Team America: World Police (Trey Parker, 2004)

Apparently this is rated highly as a comedy film. Seriously though, if you set out to offend everybody from Muslims, homosexuals, the French, the American left, actors who feel the need to use their profile to act conscientiously, Koreans, the makers of the Thunderbirds series, the United Nations, the U.S. intelligence service and your own popcorn-guzzling audience, you'd better be sharper than a surgical scalpel.
Team America is blunter than a dessert spoon and contains only three workable jokes in an agonisingly long hour and a half. It defends what it pretends to satirise, i.e. U.S. foreign intervention, it rides on what it calls cheese and takes great delight in butchering well-intentioned naysayers. It's asking you to participate in fratboys farting in each other's faces for kicks. Thank God it tanked, and if you got anything out of this you have quite serious problems.

2/10

Hobo with a Shotgun (Jason Eisener, 2011)

Well, you can't accuse this of false advertising, can you? But you can accuse Rutger Hauer, one of the most commanding screen actors of his generation, of doing absolutely anything it'll take to get up our noses. After a spate of outstanding performances in middling Dutch films and then crashlanding in Hollywood with probably one of the most complex villain portrayals ever seen in Blade Runner, the world was his oyster. What he did with it was a succession of bit parts in blockbusters and leads in mostly featureless action B-movies, and this Canadian grindhouse-cash-in has to be a wilful finger to anyone still trying to make an A-lister out of him. It's not that surprising, given that he turned up for the Blade Runner casting for the uberman destroyer role in a pink sweatshirt just to jerk Ridley Scott's chain, all of 30 years ago.
Of course he gives the part of a hobo turned vigilante his all, as always, and you'll watch it just for him, which is just as well because the film itself is completely meritless. The fetishised gore is neither inventive nor well executed, the dystopian setting and bad guys painfully flimsy and even the action violence is devoid of any internal logic, never mind the slapped-on human interest bit. Even the cinematography is inadequate, hiding behind lack of budget and a retro 'In Technicolor' in the opening credits as successfully as Wile. E. Coyote behind a skinny birch.
You just hope against hope that when he hits his seventies someone will offer Hauer the equivalent of Jean-Louis Trintignant's effective swansong in Three Colours: Red and that he'll actually take it.

3/10

The Stepford Wives (Frank Oz, 2004)

Oh, Mr Oz, voice of Yoda, why so little shame have you? Granted, Hollywood has eviscerated enough genuine classics in its relentlessly priapic remake mania that defiling a merely efficient chiller from the seventies may seem a trivial crime by now, but it's the utterly systematic nature of the gutting performed here that really impresses and sets the film apart. All air of menace is lost in the translation of the basic plot into what the director imagines is actually functional as black comedy, but that's small potatoes compared to the braindeadness of the thought process behind the politics of the film. Whereas Katharine Ross in the original was a gutsy free spirit threatened by still extant residues of a suffocating 1950s conservatism, and the men pathetically threatened country clubbers of a real dying era, here Nicole Kidman starts out as a soulless TV exec and we're somehow meant to feel for her just as a strong woman, regardless of her own vapidity. And conversely, compounding the mess, the forces of sinister conformity opposing her have remained totally unchanged from their '50s pastel homemaker models and so make no sense at all in a modern context.
Finally, as a coup de grace, Oz even cuts off the balls of the gratifyingly chilling ending of the 1975 film with a twist just for the sake of a twist, as Burton did with Planet of the Apes, so as to feebly try to dupe the viewer into thinking there was some added value in their remake after all.
God knows Kidman, Midler and Walken have all been guilty on numerous occasions of crimes against principle and intellect with their role choices. When even they're unhappy with what they've been party to, we really are up the creek.

2/10

Donkey Punch (Oliver Blackburn, 2008)

You might call this low-budget Britflick a cautionary tale for the E-d up Ibiza generation. Alternatively, it's just another carbon copy of any other schlocker in which a bunch of young morons hedonise away until it all goes sour and turns into dog-eat-dog. And then there were none.
Blackburn's debut covers its bases against charges of implausibility of motive by having its characters stoked to the gills on pills and gives the viewer licence to moralise by making nearly all of them both amoral and unlikable. Unfortunately this also means that, when they start knocking each other off on their purloined pleasure boat with escalating levels of gore, you're hard pushed to care one jot.

