Red State (Kevin Smith, 2011)

In a partial return to form, Clerks director Kevin Smith moves away from comedy for the first time with a polemic-come-action horror film revolving around horny teenagers coming up against loony Christian fundamentalists in the Bible Belt. As a summary, that still sounds very much like comedy material, but top note is Deliverance and not Dukes of Hazzard.
Conceptually, it's not particularly novel, and Smith's obviously deep-felt attack on gun-toting religious zealots is rather heavy-handed, but it is served well by some great turns from veteran actors such as John Goodman and changes tack unexpectedly enough at several junctures to keep up the interest level regardless of the bluntness of its delivery.

5/10

Super 8 (J.J. Abrams, 2011)

Steven Spielberg produces, and Super 8 reeks of his background presence, being a comic-tinged small-town suburban set-up with a scary alien menacing a checklist bunch of early-teen fledgling zombie film makers. It's The Goonies decontaminated of most of the screaming ADHD by being pushed through an American Graffiti filter, and then retargeted to cover most of the bases of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and Monsters. This is wholly as unexceptional as it sounds: there is a hidden military meanie agenda and estranged fathers and children are reconciled. It'll entertain prepubescents who haven't yet seen all its sources and consequently doesn't serve much purpose for anyone older, besides the lovingly-crafted detail in its recreation of 1979, which takes second place to running around a lot after the opening half hour.

5/10

Killer Elite (Gary McKendry, 2011)

This is a Jason Statham professional hitman product, with occasional box-office support from Robert De Niro. That really tells you everything you need to know, but for the sake of form I should add that it's set in 1981 to avoid the techno jiggery-pokery and allow its bashable chess pieces to indulge in chases and pagga-bouts without nerdy interference, the dependably urgent Clive Owen is the most formidable obstacle in their way and obviously just cut from the same cloth as the killers, and Jason's love interest is, as usual, only there to make him superficially vulnerable and simultaneously reassure the male action audience he's not gay. The action jets about with the usual captions between various sketchily realised non-US and therefore edgy locations, and it never lets up. It's supposedly based on a Ranulph Fiennes-scripted true story. If only Statham stuck to real cartoon material like Crank instead.

4/10

Le Quattro Volte (Michangelo Frammartino, 2010)

More a symbol-laden tone poem than a conventional narrative, experimental filmmaker Frammartino's second feature contains no dialogue but does have single takes of up to 9 minutes. There is no lead role as such, although watching an ailing old goatherd trudge through his thankless chores for the first part might lead you to believe that this is the full story. Instead, we move to the trajectories of other characters: a new-born goat, a tree and ultimately the rugged Calabrian landscape itself, through the seasons. The 'four times' of the title refers to a local folk animist belief in the transmigration of souls through different states of matter and so the story moves, like the spirit by inference, from human through animal and plant to mineral.
This is not an easy film to watch, with its lack of exposition and protracted scenes where nothing scripted happens. Yet it is rewarding: the carefully framed landscapes and animate points of foreground focus are perused with an eye that demanded even more patience on the part of the filmmaker than it does from the viewer. It imposes a form of reeducation of senses and expectations, and is to be valued for that, even while never fully covering the remit it has set itself in terms of theme.

7/10

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011)

The world may not have needed another Planet of the Apes reboot, but the lure of the franchise was clearly too strong. As it is, this is a perfectly serviceable film in its own right, far superior to Tim Burton's risible rewrite of the 1968 series initiator. It wisely chooses to work over the weakest of the original series, i.e. the last three TV movie-standard films detailing the origins of the apes' ascendancy, instead of futilely going head to head with the Charlton Heston classic or its passable sequel. There are of course the obligatory transpositions of memorable lines from the first film, but these are mostly cunningly placed and don't compromise the flow of the film.
The plot may be fairly off-the-shelf, with the first super-intelligent ape, the product of a genetic experiment, raised by his creator, treated as an animal by the authorities and eventually leading an army of his kin in a revolt against their captors. In short, we know exactly what will happen from the word go, and a few allusions to religion or fascism do not add up to significant innovation. Nevertheless, it's tidily put together and decently acted, even if the best of it comes from the go-to guy for CGI monkeys, Andy Serkis, and in truth there's nothing distinctive about the way the digital simians look or move.

