Cloud Atlas (The Wachowskis & Tom Tykwer, 2012)

Converting David Mitchell's best-selling 2004 novel into a film with any degree of success is a hugely ambitious undertaking, withe its six interlinked storylines spanning eras past, present and future. You can see what the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer were thinking when they decided to split directorial duties between the stories, giving them separate flavours and thereby helping to distinguish them rapidly from each other, particularly as the film is even more fragmented and flitting than the novel, to the extent that a spell of ten seconds will repeatedly contain images from four eras. On the other hand, the star of the Matrix directors is on the wane and Tykwer might still have been better off going it alone. Perhaps tackling the sci-fi action sequences of the future sections gave him cold feet. Unfortunately, those are then also the weakest parts.
The same actors turn up from era to era as characters of different nationalities and even ethnicities. This is meant to emphasise the interconnectedness of all things but frequently ends up being very counter-productive, as at best it means the viewer is constantly playing I-Spy with the cast in the new disguises instead of following events, while at worst some of the accents - was Tom Hanks going for Scottish or Polish at one point? - and prothestic make-up jobs are so flimsy that the ambience is well and truly temporarily shattered. And it is very dependent on building up a poetically portentous mood to get the viewer on its side. Few films over recent decades have tried so much, and it must get some indulgence for that bravery. The soundtrack, as we have come to expect from Tykwer, is frequently sumptuous and the photography is breath-taking at times.
It is frustrating, though, because there's ultimately less philosophical pith than there is gloss. You may find yourself at the end having spent nearly three hours totally sucked in through sensory overload and yet strangely not full up at all.

5/10

Tu Seras Mon Fils (Gilles Legrand, 2011)

You Will Be My Son gives us the stone-faced Niels Arestrup, who you may remember from A Prophet as a crime boss in prison, in a rather frighteningly similar role as the owner of a prestigious vineyard who bullies a son he doesn't see as a worthy successor to the estate into submission. He is a monster who is a terrible advertisement for the whole concept of wine snobbery: someone who uses wine to validate his entire existence and behaviour. Admittedly this point is made somewhat heavy-handedly as eventually no conversation is left without the use of wine as a metaphor for every aspect of life, and the film starts to go around in circles at this point, but Arestrup's performance is compelling nevertheless.

6/10

The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014)

Ralph Fiennes leads a huge cast of Anderson regulars and other big names as the roguish concierge of a luxury hotel in a fictitious Central European country in the 1930s. Anderson is a Marmite director, with whimsical oddball characters and preoccupations stamped all the way through his picaresque work, and this time he has really gone overboard, not least in playing 'blink and you'll miss the cameo' with the audience. It would be extremely irritating were it not done with such joyful gusto or looked less sumptuous. Fiennes is also an absolute hoot, playing with and making fun out of his mannered gentleman persona. You'd never have thought he had such comic timing; you hang on his every line. It may be an airy fancy, but it is highly enjoyable.

7/10

Side Effects (Steven Soderbergh, 2013)

Despite his repeatedly stated intention to retire from making feature films, Soderbergh is still churning them out, but the returns are diminishing. With this would-be Hitchcockian thriller, he does manage that curate's egg of wrangling a decent performance out of Jude Law, as a psychiatrist trying out a series of antidepressants on a disturbed young woman, but the film falters at what it sets its stall out to do, namely providing suspenseful twists. When his patient kills her husband, purportedly under the influence of a new experimental drug, the whole incident is shown in unambiguous detail and therefore leaves no room for doubt beyond that to do with her level of mental impairment at the time, and the sub-plot involving defrauding drug companies is too crude to add much depth either. It is strong on atmosphere and tautly cut, which are perennial virtues of the director's work, but this time around there is not enough substance to sustain the whole caboodle.