4/10

Push (Paul McGuigan, 2009)

The costumed superhero genre may eventually wind down with the whimper of derivatives and sequels, but the enduring success of TV series such as Misfits or Heroes proves the idea of any old Joe discovering out of the blue that they have cool powers will be far harder to kill off. Hence Push, in which The Division (read 'The Man') is hunting down assorted precogs, telekinetics, telepaths and the like for the usual nefarious purposes.
It's hardly inspired stuff, but surprisingly well executed, without an excess of showy FX until the finale, at least half an intent to stick to its own world's physical laws and a merciful minimum of 'Wow! Did they just do that?' reaction shots. The Hong Kong location makes a nice change from the usual U.S. product too. Complete fluff, of course, but daft harmless fun all the same, until it becomes depressingly obvious that we have just another franchise-launcher on our hands.

4/10

Der Tunnel (Roland Suso Richter, 2001)

You would think that the story of a former East German swimming champion who escapes to the West as The Wall is going up, and then takes it upon himself to bring out as many of his captive countrymen as possible with an ambitious tunnel-digging scheme, would require little dramatic embellishment. All the requisite elements are already in place, after all: absolute moral imperatives, the fear of betrayal, an unambiguous oppressor and the prospect of freedom as reward.
A pity, then, that Richter's film is a hack-job: it simplifies the bad guys, improbably collates and compresses its plot milestones and turns a desirable verisimilitude of events into cartoonish hokum. None of which, you might say, is exactly uncommon in the documentary facsimile field. But it really wasn't needed here.

4/10

Battle: Los Angeles (Jonathan Liebesman, 2011)

The American public's appetite for gung-ho military porn has become deeply frustrated with the lack of a decent enemy to fight on a traditional battlefield, with those cowardly terrorists choosing to hide in holes instead of submitting to duking it out mano-a-mano. So they're now having to invent opponents, and alien invasion is the option of last resort.
It's still depressing, though, to come across a dollar mountain burner that makes Independence Day look like a paragon of feasibility and subtlety. Naturally, you expect the platoon of tokenistically multiethnic grunts to go tortuously through the lock'n'loady motions and male bonding exercises, but there's an unforgivable absence of any tension in the interminable demolition by meaty munitions of piles of concrete, cars and hopelessly unimaginative CGI monsters. And even the strategic aspects of the battle hit new peaks of illogicality, with the Transformer/Predator-lite bogeymen for some unfathomable reason choosing to engage our brave heroes on the ground like insurgents instead of using just a smidgeon of whatever technology might have actually got them here in the first place.
It's not good when you start giving consideration to the campness of the execrable Battlefield Earth in comparison to the square-jawed humourlessness on display here. It's staggeringly dull.

3/10

The Bridges of Madison County (Clint Eastwood, 1995)

Meryl Streep gets to essay another accent as an Italian housewife with unfulfilled dreams, cooped up on a farm in 1960s Iowa. Clint Eastwood, meanwhile, gets to move decisively away from Magnums and orang-utans as the world-worn but poetic photographer who comes into her life for four days and changes it forever.
The soulful stranger who sweeps you off your feet is the mainstay of chick-flicks, of course, but there is a lot more to this film, at least in the first half as their relationship develops. Streep and Eastwood have an easy familiarity and the dialogue is similarly unforced, making for an affecting whole.
Later on, as is Eastwood's regular fallibility when he helms, the transition into the aftermath drags under an overly reverential air, and could probably have done with having half an hour lopped off. Still, a wistful charm aids it to amble over the finishing line without stretching patience.

7/10

Sin Nombre (Cary Fukunaga, 2009)

In Mexico, two boys got through a violent initiation rite into a gang. Meanwhile, a family leaves their home in Honduras to head for the U.S. border and an imagined better life.
Fukunaga's film doesn't bring anything new per se to the ever-growing illegal immigration quasi-documentary genre, but it is unflinching in its expose of fragile hopes in the face of the characters' brutal reality, and this includes a refusal to romanticise the subject. There's scant soundtrack or dramatisation because there's no poetry in being downtrodden, Fukunaga seems to want to drill home. Not a radical refrain, then, but still a potent one and effectively delivered.

