Rukajärven Tie (Olli Saarela, 1999)

The Road to Rukajärvi, lumbered with the hopeless video game-style title Ambush 1941 for the English market, is one of those platoon-scale Cross of Iron perspectives on WWII (as opposed to the massed battle more typical to the WWI trench set-up) that allows room for character development and less emphasis on the futility of war or the idiocy of generals. Not that a Finnish director would have much truck with the latter anyway, the overwhelming opinion on the country's experience seeing it as a victim rather than a guilty party.
Nevertheless, you can't keep a liberal agenda out of a Finnish war film, so it's no surprise the first casualty of the platoon's foray ends up being a Russian civilian. This is also a fair way into the film, and the tension keeps on building with little happening and the forest itself potently taking on the role of lurking adversary, until a thankfully short finale of slow-mo carnage.
Saarela's film doesn't really kick up anything new besides a setting novel to foreign audiences, but the parallel story of the lieutenant lead and the loss of his fiancee is nevertheless surprisingly affecting, and the mise-en-scene makes the most of a fragile band in a dizzifyingly endless and vacant landscape.

6/10

Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010)

Leonardo DiCaprio might have been well advised to leave some space between this and Inception, since it's clear early on in both that his character is beginning to doubt his own sanity. He's in danger of becoming a rent-a-breakdown. But then, given the menace that Scorsese hits you with from the start, and Ben Kingsley as a psychiatrist, you can hardly expect anything other than tears.
This time, DiCaprio plays a federal marshal charged with investigating a disappearance on an asylum island. He's hit from the outset with migraines and unsettling visions of his dead wife, and things can only deteriorate from there, with Kingsley and the wardens of the facility dropping increasingly provocative hints.
The whole owes a rather large debt to Samuel Fuller's seminal Shock Corridor, in which an investigative journalist undercover at a mental asylum loses his grip on reality, and so the eventual twist, heavily signposted, hardly raises an eyebrow. But this being Scorsese, the execution is of sufficient quality that you'll still keep watching until the denouement.

6/10

Jadesoturi (Antti-Jussi Annila, 2006)

Jade Warrior has the distinction of being in a genre on its own, and this will remain so.Who would have known the world needed a cross-over between the Finnish Kalevala and Chinese Wuxia epics, with wire-work and demons thrown in?
The drunken premise is basically a warrior-monk being reincarnated as a depressed smith in modern-day Finland, having to face up to his true identity to save mankind from his eternal foe. It's far too derivative to serve as anything other than a daft curio: the Pandora's Box the smith is suckered into forging is straight out of Hellraiser, The Fifth Element, or any number of other sources, the chopsocky inferior to the full-blown havoc of fully Chinese films, and the hero a muddled doofus who spends a great deal of time swooning over the revelations he keeps on getting hit with. Finnish cinema will some day get round to producing a border-crossing blockbuster instead of just black comedies or grim war films, but this isn't it.

4/10

Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

Denis Lavant, perhaps best known as the chimp-faced fire-eating street urchin in Leos Carax's ethereal Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, is cast here as a troubled former Foreign Legionnaire, the backstory of his self-torment forming the bulk of the film. On service in Djibouti, in a unit caught in a stasis of drills, whoring and ablutions, Lavant's character takes umbrage at the rise of a new arrival, popular and heroic, into the affections of his commanding officer.
This is no war film, probably largely due to a female director more concerned with the mechanics of backbiting and jealousy in a hierarchical structure than with derring-do. Not a Kathryn Bigelow soldier piece, in other words. It's soon apparent that entire hyperreal scenes serve to create an atmosphere of homoeroticism through which we come to understand that Lavant's bitterness is wholly driven by his repressed sexuality.
The plot itself could be written on a handkerchief. Denis's intention was to create a visual poem, not a conventional linear feature. To this end, there are instances of a captivating marriage of image and soundtrack. Unfortunately, it also suffocates under the inertness and impotence of its protagonist: a portrait of self-denied obsession will always run the risk of shutting the viewer out.

5/10

Valkyrie (Bryan Singer, 2008)

It's imperative for a historical biopic to bring something more to the table than just a straightforward retelling of events, when the eventual outcome is already well known. This becomes doubly vital if there's a loss of veracity with a change of language, and if there's any inkling that what we're getting is a vanity project, a star vehicle more than a dramatisation actually interested in the facts or participants.
It wasn't hard to suspect Tom Cruise as Claus von Stauffenberg, Hitler's would-be assassin, would fall prey to these failings. The usual boxes of the Hollywood WWII epic are ticked, of course: a rotation of British heavyweights as the top-ranking staff, a lot of terse secret rendezvouses and the obligatory sense of portentous urgency with a smattering of Wagner thrown in. But Cruise never really steps out of his dogged Mission: Impossible mode, with scowling and flashbacks filling in for character depth.

4/10

13 Tzameti (Géla Babluani, 2005)

A young builder overhears his employer planning to undertake 'one last job' before dying inadvertently and leaving him out of pocket for the work done. So, the callow youth assumes the boss's identity, unaware that he's heading into deep trouble with an underworld gambling ring revolving around Russian roulette.
Interestingly for cinematophiles, Babluani's film starts so fumblingly on a technical level before moving on to a surer-footed noir style that it's tempting to view this as possibly the first ever example of levels of competence in direction being used as a mirror of the protagonist's progression. There's also a detached Melvillesque nihilism to the dramatic arc which reassures you against patness.
However, 13 Tzameti doesn't have much to say beyond that, and Babluani might have well have admitted as much when he took the Yankee dollar five years later to remake it. With Jason Statham, bien sur.

5/10

Valhalla Rising (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2009)

Winding Refn may be best known as the director of the admirably uncompromising Pusher trilogy, which first brought him together with Mads Mikkelsen, an actor of formidable range and subtlety. For them to reunite to present an arthouse Conan the Barbarian is surely taking the piss.
Valhalla Rising, then is basically Lars Von Trier going straight into reworking The 13th Warrior to unwind from Antichrist. It's even divided into chapters with foreboding titles as Antichrist was. Mikkelsen's mute One Eye is a Viking era superhero kept in chains to fight without respite. A flaxen-haired waif attaches himself to the killing machine and then they're launched into a ill-conceived crusade with a band of Christians on a mission to convert heathens.
It is strong on atmosphere, particularly in some startlingly eerie photography and stiflingly disorientating setpieces. But it doesn't at any point really seem interested in injecting more thematic depth to the world it has visually managed to capture to an impressive degree, and hence leaves just disconnected moody images in the mind.

5/10