Movie & Film Reviews @ The Vast Picture Show

The best of Film 2010

2010-12-30T17:00:00.002Z

Leonardo Di Caprio inside a dream inside a dream inside a dream inside a dream inside a dream?); Ryan Reynolds inside a coffin buried six feet underground with nothing but a phone, a Zippo lighter and the viewer for company; that skulking Swedish dame Noomi Rapace with a very large tattoo and a large grudge to match; Kim Cattrall's Samantha throwing condoms at Muslim men in Abu Dhabi; the 11-year-old Hit-Girl kicking adult ass in Kick-Ass; that lost young face of Tahar Rahim's Malik arriving into prison in A Prophet; Jesse Eisenberg's motor-mouthing billionaire in The Social Network. What will you remember of cinema in 2010?

Who can put a stop to the sequels? Shrek, looking all tuckered out after a host of boring follow-ups, called it a day. Iron Man powered back in, while Harry Potter waved the magic wand for the second-last time, in what was film number seven. And there were enough 3D movies to make you goggle-eyed. The colour of money was blue, with Avatar, which opened in 2009, becoming an unstoppable force in 2010 to become the highest-grossing film of all time. Alice in Wonderland, How To Train Your Dragon, Tron: Legacy and Despicable Me all played in three dimensions, but only Toy Story 3 gave us something great to play with.

It was also the year the '80s came back with a yawn. Wall Street picked up with somewhat less worth than where it left off. Liam Neeson chomped on a cigar in The A-Team, and that was a plan that didn't come together. Freddy Krueger came back (what a nightmare) while we had a Karate Kid film with no... erm... karate. But Jaden Smith does know kung-fu.

In an age of dumbed-down Hollywood fodder, audiences responded hungrily to high-fibre offerings The Social Network and Inception. Is there a lesson to be learned from that? Surely, if anybody is listening. In comedy, Will Ferrell reminded us of why he is the only guy in town with The Other Guys, while Nicolas Cage, after years of suggesting he was going to do it, finally did it: he went Fubar in Werner Herzog's oddball and hilarious Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call. Meanwhile, two superhero crossover comedies crackled with vim and vigour: the punchy Kick-Ass and the exuberant Scott Pilgrim vs the World.

In The Ghost, Roman Polanski made a film about being under siege while being under siege; Peter Jackson lost the plot in The Lovely Bones, but that didn't stop a top-notch performance from our very own Saoirse Ronan; and Irish documentary His & Hers made every day mammy's day all over Ireland. Mike Leigh's Another Year was another warm and beautiful film, while fashion designer Tom Ford proved he had the cut of a director with A Single Man.

Films of quality abounded this year, but there were only a handful that had the measure, the unrelenting intensity, of true greatness. In A Prophet, Jacques Audiard made a film that will sit on the shelf alongside a century of classic gangster pictures. And then there was the wonderfully titled Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives from the stunningly talented Apichatpong Weerasthakul... a film to match David Lynch for weirdness, and then some.

The best films of 2010

1. A Prophet (Jacques Audiard)

Jacques Audiard's electric French prison drama snaps with brutality and crackles with rare poetry. A chilling portrait of corruption and criminality, a secular parable of Mohammad in modern France, and simply the best gangster film made anywhere in the past few decades.

2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

The uniquely titled Uncle Boonmee is nearly unclassifiable, but it is a poetic, mystic masterpiece no doubt. Its director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is so flagrant in his abuse of film convention, it seems to open a new door for filmmakers and may prove deeply influential.

3. Inception (Christopher Nolan)

Christopher Nolan's brainy, box-office-busting sci-fi sizzler was composed like a Matryoshka doll. Savvy and smart, it's the kind of filmmaking popular cinema needs right now.

4. Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)

A Greek film that will make you howl with laughter and shudder like you have fleas. A Buñuel-style allegory about loss of faith in the generation that caused the economic collapse? Probably.

5. Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois)

A film of amazing grace and almost austere beauty, this gentle film about seven Trappist monks contemplating possible death at the hands of Muslim terrorists in Algeria becomes a meditative interrogation of faith and a psychological study of siege. It turns unexpectedly into a portrait of radiant conviction.

The next best 10 (in no particular order)

Kick-Ass (Matthew Vaughn)

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)

The Other Guys (Adam McKay)

I Am Love (Luca Guadagina)

Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton)

Another Year (Mike Leigh)

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call (Werner Herzog)

Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)

A Single Man (Tom Ford)

Up In The Air (Jason Reitman)

Worst film: Sex and the City 2 (Michael Patrick King)

Most pretentious film: Enter The Void (Gasper Noé)

Best Irish film: His & Hers (Ken Wardrop)/ Savage (Brendan Muldowney)

Most over-rated film: The Social Network (David Fincher)

Most under-rated film: Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)

Best male performance: Tahar Rahim (A Prophet)

Runner-up: Casey Affleck (The Killer Inside Me)

Best female performance: Tilda Swinton (I Am Love)

Runner-up: Leslie Manville (Another Year)

Best director: Jacques Audiard (A Prophet)

Runner-up: Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives)

Best new director: Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth)/ Warwick Thornton (Samson and Delilah)

Best cinematographer: Eduard Grau (A Single Man)

Best documentary: American: The Bill Hicks Story

Best animation: Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)

Most embarrassing cinematic moment: That condom scene in Sex and the City 2

Most spine-tingling cinematic moment: That 'thing' on the stairs in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

December 26, 2010

Reviewed: Tron: Legacy 1/5 ; Burlesque 2/5 ; Catfish 3/5

2010-12-30T16:57:00.002Z

Films about people can last forever because their concerns are the same throughout time. A Chaplin comedy from the '30s or a Sirk melodrama from the '50s still speak to us because, though the fashion and customs are old-fashioned, what it is to be human remains the same. But films about technology are obsolete from the start. Just look at Tron, a film from 1982 made to play like a computer game. It starred Jeff Bridges as a computer hacker who went 'in' to The Grid. At the time, it was pioneering in its use of computer graphics. Today, it lives on as a lone, fizzing neuron in the memories of a few 45-year-old men. But don't let that stop Hollywood whipping up a faux nostalgia 28 years after most people have forgotten about it.

Things have evolved in Tron: Legacy. Where in the first film we got one Jeff Bridges, here we get two. Ordinarily, this would be a treat: Bridges, with his cranky, offbeat eccentricity has notched up a remarkable slew of films. But he's not quite himself here. When we first see his Kevin Flynn, it is 1989 and he's regaling his son Sam at bedtime with stories of his earlier Tron adventures, giving us a little back story. Something's up though. It's his face. It looks like it fell into a bucket of Botox. Instead, Bridges has been computer-regenerated to look younger. Any wonder his character mysteriously disappears.

Jump to the future and grown-up Sam (Garrett Hedlund), a clean-shaven human drone, stumbles on Kevin's secret behind a wall in a dusty arcade. He finds himself zapped and reconstituted into the 3D universe of 'The Grid'. The place is not unlike a giant neon disco the size of a city with throbbing techno courtesy of Daft Punk (who cameo in robot costume). It also doubles as a gaming arena where Sam must play for his life, in a hi-tech setting that feels like different levels of a computer game.

The despot lording the games looks suspiciously like his father. But he's not. He's Cru, a clone computer program gone rogue with the same plastic face as his real daddy back in 1989. No wonder Sam is confused. Cru believes in absolute perfection and behaves like Hitler, having ethnically cleansed, we will learn, a whole tribe of naturally occurring programs called ISOs. But how he got all this negative emotion without a disruptive childhood is anybody's guess.

When finally we meet the real Kevin Flynn, we discover the computer genius has been living in the outlands of The Grid having been banished by his own creation Cru. He meditates and has a raven beauty program called Quorra (Olivia Wilde) for company. Flynn looks like The Dude from The Big Lebowski but has aged something terrible. And you do wonder what was the point of going digital if it is going to make you age so badly.

But then other things don't add up. Sam and Kevin catch up over dinner in a palatial white villa straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. So they eat, and they sleep and you wonder why they have to do any of this if they are no longer human. And, heck, why do we even need gravity in here?

Meanwhile, the baddie computer programs drink in a cocktail bar – the worst of them being a super-camp Michael Sheen as a Bowie-esque villain – and you wonder do they pee as well? All this adds up to the film's central failing: for all its sense of wow-futurism, it can only imagine a world through clichés of human behaviour.

You can work with that if the story is any good. But Tron, despite its fancy 3D, is helplessly flat. The writers' approach is to throw everything into the mix. I mean everything. Kevin, Sam and Quorra battle Cru and his cronies in a post-modern mash-up with particles stolen from every big sci-fi action stomper from the past three decades. It is laughably bonkers and little of it makes sense, though thankfully the film puts the bad guys in neon orange and the good guys in shiny silver, so you don't even have to bring your brain.

No wonder Bridges looks depressed. He drags himself through each scene like a man awaiting death, the dialogue forming like clay in his mouth. Should we be surprised? The director, Joseph Kosinski, is a boy-with-toys first-timer whose background is special effects. Where a sharp director is all about the script (Day 1: does this make sense?), Kosinski cares only about the big shiny light show. And it is very sparkly. Tron: Legacy is so helplessly naff, so helplessly camp, it should feel out of date next week, just in time for the ironic brigade who will claim it as kitsch. "In there is the future," says Kevin Flynn. "In there is our destiny". You betcha.

Kevin Flynn turns up in Burlesque too, only here, he's wearing suspenders and a curly black wig. His face still looks like a plastic bag but his voice has changed. It's now toneless and odd, and he keeps offering advice to Christina Aguilera's talented young dancer who has escaped from Hicksville USA to come to LA to make it. You are not good enough to dance in my burlesque club, he tells her. Yes I am, she says, and proves it. (The dance routines are more strip-club than burlesque, but try explaining that to the film's target audience of seven-year-old girls).

There is no singing allowed in my burlesque club, Kevin Flynn tells her again. But then she sings so well he changes his mind. Her nemesis dancer (Kristen Bell) scowls from the wings. The rich bad man (Eric Dane), who plans on buying the club to build a skyscraper on top of it, falls for her. The nice barman (Cam Gigandet), who wears eyeliner and whose fiancée happens to be away in New York, begins to fall for her too. The film ends with a surprise twist when Kevin Flynn is unmasked but the mask doesn't come off and it turns out it was Cher all along. Do you be-li-eve?

Speaking of belief, I sat down to watch the documentary Catfish in good faith but then things started to smell… erm… fishy. The film comes from three Schulman brothers, Ariel and Henry behind camcorders and Nev, a 24-year-old New York dance photographer with handsome features and perfect white teeth. He has a friendship with a precocious eight-year-old artist called Abby who lives in Michigan. She paints pictures of his newspaper photos and posts them to him. He's chuffed. They become friends on Facebook. Then he becomes pals with Abby's mom and dad too and then her stepsister Megan gets in on the act. She looks pretty hot in her Facebook snaps and Nev is smitten. They begin a Facebook romance. They text and email. They talk on the phone. She records and sends him MP3s. Lucky for us the brothers are there to chart it all, though you start to wonder why they don't video chat.

The film is stitched together with screen shots of social media and various trips on Google Maps. And at first you think the brothers are charting this brave new world of social media – the birth of a Facebook romance. But then Nev develops suspicions that Megan is not all that she says she is. Is he being duped?

Trust on the internet emerges as the documentary's theme, but it quickly extends to the viewer's relationship with the film. Alarm bells were sounding in my head watching the remarkable neatness with which discoveries are made and events begin to pan out. And then there's the face of Nev who wears the smile of insincerity throughout. His emotions ring hollow. He looks like he's faking it. Can we believe what the brothers uncover? Perhaps it's real. Or perhaps the sense of distrust it engenders is precisely the point. Caveat emptor!

December 19, 2010

Reviewed: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader 2.5/5 ; The Tourist 1/5 ; Somewhere 3.5/5 ; On Tour 3/5

2010-12-30T16:56:00.003Z

Goodness, but the plotline in The Dawn Treader, the third film in the Chronicles of Narnia series, is suspiciously familiar. Let's see: the story travels to a dark island where we are told evil must be defeated. The place is covered in scowling bad weather, but worse, there's a bewitching Green Mist emanating from it that makes people do bad things and lose the run of themselves. Hmmm.

The Green Mist works by playing tricks on the mind. It makes two of our young heroes start lusting after gold and great wealth. It makes our young female heroine want desperately to be beautiful. And the Green Mist demands its price: we see boatloads of ordinary people being sold off as slaves to keep the whole thing going. A magician advises the kids: "To defeat the darkness that lives there, you must defeat the darkness inside yourself." This sounds suspiciously like an economist. What's he really saying here? Stop spending money on your credit card that you don't have? Give up that second house? One wonders if The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a sneaky parable for bankrupt Ireland. They could have called this The Chonicles of Blarnia.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is directed by Michael Apted and the adventure begins with a painting. It hangs on the wall of a house featuring churning emerald seas and a ship in the corner. Next thing there's sea water pouring out of the frame and into the bedroom, and our young heroes are transported into Narnia to be collected by the ship and the waiting Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes). Well, not all our young heroes. Peter and Susan, the older Pevensie children, sit this one out, presumably because they are too old. That leaves us with the youngest siblings. There's Edmund the Just (Skandar Keynes), Lucy the Valiant (Georgie Henley) and a new addition, their cousin, Eustace the Little Shit.

Eustace, played by Will Poulter, livens things up. With everybody being so damned nice and noble, he's an enjoyable brat, all freckled frowning and folded arms with eyebrows shooting skywards in permanent disgust. At home he's a telltale with a peashooter and a stash of stolen sweets under his bed. And he snorts at their make-believe Narnia. "I read books with real information," he tells him. But then he comes up gasping in Narnia waters and faints on board the ship when he meets Tavros, the bi-pedal bull who talks like a Guy Ritchie ruffian.

Things are jolly for a while: there is peace now in Narnia, swordfights for fun on the ship's deck with Reepicheep the talking mouse, and then there's the minor issue of seven missing lords, and their seven magical swords. The film proceeds with a large splash of Patrick O'Brian and adventure on various islands. We get invisible giants, magical doorways, a book of incantations and a pool that turns anything to gold. (Alas, the film didn't fall into it.) And then there's the mandatory evil creature that must be defeated. "Do not let them know your fears or it will become them," the children are warned about the nature of the island's evil. But it's too late. Edmund has already had a thought. "What is that?" someone yells at him when the thing comes out of the water. I yelled: "It's the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man!" Only it wasn't. It was a big giant sea beast, but it might as well have been.

What has always been so unconvincing about the Narnia films – apart from their edgeless characters, wearisome Christian moralising and Adam Adamson's flat direction – was watching children swordfight with grown-ups. At least in Harry Potter, it was a given that magic was needed to level the playing field. The children are so largely well-behaved you wonder if maybe they've been drugged. And you can't look to the adults for any anarchy. Ben Barnes, sailing the high seas, is certainly no Russell Crowe. Where Crowe can master and command the screen with a clean-shaven growl, Ben Barnes can grow all sorts of fancy facial hair and still be bland and shiny as a scrubbed deck.

Apted, the solid journeyman director who gave us Bond's The World is Not Enough, steers a vaguely better film than that yawn treader of a second film. It progresses with the functionality of a computer game where one acquires swords. Our heroes need seven. When they had four, I started getting restless and began looking around my feet to see if there were any lying about, just in case I could move things along.

I grasped about, meanwhile, for understanding after watching The Tourist. On the surface, everything seems (badly) right. It's a cheesy, breezy piece of Hitchcock light (just 2% real fat) and stars Angelina Jolie as an imperious criminal's moll who sets Johnny Depp's unsuspecting tourist up as a wrong man while being chased across Venice by Scotland Yard (Paul Bettany) and a gangster billionaire (Steven Berkoff). The issue of incomprehension has little to do with Depp and Jolie's munching of cardboard dialogue, though they're worth a mention: Depp, without baggy pants and eyeliner, seems to have forgotten how to behave normally, while Jolie parades about the place like it's a fashion shoot. She wears so much slap she's starting to look like a parody of herself. Somebody should make a theme park of her red lips.

