Body of Lies (Ridley Scott, 2008)

Body of Lies is Scott's sixth film since 2000's Gladiator, and while a slight improvement on the others, could still have been turned out by his hack brother Tony. It basically presents itself as a thriller for the geopolitical world of the 21st century as Leonardo DiCaprio runs around the Middle East getting into all sorts of intrigues while being double-dealt by Russell Crowe as his Washington boss. Hence, there are a lot of terse phone conversations and abductions, and Leo even utters a few words of Arabic for authenticity. But there's no depth to the set-up, and with all the old racial stereotypes in attendance, it's no more credible than a Bond film. It does manage to be less entertaining, though.

4/10

The Green Hornet (Michel Gondry, 2011)

It now seems to be required of not only all actors but also directors, irrespective of background, to make at least one superhero or action film, and whilst Gondry, having displayed a predilection for the fantastical on several occasions, is not as baffling a choice as Branagh for Thor,  it's still disappointing to find him helming an adaptation of the second-rate character The Green Hornet, who is a sort of poor man's Batman. When the viewer is then saddled with the charmless Seth Rogen as the hero, who seems to mistake acting like a prick for raffishness, the signs are not good. Car chases, unimaginative shoot-ups, excruciating banter and painfully production-line plot developments are far too much for a pay cheque-motivated Christoph Waltz's quirky villain to counterbalance.

3/10

L'empreinte de l'ange (Safy Nebbou, 2008)

Purportedly based on real events, Mark of an Angel presents Catherine Frot as a mother still unable to come to terms with the loss of her first child seven years previously, facing imminent divorce and estrangement from her son. The situation is exacerbated when she becomes fixated with the sister of one of her son's friends, convinced that the girl is her lost daughter.
From there the film moves into stalker territory, with Frot going further and further off the rails in her insistence on her seemingly impossible conviction, and this is relatively compelling in the way that watching a car crash might be. Unfortunately, the plot itself suddenly crashes too.

4/10

Mammuth (Gustave de Kervern & Benoît Delépine, 2010)

The French duo de Kervern and Delépine, makers of hand-to-mouth budget black comedies laced with social comment, occupy a niche between Aki Kaurismäki and Shane Meadows. Their downtrodden characters stumble through life's inequities with a laconic sense of resignation, but also with an undeniable humanity. However, thus far their efforts have fallen short of the best of either of their predecessors' peaks, uncertain whether to go all-out for gallows laughs, being tied down by their wish to be seriously political at the same time.
Mammuth promises to go one better, with Gerard Depardieu, more corpulent than ever, playing a slaughterhouse worker finding himself at a loss upon retirement, and forced by his wife to go on a road trip to retrieve vital documentation from former employers to ensure his pension. Depardieu is a predictably perfect fit for the role, filling the screen in every way, and has some marvellously irascible moments. But then the film once again goes astray as the makers try to engineer a sort of hippyish spiritual rebirth for him, which feels forced. The curmudgeon was much more fun.

5/10

Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011)

Moon director 'son of Bowie' Jones's second at the very at least shows that he won't have a problem getting out of his father's shadow. Source Code may be an actioner, but it's a gratifyingly thoughtful one, as Jake Gyllenhaal, no doubt cast with his haunted breakthrough role in Donnie Darko in mind, wakes up on a train stuck in someone else's body, with eight minutes to live before the train blows up.
The strand that links this with Jones's debut may not immediately be apparent until a sense of existential dread sinks in, with Gyllenhaal forced to relive the same eight minutes over and over, tasked not with altering events - which he finds with increasing despair he's powerless to do - but merely finding out the why behind it all. This gives a film otherwise threatened with being just a rollercoaster composite of its many sources real philosophical clout.

7/10

Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2010)

Iñárritu's fourth feature moves from the spliced-up multiple-story patchworks that constituted Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel to zero in on a single dad grifting and scrabbling to stay above water in Barcelona. Iñárritu still can't resist a framing device for the main story that only loses its opacity in the coda, but it doesn't appear forced this time, and comes rather as a gratification, unlike a good chunk of the channel-surfing of Babel in particular. And sticking to a single location pays off too: the weight of the drowning man's burden is made all the more solid with an inability to flee from a fixed round of preset haunts. The one time there is a diversion, with a phantasmagorical nightclub scene, it's only to underline the character's brief escape from reality.
It is almost unrelentingly bleak, with the protagonist battered by a succession of blows, not least his terminal cancer, and one real criticism that can be levelled against the film is Iñárritu's apparent determination to keep kicking the man when he's already down just so the audience fully gets how grim some people's lives are. Without the frankly stupendous Javier Bardem in the role, infusing a lost everyman with a desperate spirituality in a quest to put his house in order, the director probably wouldn't have pulled it off. With him in it, the centre holds.

7/10

Soldier (Paul W.S. Anderson, 1998)

In a standard-issue future dystopia, emotionless purpose-bred supersoldiers are sent out to do a fascistically bent state's dirty work until one falls out of favour, suffering angsty flashbacks of his denied humanity, and becomes the new prey of the rank-and-file.
In other words, Anderson and screenwriter David Webb Peoples had a nerve making this, even with the excuse that they'd be able to improve on Universal Soldier. This they do marginally, with a broodier atmosphere and less execrable dialogue, but it's hardly a Nobel prize-winning achievement from the director of Event Horizon and writer of Blade Runner. Ok, the middling former was undoubtedly the Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil culprit Anderson's career highlight, but Peoples should have resisted the urge of the wads offered to churn out what he claims is a 'sidequel' to his own highlight script. And surely do more than just chuck in nerdy references to everything sci-fi, starting of course with alternatingly constipated and weepy lead Kurt Russell's film career, but even getting round to a The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy one tucked in the corner of a computer screen, FFS.

3/10