Thérèse Desqueyroux (Claude Miller, 2012)

The last film made by Miller before his death, Thérèse Desqueyroux is a period drama set in the Landes region of France in the late 'twenties, in the milieu of land-owning families concerned above all else with maintaining their power and status. They are a tedious lot altogether, with their interminable talk of hunting and weather, and Audrey Tautou's Thérèse has the misfortune of being a free thinker in their midst. Her life of silent endurance is irrevocably changed when she then decides to start poisoning her boorish husband.
What lends a rather slight story some interest is the ambivalence of the characters and situations: far from being a driven and decisive revoluionary, Thérèse does not actually know what she wants so much as what she doesn't want, and is even inconsistent in this, while the husband for all his stifling banality is no simple male oppressor. Neither does it appear that we are to take the characters' second-hand philosophical musings at face value. Overall, the film generates a sense of disquiet without providing pat exit avenues.

6/10

Clone (Benedek Fliegauf, 2010)

Also known as Womb, this is essentially a story of emotional obsession, with science fiction trappings, strongly reminiscent in tone and pace of the same year's Never Let Me Go. Eva Green stars as a woman who raises the clone of her dead boyfriend up as her son, in a part that could pretty much have been tailor-made for her, with the air of underlying emotional instability that saturates all of her roles and range of speechless suffering looks. Doctor Who's Matt Smith, has a game attempt at doing the boyfriend/son, although there is basically no behavioural distinction between the two juvenile personae he has to portray, which is perhaps more a shortcoming on the director's part.
This is never a film to opt for jump-cuts when lingering on a stationary tableau is available, but this does give the viewer time to consider the full implications of the ethical and emotional complexity involved, and to the film's credit its intentions are wholly serious in this regard.

6/10

Dark Shadows (Tim Burton, 2012)

The Burton-Depp-Bonham Carter love-in is on all too comfortable ground in this comic Gothic horror piece based on a little-known but extremely long-running 'sixties TV series. Depp, as the tormented vampire Barnabas Collins, released from his grave after 200 years and pining after his lost love, is basically Edward Scissorhands in packaging and Sweeney Todd in delivery and murderous tendencies. Whilst his bafflement at the ways of the modern world and ludicrous period speech (also see Sleepy Hollow) provide some witty vignettes to begin with, it soon grows tiresome through sheer familiarity and the elephant in the room that is the shadow of The Addams Family cannot be ignored. Someone really needs to give Burton ten commandments of things he should no longer be allowed to touch, supernatural whimsicality being the first.

4/10

The Wolverine (James Mangold, 2013)

Hugh Jackman gets a sixth outing as the unkillable berserker, and this time the action has been moved to Japan to try to breathe some life into the hack-and-slash formula, although unfortunately this turns out to be a Japan for beginners, with every cliche in the book explained to and even more beefed-up Jackman, who has to stoically feign ignorance of yakuza and the like. While there is an attempt to inject depth into the character through making him even more tortured by his past than before, and also temporarily mortal, breakneck action is the film's overriding concern and predominant asset. It passes muster, but it's doubtful whether there is any mileage in another instalment after this, even though Jackman is an exemplary fit for the role and the character is at least more interesting in terms of unpredictability, as superheroes go, than Superman or James Bond.

5/10

Gambit (Michael Hoffmann, 2012)

A remake of a 1966 Michael Caine-Shirley MacLaine screwball heist caper, Gambit is another of the Coen brothers' script tweaks that brings the story ostensibly into the present day, with costumes, cursing and prices updated, but in fact adds little else and therefore feels somewhat cackhandedly anachronistic, not least in its U.S.-pandering depiction of London and the English. It is a pity that the Coens, on their day amongst the wittiest and most distinctive filmmakers around, have to be this lazy from time to time, but then we already saw this with their version of The Ladykillers. Yes, they may not have directed here, but it is their responsibility nevertheless. The interplay between Colin Firth as the stifled employee seeking to fob a fake artwork off on his bastard millionaire boss, Alan Rickman, is perfectly enjoyable, but it feels too used to do much more than raise the occasional chuckle.

5/10

Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

Tarantino finally gets around to doing his first actual Western, although in truth many of his films were already Westerns in all but era - Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds - being pinned as they were on moving from one drawn-out stand-off to another in Leone style. So, knowing that Tarantino has to reference like a shark needs to keep moving, why not draw on Leone explicitly? Perhaps he was too much of a sacred cow to touch, whereas Sergio Corbucci's Django was a safer beast to milk, given cult status by virtue of some deranged confrontation sequences and not much else, a poor cousin of the Leone films in every aspect.
The story is nothing to do with the original, in any case, with the hero a slave freed by a jovial German bounty hunter who then helps him to set about rescuing his wife from a slave-owner. The plot is functional, serving just to go from one bloody crescendo to another, but the cast is as strong as you habitually get with Tarantino, from Christoph Waltz as the philosophising helper to Leonardo DiCaprio's monstrous plantation owner and Samuel L. Jackson's even more loathsome character as the head of the plantation staff, full of contempt for his own race. Surrounded by these elemental forces, Jamie Foxx's gunslinger is actually somewhat of a soft centre, there are longueurs in the course of going on three hours, and you may wince at the 110 uses of the word 'nigger', as well as having reasonable grounds for doubting whether the director really manages to say anything of depth about race and the slave trade or if he is rather guilty of disingenuity. However, as ever, there's no denying Tarantino's panache, though, or mastery of turns of phrase.

7/10

Borgríki (Olaf de Fleur Johannesson, 2011)

How much gangland violence can a placid country with a population equal to the Borough of Croydon sustain? Quite a lot, as another instalment in the Scandinavian crime drama wave, City State, attempts to convince us. The acting, from the likes of Iceland's go-to man for granite-faced grittiness Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson (Jar City et al.) as a mob boss on edge, is solid enough but there's too much of a feeling that the script is just ticking boxes, with the usual corrupt police and Serbian mafias all out for revenge. The bottom line is that it's hard to care about any of them and so, for once, when Hollywood picked this up for remaking, I didn't lose any sleep over it.

5/10