Retreat (Carl Tibbetts, 2011)

A married couple at a crisis point take themselves away to try to refind their spark and then a disquieting stranger is imposed on them who soon starts messing with their heads. Yes, it's Dead Calm transposed to the Highlands and Islands, with an additional overlay of 28 Days Later with the suggestion of a pandemic having taken over the rest of the world. Newbie director Tibbetts may want to defend himself against that charge, but Polanski's Knife in the Water had already got the penetrating psychological angles down pat 50 years ago and Phillip Noyce's underrated 1989 slasher worked the more overt violence to its limits. What could possibly be left to say? It's not that this is an incompetent work, just stale, and seemingly unaware that merely changing the setting does not make for a pointful exercise. Additionally, you really start wishing for a gutsy Nicole Kidman instead of the insipid Thandie Newton as the conflicted wife, and this is the crux of the problem: it's watered down despite its pretensions at grittiness.

4/10

Notre Jour Viendra (Romain Gavras, 2010)

Our Day Will Come occupies the same social milieu of a bleak industrial Northern France that Gustave de Kervern and Benoît Delépine have mined with some success, and its initial tone is the same blend of comic-tinged drama revolving around a pair of loser protagonists too. Furthermore, like de Kervern and Delépine's trademark pieces, it develops into a road movie, with the logical corollary of having to live in Pas-de-Calais being that it's somewhere to escape from as soon as possible. In this case the duo get additional impetus to run off from a sense of being persecuted for being ginger, so Ireland becomes their promised land.
The problem that road movies can often run into is that the aimless journey itself can start to mirror narrative lack of direction, and Our Day Will Come falls prey to this weakness as the wit runs out of steam. It then veers off towards a vague existentialism, but doesn't quite manage the poignancy of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which it's heavily influenced by, having neglected to make its principals likable. Vincent Cassel may be a heavyweight actor given the right part, but he brings too much spiky baggage to the role of the enfant terrible psychiatrist, and overacting manically doesn't make the character any more endearing.

5/10

Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec (Luc Besson, 2010)

After a decade mostly spent writing substandard action screenplays for the legions of his directorial proteges, Luc Besson now seems to have taken the reins again. It's uncertain how much of a blessing this is: it's years since the prime of his deft if daft high-octane signature pieces like Nikita or Leon, and on the evidence of this comic-book adaptation, while the zippiness is still there, the punch is missing.
Louise Bourgoin plays Adèle Blanc-Sec, a sort of a proto-Indiana Jones with a feminist twist in the Paris of 1911, feistily excavating Egyptian mummies and cocking a snook at the patriarchal authorities as they bumble after a pterodactyl on the loose. It's certainly jaunty, but although the bande dessinée series may have preceded Raiders of the Lost Ark, the film feels a rip-off of Spielberg's blockbuster at every turn, from the cod Egyptology through the supernatural elements to Adèle's grotesque archrival. There may be more emphasis on comedy, but unfortunately this is not Besson's forte and the pratfalls mostly pall.

4/10

Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011)

Wheatley's debut feature Down Terrace met with considerable acclaim for its inventive melange of kitchen-sink drama and gangland brutality, and at first Kill List seems to pick up the same thread, presenting traumatised Iraq veteran and family man Jay clashing repeatedly with his wife over the parlous state of their finances. It's composed in an intelligently spliced verite style, somewhere between Shane Meadows and Andrea Arnold, and promises much. When the beleaguered man's former army buddy comes to him with a job offer involving carrying out a series of contract killings, the train is set in motion along a more constricting hitman thriller track, but enough uncertainty lingers to retain interest, through the ambiguity of their sinister employers' motives and Jay's mental unravelling. Sadly and inexplicably, this train is comprehensively derailed in the last reel with the bizarre decision to go all-out Wicker Man. There'll undoubtedly be a future occasion when this director gets all his ideas to gel; unfortunately here the good work is undone by the superposition of too many genre filters.

5/10

Banlieue 13:Ultimatum (Patrick Alessandrin, 2009)

The continuation to District 13 recycles the story of the first film but omits too much clean footage of its only USP, namely the incredible parkour displayed by its actual originator, David Belle, in favour of a lot of chopsocky and wire work. Once again the lawless walled-in Parisian ghetto is under threat of destruction by the forces of authority and big business and it's up to the dynamic cop-homeboy duo to foil their plans by, er, punching and jumping around incessantly. The action is efficiently shot, but reaches saturation point so early on that no choreographer on Earth could sustain interest in the proceedings, with a strictly perfunctory plot lending no assistance.

