Hanna (Joe Wright, 2011)

A standard action movie pot-pourri of a pubescent girl trained as lethal assassin, knowing little about her past, being hunted by the secret service that created her, is thankfully elevated no end by superior photography, punchy editing and some truly uncommon backdrops for the relentless chase that takes up most of the film. Saoirse Ronan is for once good casting too, her blankness fitting the role of a human experiment, who has grown up in a bubble and is nigh-autistically unable to get to grips with the modern world, far better than it did her irksome emoting ghost character in The Lovely Bones. Then there's also Cate Blanchett as the utterly evil villain on her trail, and you will know without being told that her performance will be several cuts above the usual hammy cackling. All in all, it doesn't do badly at all for what is basically just a melange of Léon, Kick-Ass and The Bourne Identity.

6/10

Africa United (Debs Gardner-Paterson, 2010)

A bunch of football-mad kids from Rwanda decide to trek all the way to the World Cup in South Africa, in an uneven film that mixes sweetness with adult concerns. On one hand, it's a kids' escapade story, punctuated by cute animated flights of fancy on their quest, while on the other, the memory of the recent genocide and the shadow of HIV loom large in the background, driving the wanderers on. It's pleasant and lively for the most part, but far too improbable and blithe to be taken as anything more than a healthy variation for the young 'uns from the usual First World-centric adventure fare.

5/10

Good Morning, Babylon (Paolo & Vittorio Taviani, 1987)

Upon the retirement of their father from the family stonemasonry business, two Italian brothers head out to make their fortune in America and meet with dismal failure until landing in the nascent Hollywood of the first big-budget silent films, where their talents finally find a niche.
The Tavianis have conjured a film which is as hard to dislike as an earnest puppy wagging its tail and unfortunately carries the same level of depth. The inseparable and plucky duo make an amiable pair, and the film skips along with a breezy humour, but is also hopelessly burdened by a twee sentimentality, not least in the depiction of the far right-wing movie mogul D.W. Griffith as an avuncular gentleman who takes a shine to the prop-making prodigies. The film tries to rectify the mawk overload in the final reel with the brothers falling out and then ending up volunteering for service in the First World War, but the ship to realism or  mature pathos has sailed long before then.

5/10

Conan the Barbarian (Marcus Nispel, 2011)

As Hollywood continues to eat itself, the pickings get more and more meagre. So we've reached the stage where even the semi-palatable bits of Arnold Schwarzenegger's back catalogue are being cannibalised for any remaining returns. Conan beats the Total Recall retread to the screen and simultaneously beats all rhyme and reason too. Jason Momoa may look the part as a permascowling beefcake but manages to make Arnie look like Olivier too in terms of magnetism and command of nuance, while the chief baddie is more vindictive bank manager than the stately malevolence of James Earl Jones in the original film. Above all, there's no room for atmosphere, with a director plainly too scared of ever letting up on the action lest we realise the futility of the undertaking.

3/10

The Debt (John Madden, 2011)

A rather slapdash remake of an Israeli film of the same time, The Debt places a lot of faith in the ability of heavyweights such as Helen Mirren and Tom Wilkinson to elevate humdrum material to greater resonances, and mostly fails. The subject matter of Mossad Nazi-hunters isn't too fresh to begin with, and has been handled to more complex or visceral effect by many others, including Spielberg's Munich, and while the junior versions of the leads cope gamely with the tensions around capturing a death camp doctor in East Berlin in the '60s, the evil spiels of the villain of the piece feel recycled and the agonising of the characters in the modern day about having lied with regard to the fate of their prey is flimsy. Then, just as it seems that the finale will at least be mercifully ambivalent, it has to go action film OTT instead.

4/10

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

Malick continues to walk his own lonely road on which cutaways to sumptuous nature shots are preferred to plot development as carriers of meaning, with the human element reduced to muttered voice-over banalities addressed to some deity or other. He's getting better and worse at the same time, with each successive film: the preoccupation with the natural world is bringing more and more dividends as the images are refined, becoming the primary point of interest, while the inclusion of two-legged characters seems a concession to an audience expecting something of the sort.
The story, as far as there is one, is of a man's Texas childhood with an authoritarian father and doting mother, with the man in the present day trying to make sense of those years. It's essentially a fuzzily religious and deadly earnest video art filtration of a Stand By Me menage, book-ended by a creation of life on Earth sequence. There are some scenes where a moment of real insight into the personae does stumble out, but for the most part the film is characterised by Malick's obvious struggle with trying to crystallise his ideas while being hindered by having as little notion of timing and editing as ever. Endless shots of people walking slowly and looking somewhat discombobulated is not a failsafe formula for conveying the complexities of existence.