In North by Northwest, Hitchcock used just one quick zoom to turn the tables and transfer the guilt onto Cary Grant's wrong man. Here, the director faffs for 40 minutes, while the editor is out cold after munching an entire box of Nitrazepam. We get a rooftop chase with Depp in his pyjamas and not a hint of vertigo, while the film's supposed twist is as plain as Johnny Depp's now fat face. The real twist lies in the credits when you learn that the writer/director is one Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the wunderkind who gave us The Lives of Others.

Surely this is a case of mistaken identity? One wonders if the real Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck is on the run (on a train, of course) somewhere across Europe, being followed by Russian goons with steely smiles and nice suits. They're convinced he's somebody else. He's trying to explain that he's a talented film director. But no one will listen. Back on the set in Venice, the assistant director has taken over, wearing a big blond wig with a suspicious German accent. "Ya, ya, Mr Depp, tone it down a bit, ya? Just imagine how ze great Ulrich Mühe would do it... Aczion!"

In Somewhere, the new film from Sofia Coppola, Stephen Dorff plays Johnny Marco, a Hollywood A-lister who has tasted and tested too much. We follow him on the Hollywood merry-go-round as he camps out in celebrity haunt Chateau Marmont, drives fast cars, beds a string of women, and is forced to look after his 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning). He does fun things for fun's sake. All the while, he wears the face of a man clinically depressed. Hollywood has never looked so ugly.

Coppola's film won the Golden Lion at Venice and sees a radical divestment of her dreamy style. This is an ascetic work – a film of pure behaviour in a manner that reminded me of Gus Van Sant's minimalism. It's a clever move casting Dorff. His is not an A-list face, so he defamiliarises us from celebrity – we see his character as a human being surrounded by sycophants and the effect at times is a comic absurdity. Coppola is pursuing pet themes here: alienation and the moral dissolution that comes when you have whatever you want. At times it's an absorbing watch but the film is not suffused with enough internal mystery. Coppola rattles the can but finds nothing inside. Johnny's epiphany that finally comes is a cliché, like something he is copying out of another movie.

Meanwhile, Mathiue Amalric, one of France's most beguiling actors, studiously avoids cliché in his directorial debut On Tour. He plays a frazzled theatre producer bringing a tour of American burlesque artists across France. It's a scatty, eccentric film, whose female characters are not fleshed out despite their near constant nudity. But the film has a certain spiky joie de vivre, and is anchored by a performance from Amalric that is wiry, bristling, lurching – qualities his director persona lacks.

December 12, 2010

Reviewed: Of Gods And Men 4.5/5 ; Monsters 3.5/5 (; Megamind 2/5 ; The Pipe

2010-12-30T16:55:00.000Z

High up in the Atlas mountains of Algeria lives a small monastery of French Trappist monks. Theirs is a life of peace. They celebrate mass with a hushed delicacy. They sow and harvest their gardens with a reverence for simplicity. And they care for the Muslim village that has grown up around them with duty and respect. There are seven of them – all with faces as sturdy and knobbled as old trees – though two of them stand out.

There's Luc, a heavyset old monk played by Michael Lonsdale, who once played the Bond villain Drax in Moonraker. Now he's asthmatic and tired, a man of medicine who keeps a practice that overspills with poor villagers. He hands out essentials such as spare clothes and shoes; dispenses advice on love to a young woman with earthy wisdom. And then there's Lambert Wilson's Christian, the nominal leader of the group. He is their sober intellectual who reads the Koran, writes of spiritual considerations or sits in discussions with the local Imam. And he is also the man who will walk out of the monastery at gunpoint to talk to a murderous Islamic militia, his face a mask of stern, authoritative calm while his throat is constricted with fear.

This is the world of Of Gods and Men, a film of amazing grace and almost austere beauty from French director Xavier Beauvois, who previously directed the so-so drama The Young Lieutenant. It is based on a true story, that of seven Trappist monks who were beheaded in 1996 in Algeria in mysterious circumstances. And Beauvois turns this into a rich study where terror is used as an interrogation of faith, but with an approach so gentle there is almost no wish to disturb.

The film roots us in a world where Islam and Christianity live in harmony only for a rogue group to upset the balance. The Armed Islamic Group of Algeria is roaming the country conducting killings. A gang of Croatian workers have had their throats sliced. The local Imam is upset at this new wave of militancy. The Koran, he says, does not endorse murder. The Algerian police come to the monastery and offer protection to this group of French foreigners. But Christian won't allow it. "Je refuse!" he says, though this sets the others on edge.

Beauvois turns the monastery into a psychological study of siege. Do you stay or do you go when the gamble is your life? Do the monks even own their own lives when they have dedicated them to their god? The monks take a vote that splits them down the table. Self-interest begins to surface. One of them begins to crumble, overwhelmed by fear and doubt. Others become sick from stress. They discuss leaving with the villagers. "You're the branch, we're the birds on the tree," a local woman says. "If you leave, we lose our footing." Luc and Christian see the crisis as a challenge, that their calling as men of faith is to be tested by such situations. For their discipline and resilience to buckle now would be tantamount to a loss of faith.

The film isn't a poster for religion but a study instead of radiant conviction, of grace under pressure. Beauvois's film is as restful as meditation, yet propelled by an undertow of powerful feelings. The cinematographer Caroline Champetier uses a fluid camera to create a mise en scene that is as spare as a monk's daily life. And the touchstone here is the great Danish director Carl Dreyer, with the film pushing for that blend of spirituality and transcendental style.

The film's greatest scene is a gentle allusion to the last supper. A tape cassette plays Tchaikovsky and the camera travels slowly across the faces of these men as they sit around a table. Some of them are crying, overwhelmed by beauty – of the music they rarely listen to, of the lives they may be about to give up. Their own faces are beautiful, charged from within. And the moment recalls Dreyer's luminous, spiritual close-ups of Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Beauvois captures the passion of these monks, the meeting of spiritual ordeal with renewed belief as a state of grace.

Of Gods and Men, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, is contemporary in the way it examines religious tensions in the modern world, and is somewhat old-fashioned in its bearing. But this is terrific cinema no doubt, taking us close to the transcendental.

First-time director Gareth Edwards' Monsters, meanwhile, is a strange beast. The film is set in Central America, years after an alien invasion. It's a world of military rubble and wreckage where locals are just getting on with their lives. The film tells the story of Andrew (Scoot McNairy), a stubbled twentysomething newspaper photographer who is tasked with escorting the tousled blonde Samantha (Whitney Able) – daughter of his newspaper boss – out of the infection zone towards a walled America. But they miss their boat and must trek it on foot.

In a manner similar to Jaws and the young Spielberg, Edwards has built a film around people, shelving the horror to the background for as long as possible. This feeds a sustained atmosphere. We glimpse aspects of the monsters but are rarely confronted with them. The militancy, spearheaded by the Yanks, starts suspiciously to appear one-sided.

Monsters' chief success is its sense of estrangement. This world is familiar but odd; the atmosphere is one of dread mixed with discovery. The raw realism is as alert to sense of place as a travel documentary. One wonders if Edwards set out to make something more commercial only to discover a richer canvas in the making. The film is sensitive, not as confrontational as you might expect and it will leave horror fans wanting. And even though it leans towards arthouse with its preoccupations, it will leave those fans wanting too: the characters just don't bite deep enough.

The film, though, is something of a coup. Edwards directed, photographed and produced it with a crew he was able to fit in the back of a van. The special effects he did in his bedroom with off-the-shelf software. That it looks as big-picture sharp and FX-savvy as a Hollywood spectacular suggests a DIY revolution in the making. That it was made for just $15,000 makes you wonder what James Cameron did with all that cash.

The shiny dome head of Megamind in Megamind, meanwhile, is steeped in Avatar blue. Like the villainish hero of the recent Despicable Me, his heart is steeped in goodness. Megamind is voiced by Will Ferrell with his usual hysterical, hapless abandon. For Megamind is both great and useless. He banishes Metro City's superhero only to become bored without a nemesis. It seems that lashings of knowing irony just aren't enough to entertain him – or the audience – so he creates a new nemesis out of a nerdish chump only for it to go terribly wrong. Megamind muscles in a few minor laughs but displays nothing you could call superpowers.

The local residents in The Pipe, a documentary about the controversial Corrib gas pipeline, certainly don't have any special powers. But what they do have is persistence – the kind of dogged nimbyism that can drive a campaign for nearly a decade. The "bad guys" in The Pipe, meanwhile, certainly do – Shell E&P Ireland, which wants to lay a pipline from Corrib gas field through the Erris parish in Co Mayo, and the Irish government which offered it its full support to do so.

The Pipe plays like David and Goliath, and the opening montage sets the tone: we get pastoral, aerial views of the Irish coastline cut up with a frenzy of garda clashes. From the off, then, it looks like propaganda. This helps its emotional through-line – in its little people versus the state/corporation, plenty of viewers will be sucked into support. Director Risteard O Domhnaill doesn't move beyond the point of view of the locals. He captures some stunning images, and some snorting, heaving, close-ups of the ruck and maul of protesters clashing with gardaí, who most of the time just look embarrassed. And then there's the mulish infighting among the campaigners which makes for entertainment.

The fair-minded viewer, however, who wants to weigh up this ongoing and explosive issue, is prevented from doing so. The myriad reasons for not building the pipeline are never supported here by anything other than hearsay. The wider (despicable) political picture is never extrapolated. This is a shame because some of the facts speak for themselves.

December 5, 2010

Reviewed: Unstoppable 3/5 ; The American 4/5 ; The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest 1/5 ; My Afternoon With Margueritte 3/5

2010-12-30T16:53:00.002Z

Unstoppable, the new film from Tony Scott, is about a giant unmanned locomotive that is, well, unstoppable. That this is a lie we all know because the film stars Denzel Washington. Now, try telling Denzel he's going to star in a film in which the train he is supposed to stop cannot be halted. He'd lift his jaw in the air and start nodding at you while smiling, only his eyes wouldn't be smiling at all and then he'd stop smiling just as quick and start talking down to you. "Now, now. I'll tell you what we're going to do. Alright? I'll tell you. We're going to stop the train. Stop it dead. Bam!" And he'd smack his hands together and then he'd smile at you again and everyone would let out their breath.

To be fair, the title is likely the doing of Tony Scott. He's the kind of director who can't take a piss without having two helicopters hovering overhead, and a Swat team and a brace of ambulances parked outside just in case he missed the pot. Denzel would be there too, shaking his head, saying, "I ain't cleaning up that mess." But then he would.

Unstoppable is 'based' on a real event and it is classic Scott: a careering juggernaut of loud silliness, old-fashioned in its thrills, and decisive in its delivery of them. The film works up a piston-pumping, steam-chugging head of fury, with the unmanned locomotive lugging a few carriages of molten phenol in its half-mile train. Predictably, school children are travelling in the opposite direction, while behind them in another cargo train travel Denzel's engineer Frank Barnes, and his rookie train conductor Will Colsen (Chris Pine). "We're not just talking about a train here. We're talking about a missile, the size of the Chrysler building!" says yardmaster Connie (Rosario Dawson).

Unstoppable is set in blue-collar Pennsylvania and is full of big-boned rail workers who race in jeeps after the train or hang from helicopters. These are the type of old-schoolers who can't keep their women, and the central lesson from Unstoppable is that the only way to the heart of a woman who won't pay you attention – Will's young wife, Frank's two daughters – is to risk dying. Some men might agree with this. It must be why our heroes ignore company orders, decouple their train in a lay-by and race it backwards at full speed towards the runaway engine. This also allows Denzel to achieve a neat feat: just like The Taking of Pelham 123, where he began the film as a nerdy desk controller only to end up wielding a gun again at the end, here, he starts the film travelling one way, only to end up as the film's hero travelling in another.

Films about trains are as old as cinema itself. The Lumiere brothers in 1896 screened The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station and audiences, who had never seen a film before, fled their chairs in terror, thinking the train coming towards them was going to run them over. Today, Scott has to do everything he can to enliven audiences. There are flashes of docu-style camera amidst his hyper-style, but he mainly relies on running commentary throughout the film from TV news commentators, who appear regularly almost like characters. This helps to give the effect it is happening live.

I would imagine rolling TV news is exactly what people are trying to dodge when they go to see escapist popcorn. And though the infection of the movies with this kind of thing is nothing new, Scott really overdoes it. In one scene, the locomotive ploughs through a horse transporter stuck on the line and we watch it smithereened with maximum damage and multiple cameras. But then the TV news starts to replay it and we have to keep watching it over and over again and the film begins to feel like a sports event. Worse, it uses the news commentators to explain to the audience what is happening in the film when, in all honesty, a chimpanzee could explain it to you – big train, fast, make stop, ooo-ooo aaah-aaah-aaaah-aaaaah!! You'll leave the cinema muttering at such insults. But people on the street will be wondering why you are covered in oil, your hair is windswept and your eyes watering.

You will be unmoved, however, watching The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the final installment in the Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy. It should have been called The Girl Who Doesn't Kick the Hornet's Nest, because there's no sting in the tale. There isn't even a buzz. Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) slinks into the background with a sour puss, and with all those Scandinavian secrets and lies to resolve, and all that book to get in, the film flatlines for 147 minutes with hardly a jolt of life. They really should start putting defibrillators in cinemas.

George Clooney, meanwhile, stars in The American, U2 photographer Anton Corbijn's follow-up to his accomplished debut Control. This is the story of an assassin hiding out in Castel del Monte, a cobbled town of warren streets in Italy's Abruzzo where the clouds come down to meet the surrounding hills. That the film is interested in this kind of detail is telling: I saw the trailer the other night and it was cut to pretend the film was a fast and flashy Hollywood assassin thriller. Don't be misled. The American is brooding and icy, an existentialist European-style arthouse thriller pared down to bare bones.

With The Hunter and The Limits of Control, both Raffi Pitts and Jim Jarmusch this year have given us their own take on this niche genre. But Corbijn has the edge, displaying clarity and control with a remarkable eye for beauty. It helps, too, that he has Clooney in the lead.

This is a film about observation. Clooney's Mr Butterfly has fled an attempt on his life in Sweden. He lives on the edge in a town so quiet, footsteps ring in the air. He senses he is being watched; sleeps with a gun. His paranoia is conveyed with Hitchcockian rigour: suspicion is conveyed through mood and glance; information is strictly withheld.

Mr Butterfly is building a sniper's gun for a client. He walks, he drives, he makes, he hardly talks. When he does, each line of dialogue is carved to carry just the right amount of weight – often with a beguiling frog-faced priest, Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli) who senses the man needs absolution. The lineage here is Bresson and Antonioni, process and emotional isolation. But Corbijn is becoming his own man with a precision that is deeply satisfying. Every shot and gesture is perfectly measured, while the film's final shot is breathtaking. With truly original material, Corbijn could be startling.

The film gives Clooney what he needs: inner turmoil and beautiful women – the client is a mysterious brunette (Thekla Reuten), while Clara (Violante Placido) is a prostitute with whom he has an affair. The moment where she gives herself to him, where the transaction ceases to be a transaction, is captured with acute sensitivity. Clooney's Mr Butterfly recalls Alain Delon in Le Samurai. But Clooney's character belongs to himself. He is tantalising to watch – stone-eyed and saturnine, a man of discipline struggling with a great interior dilemma. When you add this to Up In The Air and Michael Clayton, Clooney is doing career-defining work. Like Cary Grant, he is creating characters with troubled interiors that disturb the smoothness of his persona. He is the consummate movie star.

