Celebrity (Woody Allen, 1998)

Allen's loyal fans would no doubt take refuge behind the adage that you should write about what you know, but the more one is exposed to the creative barrenness of the repeated masturbatory exercises since his golden period in the '70s, the more one has to question the validity of the maxim. Celebrity is a particularly feeble example since Allen will always put himself centre stage, even more so when he's not in the film himself, and not only one but both of the main characters here, a divorced couple going through a succession of rough patches following their separation, are the screen Allen: stuttering, neurotic, cowardly and yet somehow able to pull above their station. The Kenneth Branagh one is even a frustrated writer and the mind boggles at what briefing the director will have given him as he produces a duplicate of the screen Allen down to every verbal tic and weaselly evasion.
As always, there are enough throwaway one-liners to keep things pleasant, but to what purpose when the film purports to be about the vacuity of celebrity and then proceeds to feed off cramming in as many recognisable faces as possible, a blatant smokescreen for having nothing new to say? The film proves he was already a spent force in 1998, and all the yearly reiterations since then have hardly proved otherwise.

4/10

Gangster Squad (Ruben Fleischer, 2013)

The proudly infantile title of the film already helpfully serves notice of its mission, i.e. that baddies will be mown down with no airy-fairy pandering to due process or interference from tedious legal scenes or moralising, which seem to have been obvious flaws in its precursor The Untouchables, along with its lack of bullet-time interludes. Abandon all hope of subtlety or historicity, ye who enter here.
Hollywood's retreads of the golden era of cops vs. mobsters have fewer pretensions of originality with each new visit: the team of heroes is composed of the unflaggingly virtuous leader, the ladies' man, the sharp-shooter, the brainy little one, the loyal Hispanic and the black knife-thrower, with the sole female characters the supportive wife who wants her husband to give up and stay alive, and the gangster's moll who converts. Expectations cannot be high but Gangster Squad nevertheless manages to confound what little there are by going beyond the call of duty in ransacking noirs for dialogue and scenes to even start stealing shots from outside the gangster genre, from the likes of Sunset Boulevard. This crosses the line and is the point at which any credit the makers have accrued by slaving over fresh gumshoe quips must run out.
On a side note, Josh Brolin, who plays the lead looking like Dick Tracy drawn with an etch-a-sketch and with about as much emotional range, will soon be seen in Spike Lee's systematic rape of the classic Oldboy. Please revoke his Screen Actors Guild card now, before any more harm is done.

4/10

War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

Boy finds horse, boy loses horse, horse finds boy again. Meanwhile, in the background, several million Europeans kill each other. If this is a brutal reduction of Spielberg's attempt to relate man's inhumanity to man through man's inhumanity to animal, it's his own fault. The execution may be as impressive as ever in set pieces such as the cavalry charge or the panicked flight of the horse across the battlefield, but the story is chaff, with little more substance than a drawn-out Lassie film as the anthropomorphicised beastie brings nice people from all sides together while cartoonish villains scowl at them from the wings. Spielberg the director is getting to be ready for the knacker's yard on this evidence.

5/10

John Carter (Andrew Stanton, 2012)

While the John Carter novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, published a century ago, have had an enormous influence on film science fiction from Buck Rogers through to Superman and Star Wars, it's not a little disappointing that when the original character finally hits the big screen, it's to such underwhelming effect and feels like a poor Boy's Own derivative of all its successors. Even if it doesn't have the dramatic potential of Burroughs's Tarzan, the story of the Confederate cavalryman who enters a cave and finds himself on Mars with monstrous beings and arcane technology deserves more than the overlong bombardment of CGI that is provided here. Just playing up the campness a la Flash Gordon would have done.
The film is even populated by a wealth of decent actors, not that you'd know as nearly all of them are just voices for unimaginatively realised aliens, which leaves few bared but the hero and heroine, who unfortunately have all the charisma of holiday reps. Maybe more could not have been expected of a Disney production, but it's funny to think that the director's last job was WALL-E, which was ostensibly even more child-friendly and with two robots who couldn't talk as the leads, and yet managed infinitely more substance and emotional engagement than this painfully dull budget-burner.

3/10

The Impossible (Juan Antonio Bayona, 2012)

Based on the story of a Spanish family who were holidaying in Thailand when the 2004 tsunami hit, The Impossible changes the nationality of the leads to a more marketable British and makes sure that certain emotional cliffhangers are hit on cue. It does start very impressively, with loaded Malick/Roeg-like nature cutaways, then conveying the full horrific force of the wave as it overturns the world and awing with the depiction of the resulting ruin. But it runs out of impetus as the threat recedes and the separated survivors stumble about looking credibly the worse for wear, to be sure, but nevertheless too indulged by serendipity and supporting characters who give way to their star status for us to really worry about what will happen to them. And while the regulation-angelic and plucky child actors could be far worse, Ewan McGregor produces one of those turns again where it seems like he's constantly reminding himself which emotion to try to project at any given moment rather than actually filling the role.

