Oorlogswinter (Martin Koolhoven, 2008)

Winter in Wartime covers similar ground to a wide swathe of other WWII resistance flicks, comparisons to Paul Verhoeven's recent Black Book inevitable due to the Dutch country setting. The focus here is on adolescent  disillusionment, though, as its protagonist, a teenage boy who helps a downed British airman, gradually realises the complexities of what actually constitutes heroism in the compromises created by occupation.
You can't fault the sincerity of the enterprise, based on Jan Terlouw's autobiographical novel, and there are some taut setpieces as well as decent acting. But we've been here so many times before, that something more is needed, and Koolhoven lets us down on that score with some overly glossy stock scenes. Just one German who wasn't just a faceless menace wouldn't have done any harm, either.

5/10

The Bank Job (Roger Donaldson, 2008)

Loosely based on the events of the Baker Street bank robbery in 1971, the haul of which was never recovered, The Bank Job also overlays a governmental corruption angle which plays with the urban myth that the stolen deposit boxes contained sensitive material relating to the monarchy.
Jason Statham is his usual grimacing geezer as the gang leader, visibly at a bit of a loose end as Clement and La Frenais's script will provide him with no opportunity to chin his way through to the jackpot. So it's left in a limbo between heist thriller and bumblers' farce, and doesn't really satisfy on either count, while chucking Soho porn kings and black power activists into the blender too in an attempt to alchemise a filling meal.
Full marks for rose-tinted Sweeney-ish '70s period detail, though.

5/10

Det Sjunde Inseglet (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

Some films are crystallised in popular culture in a single iconic image. With The Seventh Seal, it's Max Von Sydow sitting on a beach playing chess with Death. It's a fair summation: the game in effect forms the framework for the whole film, mirroring the inexorable march of the plague across medieval Sweden and Von Sydow's crusader knight's metaphysical struggle with divine will in the face of the apparent randomness of the world.
For all the nihilism, Bergman still manages to work in counterbalancing light interludes with a sprightly troupe of travelling players, and the laconically self-deprecating pronouncements of the knight's squire also serve to alleviate a critique of human cruelty and stupidity, whether that of the church or of the merely fearful, which could otherwise so easily have been stifled under the weight of the indignation Bergman obviously feels.
It's not Bergman's most rounded work, being overly fond of the Greek chorus and the pat solution, but earns its role in cinematic history nevertheless for the sheer force of some of its imagery.

7/10

Okuribito (Yojiro Takita, 2008)

Departures, the winner of the 2008 Foreign Language Oscar, is built on a promising enough proposition: a young man, giving up on his career as a cellist, applies for what he thinks is a travel agency job to find himself thrust into employment as an 'encoffiner' instead, charged with ceremonially preparing the dead for burial. His fiancee, given the traditional stigma attached to handlers of the deceased as the work of the underclass, is mortified at the discovery of his new position.
Takita's film has a choice to make at this point: to go all-out with the gallows humour at the protagonist's awkwardness, which it initially toys with to reasonable effect, or to probe deeper from the social critique angle. It fumbles the ball at this point and smoothes both out by opting for sentimentality instead, which proves its intellectual undoing even as it concomitantly guarantees the product's appeal to the saccharine-seeking Academy Award audience. It's never a good sign when a director attempts to convey soulfulness by having a camera encircle a man passionately playing a cello in the open air. You may recall this as shorthand for Jan-Michael Vincent's emotional depth in the dire '80s gadget action series Airwolf.

5/10

La Grande Séduction (Jean-François Pouliot, 2003)

The tiny Quebecois fishing village of Ste. Marie-La-Mauderne hits upon the idea of attracting a factory to provide much-needed employment for its welfare-dependent population. There's just one catch: for that, they need a doctor in residence, something they have singularly failed to achieve to date. Then they do find a candidate, but have their work cut out in conniving to reel the city slicker in.
Seducing Doctor Lewis rather fancies itself as an old-fashioned comedy of foibles, with Monsieur Hulot overtones, if the soundtrack is anything to go by. The humour is accordingly more often broad than subtle. The collection of gently observed quirky hicks is straight off the shelf too, and the set-up pretty much directly a transposition-as-farce of Local Hero. Nevertheless, it's cute enough to endear by virtue of zest alone, and raises a frequent warm chuckle.

6/10

The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, 2002)

As an actor, Peter Mullan has a wide oeuvre, but it's particularly his characterisation in Ken Loach's bleakly gritty My Name is Joe that seems to sum up the best of what he brings to a role, and so perhaps appropriate that as director he's so far ploughed a similar furrow of uncompromisingly harrowing real-life stories.
For all its well-meaning critical acclaim, though, The Magdalene Sisters is not his best. That it takes a few liberties in splicing together various real people to create a dramatic composite isn't the problem: the rub is, it's not dramatic enough. The history of the decades of cruelty of Ireland's nun-run Magdalene workhouses-come-prisons for women fallen by the wayside or undesirables just interned by their families has abundant potential, but Mullan's direction falls flat in its earnestness, the script containing little to surprise, also including Geraldine McEwan's stock sadistic Mother Superior. And if the quartet of girl-victims aren't actually biographical, do they need to be so gormless in their attempts to flee their plight?

5/10

Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek, 2010)

Faithfully adherent to Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 dystopian novel, Never Let Me Go posits a modern-day England in which clones are nurtured to adulthood to be farmed in stages for body parts.
It starts off in a generically post-war boarding school setting, and it's apparent that since the biggest question that must be addressed is why the battery humans are so resigned to their fate, Ishiguro always intended the institutionalisation of that form of establishment to be a justification for their passivity. It still remains the biggest weakness of the set-up, though, when transferred to film: what can be accepted without question in the hermetically sealed universe of a novel, where suspension of disbelief is facilitated by an awareness that we're only seeing what the novelist as God allows us to see, becomes trickier to take in in the cinematic medium where it's difficult to treat a world that looks like reality as not functioning like reality. The same applies to a fudged justification of why a society breeding stock just for spare parts would really bother to educate any of them.
Of course, down the route of rebellion against their destiny lies the action and chase scene version, namely Michael Bay's The Island. It is preferable to that to comply with Romanek in taking a great deal of what transpires as metaphor for other forms of institutionalised oppression, even if a little more attention to suspense would not have gone amiss, with the film letting the cat out of the bag too early. The remainder is heart-rending and beautifully acted (barring Keira Knightley's stage-school turn, as usual), but also a drainingly sheep-like march towards the inevitable.

6/10