5/10

Lourdes (Jessica Hausner, 2009)

An exploration of the nature of idolatry told from the perspective of a disabled woman on a group pilgrimage to the shrine, Lourdes hides its disaffection under an unassuming exterior, just like its protagonist. The target it rails against is the ecclesiastical grifting that goes on around the site, promising miracles to the credulous and desperate while at the same time holding their lack of faith as the cause of their physical plight. It achieves much more through being so understated than a full frontal assault might do, the barbs subtly interwoven amongst dull factual representation of interminable ceremonies and blessings, subtly enough that fervent believers might not even notice the criticism while starting to feel increasingly uncomfortable at the interaction of the pilgrims and their supposed helpers. This is a small feat on the part of the director, alongside the exposure of the hypocrisy of both parties as the young woman miraculously regains the ability to walk and is met with false smiles veiling jealous asides about her lack of piety and how that makes her undeserving of her recovery.

7/10

Apollo 18 (Gonzalo López-Gallego, 2011)

Making a space film with the budget of a home video is certainly a bold challenge, and the director has to be applauded for making such a decent fist of it. The original footage slots in quite neatly around stock images from the moon landings, with a creepiness factor accentuated by the claustrophobic setting as two astronauts find themselves haunted by increasingly troubling events around their marooned lunar module. The mash-up concept aside, there's unfortunately nothing else innovatory in the mix, but the execution is solid nevertheless.

5/10

Potiche (François Ozon, 2010)

Getting Deneuve and Depardieu in the same billing must have been too much to resist. Of course, being troupers, they provide value for money, but this is a limp vehicle for their talents. The premise is basically Made in Dagenham turned into a farce, set in the '70s in an attempt to lend some verisimilitude to the anachronistic notion of Deneuve as a trophy wife neglected by her philandering husband. She takes over his factory when a union dispute drives him to ill health, and soon has the whole shebang wrapped around her little finger. The principal interest of the piece is seeing the director avoid all his customary misanthropy, but at the cost of creating nothing but fluff. Ozon does complex angst proficiently, and should stick to his knitting: this just gets far too silly long before the singalong finale.

4/10

Angel-A (Luc Besson, 2005)

A loser con artist in Paris has an unorthodox angel sent to him when he's at his tether's end. This being a Luc Besson film, she is a statuesque gamine model and can kick butt with the best of them. She proceeds to sort his life out in next to no time with scant attention paid to plot continuity or feasibility, with the icing on the cake being falling in love with the little gimp, played by the mystifyingly popular Jamel Debbouze, who seems to have it written in for every part that no-one refers to his lame right hand. It wouldn't be a problem except that here he's called to undergo some sizable physical challenges.
It's not that the film is unentertaining: Besson has enough tricks in his locker that he could probably direct this in his sleep. It just suffers heavily in comparison with the likes of Wings of Desire in every emotional sense and the low-brow comedy doesn't do enough to compensate for the absence of magic.

4/10

I Am Number Four (D.J Caruso, 2011)

Squarely aimed at the Twilight demographic, and also yet another attempt (see Stormbreaker) to launch a teen franchise around Alex Pettyfer's moppy pout, I Am Number Four posits photogenic surfer-dude aliens amongst us being hunted down by non-photogenic, leery ones. Fortuitously the former all have their own superpowers, which they seem to learn to use with some rad effectivity in the space of an afternoon, much as they would the controls to a console FPS. It's thoroughly undemanding fare, slipping down the gullet frictionlessly, and leaves no nasty aftertaste. There's no need to make the lead such a fence post, though - even the target audience might have been able to cope with some acting.

3/10

Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim, 2008)

In this low-key Ozuesque Korean drama, a mother goes off to try to find her husband, leaving her two daughters with their callous aunt. The girls are too young to fully grasp what's going on and go from day to day imagining that they'll be soon reunited with their mother, turning with the pragmatism innate to the very young and innocent to displacement activities such as catching grasshoppers to occupy their time.

