Nebraska (Alexander Payne, 2013)

Payne may have been behind the script of the atrocity that was I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, but as a director he shows no sign of faltering and returns to a more naturalistic and understated mood with the story of a borderline-delusional old man and his put-upon son in a nowhere town, the father becoming determined after receiving a mass-mail letter telling him he's won a million to make it to Nebraska to collect his fortune. It turns into a road movie for a while, with the duo bickering all the way, taking in their stay with excruciatingly brain-dead relatives, until a fairly inescapable conclusion: no fairytale, this, despite some sumptuous black-and-white photography of endless flat prairie vistas.
As the lead, Bruce Dern snarls and sulks to maximum effect, while also conveying wounded pride with great economy, and the underlying gallows-black humour doesn't swamp the basic pathos of the characters' small lives. At a stately two hours, it could probably have done with a little trimming, but then it might have ended up a standard modern product rather than a welcome blast from a bygone era of slow, thoughtful cinema. File alongside Lynch's The Straight Story.

7/10

RoboCop (José Padilha, 2014)

Cop will eat itself. Once again, a reboot for no other purpose than having a safe product, and sod consumer goodwill; it's there to be exploited if they're undemanding enough to want nothing more than more of the same. Somehow, while Michael Keaton and Samuel L. Jackson clearly don't have ethical compunctions about getting their paycheque for this kind of thing, you expected better of Gary Oldman. It's largely irrelevant that this takes a slightly different tack to the original, with more politics and the hero's family in on what's happened from the start: these things can only be justified by improving on the source, and the satire here is toothless in comparison, seeming to be attempted only tokenistically, but so too are the generic teched-up action scenes, which really is beyond the pale.

3/10

Pietà (Kim Ki-duk, 2012)

A brutal debt collector, preying on the owners of failing machine shops, is visited by a woman who claims to be his mother. After his initial rejection of her, their relationship takes on sickly tone which is both Oedipal and parodic of a happy family.
This did very well at the international festivals, and the reason is clear: it is relentlessly grim in its outlook and prospects, and mulls heavily over the meaninglessness of anything except emotional attachment, which is then also shown to be an Achilles heel. This means it cannot be mistaken for a cheap thriller, and critics like that. But it also means that the characters are nigh-on impossible to empathise with, and as the Shakespearean revenge adage 'blood will have blood' is followed to the bitter end, contrivance takes over substance, which is something a film this bleak cannot really allow to happen.

5/10