5/10

Burke and Hare (John Landis, 2010)

Ealing Studios has been making films under its own name again for over a decade, albeit quietly, as if not wanting to draw comparison with the productions of its heyday. But when a film styles itself so much on The Ladykillers and drafts in John Landis to direct for the first time in a dozen years too, parallels will be raised.
Burke and Hare does not stack up well against either its Ealing forebears or Landis's distant peak period: while Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis are as likable as ever as the cheeky corpse-trading murderers, and the supporting cast is a diverting I-Spy line-up of British comedy names, the setpieces are rather tired and the tone frequently lurches worryingly from the safe Shaun of the Dead environment towards Carry On territory instead. It's not an atrocity on the level of so many British comedies built around TV stars in that it does manage to raise a few chuckles, but neither is it fully alive on arrival.

4/10

The Descendants (Alexander Payne, 2011)

A man forced to do some soul-searching and learn to single-parent two children while his wife lies in a terminal coma is potentially the essence of a maelstrom of schmaltz, and it is really tempting fate to have him played by George Clooney, who one is hard pushed to see as a victim, place a matter of millions in his pocket for material reassurance and then make Hawaii the setting.
But thankfully this is a film with Alexander Payne at the wheel. It isn't out of place at all in his panoply alongside Election, About Schmidt and Sideways, all of which accommodate lightness without bruising the inherent pathos. Scenes made of stock ingredients convey uncommon complexity and yet do not bludgeon the audience with the message, and the numerous traps through which films like this normally fall into proselytising or tweeness are deftly sidestepped. Yes, there are a few forced metaphors and pat elisions present too, but it is a real strength that the Clooney here is not the smirking charmer, the grizzled leader or the earnest frowner, but just a rather uncertain and small man who doesn't have all the answers or indeed a firm moral compass, and thereby turns in his most mature performance so far. I can't wait to see what Payne has done with Bruce Dern in Nebraska.

7/10

Argo (Ben Affleck, 2012)

Given the ongoing political friction between the U.S. and Iran, the decision of Affleck to tackle part of the events of the hostage crisis that took place in the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolution may be seen either as bold or foolhardy. It is fine that an actor whose image took a merciless and justified battering in the period which included calamities such as Pearl Harbor or Gigli did not lie down and curl up, but for all the plaudits this piece garnered at the Oscars, I remain unconvinced of his directorial merits.
The story is basically a tweaked version of a rescue attempt of six stranded diplomats by a CIA operatives involving him flying in to disguise them as fake filmmakers. It functions fine as light entertainment with a few hairy moments, and this is pretty much the crux of the problem. There is chipper banter between the hero's Hollywood collaborators, all the Iranians are furiously suspicious with bulging eyes and a completely fabricated chase finale is tagged on too, in an apparent belief that the audiences will simply not have an appetite for the less dramatic real story. It may be well-made and even well-intentioned, but it is still commercially compromised tosh nevertheless.

5/10

Now You See Me (Louis Leterrier, 2013)

Magicians in movies will always prove popular, as audiences love to be bamboozled and a film will be able to do that to double the effect with cuts, reverses and FX. This, however, reduces the efficacy of the illusions on show as we are aware that everything can be cheated, without any real ingenuity. There are decent movies centered around magicians and their craft, but Now You See Me is not one of them. Four illusionists robbing banks is an amusing idea, and it diverts for a while, but providing explanations for some of the tricks while pulling off completely unfeasible ones which would only work with a filmic toolkit at the same time is just irritating. The denouement is also very worn out. Now you'll see it.

4/10

Das Schloß (Michael Haneke, 1997)

Haneke's TV adaptation of Kafka's unfinished novel The Castle is in some ways the happy marriage of two unhappy artists, the Austrian director having demonstrated many of the same preoccupations throughout his career as the Austro-Hungarian writer did: deep pessimism at man's random inhumanity to man, the oppressive power of unquestioned orthodoxy and a sense of the absurdity of the world. So the end result of the union feels at once Kafka's voice made celluloid and Haneke's hand on the tiller, with no conflict between the two presences. Whether it works as a whole is quite another matter, and the conclusion has to be that it doesn't.
The protagonist is Ulrich Mühe, who arrives in a snowbound town, expecting to take up a position as a land surveyor, and instead finds himself trapped by unfathomable levels of bureaucracy and societal pettiness. The actor is not at fault, but this time the everyman does not speak to us enough: his actions are frequently as irrational or spiteful as everyone else's, something that Josef K. in the closely akin The Trial was not prone to. It reduces the power of our indignation at the ludicrous system portrayed when everyone on screen is acting sans marbles. And then, after several hours of going around in circles, the film ends midway through a scene because that's where the novel was cut short, which does rather make you wonder what the point of the exercise was. It never is an easy ride with Haneke, but this just feels wilful.

5/10

Le Week-End (Roger Michell, 2013)

The Notting Hill director takes on a Hanif Kureishi screenplay, so the expected synthesis might be middle-class feelgood fare with a maladroit political subtext struggling to get through the gloop. This is partially indeed the case, with the story of a middle-aged couple on a weekender trip to Paris, trying to rekindle their relationship. It's initially not much more than a cosy travelogue, with Kureishi's contribution seeming to be to make the wife erratically vitriolic in the middle of the bonhomie. The film's saving graces are the enduring appeal of Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan as the couple, and rather surprisingly the appearance of Jeff Goldblum in a prolonged cameo in one of his turns as a boggle-eyed motormouth, which is always uncomfortably close to what you suspect the actor actually is. Here, however, it works to bring our sympathies back on the side of the somewhat feckless pair as there's no doubt that whatever delusions they have, they're small potatoes compared to those of their pontificating friend.

