La Faute à Fidel! (Julie Gavras, 2006)

Blame it on Fidel is centred on the attempts of a nine-year-old girl in early '70s Paris to make sense of the weird behaviour of her parents as they become left-wing activists and take to spending more time worrying about the plight of the Chilean people and women seeking abortions than they do about about their kids. At the outset, the girl is spoilt and strident in her peer-pressure-driven demands, and before long the urge to strangle her will arise, but at least this gives plenty of room for character development and the film has a reasonable go at exposing the hypocrisies of adults on both sides of the political fence too through a variation of subtly acerbic and cutely comic moments. It is nevertheless heavily dependent on the feisty little lead for the whole to hold together, so it's a blessing that the casting got this so right: the actress chosen is at once a miniature grown-up and a petulant child, and completely credible in the role.

6/10

Escape Plan (Mikael Håfström, 2013)

If director Håfström had wanted to start getting his career back on track after a succession of Hollywood fiascos, culminating in 2011's execrable The Rite, he should have steered a mile clear of agreeing to do the super-annuated Sly and Arnie's first real filmic back-slapping fest. He doesn't stand a chance of making a mark as the plot is spat out of a computer (Sly a 'security expert' who breaks out of prisons for a living and Arnie a big cheese on the inside in a supposedly escape-proof jail) and then it's two hours of the gristly meat-sacks alternately grunting and hamming away at each other with lines and scenes about which even they, with their steroid-addled brains, must privately have got uncomfortable pangs of deja vu.

4/10

Safe (Boaz Yakin, 2012)

It's Jason Statham's umpteenth outing where he reluctantly ends up having to look after an innocent, which of course involves brutally disposing of hordes of gangsters. For the record, this time the innocent is a young Chinese girl who is also a maths genius wanted by the Triads, Russian mafia and corrupt NYPD alike, and he's a former cage fighter who upset his backers by not taking a dive...as if a Statham character ever would. To be charitable, it zips along, mercifully the relationship between the guardian and the ward doesn't get too mawkish - though that's probably just because the ADHD pace doesn't allow any time for it - and there is actually one surprising touch in the finale. It will while away the time between meals on a long-haul flight and serves no other productive purpose at all, not even for the Stath-man's resume.

4/10

Hitchcock (Sacha Gervasi, 2012)

A slice of the legendary filmmaker's life from the period when he went out on a limb to test the pulling power of his reputation by making Psycho, at a time when serious directors did not do horror, Hitchcock is really the story of the relationship between him and his wife Alma, which was sorely tested over the years by his preoccupation with blonde starlets. The arch script allows the stalwarts Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren ample room to trade sharp one-liners, and the chief pleasure of the film lies almost wholly in those moments, with thin scenes involving less imposing supporting cast members such as Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh feeling like so much filler. Likewise, intermittent fantasy scenes where Hitchcock has conversations with Ed Gein, the real-life serial killer who inspired the story of Psycho, reveal nothing about either the director's psyche or the subtexts of his work. Nevertheless, the interplay of the two veterans just about keeps things ticking, even if Hopkins is at times visibly struggling to emote through the piles of prosthetics and make-up caking him.

5/10

Tyrannosaur (Paddy Considine, 2011)

When you get the king of Shane Meadows's kitchen-sink pieces directing the reigning champion of the down-at-heel British realist drama, Peter Mullan, you know that there will be pain and truth in equal measure. It's an unspecified northern town and Mullan is an aggressive alcoholic wreck of a man who meets a Christian charity shop owner whose life is then revealed to be even worse. Things get bad enough that only redemption can come, but this is not fantasyland and hope is a fragile thing.
It takes almost as strong a stomach to watch this as it does to live it. It's utterly truthful, brilliantly acted - Olivia Colman once again proves she's much more than a pair of plummy chops - and while it's not cinema with a capital C, eschewing the potential of the medium to transcend real life simply because the director only wants to get as close as possible to reality without delivering an overt message, it cuts to the bone. You don't have to live on a council estate or be depressed to get something personally significant out of this.