Gérard Depardieu used to be the consummate movie star. Now he's gone all Brando, heaving huge weight about the place under that enormous nose. He stars in Jack Becker's My Afternoons With Margueritte, a sentimental bedfellow to Becker's previous film Conversations With My Gardener. File this under middle-brow French drama with appropriate clichés – an encounter between a bourgeois retiree and a working-class handyman. Let us marvel at the things they can teach each other!

Depardieu plays bumbling buffoon Germain who is in tune with nature but the butt of café jokes and he cannot escape memories of a troubled childhood. Meanwhile, Margueritte (played by 96-year-old Gisele Casadesus) is a retired scientist who reads Camus to him in the park. Depardieu can't but help make Germain more intelligent than the film wants him to be. And like Conversations, you gnash your teeth at the set-up, only for Becker's gentle insistence to win you over.

November 28, 2010

Reviewed: Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, Part 1 2.5/5 ; Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives 5/5 ; Chico And Rita

2010-12-30T16:48:00.002Z

Harry Potter is getting a bit long in the tooth. Goodness, at this stage, one would have imagined he'd be out the other side of university, wondering now where he was going to get a job with an arts degree. No doubt he'd have lost his virginity, to a Muggle who recently emigrated to Australia to work at an ice-cream counter for which she doesn't get paid very much but at least there's sunshine, and no more Harry, who she's grown tired of listening to prattling on and on about being the Chosen One. And heartbroken Harry would still have his muggle parents, who, before they had their life savings wiped out, would have paid for his 23rd birthday to have his eyes lasered and perhaps that ugly forehead scar too.

Alas, no such luck. The Chosen One is still stuck in a film franchise that renders him a teenage boy in Daniel Radcliffe's now discernibly adult body. And like Radcliffe's jaw, surviving each adventure for young Harry is a tight shave. He keeps on defeating evil only for it to come hurtling back again. This was Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It is also beginning to feel like something Nietzsche would have dreamed up, a film franchise of eternal recurrence – an infinite repetition without alteration of each and every moment. Think about it: can you really tell one film from the other?

The Deathly Hallows is film number seven and still there's no sign of the grand finale with Lord Voldemort. Honestly, you'd swear the Evil One was a No 18 bus on a Sunday. And no, I don't want two showdowns. Just one will do.

In The Half-Blood Prince, Hogwarts was a bubbling hormonal brew. Here, everybody is discernibly more serious, and one presumes this is because our heroes know the great demonic denouement is just one more film away, after you've waded through the two hours and 20 minutes of this. Dumbledore is dead, the ministry of magic is under Voldemort's control, while a panoply of Potter villains sit scowling around the Evil One's table. Voldemort looks down on them with a face that hasn't been getting any sunshine and a nose that looks like it was lopped off in a bizarre sneering accident. He wants to get his hands on Harry alive. Harry wants the 'horcruxes', magical necklaces that could probably earn you a few quid at the pawnshop. And I wanted them all to stop talking and just get on with it.

The ministry of magic, where people move like clockwork, now looks like a totalitarian nightmare inspired by Fritz Lang's Metropolis, but watered down with 20 parts. And there are period shades of WWII: Ron carries a radio with him which he listens to while they flee across a mythic landscape (looks like Scotland to me) as if he was tuning into war news; one scene feels like we are waiting for bomber planes to land and to see who has made it (one of the Weasley twins comes in low on the horizon with one ear flaming), while the ministry of magic is purging Muggle-bloods, or half-bloods. This is being conducted by Imelda Staunton's smiling witch Dolores Umbridge with ironic abandon. She condemns an innocent woman with the line: "Wands only choose witches and you are not a witch." It used to be the other way around.

The look and feel of the films has been so carefully honed over the years that everything here is as it should be. The glossy grey-green palate is silken and the digital effects are seamless. But by golly does Alfonso Cuarón's The Prisoner of Azkaban, the second film and the highpoint in the series, feel like eons ago. Where that film was fleet of foot and swift to action, The Deathly Hallows is lined with lead.

David Yates undoes all the smooth fixing he did in his second Potter, the previous film The Half-Blood Prince. This feels like an exposition dump, with characters constantly telling us who's who, and what they have to do and why and where they're going next, and oh my gosh, is that the No 18 bus? I really do have to leave…

If The Deathly Hallows sinks on screen with the weight of a diving bell, here, then, is a butterfly: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is the film that took the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes, and there's nothing like it anywhere or in any time. It is made by the uniquely talented Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Thai artist and film director who, like David Lynch, is able to magic up universes that are hermetically sealed and flow with their own strange logic. Western rationality need not apply: you have to give yourself over.

Knowing how to approach a film like this probably helps. If arthouse can be viewed as literature, Uncle Boonmee... is poetry steeped in an oriental mystique that is startlingly different. And watching how Weerasethakul flaunts and flings the rules of film to his own liking made me wonder if I was experiencing the same shock that was felt when TS Eliot launched Prufrock and its high modernism onto the world.

The story is difficult to circle. But it does involve one Uncle Boonmee, a man who lives in the Thai jungle and who is slowly dying of kidney failure. The grace with which he approaches this fact is moving and the film can be viewed in one way as a Buddhist meditation on death. Strange instances of reincarnation abound. He receives various visits, one from his sister-in-law and others from… well, I can't tell you as this would ruin their startling effect.

There is so much else and Weerasethakul pushes out in whatever direction he fancies. The story weaves the mythic with the modern, a tantric flow of the fantastic set in rich crepuscular light. Much like his previous film, the colder Syndromes and a Century, time creeps slowly up on you like the advance of urban modernity. But the fantastical is always here: there is a scene which culminates in sex with a catfish and it made me flap around with the giggles. And then there are those creatures. They stare out of dark jungle with red alien eyes. Watching one of them mount the stairs slowly into Boonmee's house is easily the most eerie moment in this year's cinema.

Weerasethakul, who doesn't like to explain his films, has said Uncle Boonmee… is an homage to the dying use of film. Different sections are shot on different stock, and one section is composed entirely of photographs a la Chris Marker's La Jetée, which I found jarring but it doesn't ruin the wider effect. A previous section involving a photographer is inspired by Antonioni's Blow Up, but testament to Weerasethakul's genius, it travels to a uniquely different place. There is so much going on here and most of it is contained within stillness, a well from which you can drink deep.

The animation Chico and Rita, meanwhile, is all sentimental surface. But what a surface. Director Fernando Trueba and Spanish designer Javier Mariscal's ode to the jazz era of the 1940s and '50s swings like a cat and snaps and swoons like a tango dance.

This is the story of Chico and Rita, remembered by Chico as a cigar-chomping old man in Havana. In his youth, Chico is a jazz pianist hustling for work in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Rita is the jade-eyed firebrand who sings with that kind of breathless voice that makes men's legs wobble. Their story plays out under the stars of doomed romance and is largely defined by their absence. He writes hit songs, she sings them; they love, they fight, they break up, they go to America. He ends up in Paris playing with Dizzy Gillespie. She ends up a screen star who dates Brando. Can they ever get it together?

Sex comes easy and so do the tunes. The mixture of '50s bebop and latin jazz is a dinnerparty delight. The depiction of the era, from the bright lights of New York, to a vibrant Havana that becomes soured by revolution, makes movie nostalgia look dull.

November 21, 2010

Reviewed: Mammoth 4/5 ; Involuntary 3.5/5 ; You Again 1/5 ; We Are What We Are 3/5

2010-12-30T16:47:00.001Z

Ten years ago, Lukas Moodysson was one of the best young directors in cinema. That old grouch Ingmar Bergman broke his silence to declare the Swede a young master. Moodysson's second film Together, an hilarious and touching story of a hippy commune in 1970s Stockholm, is one of the great films of the past decade – a film in the benevolent spirit of Renoir. At the age of 31, Moodysson had it all in his grasp.

And then, as if to emulate the great Swede, Moodysson grew old and pessimistic before his time. His films pitched into the political and started to scream at you until you hurt. Lilya 4-ever, a study of human trafficking, was first-rate. But it was so angry and confrontational, the camera was put under the face of a sweaty, heaving, horrible man during sex just so we would know what it was like to be raped. In A Hole In My Heart and Container, Moodysson was a hectoring loon. Now, at last, he's getting it together again.

Mammoth stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Michelle Williams, and opens with a scene of a loving family at play. This feels like the old Moodysson at last, but we don't get off that lightly. The film turns out to be a compromise of sorts: a smart drama about maternal guilt and the difficulties of modern parenting, and an earnest study of globalisation and its accompanying strains, dislocations and exploitations. Watching the easy nuances of this film made me think of Iñárritu's mega-budget Babel, and what a sham that was. Where that film used a Winchester rifle to tie its knot of global stories together, Moodysson, instead, chooses parenting.

In a hip New York apartment, we meet Leo and Ellen and their daughter Jackie. Ellen (Michelle Williams) is an exhausted ER surgeon who works nights, struggles to sleep during the day and worries about time spent with her eight-year-old daughter. Her husband Leo, played by Gael Garcia Bernal, bounds about the place like a puppy. He's a gamer whose website is being bought for $35m. So he's off to Thailand on a private jet to close the deal with a business partner who gifts him a $3,000 mammoth ivory pen. And then there's Gloria, the radiant Filipino child minder who treats Jackie as if she were her own.

As the story unfolds, a transference of feelings takes place. Gloria, struggling with guilt about leaving her two boys in the Philippines, is perhaps too fond of Jackie. Or maybe that's all in the mind of Ellen, who feels distant from her daughter. When a little boy comes into ER after being stabbed by his mother, Ellen begins to grow attached to his welfare. And with hardly a word, Williams reminds us of why she is such a talent: she stares out the window longingly at Gloria and Jackie who hold hands going off to school; or plasters a fake smile watching them read together. But that smile begins to slip like a mask from her face. While Gloria, too, suffers her own maternal guilt. Moodysson, an avowed feminist, has always been finely attuned to the concerns of women. And here he is less judging of the dual roles of working mums, but exploring and presenting these problems as a reality of modern life.

Leo, meanwhile, struggles to balance the hard capitalism of his trip with what he sees around him. He shrinks awkwardly from the lavish treatment he receives as a foreigner, choosing a beach hut over a five-star hotel. When he finds himself in a nightclub that doubles as a brothel full of western men, he wanders around looking at the grubby sex rooms. If this was Moodysson five years ago, he'd have been rubbing our noses into the dirty mattresses. Thank goodness here he is more quietly revealing. Indeed, Leo has even learned a lesson from earlier Moodysson films: he pays a prostitute called Cookie not to have sex. Though later, it only takes a few days and a few drinks for Leo to resort to default male behaviour.

Mammoth avoids the clichés of poverty and shows that exploitation is not just a white man's game. Gloria's boy Salvador looks for work but is tricked into labour for free by a local woman. And when his grandmother wants to teach him a lesson, she takes him to a rubbish dump where children his own age are scavengers. Your mother, she tells him, is working in America so you can have a good life and afford a doctor. When the children here get sick, they die. It's a powerful scene, but the boy still needs his mom, and that leads to trouble and tragedy.

Another Swedish heavyweight, the bizarre and wonderful Roy Andersson, proves a telling influence on first-time director Ruben Östlund. His Involuntary is a neo-realist comedy of sorts that leans heavily on Andersson's strict formalist approach: he plonks his camera at whatever angle and keeps it there for the entire scene. Faces and limbs are lopped off. Who gives a damn if you can't see the person talking? The difference here is the scenes unfold as if they were plucked from real life. Their patent absurdity is stuffed under the surface.

Involuntary is a weave of five stories: there's the uptight dinner party where fireworks explode in the face of the stubborn patriarch; the bus journey with the stage actress that comes to an amusing halt; the night out featuring two over-sexualised blonde nymphs; an idealist young teacher in a school full of indifferent, tired teachers; and a gathering of Swedish lads whose humorous sexual antics go deeply awry. The behaviour of Östlund's characters is so natural, you hardly notice the film build into a portrait of Swedish society. The humour is deeply droll. I have a sneaking suspicion, though, this plays as a riotous comedy in Sweden. But here, the humour feels lost in translation.

The humour in You Again, meanwhile, is so unspeakably noxious, to watch it conjures the suffocating feeling of being trapped in a sealed room with somebody else's farts. It stars Kristen Bell as Marni, a bullied ugly duckling turned saucy marketing executive who is reduced again to a bullied ugly duckling before she can regain the upper hand.

She returns home for her brother's wedding only to discover his fiancée is Jojo (Odette Yustman), the evil wagon who bullied her at school. Conveniently for the plot, nobody seems to remember this, even though said brother went to the same school. But then, there are lots of things in this film that don't make sense, as Marni seeks to unmask the real Jojo.

The bitch fight doubles when Jojo's flashy aunt (Sigourney Weaver) arrives, sworn school enemy of Marni's mom. She is played by Jamie Lee Curtis who goes around smiling like she has a gun pointed to her head. The film is very keen to show us how fab both of these veteran ladies look. But the director Andy Fickman might as well be a run-down tart, vying for your attention with the kind of desperate comedic set-ups that make you cringe. It plays out in a plastic universe where no real emotions exist, where everybody pretends they are happy and where nobody speaks their mind. Fortunately for the reader, I can.

It would be fair to call Jorge Michel Grau's debut film We Are What We Are a biting social satire without giving the game away. This black comedy is set in Mexico where the police are so corrupt, they can't be bothered to investigate the disappearances of prostitutes who are being snatched off the street, and where one family have a compelling need to fulfil a ritual that requires said body snatching.

The family live in a strange house full of nooks and ticking clocks. And when their father dies (the film's intriguing opening), the eldest son assumes the mantle of responsibility. This involves some slapdash kidnapping that brims over into farce. What their ritual is, the film guards from our grasp until much later on. And by that stage, the film has grown rather demented: imagine a pinch of Bunuel and a dollop of schlock horror with a veneer of sophistication from intelligent, arty camerawork. You coudn't erm... axe for any more.

November 14, 2010

Reviewed: Another Year 4/5 ; Let Me In 3/5 ; Due Date 2.5/5

2010-12-30T16:45:00.003Z

Sally Hawkins' Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky was Mike Leigh wearing swimming togs in a blast of hot June sunshine. As an antidote, or a joke perhaps, he teases us at the start of Another Year with a close-up of Imelda Staunton in anguished-washerwoman mode, with a face you could only call the 2nd of January. Staunton's Janet has been forced by her doctor to attend a counsellor. On a scale of one to 10, she is asked, how would you say you feel? Staunton's face is colder than a tombstone. One, she says. Where's Poppy when you need her? I imagine her bounding into the room – it's not easy being you, is it Janet, eh? C'mere, gimme a hug! – only to get a dig in the face.

Another Year, though, is neither summer nor winter but the even keel of four seasons. It is fashioned around a husband and wife – Tom and Gerri – who, no cartoon catastrophe, are, instead, the film's centre of gravity. Gerri (Ruth Sheen) is the counsellor treating Janet. She sports no jaw to speak of but has backbone and heart aplenty. And then there's Tom (Jim Broadbent), an engineer of quiet purpose and frazzled eyes. They are that married couple that seem to be together forever; that grow tighter with the years. They tend an allotment at the weekend and cook big comforting meals with the produce. But the film's concern is how they comfort their family and friends.

The curve of the story follows the seasonal visits of Mary (Lesley Manville), a middle-aged secretary at the surgery where Gerri works. She's a permanent singleton always on alert for a man. She's a helpless flirt, too, and twiddles her hair when testosterone's in the air. "Look at his muscles," she says of Gerri's bumbling, thirtysomething son Joe. "I'm a bit overdressed for a Sunday... what do you think?" she says, thrusting her cleavage.