6/10

The Host (Andrew Niccol, 2013)

It seems an awfully long time since Niccol appeared bearing impressive offerings in the shape of Gattaca and The Truman Show, although taking on board an adaptation of another supernatural potboiler from the writer of Twilight is hardly any way to get your career back on track. Saoirse Ronan squeaks and gawps with wonder in her eyes more annoyingly than ever as the heroine, who, like most of mankind, is now occupied by an alien lifeform, though it goes without saying that she gets the one benign invader out of the lot of them. The concept is not without promise, but the combination of trite ponderings and duff casting makes the end product complete twaddle from start to finish.

3/10

Dead Man Down (Niels Arden Oplev, 2013)

The star of the original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is reunited with that film's director, having earned the right to do Hollywood through its success, but this is much less interesting fare. Noomi Rapace is a woman disfigured in a car accident who discovers that her neighbour is a contract killer and threatens to expose him so that he'll get rid of the man who caused her injury. As the hitman is Colin Farrell, we are on well-trodden ground and naturally he is a brooding piece of damaged goods too, with his own revenge mission. An eventual falling for each other is of course on the cards, but not before the script has rather tiresomely hopped between extreme violence and musings on dealing with loss for two long hours.

4/10

City of Life (Ali F. Mostafa, 2009)

The title seems to be meant in earnest, as if what we're seeing is the richness of human existence rather than what Dubai certainly comes across as in this film, namely a soulless pile of steel and glass, populated by shits preying on the weak. The intersecting-ensemble template is directly stolen from Crash or Amores Perros, to name a few of its most recent adopters, and the primary job of the director and writers is to populate that framework with events and characters which work as moments of revelation.
City of Life fails badly in relation to its remit for because of three principal factors: many of the multinational cast intended to represent a cross-section of Dubai society can hardly act, the dialogue and scene tone swings between lifeless and melodramatic like a pendulum, and character developments and events are signposted miles in advance. Nor do you care for any of the personages, falling squarely into two sets: dumb victims and bastards. When the peak moment of catharsis comes in the form of a multiple pile-up on a motorway, it symbolises the entirety quite neatly.

3/10

Unagi (Shohei Imamura, 1997)

The Eel finds a man trying to keep a low profile after his release from prison, eight years on from killing his adulterous wife in a fit of passion. Eventually, he is forced to face up to what he did and reluctantly start reintegrating into society, as a woman he saves from an overdose attaches herself to him.
There are essentially two films at odds here: the primary a psychologically truthful study of guilt and self-repression, interspersed with telling imagery, the secondary a quirky semi-comic piece populated by gratuitously oddball side characters like a guy who keeps turning up obsessing about contacting aliens, or the woman's flamenco-dancing doolally mother. The former wins out, but the niggling presence of the latter does a lot of unwelcome work in undermining the impact of the message.

6/10

After Earth (M. Night Shyamalan, 2013)

Did anyone need another scenario with a devastated future Earth and a senior statesman of an action hero being tested by its CGI tribulations? Yet this year we had two appear simultaneously and the only seemingly judicious choice made by Shymalan, who is by now justly maligned for the bottom line of his output, over the set-up of Oblivion,  is to focus the action on Will Smith's son instead. Or, rather, that would have been a wise move if Jaden Smith in his teens demonstrated any evidence of acting ability in place of constant whining.
They have crashed on an Earth populated by monsters and the son has to undertake a perilous trek to retrieve a rescue beacon, pursued by a sort of amorphous giant sausage with claws, while injured Smith Sr. at base camp issues gruff Jediisms over the radio. This is sold as father-and-son bonding, but that won't work when you basically want the little prick to shut his trap and sit still. What you absolutely don't want is a trilogy of this guff, and yet that was something mooted, at least until the reviews came out.

4/10

Oblivion (Joseph Kosinski, 2013)

Tom Cruise sails in to rescue humanity once more, with aliens having wiped out the world as we know it and him as a jet-flying caretaker for the whole planet, which seems to consist of only American ruins. He's a maverick, of course, constantly questioning his orders to leave things as they are and with a hidey-hole where he can shoot hoops and listen to Led Zep. Morgan Freeman turns up in standard post-apocalyptic gear at some point to cash his cheque, there's a computer-game dogfight sequence and then the highest-level Thetan saves the day by dying and not dying all at once, because he's Tom Cruise. Highly illogical, Captain.