4/10

Rare Exports (Jalmari Helander, 2010)

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale hijacks the Santa Claus myth much as that other Finnish horrorshow Lordi ran away cackling with the Eurovision festival. The idea is that the real Santa is a child-eviscerating monster buried under a mountain centuries ago by fearful Lapps. Now he's got out, and it's down to one little boy to stop him. It's a slight conceit, but executed neatly with laconic humour and makes the most of its barren, snowy locations. The intrepid boy hero is also refreshingly matter-of-fact and kick-ass rather than cutesy or squealing. Lastly, the director seems to be aware that he's only got one point to make and accordingly doesn't labour it. You do wonder who it's made for, though, being too slapstick to work as horror and yet too creepy to serve as children's entertainment.

5/10

Insidious (James Wan, 2010)

Saw director Wan won't be inspiring any imitators with this one, which may be no bad thing considering the deluge of torture-porn that has followed his 2004 breakthrough film. This is basically a mish-mash of Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror, with the usual middle-class family haunted by malevolent forces after their comatose son. The wife is the hysterical one who has to convince her bloody-mindedly sceptical husband that she's not losing her marbles, then there's a campy seance and the father finally faces up to the evidence of his own eyes to go and rescue his son's soul from the underworld. It's not badly assembled by any means, just that the raw materials are so stolid. The chief virtue of it all has to be the frugal $1.5m budget.

4/10

The Bucket List (Rob Reiner, 2007)

Two old codgers with terminal cancer decide on a list of things to do before they croak and promptly run off and do the lot. Early on, as Jack Nicholson (cast to type as the sarcastic, impulsive curmudgeonly one) ridicules the triteness of the list produced by Morgan Freeman (who is of course the virtuous, salt-of-the-earth cautious one) there's a glimmer of the prospect of a departure from feelgood staples, but this is a Rob Reiner film and saccharine life-affirmation is what you'll get. It would have been interesting to see what they would have done had Nicholson's character not been loaded, but happiness is completely dependent on money in the MOR Hollywood universe and the duo's idea of really living amounts to nothing more than an unimaginative rich man's whistle-stop tour of picture-postcard locations and fine dining. Only the indulgence imbued by the easy interplay of the veteran leads saves it from drowning in schmaltz.

4/10

The Signal (David Bruckner, Dan Bush & Jacob Gentry, 2007)

On paper, the premise is a promising one compared to the horror B-movie norm: three directors showing three different perspectives of events. This largely turns out to be false advertising, however: no Rashomon, this. The three perspectives only consist of following a different character in each segment: there's no actual uncertainty as to the reality of the situation, and what we're left with is a fairly bog-standard variation on the survival-zombie epidemic genre, with TV and radio signals turning the populace psychotic. There's an attempt at wringing gallows humour out of the splatter, but it's leaden-footed fare.

4/10

Black Death (Christopher Smith, 2010)

Northern Germany comfortably stands in for a plague-ravaged medieval England as a band of mercenaries on a church-sanctioned mission to capture a necromancer draft in a young monk to guide them. When they finally reach the village of their prey, they find an untouched idyll. Nothing, of course, is as it first seems.
Black Death is a curious mix of trash and high concept. On one hand, Sean Bean as the mercenary leader seems to have taken his Boromir get-up off the rail gritting his teeth, the dialogue frequently grates even when it's not being wilfully anachronistic and a lingering air of Blackadder is only reinforced when Tim McInnerny turns up. On the other, there's actually some kind of thought process going on in the conflict between the bloodthirsty Christian crusaders and haughty village pagans, with the young monk struggling with his faith in between the two. Overall, still a failure, but a qualified one.

4/10

À Bout Portant (Fred Cavayé, 2010)

Point Blank, which bears no resemblance to the Lee Marvin revenge flick, starts with the thoroughly Hollywood scenario of a happily married nurse rescuing the wrong patient, whose associates kidnap the nurse's wife to pressgang him into delivering the crook to safety. This is rather complicated by having half the Paris police force on their tail, corrupt and thinking nothing of popping a cap in anyone between them and their target.
It may have breakneck pace aplenty but the concept is too overused to excite, and the surprises that come are rather through stretching credulity in ever more sketchy ways than through actual inventiveness on the part of the scriptwriters. It could actually have done with jacking up the ludicrosity to the gleeful level of a Statham vehicle.

