Lore (Cate Shortland, 2012)

As the war ends, an adolescent girl is left looking after her four younger siblings when their Nazi parents flee from Allied arrest. A trek across the whole of Germany begins towards the refuge of their grandmother's house. This is doomed to end almost before it has started, were it not for the help of a young man who reveals himself to have been in the concentration camps.
While it's true that the amount of potential material generated by the events of the time is almost limitless, the number of new angles on the human tragedy for all concerned and hand-wringing for Germans in particular is starting to run low. So do a British writer and Australian director bring anything new to the table? Certainly, the emphasis is necessarily less on regional detail and more on a sort of universal landscape, with repeated cutaways of impassive nature bringing Roeg's Walkabout to mind, while also, if one is being generous to the conceit, alluding almost hallucinatorily to the disconnection the children have with their fragmented land. But the makers' outsider status is also a weakness: the main character, Lore, spends almost the whole film still in the grip of her Hitler Youth indoctrination and when she does break out at last against the older generation who are still in denial, it's with a petulance that ill suits her meta-role as the symbol of a national sea-change. Her lack of maturity directly reflects a lack of authorial familiarity with the territory, something you would never find with a considered German reflection on the same. Whether this naivety is ultimately a good thing too is quite open to debate.

6/10

Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, 2012)

Say it softly, but the king of wilful quirkiness may finally be developing a point to his admittedly still occasionally irritating style. Points remain in anything he does where you cry out for a stick of celery instead of yet another gateau, but this may be his best film to date alongside The Grand Budapest Hotel, for the simple reason that you care about the characters, and that lowers your guard down so you can then enjoy the silliness too.
In a nutshell, it's about a 12-year-old boy and girl who are square pegs in their little New England island community and run away together, resulting in a manhunt after them. Yes, they talk with a tongue-in-cheek degree of self-possession for their age, yes, all the characters have some off-the-wall idiosyncrasy, but so few filmmakers want to just transport their viewers because they actually like people (Burton and Jeunet are two others who spring to mind) that you have to forgive the man his foibles and be charmed.

7/10

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2011)

An adaptation of a Terence Rattigan play, The Deep Blue Sea gives Rachel Weisz one of her first real opportunities to take centre stage in serious drama as a woman in an austere rationing-era Britain of 1950 who leaves her judge husband for a raffish ex-RAF pilot and fails to find happiness in either life, culminating in a self-recriminating suicide attempt. The strong cast pour their heart and soul into it and the period gloom is a fine emotional mirror of the wife's desperation, but the whole has little to say beyond how hopeless, darling, the way of things is. Too little mannered angst, not enough passion to speak out beyond its time.

5/10

American Hustle (David O. Russell, 2013)

Presumably the 'American' in the title is to add glamour in regulation fashion, or to announce that a political comment on the state of the nation is being made, rather than just distinguishing it from the UK TV series. In any case, we're landed in the familiar territory of voiceovers and double crosses as we follow a pair of grifters try to manage the pickle they find themselves in after being offered a deal by an ambitious FBI agent. This means bringing down corrupt politicians through a series of stings, and the film saunters perkily enough through these. It shies away from the outright carefree capering of Ocean's Eleven and the like, but one suspects that the director would really like his work to be seen in the Casino class, and this falls short through a lack of real originality in the script and a cast that is man-for-man more lightweight, something which Robert De Niro's walk-through cameo as a Mafia enforcer only serves to highlight. Still, the dialogue is lively, and the '70s fashion horror show detail of hairstyles and Sta-Prest clothing is a character in itself, so it's not without its own charms.

6/10

Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)

Joaquin Phoenix is a deft hand at doing damaged and delusional, and is therefore perfect casting as the lonely geek who falls in love with the artificial intelligence in his computer. This may have a modish sci-fi twist, but Phoenix's persona is not far removed from his socially dysfunctional soul in 2008's Two Brothers, and the comparison is beneficial. The film also manages to show a shroud of uncertainty over whether the object of his infatuation is truly self-aware, and so this is never allowed to turn either into Pacino doing barmy in S1mOne, the teary sogginess of Bicentennial Man or the more formulaic thriller set-up of the murderous household AI of Demon Seed. It does sag towards the end under the weight of the futility of the protagonist's passion, and his detachment from human contact also infects the viewer with detachment from his situation, but nevertheless some interesting ideas on the future of social interaction have been thrown up by then.

6/10

Tali-Ihantala 1944 (Åke Lindman & Sakari Kirjavainen, 2007)

Tali-Ihantala 1944 centres on the largest land battle in Nordic history, the defensive victory achieved by the Finns at Tali-Ihantala on the Karelian isthmus against a massive Russian onslaught. Unfortunately, the massiveness never comes across: the film is a succession of small skirmishes in the woods, intercut occasionally with solemn generals at HQ pondering the size of their task and explanatory notes in the form of maps and text. It approaches the history incredibly respectfully, with few concessions to drama, and this includes sketching most of the interchangeable characters in only cursory detail. It's quite ironic that the evil totalitarian invader, having lost most of the battles in the actual war, should after the war have won most of the cinematic comparisons over the same ground.

4/10

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Peter Jackson, 2013)

The second instalment in Peter Jackson's brazen attempt to milk every last drop from the Lord of the Rings bandwagon suffers from the same malaise as The Two Towers; the palette is diminished as the pastoral vibrancy of the Shire has been left far behind and now just battles, hardships and chases involving the laughably indestructible heroes are left to occupy another excessive running time, with so many scenes and characters added as filler to a relatively short book that you begin to doubt the existence of any of them in the source. Of course, Tolkien was quite capable of pages of waffle himself, and in comparison with most fantasy adaptations this is still largely impressive stuff, with some cracking setpieces, the customary stunning scenery and some surprising moral ambiguity as the heroes set themselves against a man who only wishes to have their personal quest not result in the dragon slaughtering his community. But an end, that comes so abruptly that it's obvious that material is being saved just to squeeze out another film by hook or by crook, leaves a somewhat sour taste.

5/10