Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011)

A laconic, detached stunt driver moonlights as a getaway driver par excellence for robberies in an LA of nocturnal freeways. His life is spartan and compartmentalised, and his success assured until another factor enters the equation...
Drive unabashedly draws from the seminal 1978 noir, The Driver: even if Winding Refn's claim not to have seen Walter Hill's film until having started work on this one is to be believed, he has acknowledged the influence of the writer of Drive's source novel. By a bizarre and surely unintentional coincidence, the antihero is even played by another Ryan; Gosling instead of O'Neal, and they share a mix of cockiness tinged with melancholy. But the two films are still different animals: whereas Hill's was a more straightforward cat-and-mouse thriller with Bruce Dern's cop determined to reel the rogue in, Winding Refn, as always, is more interested in the existential angle. In that, while both filmmakers are obviously indebted to Le Samourai, it's the latter who is more in line with the Melvillian philosophy. Gosling's character is a self-contained robot who is later forced to feel.
The spark for the transformation is affection for Carey Mulligan's single mother, but there's no stock physical consummation between them: the relationship retains the idealised distance of a fairytale. The rest of the film is consistent with this ethereal air: neon lights flash by, a determinedly '80s retro synth soundtrack pounds away and conversations fade out with more implied than said. It's brazenly stylised, übercool, and yet in the end, unexpectedly sad.

8/10

Kukushka (Aleksandr Rogozhkin, 2002)

A small and unpretentious gem of a film, The Cuckoo is something like what you'd get if you crossed Hell in the Pacific with Down by Law, and added a dash of Jules et Jim. In Lapland during the dying days of the Russo-Finnish war, a Russian political prisoner and a condemned Finnish sniper find themselves under the roof of an independent Lapp woman, at each other's throats and eventually with a begrudging mutual tolerance.
None of the trio speak each other's languages and the film exploits this to rather sweetly comic effect as they continue to yammer on regardless, with no end of talking at cross-purposes even as they fully believe to have understood each other. It works as a neat metaphor for the barriers of mutual comprehension that lead to wars without labouring the point unduly.
The characters are attractively drawn, too, from the coquettish but gutsy woman to the motor-mouthed and pragmatic Finnish soldier and the distrustful but fundamentally decent Russian. They are all fallible and likable without becoming caricatures. Add some evocative Arctic landscapes and a sparing reliance on soundtrack or histrionics, and the end result is a breath of fresh air.

7/10

Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007)

Another zero-budget horror that spawned a monster of a franchise for writer-director Peli, Paranormal Activity is workmanlike and wholly unexceptional with the usual set-up of a couple believing their house to be haunted. The wife is of course the one who gets the brunt of it, and what twist there is to distinguish the product from legions of clones is that the husband, rather than go through the standard disbelief-denial-acceptance cycle, takes on the situation with breezy gusto, setting up a video camera straightaway to film themselves sleeping and hopefully catch sight of supernatural phenomena. But that's about all. The popularity of the format rests wholly on America's rather easily psychoanalysable sense of discomfort with violation of the home and widespread belief in demonic forces.

4/10

Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980)