Mary is an awful witterer and sinks glass after glass of chardonnay. But underneath the talk, you start to hear the awful silence in her life. When the man she is making eyes at in a pub is met by his much younger girlfriend, the camera sits on Mary's face and we see in her eyes her despair at becoming invisible. There was a similar moment in Leigh's Naked, where a middle-aged woman trussed up her hair in sexual desperation in front of the young Johnny. Here, Leigh has Mary pinned without making her move at all and we spend the rest of the film watching her wriggle.

Tom has two brothers who come to visit too. There's helpless Ken (Peter Wright), all spilling weight and tins of beer and crisps. And like Mary he's sad and alone and doesn't know how to cook. And then there's the older brother Ronnie (David Bradley), whose wife they travel north to bury. It is perhaps the best moment in the film: Ronnie's son turns up, a shaven-headed bully who spits and spurns those around him and makes a mockery of his mother's wake. Family, indeed, is a messy business.

Beneath the drama, there's something gnawing away. Leigh evokes a sense of society pulling apart. The film is less an advertisement for marriage, as seen through Tom and Gerri, than an alert about those who end up living their lives alone. Families break up and scatter, leaving isolation and loneliness. And so, in their quiet way, Tom and Gerri are vital.

Mary turns from amusingly drunk into an unamusing lush. She babbles on hilariously about getting a car to whizz her away for happiness at weekends. But when she does so, she's a hazard, while the car proves nothing but trouble. By autumn she has become a sad obligation. Manville is terrific, but there are times you can hear the strain of her character being pushed too hard. She's one of those Leigh chatterboxes that drive you nuts but are compelling to watch because of how Leigh allows them to reveal, through small talk, what lies beneath.

This is accentuated by the way he watches them. When the talk runs out he lingers on their faces. Manville flashes despair like jabs of pain. And then there's Ronnie, with one of those great, sad loping faces that sits so still it could be a Depression-era photograph by Dorothea Lange. The camera drinks him in.

Leigh is so good at building consummate characters you come away from this wondering that they're not real. His empathy here is staggering; his gift is to make us better watchers and listeners of people and, for that, this is a blessing.

Imagine if shortly after Kubrick made The Shining, the French came along and remade the film, measure for measure, because nobody could be bothered to watch it in English with subtitles. This is the sad, bizarre situation we face in Let Me In, a Hollywood remake of Thomas Alfredson's Swedish horror masterpiece, Let The Right One In. That Hollywood has always remade horror films is nothing new. But Alfredson's forlorn coming-of-age vampire film ranged so uniquely outside genre it would have been best left alone.

This is obvious watching Let Me In. It is so carefully modelled off the original – in pacing, tone, sensitivity and beauty – that the director Matt (Cloverfield) Reeves cannot step out of the film's shadow. From the opening, however, all neon flash in snow drift in New Mexico in the early '80s, it is clear he is in charge. Where the original builds a slow pace full of nuanced excitement, Reeves keeps the pace the same – a salve to the attention-deficit disorder of most Hollywood horrors – but he doesn't risk opening the film to US audiences without a blast of excitement.

He tells the tale with visual panache, a little nod to Rear Window and some minor changes, and though there is less plot, the story remains the same. It tells of the unlikely friendship between Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee of The Road) and Abby, the creepy girl next door (Chloe Moretz of Kick-Ass). Owen's dangerous fascinations are toned down though he is still bullied at school. Abby is, unknown to Owen, an ageless vampire whose supposed father (Richard Jenkins) must go out and get her blood to increasing danger and cost.

Where the ambiguity of evil in the original was more acute because morality was kept largely within the central child's point of view, here we get background hints and references about god, and there is a policeman (Elias Koteas) on the case, too, which makes you wonder if America can ever get around its obsession with the blinkers of good and evil. Viewed in complete isolation, this is a very accomplished film – though much in the same way a reproduction of a master painting looks pretty good to the uninitiated.

I'm sure Todd Phillips would like to reproduce the success of his previous comedy The Hangover. His lustre has earned him the right now to work with Robert Downey Jr. And in Due Date – a road comedy with little mileage – he reunites with Jake Galifianakis, that shaggy-bearded, pratfall-loving schlub who causes nothing but trouble.

Downey Jr's Peter is an anal architect who is flying home to LA for the birth of his first child. Galifianakis' Ethan Tremblay is a fey, pot-smoking, wannabe actor who keeps a dog in a bag and makes Peter's life hell. It's the clichéd odd couple: uptight pain-in-the-ass and easy-going mess. Phillips revels in misfortune and awkward contrivance. He has them kicked off their flight and forces them to drive across America together. Ethan masturbates in the car, drives them off a bridge and stands by while Peter is beaten up by a wheelchair-bound Iraq vet. The humour is mean-spirited but does produce a few titters. Downey Jr is so good an actor you hardly notice he's slumming it. Without the presence of both stars, however, there's little humming under the hood.

November 7, 2010

Reviewed: Burke and Hare 1/5 ; The Kids Are All Right 3.5/5 ; The Hunter 3/5 (

2010-12-30T16:41:00.001Z

It began as a slight chill, what seemed like a touch of frost on the breath. And as the first reel of John Landis's Burke and Hare unfolded, I felt a tightening too in my chest. I looked about: there was nobody behind me in the cinema. And no one else about. I seemed to remember the heating was on when I entered – I did take off my coat.

I began to feel a little colder as Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis larked about as the titular serial murderers who did their work in Edinburgh in the late 1820s. They sport Irish accents more slippery than a runaway eel in a pool of blood. Edinburgh here is gothic and grim: a dungeon of dry ice but a ghastly delight. Then Christopher Lee cameos in a gasping respite. He is an early victim – they sit on his chest, a method that came to be known as 'burking', though in earlier days Lee would easily have wrung their necks.

I began to experience cold spells crawling up my limbs. On screen, cadavers wriggle with maggots, or newly-severed limbs geyser blood, but the scares are dressed as comedy as the hapless Burke and Hare do just about anything for cash. So, too, will Tom Wilkinson. His Dr Knox needs bodies for his medical college dissections and turns a blind eye to where he gets them. Isla Fisher's Ginny, meanwhile, runs around without her head. She's looking for funds to stage an all-woman version of Macbeth – financed by Burke's blood money. One of Macbeth's witches said, "present fears are less than horrible imaginings". Obviously she was wrong.

Is this grave robbery digging up an old affair and making such a botch job of its exhumation? It's certainly rotten. I neared the end and realised the chills were nothing supernatural. It was my nervous system alerting me to a fight or flight response. So I took to my heels from this horror.

There's nothing ghoulish about the children in The Kids Are All Right, a deft dramedy from director Lisa Cholodenko. It's the adults that are a nightmare. But let's look at the kids first. There's Laser (Josh Hutcherson), a 15-year-old boy of solid build who wears a permanent look of annoyance that suggests he thinks the entire world is stupid. We're told he's an athlete though mainly we just get to watch him sulk politely. And then there's his older sister Joni (Mia Wasikowska), 18 years old, blonde and bright and off to college with her straight As and her virginity still intact. She's the kind of girl who you have to work really hard to make angry.

That the film is keen to stress how well-adjusted this pair are is because their parents are a lesbian couple – indeed, the first, I think, in a mainstream American film. Their parents are Nic and Jules, Nic played by Annette Bening with pinched lips and stern demeanour, and Jules by Julianne Moore, with all-round softness. There's a sly moment on the part of the director when we first meet them at the dinner table, and they lean over each other as if they are about to kiss, and they hang in mid-air and then they do, as if they want to tease a certain kind of viewer and tell them to get over it.

The film takes place in sunny California where Laser and Joni, behind their parents' backs, arrange to meet their sperm-donor dad. He's played by Mark Ruffalo, an actor so laid back he talks like he's lying down. Perhaps he should be called Mark Unruffleable. His Paul is a restaurateur and organic farmer, not to mention a classic commitment-phobe. He takes the news and the nature of his becoming a father with ease. He then tells the kids he loves lesbians. One of the film's biggest laughs will be just how true this is.

The director, and co-writer Stuart Blumberg, have an ear for conversation and the way it unfolds and ensnares us. Where it takes most kids about 12 years to grow disappointed with their parents, it happens here in all of two minutes when Laser and Joni realise donor dad is a slacker. His charm, though, is infectious. So that leaves uptight Nic to nit-pick him over dinner. He dropped out of college, he tells them, and Nic is dismayed – the donor description said otherwise. Clearly, it's much too late to be annoyed.

Cholodenko decides to have fun watching two moms trying to understand a teenage son. Laser hangs around with a ruffian they don't like. It appears they don't quite understand male bonding. "What do you get from your relationship with Cle?" they ask him, and his puzzled face tells them that, for a start, boys don't refer to friendships as relationships.

The mix-ups deepen when they think he might be gay. It doesn't help when Laser and his friend go rooting around mammies' room searching for pot and instead stumble on a video. Curious, they put it on. It's male gay porn. They don't hear the car in the driveway. Soon, parents and teenage son are about as confused as each other, and the audience is following closely behind.

For what's that happening between Paul and Jules? You can almost see the pheromones pounding the air between them. Jules, living out a mid-life lesbian crisis, has an affair with the sperm donor. I suppose you could call this reverse engineering.

There is hilarity to be had watching the dynamics unfold. But there is more sober work afoot. Unlike the pandering Hollywood usually affords gay relationships, Cholodenko puts this lesbian marriage through its paces. She makes it jump through hoops. Bening and Moore effortlessly evoke the warmth and frayed edges of an old marriage. Go easy on the wine, says Jules. Go easy on the micromanagement, says Nic. They are suffering the problems of marriage fatigue like everybody else.

Moore is an easy joy. Bening in her role of the matriarch is terrific. You can sense the family's totem pole begin to wobble: this is a woman who has held everything tight in her control and now she senses she could lose it all. Sometimes, she veers towards the unsympathetic. But then you see what she is up to: this woman is fighting to keep her family together. And that's the film's address: it doesn't matter how you build a family. It's the act of loving and of self-regulation that counts. The kids are alright because the parents give a damn; they are the sticking glue of society. As Paul soon learns to his cost, it's the act of not building a family – the selfishness of just looking out for yourself – that is at fault.

In Raffi Pitts' The Hunter, a former criminal's family disappear one day in Tehran. Ali, the film's hero – played by Pitts with a face like a slab of Botoxed basalt – combs the streets. The police seem indifferent. They tell him after interrogating him that his wife was killed in a demonstration. He doesn't bat an eyelid. But was she? And where's his young daughter? In an act of anger or frustration, Ali takes his hunting rifle and shoots two policemen on a motorway. Pitts' images are superb: precise and emotionally frozen. The film plays like a minimalist, existentialist thriller: Point Blank meets Le Samurai, perhaps, with a superbly eerie and ghostly car chase in the fog that is all the better for the absence of soundtrack or sound effects. And what's the scene with the helicopter about?

The film is cryptic or obscure, depending on where you stand watching it. The viewer is given only minimally more information than its hero. It strikes me as making deep and serious commentary about Iran in a way that can register with knowing viewers yet pass by cultural authorities there. Iran is depicted as an abandoned, forlorn place where people can be made to disappear and authoritarian corruption forces people to selfish acts of survival. Rather than its emotions, it is a film you remember for its mood.

October 31, 2010

Reviewed: Red 2/5 ; Easy A 3.5/5 ; Carlos 3/5 ; Africa United 3/5

2010-12-30T16:40:00.002Z

If there is any reason to go see RED, an over-the-hill action-comedy starring Bruce Willis, it is to see Helen Mirren firing a cannon machine-gun while dressed in a white ballgown. Once there was a time when Mirren slayed slavering male viewers with just the artillery that nature gave her, wearing nothing but her birthday suit. This new approach seems like a good model for how to age with dignity.

RED, with its plot about retired CIA operatives kicking ass, plays like a campaign for age awareness: Hollywood gets to patronise some 'ageing' performers by having them star in roles they are unsuitable for, while it gets to sell a gag to the audience. But it is a chance, too, for some stalwart actors to take themselves less seriously. I mean, where else are you going to see Morgan Freeman perv on the backside of a nurse? Who even knew he had a sex drive?

At the centre sits Bruce Willis, baldy of head, smirky of grin, and ageless like a wrinkled turtle. His Frank Moses is 'Retired and Extremely Dangerous', a former CIA badass who can't settle in quiet suburbia. To pass the time, he flirts on the phone with Sarah (Mary Louise Parker), a nervy, single 40-something in Kansas who works at a government agency that issues his retirement cheques. They agree tentatively on a blind date. And then his house is invaded, rather un-tentatively, by assassins and he goes on the run.

So what does he do next? He goes to Kansas, breaks into Sarah's apartment, packs her bag, and when she arrives home after a date, abducts her. I'm taking you with me, he says, because they will have been bugging my calls and they'll know I like you. This must count as the worst excuse for a Hitchcockian set-up I've ever seen. Think of Robert Donat's abduction of the unwilling Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps. The film found good reason for them to be stuck with each other – they were handcuffed together. And look how they spent the rest of the film chaffing.

The chaffing – by which I mean drama and ribald fun – is limited here because Frank gags Sarah with gaffer tape. What a missed opportunity. When he takes it off, she squeezes out one good line: "I was happy not to get kidnapped or drugged. I was hoping you would have hair." But he zips her up again and that dead look in the eyes of Mary Louise Parker is that of an actress who isn't allowed to shine. Soon, she stops whingeing and becomes compliant. The film gives up on her. So does the viewer. And if Frank's character was real in any way, instead of him just being another Bruce Willis, he would have given up on her too. But who wants Bruce Willis to play anybody other than Bruce Willis?

Sarah's blandness, however, is disappointing for another reason. Willis's Frank is so smooth, so unperturbable under fire, it would have been a boon if she had been working to sabotage him in her eagerness to get away. When Frank is attacked at home, the front porch crumbles around him but his dressing gown remains unfluffed. When they go to a swamp in search of old friend, John Malkovich's paranoid, conspiracy theorist Marvin, there's a huge, unwatched speedboat just waiting to ferry them. Make some trouble finding a boat? Or stick them in a row boat together? Why bother?

In a plot leading back to a dodgy ops job in Guatemala in the 1980s, Frank enlists the help of his old CIA colleagues in the search for who is trying to kill him. Willis is not the only one who plays it cool. Brian Cox lounges in a smoking jacket as a retired KGB agent who is still sweet on Mirren's Victoria; Freeman proves nifty with a gun, while Marvin enjoys a moment shot like a western showdown, where he draws his gun and shoots a rocket hurtling towards him. Rocket and its shooter casually dispensed, he declares, don't call me old!

Old? This film about retirement stars two male leads who are still in their 50s. And not for one second does it actually show any interest in expressing any of the dissatisfactions or difficulties of ageing. The director, Robert Schwentke, is the kind of helmsman who prefers instead to be busy giving you deja vu. You watch a scene and anticipate what is coming in your mind and then see it happen on screen. Remove the film's stimulus of the age gimmick, and the film would be so jaded, it would hardly keep its eyes open. It's not the OAPs that need a nap. It's the viewer.

For refreshment, then, feast your eyes upon the young actress Emma Stone. She has eyes like a cat, a purr for a voice and she slinks and prowls about the screen like it was a fireside rug and she damned well knows she owns it. You do want to take her home.

Stone's star turn in Easy A makes a film that could have been a near-miss into a near-hit. Her Olive is a high-schooler both savvy and smart and quicker to the draw with the killer line than you could ever wish to be. She's also an enthusiastic liar, though she's no Mean Girl. We discover this when she kindly helps her gay friend (Dan Byrd) by staging a sex scene behind doors at a party. He's suddenly 'in' with the boys. She's suddenly 'out', not just with the girls, but with the whole school. The director Will Gluck rewards this act of shame by making her walk a gauntlet of leering students. You would think none of them were at it.

