Duo Luo Tian Shi (Wong Kar-wai, 1995)

Wong Kar-wai's fifth feature, Fallen Angels, picks up from the massive success of the previous year's Chungking Express in mood and theme, reinforcing the continuity by having Takeshi Kaneshiro reprise his character in name and quirkily memorable motif from that film: he has now actually gone mute from eating a tin of pineapples past its sell-by. That this only superficially ties the character to his previous incarnation is in keeping with the mercurial, ephemeral nature of the quintet of the unrequited fallen in this episode. They flutter around each other and Christopher Doyle's hyperreal rain-and-neon Hong Kong like moths, detached yet feeling a longing for something they can't pin down. 

Doyle's camera wheels and tilts as restlessly as the gratingly ADHD women that populate Kar-wai's films and there's a crutch-like reliance on voice-over narrative and a driving soundtrack to pressgang responses. But, out of the stylised sensory overload, real content does emerge unexpectedly and curiously: it leaves emotional echoes like a retinal imprint of fireworks, that linger after the flimsy plot of hawkers and hitmen has been washed away.

6/10

Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008)

Clint has been refining his gruff curmudgeon with a heart of gold screen persona for quite a while now, and here gives us a full helping of nothing but as Walt Kowalski, a widowed Korean war veteran besieged by a whole menagerie of humanity to snarl disbelieving disgust at, from his son's vampirically self-serving family to babbling Orientals, street hoodlums, feckless young people and the presumptiously intrusive naive local priest. This is all well and good, as no one does a grumpy old sod quite like Clint does, and it works nicely for laughs to line them up and have them knocked down with his Lurch-like groans.

Then, just as in Million Dollar Baby, he's forced to come out of his shell through external circumstance and the persistent attentions of an idealistic youngster, respectively in this case a gang making the mistake of encroaching on his peace and quiet and his Hmong (roughly, Vietnamese) neighbours' perky daughter. So he's reeled in to rejoin the rest of humanity, although the script gamely tries to maintain that he's still the same old git by not letting him ease up on the racial slur overbombing in every other sentence. But then his illness is introduced, there's a flash of the vigilante fury of old and we're well on the way to a certain sticky end.

Frequently, the script can think of no more subtle way to have Walt voice his dismay than talking to himself. Some of the supporting actors seem to have been picked more for their authentic backgrounds than required contribution or ability to act, and the depiction of the punk-ass gang that starts terrorising his neighbours is even more irritatingly cartoonish. But Eastwood is such a natural fit for the elegiac elements of a man reluctantly re-exposing his humanity, and the moments where his spiky bluff is called to comic effect, that it's tempting to forgive a lot of these glaring weaknesses.

6/10

Nói Albínói (Dagur Kári, 2003)

Nói, a 17-year-old hairless albino, has issues with authority in a remote Icelandic town in the shadow of a mountain and immerses himself in fantasies of faraway lands until the arrival of a girl closer to home, in a cafe where he systematically loots the fruit machine on a daily basis.
Kári's best-known film to date really exploits the alien feel of the snowbound landscape, populating it with skewed but good-hearted eccentrics, all accentuating the dissociation felt by its protagonist, whose Martian appearance is complemented by his sardonic intelligence. But at heart he's still a teenager with a teenager's impulses, frustrated at having no clear target to rebel against, lashing out in various aimlessly pathetic ways.
The lifelessly impassive environment, a prison without walls, is used to hold a mirror to his impotence, and so the film's universal theme, albeit a well-worn one, i.e. the oppressive nature of small-town life and the insignificance of the individual, is conveyed effectively to any audience beyond its mere geographical specifics. But because it's also done with a lively wit and a genuine fascination with the minutiae of its characters' doings, that sense of oppression never becomes overwhelming to the observer.

7/10

Efter Brylluppet (Susanne Bier, 2006)

Here, Danish director Susanne Bier turns out another Dogme-inflected ensemble piece on the vagaries of the human heart. Mads Mikkelsen is affectingly vulnerable as a former wastrel who seems to have found a redemptive mission as he returns to Denmark from Mumbai to seek funds for an orphanage, only to find that fate has other plans in store for his emotional centre.

