Madeo (Bong Joon-ho, 2009)

The title Mother alludes concisely to 'mother's pride' or 'mother knows best', and these are amongst the notes touched on in a story of a poor herbalist mother who cossets her child-minded adult son to the best of her ability until he's accused and convicted of the murder of a local schoolgirl after a drunken night's blackout. With the police unhelpful, she then sets about playing detective and finding the true culprit.
Bong Joon-ho, perhaps best known for 2006's tongue-in-cheek monster eco-horror The Host, is an odd fish as directors go: he wilfully mixes up registers and throws in non-sequitur incidents, which at the worst of times leads to an adulteration of all the colours on the palette, as seen here in the opener which is far too comic in relation to what follows. Yet later on we get the benefits of his method, as it works to throw the viewer off balance and liable to be genuinely unprepared for the twists that occur. Supported by Kim Hye-ja's powerful performance as the frantically possessive mother, it ends up as a thoroughly unconventional thriller and all the better for it.

7/10

Splice (Vincenzo Natali, 2009)

Natali's first, the 1997 Cube, may have been a B-movie with cardboard characters and clunky dialogue, but the concept was high enough to make it riveting regardless. Not so with Splice, which features the still-plummeting Adrien Brody and the replaceable Sarah Polley as two hotshot genetic researchers who aren't content with creating ridiculously phallic blobmonsters that provide a cure for everything from the common cold upwards and so move on to secretly concoct a human-something hybrid. The 'something' part is never specified, which conveniently allows the creature to sprout all manner of random freaky animal attributes, whilst basically remaining a telegenic bald woman with odd legs and a stinger tail.
It can only be taken as the director taking the money and running off on a spree of FX, since it doesn't satisfy any other purpose: the science is laughable but not satirical, the relationship dilemmas between the couple paper-thin, and even the thriller/horror element falls flat on its face when called on.

3/10

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011)

Let the Right One In director Alfredson brings his superlative command of mood and tension to the film adaptation of le Carré's definitive Cold War counterespionage novel. Events necessarily have to be compressed from the original Alec Guinness-led 1979 seven-part BBC series, repeatedly bringing the risk of losing the thread, and the temptation to introduce Hollywood spy thriller time, place and character captions must have been there, but thankfully it's resisted: the cliched signposting would have shattered the meticulously crafted sense of time and place of a fusty, repressed and paranoid '70s England that permeates the construct from the peculiar dank locations to the understated and nuanced acting.
If truth be told, the opening half-hour drags with a lot of going in and out of drab buildings and little plot progression, and the search for the Soviet mole has limited resonance with almost everyone a potential Philby and little else concrete of universal interest at stake. But this is to judge it by the criteria of other modern spy films, from which it's a breed apart and not just because of the period: it's about layered atmosphere, not fast pay-offs, and scores highly on the level of the small gesture and single chosen word. It's also gratifying to see Gary Oldman, at the head of an impressive cast, move decisively away from his Hollywood pantomime roles to give a portrayal of the careworn Smiley which nods neatly towards Guinness's version without ever descending into caricature.

7/10

So weit die Füße tragen (Hardy Martins, 2001)

The real-life story behind As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me is so mind-boggling that any embellishment can only be gilding the lily. How a German POW sentenced to 25 years' hard labour in a lead mine in easternmost Siberia at the end of the war managed to escape and trek 11,000 kilometres to safety across a land of hostile elements already seems like the stuff of wild fantasy. It would win the audience's indulgence, though, if it displayed a painstaking sense of veracity.
What the director does instead from the outset is to splash on sentimentalised gloop, drowning every scene under an asinine adventure soundtrack, whilst adding stock hero movie characters, including a cackling camp commandant villain who keeps on catching up with the fugitive with supernatural precognition and a nomadic tribeswoman love interest who also seems to be a model. Needless to say, these were strangely absent from Clemens Forell's original biography, along with various other scenes of derring-do involving rescues and chases. It's basically no better than a TV movie, bar the budget that allowed for filming in some beautiful scenery, and a rare justifiable candidate for another remake. The story deserves better.