6/10

Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie, 2007)

Ryan Gosling plays a socially maladroit man who lives alone with only his brother and sister-in-law as visitors when they make attempts to draw him out of his shell. Then, one day, things finally seem to be looking up when he announces that he has met someone on the Internet. It proves a false dawn, though, when this is revealed to be an anatomically accurate bespoke doll.
Gosling is a fine actor, capable of investing his maladjusted characters with genuine pathos. Still, here he has an uphill struggle: it never ceases to exasperate how U.S. audiences and filmmakers in 'gentle' leftfield dramas such as this are so sold on the proposition that a bag of personal eccentricities and their improbable indulgence amount to a meaningful statement on life's rich tapestry. The fact that the town colludes in Lars's delusion is not evidence of tolerance, but just pure wish-fulfilment on the part of the director, on a par with the protagonist's dream relationship.
Still, it's hard to get angry about a film that at least has its heart in the right place, and some of the turns by which Lars maintains the integrity of his mental concoction are neatly crafted.

5/10

It's a Wonderful Afterlife (Gurinder Chadha, 2010)

Since Bend It Like Beckham, Chadha has continued to live on its dividends with changes of setting failing to disguise that she's churning out the same romcom. Granted, here the mother obsessed with seeing her chubby daughter respectably married off has also turned into a serial killer who has knocked off anyone slighting her progeny, but it's still Southall and the perennial British Asian comedy's or drama's fixation with the expectations of parents from the old country versus the next generation's desire for independence. The record really needs changing: by now all bases have been covered and these directors aren't doing their community any favours.
That said, Chadha could probably have earned a reprieve if the horror comedy within, with the mother's limbo-trapped victims hounding her as a pack, had been either original or funny. But it struggles to manage more than hackneyed throughout.

4/10

Pranzo di Ferragosto (Gianni Di Gregorio, 2008)

Mid-August Lunch, Di Gregorio's debut feature well into middle age, has the director more or less playing himself as he potters about trying to cater for the needs of a home invasion of babbling grannies when he already feels swamped by his nonagenarian mother alone. He turns to frequent liquid refreshment for refuge but there's no getting away from his sprightly housepests.
Nothing of great dramatic import occurs thereafter, but the pleasure of the film is just in its unhurried pace married to a lightly comic and empathetic observation of the mundane foibles and tribulations of real life.

7/10

Un Secret (Claude Miller, 2007)

What really works for this real-life-based dissection of a family history on The Holocaust is the focus on the survivors. For a long spell, we're not aware it's to do with the war at all, or Jews, or even the past. An onion is peeled down layer by layer until the heart is finally reached.

What works less well is the superimposition of the modern era framing device - we don't need to see the repercussions to an adult if his past is engraved with such attention. But that's a small quibble, alongside the stretching of characters' ages so the lead's father looks the same in 1962 as he did in 1936: Un Secret manages to bring a life history of an over-visited period alive with a force that documentaries often fall short of. None of the characters are just victims, devils or saints, but fully rounded people.

7/10

A Guide to Recognising Your Saints (Dito Montiel, 2006)

You can't knock this semi-autobiographical piece on the director's own youth in a Queens ghetto for lack of sincerity, and it's well acted too, with even the inexplicably popular Shia LaBeouf as the young protagonist not proving a hindrance for once.
But 'telling it like it is' can only get you so far. The young Montiel's gormless friends and self-deluding family are even more inarticulate than he is, and unlike in the well-worn genre's better specimens such as Boyz n the Hood there are no moments of catharsis or rough poetry to latch on to. Some die, some go to jail, and the central character does a runner and then mulls over whatever it meant to him years later, now in the form of the underused Robert Downey Jr. It's not a bad film, just of little original interest to a wider world.

5/10

Glorious 39 (Stephen Poliakoff, 2009)

When a heavyweight playwright directs, you can prepare to make allowances for the cinematic side, but the script really has to be watertight. Glorious 39 does the opposite, and it's infuriating. Romola Garai does fine as the adopted scion of a posh MP, growing hysterical about dark dealings in the summer of 1939 as the rumble of approaching war grows harder to ignore, and she's supported by a cast fit for the purpose.
But Poliakoff just doesn't have an adequate command of historical detail, in particular the feasibility of the appeasement conspiracy main plot, and this seems to unbalance the rest of the tone as well, which ends up as supernatural horror instead of the disturbing thriller he must have been aiming for. Narrative improbabilities pile up at an alarming rate and thus the political point, which seems to be about the evils of preserving the status quo at all costs, is lost in the pandemonium.

