Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)

It's the most visually impressive computer game ever created, and for a computer game has a decent back story.
Unfortunately, Avatar is a film, and has to be judged by different standards. So, the hero is derivative of countless conversion tales, the natives he identifies with a hackneyed mish-mash of African tribespeople and Native Americans, and the villains more cartoonish than the CGI around them. It would be just standard Lion King Disney if it wasn't for the front of green-lite and politics-lite intent. If you can switch your brain to swallowing all of it as a cartoon, Avatar works, and works well: the US military shits on noble savages who are immeasurably more in tune with the land, and it falls on an American to have a Damascene moment and lead the poor masses to victory over the nasty technocracy. Turn the sound off; it's a lot more enjoyable without the encumbrance of a plot that will strain the patience of the most tolerant liberal over nearly three hours. It does look fantastic, when all's said and done.

5/10

La Piel Que Habito (Pedro Almodóvar, 2011)

Almodóvar executes a change of tack away from his customary battleaxes, nuns, whores with hearts of gold and distillation of Sirkian melodrama as farce with Antonio Banderas as a plastic surgeon obsessed, after the tragic death of his wife, with creating a human skin impervious to harm, keeping a young woman locked up in his house as a guinea pig for his experiments.
The Skin I Live In is basically George Franju's 1960 Grand Guignol horror Eyes Without a Face put through the filter of Open Your Eyes, and while Almodóvar will never disappoint in terms of his mastery in unsettling the viewer on many levels, here he doesn't quite manage to crystallise an ambitious set of observations about the nature of identity. It's immaculately constructed, from image to casting, as you'd expect, but at a bit of a loss as to where to go after the familiar preoccupation with transsexuality has reared its head again.

6/10

The Rum Diary (Bruce Robinson, 2011)

The director of Withnail & I adapts a Hunter S. Thompson novel, and Johnny Depp reprises Thompson's gonzo alter ego from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, albeit in an embryonic, more moderate form. It ought to be gold, instead it ends up less than the sum of such formidable parts. Depp's journalist is in capitalist-plundered Puerto Rico in the heady days of 1960 and of course a drunk, but nowhere near as uncontrollably OTT as Raoul Duke or Withnail, and more's the pity. Various other hacks are tasked with filling the debauchery gap, but that misses the point: the pleasure of Terry Gilliam's 1998 take on the Thompson character did not lie principally in the methodical self-mashing, but in the mordant cynicism that he used to justify his to-hell-in-a-handcart world view. Here, the wit is largely reduced to muttered asides by Depp in the gaps between assorted mild shenanigans. It's amiable where it should have been side-splitting.

6/10

Hævnen (Susanne Bier, 2010)

Winner of the 2011 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, In a Better World sees director Bier continue in the furrow of meditations on love and loss, most eloquently expressed to date in 2006's After the Wedding. A bereaved father moves to a small Danish town with his 12-year-old son. The boy carries stores of anger looking for an outlet and sets upon punishing bullies, at school and beyond, dragging a schoolmate victim in his wake. His reluctant accomplice has worries of his own besides being victimised for being Swedish: his parents are divorcing and his father, an aid doctor in an unspecified war-torn African country, is often out of reach and his pacifist attitude perplexing to the boys when he is actually present.
The bare bones of the story are thus fairly conventional: prepubescents coming to terms with the adult world as the adults come to terms with their past failings. Further watering down the brew is the third-world refugee camp parallelling, which smacks of woolly tokenism. But on the firmer soil of the families in Denmark, it does work. The appeal of the film is all in the execution: the direction is sensitive, the photography lustrous and the performances, particularly those of William Jøhnk Nielsen as the railing young avenger and Mikael Persbrandt as the conflicted doctor, several shades above mere role requirements.