3/10

Mibu gishi den (Yôjirô Takita, 2003)

Centering on the end of the feudal era in Japan, When the Last Sword Is Drawn is told in retrospect from a Tokyo at the verge of the 20th century with an old man harbouring a secret history visiting a doctor. Recognising a samurai in a photograph as an associate from thirty years before, the man prompts the doctor to tell the story of his connection to the samurai.
Takita's film is a very mixed bag: it carefully evokes the spirit of a bygone age in which clan loyalty, honour and awareness of status were the guiding precepts of life and the framing device of the flashback is effective in gradually unpeeling the layers of the onion to illuminate the dramatic transition of a culture in a short span. It's also a welcome divergence from the usual bushido-and-swords fare to focus on a character whose plight is one of economic desperation rather than just bound by duty. But there are also many weaknesses: the battles are surprisingly flat for the genre, the lack of signposting when the story slots in flashbacks within flashbacks is disorientating, and the bland soundtrack is frequently detrimental to the mood. It also gets cloyingly protracted and oversentimental in the last act, something that it seems Takita is prone to, judging from his 2008 Foreign Language Oscar winner, Departures.

5/10

Limitless (Neil Burger, 2011)

This lively if superficial thriller presents Eddie Morra, a wastrel writer paralysed by writer's block, whose luck appears to have turned when a chance meeting with his brother-in-law leads to him trying a cerebral superdrug which gives him the ability of instant recall of everything he has ever subconsciously witnessed. Armed with this power he's soon on the way to finishing his novel, in the black, rebuilding his last relationship and astounding the world of finance with his stock market predictions. But of course there's no such thing as a free lunch and murder of his brother-in-law is only the beginning of his perils, with a gangster and another sinister pursuer after his misbegotten panacea, which predictably also turns out to have unpleasant side effects.
The anodyne Bradley Cooper is cast usefully for once here: his perpetual smirk and glibly slick delivery are a perfect fit for an amorally opportunistic character who weasels his way through challenges without ever turning virtuous. This lack of enlightenment makes a refreshing change from the genre norm. Also intriguingly, the enslaving poison - at least at the outset - disarmingly displays none of the standard downsides, bringing wealth and focus as opposed to penury and derangement, which actually makes the protagonist's chemical dependency rather seductive.
It's still hokum, of course, requiring a ludicrous number of improbabilities to be swallowed, such as Morra's discovery that merely having watched kung-fu films has made him an expert fighter (in Oldboy this also required 15 years of physical training) or that writing a great novel is simply a matter of command of language. But hokum that motors along nicely all the same.

6/10

Jûsan-nin no shikaku (Takashi Miike, 2010)

Approaching Miike's films is like submitting to a lucky dip. He churns out at least three a year and for every breathtaking Audition there's guaranteed to be an idiosyncratically muddled stinker like The Happiness of the Katakuris. It therefore comes as a great relief that 13 Assassins is actually very conventional, and decently constructed to boot. It's only really The Seven Samurai with killing a psychotic noble instead of marauding bandits and six more heroes, right down to the last one being a disrespectful loose cannon a la Mifune, but the build-up is patient and the eventual 50-minute battle choreographed variedly enough that it just about escapes the debt.

6/10

Les Petits Mouchoirs (Guillaume Canet, 2010)

Canet's third feature as director is an ensemble piece with a group of friends on their annual holiday on the Gironde coast in the aftermath of the near-fatal road accident of one of their regular party. The comatose absentee is largely forgotten as the band frolic and agonise over their relationship problems.
Little White Lies was a huge hit in France, where pieces revolving around middle-class types without financial cares hopping in and out of each other's beds form a genre of their own. Canet's stab does contain its share of fizz in dialogue and a few scenes that suggest a sense of awareness of the shallowness of its characters. But it suffers throughout from an overreliance on the soundtrack (which is oddly entirely in English too, as if brazenly aiming for foreign sales) to bolster the drama, and then an indulgently weepy finale leaves little doubt that we're still meant to empathise with the self-centered crew. Think The Big Chill, only a reimagining where no-one really learns anything.

5/10

Devil's Playground (Mark McQueen, 2010)

It's not the rage virus, it's the result of an experimental 'performance enhancer' called RAK-295. The quasi-zombies don't just sprint, they do parkour too, and there's a woman whose unique immunity to the lurgy means the authorities want to get their mitts on her (see Children of Men). So, it's clearly not a carbon copy of 28 Days Later. It is a depressingly shameless downmarket knock-off, though. There clearly weren't the funds for the trademark setpieces of 28 Days utilising picture postcard locations cleared of life for shock effect, so it's mostly scrabbling around at night. The budgetary shortage extends to the soundtrack too, which is genre-generic, and the cast, with Danny Dyer in for Cillian Murphy. It's the absence of invention and even suspense which is really unforgivable, though. After all, ideas cost nothing.