What follows is a sensitive exploration of imperfect people and their conflicting passions. Its fairly standard plot - a father meeting the daughter he never knew he had - is rescued from mediocrity by the performances of Mikkelsen and Rolf Lassgård as his millionaire financier with ulterior motives, and Bier's direction, which, although curiously fond of milking close-ups of people's eyes for all the deeper truth that might be wrung out of them, succeeds in conveying how people really behave when pushed into a corner.

The only real bum note is the sloppily tacked-on (pre-Slumdog) cutesy waifs-in-India subplot, which casts a lingering doubt as to whether Bier was looking for a breakthrough into the realm of the Hollywood zloty along with the Oscar nomination. It worked, anyway - she was directing Halle Berry by the following year.

7/10

Taken (Pierre Morel, 2008)

Continuing in a filmic trend (see Hostel et al.) that's rather too easily attributable to America's current sense of being under siege, Taken cuts the crap of bothering to set the scene of the foreign and dangerous by having a couple of teenage girls abducted into slavery the moment they step off the LAX-Paris flight. Unfortunately one of them has Liam Neeson for a dad, and, wavering accent to the contrary, he's a former U.S. government 'preventer'. All the unshaven Albanian and Iranian rent-a-thugs in Paris have therefore signed their own death warrants in one fell swoop. From there on, Dad alternates between Jason Bourne and The Hulk, cutting a righteously relentless swathe through the hordes standing between him and the 'Daddy, I love you' scene.

There are a few nice touches of spy trickery, but the one gadget the film fails to provide is a bodycount meter in the corner of the screen. Apparently Luc Besson shared scriptwriting duties. Maybe he was the one with the photocopier.

4/10

Kurochka Ryaba (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1994)

Konchalovsky returned to post-Soviet Russia after a drawn-out sojourn in the West, and not a moment too soon, as by that stage he had sunk to directing Stallone and Russell in Tango & Cash. Here, he completes the circle by revisiting the village of Bezvodnoye, the scene of Asya's Happiness, which was banned by the authorities for 20 years for its less than paradisiac perspective on life in Soviet society.
Absence has not made the heart grow fonder. In a blackly satirical dissection of the collision of the capitalist juggernaut with a way of life that the main protagonist, a firebrand peasant also named Asya, describes as being unchanged for a millennium, no stratum of society really escapes unscathed. There's little of the warmth of, say, Kusturica's broadly sketched yokels and opportunists: it's all too close to the bone. Konchalovsky has again used a mostly amateur cast of locals, but now one wonders if they realised what a hatchet job was being done on them. Russia's peasantry are depicted as a gullible, vindictively reactionary mob, ready to follow anyone who'll ply them with enough vodka, and the officials as amorally corrupt. And in the world beyond there are only gangsters.

Konchalovsky occasionally seems to sense that something's not right in the mix, and inserts a moment of comic mania out of the blue, such as a stop-motion chase scene, or Asya's chicken talking back to her, but these feel forced amidst the overall nihilism of the scenario.

5/10

Párpados Azules (Ernesto Contreras, 2007)

This is a sparse little piece centred on two lonely wallflowers in unimportant jobs, unrecognised by their colleagues, unrespected by their few kin, who come together out of a recognition of their shared plight. This pretty much covers what happens. But the amount of time that Contreras gives for his wary characters to let their guards down, and the fearful blankness of their interactions, against which subtle touches such as the defensive spikiness of Cecilia Suárez's Marina stand out, mean that their relationship unfolds unforcedly, organically.

This approach is also parallelled in the visual aspect. It's mostly shot as flatly as a documentary, which makes a few moments when the director really wants the image to do the work with an unexpectedly crafted composition suddenly strike with captivating effect.

It doesn't actually say much in the end. Nevertheless, it's refreshing to come across a film that has the courage to be truthfully small.

7/10