Triangle (Christopher Smith, 2009)

Some films are so dependent on their plot contortions that an effective representation in a review becomes impossible, for fear of violating the spoiler rule. The evaluation is then simply a thumbs-up or down.
Triangle may start in standard supernatural slasher territory, with a bunch of blandly good-looking friends coming across a ghost ship on a boating trip. The ship of course turns out not to be deserted, and the heroine, played by the instantly forgettable Melissa George, gets trapped in a personal hell.
That the film then turns into a rather blatant rip-off of 2007's Spanish psychological thriller Timecrimes actually turns out to be its salvation. At least it guarantees rewards in terms of piecing it all together.

6/10

Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1999)

Here The Crow director Proyas throws detective film noir, The Truman Show and The Matrix into a mangle and then cranks for a while until a paste of passable consistency emerges.
This is a slightly cruel reduction: being contemporaneous with the two blockbusters mentioned, there's no concrete evidence of any idea theft from either. What it is, though, is suffering by comparison with either: the '40s gumshoe patina doesn't make the idea of a fake world outside the city as universally appealing as in Truman, and the aliens responsible for the shifting reality, being led by arch-cheesemonger Richard O'Brien, don't have the chilling vim of The Matrix's tyrannical computer program as the antagonist.
Rufus Sewell does well enough as the eventually messianic hero on the run, but William Hurt's cop is stolid rather than stoic and Kiefer Sutherland's pseudo-Mengele mumbling doctor is just plain silly. Its prettiness is also offset by some grave gaps in narrative logic and an ADHD 1.8-second average shot length. Taken on its own merits, then, it just about bears up, but refinements on the ideas by other films have made it a bit superfluous.

5/10

Precious (Lee Daniels, 2009)

Black American kitchen-sink drama has seen a surfeit of films centring on gangs or teenagers getting themselves out of a hole with edukeishon over the years, and at first glance Precious would fall squarely into the second category: pregnant teenager Precious, a surly illiterate blob, is weighed down with an abusive mother whose sole mantra is 'you ain't never gonna amount to nuthin', until she starts finding her own voice under the wing of an inspirational teacher. It could be right royal crap, with J-Lo or Michelle Pfeiffer as the saintly motivator, and the fat girl finding the holy feelgood trinity of money, love and skinniness.
Thankfully, we're spared that: the bar's simply been set too high and you know Precious's filmstar fantasies will, for once, remain just that. Instead, the goal becomes a more attainable and universal one; simple self-determination. There are no real surprises along the way towards that end, but a strong cast and unpatronising script raise it above the worthy-but-dull mean.

6/10

Heaven (Tom Tykwer, 2002)

At first, this comes across easily enough as a companion piece to Tykwer's The Princess and the Warrior from 2000, the similarities obvious as a pair of star-crossed lovers strive to get away from a system that would seek to imprison them, and a hint of crossover into unreality hovering just out of sight. But with the knowledge that the director just picked up Kieslowski's last ever script, a different interpretation forces itself onto the film. You start looking for the late Polish auteur's moral outrage, steeped in black humour or bleak pathos. This is to do Tykwer an injustice, however: he's capable of more changes of pace than just breakneck, and brings his own slant to the story without steamrollering.
Cate Blanchett's Englishwoman in Turin, devastated to find that in seeking to kill a drug baron, she's accidentally wiped out innocent bystanders instead, presents a morally compromised protagonist and it takes some doing on both the writer's and director's part to allow empathy with her to live on. When Giovanni Ribisi's policeman falls for her at first sight, a suspension of disbelief is required, and by his own admission Tykwer got similarly swept away by the opportunity to use his aerial camera toy on lush Italian landscapes. But it's worth it in the end for sheer ambience, and aficionados of either director can't feel cheated.

7/10

The Expendables (Sylvester Stallone, 2010)

Stallone, Statham, Li, Lundgren, Rourke, Roberts, Schwarzenegger, Willis. And a few more apparently famous meatheads from MMA/WWF. It's almost the full set. One wonders what Norris, Van Damme, Russell and Seagal did wrong to be left out of a last big payday-come-love-in for the now creaky-jointed and gaffer-taped action hams of the '80s and '90s (ostensibly, this seems like a passing on of the baton to Statham and Li, but they're getting long in the tooth too). If it was out of meanness, it seems particularly churlish, as they've proven at least as much as any of the ones present that they belong in a sandbox of smashing things and walking stone-faced away from giant explosions, with all that noise clearly putting Stallone into such a daze that he forgot to get a scriptwriter. Oh, crack mercenaries, South American dictator. Ok, that'll do.
It could have actually been fun, maybe if it had been as OTT as Crank or Predator. As it was, I swiftly realised that if you just put all dozen or so into a ring and had them kick seven shades of shit out of each other for 2 hours it would have made for a vastly more gratifying piece of entertainment.

3/10

The Men Who Stare at Goats (Grant Heslov, 2009)

I don't know know about you, but when I hear Ewan McGregor's cod-American voice pipe up as the film's narrator, it bodes ill for quality control from thereon. And so it proves, when his journalist character takes himself off to Iraq to seek out a big scoop and gets one in the shape of psychic experiments taking place within the US military. That it's all loosely based on real facts is by-the-by since it veers unsteadily like a truck on a potholed desert road from comedy to political comment to pathos, none of which it does convincingly.
Clooney, Spacey and Bridges are also there with a selection of their stock personages, and you wonder why except to conclude that it must have been a quiet time of year and maybe the shoot was a blast. Meanwhile, for the viewer, it's all about as diverting and pointful as doing the crossword.

4/10

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

Hollywood is far from done with the Western, but now it only lives on as a kind of procession of the walking dead, in savage meditations on the decline of the age of the outlaw and the disappearance of the frontier. It's been swinging towards this for forty years, of course, since Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which really set the template that the likes of Unforgiven and all lesser derivatives have to nod to. So you can't really call modern Westerns revisionist in any meaningful sense: they're just revisitors to a familiar country where the heroic myth is already taken as a sham anachronism.
All this doesn't mean that there isn't still room for a great Western. The Assassination of Jesse James is very nearly one: Brad Pitt occupies the centre assuredly as the increasingly beleaguered bandit with whom it stretches your kindness to see him as merely utilitarian rather than just sociopathic, and the film's dialogues feel genuinely fresh, which is a hard enough act given the weight of genre convention. Ultimately, though, it all has to serve second fiddle to Roger Deakins's cinematography: I'm hard pushed to remember anything in the same class in recent years and certainly nothing to surpass it. Frame after frame just seems like a painting.

8/10