4/10

La Délicatesse (David & Stéphane Foenkinos, 2011)

David Foenkinos adapts his best-selling novel, Delicacy, with Audrey Tautou as a woman prematurely widowed who immerses herself in her work in order to cope with her loss until finding romance again with a Swedish co-worker. The character is equal parts Tautou's cute gamines and damaged but determined individuals and the film overall is likewise a melange of drama and romantic comedy, but this time the two elements have failed to blend. Scenes in both modes work in isolation, but too many leaps and elisions create a disjointed effect and as a result the characters, Tautou's in particular, tend to act impulsively without sufficient underlying psychological reasons having been laid out for their actions. Thus the eventual new-found romance ends up flat and unconvincing. The conclusion cannot be escaped here that novelists, used to relying on the structural shortcuts and internal monologues of their art form to create emotional and narrative coherence, are not necessarily the best people to convert their stories into the medium of cinema when other means are required to achieve the same effect.

5/10

Stoker (Chan-wook Park, 2013)

We know Chan-wook Park does extreme violence, has already delved into the vampire genre in Thirst and now comes up with a title which can only make you think of the writer of Dracula. Then he has a field day with the notion by scattering vampiric hints liberally throughout and despite the overwhelming glut of films on the theme you almost start wishing he will actually deliver on the formula.
If Stoker only had its fun and games with supernatural allusions weeded out, it would work better as a study of sociopathy, which is what it essentially is. The protagonists, a withdrawn and moody teenage girl stuck with her needy mother after her father's apparent suicide, and the oleaginously seductive and disquieting uncle she never knew that existed coming to stay and swiftly taking over their lives, are interesting enough, even if the lead is a bit too close for comfort to Wednesday Addams. Park's technique of focusing on seemingly disconnected minutiae is also as effective as ever in creating a wholly unsettling atmosphere. However, with the narrative lacking any particular place to go, the guessing game played with the audience's expectations comes across as camouflage for that aimlessness rather than as a valid extra layer to the onion.

5/10

Trance (Danny Boyle, 2013)

James McAvoy plays an art auctioneer who gets mixed up in a heist perpetrated by Vincent Cassel's gang. He stashes away the painting they're after and then forgets where it is following a blow to the head, so the crooks force him to see a hypnotherapist to regain his memory. The film soon forks off into a succession of rapid twists and turns as reality comes under doubt. The casting is strong enough to retain interest, but the plot itself gets irritatingly garbled and obviously begs to be viewed again to make full sense of it, unfortunately without having an adequately rewarding pay-off to make this a worthwhile undertaking. Diverting, then, but considerably short of the elan and sense of purpose of Marnie, Inception or Memento, to name some notable precursors in amnesia-driven mental discombobulation.

5/10

Philomena (Stephen Frears, 2013)

The wildly oscillating-quality director Frears is decisively peaking again with this one, probably helped by having the support of a true story to curb any sentimental excesses. The other back-up is of course the actors, with Judi Dench in fine fettle and Steve Coogan successfully putting more distance between himself as a dramatic actor and his Alan Partridge monster.
Philomena Lee is a former victim of Ireland's Catholic workhouse system for 'fallen women', as seen in The Magdalene Sisters. The child resulting from her unplanned teenage pregnancy was sold to the highest bidder by the nuns and she is now seeking to find that child after decades of self-denial. Coogan plays the BBC journalist Martin Sixsmith, at a loose end after his sacking, who sets out to get his career back on track by helping her track down her lost child. There is gentle comedy at the mismatch between the devout and seemingly simple mother with a mission and the cynical journalist with a constant eye on his human interest angle, but it does not stifle the bittersweetness and righteous anger generated by inhuman institutions and cruel circumstance along the way on their road trip.

7/10

The Place Beyond the Pines (Derek Cianfrance, 2013)

This is a triptych of sorts, with the sins of the fathers spilling over into later chapters. It begins with Ryan Gosling as a stunt motorbike rider, naturally preternaturally gifted like his getaway driver from Drive, who discovers he has an infant son in one of his touring-stop towns and then goes off the rails in a bid to provide for him. The story then moves on to Bradley Cooper as a cop who brings him down in questionable circumstances. The whole is a blend of understated dialogue and touting the proposition that there is a universal lesson to be learnt from the repercussions of isolated mistakes that echo for generations. If this sounds dismissive, it's for overambitious aspirations towards soothsaying. Nevertheless, it is emotionally complex in a way that few films with Hollywood A-list actors even attempt and does manage to tug on a few heartstrings in the process.

6/10

Berlin 36 (Kaspar Heidelbach, 2009)

In the run-up to the 1936 Olympics, the Nazis were in a quandary: they had to demonstrate their society to be at least superficially tolerant to avoid an American boycott of the games, and yet of course were loath to have any Jewish representation. In this context, the story of Gretel Bergmann, the Jew who was Germany's best high-jumper at the time, should provide a fresh angle on the worn-out subject of the persecution of the time. The true story even includes a man raised as a woman as one of her competitors: there is material in abundance here for the taking.
Sadly, most of it goes to waste. Karoline Herfurth, as Bergmann, projects one-key sullenness just as the performance of her rival with the terrible secret (rather undermined by having such a blatantly male actor in the role) is little more than scared eye-flitting all the way through. The atmosphere at the training camp, where most of the film takes place, is also irritatingly reminiscent of a bad American high school film, complete with a duo of girl bullies. The criticisms that the film received for taking liberties with the facts are then fairly irrelevant in the light of its failure to do anything dramatically useful with the changes.

