Un Prophète (Jacques Audiard, 2009)

Following hard on the heels of the international success of Mesrine, A Prophet is another slice of French prison and underworld life, this time without a biopic backdrop. Audiard gives us an Arab everyman who has fallen through society's security net and for whom prison serves primarily as a means to becoming more efficient and focused as a criminal. Taken by force under the wing of a brutal Corsican gangster as soon as he steps through the prison doors to start a 6-year sentence, 19-year old Malik soon has emotional baggage in abundance as he's given the choice to either kill a stool pigeon or be killed himself.
You can see why critics swooned: it's unglamorous and uncompromising, without treacly redemptions, and yet also suffused with moments of bleak poetry in glimpses of what might have been. But the constraints of the subject matter never give room for anything truly revelatory, and the potential politics of the culture clash within its compromised protagonist are largely neglected too.
There is plenty to applaud too: Tahar Rahim as the natural survivor in the lead role and Niels Arestrup as the posturing gangland boss present compelling performances, and the rife violence is played out far more in the mind and suggestion than in salacious graphic detail. All this makes for a honest and tense low-key crime drama, but there's insufficient additional depth to justify the film's epic running time.

6/10

Cargo (Ivan Engler, 2009)

The motley crew of a grungy cargo ship in 2070, en route to a distant star, gradually discover that the faceless corporation that employs them has other plans for them. Calling the firm Weyland-Yutani would of course be copyright infringement, but the rest is there for the taking.

It may be mean-spirited to pick up Cargo for being so derivative, so many rip-offs down the line from Alien, Dark Star, 2001 et al, but the prospect of a German perspective on the standard future dystopia populated by bleary dreamers and zealous bureaucrats held out some promise: after all, French directors have demonstrated a knack of adding new elements to the brew on numerous occasions over the years.
No such luck: it's woodenly-acted freeze-dried rations from beginning to end and distinguishable from a Hollywood B-film by language only. Late on, having blundered through several glaring plotholes, Engler does hit a single poignant idea, but then has to stub it out at once to end the film post haste.

3/10

Nunta Muta (Horaƫiu Mǎlǎele, 2008)

Silent Wedding takes place in Romania in 1953, when the whole country is officially in mourning following the death of Stalin. And it's also a hoot. As with Kusturica's black comedy romps through the communist era in Yugoslavia, Mǎlǎele's film jigs a merry dance between tragedy and celebration with irrepressible zest.
In a nutshell, a small village decides that a local wedding will go ahead regardless of the silence imposed on the country...in absolute silence. Needless to say, this proves a tall order for the chirpy villagers.
Satire and pathos are blended in without overwhelming the joie-de-vivre of a rumbunctious and likeable cast who have the naturalistic air of lay actors. Some of the humour is too broad, to be sure, and the more absurdist moments occasionally have a randomised feel, but overall, like with Kusturica, it'd take a heart of stone to resist getting pulled along with the mood.

7/10

The Taking of Pelham 123 (Tony Scott, 2009)

Well, another pointless remake of a reasonable Golden Age of Hollywood heist film with Tony Scott, a hack of medium standing who somehow always commands a hefty budget despite a singular failure to ever deliver anything memorable with it, unless you count the pace-setting homoerotics of Top Gun. Add the dead certs that Travolta will ham it up something rotten as the villain and Washington will provide the compromised but surprisingly tough everyman angle. Expectations duly lowered by this combination,  the efficiency of the dialogue and set-up in the first half hour come as a pleasant surprise. Then Scott realises at the same time that there's not much more dialogue to be had between his two principals, and there's still half an hour until the train hijackers' deadline to fill up somehow, and that his goldfish audience might be drowsing without screeching cop cars or machine guns, so it's time for some wholly gratuitous crashes in scenes quite redundant to the actual drama at hand. We just about make it to the end before the cliche and plothole count has gone through the roof, but it's a close-run thing.

4/10

Doomsday (Neil Marshall, 2008)

After Dog Soldiers, The Descent, this heap and Centurion it would be decent of Marshall to Ronseal it and change his surname to 'Generic Survival Horror'. Although, to be fair, the first two films at least met their undemanding brief with some fun and pizazz. Whereas with this one the soldering of source materials is just too glaring to be anything other than embarrassing. Appropriately, since cannibals feature somewhere in the leftover stew of a plot, the whole thing is shamelessly cannibalised from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and 28 Days Later, cobbled together with some double-sided sticky tape in the form of lesser pilferings from Resident Evil and Escape from New York.
In a sentence: Rhona Mitra does Kate Beckinsale as a foxy hardnut, Scotland is isolated because of a plague that makes all it doesn't kill sprout mohicans, and Bob Hoskins and Malcolm McDowell breeze by to pick up their pay cheques. Meanwhile, Marshall spends $30m on petrol bombs. That's your lot.

3/10

Antichrist (Lars Von Trier, 2009)

Von Trier has stated that this protracted nightmare arose from his continuing battles with depression, and Antichrist certainly manages to ferry the viewer to the land of the unwell with some panache. Viewed as a psychological horror film, its air of looming menace is leagues ahead of the slasher pack. Viewed as a dissertation on the disabling effects of grief, it's far less effective, as Charlotte Gainsbourg's bereaved mother gets increasingly hysterical and takes it out with escalating severity on her psychiatrist husband, Willem Dafoe. It's not that her delusional mania is unfeasible per se as a depiction of mental illness brought on by trauma, it's just that it's difficult to see the loss of a child as the catalyst for not only the self-loathing but also the misandry that follow. In seeking to communicate his blackest moods, Von Trier seems to have chosen the wrong narrative vehicle.
Then there's also his familiar and unresolved preoccupation with women as victims, though here Gainsbourg's character has in effect become her own victim, and that in turn raises an uncomfortable air of women seen as both ultimately unfathomable and prey to insanity in their vulnerability.
Overall, Antichrist is best taken without concessions to whatever red herrings of psychological analysis Von Trier may dangle before us, and with a refusal to read any more than a habitual provocateur's brief to shock into the scenes where he starts mutilating his actors. It works beautifully as eerie, satanically tinged horror, the performances scarily committed and the photography in particular of exceptional nuance and vividity.

6/10

Chocolat (Lasse Hallström, 2000)

Chances are that if you were in the market for this, you'll have seen it already, seeing as it has chick-flick stamped so solidly through it as a stick of Blackpool rock. Not that any adaptation of a novel by the superlatively imaginative Joanne Harris should be dismissed out of hand as serving only that market.
The basic structure of the source material has survived in the film version: Vianne Rocher, with precocious daughter in tow, causes turmoil on arrival in a tight-lippedly conservative French town little adapted to the post-war world with her sensuous confections and forthright interventions, soon leading to the mayor plotting to have her sent packing. The allusions to the conflict between church and atheism/paganism are still there too, and the main characters are well served by dependable casting, from Juliette Binoche to Judi Dench, Alfred Molina as the scheming mayor and Johnny Depp in a vanity cameo as a roguish traveller and Vianne's love interest.
But Hallström's film fails on one critical count: it's too flat to convey the magic of the bewitching chocolatier's alchemy, and so the ecstatic conversions she brings about in the repressed villagers just come across as instances of ludicrous gluttony whereas it should be apparent that there's real witchcraft at work. It's all perfectly charming and light, but leaves too sugary an aftertaste. Something more along the lines of Tom Tykwer's painstaking working of Perfume was called for.

6/10