Olive, high on feminism after reading The Scarlet Letter, stitches a scarlet 'A' onto her clothing and dangerously encourages a fake reputation as a slut. Trouble deepens, but her actions reveal the double standard that men can sleep around but women can't. And yet the film doesn't have the courage of its convictions to actually allow her to be anything but chaste. Of course, to do so would deprive the film of its humour, as Olive incurs the wrath of Christian fundamentalist classmates and teachers and later exposes their hypocrisies. The characters are all self-aware, commenting on genre clichés before they happen. This makes it knowing and entertaining, but with so much irony about, it's never going to have real heart.

In Carlos, French director Olivier Assayas biopics the life of one Illich Ramirez Sanchez, or Carlos the Jackal to you and me, the Venezuelan left-wing radical terrorist who held the capitalistic dogs of Europe to ransom during the 1970s and '80s. Multi-lingual Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez plays him as a charismatic playboy who smoothes in suits or battles in beret and sunglasses. He shoots a roomful of French police with merely an intake of breath and kidnaps an entire Opec gathering of oil ministers with breathless chutzpah. Where Soderberg's Che was strictly behavioural and sought to separate man from myth, Assayas keeps things toned down but allows Ramirez to inject a bit of swagger. His Carlos is an intriguing character – a bundle of contradictions, in fact. And watching him, the film proves that terrorism + time = cool.

Carlos was initially made as a 330-minute TV project, but this 140-minute version has been cut for the screen. It behaves like a film, as Assayas (Demon Lover and Summer Hours) is a skilled director. As Carlos is hunted by the west and seeks protection from the various Middle Eastern governments that financed his terrorism, the film begins to lose its grasp, suffering from too many cuts.

Meanwhile, Africa United is a children's film with a difference. Instead of masking tricky issues in metaphor, it plays them out in the open with frankness. This is the story of a group of children who make an epic trip from Rwanda through seven African countries to get to the World Cup. And though their journey brings them face to face with corruption, child warfare, prostitution and Aids, their faces beam with a can-do optimism. They are, after all, a symbolic Africa United. It is naively sweet.

October 24, 2010

Reviewed: The Social Network 3.5/5 ; Vampires Suck 1/5 ; Despicable Me 3/5

2010-12-30T16:39:00.001Z

Who would want to be friends with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg? I doubt he would even want to be friends with himself watching David Fincher's The Social Network, a drama about the young Harvard computer geek before he co-founded Facebook and became the world's youngest billionaire. We meet him in the middle of a crisis with his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend and he's motor-mouthing arrogance and casual insults because he just can't help himself. She tells him he's an asshole. Oh the delicious irony – see how socially inept the social network founder is!

This scene is vastly unusual. Any kid this age in a movie is usually petrified of women, or, if he has advanced to the next stage, just wants to squeeze a pair of boobs. But as we will see, Mark is no ordinary kid. He walks back through campus to his dorm, all curly hair in hoodie and flip flops and you just know Fincher is in charge: the film's palette has that curious Fincher Green, a kind of autumnal sludge. And then there's that menacing mood – a piano bass note resonates ominously. What dark things lurk? A head in a box? A serial killer? Mmmm. Mark goes back to his dorm, programs some controversial software called FaceMash that allows male students to compare the looks of female students and insults his ex-girlfriend's breast size on his blog.

And that's just the thing. Fincher, and writer Aaron 'The West Wing' Sorkin, take these small moments and turn them, with the help of Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires, into a (somewhat) drama for our time. That heady thrill of the early 2000s is recreated, when the good way of life coincided with a remarkable freedom for young people.

As Mark and his best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) create code for FaceMash, the film cuts skillfully between college kids partying like no other generation did before them. FaceMash lands Mark in academic probation, but it brings him to the attention of two 6ft 5in twins and budding entrepreneurs called Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Arnie Hammer). They're planning a social network not unlike MySpace but just for Harvard. Mark says he's in, but suspiciously doesn't work on it. Next thing he's launching Facebook – just for Harvard – and the film skips forward to recreate two legal battles, one with the Winklevoss brothers, who claim intellectual theft; the other with Eduardo, who, we discover later, was gloriously shafted.

Mark's arrogance is hilarious, almost hapless, for it forms the core of the film's drama: as he stampedes and succeeds, he isolates himself emotionally. But as the film continued, I found it hard to see him as some kind of villain. He is the way he is: a super-smart rationalist who steps on toes because he views the world and people through hard logic. It's not as if emotional intelligence is his strong point.

The unspooling of the film is designed to reflect the speed at which the modern era changes, or at least its superficial elements, for if we are honest, we are still the same underneath. A youngster can quickly become a billionaire in a short time, unlike the days when you had to graft life-long for it. But it seems a stretch to say this is a film about the way we all live now. It strikes me more as a slick dramatisation about the way a handful of privileged kids in an Ivy League college lived then.

You would imagine a roomful of introverts obsessed with computer code would play to type – reticent and somewhat inadequate. Indeed, I have heard the real-life Zuckerberg being interviewed and there's nothing special about the way he talks. But here, Sorkin turns him into a one-man Bogie-and-Bacall. He behaves with the arrogance of a galactic warlord holding earth to ransom with a death gun. Everybody else sounds eerily like middle-aged policy wonks from The West Wing. In the Sorkin universe, people don't have to think before they talk, and they talk without having to pause and the words come out barbed and beautiful, like extroverts tongue-skiing on coke.

Then Justin Timberlake arrives and serves another delicious irony playing Sean Parker, the Napster founder. He portrays Parker as an ingratiating asshole, and so pop music has its revenge on the man who destroyed the music business. Parker is another motor-mouthing marathon, leading Eduardo to comment: "There's gotta be some kind of land-speed record for talking."

Indeed. The film's pace gets so fast, two things have to start happening at once: Eduardo must put out a fire while taking an important phone call.

With all that talk, you need a reprieve, and Fincher momentarily grants one with a beautifully crafted moment – all sweat and torque – of a boat race in Cambridge. Your brain is soothed as you get to watch the film instead of listen to it. Though not for long. Later, you notice how little of the film stays with you. There are no images that burn the retina. And I suspect this is because of the Sorkin effect, which allows little time for the camera to linger. (It would have made an excellent TV mini-series). The film whizzes by with that same breathless excitement you felt when you first discovered Facebook. And likewise leaves you a few days later wondering what all the fuss was about.

Speaking of empty feelings, Vampires Suck(ed).

Meanwhile, the beguiling animation Despicable Me boasts another anti-hero called Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), a super-villain in the James Bond style with a penchant for schadenfreude. He speaks like Bela Lugosi and looks like a sparrow, all pot-belly and spindly legs. He drives dangerously around town in a super-villain vehicle that's not unlike a rocket-powered armoured tank. He uses a freeze gun to skip coffee shop queues. He thinks he's the bomb until another super-villain steals an Egyptian pyramid. How's he going to beat that? He concocts a plan with his elder assistant inventor (Russell Brand) and his oompa-loompa-styled, gobbledygook-speaking assistants and goes to the Bank of Evil (formerly Lehman Brothers) for a loan. Will the money be used to set up a social network that houses the personal details of 500 million people around the world? No. He wants to steal the moon!

The film abounds with barmy humour and inventive chaos. Gru's rivalry with Vector (Jason Segel), a villain who looks like Rick Moranis, forces him to concoct another plan where he adopts three orphan girls to get inside Vector's HQ. And this leads to the film's sweet conceit: surrounded by annoying orphans, their goodness begins to rub off on him. He starts to soften. He becomes sentimental. By the end, he's no more a villain than Mark Zuckerberg. When I got home I logged into Facebook. I wanted to be his friend.

October 17, 2010

Reviewed: Buried 4/5 ; I'm Still Here 3.5/5 ; Made In Dagenham 2/5 ; Back To The Future 5/5

2010-12-30T16:38:00.001Z

Rodrigo Cortés' Buried, a claustrophobic thriller starring Ryan Reynolds, opens in pitch darkness. We hear a man come to consciousness and take in his surroundings. He's in a box of some kind. He screams mutely through a gag.

He kicks at the wood but it does not give. It will emerge he's in a rudimentary wooden coffin, and he is buried underground in the desert. We know this, because later, sand will stream slowly through the cracks, like time counting down to aught. And the good news, or bad, depending on your disposition, is we're trapped with him. For the entire film. I'm getting cramp just writing about it.

In the 2009 war film Lebanon, the director Samuel Maoz confined most of the action inside a tank. Though you came out of the film with your ears ringing and covered in grease, you were allowed to watch the world outside through the gunman's crosshairs. Here, the Spanish director allows us to see little but the face of Reynolds' Paul Conroy. Thankfully, Paul remembers he has a Zippo lighter in his pocket. Let's hope he wasn't a heavy smoker. In the half-light we see his face: all sweat and blood, stubble and dirt. And then there's his eyes, and you don't forget those. As if to reinforce his position, the camera travels twice the length of the coffin. One shot does a neat slow somersault, in a gesture borrowed from Scorsese, to land us at the bottom of the box next to his feet.

Paul, we will later learn, is a US civilian truck driver in Iraq. His convoy was attacked. Now he is awake. And suddenly there's a mobile phone ringing. This is a departure. A mobile is always a way to drain tension, which is why you can't get a signal in most horror films. Where's the fun if you can call for help? Here, the phone proves to be a clever boon. The man on the line is an Iraqi telling him he is to make a ransom video using the phone and that he wants $5m. Later, things begin to brighten when his kidnapper tells him he will settle for one million dollars. Thank goodness for the recession.

The phone is in Arabic and the emergency number he carries has been removed. Apparently there is no 1800-trapped-in-a-coffin hotline in Iraq. So he dials 911 in America and suddenly there's the tang of Hitchcock: he sounds like a genius prank caller. I'm in a coffin, he says. In a funeral home? the operator asks. No, underground. Where? In Iraq! He struggles to prove who he is and that he's where he says he is. (There are other shades of Hitch too: from the Saul Bass-style credits to the dramatic music that gives a sense of surge to the confined space).

Paul calls his wife in America and gets an answering machine. The US authorities become a bureaucratic nightmare and put him on hold. Getting out of the coffin is going to prove harder than getting into Kafka's castle. It doesn't help that his exasperation works against him. Ryan Reynolds has always been somewhat disagreeable, with a surly strop in his demeanour. Paul doesn't endear himself to anyone on the phone, rubbing people up the wrong way. But Reynolds is mesmerising, a one-hander holding our attention for 95 minutes.

In the way that Paul is treated, the film displays a cheap contempt for Iraq. The authorities want his situation contained. ("The situation is in a coffin right now," he yells. "I think it is pretty contained!"). But the film is better than an anti-Iraq film. Divested of distractions, it boils things down to the most essential drama: whether one can live or die.

Cortés does lots with little. He uses quick, tight zooms for emphasis, and works with a handful of camera angles. You become completely immersed because it is shot in what feels like real-time. And there is sick fun to be had wondering what next the script will throw at him. In the days of Laurel and Hardy, a fellow was kept at script meetings for blue-sky thinking. If you want to know who was responsible for the gorilla the boys met while crossing a rope bridge carrying a piano in Swiss Miss, it was that man. His spirit is at work here, never more so than in the moment when something unexpected crawls down Paul's trouser leg.

Buried is a film to be seen in the cinema, where the entombed effects of darkness are more profound and where you can't pause and walk away to make a cup of tea. This hardened critic found himself taking deep breaths while his eye lurked across the open space of the cinema to the comforting glow of the exit sign. Just in case.

Joaquin Phoenix wanted out too, or so we were told, but his retirement from film and subsequent mental breakdown - caught in the full glare of the celebrity press - was just bait. Phoenix and the actor-turned-director Casey Affleck were luring them into I'm Still Here, a mockumentary in which Phoenix ingeniously uses himself as his own canvas - a radical situationist stunt.

The film charts his well-documented 'career change' into an abysmal, monotone rapper. Phoenix becomes an overweight, mumbling young Brando surrounded by sycophants and his own egomania. The film rubs our noses in the cult of personality, modern culture's fetish for wanting 'the in' on stars and the accompanying celebrity media attention. The 'real' Phoenix is all a performance, a method improvisation over 18 months. His comedy doesn't pack the punch of Sacha Baron Cohen, but there are some outrageously funny moments. The film doesn't quite connect with the gut, but you've got to admire its daring and determination.

The women in Made in Dagenham are all daring and determination too. It is 1968, and these real-life semi-skilled seamstresses are being downgraded by Ford, effectively because they are women. Nigel Cole's film dramatises the three-week stand-off that saw 187 women put the brakes on one of the biggest car factories in the world over fair pay, an act that would lead to Britain's pioneering Equal Pay Act two years later.

The outlier factory is full of working-class women who work in their bras and are goaded into action by sympathetic shop steward Albert (Bob Hoskins), who later turns against the unions. They are portrayed by men with ashtray faces, who smile condescendingly at the women's claims. Sally Hawkins's Rita O'Grady is the toothy and timorous leader of the women who comes good. With Albert's coaching, she develops the pluck of a prize fighter compacted into a tiny frame that is in danger of being toppled over by her hairdo. The drama is spread thin like margarine but thickens when Rita's own husband begins to resent her and the battle becomes personal.

Meanwhile, in 1985, Back to the Future's Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) introduced the world to the flux capacitor and that wing-doored DeLorean. "When this baby hits 88mph," he said, "you're going to see some serious shit."

Boy, was he right. Twenty five years on, this re-release of Robert Zemeckis' high-school-teen-comedy-oedipal-screwball-sci-fi-family- adventure-romance still unfolds with fresh wonder and comedic charm. The film has not aged, nor, poignantly, has Michael J Fox's Marty McFly, who will forever remain on screen the nimble-footed, smooth-talking slacker.

October 3, 2010

Reviewed: The Town 4/5 ; Eat, Pray, Love 1/5 ; The Hole (3D) 3/5 ; Enter The Void 1/5 (Gaspar Noé)

2010-12-30T16:37:00.001Z

When Clint Eastwood finally shuffles out of the director's chair – after a long, flinty stare, threatening growls, and a quick couple of slugs – Ben Affleck should be waiting politely to take his place. Measure for measure, Eastwood has been the current cinema's best proponent of the classical Hollywood style: not too much of this, just a pinch of that – the kind of filmmaking that doesn't call attention to itself and gets on with telling a good story. And Affleck, in the space of two films, has been making the cut.

The Town is a crime thriller full of unusual sensitivity and hard-knuckle grit. It's set in Charlestown, an area we are told has given birth to more bank robbers than a convention of 1930s films. This is working-class, Irish Boston, up the road from Eastwood's Mystic River, and Affleck's own debut, that nervy noir Gone Baby Gone. The film picks up mid-heist where we get an idea, pretty quickly, of our two main men: there's Ben Affleck's Doug MacRay, the gangleader who instructs his team beforehand that no one should get hurt; and there's his number two, Jem Coughlin, played by The Hurt Locker's Jeremy Renner as another live-wire loon, the kind of guy that keeps tipping everything off balance.

And yet it is MacRay that causes all the trouble. During the heist, they kidnap the bank's willowy manager Claire Keesey, played by Rebecca Hall. They let her go safely, and, though she has no idea what they look like, they discover she lives around the corner. What does she know? Doug 'bumps' into her at the launderette and the scene leads to the only heavy-handed gesture in the film: she folds her laundry, sees blood stains from a beaten bank worker on her white shirt and floats teary-eyed into black and white reverie. Doug looks at her and then the shirt. "I'm sorry," he says. "It's not your fault," she says. We giggle. He's hooked.