So Yong Kim's film contains no dramatic events beyond this but passes amiably enough, with the two waifs independent more than sentimentalised, and there are no great pretensions to do more than tell things as they are. It's of interest to note that men are wholly absent from the film, only ever seen at a distance if at all. The only close-up exception is a stranger who tells the children that their aunt's number is disconnected; the allusion to masculine abandonment is obvious.

6/10

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011)

A laconic, detached stunt driver moonlights as a getaway driver par excellence for robberies in an LA of nocturnal freeways. His life is spartan and compartmentalised, and his success assured until another factor enters the equation...
Drive unabashedly draws from the seminal 1978 noir, The Driver: even if Winding Refn's claim not to have seen Walter Hill's film until having started work on this one is to be believed, he has acknowledged its influence on the writer of Drive's source novel. By a bizarre and surely unintentional coincidence, the antihero is even played by another Ryan; Gosling instead of O'Neal, and they share a mix of cockiness tinged with melancholy. But the two films are still different animals: whereas Hill's was a more straightforward cat-and-mouse thriller with Bruce Dern's cop determined to reel the rogue in, Winding Refn, as always, is more interested in the existential angle. In that, while both filmmakers are obviously indebted to Le Samourai, it's the latter who is more in line with the Melvillian philosophy. Gosling's character is a self-contained robot who is later forced to feel.
The spark for the transformation is affection for Carey Mulligan's single mother, but there's no stock physical consummation between them: the relationship retains the idealised distance of a fairytale. The rest of the film is consistent with this ethereal air: neon lights flash by, a determinedly '80s retro synth soundtrack pounds away and conversations fade out with more implied than said. It's brazenly stylised, übercool, and yet in the end, unexpectedly sad.

7/10

Kukushka (Aleksandr Rogozhkin, 2002)

A small and unpretentious gem of a film, The Cuckoo is something like what you'd get if you crossed Hell in the Pacific with Down by Law, and added a dash of Jules et Jim. In Lapland during the dying days of the Russo-Finnish war, a Russian political prisoner and a condemned Finnish sniper find themselves under the roof of an independent Lapp woman, at each other's throats and eventually with a begrudging mutual tolerance.
None of the trio speak each other's languages and the film exploits this to rather sweetly comic effect as they continue to yammer on regardless, with no end of talking at cross-purposes even as they fully believe to have understood each other. It works as a neat metaphor for the barriers of mutual comprehension that lead to wars without labouring the point unduly.
The characters are attractively drawn, too, from the coquettish but gutsy woman to the motor-mouthed and pragmatic Finnish soldier and the distrustful but fundamentally decent Russian. They are all fallible and likable without becoming caricatures. Add some evocative Arctic landscapes and a sparing reliance on soundtrack or histrionics, and the end result is a breath of fresh air.

7/10

Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007)

Another zero-budget horror that spawned a monster of a franchise for writer-director Peli, Paranormal Activity is workmanlike and wholly unexceptional with the usual set-up of a couple believing their house to be haunted. The wife is of course the one who gets the brunt of it, and what twist there is to distinguish the product from legions of clones is that the husband, rather than go through the standard disbelief-denial-acceptance cycle, takes on the situation with breezy gusto, setting up a video camera straightaway to film themselves sleeping and hopefully catch sight of supernatural phenomena. But that's about all. The popularity of the format rests wholly on America's rather easily psychoanalysable sense of discomfort with violation of the home and widespread belief in demonic forces.

4/10

Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980)

