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