4/10

Irvine Welsh's Ecstasy (Rob Heydon, 2011)

Shamelessly riding on the coattails of the iconic Trainspotting, even to the point of ripping off trademarks such as slapping character names freeze-framed on the screen as they appear and having a man scrabble around in a toilet bowl for egested drugs, this is also has to manage with lesser casting and flatter photography than its predecessor's. That said, the script does its best to stretch out one of Welsh's more generic short stories, that of an ageing club drug dealer trying to get out of the game, and leaven it with humour and romantic elements. It is by no means the abysmal failure that some critics would have you believe when considered on its own merits, all-importantly capturing the rave mindstate almost as effectively as Human Traffic did, even if it is then rather over-reliant on filling screentime with this. But the shadow cast by its towering forebear is basically impossible to escape from.

5/10

Intouchables (Olivier Nakache & Eric Toledano, 2011)

A film on an odd-couple template that sets its stall out as being based on a true story, Untouchable nevertheless relies heavily on suspension of disbelief as a millionaire quadriplegic indulgently takes a black inner-city hoodie as his personal carer, regardless of his total lack of training or credentials. But I suppose otherwise we wouldn't get the rest of the formula, with the unlikely pair naturally warming to each other as they learn what's on the other side of the social divide. Disbelief duly suspended, it's a perfectly charming piece nevertheless, with the duo going through various escapades in which they challenge each other's preconceptions and giggle together at orthodoxy, which is something that any viewer can probably imagine identifying with, and thereby the foundation for the film's somewhat phenomenal success.

6/10

World War Z (Marc Forster, 2013)

Presumably the writers decided that the world created by 28 Days Later, with its sprinting, instantly turning zombies was 'worth exploring', so World War Z is basically a whistlestop tour around the globe with pauses for CGI mass carnage. The hero, Brad Pitt with his doleful Jesus face on, is reluctantly pressed into it, of course, having his cute kids to worry about, and even after decades of celluloid devoted to the pressing problem of armies of the undead, little progress seems to have been made in adding plausibility to the premise, albeit it that is now only called a super-virus and they don't go around hankering after brains. Apparently you can also fly in a day from South Korea to Israel in an antiquated cargo plane without stopping, and this sums up the overall level of pointlessness quite neatly.

4/10

Przypadek (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1981)

Blind Chance was banned by the Polish authorities in the last days of state communism, probably as much for its mild sexual content as for its anti-totalitarian views. When considering the peaks of Kieslowski's output, the ban is not actually much of a blow: we've been in the world of the butterfly effect since to better effect, even in the outright rip-off Sliding Doors, which steals this film's conceit that the main character either succeeding or failing to catch a train would change the whole of their subsequent life, and is at once more mediocre in intellectual content and yet better in coherence. The problem here is that while Blind Chance is bursting with philosophical ideas about religion, predestiny and freedom, their collation is such a muddle that characters merge into each other and any finesse in why its three parallel universes diverge so drastically from each other is quite lost. It's not the great director's most lucid hour.

5/10

The Last Stand (Kim Jee-Woon, 2013)

Arnie creaks out of his armchair for one last action outing, as the title probably disingenuously promises, and in time-honoured fashion the rest of the cast sportingly ignore the mismatch between his accent which actually seems to have got thicker as if he no longer had the energy to half-try and his character's name as a small-town sheriff who takes it on himself to stop a speeding fugitive crossing over to Mexico, plus his army of goons. Diverging from the High Noon set-up, the filmmaker seems to have decided that these days the big guy needs help for 'plausibility' so he gets a posse of forgettable deputies too, and then unfortunately makes all the dialogue utterly forgettable as well. The action is workmanlike as these things go, but it's hardly a great swansong for the Wrinklynator.

4/10

Tower Block (James Nunn & Ronnie Thompson, 2012)

The notion of the high-rise block as a dystopian environment has become something of a meme of late, not just within science fiction, and Tower Block gamely tries to convince that its scenario is altogether feasible in the English suburban wasteland as an anonymous sniper starts picking off the residents of one block for an unknown reason. The characters are the usual mix of archetypes, with no particular priority given to any of them, which at least makes guessing who'll go next halfway unpredictable, and that may be the best you can expect of a model of low-budget thriller which scores low on concept originality, though reasonably well on suspense execution.

4/10

About Time (Richard Curtis, 2013)

Richard Curtis directs his third film with an identikit style to his trademark screenplays: the characters are all again well-to-do and terribly English, shuttling between nice Notting Hill restaurants and lovely country houses with nothing in between and nary an actual concern for anything as grubby as having to work, since there are relationships to be worked out and social embarrassment quandaries to be hurdled.
But having a pop at Curtis for lacking social realism is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, and about as pointful. The true test of his films is whether they raise a laugh and if there's emotional content that gets through the sugar-coating. In both respects, About Time is a fair success. The story, with a young man finding he has the ability to visit any stage of his past life, may be lifted pretty directly from The Time Traveller's Wife, and the inclusion of Rachel McAdams as the love interest once more is hopefully an admission of the theft, but it does tweak the formula in a fairly interesting way and manages to inject moments of pathos into the overall comic tone without trampling on either aspect. The dependable presence of everyone's favourite uncle Bill Nighy as the traveller's father provides insurance for this juggling act.
Of course, the causality mechanics are riddled with inconsistencies, and it goes on too long just to deliver a soppy homily, but there is nevertheless a good deal of jollity along the way too.