8/10

Dom Hemingway (Richard Shepard, 2013)

Jude Law essays walking in the shoes of Ray Winstone as a jowly soliloquising career criminal with 'anger management issues', fresh out of prison and, as these things go, soon back in the shit again as he seeks what he thinks he's owed. It's one of Law's better performances, thank God, with the actor clearly having fun uglying up and letting loose, Richard E.Grant provides welcome support as his long-suffering friend and the dialogue is amusing, even if utterly contrived. Nevertheless, the plot is strictly by the numbers and there's no depth to look for. It wants to be another Sexy Beast, but rings more like a Guy Ritchie production.

4/10

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976)

Dependable character actor Ben Gazzara plays nightclub owner Cosmo Vitelli in a prime example of the gritty lo-fi '70s crime genre that has now sadly been almost completely squashed by fast-edit bulldozers with stylised violence. Up to his neck with a gambling debt to the mob, he is forced by them to execute one of their rivals and a happy ending is never in sight after that.
It's fair to say that some elements of the film have dated badly, including the technical work, and the cabaret-come-striptease show that is the crowd-puller at the club is cringeworthily twee, but the core story of a man struggling under the yoke of his own pride and foolishness as much as the pressure of the gangsters is a grippingly strong one. The tone manages to be sardonic rather than just wise-cracking in the mob banter scenes, and there is as little posturing in these as there is in the eventual moments of violence.

7/10

Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro, 2013)

Gigantic monsters start sprouting out of a rift in the Pacific Ocean and mankind is plunged into years of escalating war, defended by giant robot warriors called Jaegers which take two neurally connected pilots to operate. Yes, Guillermo del Toro has decided to start a new franchise and this time he's taking on the combined Godzilla and Transformers production lines in the boomy style of Michael Bay. Everything from American football tactics through Battletech and WWF to samurai moves is thrown into the choreography mix, and it is pacy while being rather impressively stupid at the same time. 12-year-old boys will love it and not care in the slightest that the fight sequences make no sense, and it does have a certain gleeful appeal in its quite brazen melding of any monster or sci-fi action elements it likes the look of. But del Toro owes himself more than fishing for the Far Eastern robots and monsters market, and that too applies to Idris Elba as the commander of the defenders, who really wants to take a break from all this silliness before it's too late.

5/10

Tao jie (Ann Hui, 2012)

A Simple Life takes two big names in Hong Kong cinema, Deanie Ip and the probably more internationally recognisable action-film star Andy Lau, and drops them into a decidedly unglamourous milieu as Ah Tao, the female servant of four generations of a well-to-do family is forced to retire after a stroke and Roger, a film producer and the sole member of the family left in Hong Kong, lays aside his diffidence to try to pay her back for decades of care. At first, this just involves setting her up in an old people's home, but gradually the emotional bonds between them deepen. Nothing uncommonly dramatic happens thereafter apart from further slumps in her condition following periods of stability, but the story is honest, not overly sentimental and well served by the two leads, who have a credible chemistry.

6/10

L'Ordre et la Morale (Mathieu Kassovitz, 2011)

Shockingly generically titled Rebellion for English-market distribution, Kassovitz's personal project places himself centre stage as Philippe Legorjus, a police hostage negotiator sent to the overseas territory of New Caledonia to resolve a crisis in which local separatists have captured local gendarmes. This is all based on a true story, with the 1988 French Presidential election looming large in the background and soon coming to dictate the whole course of proceedings.
It's obviously very heartfelt for the director, and on occasion the balancing act between communicating the bare facts and polemicising gets precarious, with too much polarisation between the callous politicians and military on one side and the soulful and moral freedom fighters on the other. It may also be hard for a British viewer to resist a sense of smugness about France's continuing failure to deal with its post-colonial insecurity, albeit that the parallels that can be drawn between their bulldozering attempts to deal with the guerrilla problem also invite easy comparison with the ongoing Iraq and Afghanistan situations. But the film is ultimately raised beyond such niggles by its sheer sense of righteous anger at injustice, translated effectively into taut and morally tortured drama. Finally, an overdue return to form for the director of La Haine.

7/10