I break a rule in reviewing a TV series, but Fassbinder's 14-part telling of Alfred Döblin's novel has more in common with cinema despite its small-screen origins. It has aspirations far beyond the medium's norm in its epic scope, deliberately stagy and hypercoloured scenes, surrealist overtones and self-referential structure. It purports to speak not just about petty criminals in depressed Weimar Berlin, but about the human condition, and to this aim uses portentous obscurantist poetry not just in intermittent cuts to a sage-like narrator but places the words in the mouth of the protagonist himself. It's in turn hypnotically beguiling and absolutely infuriating and often both at the same time.
The story is that of Franz Biberkopf, released from prison after killing his girlfriend in a fit of rage into a city where everyone seems to be jobless or on the make. He's a bear of a man, flickering between joviality and jealous fury, assured worldliness and helpless despair. He's a simpleton and a philosopher. He brags to feeble women and is fed on by unscrupulous men. He is clearly meant to be Everyman, and it's to the credit of Günter Lamprecht's empathic performance that the massive conceit almost works.
Everywoman, on the other hand, gets a raw deal in Fassbinder's Weltanschauung. It's a more thorough reductionism than the usual chauvinist virgin-whore dichotomy: women are simply insane. Each female character flips out in some unfounded way  over the course of the story, even Hanna Schygulla's character, who plays a sort of a tarty big sister to Franz. In the case of Franz's eventual love, the childlike Mieze, the narrator's harping on her sweetness and homely innocence grates almost as much as her twittering repetition of simple lines over and over again.
In the absence of the strong female, the most interesting character besides Franz ends up being the small-time gangster Reinhold, who Franz is helplessly drawn to and whose bitter misanthropy drags Franz to his perdition. Gottfried John plays him as a sneering, stammering lizard of a man seething with a self-loathing he doesn't quite understand. Fassbinder said that he saw himself in the story as a composite of Franz, Reinhold and Mieze, and that comes across clearly when you read about the troubled and contrary director's life.
It's an ordeal of a film with its perverse fixations and wilful unnaturalism, not least in the epilogue, which is an addition to Döblin's story by Fassbinder and consequently the worst of the episodes, being a deranged hallucinatory deconstruction of Biberkopf's whole life in the throes of his eventual madness. It may well make you never watch another of the director's works again. It is also fascinating, and there is no contradiction between the two.

7/10

Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance, 2010)

A chronicle of the rise and fall of a relationship, Blue Valentine benefits from strong casting with the perennially excellent Ryan Gosling and a solid turn from Michelle Williams, and scuppers a lot of the good work they do in developing a credible picture of how love turns sour by using the modishly overused multiple flashback method. The film jumps hyperactively from the present to various points in the couple's past without deigning to provide adequate signposting beyond the length of Gosling's hair and gains nothing in terms of layering, only dissipating the emotion built up. There are some things to be said for Dogme after all.
The characters are true to life, even if Gosling can do the hangdog loser in his sleep and the frustrated wife is a fairly standard sounding board for the aimless husband's draining presence. Their interaction, when whether mawkish, domesticated or end-of-tether, hits many painfully true notes. There are all the seeds of a wonderful film here. If only someone other than the director in question could reassemble it.

6/10

Perfect Sense (David Mackenzie, 2011)

Perfect Sense transcends the global epidemic genre by having little interest in the thriller or even science angles. It's a love story between a chef and a scientist who keep going through the world first losing its sense of smell and taste, and then incidents of complete deafness start occurring. Its starting premise may therefore be akin to Fernando Meirelles's accomplished Blindness, but the pandemonium that rises does not take in apocalyptic panoramas: it's internalised within the sufferers' minds.
There are shortcomings: the mere casting of inveterate self-exposers Ewan McGregor and Eva Green as the lovers promises a surfeit of kitless scenes, and these result in some longueurs. Then there are other scenes which pitch perilously close towards pure daftness. But the elegiac poetry that director Mackenzie brings to a crumbling world is classy.

6/10

YellowBrickRoad (Jesse Holland & Andy Mitton, 2010)

In The Blair Witch Project fashion, a motley crew set out into eerie backwoods to try to get to the heart of a local mystery. This time it's not a witch legend but an entire 572 locals who walked off one day in 1940 and disappeared off the face of the Earth, and the seekers aren't film students but have pretensions of being scientific investigators. Nevertheless, the influence of the 1999 zero-budget hit is blatant. Unexplained noises emanate from the woods, a hallucinatory atmosphere takes over and members of the party soon starts to get unhinged.
It's not actually as inept as such a summary dismissal may indicate, just badly in need of its very own ideas. The very last scene seems to belong to another film altogether, being the stuff of real nightmare, and makes you wonder what might have been done with a tad more inspiration.

4/10