5/10

My Week with Marilyn (Simon Curtis, 2011)

An account of Marilyn Monroe's fling with a crew member during the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl in London, relying on his autobiography for its factual basis, My Week with Marilyn takes a potentially interesting idea and fails to do much with it, largely because of flat photography and a script that doesn't go much beyond the perfunctory. Michelle Williams captures Monroe's mannerisms and voice to a tee, but that's all the story does too, with her anxiety-fuelled overdoses and fits of feeling cornered by all around her repeating how luminous she is. It's not the actress's fault that she is actually rather ordinary-looking, but it should have been dealt with first thing in casting. Meanwhile, Eddie Redmayne gawps on with his usual soulful teary eyes as the young man fawning over her, and Kenneth Branagh's Olivier is so much of a mannered impersonation it feels like he's just taking the piss. It's all very forgettable.

4/10

Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, 2013)

American independent cinema sometimes suffers from a particular affliction not found elsewhere: a counter-reaction against a mainstream which is so facile and crude that doing anything which is the polar opposite of that seems meritorious. This is not a happy situation, and Upstream Color is an awful film, less watchable than a Transformers sequel. Having no confidence in its premise, which is a confused woman being robbed after having been injected with a parasite and then ending up in a relationship with a confused man, it chops up the scenes, brings in completely unexplained characters and goes around in circles which seem to imply people being tied into the psyches of pigs on a farm. It almost makes you cry at times at its utter cluelessness, because somewhere below you can actually hear the director trying to say something of substance, but no-one is helping his one-man-band.

2/10

One Day (Lone Scherfig, 2011)

The adaptation of David Nicholls's romantic bestseller stays faithful to the source, probably operating on the principle of not tinkering with a tried and tested commercial formula. It thus follows the up-and-down relationship of Dexter and Emma from university, through his fame and addictions and her dead-end phases of existence, catching up with them at annual intervals for a day. The leads Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess are both sweet, even allowing for her wildly wandering accent and his mumbling delivery. Unfortunately, their chemistry does not really work for the simple reason that it's difficult to support her indulgence of his protracted bad years. Here, sticking doggedly to the structure of the novel is a shortcoming too, as the transitions from the dark of one year to the light of another occur without warning in minutes instead of chapters, leaving the viewer constantly playing catch-up with the current emotional balance between the characters.

5/10

Thor: The Dark World (Alan Taylor, 2013)

Branagh steps aside after his bizarre directorial decision to helm the first instalment, making way for someone who is primarily a TV director, and predictably this brings no improvement. Instead of any greater depth to the characters or storyline we get the typical fallback position of sequels, namely even bigger explosions and faster cuts, as if that were any compensation. It's like Lord of the Rings as the George Lucas of recent decades would have butchered it, and very boring at that. The plot is some nonsense about Dark Elves seeking to exploit the alignment of the worlds for power, the frowning beefcake demi-god hero still no more than a blank space on the screen, and when the film is briefly livened up by the reappearance of Tom Hiddleston as Thor's Machiavellian half-brother, it's only a false dawn as he is given nothing of interest to do. And yes, they are going to force out yet another one too.

4/10

Filth (Jon S. Baird, 2013)

Cinematic adaptations of Irvine Welsh's work have assumed a number of standard devices ever since Trainspotting, and Filth runs through the whole lot of them with glee. There are numerous infringements of the fourth wall, hallucinatory sequences and sardonic voice-overs. This could all easily become very cloying, were it not for James McAvoy turning out perhaps the best performance of his career as the bent copper Bruce Robertson, seeking to land colleagues and acquaintances alike in the shit as he chases a promotion and drinks himself into degradation, increasingly frantic and delusional in his conviction that he can get away with anything. It's painful to watch and yet also engaging, working beyond the level of black comedy with some truly moving moments as the anti-hero struggles to deny feeling for any of the people around him in the grip of his numerous issues.

7/10

The Dyatlov Pass Incident (Renny Harlin, 2013)

The director continues to slip further away from at least getting A-list stars onto his hackish productions with an unwanted addition to the horror/sci-fi sub-genre which involves squealing young American tourists running blithely around the creepy lands of Eastern Europe with a camcorder until coming to a sticky end. Here, a party of intrepid students investigates the real-life mass disappearance of a group of mountaineers in Cold War Russia, but any profit to be gained from having an actual mystery as the basis is eventually left aside as Harlin throws everything but the kitchen sink at them in terms of unearthly menaces, from aliens through the Philadelphia Experiment to zombies. The legacy of The Blair Witch Project has not been a very auspicious one.

3/10