For just a second, the criminal tastes the victim's trauma and it serves as one of the film's enticing mysteries: does Doug fall for Claire out of guilt? Or is it genuine love? You can see, though, what he's attracted to. Hall has a grace and an easy earthiness, the kind of actress who makes her characters so at home in a film, you would think they were always there. And watching Doug decide to woo and pursue her is uneasily exciting. It also makes for a moment of tension better than any action sequence: during an afternoon date, Jem turns up out of the blue sporting the neck tattoo we know Claire has told the Feds she's seen. She sits there smiling, Jem entertains, while Doug and the audience hand-chew in anxiety.

There are times you wonder what these two are doing together: she's a white-collar bank manager who tends an allotment; he's a blue-collar sand-and-gravel man who part-times hi-tech robberies. I suppose they both like banks, though they don't talk much about that. But after a while, you see she understands his hardness is just an act and Affleck, the actor, is very good at portraying that jutting jaw which guards a sensitive soul.

Affleck, the director, explores all this while shaping a smooth heist thriller. There is a rat-trap alley car chase that ends with a moment of surreal comedy. And the Fed on their tail, Jon Hamm's Agent Frawley, is the kind of velvet-glove operator who can walk into a roughneck bar and charm MacRay's drug-addled ex-girlfriend before he needs to pull a badge.

Affleck, however, only part-plays the cat-and-mouse game of nemesis. He's more interested in exploring the nature of the sensitive male in a hard-bitten world. You can tell he knows these people and the terrain. And he rings around his hero tradition and loyalty like coils of barbed wire. Jem serves the way things are always done; their paymaster, a pinched and prickly ex-IRA florist played with nasty relish by Pete Postlethwaite, expects loyalty. As Doug is forced into one last job, it becomes clear The Town is not just about not getting caught. It is also about escape.

You think of escape, too, watching Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love. At two-and-a-half hours, it's like being jammed beside an obnoxious, self-obsessed giraffe for a long flight. This is based on Elizabeth Gilbert's self-help memoir and is the story of a perennially unhappy woman in search of enlightenment. In New York, she looks disparagingly at her new husband when he can't hold a friend's child properly and decides he's toast. She hooks up with an actor (James Franco) who is sweet but cans him too. "You never asked me to stay," she tells him as she leaves him, when, in fact, she was using him as a rebound relationship. She decides to go travelling to become free of men, and when she finds herself alone in Rome, having got what she wants, she moans, "I am alone". With her spindly arms and skinny waist, she tucks into a plate of pizza like she was tucking into a bucket of foie gras and proclaims the joys of guilt-free eating. She goes to India – a pageant of predictability – and moans that she can't meditate. She goes to Bali and moans when Javier Bardem knocks her off her bike. Honestly, some women are just never happy. My favourite bit comes when she returns to the Bali medicine doctor she met a year before, and, for a moment, he doesn't remember who she is. I suppose he's had his fill of self-indulgent, rich American women.

Like Sex and the City 2, Eat, Pray, Love is holiday porn masquerading as a film. It is dramatically inert and bizarrely lit: in almost every scene, Roberts is back-lit so her hair glows with an aura as if she were the Buddha himself. But the film's quest is not really about enlightenment (go watch an Ozu film instead). It is about finding a man. And while there is a rootlessness to modern life, if it can be addressed in any way, this is not it.

The Hole (3D) is a serviceable family horror with spirited humour from Gremlins director Joe Dante. The basement's supernatural lure, in classic fashion, reflects the psychological fears of our teen protagonists.

His own hole (2D), meanwhile, is the place Gaspar Noé climbs inside in Enter the Void, the latest film from the Argentine-French provocateur who made us watch, in Irreversible, the raping of Monica Bellucci for nine minutes. Here, he tells the story of a dead junkie with a first-person camera that follows the grim exploits of his stripper sister (Paz de la Huerta) in neon-lit Tokyo.

Our protagonist is killed early on in a scene that is technically brilliant. And the camera evokes his spirit, roving through a world that is hellish and unnatural like a bad acid trip. Most of the film is shot from overhead, with a cinematic fluidity that is not unlike watching Google Earth. It also means we rarely get to watch faces. If film is a study of the human face because the face is a mirror to all of life – both in its beauty and its ugliness – then Noé has no interest in life and the film does its best to deny beauty in every form, like the nihilistic tantrums of a teenager. Noé hammers home his point with ear-deafening, strobe-lit monotony that life is nothing but the biological urge for sex and violent despair. It is shaped with the same woozy mysticism of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey amidst the grim mania of Brughel's The Triumph of Death. It's trash dressed up as art.

September 26, 2010

Reviewed: The Other Guys 4/5 ; Winter's Bone 4/5 ; The Kid 1.5/5 ; Savage 3.5/5

2010-12-30T15:09:00.002Z

In The Other Guys, a brazen buddy-cop comedy from Adam McKay, there are no other guys. There's just Will Ferrell devouring the screen. That wire-brush head of his is fizzing with electricity. His comedic capers become so colossal he produces his own gravitational pull, a belly-buckling black hole that sucks in the other players, the props, the film crew, even the audience. You laugh so hard, you hardly notice the bolt-moorings of your seat fly past until you are airborne too, being sucked towards the screen. I imagine him as the only thing left in the universe, still bounding around maniacally looking for mayhem.

It seems no surprise that Ferrell has had his decade at a time when men no longer know how to behave. His shtick is as heady as a Jagerbomb – all high energy, spiked with a potent, surreal edge – and it is almost always fuelled by male insecurity. His characters are terrified of being regarded as anything less than four-square men. Hence they strut and swagger in desperation until they look like fools. Think of him in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, as the newsreader becoming more and more desperate to win the affections of his female co-anchor, who might just be as good as he is; or the macho figure-skater in Blades of Glory, who has to dance with another man. And then there's his Saturday Night Live skit of George W Bush, who, in fence-leaning pose, is unsure of which way to hold his tools.

Here, Ferrell plays anal Detective Gamble, a forensic accountant who keeps hand sanitiser on his desk and begins the day with the call: "9:15! Let's have a great day everybody!" He's the joke of the office and his partner, Mark Wahlberg's Detective Hoitz, loathes him. "The sound of your piss hitting the urinal – it sounds feminine," he snides. Gamble is the kind of cop who gets excited by paperwork. When they are appointed by Captain Mauch (Michael Keaton) to handle a case after his best pair of detectives (Samuel L Jackson and Dwayne Johnson) are killed in quite some style, Hoitz has to put a gun to his head to get him to leave the desk. Chaos, your carriage awaits.

As is often the way with McKay films, the plot exists merely to service the comedians. Here, it's a send-up of copper clichés: Gamble and Hoitz cotton on to a case in which a British financier (Steve Coogan) is embezzling billions and they bungle their way through it. You hardly notice this till the film decides it wants something of a proper final reel, and it goes and spoils all the fun. Thankfully, there's enough from the first hour to keep you high.

As Detective Gamble runs about with a wooden prop for a gun (he's not allowed have one), in Ferrell's face is the look of a wounded male. He is being forced to man up and doesn't want to let it all hang out. Being gelded has worked well for him: Hoitz has to endure the tickling irony that, for all his male posturing – "I am a peacock! You gotta let me fly!" – his woman has left him, while Gamble has an array of gorgeous ex-girlfriends, one of whom will chase his red Prius for 20 miles to catch him. Worse, when invited by Gamble for dinner, Hoitz finds the dish of the day is Gamble's wife Sheila, played by Eva Mendes, doing what Eva Mendes does best. Hoitz heats up like a male awaking to find he's in a Lynx ad, and Wahlberg – an actor who looks funny when playing serious – is seriously funny.

Watching Gamble come out of himself is like watching a slow-motion jack-in-the-box tied to explosives. There are shades of Ferrell's Frank the Tank from Old School, the repressed male who after a few sips becomes a Tasmanian Devil of beer-guzzling, naked mayhem. And the madness seems to peak – before that deadening third act – in a scene in a bar which is told in a series of freeze-frames. The camera glides through the room, from one moment to the next, drinking in the deepening decadence. Men just want to be men, and that means they just want to be boys

I'm sure Ree Dolly would love to play at being a girl. But the 17-year-old at the centre of Winter's Bone must be all woman. Debra Granik's harrowing drama, based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, is set in the Ozark forests of Missouri. It's a place full of idle wreckage and faces that look just as smashed – the lawless community here is rife with crystal meth addicts. The sheriff arrives to tell Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) that her missing father – a meth dealer – had better show for court as he has put the family home up for his bond. She has a neurasthenic for a mother, and a younger brother and sister who need her care. So Ree Dolly must find her Pa.

Winter's Bone is a bastard sister to Courtney Hunt's 2008 recession thriller Frozen River: both feature a resilient, abandoned woman who must search for an errant man. Granik's style is unobtrusive and she shoots in a frigid blue, a world where emotion hardly registers. And Lawrence is quite the find: she may not project the same class of steely vulnerability as Melissa Leo's struggling mother in Frozen River, but she shows a resolve that does not entertain fear. She becomes an almost mythical babe in the woods forced to confront dangerous forces – the scene where Ree Dolly finally confronts her father is unforgettable. The film leaves on a hopeful note, but there's no escaping how community here is sundered.

Childhood fares even worse in Nick Moran's The Kid, a British film reeking of amateurism. This is based on the wretched life story of one Kevin Lewis and stars Natascha McElhone as a violent, under-class harpie who subjects Kevin (Rupert Friend) to such awful abuse the social services step in. Life will improve then get worse for Kevin – a shrinking violet who ends up as a London underworld criminal and bare-knuckle boxer. But after watching this, I wanted to go a few rounds with the director. Nobody seems to have explained to him that you cannot convey drama through the use of montage, which become so excessive here, it begins to resemble one long 1980s music video.

Praise the skies, then, for psychological vigilante thriller Savage. Here's an Irish film with that rare thing: a touch of class. For a start, it's got Darren Healy, a rugged Irish actor who plays Paul Graynor, a photographer who is subjected to a shocking knife attack. Graynor emerges as a shell of a man nursing a terrible shame – so much so that he cannot face his new girlfriend (Nora-Jane Noone). Healy was very good in last year's Irish drama Eamon and he's great at showing a shaggy vulnerability because he looks tougher than a truck. His transformation into a wild-eyed Travis Bickle is absorbing. Writer/director Brendan Muldowney's debut may owe a tad too much to Scorsese's Taxi Driver, but it is a tense, tough watch, with noirish Dublin cast in a hard light. He explores different shades of masculinity with acuity, and though I can imagine how more stylish dialogue would have sharpened his ending, this has rhythm and tone and holds its own.

September 19, 2010

The Runaways 3/5 ; Going the Distance 3/5 ; Cyrus ; Tamara Drewe 2/5 ; Swansong: The Story of Occi Byrne 2/5 ; Metropolis 5/5 (Fritz Lang)

2010-12-30T14:58:00.002Z

The first thing you see in The Runaways, Floria Sigismondi's blaring biopic of the heady rise and demise of the eponymous 1970s all-girl band, is a pair of elongated, milky thighs. It seems like an honest start: the Runaways are a band more remembered for what they wore – or what they didn't wear – on stage than for their music. They strutted their women's lib-ido in stockings and suspenders and squashed the fragile egos of boys under heels.

Here's a film, then, that comes loaded with so much feminist baggage, you hardly need to see it to know this is a tale of girl rockers railing for the right to play guitars. We certainly don't need James Brown wailing on the soundtrack, "This is a man's world", but he does, right on cue, after an acoustic-wielding, middle-aged male guitar instructor tells a 15-year-old Joan Jett – the band's future rhythm guitarist – that girls don't play electric guitar.

Jett is played by Twilight star Kristen Stewart and she turns the rocker into an androgynous gruff. She walks stiff as if she has stuffed cardboard down the back of her leather jacket, while she sits outside with her guitar and a girlfriend shaping awkwardly the chords for 'I'm a Wild One'. Cherie Currie, meanwhile, is played with a distant stare by Dakota Fanning. Before she joins the band, she takes to the school stage to mime badly to David Bowie. We see each of them trying to throw shapes without the chops, and the film gets the measure of that awkwardness of unfashioned youth.

One problem with heaving a band's history onto the screen is the screenwriter has to take all that sprawling, unshapely business called life and smooth it into shape. And The Runaways is as smooth as the varnish on a Les Paul. The plot proceeds as a fait accompli. Just watch how the band comes into being: Jett walks up to record producer Kim Fowley and tells him she wants to start an all-girl band. Now there's an idea, he says. As easy as that. The songs that come to be written are done according to Chapter 3 of The Screenwriter's Guide to Rock Biopics, wherein inspiration is plucked from the ether and a chorus arrives almost fully born. We also get 'the studio row' (Chapter 7), wherein a perfunctory bottle of booze is hurled at the control room's window.

Fowley is played with a manic glee by the brilliant indie actor Michael Shannon. And he proves to be the film's most telling protagonist: a glam, face-painted cynic who knows exactly what the music business will want. He's abrasive and abusive, and often hilarious, and helps to upset the film's feminist jangle.

According to this film, the girl band that inspired a generation of women to rock was itself a product of a male mind: Fowley chooses Cherie as singer because she looks like "jail bait". He writes their provocative lyrics, grooms their anger, teaches them how to strut and sauce. And that's just it: the urge to rock is a shortcut born in most young men as a will to power. (Read: money and chicks.) Women come to the equation already stacked with sexual power. The same hunger isn't there. Fowley knows this and has to teach accordingly: "You bitches need to start thinking like men. Men just want to f**k!" he yells. The Runaways come away looking like an X-Factor construction. Janis Joplin has more edge in her split ends.

Yet there's danger in its depiction of Cherie's collapse into addiction. Without a family to support her or record company protection, we watch her crush pills under a platform heel and lick the powder off the floor. Later, in the film's most powerful image, she stumbles on high heels shit-faced in a supermarket trying to buy booze. She's out of the band, old before her time and still underage. Like most teens, the Runaways wore their spiky, knowing gaze, but they were in way over their heads. And watching Dakota Fanning play this is doubly disconcerting: it seemed like only yesterday when I was reviewing this child star in Charlotte's Web. How fast they grow up.

Drew Barrymore knows a thing or two about being a child star and the accompanying hazards. She's now 35 and an accomplished actress and director, and watching her in romcom Going the Distance, you wonder why she doesn't get bigger roles. Barrymore brings the same earthy, refreshing frankness that exuded from her directorial debut Whip It. Her character Erin, a 32-year-old journalism student, is not the kind of demure, wincing damsel we see in most US romcoms. She meets Garrett (Justin Long, her real-life beau) on a one-night stand and they proceed with a relationship that is realistic, keenly felt but designed to be shortlived. Alas, they fall in love and when she returns to the west coast and her uptight sister (Christina Applegate) they decide to give long-distance love a go.

The film begins with some cheap slapstick – a sign of insecurity from director Nanette Burstein. But it settles into an easy comedy, the best gags of which come from Garrett's friend Dan, played by Charlie Day, who has a voice like a squeegee. Love is squeezed by recession and distance, while our expectations are dampened by the romcom formula, which refuses to allow this film to break free despite displaying a bit of energy. I keep trying to break up with the Hollywood romcom formula, but Hollywood keeps getting us back together again in the end. When will it stop?

Certainly not in Cyrus, a romcom with a slight difference from brothers Jay and Mark Duplass. This is the story of John and Molly (John C Reilly and Marisa Tomei) who fall in love only to discover Molly's mollycoddled 21-year-old son Cyrus (Jonah Hill) would prefer otherwise. The difference lies with the directors' observational skills, honed in their work in the mumblecore movement, and it suggests they have the talent for better things. You can see it at work in the film's first reel where we get John C Reilly all to ourselves. He has a great expressive face, with a forehead like a ridge of rock, and it helps him to look permanently befuddled at the world. And that's just how he plays it, a cousin to his character in Magnolia who cannot find romance and who still clings to his ex-wife (Catherine Keener).