7/10

Carnage (Roman Polanski, 2011)

The presence of only four actors, all of whom we are shown in the first real scene, signals from the outset that as stage play adaptations go, this one will not venture outside the single set, and that promises contorting limitations on the plot, since devices will need to be generated to ensure that none of them leaves. That in turn brings the likelihood of cabin fever setting in, and character relationships evolving at a hothouse rate.
Polanski's film doesn't escape the groove set by all of these presets. Having all four play to type/stereotype pretty much guarantees the inevitability of the trajectory. Hence, John C. Reilly is the lumbering and honest working man, Jodie Foster a shrill high-minded liberal, Kate Winslet a warm front seething with subsurface frustration, and Christophe Waltz a smug amoral bastard.
Yet watching them go at loggerheads, superficially over the issue of one couple's son having hit the other's, but soon clearly at each other, is enormous fun. Once you've accepted the formula, these are outstanding performers each given fluid dialogue and meaty solos, producing some moments of arch comedy and real substance as a result. It doesn't overstay its welcome, either, and comes with an epilogue that puts the preceding 90 minutes of bluster very satisfyingly into context.

7/10

Cowboys & Aliens (Jon Favreau, 2011)

A Jon Favreau product tends to do exactly what it says on the tin, but it would have been nice if there had actually been a layer of irony behind this particular title, instead of nothing more than a Western with gunslingers being terrorised by sub-Alien critters. A crisis of religious faith brought on by the paranormal events could have been one avenue, all-out B-movie hijinks in the style of Tremors another. Instead, Favreau goes for somewhere in between and ends up with a splattered blancmange, not deep, exciting, or, as the last resort, funny. Daniel Craig's mean hombre accent wanders all over the territory, Harrison Ford's character has to swing from hoary bastard cattle baron to heart-of-gold action pappy before we get a chance to hate him and undermine his cemented box-office hero status, and the sci-fi component just means an opportunity for fiery FX. It embarrassingly falls short of even its very modest ambitions.

3/10

The Fighter (David O. Russell, 2010)

Being based on a true story only gets you so far in the interest stakes, and while Christian Bale dependably does his wacko turn as the aspiring champ's chump druggie brother, Mark Wahlberg's character as the fighter Micky Ward is a stolid one which could actually do with the cartoonish klutzery of a Rocky. The story progression is the same, though, from rags to unlikely glory, with just the addition of a white-trash family as Micky's management and entourage, who the director invites us to find both repugnant and comic at the same time. Not that these shortcomings deterred the Academy Award voters, who inexplicably nominated it in seven categories. But then they do like their salt-of-the-earth underdog stories above and beyond the call of duty.

5/10

Warrior (Gavin O'Connor, 2011)

Nick Nolte and Tom Hardy burn up the screen as a dysfunctional father-son unit, the former a recovering alcoholic trying to make amends for his sins as the latter returns with chips on both shoulders to demand to be trained for a mixed-martial art tournament. The tournament in question eventually sets Hardy on a collision course with his brother, the schoolteacher Joel Edgerton, who is just as estranged from their ne'er-do-well dad as he is.
No radical amendments to the fight film formula, then: blue-collar financial worries, embitterment, hopes of reconciliation and an opponent who is an immovable object are the cornerstones. Nevertheless, the muscular acting lifts it above most other contenders, and the ending packs an unexpected punch.

6/10

L'hérisson (Mona Achache, 2009)

The Hedgehog is based on the rather wonderful novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery to a degree that its makers modestly claim is loose, although it actually follows the structural elements of the source very closely. The modesty is probably due to the director having to adopt alternative filmic approaches to depicting the interior monologues of its characters, namely some animated inserts and the device of having the precocious 12-year-old's added narrative explained by her making a video of her life. Both work inobtrusively enough, with the animation in particular adding a zing that would otherwise be missed with the loss of her and the other principal's poignant private musings.
It's a simple enough set-up: the suicide-plotting daughter of a posh Parisian family is cynical and cutting beyond her years, and 'the hedgehog' is sensitive and intelligent beyond the allowed limits of her station as the dumpy concierge of their apartment building. A friendship forms between the two through the arrival of a bridging agent, a cultured Japanese man, and the mutual realisation of what the three have in common in contrast to the shallowness of the society immediately around them.
Despite Achache's best efforts, the sum total has to fall short of the sheer poetry of the novel, unable to convey all the thought contained therein. Taken in its own right, however, it's far more emotionally involving than most recent French dramas revolving around class and angst, and helped considerably by some astute casting.

7/10