Haywire (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

This is explicitly and without greater pretensions a vehicle for real-life MMA fighter Gina Carano, and as such the only point of interest in a purely perfunctory plot involving a secret service contractor who is backstabbed by her employers and sets out for revenge is the fight sequences. These are exhilarating, at least at first, with the knowledge that the star can do and is doing everything shown. Then the force of repetition leaches out the novelty and what is left is the actor's limited range in scenes between pummelings, where she comes across as an even harder nut than while kicking the shit out of various large men. A work of pure fetishism from Soderbergh, then.

4/10

Man of Steel (Zack Snyder, 2013)

Superman gets an umpteenth reboot with the now obligatory grungier outfit, a moodier attitude to match it and the standard Christ allusions and hand-wringing about destiny. It is certainly superior to the wet Superman Returns of 2006. For starters, we're spared the Clark Kent disguise nonsense, at least until the end, and there is none of the usual kryptonite guff. You can feel the influence of producer Christopher Nolan behind the more prosaic director, particularly in the slow build-up which has more than a touch of Batman Begins.
The main problem, though, is how to make the character interesting when he has virtually no physical limitations and having him duke it out with other identically indestructible Kryptonians for hours on end is no solution, leading to scenes of ludicrous proportions where little of the real estate of Metropolis is left standing. The slapstick and sweetness of the Christopher Reeve era is sorely missed.

5/10

Prisoners (Denis Villeneuve, 2013)

The small-town America of perverts and suppressed paranoia lurking under the suburban surface is an oft-visited setting and brings with it certain tropes such as the establishment of a false sense of secure family life and cycles of abuse originating from religious fanaticism warping individuals. Prisoners has all this in spades, but is elevated above the run-of-the-mill child abduction story by strong casting, including Hugh Jackman as the father who takes the law into his own hands and is driven to horrific acts through his conviction, and also by a succession of false trails which keep you guessing.

6/10

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (Declan Lowney, 2013)

To say that there is a chequered history behind the crossing over of popular TV comics to features is somewhat of an understatement. It works better when, as in this case, it is their best-loved character that makes the transition, but it's nevertheless rare that the character survives unscathed. The cheesy silliness of Police Squad, for instance, was great in the comfortable confines of the half-hour episode and increasingly laboured when stretched out to ninety minutes with the same plot and characters.
Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa astutely gets around this by moving the persona on, making him more fully rounded, so that while his little-Englander peevishness and buffoonish delusions are still there, it is less of an outright caricature and more of a sympathetic observation, which stands up better to the tests of the full-length adaptation. Is Coogan getting sentimental about his monstrous creation? If so, it's a fond farewell. It's still far funnier at any rate than just about any other film you'll have seen in the last few years.

7/10

Elysium (Neill Blomkamp, 2013)

Elysium gives us Matt Damon, seemingly in a shift-based arrangement with Will Smith and Tom Cruise as the saviour of humanity in the familiar future dystopia, as a member of the serf-like masses back on Earth who stands up against the upper stratum of society living in orbital luxury. Before long, he's got terminal radiation poisoning to set up his martyrdom and an exoskeleton to give him superpowers and then it's strictly done by numbers. Blomkamp's world may not have aliens in it as in his breakthrough hit District 9, but it still feels oddly like the same place and hence there's little to surprise in the set-ups and vistas, no matter how efficiently they may be realised.

5/10

Kiseki (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2011)

I Wish has a superficial similarity to Stand By Me in that it centres around a bunch of young boys taking off on a secret trip. The motivation here is however less about the lessons coming-of-age and bonding amongst friends, with the children mostly younger and more innocent: their goal is to witness the moment when two bullet trains pass each other, in the fanciful belief that any wish made at that moment will come true. This could be very mawkish, something in which it has said be said that Japanese film has plenty of previous. But the child actors perform with fresh-faced enthusiasm, helped by Koreeda's technique of providing direction rather than word-for-word scripts, which leads to a freedom of expression, and the troubles faced by their individual families in the background are also not pumped up to melodramatic levels.

7/10