4/10

Stormbreaker (Geoffrey Sax, 2006)

I imagine Charlie Higson's junior James Bond novelisations might actually be worth filming for the teenage demographic, instead of this clone. But do teenagers need an age-tailored version anyway, when the real deal is hardly adult entertainment? Any 12-year-old should be content with the cartoonishness of Live and Let Die. And then there's always Harry Potter for the younger ones.
So, in retrospect it's not hard to see why this bombed at the box office, aborting plans for a sequel dynasty: it falls between too many stools. There's an angelically good-looking boy hero who vies with Hayden Christensen for acting prowess (Christensen's fall-back being sulky tantrums; Alex Pettyfer just looks tranquilised), a helicopter seemingly permanently stationed above London for swooping panoramic shots to remind potential tourist visitors to come and check it out, and a galaxy of British acting stalwarts from Nighy to Coltrane, Serkis, Okonedo and Fry to lure parental guardians in, their characters equipped with nudge-wink Bond references. Rourke, Silverstone and McGregor are in there too, presumably just because the budget was too and you can't be too careful these days when trying to set up an international franchise. The action is ADHD-paced and the plot fills about half a napkin, leaving the boy spy to jump over things, perform improbable martial arts and press buttons on cool gadgets.
In short, it's crap.

3/10

El Rey de la Montaña (Gonzalo López-Gallego, 2007)

King of the Hill is proof if more proof were needed that it's not only the Americans who can churn out painted-by-numbers survival thrillers which tell us to avoid the backwoods like the plague. The Spanish, for one, are building up quite a stock in the genre. The year before this, the one where tourists Gary Oldman and Paddy Considine are hounded by murderous hicks was even released internationally as Backwoods. That wasn't exactly brimming with originality and neither is López-Gallego's effort.
A lost couple of urbanites who meet by chance are soon being shot at by unseen manhunters, and that's about it. Sure, it's broodily shot and with a more understated and unsettling soundtrack than its modern US doppelgangers have, but there's nary a sense that the director has either the nous or will to convey any deeper message. Then he really shoots himself in the foot by showing us the sociopaths directly, so the room for surprise is well and truly gone.
Did any of these films really need to be made after the definitive Deliverance?

3/10

Double Take (Johan Grimonprez, 2009)

A film doesn't have to consist of original footage to be an artistic work. Double Take splices together Cold War newsreels, fatuous adverts and images from Hitchcock's films, linking all three with the iconic director's intros to Alfred Hitchcock Presents to illuminate both the era and Hitchcock's own productions with their singular preoccupations. Ingenious editing makes a story gel in which Hitchcock is unsettled by meeting his double, but the real interest is in the stock footage that surrounds the device, the weight of repetition acting hypnotically until you're pulled under into a world that by all rights should have imploded instead of evolving.

7/10

Kick-Ass (Matthew Vaughn, 2010)

The interminable torrent of superhero comic adaptations was bound to lead to a sub-genre that milked the fans for laughs, especially with real-world vigilantism still on the rise. Kick-Ass pulls off the action and comedy with more panache than Defendor did, but at the cost of the pathos. A middle-aged mentally subnormal man putting on a costume to fight crime and mostly just have the shit beaten out of him by street punks works as something pitiable, whereas you don't expect much else from a nerdy teenager.
Still, it's perky and wears its ludicrosity well, a rather essential touch when a 10-year-old girl vigilante repeatedly slices and kicks her way through droves of beefy gangsters. Where it loses focus, however, is in the impact of the extreme violence: it's either cartoonised or realistic, entirely depending on who's at the receiving end, and the flapping from one to the other diminishes both its comic and dramatic effects.

6/10

Essential Killing (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2010)

An insurgent somewhere that may be Afghanistan is taken prisoner by the US military, summarily tortured and then manages to escape. A manhunt through a snowy landscape ensues, and the unnamed and deafened fugitive resorts to increasingly desperate measures in his frenzy to simply survive.
Casting Vincent Gallo as the terrorist/freedom fighter was a masterstroke on the part of the renownedly leftfield Skolimowski: associations with his asshole outsider roles in Buffalo 66 et al. add a further layer of ambiguity to an already interpretationally complex protagonist. He doesn't utter a word, he kills - the title is deliberately vague as to whether it's essential that he kills for survival or is killed for what he is - and we only get vague inklings of his past life through snatches of dream flashbacks. His motivations are never explained: you care just because he's hunted and the story will die without his survival. Skolimowski avoids politicising at all costs, and this includes separating the setting and events from anywhere localisable.
This refusal to commit is both a weakness and an asset: the story is applicable equally to everywhere and nowhere specific. It's perhaps understandable given the director's roots in the Communist era, when toeing the line between The Party and conveying a personal ideological message was a necessary yoke. Hence the eventual hallucinatorily metaphysical air, which owes a great debt to Tarkovsky. But it works.

