Lawless (John Hillcoat, 2012)

Although this time it's hillbilly bootleggers in Prohibition-era Virginia, there's a similar gritty feel to this as the previous collaboration of the director with the screenplay's writer Nick Cave, 2005's The Proposition. The film's palette is the same washed-out ochres and there's a sense of bad times a-coming, with the lead character, Shia LaBeouf's pimply wannabe big shot, sure to get a rude awakening.
As usual, LaBeouf is the weakest link, but at least there's strong support from the likes of Tom Hardy as his hardass brother and Guy Pearce as a bloodless preening psychotic lawman after their hides, somewhat in the mould of Gary Oldman in Leon, who incidentally also appears in a minor role. It's strong on period detail but in the end less than the sum of its parts, capturing the attention only by dint of its moments of extreme violence.

4/10

Ashes (Mat Whitecross, 2012)

Probably the best aspect of this low-budget affair is that for a large bulk of the time it runs as a serious drama centering on a man breaking his father out of a psychiatric hospital where he has ended up with Alzheimer's. The son then tries to get the father across the country to his home while he keeps wandering off and otherwise making a nuisance of himself. As you might expect, Ray Winstone does a sterling job as the cantankerous and incoherent patient. But we also know what you get when a director decides to cast him: by hook or by crook, a thriller will yet somehow rear its head out of the murk. And so it does, as the horrible reason behind his final breakdown is revealed through flashbacks. A shame then, to be back in the world of the gangster geezer again, when for a while the film led you to expect something different, but at least it tried.

5/10

Albatross (Niall MacCormick, 2011)

The writer has explicitly stated that she wanted to make her version of Wish You Were Here and the admission is sensible seeing as the parallels are obvious, with a 17-year-old girl who is both free spirit and temptress entering the lives of a squabbling family in a seaside town and proceeding to turn them upside down. The father is a cripplingly blocked writer despised by his wife and the elder daughter just tries to keep her head under the radar in her mousy way.
In all honesty, the joie de vivre of the anarchic new arrival does start to grate after not too long: the makers seem to be more taken with her non-stop quipping and flirting than is reasonable to expect of the audience. So it actually comes as a relief when things go sour, as is always on the cards, and after that the fact that the end wants to reintroduce a note of sweetness is quite forgivable.

6/10

Margin Call (J.C. Chandor, 2011)

The basic outline of unprincipled goings on in a Wall Street investment bank may not be novel, but Margin Call is picked up no end by a stellar cast delivering muscular dialogue. It may not generate memorable quotes in the manner of Wall Street, but then that film always was just a cartoon. This, on the other hand, has a real feel of verisimilitude as a crew of traders led by Kevin Spacey's under-fire manager come to realise that their careers in the company are soon to be over and that successfully achieving a radical fire sale of the business's assets will not save their jobs.

There is one false note late on when some of the hardest-nosed individuals in the firm are shown moping as if they really experienced regret, but thankfully this is short-lived and the end is as unsentimental as the rest has been scathing in condemning the throwaway greed of the system.

7/10

Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik, 2012)

A very much less ambitious film from the director Dominik five years after his modern classic Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Brad Pitt features again as both star and producer, although the focus for the most part is on two losers who foolishly bust up a card game and from then on are living on borrowed time. It goes for a sadsack version of the Pulp Fiction set-up at the start, with the twosome talking wish-fulfilment crap in their car before they carry out the misconceived job, and then Pitt makes his appearance as a contract killer on their tail, accompanied by a drunken James Gandolfini. The strong leads and moody photography just about keep the interest up, but there's a feeling of going through the motions in terms of both character and overall point, not added to by the film's rather forced background context involving the current uncertain political and economic environment in America.

5/10