The Place Beyond the Pines (Derek Cianfrance, 2013)

This is a triptych of sorts, with the sins of the fathers spilling over into later chapters. It begins with Ryan Gosling as a stunt motorbike rider, naturally preternaturally gifted like his getaway driver from Drive, who discovers he has an infant son in one of his touring-stop towns and then goes off the rails in a bid to provide for him. The story then moves on to Bradley Cooper as a cop who brings him down in questionable circumstances. The whole is a blend of understated dialogue and touting the proposition that there is a universal lesson to be learnt from the repercussions of isolated mistakes that echo for generations. If this sounds dismissive, it's for overambitious aspirations towards soothsaying. Nevertheless, it is emotionally complex in a way that few films with Hollywood A-list actors even attempt and does manage to tug on a few heartstrings in the process.

6/10

Berlin 36 (Kaspar Heidelbach, 2009)

In the run-up to the 1936 Olympics, the Nazis were in a quandary: they had to demonstrate their society to be at least superficially tolerant to avoid an American boycott of the games, and yet of course were loath to have any Jewish representation. In this context, the story of Gretel Bergmann, the Jew who was Germany's best high-jumper at the time, should provide a fresh angle on the worn-out subject of the persecution of the time. The true story even includes a man raised as a woman as one of her competitors: there is material in abundance here for the taking.
Sadly, most of it goes to waste. Karoline Herfurth, as Bergmann, projects one-key sullenness just as the performance of her rival with the terrible secret (rather undermined by having such a blatantly male actor in the role) is little more than scared eye-flitting all the way through. The atmosphere at the training camp, where most of the film takes place, is also irritatingly reminiscent of a bad American high school film, complete with a duo of girl bullies. The criticisms that the film received for taking liberties with the facts are then fairly irrelevant in the light of its failure to do anything dramatically useful with the changes.

4/10

Irvine Welsh's Ecstasy (Rob Heydon, 2011)

Shamelessly riding on the coattails of the iconic Trainspotting, even to the point of ripping off trademarks such as slapping character names freeze-framed on the screen as they appear and having a man scrabble around in a toilet bowl for egested drugs, this is also has to manage with lesser casting and flatter photography than its predecessor's. That said, the script does its best to stretch out one of Welsh's more generic short stories, that of an ageing club drug dealer trying to get out of the game, and leaven it with humour and romantic elements. It is by no means the abysmal failure that some critics would have you believe when considered on its own merits, all-importantly capturing the rave mindstate almost as effectively as Human Traffic did, even if it is then rather over-reliant on filling screentime with this. But the shadow cast by its towering forebear is basically impossible to escape from.

5/10

Intouchables (Olivier Nakache & Eric Toledano, 2011)

A film on an odd-couple template that sets its stall out as being based on a true story, Untouchable nevertheless relies heavily on suspension of disbelief as a millionaire quadriplegic indulgently takes a black inner-city hoodie as his personal carer, regardless of his total lack of training or credentials. But I suppose otherwise we wouldn't get the rest of the formula, with the unlikely pair naturally warming to each other as they learn what's on the other side of the social divide. Disbelief duly suspended, it's a perfectly charming piece nevertheless, with the duo going through various escapades in which they challenge each other's preconceptions and giggle together at orthodoxy, which is something that any viewer can probably imagine identifying with, and thereby the foundation for the film's somewhat phenomenal success.

6/10

World War Z (Marc Forster, 2013)

Presumably the writers decided that the world created by 28 Days Later, with its sprinting, instantly turning zombies was 'worth exploring', so World War Z is basically a whistlestop tour around the globe with pauses for CGI mass carnage. The hero, Brad Pitt with his doleful Jesus face on, is reluctantly pressed into it, of course, having his cute kids to worry about, and even after decades of celluloid devoted to the pressing problem of armies of the undead, little progress seems to have been made in adding plausibility to the premise, albeit it that is now only called a super-virus and they don't go around hankering after brains. Apparently you can also fly in a day from South Korea to Israel in an antiquated cargo plane without stopping, and this sums up the overall level of pointlessness quite neatly.

4/10

Przypadek (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1981)

Blind Chance was banned by the Polish authorities in the last days of state communism, probably as much for its mild sexual content as for its anti-totalitarian views. When considering the peaks of Kieslowski's output, the ban is not actually much of a blow: we've been in the world of the butterfly effect since to better effect, even in the outright rip-off Sliding Doors, which steals this film's conceit that the main character either succeeding or failing to catch a train would change the whole of their subsequent life, and is at once more mediocre in intellectual content and yet better in coherence. The problem here is that while Blind Chance is bursting with philosophical ideas about religion, predestiny and freedom, their collation is such a muddle that characters merge into each other and any finesse in why its three parallel universes diverge so drastically from each other is quite lost. It's not the great director's most lucid hour.

5/10

The Last Stand (Kim Jee-Woon, 2013)

Arnie creaks out of his armchair for one last action outing, as the title probably disingenuously promises, and in time-honoured fashion the rest of the cast sportingly ignore the mismatch between his accent which actually seems to have got thicker as if he no longer had the energy to half-try and his character's name as a small-town sheriff who takes it on himself to stop a speeding fugitive crossing over to Mexico, plus his army of goons. Diverging from the High Noon set-up, the filmmaker seems to have decided that these days the big guy needs help for 'plausibility' so he gets a posse of forgettable deputies too, and then unfortunately makes all the dialogue utterly forgettable as well. The action is workmanlike as these things go, but it's hardly a great swansong for the Wrinklynator.

4/10