Another Year (Mike Leigh, 2010)

A comfortable middle-class couple heading towards retirement are burdened with single friends and family whose lives are less happy. Of these, the nervous wreck Mary takes centre stage, a relentlessly needy and alcoholic victim, self-unaware to such an extent in her flailing that she becomes a nightmare dinner guest on the scale of the tyrannical Abigail in Leigh's best-known TV play. That she avoids becoming a similar caricature at the same time owes much to a complex portrayal by Lesley Manville, though it should be noted that none of the other characters are mere archetypes either, with the otherwise saintly hosting couple not free of an unhelpful tendency to sweep any awkward issues under the carpet. All in all, it's a mature piece on the undramatic difficulties of real life, and as such ranks amongst Leigh's best work.

7/10

O'Horten (Bent Hamer, 2007)

On the day of his retirement after 40 years of service, train driver Odd Horten gets waylaid on the way to his leaving do and goes through a series of whimsical encounters in the dead of the Oslo winter night, leading him to reevaluate his life and what he has left undone through overprudence. It's a slight story, but gently told and the stolid and perpetually bemused Horten makes a likable protagonist, a variant of Monsieur Hulot without the anarchic selfishness.

5/10

Iron Sky (Timo Vuorensola, 2012)

€7.5 million may be a hefty budget for a Scandinavian sci-fi film, which has also benefited from a heap of free online community help to make up the shortfall in technical quality compared to its big-studio competition, and Iron Sky can best be viewed as an exercise in how to wring the maximum bangs out of relatively limited bucks. Unfortunately, bangs are about all it's good for. 'Nazis from the Moon invade Earth' is a passable daft B-movie concept, and the irreverence the makers show towards all and sundry, even their own countrymen, promises harmless fun. If only it wasn't so painfully unfunny. Never mind the English and German of the film, but the language of wit is also a foreign one to the team of scriptwriters. The director and producer's previous online release, a leaden-footed and pointless pastiche of Star Trek, should probably have served as adequate warning.

3/10

Die Kommenden Tage (Lars Kraume, 2010)

The near future: the European Union has disintegrated and a wall has been erected across the Alps to keep out a tide of African immigrants, in the wake of an oil-sparked war in the Middle East. Meanwhile, on the domestic front, a group of international terrorists launches attacks to disrupt the Internet and cast the Government as a villain.
One would guess the idea was to produce a feasible dystopia, extrapolatable from the state of the world as it is now, along the lines of Children of Men. The director must certainly have talked a good game to get some solid actors onboard, including the omnipresent Daniel Brühl. The budget is a fraction of that of Alfonso Cuarón's overblown and singular monster, but that should be irrelevant when ideas rather than FX are the capital. Unfortunately, The Coming Days fails on almost every front that counts. The entourage of self-involved young Berliners is unlikable without exception, the geopolitical scenario criminally infantile and the story arc not only lifelessly flat but riven with illogicalities. It ill behoves a film so uninspired to harbour any pretensions of importance, and yet it does.

3/10

Soul Kitchen (Fatih Akin, 2009)

Fatih Akin, the Turkish-German behind hard-hitting explorations of identity and purpose such as Head-On and The Edge of Heaven, attempts a lighter tack with a simple story of a Greek-German restaurateur in Hamburg whose dreams of success founder on the rocks of his clientele's stodgy tastes, his ex-con brother's indiscretions and his own daft infatuation with a rich girl who sets him unreasonable demands. Then city officials, a gangster and ill health come in to mop up what's left. The film is hard pushed to stagger on with its feelgood tone intact after this unfeasible multiple assault. It just about manages on the strength of being so ebullient, as embodied by the merely incredulous reaction of Adam Bousdoukos's protagonist to each new misfortune where, in an Akin picture in fully existential mode, despair would be the natural response instead. Akin still can't do comedy, though, bless him.

