In Time (Andrew Niccol, 2011)

The future: time has become the primary global currency as everyone is down to expire at the age of 25, failing buying their lifeclocks more time through working. Time keeps getting more expensive, though, and population control by the privileged elite is behind it all. It's Logan's Run with a more ludicrous premise then if that were possible, and director Niccol has been in a dystopia not too dissimilar from this one before with the superlative Gattaca. The sense of tension created by the protagonists' constant race to stay a step ahead of termination is effective, but it's heavily undermined by having the bizarrely popular charisma black hole Justin Timberlake play the man defying the wicked system.

5/10

Jakob the Liar (Peter Kassovitz, 1999)

Robin Williams in holocaust schmaltz shock! The suspicion can't be avoided that while Life Is Beautiful two years earlier got plenty of exposure in the U.S. market too, not least through Robert Benigni's Best Actor Oscar, the studio execs must have though there was still enough mileage in the comically-tinged Jews outsmarting Nazis weepy formula. To give it its due, Jakob the Liar is not an offensive film, just highly predictable with Williams in the Warsaw ghetto becoming an unwilling ray of hope through everyone's collective belief that he has a radio and through it has found out that the end of the war is nigh. Naturally, he takes a plucky young girl under his wing in the process. While Williams does his big-hearted turn as dependably as ever, and the rest of the cast contribute solid support too, it's too uncertainly toned to engage the emotions as deeply as the context requires.

5/10

Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009)

Featuring a sassy young girl in a new home finding herself at nights in a surreal version of the same environment, with talking animals and people with buttons for eyes, this is another lustrous stop-motion animation from the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas. As with Nightmare, it's spruced up digitally, again sparingly enough to avoid swamping the gratifying solidity of the underlying figurines under too much sheen.
This time the source is renowned fantasist Neil Gaiman's book rather than a Tim Burton script. Regardless the visual influence of the Burton collaboration lingers, from the broad range of caricature body types to the wildly imaginative backdrops, and is felt even more strongly as the story turns more sinister and gothic. Where it's somewhat lacking, then, is in a true style and heart of its own, but the verve and ingenuity of the images does offer ample compensation.

6/10

Nueve Reinas (Fabián Bielinsky, 2000)

A vivacious and well-assembled Argentinian crime caper from a director who died too soon, Nine Queens presents two petty con artists who stumble on the promise of the big spondulicks through fobbing a big crook about to be forced to flee the country off with dodgy rare stamps, the Nine Queens of the title. The succession of sleight-of-hand scams and confidence tricks they carry out along the way may be nothing new as a theme, but it's executed with some panache and wit, and is above all great fun.

7/10

Trolljegeren (André Øvredal, 2010)

Troll Hunter runs as a documentary in the manner of The Blair Witch Project, except with the fear sucked out and puerile cheekiness inserted. The theme may work better for Norwegians drenched in the mythos, but outside that context it's just students with hand-held cameras going from one fjord to the next in pursuit of giant uglies. The film's distinguishing virtue is the realisation of the trolls themselves: they are rendered genuinely impressively and their creators have given them bulk and character far beyond their human opponents, who you'd probably want to be squashed at the first instance.

5/10

Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)

The Emperor has no clothes.
Film critics can be a scared pack of dogs, collectively more fearful than when standing alone. Tarkovsky's supposed masterpiece can be dissected as easily as any other sixth-form play would be. There are three men who have to go through the trials of The Zone in an undisclosed land, which is basically a thinly veiled version of the Soviet Union.
It's a stage play where changes of setting only exist to provide more excuses for scriptwriters to cram elementary philosophy into the characters' mouths. If you're of a fickle persuasion, some imaginative and  Nicolas Roeg-style nature inserts, with some brilliant shots alongside them, will probably convince you that there's a genius of an artistic mind behind the random imagery. It's not that some points don't get scored, but there are too many agendas and no uniting purpose. It may be one of the most overrated films ever, and would slip under the radar as a reasonably intelligent slice of metaphysical examination were it not for the yoke of its reputation.

5/10

Easy Virtue (Stephan Elliott, 2008)

Oscar Wilde remains fresh because his aphorisms are evergreen. His twentieth-century successor Noël Coward, on the other hand, stales with every passing year because of being so tethered to a particular and narrow time and social milieu. Not that being so prolific could have helped either, with the inevitable dilution of novelty through increased output.
It's not that Easy Virtue is a dull piece, nor is Elliott's adaptation wholly without merit, propped up significantly by dependable casting in the form of Kristin Scott Thomas as the tyrannically snobbish materfamilias and Colin Firth as her sardonically disdainful husband. Playing the glamorous American who arrives unwanted into their stultifying landed gentry household as their son's new wife, Jessica Biel is a minor revelation too, projecting acid wit far more convincingly than the vacant Johanssens or Portmans she might otherwise have been bracketed with. It's just so insubstantial, the inbred status quo a house of straw for critique, the period detail sloppy and the bon mots raising no more than smirks and arched eyebrows.

