Cemetery Junction (Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant, 2010)

Ricky Gervais has stated that he was seeking to compete with the ubiquitous American feelgood coming-of-age romcoms with this piece, rather than ending up with that quintessential British product, the unexportable kitchen sink drama.
He succeeds. Although the kitchen sink is always just out of focus in the background, probably inevitably given both Gervais's sardonic sensibilities and the setting, which carries autobiographical echoes - the location is a fictitious Reading suburb in the early '70s and Gervais even plays the main character's ambitionless father - it engages and warms the cockles while mostly managing to stay clear of the sugariness of most of its US counterparts. The four young principals, dreaming of a life beyond the drab plans the older generation has for them, are refreshingly drawn and played, and cameos by a host of British stalwarts are helpful rather than obtrusive. The outcome is of course never in doubt, but getting there is a pleasant journey.

7/10

Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)

Wes 'Quirky' Anderson populates his films with strong ensembles, who are then under instructions to approach the comical vicissitudes thrown at their characters with a philosophical raised eyebrow. This worked to a degree in The Royal Tenenbaums and A Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, probably becuse the principal protagonist wasn't such a self-centred and conniving little nerdlinger, as is the case with Jason Schwartzman's character here.
Max Fischer is about to get himself ejected from Rushmore, a posh American school existing in some period between the '30s and the present, for poor academic performance brought on by using the school as a personal playground through running every single off-curricular society. Then an English teacher turns up (the insipid Olivia Williams) and a crush on her becomes his new project. Bill Murray wanders in and out depressed with that philosophical raised eyebrow.
It's clear, as with Anderson's other efforts, that the accumulation of nonsensical interludes and random character foibles is intended to produce a composite which speaks out about Life. This kind of approach usually works on an American middlebrow audience. So, Fischer's machinations are to be seen as victories for the Everydweeb, and their outcomes as bittersweet life lessons.
But Fischer learns nothing, and is just as unpleasant at the end as at the start, which would be ok if it wasn't so clear that learning was intended. And a succession of interludes along his circular journey, such as the awful plays he produces, keep promising a point but work neither as satire on pseuds, knockabout fun or anything deeper.

4/10

Predators (Nimród Antal, 2010)

But for a few oblique references to the Arnie original, this is basically a total retread of the hunter-prey jungle rampage (with a few added aliens, since you can only ever go bigger). To fill in for the Governator's rippling pecs not only has the unlikely figure of Adrien Brody (as a grunting hardass mercenary!) had to buff up, but Laurence Fishburne suddenly appears too, puffed up out of recognition. The carefully ethnically-mixed cast are whittled down at a rate very much in keeping with the mathematical formula for the genre. And that's about it. The best you could say is that it's efficient.

4/10

L'Enfer (Danis Tanovic, 2005)

The second part of the Kieslowski-scripted loose trilogy, following on from the Tom Tykwer-helmed largely accomplished Heaven in 2002, Hell continues with themes familiar to the late Polish director's perennial preoccupations with past transgressions causing personal cataclysms in the present.
We're in France this time, with a trio of sisters all caught up with bourgeois family and relationship dilemmas. That could already be the crux of the rub: the mannered setting sets it at a remove from Kieslowski's masterful ability to create engagement with the characters. Although the casting of the sisters may not help too: one's a petulant loon, another a doormat, and the third the blankly pouting arthouse Bardot, Emmanuelle Béart. Carole Bouquet as the spitefully taciturn mother of the three does redress the balance but is seen too briefly.
There are still some wince-inducingly catharctic scenes, but it's a disjointed piece and doesn't augur well for Kieslowski's former scriptwriting partner Piesiewicz cannibalising what scraps he can find so that Purgatory ever gets made.

5/10

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