Romance blossoms and Marisa Tomei's Molly proves to be a bland poster girl for sweet femininity, while Jonah Hill's usual comic edge is dulled. As Cyrus turns out not quite the nice chap he's made himself out to be, an opportunity is missed for chaos and battling wills. The Duplasses tease us with some high-strung humour, but they don't want that kind of film. Their gaze is benign and they want everybody to come good. Which is another way of saying, it all ends up terribly nice.

Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe is a rustic romcom – something like Emmerdale Farm being overrun by middle-aged Guardian readers. It's the kind of mildly saucy, middle-class British fare that only the Brits can love (and the Americans, because it's British). It stars Gemma Arterton (who was much funnier in The Prince of Persia) as a raven temptress who, with a fresh nose job, inherits the farmhouse next door to a writers' retreat in Dorset and proceeds to turn the place into a warren of competing love triangles. The film is based on Posy Simmonds' broad comic strip from the Guardian Review and throws into the mix a rock drummer (Dominic Cooper), a crime writer (Roger Allam) and an academic (Bill Camp), whose various jealousies, vanities and inanities are exposed. Frears sits this one out on autopilot.

Like an Irish Van Helsing, debut Irish director Conor McDermottroe reunites various monsters from the Irish past for an outing in his stumbling melodrama Swansong: The Story of Occi Byrne. We get the Preying Priest, the Frigid Father, the Singled-out Single Mom, and some Abusive Asylum Workers. No wonder Occi (Martin McCann) develops a lifelong battle with mental illness. Trapped in the company of this cast of clichés, you, too, could lose your mind.

Metropolis, meanwhile, Fritz Lang's 1927 silent masterwork, is a sight to behold. This new cut of the dystopic epic – one of the most influential films ever made – has been lovingly restored from new footage that was found in an archive in Buenos Aires. The film we have from before looks crystalline. The new sections, recovered from a 16mm print, are scratchy and in the main leave the impression they were judiciously cut. But the film's visual impact is still towering.

September 12, 2010

Reviewed: Certified Copy (4.5/5) ; Cherry Tree Lane (1.5/5); Dinner for Schmucks (1/5); Black Dynamite (3.5/5)

2010-12-30T14:55:00.001Z

What is there to say about Juliette Binoche that hasn't already been said? I'll try anyway: her face, when the camera is rolling, is lit by moonbeams, as if they shone only for her. While those hazel eyes house the mercury of a rushing river. Trying to contain in words her performance in Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy, where she is muse to an old master, is like trying to grasp in your hands the flickering of light on water. She shimmers gently then flickers diamond bright, hard and soft in infinite proportions, vulnerable and strong, often in the same moment. She can suggest an abyss, an edge to fall over, with a teetering glance. She allows you to see into her soul.

Kiarostami's unusual new film is a dazzling weave: a slice of gentle comedy amidst a beguiling romance in which a couple who have just met live out 15 years of marriage in an afternoon's conversation. There's Binoche's unnamed character, an art dealer, who takes James, a silver-haired English writer (William Shimell), out on a date of sorts on a bronzed, Tuscan afternoon. They meet ostensibly to discuss his book, a treatment on whether beauty can exist where originality does not. What is clear is they like each other. How will it play out?

First they go for a drive, for Kiarostami likes nothing better than a car. Not since Hitchcock has there been a director who has made so cinematic its confining space. We watch them drive and listen to them talk. She's a handful: prickly and argumentative; he's gentle but aloof and ruminative. The film evolves into a conversation in Kiarostami's questioning style, a meditation on art, life and the difficulties of love.

She's nervous around him, skittery like a teen. She speaks a bit of Italian, and lots of English. And it's strange listening to Binoche in her hybrid English accent: it makes her sound vulnerable, as if she's not just unsure of the language, but unsure of her feelings. In French, she sounds so sure of herself.

James sits in the car with his nose in the air, as if he's trying to assume an air of control. But he's struggling. You wonder if he had the intentions of a man who wants a fling, only to discover there are depths he is being drawn into. I loved his line, 'Would you like to invite me for a cup of coffee?' Watch him struggle later to put a hand on her shoulder.

They walk and talk in the manner of Richard Linklater's Sunrise/Sunset films. After a misunderstanding in a cafe, they play at being married. Their fiction builds until you second-guess yourself: are they married? They wander into an empty restaurant and begin to argue like a tattered old couple. They morph into the ghosts of George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman from Rossellini's Journey to Italy, his great 1954 film of a crumbling marriage among Italy's ancient ruins. And I believe there is something akin to genius at work here, in which we are able to experience both this couple's wary newness of each other and their aged weariness in the same moment, as if time has been folded on itself.

The Rossellini reference seems perfect. Kiarostami made his international name with films that merged an eye for beauty with the neo-realism of Italy that Rossellini began his career with. Typically, Shimell is an opera singer who has never acted in a film before. And the camera is almost casual roaming the streets. The film is spontaneous but it is silken, too. There are moments of beauty that could have stepped out of a painting: I honestly believe there won't be a more luminous image in the cinema this year than the one in which a young bride walks into the foreground of a shot, her face quivering with the most delicate, nervous emotion, while our couple stand in the background.

In A Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami pulled a post-modern stunt: the film's ending opened out onto a film set where the actors were being directed by Kiarostami himself. It acknowledged the reality that fiction is just an act. Here, he plays a similar game. In their talk and in the film's references to older films, there is an acknowledgement that originality may not exist. But yet, even if their fake feelings belong to another film, and you know they are playing a game, you come to feel that this is real, that there is real beauty and truth and pain in their emotions. And so the copy takes on its own beauty, as if it were an original.

Cormac McCarthy once said "the ugly fact is books are made out of books". And the same is true of film. Newness is usually measured in the imprint of a personality, how a director shapes material. Just look at Cherry Tree Lane. This British home invasion horror from London to Brighton director Paul Andrew Williams plays a funny game. For it might as well be Funny Games, the Michael Haneke terror picture so gruesome the Austrian made it twice. If the film is a straight lift, is Williams doing anything to make it his own?

Tom Butcher and Lantana star Rachael Blake play a middle-class English couple who discover they are living in a Daily Mail nightmare. Their home is invaded by three violent youths on the premise they are looking for their son. Cue ritual humiliation. Williams waters down the sexual and psychological humiliation, amps up the brutality, and hurls a spanner: instead of the couple's young son being forced to watch, here, a young teenager – a brother of the leader's girlfriend – walks in and sits blank-faced.

If this is a statement about how immune youngsters are now to violence, then that's fine. But there is little else here. There are a few posh camera shots that suggest the director wants to say something and some weak suggestions of class deprivation. But it strains for something to say. Haneke's sophisticated film confronted audiences about their enjoyment of torture. Cherry Tree Lane does not rise above weak horrortainment.

If Will Ferrell has made his career playing comic heroes who are insecure about their masculinity, Steve Carell has made his playing morons who don't care about theirs. His perpetual self-abasement as an ordinary idiot makes him a beloved berk. He's at it again in Dinner for Schmucks, Jay Roach's no-rent remake of Francis Veber's 1998 French film, Le Diner de Cons. It's a comedy played so panoptic, you almost miss the jokes – they're too broad to see.

Here, mid-level financial analyst Tim (the anaemic Paul Rudd) wants to get to the seventh floor. So the big boys invite him to a dinner where he has to bring a guest – an idiot they can make fun off. As is common right now, the film will give the moneymen their comeuppance. But it can't help but respond to old values. When Tim knocks down a stranger, who just happens to be Carell's Barry, the injured party bounces back up. "Wow," he says. "Is that a Porsche?" Some things in Hollywood are just hard-wired.

Barry is a toothy, raincoat-wearing half-wit. He stuffs dead mice and arranges them in cute diorama – just the kind of nerd Tim needs for dinner. But Barry will also wreck Tim's life and trample over your sense of humour. Funny men Jemaine Clement and Zach Galifianakis are wheeled out in roles to squeeze a few gags. But, honestly, a defibrillator wouldn't help.

Now, sing along:

Who's the black private dick

That's a sex machine to all the chicks?

(Black Dynamite!)

You're damn right;

Who is the man

That would risk his neck for his brother man?

(Black Dynamite!)

Can ya dig… this affectionate, sometimes hilarious, blaxploitation spoof? Yes we can.

September 5, 2010

Reviewed: Mother 3.5/5 ; Salt 3/5 ; The Illusionist 4/5 ; Pyjama Girls 2/5 ; The Expendables 2/5 ; Marmaduke 1/5

2010-12-30T14:53:00.001Z

The new film from The Host director Bong Joon-ho opens in a field full of grass. Mist curls among forlorn trees in the distance, while towards us walks a woman (Kim Hye-ja) looking lost. Her moping face looks like it is about to slide off into the grass. And then she stops. She begins to sway with the breeze. And her movements deepen and you think: surely she's not starting to dance. But dance she does, along to the film's soundtrack. Welcome to the strange world of Mother, where comic absurdity blooms bizarrely out of tragedy and nothing will proceed the way you might expect.

The Host was no different. On paper it seemed a straightforward B-movie: a gargantuan green descendent of Godzilla terrorized Seoul. But at the film's heart was a family full of eccentrics, whose bungling and odd humour reached into absurdity. Mother, too, could be a genre film on paper, if you can imagine the plot of a film noir reshaped into a cosmic dramedy.

Hye-ja's mother is the kind of woman who will do anything for her son, Do-joon (Bin Won). We know this judging by a scene – quite unforgettable, really – where we watch him urinate against a wall. She walks over, bends curiously to look at him in action, almost as if to check that he is functioning properly, then tips a bowl of soup into his mouth. They also sleep in the same bed. Though it seems she is never anything more than over protective, even when he reaches across drunk and tries to squeeze a breast. Think of the stereotype of the suffocating Jewish mother. Only her son isn't neurotic. He's just a little slow.

Do-joon stares out at you as if from a goldfish bowl. He has no memory to speak of and if somebody calls him a retard, he has a propensity to be violent. He is also a lodestone for trouble. He follows a girl drunk one night and ends up the chief suspect when she is found dead and strung up on display to the whole town the next day. He is tricked into a confession. His mother spends the rest of the film trying to prove his innocence.

In the hands of Joon-ho, the plot seems incidental. The unexpected is always waiting to leap out at you. The police come to arrest Do-joon and they end up in a traffic accident. At the start of the film, we watched him bounced off a car in a hit and run. Only one of these moments has something to do with the plot. Joon-ho slots them in seemingly because he is bored. Or perhaps he suspects we're bored. Or maybe it's because he thinks life is full of the unexpected.

This is a Korean world populated by loons. A cop before interrogation stuffs an apple into Do-joon's mouth then kicks it out of him. There is a sozzled attorney general who conducts business through a microphone in a karaoke bar. Meanwhile, it was a car full of academics that was responsible for the hit and run. There is social satire at work here, strained through comedy that could well be Kaurismaki on sake.

Kim Hye-ja's mother, nutty and determined, with a deep strain of guilt, will do anything including ritual humiliation to prove her son's innocence. Hye-ja's skittery features seem to leap off her face with conflicting emotions. But her desperation is betrayed by the arm's length distance Joon-ho observes her from. When the film plays its cosmic joke, you are more amused than torn. The old saying goes that comedy is tragedy plus time. Bong Joon-ho doesn't want to wait around for his laughs.

Everybody knows men will go to see Salt just to watch Angelina Jolie point her guns at the screen. The director Phillip Noyce knows this too, so he opens the film with her in her underwear lying tied on her back. This is how most men would like to see her. Following this, a nasty North Korean interrogator begins to pour petrol down her throat. This, I imagine, is how most women would like to see her.

But you can't keep a good woman tied down. Two years later, Jolie's Evelyn Salt is a CIA Russian expert in Washington, all blonde and serious in a suit. A Russian defector walks in and announces during Salt's interrogation of him that an embedded Russian spy is going to kill the Russian prime minister on a trip to the US, thus triggering a nuclear war. Salt doesn't seem surprised at this. This is because, like the chilled roast you find in your fridge on a Monday morning, she knows there is always a cold war plot left over some place. But she is surprised when he says the Russian agent's name is Evelyn Salt. That's my name, she says. Run, woman, run.

Salt is presumably innocent. But what is she doing at the funeral the Russian premier is attending? And why is her hair suddenly dyed a deadly shade of black? Her gaze hardens and Noyce turns her into a full-blooded action hero, a female Bourne. She whips up a bazooka in 30 seconds using tubing and some chemicals. She strolls in slow-mo with a pair of grenades in her hand. We won't ask Freud what that means. But we will say she makes the A-Team look like a bunch of chimps.

Salt is helped along by director Noyce who has an ability to make the ludicrous seem plausible. She is chased by rival CIA bosses Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor. With his shaky camera footage, Noyce makes efforts to catch her look like trying to catch an eel in the bath. The film is engineered with reasonable precision. But as soon as the plot begins reaching for the nuclear button, my patience began to explode.

If Salt is an assault, watching The Illusionist is having your temples massaged. Sylvain Chomet's near-silent animation, set to a plaintive score, is a beautiful, poignant work. It follows a script penned in the 1950s by the French comic icon Jacques Tati, who wrote it about an estranged relationship he had with his daughter. Tati is incarnated here, with his duck-walk and drainpipe legs, as old magician Taticheff, whose on-stage bumbling is part of his beauty but in whom no one in this 1950s environment of rock'n'roll is interested anymore.

Chomet's 2003 animation, The Triplets of Belleville, was something of a landmark – a brash and baroque fantasy. Here, his hand is classically restrained, allowing for an elegant simplicity. The story takes the failing magician to Scotland where he meets a girl who believes his magic is real; elsewhere, however, things begin to decline.

This is a story that drips with longing and inadequacy, and is full of stunning images: an old clown drinking himself to death while circus music plays on a record player; a ventriloquist eating dinner alone with his dummy that keeps falling over. The story keeps drawing our attention to the passing of an era. It is very much inspired by Chaplin's Limelight, where the great director redrew himself in the era of sound as an old vaudeville star in neglect. There is that same sense of pathos here. Only a heart of stone will not be moved at the end as, one by one, the lights go down, an era passes, and a slice of magic is gone.

There is no magic in Maya Derrington's fly-on-the-wall Irish documentary Pyjama Girls, a slight, 70-minute film powered, it seems, by good intentions alone. Set within the gritty milieu of Dublin's inner city, it follows a pair of teens, Lauren Dempsey and Tara Salinger, two specialists in urban pyjama wearing. The film flirts with exploring the unique Dublin fashion of somnambulant sleepwear, but really Derrington wants us to see what life is like in this environment. The girls' mindless banter gets a bit wearing, though Dempsey, who lives in inner city flats with her grandmother, opens up about her anger problems and how her life has unfolded. Her mother went down "the wrong road", she tells us, and you can see how she is caught in the ripple effects of it.

There are moments that leap out: a takeaway snack box for Christmas dinner and the retelling of an appalling conversation on a bus in which a man informs Dempsey he could well be her father. There is a worthy social conscience at work here. But that doesn't alleviate the want of enough material to develop a narrative. The film stutters and stumbles and we do not get to watch our characters change over time. Even a story about a lack of social momentum needs framework and movement.

Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables is an action flick both old-fashioned and heavy-footed. And no wonder: it's got more aged meat than your local butchers, starring Sly, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren and Mickey Rourke with cheesey cameos from Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Talking mutt film Marmaduke, meanwhile, is so dog-eared I'm sure even the kids will tire of it.