7/10

A Serious Man (the Coen brothers, 2009)

The Coens get back on track after some wobbles with a walk in the shoes of Allenesque nebbish Larry Gopnik, a physics professor in a parodically drab Minnesota in 1967. We follow his travails as he gets progressively crapped on from all sides, finding safe haven neither with family nor work, and ineffectually incredulous at the build-up of anxieties from financial to medical, culminating in the spiritual.
Of course it probably helps the Coens' task that they're firmly on home ground, incorporating many elements of their Mid-Western childhoods, and ambition is therefore not this film's key virtue. But making a put-upon drip's midlife crisis at once excruciatingly hilarious and poignant is no small order, and it's executed with their trademark lightness and elan. Few filmmakers display such a mastery of the nuances and twists of dialogue or characterisation.

7/10

The Rite (Mikael Håfström, 2011)

A young man, about to enter the priesthood but stricken with a severe crisis of faith is taken under the tutelage of an older fire-and-brimstone exorcist and finds his religion at last when faced with incontrovertible proof of demonic possession. Yes, it's The Exorcist, except this time in Rome, just for the sake of moody ecclesiastical architecture. Anthony Hopkins uberhams on a par with Hannibal as the veteran demon-banisher, which may be just as well since the nominal lead Colin O'Donoghue is a hopelessly wet flannel.
Hopkins promises us that we won't be seeing spinning heads or pea soup, but this is only because we have CGI to make the possessed look spooky these days. It's as lacking in internal logic as any run-of-the-mill Man vs. Satan factory production and only any good for bolstering Sir Anthony's already considerable bank balance, and certainly not the directorial reputation of Håfström, who really needs to make a clean break by now from his smudgy fixation with The Devil. The religiously inclined may still be tempted regardless, since it's 'inspired by true events'. Oh well, waste two hours if the power of Christ compels you.

3/10

Sauna (Antti-Jussi Annila, 2008)

Sauna, otherwise known as Evil Rising, does play a trump card right at the outset: a swamp in North Karelia in 1595 has to be the most outlandish setting for any film of 2008, let alone a horror film. Unfortunately, it doesn't make the most of the idiosyncrasy. Annila squeezes every cent out of a paltry million-Euro budget, and the end result looks the part, with some of the incidental musings on the nature of war and borders hinting at a film deeper than a bog-standard demonic retribution piece, but the overall point is muddled. The brothers in the wilderness, seeking to chart the King's lands in the aftermath of a ghastly war, commit an unforgivable sin and all that remains is the wait for their punishment, which is eventually delivered kicking and screaming as a mish-mash of hand-wringing guilt and supernatural gore.

4/10

Aruitemo Aruitemo (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2008)

In Still Walking a family gathers, as they do every year, to remember the drowned eldest son in a nervy family drama that owes more than just the set-up to Ozu. Koreeda would probably not deny the influence: the structural elements are the same as in Tokyo Story in particular, with the grown-up children paying lip service to the obligatory visit to their elderly parents, with backbiting over past events just simmering under the surface while the matriarch settles on trying to stifle the discord with a mountain of food. Meanwhile, precocious grandchildren run around making impertinent observations. And the outsider, i.e. the daughter-in-law, is again the only one spared overt parental censure.
Where Koreeda does diverge from the Ozu template is in the bitterness that unexpectedly rears its head, and it's there that the story momentarily walks on its own legs, even if it then finds it has nowhere else to go. Still, it's sensitively observed and manages to sidestep both melodrama and schmaltz, and so at least works as a slice of real life.

6/10

Max Manus (Joachim Rønning & Espen Sandberg, 2008)

The WWII resistance hero biopic, for all its worthiness, is a tired topic for cinema and any attempt really has to have a few aces up its sleeve to bring the events alive. The Norwegian side of the story Max Manus doesn't: as is par for the course, it makes all the protagonists a bit more photogenic than their real-life counterparts, jazzes up the action a notch to conform to modern action-flick viewer expectations, shuffles a few events and incidental characters for dramatic purposes and otherwise sticks reverentially to a remit of historical factuality. But it's the job of documentary to give us the facts: cinema is meant to wipe away the dust on the photos and documents and transport us to feel it all afresh. Its Danish equivalent of the same year, Flammen & Citronen, managed to introduce moral ambivalence and immediacy into the formula without taking too many liberties with veracity, and Max Manus suffers by comparison. It's neither jingoistic, nor dull if you're only seeing your first resistance film, just lacking in complexity.