3/10

The Losers (Sylvain White, 2010)

A crack team of black ops agents get stabbed in the back by their corrupt CIA boss and vow revenge, take 313. The best that can be said of The Losers is that it's superior in terms of editing, wit and acting to the overall identikit The Expendables that came out later in the year. This is of course not saying much. Ok, it was cheaper too, with a cast that's still recognisable prepared to grunt their way through the motions for a fee far short of what Stallone and co. demanded, and hence may be viewed in a favourable light simply for its economy. But indulgence can only go so far when there's such a paucity of imagination at work that the regulation-ethnically assorted protagonists have to wave big guns in each other's faces to punctuate every argument and we're asked to put up with the tiresome bag of playschool-psychotic quips that is Jason Patric as the arch-villain.

4/10

Sommersturm (Marco Kreuzpaintner, 2004)

Summer Storm was a success in Germany largely because of the casting of household name Robert Stadlober as the lead character, a teenager grappling with his sexuality. For a foreign audience not armed with that context the film is basically just another coming-of-age and coming-out piece, with nothing much in terms of plot trajectory to distinguish it from countless others. The setting of a summer camp and rowing competition for youth clubs does give it a fraction more colour than the normal angsty urban setting, and the accompanying mood is refreshingly upbeat too, but it comes at the price of a pedestrian feelgood moral to the story along the lines of tolerance and accepting what you are und so weiter.

5/10

Todo sobre mi madre (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)

All About My Mother stands apart in Almodóvar's oeuvre as the film that ticks all the boxes in the ebullient imp's list of interests, and as such works as a crash course in Almodóvarology. It contains: tough but warm female leads, a co-dependently close relationship between mother and son, AIDS, drug addicts, transsexual prostitutes, a self-mythologising actress, nuns and a comic sidekick. If this seems overly reductionist, suffice it to say that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, since by the time he got to this the director had refined the mix through numerous dry runs. The central story of the bereaved mother who moves to Barcelona to get away from her memories takes the weight of all the other elements without obvious encumbrance, and the switches in tone between vivacity and tragedy are executed sure-footedly. Yes, Almodóvar does continue making more or less the same film over and over again, but there's no denying his command of the medium.

7/10

Mr. Nice (Bernard Rose, 2010)

The biopic of erstwhile major league cannabis smuggler Howard Marks benefits from ideal casting with the versatile (and, importantly, very Welsh) Rhys Ifans as the titular lead. Ifans has a range that accommodates effortless flipping from arch and cocksure to wounded and reflective, which is what Rose's construct repeatedly calls for - Marks is plainly a folk hero through this film's filter, and guilty of not much else except foolhardily expedient associations with ineffectual terrorists and an inability to quit while he's ahead. So the tone determinedly steers clear of the judgemental and skips lightly from one key incident to another in Marks's career without getting bogged down in heavy repercussions. It's wholly anecdotal, and as such as diverting as you'd except from a slightly squiffy bon-vivant raconteur, but also as lightweight as that suggests.

6/10

The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

The story of the founding of Facebook is largely told in retrospect from the present in which the founder is being sued by his former associates for reasons relating to issues of the ownership of the business, by then already worth billions.
With all the players from an episode of very recent history still around and no real dissent heard as to the film's veracity, it's difficult to view The Social Network as anything other than a jazzed-up documentary with the edges smoothed off and the usual elisions and compressions made for dramatic purposes. Nevertheless, it works efficiently enough as satire on the nature of corporate greed vs private dreams, with the precocious visionary Zuckerberg seen as being motivated by a surfeit of pride in his constructs rather than a lust for money, and the still points interspersed among the technobabble are surprisingly emotive in their bleakness. The casting is good, too: Jesse Eisenberg convinces as the lead, supercilious and yet easy to wound, and even Justin Timberlake fits, though largely by virtue of playing a gabbling asshole in the person of the Napster founder Sean Parker. If the characters remain unlikable and their preoccupations pathetically shallow, then Fincher can only be excused for having captured the essence of the phenomenon accurately.