4/10

127 Hours (Danny Boyle, 2010)

Danny Boyle may be on the right side of the hit-or-miss equation with a large part of the credit due to Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire and Sunshine bolstering a record too strong to be brought down by the occasional A Life Less Ordinary. At least you know what he presents will take risks, and that's usually worth the price of admission. Taking on the Aron Ralston story is a bigger gamble than before, though. A man will spend 5 days trapped under a desert rock, alone, and then saw his arm off to survive. Every development is already in place, and it's just an inexorable, agonising grind towards that cathartic moment.
Boyle ducks out of putting the viewer through the same torment as that of the protagonist by inserting dream sequences, flashbacks and dramatic interludes that provide some respite in the form of other situations and characters, and some of the phases move a little too far in the direction of the mystical or showy, but then we are dealing with the inside of one man's head and with the knowledge that Ralston gave the end result his seal of approval. It can't be the director's most satisfying work, being compromised by having to make an unpalatable event with little wider message into entertainment of a fashion, but to its credit it does steer the right side of exploitation.

6/10

Daylight Robbery (Paris Leonti, 2008)

Geezers United like to rob a bank or two, no lie! All is not well when you find yourself wishing you were watching a Guy Ritchie underworld film instead of this, yet another piece of inept formula toss in the British heist genre that even has none of the saving quirks of Ritchie's codfather works. All the usual Laahndahn hooligan/gangster suspects are there, from Geoff Bell through Leo Gregory to Vas Blackwood, and sure enough director Leonti hits on the masterstroke of twinning the two by having the lads use the World Cup as a cover to bust a bank. There's no tension at all, the crew are wankers to a man where presumably cheeky chappies was the objective, and the robbery contains no feasible or inventive details whatsoever. At least The Bank Job was based on a true story. This just has the forces of law and order represented by Barry from EastEnders. Daylight robbery indeed.

3/10

Celda 211(Daniel Monzón, 2009)

Cell 211 takes us straight into the outbreak of a riot in a Spanish prison, as a warden on his first day at the job is caught on the wrong side of the fence and forced to make up a criminal past to stay in one piece. It's a delicate balancing act between credible complicity with the prisoners and trying to transmit information about what's occurring inside to the prison authorities. In the meanwhile, the leader of the rioters takes him under his wing and an understanding between the two is formed as the idealistic newbie learns what conditions prevail inside the prison system.
Comment on the unproductive brutality of the status quo could easily have got too heavy-handed here, but Monzón seems to have realised that political campaigning about such glaring targets can make for an unhappy marriage with the thriller framework and the decision to focus on action and the relationship between the two leads is a prudent one. Less successful, however, is the incorporation of the complicating element that is the warden's pregnant wife on the outside, who flips for no other reason than plot requirements.
Nevertheless, there are more positives than negatives. As the lead, Alberto Ammann convinces as his character shifts from bravado to anger and despair, and the end comes as quite a shock too, with the director making the most of fairly stock ingredients.

6/10

Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993)

Mike Leigh's directorial pinnacle was also the making of David Thewlis, and his is a mesmerising performance as Johnny, a sorry sack of suppressed rage fleeing to London after effectively committing rape in Manchester. He uses verbal dexterity and erudition as much as a self-amusing control mechanism for his own manic depression as a weapon against all and sundry, from his former girlfriend to her flatmate and random strangers he accosts, and ends up going over the edge over several nights of sleeping rough and increasingly aimless railing. In Johnny, Leigh has created an iconic figure, an anti-hero with a crippling flaw set against each redeeming feature, and Thewlis's portrayal hits the balance between the two with an intuitive precision.
It's a far angrier film than any that Leigh has made before or since, its humour more bitter, and is also separated from the others by having so little focus for its anger, mirroring Johnny's utter lack of direction. The virulence of the class system is omnipresent, and there are other digs at the state of society which contextualise the characters' attitudes and the broken world around them, but none is presented as an overt cause of the fall. There are only glimpses of warmth: all the principals have their guard up too much to let anyone in.
There is one major false note, shoehorning in a villain, a cartoonishly misanthropic upper-class counterpart to Johnny, who seems to be included just to crudely underline that the message isn't merely that social deprivation produces dysfunctional men. Nevertheless, the rest hits with such raw force that the impact of that intrusion is negligible.

8/10