4/10

La Nostra Vita (Daniele Luchetti, 2010)

La Nostra Vita is set in Rome, but a Rome far removed from the tourist traps of the Trevi fountain or Colosseum, instead the miles of dusty suburban building site evolved from the ruins of Bicycle Thieves. Claudio, a construction worker, seizes on discovering his boss sweeping the demise of an immigrant worker at the site under the carpet to blackmail his employer into giving him a project, hoping to keep his young family's heads above water. But then personal tragedy strikes, and he's stretched to breaking point in striving to survive.
Luchetti's film is an unsteady ship: it lurches unpredictably from sentimentality and stereotyping to harsh verite from scene to scene. It ends up in credit largely due to the judicious decision to resist smoothing away the lead's less likable edges along the way: even at the end, he does not essay a rebuttal to the accusation of being obsessed with money.

5/10

Brødre (Susanne Bier, 2004)

Brothers, Bier's international breakthrough, serves up the template for all of her later films. A husband-and-wife relationship goes sour in the wake of a traumatic event, guilt is repressed and builds up to an explosive catharsis, and there's a sub-plot centering on a feral Third World region. By the facility of this summary, Bier is a filmmaker of limited palette. Then again, Monet painted Rouen Cathedral more than thirty times.
So, Bier/Dogme stalwart Ulrich Thomsen is the family man who is presumed dead on a military rescue mission in Afghanistan, and the middle of the film has his loafer brother and bereaved wife becoming increasingly close until his eventual return bearing emotional baggage he can't handle, taking out his personal hell on them instead.
It's characteristic of the director's other work in more than just theme: there are moments of stunning imagery as well as scenes which achieve more through understatement than explicit exposition. And once again, the Third World element, this time the brutality of the Afghan captors, is cartoonish in its extremism and wholly pointless. It's a strange brew, and as usual hits more than misses in sum total, but you do wonder why no-one will tell the director what to lose. Maybe next time.
Incidentally, the American remake cast Spider-Man as the shell-shocked father and Queen Amidala as his wife. There, two film reviews for the price of one.

6/10

The Awakening (Nick Murphy, 2011)

It's 1922 and a young female debunker of supernatural hoaxes arrives at a boarding school determined to expose the supposed haunting there.
This is the debut feature of TV series director Murphy, and it's evident he has not yet become proficient with the change of medium, with the film suffering from a flatness of lighting and dramatic build-up characteristic of a standard BBC production. It's strong on mood, at least, and critically for a horror piece delivers well on chills, but suffers a great deal from comparison with its obvious and more self-assured sources, namely The Others, The Shining, The Sixth Sense and most blatantly the lesser known El Orfanato, being weighed down by too much clunky dialogue and plot inconsistencies. Rebecca Hall does a good Shelley Duvall turn as the lead in fear of loss of her sanity, but it's not quite enough to overcome the sum of debts and intrinsic deficiencies.

5/10

Woochi (Dong-hun Choi, 2009)

A sort of remake of Les Visiteurs with duelling wizards and demons, Woochi chucks a cocky Taoist sorcerer 500 years forward into the present in pursuit of wire-working kung fu spirits. He's accompanied by a gurning comic relief sidekick, of course, and three more in the form of bumbling minor deities. The comedy is hopelessly hackneyed for the most part, however, so it's left to the FX-laden action to carry the film, and it manages this at a jaunty pace without actually coming up with any innovative trumps. Then it vanishes in a puff of smoke.

4/10

Resistance (Amit Gupta, 2011)

Alternate histories involving Nazis don't die, they just keep mutating into hybrid states. We've had the sci-fi and horror versions ad nauseam, even before the imminent Iron Sky, so now it's the turn of the serious and soulful occupation drama, centering on Welsh women in a remote valley wrestling with the ethics of collaboration as a platoon of Germans arrives. It's not much of a dilemma: the few local men still around are shown as being deluded in their continued resistance while the new arrivals are sensitive, helpful and good with animals. It is atmospheric but also takes itself far too seriously, right from the preposterous notion in the opening titles that Germany was still somehow capable of winning the war as late as 1944.

5/10