Somos Lo Que Hay (Jorge Michel Grau, 2010)

We Are What We Are falls squarely into the bracket of social drama crossed with gore horror. Given the right mix, recently most notably in the case of Let the Right One In, overblowing a character to horrific effect can be highly potent as a vehicle for conveying separation and alienation from societal norms. Get the mix wrong, however, and you're left with unlikeable freaks.
It probably doesn't help that Grau's shot is centered on a family of cannibals in Mexico, suddenly aimless at the loss of their patriarch. Cannibalism may seem, being rooted in feasible reality, a stronger packmule to carry political subtexts than the supernatural recourses to zombies or vampires. But it's precisely because there aren't the freedoms of the otherworldly context that the job in hand actually becomes harder. Having to deal with reality as a framework, creating empathy for the personae becomes of principal importance, and this film seems to forget that, much as the previous year's bizarrely feted misanthropic Dogtooth did, with which it shares more than a few structural elements. You will want the whole family to die long before the inevitable end.

4/10

The King's Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010)

As with Kate Winslet's self-fulfilling quip about needing a Holocaust part to bag herself an Oscar, stuffing a biopic of a British monarch chock-full of heavyweights is also a rather dependable route to Academy Awards success, and so it proved.
But in this case, it was also deserved, Colin Firth's plaudit in particular. Whilst, being constrained by the closeted milieu of the royal universe, it contains little to address wider human concerns, and also surely taking great liberties with the facts behind closed doors for comic and empathetic effect, it really does engage. Firth as the King-to-be mortifyingly crippled by his stammer and Geoffrey Rush as his irreverent Australian speech therapist are enormous fun to watch in their verbal jousting, and the director knows just when to lay off before this goes overboard to switch seamlessly to a confessional, intimate tone in a portrait of a man imprisoned by birthright and expectation.
Of course, it's all heading towards a triumphalist climax, and the benefit of historical hindsight hardly makes this a spoiler, but it's still curiously poignant when it arrives.

7/10

Harry Brown (Daniel Barber, 2009)

Michael Caine returns to his childhood manor as a bereaved pensioner on a hellish South London council estate, ruled over by feral hoodies. He strives to keep a low profile, but the murder of his best friend by the street trash sends him over the edge and it all goes very Get Carter as Caine wreaks righteous vengeance on all and sundry. Think Death Wish as directed by Shane Meadows.
You can see why Caine was drawn to return to the mean streets: on one level, Barber's film is a wholeheartedly pessimistic depiction of a broken society that the veteran actor fled long ago in disgust. The nihilism must have concorded with, and justified, his world view. Regardless of that, you have to be glad he did: he remains a magnetic screen presence, and impossible not to root for on his mission even though you know all along that he's carving through cartoon ogres, some drawn so evil that they couldn't possibly function in the real world.

6/10

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (Tom Six, 2009)

Oh God, it's even the title that's ominous...dealing with a director versed in the tortureporn series principle who knows that just by leaving a little room for a sequel at the end, there'll be takers for one.
And of course there are. Never mind the capitalistically derivative nature of what the director has chucked up, with teenage Americans in Yuu-Rope being served up as meat to a local denizen gleeful for material for his medical experiments. There's just an arms race in hideous ideas, and endless young directors are being fed money by the barrowload to precipitate MAD first. Ok, a mad German doctor (with overtones of Mengele) wants to surgically attach people, mouth to arse, to create a human chain. Sick? Check. Not something you want done to you? Check. And that's it, really. Superior cinematography and a few mollifyingly idiosyncratic touches unwarrantedly dignify a nasty piece of exploitation where you can't even call on suspense for help when no decision is made between the villain being either a Michael Myers or a bumbler. And it cops out on the biological details, even, when you thought those might have been a bit important.

3/10

La Règle du Jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939)

Some film classics just date worse than others. Renoir's La Règle du Jeu is routinely and lazily considered by scared critics to be an untouchable masterpiece, while when it's seen through later eyes it's a fairly tame melange of upper and lower class types occasionally intermingling, a few splashes of social critique and some farcical comedy. There's nothing innovatory either, even for 1939. If you want cinema as an artform struggling for recognition, instead of just entertainment, Eisenstein et al. had that covered years before. Ditto having a social message.
There are real virtues, of course: swathes of pithy aphoristic observations ('The terrible thing about this world is that everyone has his reasons'), and the indisputable humanism is satisfyingly complex. But Renoir is also a dilettante and has a go at covering all the bases whilst satisfying none to the full. Hence, the film can too easily be reduced to just poshos trying to work out who they want to have affairs with and whether to be kind to their servants, and therefore dramatically weaker than a good episode of EastEnders.

6/10

Buried (Rodrigo Cortés, 2010)

In which Ryan Reynolds wakes up to find himself trapped in a coffin somewhere under the sands of Iraq. The concept is hardly new, with the claustrophobic nightmare of interment notably covered in George Sluizer's two versions of The Vanishing. But whereas in those films, their respective European arthouse and Hollywood thriller models already pointed fairly reliably to the nature of the protagonist's eventual fate, here Spanish director Cortés has cleverly cast a Hollywood A-lister in the role and, with that dichotomy, all bets are off from the outset.
The script does of course get constrained by a lack of room to manoeuvre a great deal, with Reynolds's character dutifully going through the five stages of grief. But there's a gratifyingly mordant political wit at work in his increasingly desperate mobile phone pleadings with blandly officious and uncomprehending American governmental bodies and call centre operatives, and the filmmakers' ingenuity coping with the technical demands placed on them by the brief makes Buried a riveting exercise to follow.

7/10

Sezon Tumanov (Anna Tchernakova, 2009)

The Season of Mists is a rarity as an Anglo-Russian co-production and unsurprisingly takes a bridging of the gap between the two cultures as its theme. Crossing and re-crossing the divide is Marina, a 40-year-old Russian married to an Englishman, feeling increasingly trapped in a Leicestershire village until the arrival of a band of Russian musicians gives her outlet for her longings in the form of a tempestuous affair.
The emigre's saudade for an idealised homeland has a universality of appeal, and Tchernakova handles the emotional content sensitively. A pity, then, that the film is let down on so many fronts: cringeworthily inept acting from Marina's daughter, a minuscule budget making a mess of chunks of the English synced dialogue, and some half-baked side characters, including a trio of semi-comic biddies in Marina's hairdressing salon, and Dudley Sutton stumbling around burbling about aliens having abducted his wife, which is clearly meant to lend mystical pathos to the themes of outsiders and events beyond one's control, but just strikes a daft false note.

4/10