Kakushi-toride no san-akunin (Akira Kurosawa, 1958)

Cited by George Lucas as a key influence on the first Star Wars film for its telling of a getaway adventure from the perspective of a pair of lesser characters, The Hidden Fortress follows two greedy and cowardly good-for-nothings who get caught up in smuggling gold and a princess in disguise after the defeat of their clan's army. The clan general Toshiro Mifune is involved to keep them in line and provide the action heroics in the motley band's escape, but it's the bickering duo who take centre stage and this is much to the film's detriment. There is simply no good reason for them to be kept in tow, barring a need to have a device to get the serious protagonists into trouble time and again, and their low comedy grates right from the start. As you might expect, Kurosawa does manage to give the story an easy flow, but it's nevertheless one of his most disposable films.

5/10

Love (William Eubank, 2011)

An astronaut on an orbiting space station loses contact with Earth and loses his marbles over time in his isolation, until things get mystical. Love can hardly disavow its indebtedness to 2001 or Moon, so one would hope that the additional elements to the splice of the two would lend purpose to the exercise. Unfortunately, nothing is made of the Civil War-era prologue and the intercut interviews with various individuals burbling about the nature of existence add nothing in the way of meaning. It may seem churlish to kick such an innocuous low-budget production, but it really manages to irritate with its plodding blandness.

3/10

Seven Psychopaths (Martin McDonagh, 2012)

The In Bruges director and star join forces again in a less than sure-footed black comedy, with Farrell this time letting others do the nutjob work as he takes a back seat as an alcoholic aspiring screenwriter whose script, revolving around the psychopaths of the title, begins to find uncomfortable echoes in reality. It's diverting enough, with Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken and Woody Harrelson putting in their usual dependable turns as cheerfully unbalanced types around him, but a scattering of bon mots and grand guignol scenes does not make for a very substantial whole.

5/10

La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)

La Jetée enjoys an unusual status in film history as a 28-minute short that has had a lasting and overt influence over successive generations of features. It concisely relates an experiment by scientists in a post-armageddon world to send a man back in time to before the war, using his own recollections of childhood as a targeting point. This is not science fiction in the usual future dystopia mould: the whole film is composed of black and white stills, there are no attempts at showy special effects and the plot, as much as there is one, is circular. It's a masterpiece in economy of style, creating an entrancing effect through its prose poetry narrative to draw you to dwell on its theme of the inescapability of memory.

8/10

Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)

Self-cultivated enigma filmmaker Marker never made a conventional feature either before or after his most famous piece, La Jetée, and Sans Soleil, a form of clip and image-montage essay with the outward trappings of a documentary, is what might be considered characteristic of his oeuvre. It moves back and forth between Guinea-Bissau and Japan, seeking to wring out some overall picture of the human condition on approaching the twenty-first century from 'two extreme poles of survival'.
It contains some striking imagery and hits on a number of neat portentous observations on the societies it regards and on the nature of memory. It has, however, dated quite badly in parts and a modern viewer may find the pontification of the narrator at times unfocused and at worst condescendingly exoticising of the foreignness of the societies it surveys. But the angle of approach has to be applauded, if for uniqueness alone.

6/10

Looper (Rian Johnson, 2012)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, continuing to be groomed along the road to unlikely hard man status after The Dark Knight Rises, is a hired killer in the near future, tasked with despatching people sent from 30 years further down the line as soon as they arrive. He gets a world-weary voiceover, as he did in Brick by the same director, a patina of angst over his work, which manifests as a drug habit, and a vulnerability that makes him unable to carry on doing his job clinically, even before Bruce Willis turns up as his future self in a nod to, and quite equally plundering of, his role in Twelve Monkeys. Looper is, then, a film original in that all the constituent parts have never been assembled in exactly the same way before, while at the same time it's easy to go through it ticking off the sources and debating whether best use is made of each. Bruce gets to shoot a lot of big guns and concurrently an honest stab is also made at some vague existential purpose in an attempt to satisfy allcomers, but the internal logic gets somewhat shaky by the finale.

5/10

Mein Bester Feind (Wolfgang Murnberger, 2011)

My Best Enemy follows the see-sawing fortunes of a Viennese Jewish art dealer and his Aryan friend through the war, a falling out coming early on as the latter joins the SS and becomes complicit in the former's imprisonment. This promises to be grim fare, so it's a surprise both pleasant and discomfiting that the director opts for a comic tone for large swathes of the story. There is a certain coming-of-age in the sense that it is taken as read that we know by now what horrors occurred in history, and that it may finally be acceptable to use the historical backdrop as just that: only a context and not the subject itself, which is basically the fracturing relationship of two men, with the SS after a Michelangelo drawing in the dealer's possession.
For the most part, the film manages to avoid stepping on any sensitive toes and generates a fair deal of zippy dialogue, with Moritz Bleibtreu as solid as ever as the lead. It's not a revelatory piece in any sense, nor does it purport to be, but it does make a nice change that the Jew for once is not merely a helpless victim to be bailed out by a good German, as in The Pianist and many others with the same starting position.

6/10

Cockneys vs Zombies (Matthias Hoene, 2012)

Zombie survival comedy again. The selling point this time is that it's the East End, but scenes capitalising on local flavour for comic effect (the Blitz spirit, football hooligans and so on) are too few and far between. The old folks' home under siege could also have been made far better use of, particularly as that's where the senior character actors are holed up. Instead, their potential is wasted almost so much as the ammunition on the unmenacing shuffling hordes, with everyone getting a chance to shoot some really big guns for minutes on end. Yawn.

3/10

City of Ember (Gil Kenan, 2008)

A community have spent generations, for reasons unspecified, hermetically sealed in an underground city. When the generator that is the source of their only light and power begins to fail, a plucky girl and boy start seeking the reason for their confinement and then for a way out.
City of Ember is a somewhat odd mix of the shell of a dark sci-fi concept, echoing the bleaker than bleak THX 1138, stuffed with a children's film's content, including the impossible perkiness of Saoirse Ronan as the  lead. The strong veteran supporting cast, including Bill Murray, Tim Robbins and Martin Landau, seductively offers a counterbalance, and the impressive steampunk set and costume design, redolent of The City of Lost Children, catches the eye, but in essence this is just Harry Potter-lite, with too little to call its own.

4/10