6/10

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (Werner Herzog, 2009)

Does any one know what was going through Herzog's mind when he decided to pick up on the protagonist from Abel Ferrara's seminal 1992 odyssey through the sewers of the city and of a man's sense of self-worth, with an utterly corrupt police detective cast as Ulysses? Herzog doesn't do remakes like he doesn't do cop films, and yet here he is doing both.
Of course, it soon becomes apparent we've got quite a different beast on our hands, so different that not even crediting Ferrara makes sense by the end. Gone is the bribe-and-contraband pocketing Catholic's sense of guilt, replaced by just plain mental disintegration under the weight of this incarnation's even more crippling range of chemical and behavioural dependencies. Without even the shadow of faith in the background, there's no 11th-hour redemption on the cards, just a dwindling prospect of getting away scot-free.
And hence the lack of gravitas in the tone, reflected in the casting: whereas Harvey Keitel does haunted and tortured immaculately in the original, here the absence of any spiritual purpose to cling to requires casting in line with the farcical surrealism, and it's fair to say that for once Nicolas Cage fits the bill.
The end result, then, is a ride on its own terms through madness, that sucks you in through sheer unpredictability. But since it's also without a moral compass, once the end credits have rolled it sinks away without trace where Ferrara's version lingered.

5/10

Submarine (Richard Ayoade, 2010)

Ayoade's assured directorial debut gives us the insular 15-year-old Oliver growing up in a vaguely '80s South Wales, preoccupied with all the usual problems: school bullying, his worryingly divergent parents, finding a girlfriend.
Although the film is based on Joe Dunthorne's novel, it's hard not to see streaks of Ayoade's public image (by which I mean the rare appearances from behind the mask of Moss in The IT Crowd) in Oliver: cerebral, bookish, geekish, withdrawn and also caustically witty. Either way, Oliver is a great character, played with a wide-eyed disbelief at the state of things around him by Craig Roberts. The supporting cast is excellent too; Sally Hawkins terrifyingly intrusive as his mother and Noah Taylor a study in beigeness as the mousy father.
Submarine's great strength is that it works equally well as comedy as it does as poignant drama. The soundtrack is supporting rather than crutch-like, and unexpected flashes of camera trickery or divergence into unreality are not intrusive but just serve to heighten the sentiment of the moment. The end result is one of the finest British films in years.

8/10

Red (Robert Schwentke, 2010)

This hotchpotch of equal parts of The Bourne Supremacy, Die Hard and Space Cowboys far too obviously started life as the unhappy offspring of a studio exec brainstorming session, presumably with the brief of getting the last drops out of the tank of a gamut of big names. Or maybe the brief was just 'what if we have Helen Mirren as an assassin?'
The result brings Willis, Mirren, Malkovich and Freeman together as former black ops spooks who now find themselves framed for a crime they did not commit. Which actually makes it The A-Team. Anyway, they band together to find out who's trying to kill them and perform all manner of pulling the wool over the opposition's eyes along the way.
To be fair, the incessant action is crisp and some of the verbal interplay raises a smile, though that's the least that you're paying top-line pros for. It's just that the ideas are so tired.

4/10

Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011)

Well, here's a novel conceit for a low-budget British horror film: aliens vs. hoodies. It probably helps that first time director Cornish is best known for his lo-fi comedy duo show on late night telly some moons ago in which him and mate Adam Buxton got to indulge their geeky penchant for discussing filmic what-ifs endlessly.
There's not much of a plot beyond what it says on the tin, of course, as a bunch of teenage lowlifes on a Peckham estate find themselves under attack by big growly things, but it's executed zippily with a sense of humour that doesn't impinge on the tension or unexpectedly realistically drawn characters. More, please, though not a sequel of course.