6/10

Monsieur Lazhar (Philippe Falardeau, 2011)

An Algerian asylum seeker in Montreal, following the death of his wife, takes up as job as a schoolteacher for a class whose teacher has recently hanged herself. These are not the stock ingredients of uplifting cinema, but the story meanders slowly and sensitively as Lazhar and the children alike try to get used to each other and come to terms with their respective losses. Also importantly, the children are not sentimentalised, but allowed fully rounded personalities, backed by mature performances from the principal ones.
This was Canada's entry for the 2012 Foreign Language Oscar: one can't help feeling an extra layer of schmaltz would have got it past the finishing post first.

7/10

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (Tommy Wirkola, 2013)

The impressively stupid title promises nothing of value and one of the film's only virtues is coming good on that promise. Hansel and Gretel are kung-fu fighting witch slayers in a medieval Europe of indeterminate geography, realised with a TV-movie level of attention to period detail. They dress in bad-ass black leather and have giant arrow machine guns a la Hugh Jackman in the equally shoddy teen market-aimed Van Helsing. Jeremy Renner still looks like a potato, no matter how many women directors will throw at him, and Gemma Arteton is as wooden as ever. And there's not even anything novel to the realisation of the screeching witches.

3/10

The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd, 2011)

It was inevitable that casting Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher would infuse the erstwhile Prime Minister with too much of the milk of human kindness, as would seeing her in early dementia, having conversations with her dead husband. But then this director is not ideologically driven to dance on Thatcher's grave, obviously wanting to present a portrait of ageing instead, and the combination of Streep's subtle performance and a series of evocative flashbacks to phases of her personal and political life works well in this regard, albeit that the nitty-gritty detail of her political beliefs is somewhat glossed over in the process. A male director might well have focused more on the big events of her tenure to cover this, but then also missed out on the basic truth of the character, namely that being a steam-rollering ideologue is not inconsistent with being a visionary of sorts too, nor that it is possible to care deeply for a few and simultaneously be empathically quite out of touch with a multitude.

6/10

Las Acacias (Pablo Giorgelli, 2011)

A grouchy truck driver reluctantly takes a mother and baby with him as he drives from Paraguay to Buenos Aires, and this plot summary can hardly be expanded further, with little happening and the two protagonists hardly even talking to each other for the first half of the journey. It's a breath of fresh air in a world obsessed by the the need to generate fake drama when real life contains quite enough just as long as you know where to look. Of course they end up bonding, as that is the one dramatic element that requires resolution, but it's quite unforced and beautifully underplayed.

7/10

The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)

Anderson has vigorously denied that this is the story of the founder of Scientology, probably because no-one wants Tom Cruise taking a contract out on them, and it's true that there are enough divergences from L.Ron Hubbard's life to cover the director's back. Nevertheless it's hard to avoid the parallels, particularly when Philip Seymour Hoffman introduces himself as a master of a host of disciplines, ranging from writer to nuclear physicist.
An explicit biopic would in fact have made for a more interesting film: what we get instead is two superlative actors, Joaquin Phoenix's alcoholic simpleton in the pocket of Hoffman's guru, bouncing off each other over the years of their acquaintance. Phoenix throws all his method tricks into the mix, all tics, mumbling and unpredictable explosions of violence while Hoffman smirks and bullies those who disbelieve in his demented creed. But there is no discernible reason for the preacher to take the troubled disciple under his wing, having no money, talent or wit to exploit, and the only purpose the character seems to serve is to show what a control freak the leader is. This, then is a seductively handsome farrago that constantly hints at substance without actually delivering any. Exactly like the master, in fact.

5/10

Byzantium (Neil Jordan, 2012)

Neil Jordan goes back to vampires almost 20 years after Interview with the Vampire. The pair of undead this time are a mother and daughter on the English seaside, not allowed to do anything as distasteful as the carnage committed by their male counterparts and having no powers to speak of beyond an uncanny ability to mope. It's basically a fusion of Twilight and Let the Right One In, and adds nothing to an already saturated genre. The characters are neither interesting or scary, and surely at least one of the two was required.

4/10

Keinohrhasen (Til Schweiger, 2007)

'Germany's sexiest man', actor-director Til Schweiger is somewhat regularly typecast as a prick, not least by himself, who the ladies are nevertheless unable to resist. Rabbit Without Ears drew phenomenal audiences and is a matter of some crudity and small import, a romantic comedy of a Jennifer Aniston or Matthew McConaughey calibre except with more shagging and swearing. Schweiger's character is a self-satisfied Berlin paparazzo, but essentially the director himself, who becomes a bit nicer in the course of bedding several women who tell him what a tool he is before falling in love with him. The film seems to hold a belief that it's making pertinent points about sex and gender relations while making us feel good, but essentially achieves neither with great depth.