I break a rule in reviewing a TV series, but Fassbinder's 14-part telling of Alfred Döblin's novel has more in common with cinema despite its small-screen origins. It has aspirations far beyond the medium's norm in its epic scope, deliberately stagy and hypercoloured scenes, surrealist overtones and self-referential structure. It purports to speak not just about petty criminals in depressed Weimar Berlin, but about the human condition, and to this aim uses portentous obscurantist poetry not just in intermittent cuts to a sage-like narrator but places the words in the mouth of the protagonist himself. It's in turn hypnotically beguiling and absolutely infuriating and often both at the same time.
The story is that of Franz Biberkopf, released from prison after killing his girlfriend in a fit of rage into a city where everyone seems to be jobless or on the make. He's a bear of a man, flickering between joviality and jealous fury, assured worldliness and helpless despair. He's a simpleton and a philosopher. He brags to feeble women and is fed on by unscrupulous men. He is clearly meant to be Everyman, and it's to the credit of Günter Lamprecht's empathic performance that the massive conceit almost works.
Everywoman, on the other hand, gets a raw deal in Fassbinder's Weltanschauung. It's a more thorough reductionism than the usual chauvinist virgin-whore dichotomy: women are simply insane. Each female character flips out in some unfounded way  over the course of the story, even Hanna Schygulla's character, who plays a sort of a tarty big sister to Franz. In the case of Franz's eventual love, the childlike Mieze, the narrator's harping on her sweetness and homely innocence grates almost as much as her twittering repetition of simple lines over and over again.
In the absence of the strong female, the most interesting character besides Franz ends up being the small-time gangster Reinhold, who Franz is helplessly drawn to and whose bitter misanthropy drags Franz to his perdition. Gottfried John plays him as a sneering, stammering lizard of a man seething with a self-loathing he doesn't quite understand. Fassbinder said that he saw himself in the story as a composite of Franz, Reinhold and Mieze, and that comes across clearly when you read about the troubled and contrary director's life.
It's an ordeal of a film with its perverse fixations and wilful unnaturalism, not least in the epilogue, which is an addition to Döblin's story by Fassbinder and consequently the worst of the episodes, being a deranged hallucinatory deconstruction of Biberkopf's whole life in the throes of his eventual madness. It may well make you never watch another of the director's works again. It is also fascinating, and there is no contradiction between the two.

7/10

Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance, 2010)

A chronicle of the rise and fall of a relationship, Blue Valentine benefits from strong casting with the perennially excellent Ryan Gosling and a solid turn from Michelle Williams, and scuppers a lot of the good work they do in developing a credible picture of how love turns sour by using the modishly overused multiple flashback method. The film jumps hyperactively from the present to various points in the couple's past without deigning to provide adequate signposting beyond the length of Gosling's hair and gains nothing in terms of layering, only dissipating the emotion built up. There are some things to be said for Dogme after all.
The characters are true to life, even if Gosling can do the hangdog loser in his sleep and the frustrated wife is a fairly standard sounding board for the aimless husband's draining presence. Their interaction, when whether mawkish, domesticated or end-of-tether, hits many painfully true notes. There are all the seeds of a wonderful film here. If only someone other than the director in question could reassemble it.

6/10

Perfect Sense (David Mackenzie, 2011)

Perfect Sense transcends the global epidemic genre by having little interest in the thriller or even science angles. It's a love story between a chef and a scientist who keep going through the world first losing its sense of smell and taste, and then incidents of complete deafness start occurring. Its starting premise may therefore be akin to Fernando Meirelles's accomplished Blindness, but the pandemonium that rises does not take in apocalyptic panoramas: it's internalised within the sufferers' minds.
There are shortcomings: the mere casting of inveterate self-exposers Ewan McGregor and Eva Green as the lovers promises a surfeit of kitless scenes, and these result in some longueurs. Then there are other scenes which pitch perilously close towards pure daftness. But the elegiac poetry that director Mackenzie brings to a crumbling world is classy.

6/10

YellowBrickRoad (Jesse Holland & Andy Mitton, 2010)

In The Blair Witch Project fashion, a motley crew set out into eerie backwoods to try to get to the heart of a local mystery. This time it's not a witch legend but an entire 572 locals who walked off one day in 1940 and disappeared off the face of the Earth, and the seekers aren't film students but have pretensions of being scientific investigators. Nevertheless, the influence of the 1999 zero-budget hit is blatant. Unexplained noises emanate from the woods, a hallucinatory atmosphere takes over and members of the party soon starts to get unhinged.
It's not actually as inept as such a summary dismissal may indicate, just badly in need of its very own ideas. The very last scene seems to belong to another film altogether, being the stuff of real nightmare, and makes you wonder what might have been done with a tad more inspiration.

4/10