5/10

Herr Lehmann (Leander Haußmann, 2003)

Frank Lehmann is a loafer living in a bubble about to burst: about to turn thirty, as the Berlin enclave of Kreuzberg that he and his friends never venture beyond is about to be breached by the falling of The Wall.
Haußmann's film is faithful to Sven Regener's best-selling, autobiographically derived comic novel about Berlin boho life in the '80s, and for the most part makes a virtue of having its characters do very little at all apart from drinking and talking crap. They circulate around the same three bars day in, day out, and their conversation has the same circular motion, with their individual mantras repeated ad absurdum until transmuted into comedy. The formula does have diminishing returns, however, and the director's obvious need to escape this comfortable milieu and say something with a wider resonance doesn't quite find an outlet, running into several narrative dead ends. But there are still enough little pleasures along the way to make it more a stumble and skip than a trudge towards the looming end-of-an-era coda.

6/10

De Grønne Slagtere (Anders Thomas Jensen, 2003)

The second feature from prolific screenwriter Jensen, The Green Butchers presents Mads Mikkelsen - who else?- and Nikolaj Lie Kaas as butchers who, suffering under the yoke of the town's master sausage-maker, set up shop on their own and find the going tough until a stroke of fortune lands them with the missing ingredient in the recipe for success. Unfortunately, that ingredient happens to be human flesh, and events predictably spiral out of control.
Jensen's film doesn't really rise from black comedy to the level of satire; there's no attempt to link the pals' predicament to social critique, for instance. Neither is the central conceit new: never mind Delicatessen, there was already Sweeney Todd, amongst others in between. But it is punchily written, with the novelty of somehow still keeping our sympathies with the hapless duo. The casting helps: Mikkelsen in particular is routinely excellent and somehow manages to turn his aspirational and anal murderer into a pitiable victim of circumstance.

6/10

Machete (Ethan Maniquis & Robert Rodriguez, 2010)

Robert Rodriguez must thank his lucky stars for the day when his mate Tarantino asked him along for the Grindhouse ride. That legitimised 1970s schlock B-movies by adding a post-modern nudge and wink. But it was also clear that it was a pant-wetting homage to the shit of the era from boys who'd never grow up, and while Tarantino's bag contains more omnivorous cinematic class to make his wet dreams palatable, as with Inglourious Basterds, for Rodriguez it's just given another lease of life beyond his kids adventure films, returning to the Mariachi bang-bang. Danny Trejo is thus finally given a leading role as the titular hero, and various big names all the way up to De Niro come along in the belief that it's all just a knowing laugh, after all.
Except that it's not particularly witty, and going OTT with the cliches doesn't automatically equate to neutralising the reactionary content. And a deeply reactionary film it is too, with cement-bag-faced Trejo somehow bedding all available women while lopping off arms and heads in a constipated fury. That those arms and legs happen this time to belong to anti-immigrant rednecks and corrupt Texan politicians hardly matters.

4/10

Werckmeister Harmóniák (Béla Tarr, 2000)

The term arthouse is usually misapplied to any drama with subtitles, but the work of Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr can't avoid the label. With Werckmeister Harmonies, the audience may be relieved to be spared the 7-hour running length of his most excessive experiments, but this is still a filmmaker who'll declare that narrative is not his central concern.
So, there are shots of men marching that last minutes upon minutes. The pace is so glacial that the effect is of thematic movements across history rather than events in the stories of individuals, and in this particular case, once you've submitted to the design, the approach is rather synergistic with the theme. The setting may seem at first to be a particular Hungarian town in the middle of a specific historical turmoil, so you look for identifiers until the realisation comes that it is at once meant to be no single place or time and also potentially everywhere and everywhen, as allegory after allegory washes over in slow waves.
Tarr can certainly be criticised for heavy-handedness: it would not be a debasement of his message to vary the method from time to time, and would indeed add something through the creation of contrast. Nevertheless, it seems churlish to harp on about that failing, when parts are touched that few films reach. Tarr has set out to make the viewer consider the nature of revolution and counter-revolution, and individual conviction and dishonesty, from a new perspective and should be commended for the effort, if not always the execution.

7/10