screwing up her face a lot when, given the key role of the partisan leader Manouchian's wife, some nuancing would not have gone amiss.


5/10 

Carlos (Olivier Assayas, 2010)

Cobbled together from a much longer TV series, the cinematic version of the 'Carlos the Jackal' story still weighs in at near a hefty 3 hours. To its credit, it manages to work as cinema and keep rolling dramatically despite these limitations. Of course, having an abundance of fact-based extreme setpieces, right down to taking all the OPEC ministers hostage, makes Assayas's job a great deal easier, only having to join the dots.
He manages this reasonably well, with Edgar Ramirez as the revolutionary-come-nutjob for hire retaining pity and antipathy in equal measure as his bombast and botch-jobs produce less and less fruit until the unstavable downfall. But there are also no surprises in the director's trawl through whatever might have been real developments or meetings, and a frequent fall-back becomes characters chain-smoking moodily in place of actual characterisation.

5/10

Unknown (Simon Brand, 2006)

Not the forgettable 2011 Liam Neeson thriller of the same title, but forgettable in its own right, this presents five men waking up locked in a warehouse in differing conditions of captivity and health, all stricken with amnesia. As with its namesake, the title makes little enough sense beyond that, being just a convenient lure to punters.
Unfortunate typecasting - Jim Caviezel will only ever be saintly - detracts from the suspense in working out who the bad guys and good guys might be, and flashbacks as the characters' memories start returning undo more of what remains to work the viewer's mind. A succession of plot twists stacks up towards the end, but that's to be expected and no compensation for starting off with a tired scenario in the first place.

4/10

Die Blechtrommel (Volker Schlöndorff, 1979)

The screen adaptation of Günter Grass's acclaimed novel about a preternaturally developmentally arrested three-year-old in wartime Danzig picked up a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar amongst other plaudits, and you can see how it sold easily to foreign voting panels eager to award Germans mocking the posturings of Nazism through allegory. But that was thirty years ago, and you have to ask whether the device has stood the test of time.
In short, no: The Tin Drum scores on arresting imagery and absurdism, turning grim events into high farce, but fails to engage emotionally at a deeper level. The Damien-like Oskar, marching along breaking glass with his shrieking and banging his beloved drum incessantly is not effective either as a counterpoint to the horror or as a powerless everyman. He's too much of an autistic circus freak to care about, and since the story is through his eyes, the grotesquery shown struggles to translate to its implied message.

5/10

The Town (Ben Affleck, 2010)

Ben Affleck the actor didn't deserve to get flushed down the toilet for his spell of atrocities in 2001-3, as heinous as Pearl Harbor or Gigli doubtless were, but it was a close call. Affleck the director is treading a safer if duller path as Ed Burns's more photogenic stand-in, able to call on a bigger budget but smoothing off too many rough edges to have much interest. The Town is an archetypal Burns set-up, with Affleck leading a set of Oirish ghetto bank robbers through a run of heists while struggling with the usual 'good guy trapped inside the bad guy but trying to go clean' scenario.
It's well assembled, to be fair, taut and decently cast, and moves from stock scene to stock scene with some economy, so that the souring of his love interest relationship upon discovery of his true nature or the showdown with his bullying overlords aren't painfully drawn out, as if Affleck was apologetic at the formulaic structure of it all and just wanted to get through in one piece, much like his character. But why go through it at all?

5/10

Ink (Jamin Winans, 2009)

This fantasy riff on invisible agents of good and evil moving amongst us failed to pick up any significant distribution, and you can see that a combination of a no-name cast and bland story arc would dependably send it straight to video. On the other hand, from an effects design and editing perspective, it still carries surprising merits, with the malevolent succubi preying on humans' doubts particularly striking with their leering TV-screen faces. But there are too many negatives to really make it click: the hero leads have to stumble through lumpen dialogue and the obligatory sub-kung-fu fight scenes lack any punch. Winans is clearly uncertain whether he's pitching a spooky bedtime story with a cute little girl as the focus, or a grittier horror piece on hidden realities like Dark City or Nightwatch, the latter of which I soon started wishing Ink to be ripping off even more dutifully.

4/10

Das Schreckliche Mädchen (Michael Verhoeven, 1990)

Michael Verhoeven is a director clearly somewhat preoccupied with the shadow of Nazism, as evidenced by his take on the Sophie Scholl story as far back as 1982 in The White Rose, as well as other works lesser known abroad. In The Nasty Girl he only superficially fictionalises the mission of a young Bavarian woman to expose uncomfortable truths about what went on in her home town during the war. It soon becomes clear from the obstructions and hostility she meets in her investigations that 40 years later, now in the midst of the Cold War, is too soon to start rocking a fragile boat.
So far, standard enough. Where Verhoeven succeeds, though, is in making the teenage crusader no angel: she's at turns coquettish and strident, downright irritating in fact, constantly mugging the camera with mock surprise or self-congratulatory squeals. That she still remains sympathetic as well owes a lot to Lena Stolze's ebullient performance, and the director's box of cinematic tricks, with frequent artificial backdrops and deliberately bizarre cutaways, mostly works to move things along in a refreshingly idiosyncratic manner too. Maybe the quirks do end up detracting from the depth of the message, but it works well as cinema, which is rare with the well-worn topic.

7/10

The Next Three Days (Paul Haggis, 2010)

A fairly pointless remake of the French thriller Pour Elle, which adds some TV movie domestic drama and some more unfeasibilities for bulk, like a pumped-up cruiserweight. Russell Crowe looks hangdog and jowlier than ever as he mopes about from year to year in his attempt to get his wife off a murder charge, until all that's left is springing her from prison. It does nevertheless hold the attention long enough, through Crowe's planning and plotting, to raise hopes of an unconventional denouement. Then it dismayingly starts dismantling them, lurching from one improbability to another, and there has to be a serious doubt as to whether Haggis as director rather than writer will ever raise his game above the diverting but pedestrian.

5/10

Sous le Sable (François Ozon, 2000)

Under the Sand moves from the abrupt disappearance of Charlotte Rampling's husband to a disheartening realisation that denial of the event has turned her quite hopelessly barmy, still buying him gifts, having conversations and recoiling when those around her try to address the reality of what happened. It could fall quite easily into hysterics, but Rampling's chief virtue as an actress is a pursed, highly-strung aspect quite alien in its intensity, which for once works with no small efficacy to give a subtle reading of teetering on the brink while coping with loss. Ozon can be a frustrating director to persist with, though. He manages to be truly poetic in parts, but is also tempered by a failure to hold any firmer a grip on maintaining narrative direction than its protagonist's hold on sanity.

6/10