5/10

Tie saam gok (Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark & Johnnie To, 2007)

Triangle is a comic-tinged crime pic in which three friends attempt to run off with buried antique treasure while being pursued by various other interested parties including a corrupt cop, a cheating wife and a bunch of gangsters. It's directed in half-hour chunks by a triumvirate of Hong Kong's biggest action directors, one handing over to the next. The last, Johnnie To, perhaps best known internationally for his punchy 2005 Triad thriller Election, has a lot to wrap up in the last part, which he manages with considerable panache, including a series of bizarre multiple Mexican stand-offs.
As interesting an experiment as it is, the film's shortcomings are pretty much a direct result of the multiple helmsmanship. Hark sets down far too many sub-plots in the first part and thereby lumbers the other two with the unwelcome task of having to resolve them while moving the story on, which doesn't leave much room for build-up of substance or tension. It does look rather stunning, though, having prudently kept the same cinematographer throughout.

5/10

Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)

Malick's second feature was the first to fully embody his signature style, with voice-over narrative giving cohesion to the plot, in which characters wander across a natural world teeming with life and quite indifferent to their concerns. When the characters are given dialogue, it is as artless and unforced as the lighting of the scenes. In Malick's later works, the inimitable style has become so accentuated that it often reaches the level of parody, the pace too languid, the words banal, but in Days of Heaven it was not only fresh but perfectly realised.
The presence of a young Richard Gere and his sullen pout as the nominally main character cannot detract from the luminosity of Néstor Almendros's painterly photography of endless prairie landscapes, the telling detail shots or the perfectly judged score. The story outline, of a dirt-poor itinerant worker persuading his lover to marry a wealthy farmer under false pretences, is minimal. But it's not governed by the laws of conventional story-telling: it's to be imbibed rather than dissected. For once, as Malick has always sought to achieve, all the spirituality and politics are conveyed by the mood, which is utterly hypnotic.

8/10

Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994)

I have been inclined to stave off seeing this Stone-Tarantino collaboration for a long time, suspecting an unholy marriage of sententious cant and puerile trash culture references, which would be the worst that both parties bring to the table. Yet even Stone has turned out some decent films over the years, although one now has to go back quite a way to find them. You still can't help thinking that a Stone script from yesteryear, with an actual polemic core, processed through Tarantino's superior presentational technique, would have made much more sense. As it is, the film, a sort of hypercharged black comedy run-through of Badlands, jostled along frenetically by a barrage of clips and stylistic grabs from cinematic and news history, is like a garish B-movie that tells you off for being a slave to instant gratification and moralises about violence in the media while instantly gratifying you and churning out ultraviolence. It's at once compelling and intensely irritating.

6/10

Colombiana (Olivier Megaton, 2011)

Luc Besson protege Megaton made himself into a brand when he changed his name, promising a payload of massive explosions and sledgehammer violence, and Colombiana continues along this path, investing almost totally in fighting, which is admittedly effectively realised. Attention paid to anything else is at the minimum level required to shunt the viewer from one choreographed setpiece to another, of course, the plot model picked off the rack being the 'revenge for murdered parents' one. Waifish Zoe Saldana does her best to convince as the avenging angel, managing less well when the character is encumbered with a few weepy scenes to underline her pain. I do wonder why co-writer Besson didn't help the director out with a few pointers in providing emotional content too, since Megaton's effort is just a dumber copy of his 1990 action classic Nikita.

3/10

The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom, 2010)

A remake of a 1976 adaptation of Jim Thompson's noir crime novel, Winterbottom's film adds nice photography and modern graphic violence and little else to the story of a psychotic Texan sheriff who gradually gets entangled in the web of deceit he has woven. It's a film most out of character for Winterbottom, until now a director of well-intentioned docudramas such as Welcome to Sarajevo or In This World, or entertainment with a brain, such as 24 Hour Party People or Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. You don't expect him to stoop to a remake, go gratuitous with the on-screen brutality - although for all the accusations of misogyny levelled at the film, it has to be understood that depicting a woman-hating sadist is not the same as condoning one - or put Jessica Alba in a film. Casey Affleck does put in an unsettling performance as the softly-spoken killer, but it also feels a less nuanced recycling of his character in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Winterbottom clearly wants to make a serious point about the casualness with which film too often treats real brutality. It's just that here the touch is too heavy-handed.

5/10