The Recruit (Roger Donaldson, 2003)

Basically seeking to replicate the passing of the baton from Robert Redford to Brad Pitt in Spy Game, The Recruit has Al Pacino showing Colin Farrell the CIA ropes in a thriller which passes muster in the first half, involving spy-school training, a safe area for a scriptwriter in that espionnage jargon and running through the tricks of the trade can be chucked in as plot, and then seems to get bored with itself once it inevitably turns on the full thriller mode, with moles and car chases. Bringing in these signallers of high excitement is fine, and in fact helpful of the director, as the viewer is likely to have got stricken with ennui around the same time.

4/10

The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)

Orson Welles's follow-up to Citizen Kane comes to us today as one of the most studio-mutilated works of a major director ever, and to an extent it's easy to see where content has been crudely torn out or scenes refilmed to make them more sentimentally palatable to test audiences. Still, it's routinely cited as one of the masterpieces of American cinema, even in its compromised form, and so begs analysis as to what substance there is to it.
In a nutshell, it's the story of the decline of an old power family, an embodiment of American aristocracy, proving itself unable as the twentieth century begins to adapt to new technology, as represented by the arrival of the automobile, and new values, with the new money car maker seeking to marry the family's widowed matriarch and her son being unable to accept this. But one idea does not an epic make. It hangs massively on the character of the first-born scion of the dynasty, who is a ridiculously arrogant little prick, and should at least have been given a few redeeming characteristics for the sake of complexity, if nothing else. So the family goes down the toilet because of his whims instead of societal change, which surely can't have been Welles's intention.

5/10

Bunny Lake Is Missing (Otto Preminger, 1965)

An American woman, just arrived in London, goes to pick up her daughter from her first day at a kindergarten to discover she's missing and in time-tested psychological thriller fashion, everyone seems wilfully reluctant to help or even acknowledge her distress. Laurence Olivier comes in as an arch police superintendent to investigate the case, and is soon developing doubts about the existence of the girl in the face of the mother's womanly hysterics.
If the premise sounds familiar, it's been used in recent years in The Forgotten and Flightplan, to name two. Bunny Lake Is Missing is substantially superior to either, by virtue of a great supporting cast of creepy eccentrics, Noel Coward's unctuous pervert landlord the stand-out turn of the lot, and smart dialogue distributed amongst them all. A pity, then, that the finale feels so out of kilter: the twist is wholly illogical in terms of characters established so far and its camp execution a badly dated mark of modish '60s far-outness.

6/10

Shiqi sui de dan che (Xiaoshuai Wang, 2001)

Beijing Bicycle tells the story of a boy from the countryside who becomes a bicycle courier in Beijing, toiling away to make the company bicycle his own property until it's stolen by a schoolboy his age whose family is too poor to afford one. The film is essentially about the bicycle itself, as a means of livelihood to one and as a must-have peer group accessory for the other, and consequently the whole story revolves around the courier's attempts to retrieve his vital work tool.
The bicycle attains a larger-than-life status as a symbol of a whole host of things, even down to being a critical factor in relations with the opposite sex in Chinese society, which is an intriguing angle. But the courier's unwavering passivity means he never defends himself against those who take advantage of him, and the schoolboy in turn is just a self-pitying weasel, so ultimately it's hard to sympathise with either protagonist. The director gets lost in arousing pity at the cost of making sense.

5/10

The Navigators (Ken Loach, 2001)

The firebrand gets his teeth into the subject of rail privatisation, from his customary bottom-rung angle. A railway maintenance crew find job security swept out from under their feet when their organisation is privatised and carved up. The workers' mockery of the modish buzz-speak inflicted on them soon turns to disbelief and frustration as corners are cut and long-standing worker rights abused in the new drive to outcompete their former colleagues.
At one point, one of the characters is given a brief speech criticising the laxity of the working atmosphere as it used to be, but this seems tokenistic on the part of the director and writer, and that's fair enough: they make a convincing attack on the revised status quo utilising the double prongs of clearly informed verisimilitude - it might almost be a fly-on-the-wall documentary - and black humour at junctures exposing the farcical and half-baked application of new working practices by the befuddled management. It is a full-blooded polemic, of course, but there is an art to distilling so much prosaic reality into compelling drama.

7/10

Omar m'a tuer (Roschdy Zem, 2011)

Based on the true and sadly ongoing saga of the persecution of Moroccan immigrant Omar Raddad by the French judicial system, Omar m'a tuer (literally, 'Omar to kill me', which is significant in the plot) is the second feature by the actor Roschdy Zem, perhaps best known for his role in the war drama Indigènes. Considering he also has Moroccan roots, the tyro director manages to contain his rage at the travesty of the story with admirable discipline. The accumulation of instances of evidence mislaid or bent, proper procedure disregarded and suppositions taken as fact by the authorities seeking to pin the murder of a wealthy white woman on her naive and illiterate Arab gardener beggars belief. The directorial approach to this is as cool-headed as outrage will allow, also extending to the understated performance of the accused, and if this results in some longeurs in the telling, it's a price worth paying when the actual priority is to try to effect change in the real world.