5/10

El secreto de sus ojos (Juan José Campanella, 2009)

Part thriller, part wistful drama, the Argentine The Secret in Their Eyes rather defies tidy classification, and is all the more rewarding for that. It revolves around a retired justice department agent who is still haunted by a murder case from 25 years back which was never properly resolved, and similarly by an unrequited attraction to his department chief from the same time. The jumping back and forth between then and now is nothing new, but works unobtrusively enough, without undue gimmickry, and the film likewise has enough confidence in its characters to avoid resorting to plot trickery or histrionics. The dialogue bristles with nous and while the need of the protagonists for closure is palpable, this is also unsentimentalised. In truth, it's not distinctive enough to have garnered quite all the plaudits it did, including the year's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, but it is a gratifyingly mature piece nevertheless.

7/10

Brighton Rock (Rowan Joffe, 2010)

The 1947 adaptation of Graham Greene's benchmark for subsequent British crime fiction may show its age badly in terms of its prurience around the nastier elements of the story and its handling of the working class, the combination resulting in a great deal of unintentional comedy for the modern viewer, and this must be a major self-justification for Joffe's update. However, Richard Attenborough as the teenage gangster Pinkie was truly chilling, and as promising an actor Sam Riley is, this version of the character is merely cold and ambitious where a real sociopath was called for. The revision of era from the '30s to the early '60s also seems pointless, beyond wedging in what else we know of Brighton besides sticks of rock and the Pier, i.e. mods and rockers, which only serves to distract from the milieu of the gangsters.
As might be expected, Joffe's film is well cast and handsomely shot. It's just difficult to see any point to it besides bringing the story up to modern sensibilities, with nothing added and, if anything, something lost in the cursory treatment of Greene's novel's references to religion.

5/10

Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011)

Lars von Trier's latest passes the Ronseal test with flying colours, as you might expect, taking little time to start shoving emotional splints under the fingernails after a faux-airy narrative opening which has already been doomed by a montage of apocalyptic images in the pre-credits sequence. The couple about to have their wedding reception at a country house may seem happy, but alarm bells start ringing when the realisation dawns that any moment of real emotional engagement between them is swept under a carpet by overemphatic displays of physical attraction. Then things turn overtly sour.
It's a film of two parts, not just explicitly but also tonally. The second part brings to the fore the device of a new planet bearing down on Earth, and once we're able to bypass the credibility gap in terms of the physics involved and see it as just a representation of the fate you really can't escape, the film takes on a quite gut-wrenchingly powerful impetus. The antagonist is a stroke of genius: rarely have characters been laid so hopeless and weak with absolutely no conceivable way out. Von Trier is the planet Melancholia, inexorably and pitilessly rolling on to crush the viewer under the weight of his depression. The quite extraordinary beauty of Manuel Alberto Claro's photography working on unsettling portentous imagery is expressly subjugated to the purpose of keeping the viewer entranced until the final cut. You will leave dazed, and that is no small feat in itself.

7/10

The Invention of Lying (Ricky Gervais & Matthew Robinson, 2009)

Ricky Gervais's U.S. film career seems to have settled in a niche of middling comedies with a fantastical twist: in Ghost Town, he alone saw the dead, and here he alone has realised how to lie. Setting Gervais's character thus apart in some way from the rest of humanity is a logical move in so much as we're never going to buy the misanthrope as warm-hearted, nor with that residual David Brent rictus grin as wholly sincere or dependable.
Nevertheless, The Invention of Lying does seem to be trying to push Gervais as a potential romcom lead in the sad puppy mould. He does the exasperation part fine, as he finds to his chagrin that his slightest overstatement is taken entirely at face value by the world at large, but his acts of philanthropy are a whole lot harder to swallow, never mind the tissue-thin set-up that never properly engages with the deeper implications of a fantasy world where somehow everything is just as it is now, bar everyone being utterly literal. It sails along pleasantly, raising a few smirks, and is then never heard of again.

5/10