4/10

Iron Man 3 (Shane Black, 2013)

Lethal Weapon series scriptwriter Black collaborated with Robert Downey Jr. on the offbeat Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but there's little convention-bucking here as the Iron Man franchise limps painfully through another two hours of explosions, complete with unconvincing anxiety attacks for the hero replacing his more credible alcoholism, a little boy taken under his wing and Ben Kingsley's admittedly amusing accents a smokescreen for Guy Pearce's tiresome megalomaniac. Another comeback for the flying U.S. military weapon will not be welcome.

4/10

Star Trek Into Darkness (J.J. Abrams, 2013)

Now that the alternate universe reboot is out of the way, which allowed the scriptwriters to escape the yoke of reverentially paying their dues to the weight of generations of films and TV shows and the struggle to keep things canon-consistent in everything from technological advances to historical details, Star Trek Into Darkness should have free rein to go off where no director of the franchise has gone before. Why, then, does Abrams choose to bring in Khan as the villain, just as in the second film of the original series? And bait the audience by making him a WASP? Yes, he's a more complex character this time, with believable motives, and Benedict Cumberbatch keeps his portrayal in check in comparison with Ricardo Montalban's tour-de-force in hamminess, but it isn't actually any more fun and a real departure would not have done any harm.
Anyway, any criticism of the Abrams way is probably pointless as the ludicrous lens flares on board are still there as raised middle fingers, and he will loot only the finest cheese references from the archives for cheap laughs. Just take it as decent popcorn and it passes the time perfectly adequately.

6/10

Habitación en Roma (Julio Medem, 2010)

Two young women holidaying in Rome experience a one-night romance before parting to continue their straight lives. Room in Rome probably fancies itself as a lesbian-curious version of Before Sunrise, but fails to make the characters' connection palpable or, despite making the pair unfeasibly good-looking, the bonding between them work erotically either. It's hard to dismiss the director being a heterosexual man with foggy notions of what women actually do or feel as a reason for this: odd, since Medem once demonstrated a real grasp of both male and female emotional involvement and eroticism in sensitive and vibrant dramas such as Lovers of the Arctic Circle and Sex and Lucia. But that was ten years earlier and it's clear that this is now a middle-aged director with nothing left but wish-fulfilment issues. The script rather pathetically makes the Spanish one an engineer and has the pair demonstrate expert knowledge of renaissance art and personages in between their bouts of tasteful frotting to claim distance from being mere soft porn, but the attempt is far too transparent to convince, and thoroughly undermined in any case by a torrent of excruciatingly twee dialogue in contrived English.

3/10

Tropa de Elite (José Padilha, 2007)

The notion of mega-city slums as inaccessible warzones is the staple fare of many science-fiction dystopias, but can lay claim to being a representation of modern reality in Brazil's favelas. While the unfortunately gung-ho-monikered Elite Squad may be accused of milking this stage for ultraviolence, there is a seriousness at the heart of the film too that sets it apart from mere exploitation, treating the local drug lords, corrupt police and hopelessly ramshackle overall milieu with a cynical nihilism, embodied in the disintegrating psyche of its narrator and lead character, the sadistic Captain Nascimento of the unit of the title. Despite accusations to the contrary, it cannot be seen as a standard-bearer for state repression in the face of societal collapse, as the marauding police are hardly better than the gangsters they hunt, but it could have done with taking a step back and presenting a wider view, as was the case in the similarly-themed, but far more subtle, City of God.

5/10

Gränsen (Richard Holm, 2011)

Sweden timidly sat out WWII while its neighbours on all sides were under attack by totalitarian superpowers, so a war film factually based on the country's involvement would not be conducive to bloody thrills. Therefore The Border cooks up the hypothesis that one squad did fight Germans across the Norwegian border and thereby also prevented an invasion. This premise is as half-baked as its chronology, with a Finnish Winter War veteran turning up to aid them in a randomly picked 1942, but it is interesting to note evidence of a lingering sense of national guilt at having been so passive on the part of the filmmakers, with the Swedish characters flapping ineffectually and effectively causing all the trouble while the sole Finnish and Norwegian characters take charge and get scant reward for having done so.

4/10

Macbeth (Orson Welles, 1948)

Thankfully not as feyly mannered as Laurence Olivier's Hamlet of the same year, Welles's Shakespeare adaptation is nevertheless beset with vulnerabilities of its own. It may have been unacceptably cinematic for traditionalist critics at the time but in modern terms feels stiffly stagebound, the casting of Roddy McDowall as a pipsqueak Malcolm and Dan O'Herlihy as a cardboard cutout Macduff is ill-judged, and some of the attempts at expressionist cutaways fall flat on their face. Yet some really work too, and at least Welles in his pomp wasn't afraid to tweak a sacrosanct text. It ends up in overall credit largely because of his own towering performance as the frantic despot and that of Jeanette Nolan, a screen debutant, as his goading wife.

6/10

Irina Palm (Sam Garbarski, 2007)

Marianne Faithfull, rather wishfully playing a mere 50 year-old, is the woman re-monikered Irina Palm when she turns to a sort prostitution-lite to pay for her grandson's medical treatment. She becomes much in demand for apparently providing hand jobs of unmatched quality. This outline of a drama with serious aspirations might seem brutally reductionist, but it does closely match the profile of a porn farce, and would be much more satisfying fare if directed by Russ Meyer instead of trying to shove Faithfull's somnambulist mumbling of lifeless dialogue or the notion of a Serbian sex club owner with a heart of gold at us. As twaddle, it's fairly complete.

