Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012)

Bond No. 23 is in safe hands with the halfway-to-arthouse director Mendes, but this being a Bond film, staple requirements must be met and so the impact of any new arrival behind the camera will always be tempered, just as the value placing any object of real interest in terms of talent in front of it is compromised by the basic brief. Here, the latter onus is on Javier Bardem's camp pseudo cyberterrorist, and of course he delivers good charming and menacing at the same time, but it's always a case of watching all of the cast including Judi Dench, and bar only Daniel Craig, who gets free rein, soldier on with one hand tied behind their backs.
Skyfall belongs, then, in the better echelon of latter-day Bondage, with a moderately involving set of twists and a game stab at providing credible danger for the unkillable hero, but it does these films no favours to praise them to high heaven merely for managing to eschew daft gadgetry and refrain from blowing anything up for ten minutes.

6/10

Poltory komnaty ili sentimentalnoe puteshestvie na rodinu (Andrey Khrzhanovskiy, 2009)

The Jewish Russian poet Joseph Brodsky ended up being more recognised by the world at large through his Nobel prize and his adopted home in the United States than by the Soviet Union that imprisoned him as being a 'social parasite' and then exiled him. A Room and a Half would have enough material in this alone for a hefty biopic, but goes one step further in appending a fictional account of his return to the land of his birth, a journey he never made and a layer that might have been redundant were it not for enabling the director to lend added poignancy and meaning to the use of his poetry in contextualising and driving the story. This is something that biopics of artists, frequently those of writers, fail to do, falling back on the presumption that its up to the audience to be familiar enough with the artist's work to allow the filmmaker to skip over the potentially awkward issue of how to elegantly fit in a wholly other medium into one that is primarily visual and  auditory. So, the writings are used to telling effect, but the film also makes bold use of a wide palette of styles, from mock archive footage all the way to animation, a method that could be obtrusive if handled gratuitously and instead enriches the experience further. It's an unassuming gem of a film.

8/10