Daybreakers (the Spierig brothers, 2009)

Vampires, with a Matrix twist: in the near future (as it always is) they constitute 95% of mankind and the rest serve as a dwindling supply of food for the mass. Ethan Hawke, as in Gattaca, is the humanistic dissenter who seeks to reverse the tide, while Sam Neill more or less recycles his evil megalomaniac from Event Horizon as head capitalist bloodsucker who just wants to milk the status quo.
There's plenty of room here for black critique of the destructiveness of market forces, and more space to manoeuvre within the confines of a crowded genre is made by the upside-down premise of the human as the outsider. Both opportunities are largely wasted, and the whole collapses under the weight of having to engineer a resolution from a very half-baked set of internal scientific rules. All that doesn't preclude a sequel, of course.

5/10

The Invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2007)

The umpteenth filming of The Body Snatchers drafts in the director of the sporadically estimable Das Experiment and Downfall, and it's difficult to see what the aim was with either yet another act of remastication or getting an ostensibly serious director to helm it, particularly as the studio then promptly disembowelled Hirschbiegel's darker original version in favour of a formulaic progression to eventual salvation. Philip Kaufman's nihilistic 1978 version with Donald Sutherland and a choking air of irreversible, creeping encirclement should have been the last word on the concept. Here, we get police cars getting trashed in place of actual suspense, and Nicole Kidman dragging her blonde beagle-eyed boy around while trying to avoid sleep, as the audience simultaneously fights the same losing battle against somnolence.
On a positive note, Warner Bros. lost $40m at the box office on this mess, and Hirschbiegel will probably be able to sweep it under the carpet as a case study in studio interference. A cautionary tale to all involved, then.

4/10

Les Triplettes de Belleville (Sylvain Chomet, 2003)

Chomet's first feature, released in the English-language market as Belleville Rendez-Vous, is a near-perfect marriage of painstakingly crafted old-school painting and CGI. Chomet did then go on to perfect the fusion in 2010's The Illusionist.
The story here is fairly unexceptional: a boy grows up dreaming of winning the Tour De France and is coached to that end by his indefatigable grandma, until he's abducted by a nefarious mafioso and she sets out to rescue him. The pleasure is rather in all the incidental detail: each OTT characterisation is imbued with a spark of life and individualism that modern Disney's mass-production wisecracking animals are wholly lacking, and the pacing, even when the action gets frenetic, still allows room for each witty contrivance to breathe before moving on. Chomet also has an acute sense of staging and perspective, which makes for captivatingly vertiginous shots without the crutch of 3-D.
If there's a downside, it's that it's too enchanted with its inventiveness to leave much of an emotional residue. But it's hard to be uncharmed.

7/10

Io Sono L'Amore (Luca Guadagnino, 2009)

I Am Love takes us into the crumbling upper echelon of Italian society, with a patriarchal industrialist formally passing on ownership of his company to his son and grandson. Meanwhile, the son's wife and her secretly lesbian daughter strive inarticulately to break out of the gilded cage of their mansion and the stratified behavioural constraints it represents.
Tilda Swinton, the focal point as the duty-bound and yearning wife, also produced and has talked up a good game about the film as the conflict between stifling tradition and the desire for love bubbling under that. But the film is too taken in by its own cosmetic virtues, with Yorick Le Saux's lambent photography and John Adams's overpoweringly revelatory soundtrack, and so the emotion remains locked in by the veneer of sophistication that Guadagnino purports to strip. Characters are reduced to walking from room to room and flitting nervous glances aside. This should have been a Brideshead Revisited; instead it's a lifeless episode of Dynasty, for all its artful prettiness.

5/10

Defendor (Peter Stebbings, 2009)

Woody Harrelson is a child-man with delusions of being a superhero. It really does write itself.
In the manner typical to these set-ups in Hollywood, Defendor starts quite promisingly, with the perfectly cast Harrelson - no one does the amiable and earnest buffoon quite as adamantly - getting seven shades beaten out of him with his every attempt at vigilantism. There's a gratifying adherence to the conventions of the superhero genre in details and soundtrack, where the slapstick of Mystery Men might have been expected.
And then you have to conclude that relentless slapstick would have been welcome, instead of a deflating descent into Robin Williams territory, where we're asked to take our sadsack's predicament as a social comment of sorts, whereas it's actually no more equipped to deal with seriousness than were K-Pax and Hancock, of which it's a rough melange.
Don't expect it to be the last of its ilk, in any case. The superhero comic adaptation production line shows no sign of slowing down, meaning a plentiful supply of runts in balaclavas in the real world dreaming of being Batman, consequently generating material for parodies about them. For every electric Kick-Ass, there'll be an inoffensive Defendor. All will be watched by those runts in balaclavas, in any case, just glad to have their lives up on screen.

5/10

Houseboat (Melville Shavelson, 1958)

A blast from an age where romantic comedies had to be served up with an earworm of a silly song, hammered home by the leads with multiple repetitions until each viewer was stuck with it ringing in their ears for weeks. Doris Day vehicles had to be the worst offenders, but plenty more starlets got delegated with the task, as here with Sophia Loren and the 'Bing Bang Bong' song.
For all that, Houseboat is a likeable enough piece of fluff, largely thanks to its dependable typecasting of Loren as a no-nonsense vivacious Italian and Cary Grant as an indignant and put-upon character with a soft centre. So, he's a widowed father of three button-nosed kids who ends up with La Loren as a maid, and of course a thirty-year age gap between the two leads will prove no obstacle at all to romance. If this sounds insufferably twee, at least the dialogue is perky and helps undercut the formula sweetness.

5/10  

Salt (Phillip Noyce, 2010)

In which Angelina Jolie cements her status as the queen of the derivative and forgettable actioner. Milla Jovovich may unashamedly front even greater dross and high-kick more unfeasibly, but Jolie is meant to be an A-list star and a proper actress to boot. Why there's any need to keep on with the scowly macho stuff is unfathomable.
Salt manages to plunder both Bourne and Bond without the decency of throwing a knowing wink, and all it adds is layers of illogicality as Jolie discovers she's in fact (surely anachronistically) a Russian sleeper agent trained to assassinate the President, and then goes on a rampage with lashings of FX-budget gobbling collateral damage. Meanwhile, Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor also run around po-faced, barking instuctions into mobile phones. Thoroughly pointless from start to finish.

3/10