3/10

Small Time Crooks (Woody Allen, 2000)

In which Woody plays Woody and Tracey Ullman does a screeching Rosie Perez impersonation as his wife. He dunderheadedly plans a bank robbery to alleviate their financial penury, but it ends up being her cookies that land them their fortune. Hugh Grant then turns up as Hugh Grant, an unctuously suave art dealer who the couple ask to coach them in an A-Z of high culture. The film intermittently induces a smirk with its one-liners and is simultaneously utterly disposable, doing the usual Hollywood trick of feigning to assert that money cannot buy happiness, yet being loath to leave its protagonists anything other than rich at the close of play. At the time of writing, it has been 21 years since Allen made a truly worthwhile film, and wastes of celluloid like this now far outweigh the fruits of his peak years.

4/10

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Timur Bekmambetov, 2012)

Night Watch director Bekmambetov gleefully mashes up American history with his comedy horror stock-in-trade in a Ronseal product designed primarily for bored teenage boys who you won't get to go to Spielberg's biopic. Lincoln does indeed moonlight as an axe-wielding vampire decapitator in between delivering speeches on the equality of all men, and that's just about it. The CGI effects are neat and Rufus Sewell makes a decent evil bastard, but the rest of the cast are squeaking runts in adults' clothing and having everyone do kung-fu yet again is just stultifyingly tedious. There is precious little point to any of it, but then the title never promised anything more either, so I suppose the director can't be sued.

3/10

The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011)

The lives of three black housemaids in the early '60s, in pre-civil rights Mississippi, are changed when the scion of a wealthy local white family decides to write a book about their experiences. This is a worthy topic and as such the film predictably garnered a handful of Oscar nominations, but despite some fine performances and warm scenes, suffers from a lack of teeth and subtlety. As is par for the course, the whites are racist and malicious, bar a few ostracised idealists to play the 'Good German', and the oppressed blacks long-suffering and mystically wise, and therefore the stereotyping that the film depends on for dramatic impetus is a handicap which prevents it from attaining any great profundity. And of course once more it's the good whitey to the rescue at the end of the day, with her mother allowed to say sorry too to shore up the heroine's impeccable credentials.

5/10

678 (Mohamed Diab, 2010)

678 is the number of a bus in Cairo taken by one of the three main characters, a devout working-class woman, who one day finds herself fighting back against the perpetual molestation committed against her by the men on the bus. Two other women, one a budding stand-up comic continually harassed in her call centre job, and the other a wealthy one who was raped in the mayhem after a football match, become involved as she rises to national media notoriety for repeated incidents where she stabs molesters in the groin. So does a policeman charged with finding the attacker, and while the female protagonists are well-drawn characters too, representing different strata of society without simplifying them needlessly, his is perhaps the most interesting persona. This is because while there is explicit condemnation of the inherent inequality and sexism of Egyptian society throughout, his overly pragmatic desire to avoid upsetting the apple cart at all costs may be seen as the film's most telling and disheartening political statement on the status quo.
Overall, barring the minor quibble that Cairo is made to feel like a village with all the characters improbably bumping into each other at some point, the film tackles a difficult subject with no small assurance and skill. Naturally, it caused a storm of outrage in Egypt.

7/10

The Inner Circle (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1991)

Andrei Konchalovsky may have had the best of intentions in scripting and directing the factually based story of Stalin's personal film projectionist, and a foreign audience could easily be duped into supposing that bona fide serious arthouse would be the result, but in actual fact one has to constantly remind oneself that this is not just cobbled together by a western studio with foggy notions of life in the big bad Soviet Union. This director was also behind Tango & Cash, after all.
Making the least of its production values, it's saturated with Russkie cliches from babushkas to cossack dancing and woefully uncertain of its tone: the first half plays out as comedy, with Tom Hulce as the lead reprising his gormlessly grinning naif Mozart, enthralled by being in the presence of the country's evil leadership, and then there's suddenly a switch to a tragic finale as he at last loses faith in the system, but with dialogue so hackneyed that it's actually funnier than the intentionally comic part. Special mention should be made too of Lolita Davidovich's portrayal of his feckless wife, which is as inept a performance as you're ever likely to see outside C-movie land.

3/10

Gori Vatra (Pjer Zalica, 2003)

Fuse is in many ways a model for 2007's Romanian Nesfrasit: it's a blackly satirical take on a Balkan backwater town's fixation with the arrival of important American visitors that leads to a concerted effort by the locals to make themselves presentable. Where it diverges is that this is Bosnia only two years into a fragile peace after the war, and the old tensions are still very much in evidence. The preparations for President Clinton's impending whistlestop visit produce a certain amount of farcical fun in the townsfolk's preparations, such as when the former communist charged with producing flags for the event turns out a Stars and Stripes with red stars, but the satire is somewhat sidelined by the continued threat of landmines and terrorist actions by those unable to leave the past be.

6/10