6/10

Tell-Tale (Michael Cuesta, 2009)

A heart transplant patient begins to suffer flashbacks to the last moments of the organ's previous owner and is impelled to seek out the donor's killers and wreak vengeance. Thus the basic concept of the Pang brothers' 2002 horror hit The Eye, already premasticated for US consumption in 2008 and cannibalised freely by numerous other films, is wheeled out yet again and jump-started back to life, sputtering with confusion. The director may think he's pulled the wool over the retreading police's eyes by having the title allude to Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Tell-Tale Heart, in which a murderer is driven to confess by a belief that the victim's heart beats on, a symbol of guilt, but the similarity ends there and fumbling attempts to say something about the ethics of euthanasia are quite scuppered by a salacious championing of vigilantism. A botched operation altogether.

4/10

Raining Stones (Ken Loach, 1993)

Hapless unemployed family man Bob stumbles from one paltry scam to another in a desperate attempt to scrape enough money together for his daughter's first communion. This being baseline Loach, the outlook is poor and misfortunes will come in droves. You can't fault the director for his honesty and indignation, but they do tend to detract from the drama, by sheer dint of making the chain of events rather predictable, i.e. going from bad to worse, with the supporting turn by the omnipresent Ricky Tomlinson adding the usual instances of earthy humour but not allowed to deflect the downward trajectory. Still, it's nice that Loach restrains himself from shooting fish in a barrel with the giant target of the Catholic church, Bob more a victim of his own subservience to it than the indoctrination of the institution itself, his half-cooked schemes similarly the main cause of his downfall above and beyond crippling societal circumstances, which are usually Loach's primum mobile for all evil. The plot also veers away from pat determinism in the end, good being as likely to transpire as bad given enough time.

6/10

Tehroun (Nader T. Homayoun, 2009)

Depicting the harsh reality of a hand-to-mouth urban existence in Iran, with lives quite at odds with the orthodox image of the country, is enough in itself to lend interest to Homayoun's film, at least from the perspective of the western viewer. However, Tehroun manages perfectly well as a drama without any such qualifier. The basic plot of a man down on his luck and trying to keep the loan shark who he's heavily in debt to off his back is nothing novel, but the slow reveal of the particulars of his situation is handled with assurance, pacing out the pivotal points with thought-out economy. Furthermore, beyond the fact that the director had to pretend he was making a documentary to get the film past the censors, the intent really is to document and not to entertain, the director resisting the urge to get vicarious or melodramatic with the crime or human interest angles.

6/10

Kika (Pedro Almodóvar, 1993)

Almodóvar's style has settled down in more recent years, and while the results can still be audacious or mischievous forced marriages of clashing elements, he no longer tries to cram in every eclectic idea possible as if he were living out his last day. Kika is still very much of that mindset, though. It revolves a bubble-headed cosmetologist, a sinister novelist, a murder-exploitation TV show presenter and a priapic ex-porn star who's broken out of prison, with a supporting cast each endowed with personalised pecularities. Almodóvar's script methodology largely consists of clattering them like pebbles against each other and recording the resulting sparks.
You can be exasperated by such a blase disregard for the conventions of cinematic construction or disinterest in having a moral centre or relish the resultant jumble for the pearls of repartee or set-piece it throws up, and what pearls they are sometimes. For example, when one woman tells another about having submitted to incest with her sub-normal brother to preserve the neighbours from his carnal urges. The irresistible humour springs from Almodóvar's matter-of-fact handling of such notions. He may try too hard to discomfit in these early pieces, like a naughty schoolboy, and sometimes the plot is just an afterthought, which is pretty much the case here too, but it is fun.

6/10

The Resident (Antti Jokinen, 2011)

Hilary Swank stars as a doctor who moves into a new flat and slowly becomes aware of her landlord's unhinged infatuation with her. The scenes of him spying on her through numerous holes in walls are straight out of Psycho, except that nothing is left to the imagination as regards his identity or motives, and the camera lingers in a more seedily prurient way than we ever see him do until he totally loses the plot and comes clean as a standard rejected ogre. Then it's time for the formula slasher finale, which doesn't even manage tension. The director's background is in pop videos and that's clearly where he should have stayed.

