Centurion (Neil Marshall, 2010)

The sword-and-sandal revival trudges on like a tired legionnaire in the wake of the success of Gladiator back in 2000, with TV series mostly going for backstabbing soap operas with forced modern political parallels while movies centre on hack-and-slash action. Centurion managed to nab the story of the Ninth Roman Legion annihilated by native Britons before the following year's The Eagle, but both are rather unsatisfactory exercises that understretch a fine cast, this one squandering the likes of Michael Fassbender, David Morrissey and Ulrich Thomsen. You can see both the budgetary and local appeal of setting a Roman epic in Britain, and the landscapes are impressively utilised, but the battles are a poor cousin of their Gladiator counterparts, inviting unwelcome comparison through using a similar multiple-frame rate filming technique of the plentiful gore on show, while the story and characterisations themselves have little meat on them.

4/10

Zwart Water (Elbert van Strien, 2010)

A mild Dutch haunted house film of the common garden variety, Two Eyes Staring has a family move into an inherited country mansion which turns out to be a repository for buried events in the mother's family history, manifesting as ghostly visitations to her daughter. The film is tidily shot and well cast, but manages little sense of menace as the wheels begin to fall off the narrative logic of the plot, and musters no more originality than its Hollywood slasher cousins for all its psychological aspirations.

4/10

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

Much panned by Hergé aficionados for the cardinal sin of not being the comic books of their childhood, Spielberg's effort is actually a rather successful one until the plot settles into a sanitised Raiders of the Lost Ark non-stop chase groove, complete with motorcycle sidecars and Arabic markets to trash. The motion capture is fluid and the renditions of the characters' faces nicely perched halfway between their cartoon versions and real people, with a painstaking amount of attention paid to incidental period details and object textures around them as well. The dialogue, the fruit of the loving labours of the Moffat/Wright/Cornish partnership, is also crisp and humorous in the fashion of the books, supported by solid voice casting, Andy Serkis's Captain Haddock being a particular treat. If it feels lacking in substance, this is probably just because you haven't read the books since you were 11 years old.

6/10

The Thing (Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., 2011)

The concepts of cult horror films do indeed not grow on trees, and the director of this reprocessing of the 1982 John Carpenter classic must have thought he'd hit on a brainwave when he realised that this could actually be sold as a prequel, with the original allowing plenty of room for a lead-up story, rather than just another tawdry remake. Regrettably he then wastes the licence afforded by duplicating the storyline virtually scene by scene, including the one where the beleaguered party has to devise some kind of test to separate the bogeymen from the good guys. It soon gets too frantic, as is the tendency with remakes, with characters we have scarcely met dying in droves and an abundance of digital FX monstrosities diluting rather than complementing the fear. The film's principal merit ends up being linking to the original pretty seamlessly, with no glaring continuity errors, which is a rather modest achievement and hardly worth box office business in itself.

4/10

Chronicle (Josh Trank, 2012)

Three teens find a strange object in the woods and subsequently begin exhibiting an increasing range of superpowers. However, the tone in the set-up is tense enough that it comes as no wonder that the one of them who is a bullied social outcast at the beginning is the one who starts abusing his powers.
What distinguishes Chronicle from the horde of superhero films is not that it shows the individuals with suddenly vastly expanded possibilities as imperfect or troubled, but rather implies that power corrupts, and that corrosion of the mind increases with enhancement of the body. No masterpiece, this, but maybe for teens with testosteronal delusions, a healthy antidote to the usual chest-beating positivity of the genre.

6/10

Une Vie de Chat (Jean-Loup Felicioli & Alain Gagnol, 2010)

A Parisian cat is a burglar's partner by night and a little girl's pet by day. When the girl falls into the clutches of a bunch of gangsters, the burglar decides to come to her aid. The simple storyline of A Cat in Paris is just about enough to sustain the 70-minute running time and the nocturnal Parisian backdrops are luminously painted. But the characters themselves are positively dull, sloppily and unappealingly drawn, including the cat itself. It'll do for undemanding young children but there's little for an adult audience here when compared to the best examples of the genre, such as the work of Sylvain Chomet.

4/10

Barbara (Christian Petzold, 2012)

Barbara, a doctor from Berlin, arrives in a provincial East German town in 1980, banished for some slight against the authorities and now continually harassed by the Stasi. She cuts a spikily guarded and nervous figure at first, until a doctor and a troubled young patient at her new hospital begin to melt her barriers. Nevertheless, all the while she is plotting to escape to the West with the aid of her wealthy lover on the other side.
Barbara is a solid accompaniment to the other internationally successful film of recent years about the oppressiveness of the DDR regime, The Lives of Others, but very much its own creature. While the eventual softening of the main protagonist and denouement may be foreseeable, the route there is roundabout and takes unexpected turns, with the dialogue in the interplay between the two doctors in particular laced with a fine subtext and numerous scenes making subtle allusions to larger themes. Nina Hoss is also excellent as the lead, understatedly emoting the pain within.

8/10

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (Guy Ritchie, 2011)

Ritchie's sequel takes up the story with more of the same blend of comically tinged derring-do and improbable deductions, and it seems that after years of being ridiculed for his mockney gangster business, Ritchie has finally found his niche. It's much the same film as the first, even if there's a Moriarty lurking about, but this is no bad thing, since it ensures a rather stunningly realised Victorian London and crisp use of the Holmes bullet time technique. The chemistry is also nice between the fidgety Downey Jr. and Jude Law, who on showings like this is much better as a comic sidekick than as a stiff dramatic lead. There's far too much explosive action for Rathbone traditionalists, of course, but it rolls along entertainingly all the same.

6/10

The Dictator (Larry Charles, 2012)

The good call The Dictator makes is to give up on the device of Sacha Baron Cohen's faux-naif persona, duping members of the public, which was clearly running out of mileage even before Brüno. So one hand hand we do get a more standard comedy. On the other, the plot arc is exactly the same as before, with the title character arriving in America, ending up on the skids and then working to an epiphany of sorts. The problem here is two-fold: the deposed Third World despot is just not that funny a character, with the innate warmth of Baron Cohen's first few creations replaced by tasteless callousness and swearing, and there isn't nearly enough satire considering the wealth of real-world sociopathic buffoons that there is to draw from. A sprinkling of bon mots does not generate enough mirth to elevate the film to satisfying entertainment.

4/10

The Divide (Xavier Gens, 2011)

Armageddon days are here again and an assortment of characters find themselves stuck together in a cellar to weather the storm. As per regulations, there's the tough bastard, the sleazebags, the coward and the woman who has a nervous breakdown. The one thing they do all have in common is being thoroughly self-interested and as they lose the plot and go for each other while slowly dying of radiation, you really wish they'd just get on with it.

3/10

Avengers Assemble (Joss Whedon, 2012)

Chucking together the biggest superhero money-spinners that Sony hasn't managed to get its paws on and that comics had at least set the groundwork for in terms of background, Avengers Assemble promises much in the way of rollercoaster thrills and certainly delivers on an FX level, with a few character interaction interludes in the midst of the fray gamely trying to tie all the disparate personages together and give them all individual agendas. What the film really fails to do, though, with three demigod-powered types amongst a band of mere mortals, is convincingly give the lesser ones much of interest to contribute as Earth gets invaded by an army of aliens. The impending sequel will have to deal with the same problem and will probably also fail in the attempt.

5/10