6/10

Thor (Kenneth Branagh, 2011)

Branagh??? You may find yourself watching (which largely means enduring) this just for that, thus playing right into the studio's hands. Superhero fans watch the films regardless of who's at the helm, but this way they bag even some of the otherwise disinterested. Fiendish.
Anyway, to the film itself. It doesn't take a familiarity with the comics to know that this'll be NMINO (Nordic Mythology In Name Only), with the names and places lifted just to provide a new setting for the standard pagga, but somehow with Branagh you hoped there'd be a soupcon of something extra. As it is, we get a glossy version of Asgard and all with some giant-battling background, which grinds on until Thor is finally banished to Earth and made human for being unbearably arrogant.
I suppose story arc-wise it makes a nice change to at least have the hero start out as an overbearing ass, so that heroic deed would become gaining maturity rather than any act of beast-slaying (we are talking about a god here, after all - as with Superman it's difficult to make the battles themselves the interesting part). Unfortunately, Chris Hemsworth as the lead has quarterback acting skills to go with the physique and so you hardly notice any growing up take place. And the film takes far too long to get to the potentially tasty part anyway, which is the comic culture clash bit when he does finally get down here, and then it's already game over. Yawn.

4/10

Body of Lies (Ridley Scott, 2008)

Body of Lies is Scott's sixth film since 2000's Gladiator, and while a slight improvement on the others, could still have been turned out by his hack brother Tony. It basically presents itself as a thriller for the geopolitical world of the 21st century as Leonardo DiCaprio runs around the Middle East getting into all sorts of intrigues while being double-dealt by Russell Crowe as his Washington boss. Hence, there are a lot of terse phone conversations and abductions, and Leo even utters a few words of Arabic for authenticity. But there's no depth to the set-up, and with all the old racial stereotypes in attendance, it's no more credible than a Bond film. It does manage to be less entertaining, though.

4/10

The Green Hornet (Michel Gondry, 2011)

It now seems to be required of not only all actors but also directors, irrespective of background, to make at least one superhero or action film, and whilst Gondry, having displayed a predilection for the fantastical on several occasions, is not as baffling a choice as Branagh for Thor,  it's still disappointing to find him helming an adaptation of the second-rate character The Green Hornet, who is a sort of poor man's Batman. When the viewer is then saddled with the charmless Seth Rogen as the hero, who seems to mistake acting like a prick for raffishness, the signs are not good. Car chases, unimaginative shoot-ups, excruciating banter and painfully production-line plot developments are far too much for a pay cheque-motivated Christoph Waltz's quirky villain to counterbalance.

3/10

L'empreinte de l'ange (Safy Nebbou, 2008)

Purportedly based on real events, Mark of an Angel presents Catherine Frot as a mother still unable to come to terms with the loss of her first child seven years previously, facing imminent divorce and estrangement from her son. The situation is exacerbated when she becomes fixated with the sister of one of her son's friends, convinced that the girl is her lost daughter.
From there the film moves into stalker territory, with Frot going further and further off the rails in her insistence on her seemingly impossible conviction, and this is relatively compelling in the way that watching a car crash might be. Unfortunately, the plot itself suddenly crashes too.

4/10

Mammuth (Gustave de Kervern & Benoît Delépine, 2010)

The French duo de Kervern and Delépine, makers of hand-to-mouth budget black comedies laced with social comment, occupy a niche between Aki Kaurismäki and Shane Meadows. Their downtrodden characters stumble through life's inequities with a laconic sense of resignation, but also with an undeniable humanity. However, thus far their efforts have fallen short of the best of either of their predecessors' peaks, uncertain whether to go all-out for gallows laughs, being tied down by their wish to be seriously political at the same time.
Mammuth promises to go one better, with Gerard Depardieu, more corpulent than ever, playing a slaughterhouse worker finding himself at a loss upon retirement, and forced by his wife to go on a road trip to retrieve vital documentation from former employers to ensure his pension. Depardieu is a predictably perfect fit for the role, filling the screen in every way, and has some marvellously irascible moments. But then the film once again goes astray as the makers try to engineer a sort of hippyish spiritual rebirth for him, which feels forced. The curmudgeon was much more fun.

5/10

Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011)

Moon director 'son of Bowie' Jones's second at the very at least shows that he won't have a problem getting out of his father's shadow. Source Code may be an actioner, but it's a gratifyingly thoughtful one, as Jake Gyllenhaal, no doubt cast with his haunted breakthrough role in Donnie Darko in mind, wakes up on a train stuck in someone else's body, with eight minutes to live before the train blows up.
The strand that links this with Jones's debut may not immediately be apparent until a sense of existential dread sinks in, with Gyllenhaal forced to relive the same eight minutes over and over, tasked not with altering events - which he finds with increasing despair he's powerless to do - but merely finding out the why behind it all. This gives a film otherwise threatened with being just a rollercoaster composite of its many sources real philosophical clout.

7/10