3/10

Repo Men (Miguel Sapochnik, 2010)

Dear oh dear. It's not that you'd expect Jude Law to have the sense to avoid generic dystopian sci-fi product, but decent actor Forest Whitaker's decision to take part makes you wonder whether his appearance in Battlefield Earth was actually deadly earnest. Repo Men is assembled in a workmanlike fashion, and that's about all. Having the characters watch the Monty Python organ donor sketch at one point is a shoddy excuse for making a whole unfunny film out of it, with legally sanctioned agents murdering members of the public who have received organs and then defaulted on their payments. It tries charmlessly and cynically to have a foot in both the black humour and political critique camps, while pandering to aficionados of gratuitous blood and guts. The pace is Michael Bay, the principal characters have no chemistry at all, their motivations and Damascene conversions embarrassingly nonsensical, the imaging of the future is straight off the shelf and the script is similarly wholly devoid of original thought and logic. The final insult is added when the writers go back to the scene of their theft from the Python camp to steal the entire ending of Brazil. Even Equilibrium was better than this, and Lord knows that was shit.

2/10

The Runaways (Floria Sigismondi, 2010)

Rock biopics most often live or die on the strength and longevity of the music of their subjects, and this is a problem right from the outset in this case. The Runaways were a proto-Riot Grrrl band in late Seventies America who were doubtless influential for their lairy trailblazing, but have left no musical legacy, at least on this side of the pond, beyond founder member Joan Jett's one international hit during her later solo career. The songs are Sex Pistols performed by a Suzi Quatro with teenage anger-management issues, and nowhere near as good as either of those influences.
But then Andy Warhol was an artist in name only, and yet still worthy of a retrospective simply for the circus built up around him, and so it is with these protagonists. The film does realise that the point of interest is the phenomenon and not the creation, and handles the vicissitudes of an exploitative industry and the damage wreaked on girls ill-equipped to handle the whole rock star package with an assured touch, but there's really little to detain the casual passer-by.

5/10

Na kometě (Karel Zeman, 1970)

The Czechs do absurdist fantasy unlike anyone else, stamped through like a stick of rock with a tone that often manages a sense of delight without stumbling into inanity and underlying cynicism without turning morose. The darkly comic output of Jan Svankmajer would perhaps be the internationally best-known of the lot, but he's by no means alone. When veteran animator-director Zeman turned to adapt one of Jules Verne's particularly whimsical works for the screen, the outcome was foreseeable, and so it proves. Off on a Comet, featuring an assortment of posturing colonial-era factions making war on each other on a piece of North Africa knocked into space by a comet, is a visual feast, the style Python-era Terry Gilliam laced with Lotte Reiniger arabesque trimmings. It is also utterly daft and throwaway, with scant regard for logic or continuity, plasticine dinosaurs being the least of its follies. Along the way it slips in as many anti-imperialist statements as the communist censor will allow. Decent stuff for kids who can read subtitles, then.

5/10

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2010)

Shaun of the Dead helmsman Wright tries his hand at the Transatlantic college slacker comedy and the result is enough of a smorgasbord to garner cult status, which is rather often another way of saying that a film is an idiosyncratic mess delivered with conviction. Michael Cera of Juno and Superbad fame is once more a smart-alec twerp with self-generated girlfriend trouble, which is stepped up a gear when  it's decreed that he has to vanquish his desired squeeze's seven exes mano a mano. The consequent duels then take up most of the rest of the film, in an easily scriptable Street Fighter video game format, naturally caked in oodles of FX. It may be the computer geekiest movie ever made, and quite brazenly happy with its inanity. It also wears its ADHD affliction with pride, and this runs all the way through the dialogue as well, which consists of relentless verbal jousting with cheesy cameo stars like Chris Evans and Brandon Routh. All this would probably stack up to just cause for murder if it wasn't so good-natured.

5/10

Gangster No. 1 (Paul McGuigan, 2000)

A host of cultish English actors essay cockernee accents and test out their hard man snarls as two gangs lock horns in 1960s London. Not that we see much of what dodgy dealings their businesses are built on: the focus is mostly on Paul Bettany's psycho aspiring to the crown and the subsequent unravelling of his kingdom. In the manner of an insecure teenager believing a foul mouth proof of manhood, it goes totally overboard on the f- and c-counts and takes a worryingly deep interest in ultraviolence. And yet, once it has thereby established its deadly serious 'gritty and brutal' credentials, it seems to feel apologetic and swings towards a surprisingly mature ending, with Malcolm McDowell as the gone-to-seed older version of the upstart finally losing the plot in a non-formulaic way that isn't even hammy, which is a rarity for the actor. A very mixed bag.

