Los Lunes al Sol (Fernando León de Aranoa, 2002)

Situationally in some ways a precursor of 2007's Couscous, Mondays in the Sun revolves around a group of laid-off shipyard workers meeting nightly in a bar to mull over their predicament and rail against the system that led them to it. Javier Bardem, as their ringleader of sorts, is a melange of wounded angry pride and skirt-chasing posturing, whilst the others struggle with their lack of opportunities, collapsing marriages and incipient alcoholism. The tone is bitter-sweetly comic at times, without choking the moments of pathos that arise. It might be seen as a Spanish foray into Ken Loach territory in that aspect, even without the political subtext. No surprises, but Bardem is colossal, as always.

6/10

The Guard (John Michael McDonagh, 2011)

An affable comedy-come-thriller casts Brendan Gleeson in his most effective niche (see In Bruges) as a gruff Irish policeman with a stackload to bad habits from whoring to drink and drugs, a sort of Bad Lieutenant scenario but far lighter and not in fact judgmental at all towards its hero's foibles. The story itself is a fairly bogstandard buddy movie model, with Don Cheadle's FBI agent turning up in search of some drug smugglers, but the execution is cutely witty and Gleeson gives as good value for money as ever.

6/10

Snowtown (Justin Kurzel, 2011)

Detailing the eleven murders that took place in a blue-collar Adelaide suburb in the '90s, Snowtown is virtually unwatchable at times in its brutality. It's so thoroughly unglamorised in its determination to tell it like it is that it cannot work as entertainment even for the most hardened slasher film devotee. We hardly see anything of the murders, with the director determined to avoid vicarious action movie thrills. This is the film's overriding asset: it adds a layer of cold menace to the ring leader of the killings of homosexual and socially vulnerable victims and his inexorable grooming of an abused teenage boy to do his megalomaniac bidding. It'll leave you feeling sick, but it's an honest exercise.

7/10

Black Pond (Tom Kingsley & Will Sharpe, 2011)

A distinctly eerie low-budget black comedy, Black Pond comes across more as a TV piece in the style of Nighty Night than an actual cinematic feature, even if it got to our screens via the Raindance film festival. The unsettling air is contributed to by the rehabilitative casting of convicted child porn downloader Chris Langham as the family father, who is befriended by a gentle man with obvious psychological issues. We already know from the outset that the family end up burying the visitor in the woods after he dies at their house, and a number of false notes, particularly Simon Amstell's wedged-in cameo as an obnoxious twerp of a psychiatrist, also detract from the film's dramatic consistency. But the dialogue is also nicely acerbic, particularly between the estranged husband and wife, with the batting between her bitching and his stream of bland inanities, and some images are genuinely fresh and disturbing. It's an interesting debut from the directors, albeit somewhat uncertain whether it's seeking to be a faux-documentary, a comedy of embarrassment or a serious drama.

6/10

Green Zone (Paul Greengrass, 2010)

Enough, already. No more Iraq war dissections that try to have their cake and eat it by feeding action fans whilst purporting to say something serious about establishment corruption and double-dealing relating to the war. It's not that Green Zone, with Matt Damon - who else? - seeking to find out why WMDs are nowhere to be found, is an incompetent piece, just that the recipe is so stale. There's a noble and indignant Iraqi collaborator to help the good guy, a snarling pantomime general to be caught, and another cartoon thug on the American side doing his best to catch the hero in some friendly fire before he manages to expose the military-led conspiracy at work. It all revolves around a little book which we are to believe conveniently has a list of secret Iraqi safe houses. It could have done with more attention paid to plausibility and less of the run-of-the-mill chase action.

4/10

The Ides of March (George Clooney, 2011)

Mr Clooney has taken rather well to this directing lark, even if he's rather preoccupied with the machinations of government and politics and may have to do something else next to keep up the interest levels. It helps a great deal of course when he can draft in a host of the finest character actors Hollywood has to offer in the shape of Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti. Clooney himself plays a slick Democrat presidential candidate, with Gosling as the actual centre of the film as an over-confident young campaign manager. He's an idealistic rising star and so of course headed for a fall when an unwise dalliance with an intern and an unofficial meeting with his opposite number give his senior colleague the excuse he needs to force him out.
In truth, there's not much here we haven't seen in The West Wing or a range of other American political dramas. But the dialogue is knowing and punchy, and good actors go a long way to compensating for the limitations of a well-worn formula, with Gosling's trademark air of existential disillusionment a particularly good fit for the main role.

6/10

Home (Ursula Meier, 2008)

A close-knit family living in isolation next to a disused motorway has their life thrown off kilter as the road is at last opened up to traffic and they become even more cut off than before. They take it in their stride though, devising ways to keep going as if this were just a minor setback. It has the flavour of an oddball comedy to begin with, but with Isabelle Huppert in customary tight-lipped basket case mode as the mater familias you know that a turn for the worse is always on the cards. And her character is of course the main reason behind this development, refusing to move and in complete denial of the unsustainability of their situation as they slowly sink into a lead-poisoned torpor, having bricked up their remaining windows. The film thereby moves into an atmosphere of stifling horror, and while the motivations of the characters may be improbable, marks are scored for trying to say something deeper about the significance of a home even when it becomes a prison.

6/10

Bin-jip (Ki-duk Kim, 2004)

3-Iron is one of those laconic pieces that prefers to mystify in preference to being didactic and as a consequence will leave the viewer either refreshed or infuriated, depending on whether it's interpreted as revelatory or glibly pretentious. It involves a young man who breaks into one vacant property after another, staying overnight at each, during which he eats, washes and fixes something broken. He's an opportunist and an altruist, and we never really find out more about his motives, even when a battered wife he chances on in one house leaves to share his lifestyle, since they never speak to explain themselves. So we're left to read what we can from their actions. I found it rather captivating, reminiscent of Herman Melville's short story Bartleby, the Scrivener, in which an office clerk gradually withdraws from all activity and finally self-sustenance with nothing but a 'I would prefer not to' by way of reply, but I can also understand how some might tear their hair out at its wilful crypticism.

7/10

Seven Pounds (Gabriele Muccino, 2008)

The Pursuit of Happyness director Muccino is reunited with Will Smith for a weepy in which Smith plays a character with elements by now thoroughly familiar not just from his drama roles, but even his action ones all the way through to I Am Legend or I, Robot: a sensitive loner carrying serious baggage trying to put things right. Here, he's seeking redemption for having caused the death of his fiancee and six other people in an accident, and poses as an IRS agent to find seriously ill people and start donating parts of his body to fix them. It could be painfully mawkish, not least in the button-pressingly soulful romance he develops with one of the dying, but Smith is actually very good at this by now and Muccino handles the sentiment just about the right side of wanton tear-jerking.

5/10

Vanishing on 7th Street (Brad Anderson, 2010)

It's fashionable for the sci-fi fraternity to pan anything starring Hayden Christensen after the Star Wars fiascoes, and it's fair to say he'll never develop a range beyond weaselly glowering. Add the hopelessly wet Thandie Newton as a second lead, have it directed by hack Anderson and things do not look promising. Still, if you do find in in your heart to accept all these limitations, this actually works ok on a popcorn level as a doomy catastrophe flick on the familiar riff of the collapse of civilisation in the face of a supernatural menace. The four characters holed up in a bar in an emptied city where the night eats up all caught in it are completely stock, of course, as is the course of survival-horror events, but there's a small saving grace in having the threat as nothing more than the elemental fear of the dark without attempting to add cod-scientific or religious explanations.

4/10