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

The Watch (Akiva Schaffer, 2012)

Expectations should not be set too high when a Ben Stiller comedy also includes the obligatory Vince Vaughn and/or Owen Wilson, but this film really exhausts any residual goodwill from previous semi-successful collaborations such as Starsky & Hutch. No effort at all has been made to give them characters beyond easily marketable clones of their past roles, so Stiller is the uptight sensible one and Vaughn the blabbering foul-mouthed slob, as they take on invading aliens in their sleepy home town. There is gore at childish levels but no thrills to back it up, and the comedy side of the affair, barring a few isolated quips, is a barren revisitation of scatological and priapic staples. What TV comedy icon Richard Ayoade was doing signing up for this cynically masturbatory exercise is anyone's guess.

3/10

Sønner av Norge (Jens Lien, 2011)

Sons of Norway takes us to 1979 and the arrival of punk in the life of a 14-year-old in a dormitory town of Oslo. The boy's mother dies in an accident and it is left up to his hippie father to try to keep the conflicted adolescent out of trouble. This is in many ways the last thing that the young rebel wants, as dad is just too cool and understanding to be able to revolt against with any conviction. There are a number of amusing vignettes, such as the boy's squirming discomfort when the dad takes him to a nudist camp or joins his band on drums, and while this is no groundbreaking addition to the coming-of-age genre, it's a pleasant enough ride.

6/10

La Cara Oculta (Andrés Baiz, 2011)

A Spanish couple move to Colombia when the man gets a job conducting the local philharmonic orchestra. Initially happy, his girlfriend develops suspicions that he's cheating on her, and through discovering a hidden panic room in their new house, devises a scheme to find out what he's up to. This goes badly wrong.
The Hidden Face has the basic features of a thriller but never really takes off as such, with aspects of the scenario not making a great deal of sense, and the orchestral sequences are somewhat spurious. On the other hand, it does function quite adequately as a study of jealousy and distrust in relationships. Diverting, then, but too caught between two stools to stand out as either thriller or psychological drama.

5/10

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden, 2011)

Armed with a who's who list of elderly English actors, from Maggie Smith to Judi Dench, this is a genteel feelgood comedy set in a ramshackle Indian hotel run by Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire fame. The oldies take to their new surroundings with varying degrees of enthusiasm and a smile or two is raised, but this is fairly thin fare in plot terms and would probably sink were it not for the goodwill generated by its familiar and dependable cast.

5/10

Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011)

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia revolves around a group of policemen searching for a buried body on the Anatolian plains with the perpetrator of the murder in question. Realism is the key note here, with the story being based on actual events: their progress is slow and slipshod, and their conversations in the middle of the night on issues from bureaucracy and family to yoghurt naturalistically undramatic and frequently amusing for the incongruity between their grim task and what mostly preoccupies their thoughts instead. The snail-like pace of the film, with little happening in over two and a half hours, does however make for somewhat of an endurance test, even for a tolerant viewer.

6/10

Uzak (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002)

Less is quite often more in an ADHD world and Distant is a case in point, involving an existentially depressed photographer in Istanbul having to put up with the arrival of his country cousin, who has garbled notions of being able to find work there. Theirs is not a happy co-habitation. It would be hard to add more to a synopsis since very little actually happens, but the director's command of the small gesture and telling symbolic detail are masterly, and the Bosphorus has seldom looked as sombrely lustrous as it does here, the sun constantly straining to get through banks of wintry cloud as the characters see their dreams sail away.

7/10

Dimenticare Palermo (Francesco Rosi, 1990)

To be fair, the presence of James Belushi in a 'serious role' should really ring enough alarm bells, nor should having arch-pontificator Gore Vidal as co-writer be that reassuring. Belushi plays an Italian-American running for Mayor of New York who falls foul of the Sicilian Mafia through his intention to legalise drugs. The first half of the film plays out just as a protracted travelogue of Sicily, and while the director clearly has Hitchcockian aspirations, these are somewhat hampered by using Hitch's clumsiest film, The Man Who Knew Too Much, as the stylistic template, only with far less competent or likable actors. An attempt at the end to paste a preachy political message over the preceding hotch-potch of loose ends fails to imbue the exercise with much more purpose.

3/10

Jagten (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

The Hunt features that stalwart of Danish cinema, Mads Mikkelsen, as a divorced father who helps out at a local kindergarten while trying to get back custody of his son. The title refers on a superficial level to his involvement with a men's hunting club, but it takes on a bitter irony as he becomes the prey instead when something carelessly spurted by a little girl to a teacher leads the community to hound him pitilessly as a child molester.
In the current climate of paranoia to do with paedophilia, their reaction, while unfounded and overblown, is sadly all too credible - a repeated refrain is the fallacy that children do not lie - and Mikkelsen once more invests a sorry story with a nobility and control of nuance that makes it compelling viewing.

7/10

Juan de los Muertos (Alejandro Brugués, 2011)

Juan of the Dead has the decency to forthrightly own up to its source, Shaun of the Dead, with its title, and thereafter indulges in replicating a good part of the British comedy horror through its tone and characters, the main ones being a couple of amiable slackers, while stopping short of outright theft in terms of scenes. The transposition of the zombie outbreak to Havana is by no means without purpose, allowing for sly satire at the expense of the sententious establishment and the pragmatic attitude of the Cubans, rain or shine. It's lively camp fun all the way through and a rare example of a remake that works on its own merits without feeling like a bastardisation.

6/10

De rouille et d'os (Jacques Audiard, 2012)

The underside of life in a place like Cannes is rarely explored. Rust and Bone tells the story of a single father struggling to make ends meet as a security guard, who meets a double amputee. An ambiguous relationship begins between them. He's as blasé about the emotional content of their encounters as he is about most things while she finds herself unable to remain detached, accompanying him when he begins to take part in bare-knuckle boxing bouts.
The asset of Rust and Bone, its refusal to cave into outright melodrama despite having all the ingredients for that in place, is also its weakness: we remain at the same remove from feeling as the characters do through their self-control. Nevertheless, this is a fully rounded picture of people who feel real.

6/10