5/10

Barney's Version (Richard J. Lewis, 2010)

Weighty novels and their film derivatives centred around the chequered life stories of misanthropic men looking back from middle age are generally to be approached with caution: the central figure is too often the author himself thinly veiled, only injected with greater spending power and off-the cuff wit, and supplied with improbably alluring women to boot. But when Paul Giamatti is the misanthrope in question, a lot becomes forgivable. He may not be stretched here in Sideways mode as Barney Panofsky, boozy and philandering eternal kid, alternately snapping and schmoozing his way over forty years, but he's never less than compelling to watch. True, he is used as a Trojan horse for some pretty schmaltzy content in places, but as the tone darkens from comedy to elegiac drama, his performance is a steadfast core to hold onto.

6/10

Baaria (Giuseppe Tornatore, 2009)

Tornatore, much feted for his affectionate portrait of the magical and formative effect of films on a young boy's imagination in 1988's Cinema Paradiso, which could not have been far from autobiography, goes the whole hog in attempting to tell the tale of his Sicilian home town across three generations of a single family. The film moves from the fascist years to the rise of communism as a beacon for the abused peasantry before ending up with a start in a chaotic modern day.
You can see nods to and borrowings from Fellini and Bertolucci in equal measure, amongst others, and fantastical interludes are called in to serve as milestones of import in a hefty 150 minutes that still however manages periodically to leap between decades too quickly like a casual tourist of eras, driven on by a customarily sweeping score from Ennio Morricone that he could quite easily have put together in an afternoon from unused scraps of The Legend of 1900 or Once Upon a Time in America.
It is sweet in places and there are neat background features which vary tellingly to mark the passage of time. It's just too sugary to engage the emotions with any great force. And if I see any more cheeky wide-eyed scamps touting for audience indulgence in Italian films, I'll scweam.

4/10

Kairo (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001)

Pulse walks in the footsteps of the more explicitly horror-centred Ring from three years before, but with its attention only intermittently on where it's going. You can see that as its cast of reclusive youths  struggle to articulate feelings of loneliness before succumbing to a supernaturally driven impulse to commit suicide, which takes over society en masse without explanation, that the director is trying to say something about modern alienation as a private nemesis to distinguish the film from the ranks of apocalyptic cinema. But it's too fuzzily thought out to support much of a message, and the appearances of foreboding spirits from the beyond and technology providing a portal to doom are uninspired plunderings from Hideo Nakata's benchmark hair-raiser.

4/10

Obicni Ljudi (Vladimir Perisic, 2009)

Ordinary People treads gingerly along the long path towards Serbian self-critique of the Bosnian war and the atrocities they committed, fearful of provoking lynching parties back home for just touching the subject. It's understandable, of course, being the first of its kind, but this stifles the authorial voice too and so most of the running time passes in dialogueless long takes. On one hand, this means that it can say nothing explicit about the actions and emotions of the uninformed firing squad that we follow as they are directed to shoot civilians in some deserted village. However, on the other, the concomitant lack of preaching and exposition are truly refreshing, even if this was just the result of directorial self-censorship. The soldiers reluctantly following unexplained orders become universal figures of sorts, and this absolves the film to an extent of the obligation to express overt outrage.

6/10

The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012)

Nolan's Batman trilogy ends as mega-budget franchise series are obligated to do these days, namely by upping the budget still further and spending the bulk of it on FX and explosives, accommodated by bloating the running time and chucking in additional cliffhangers.
If Nolan wasn't the director of the complex and beguiling Memento, it would by now be hard to separate his output from the work of a number of efficient high-octane action handlers of the ilk of John McTiernan or James Cameron. But he is, and you will sit through a Nolan film on the lookout for more cerebral elements whilst already having adjusted your critical filter to superhero adaptation mode. For Nolan's work to be feted as it is, it shouldn't require either of these indulgences on the viewer's part. As with the second instalment, The Dark Knight Rises should work as visceral and atmospheric drama without needing daft genre-based allowances. But, as with The Dark Knight, it too often doesn't.
There's no enigmatic volatile element in the form of Heath Ledger's Joker to legerdemain the film out of trouble this time: the steroidal Bane with his muzzle mask, standard-issue psychopathy and generic henchman army, and the rudimentary nuclear bomb-stopping plot are inadequate substitutes. Michael Caine wanders in a number of times to deliver tearful variations on the 'stop moping' speech and Morgan Freeman's avuncular scenes are mostly just recyclings of ones from the first two films. Perhaps surprisingly, Anne Hathaway actually makes a far from insipid Catwoman, but her character motivations are as sketchily realised as the logic of the later stages in the plot, holes starting to prevail over fabric.
There are still rewards for continuing to watch with certain stand-out confrontations and lines, and the very end is tonally more thoughtfully conceived than the lead-up to it, albeit that this is an underhanded trick to play just before you walk out of the cinema  In short, it could have been epic, but for want of ruthless script editing ends up an ungainly folly. It is to be hoped that Nolan will finally want to turn down the volume after this. Whether the lure of the studio dollar will let him is another matter.

5/10