August 22, 2010

Reviewed: The Karate Kd 2.5/5 ; The A-Team 1/5 ; Gainsbourg 3/5

2010-12-30T14:49:00.000Z

The Karate Kid, a tortuously long remake of the 1984 teen classic, takes the story that was set in America and rebuilds it piece by piece in China. Pretty much like the world economy, then. It stars Jaden Smith as Dre Parker, an only child whose mother (Taraji P Henson) is forced to relocate to Beijing after she loses her job at a Detroit car plant.

Dre ain't a happy kid. This could be because his mother seems to have been the only employee from Detroit who relocated. Otherwise, he grumps and groans at having to leave home. He frowns at the overdubbed cartoons. He shrugs with inertia when his exasperated mom asks him to stop dumping his coat on the floor. Then he bottles up after he is bullied at his new school.

This occurs when he tries to chat up a young Chinese violin player Mei Ying (Wen Wen Han). Only in China would you find a 12-year-old girl proudly practising the violin in the schoolyard. Back west, she would be beaten up. In China, it seems you get beaten up if you interrupt the over-achieving of another person. This is why their economy is doing better than our own. It also must explain the motivation of Cheng (Zhenwei Wang), the bully boy who sends Dre to the floor with a series of high kicks. Cheng can't, surely, be motivated by sexual jealousy, in the way that Ralph Macchio's Daniel LaRusso was bullied for winning the attentions of a cheerleader. This is because Cheng, like most of the cast, is a pre-pubescent boy.

As an actor, Zhenwei Wang knows an impressive array of kung fu moves but he has just one facial expression. This is set in the rigor mortis of a growl. He parades into each of his scenes like a pantomime villain about to crush young Dre underfoot. But as Dre keeps getting licked, a curious thing began to happen: I started to side with Cheng. That's it, hit him! Kick him harder! Knock him one in the gut!

Now, I don't usually condone bullying, but the cards are hopelessly stacked against Cheng. Dre will have Jackie Chan teach him to fight. Naturally, he is going to beat Cheng in the tournament he will eventually enter to settle scores. And there's the fact that Dre is played by Jaden Smith, a child actor so smug in his self-awareness he could do with a bit of a dressing-down.

Occasionally, the film asks of young Smith that he play vulnerable. This he does admirably. But his facial expressions are undone by his body language. He walks like he owns the town. I suppose he just can't help it. The producers of the film are his parents – Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. And they do own the town. He is 11 years old and gets to spar with Jackie Chan, while a large section of the Great Wall of China is closed down just for him so he can practise kung fu on it. Presumably you can see his ego from space.

One of the key things you notice about The Karate Kid is there is no karate. As misrepresentations go, this must fall under the trade descriptions act. Karate, of course, is Japanese and China has its own martial arts traditions (and its own tourist sights too, the camera is keen to highlight). The main reason, though, is because of Jackie Chan. He no do karate. He know kung fu. He also no do acting. His janitor Mr Han looks like a sclerotic glob up until the point where he rescues Dre from a beating. He gets to rustle up some chops and comes alive, though he doesn't hurt the kids: he turns their moves back on themselves, so in effect, they beat themselves up.

Just like Mr Miyagi, he too lost a wife and child, and so will come to feel a paternal bond for the fatherless Dre. But otherwise, he does things his own way. He teaches Dre discipline by making him hang up his coat and take it off again and hang it up again and take it off again. Coat on. Coat off. Incidentally, he keeps a car he is restoring in his living room because, apparently, there is no parking on the streets of Beijing. In relation to this, it appears he prefers to wax off on his own.

In one scene, Mr Han watches a fly buzz around his dinner and holds a pair of chopsticks poised in his hand. Then, unexpectedly, he lifts the other hand which contains a fly swat. Such a knowing gesture is designed to appeal to those who have paid to see this film for a nostalgia kick. But there is little in this for adults, just the rehashed tropes of an underdog kids' story.

In 2007, a crap commando director was sent to prison by a military court for a crime (Smokin' Aces) that he most certainly did commit. This man promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by film critics, he survives as a director of fortune. If you have a rubbish script, if no one else can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can hire... Joe Carnahan.

Twenty-three years after The A-Team was canned on TV (the bread and butter of my youth), Carnahan exhumes the characters to relieve your summer boredom in this daft, barely entertaining adventure. As usual, nobody gets killed. Except, perhaps, the audience. There's Liam Neeson as the mastermind Hannibal, Bradley Cooper as the smug Face, Sharlto Copely as mad Murdock, and Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson as the bad-ass, burly BA. All they are required to do is look and act the part.

There was an inherent simplicity in the original. The A-Team took out bad guys while being chased by military police; when they were cornered in a shed, they could concoct a cannon that fired cabbages. During action sequences, you could tell who did what because you could see the things happen. Here stuff happens but the direction is so incoherent and the editing so frazzled, the film resembles a Jackson Pollock painting.

The action sequences seem to have been written by a child. The A-Team escape from an exploding aeroplane inside a tank while attached to a parachute and manage to shoot down aircraft. Earlier, Murdock flies a helicopter into a deliberate upside-down freefall as he is being chased by a heat-seeking missile-firing military helicopter while BA dangles outside the chopper being held only by the hand of Face. I couldn't really see Hannibal but I presume he was smiling and smoking a cigar. "Overkill is underrated," says Murdock at one point. I'd have to disagree.

The cat-and-mouse plot takes in any number of continents and has no time for character development. But let's be honest, where could the characters go? The only character who has presence is the silver-haired Neeson, and even that's a stretch. His Hannibal is now a metaphysician. "I don't believe in coincidences. No matter how random things seem to appear, there's still a plan." Ah, no. The A-Team is merely a series of random action sequences spliced together. It's a plan that cannot come together.

Joann Sfar's magical-realist Gainsbourg is a biopic of the French singer Serge. Writer/director Sfar draws from his own graphic novel and the results are broad if not barmy. Sfar begins the story with Gainsbourg as a precocious 1940s child painter, struggling with his Jewish alienated identity. He's followed around by a giant papier mâché caricature of himself which acts as a prodding subconscious.

Gainsbourg finds his forte as a musician with low self esteem, but when he finds fame, he makes up for what he lacks in muster with women. Long-legged Lucy Gordon (who sadly took her life soon after) plays Jane Birkin, while Laetitia Casta, with her milky thighs, makes for a fab Bridget Bardot. After a while, you notice how distracted the camera is by all these hot women and you start to wonder what the point of the film is. What begins as a study of life and art becomes an indulgent, listless study of womanising. Eric Elmosnino as Gainsbourg provides a terrific impersonation. With his drooping lip, hawk nose and louche demeanour, it is difficult to tell them apart. Elmosnino's transformation into the haggard bum who dies at 62 is always engagingly convincing. But the film, a little too glib and glam, is never affecting.

Reviewed: The Rebound 2/5 ; Baaria 2/5 ; Splice 3/5 ; Colony 3/5 ; City Island 3/5

2010-12-30T14:44:00.002Z

If Bart Freundlich's romcom The Rebound is to be believed, Catherine Zeta-Jones is now a cougar. This news must have been devastating for Michael Douglas. By my reckoning, this dates his birth to the Proterozoic era. The Welsh actress is married to a fossil.

By comparison, Zeta-Jones' love interest Aram in The Rebound, played by The Hangover's Justin Bartha, is aged 25. He has failed to launch. Her launch has failed. The writer-director obviously thinks this is a dangerous idea. Has he not seen Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude, where Harold was 20 and Maude was 69? That film was made in 1971. Now there was a dangerous idea. The antics here are about as perilous as a scoop of vanilla ice-cream about to dribble off a toddler's cone.

Zeta-Jones' Sandy is a suburban mother of two who drives an SUV. She says maxims such as "own your own power" to her young son before sending him into class, to which he responds with a look that suggests he wants to own a new mother. On her way home, she duets with Meredith Brooks: "I'm a bitch, I'm a lover, I'm a child, I'm a mother, I'm a sinner, I'm a saint, I do not feel ashamed," and you feel the point has been made. This is before she arrives home to find her husband is a sinner too, and has been having one of her friends over the formica.

It is not until Sandy moves back to the city with her kids and is forced back out onto the dating scene that you begin to suspect the film will only ask of Zeta-Jones that she keep feigning surprise. Her best friend Molly (Megan Byrne) shouts 'nice ass' to Aram, the kind-hearted, coffee-shop slacker who works downstairs, and Sandy ducks for cover. When her friend urges Sandy to sleep with her first date, a creepy chiropractor, she responds to the notion with a face that looks like it's been walloped with a kipper. She pulls the kipper face again when the chiropractor turns gross-out and makes a move on her. You think of Samantha Jones parading around for the last decade without any knickers on and Sandy begins to look Victorian. Certainly her inner cougar needs some coaxing. The alternative to that Sandy is just a normal woman. And The Rebound is a call for a sense of calm, suggesting the media's portrayal of the cougar is just brash fantasy.

Owing to the parameters of the romcom, and seeing as Freundlich is unlikely to reinvent the wheel, we know Sandy and Aram are going to get together from the moment he starts babysitting. But you would think at least the film would pretend otherwise. The standard measure for any romcom is how well a couple don't like each other. The magnetism has to be all wrong. Think of that cringing car ride at the start of When Harry Met Sally and how the film spent the rest of the time reversing their polarity from repel to attract.

But Freundlich doesn't believe in friction. It's obvious that despite the age gap, these guys like each other from the off. It's not helped by Bartha's portrayal of Aram as somebody so sweet and pleasing, he actually makes you nauseous. The Rebound operates on the basis that an age gap and the resulting societal pressures are enough for drama. But that is no match for real, physical chemistry. Sandy and Aram are like a pair of inert gasses from chemistry class out on a date. They don't react with anything.

Sandy's children spike the conversation with knowing remarks. But The Rebound's manners are polite. It dabbles in weak gross-out and has a smidgen of slapstick but its heart isn't in it. Freundlich, meanwhile, behaves like an invisible director: not the kind who knows how to push and prod or pinch a scene into shape and then step away again, or who knows the way of a quiet camera. Instead, he's the kind who lobs in two montage scenes and goes off for a sandwich, the latter lasting five whole minutes. The icky sequence happens just at the place where the couple part before the inevitable reuniting. If this moment is such a cliché for the director that he can't be bothered dramatising it, or showing some kind of aha! epiphany for the characters, then why bother with it at all?

The problem in Baaria, the new film from Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore, is that he wants to dramatise everything. Tornatore's tale travels over five decades beginning with the 1930s and all of Sicilian life in the town of Baaria is made to fit into his grand gestures. The film's surfaces are all brown-burnished and everything is filmed with sweeping camera. This is meant to feel like a partner to his 1989 classic, but where Cinema Paradiso pulsed to the rhythms of life, Baaria is all helter-skelter and anecdote, like an ADD teen that doesn't know how to settle. It feels like a collection of postcards rather than a film.

The story follows events in the town and the experiences of one family in particular. There's Cicco (Gaetano Aronica), a man who can lift an anvil with rope and just his teeth; there's youngster Peppino (Franceso Scianna) who grows up to be a communist at a time when the Christian Democrats and the Mafia are in charge; and his son Pietro, who runs off for a pack of cigarettes and takes flight. The director, too, looks down from above and reduces life into a series of amusing anecdotes. The blackshirts bully, the US forces bomb and invade, while, all the while, the townsfolk tear at each other's throats. Seen, though, through Tornatorne's soft-eyed sentimentalism, all of this is humorous. Nothing ever really hurts.

In reducing Sicilians to a cliché – permanently shouting, high-blooded, authority-hating melodramatics – the portrait rings hollow.

The B-movie Splice brings horror up to date with the science lab. The genre has been so busy of late drilling eyeballs and sandpapering genitals, nobody seems to have noticed the advances made in genetic science. In real life, Dr Craig Venter turned Dr Frankenstein when he recently created the first living cell from synthetic DNA. One hopes Dr Venter is subject to better scrutiny than the pair of silly scientists in Splice, a film snug in the tradition of the cautionary tale: a Shelley-esque finger-wag at genetic goofery.

Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) are a pair of celebrated, trendy-dressing, genetic engineers. They have created artificial life – a blob that has the ability to change sex – but their pharmaceutical sponsors decide to close them down. Elsa doesn't take the news well. She takes some of the blob's DNA and mixes it with some of her own, as you do, in a machine that looks like a giant ice-cream maker. The secret result is suitably grotesque and is called DREN: a female-hybrid-something-or-other, which has unexpected intelligence, a head like Lily Cole and literally, a sting in the tail. Clive isn't enthused. He's particularly unamused when Elsa starts treating DREN like the child she never had. And then DREN grows up – fast – and starts hitting on Clive. Then it's Elsa's turn to be unimpressed.

Director Vincenzo Natali creates a Cronenbergian sense of unease and takes glee in our recoiling at his loathsome creations. Science comes off looking rather dizzy, but the film's twists and turns are more exacting.

Colony is another bee movie. This US documentary, filmed bravely and beautifully by Irishman Ross McDonnell, is a snapshot of beekeeping today. It's beset by colony collapse disorder, an unexplained phenomenon killing vast swathes of bee populations, while the economic collapse has squeezed out whatever honey was left in doing the job. CCD has been well-documented in print media, and Colony doesn't explore anything new. But it succeeds in humanising these serious problems for thick-skinned beekeepers.

City Island, meanwhile, is a salty-sweet dramedy about secrets and lies. Writer-director Raymond De Felitta casts Andy Garcia as Vince Rizzo, an endearing working-class prison guard whose family is an open wound of resentment. The film keeps wrong-footing you, teasing you with the notion it is going to be high-strung drama. Here, they all keep bizarre secrets: Vince sneaks off to acting class where fellow actor Molly (Emily Mortimer) becomes his eccentric but guiding angel; his son (Ezra Miller) has a fetish for fat women; his daughter (Dominik Garia-Lorido) is a stripper, while his ear-splitting wife (Julianna Marguilies) has designs on Tony (Steven Strait), a young man just released from prison hired to help build a bathroom out back. What nobody knows, including Tony, is that he is Vince's illegitimate son. As you would imagine, deceit and cross-purposes build into towering thunder clouds of trouble. But when the air clears the film has unexpectedly become a comedy where the laughs stack up. You can forgive it this unevenness because it untangles the mess with a welcome warmth and is generous to its characters' faults.

July 25, 2010

Reviewed: Twilight Saga: Eclipse 2.5/5 ; Predators 2.5/5 ; Leaving 3/5

2010-12-30T12:50:00.001Z

Eclipse, the third film in the romantic vampire saga Twilight, is an epic, teeth-grinding, face-gurning, groin-clenching battle of wills: who will finally get to pop Bella Swan's cherry? It's a story that doesn't play it that straight, but the metaphor is there for the taking. Brunette Bella (Kristen Stewart) is still waiting for her vampire boyfriend Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), he of the vulpine eyes, box jaw and bad white make-up, to turn her into a vampire. But they have decided to wait, as tradition would have it, until graduation. Presumably he will do it in the back of a car.

Meanwhile, Bella's friend, the werewolf Jacob, despairs. He is played by Taylor Lautner, an actor with such a high body temperature he doesn't wear shirts, and who looks like he put his head into a trash compactor to get his cheekbones just right. Jacob now admits he is in love with Bella. And the couple's graduation plan puts a needle in his paw. "Better you be really dead than one of them!" he snorts jealously. He tries to woo her. Edward gets jumpy when she's with him. Bella, meanwhile, wanders about looking distant and horny. We know this because Kristen Stewart spends the entire film sighing and biting her lip.

You can lay the blame for this with Edward. When he's not busy assembling the good-natured Cullen vampire clan and agreeing a peace treaty with Jacob's wolves to defend Bella from his arch-enemy Victoria (who is assembling a new army of vampires to kill Bella), he is declining the advances of the girlfriend he is trying to protect. In the second film, there were excuses for this: the plot kept them apart mostly. But here they've two hours to get it on.

Bella tries. Oh, how she tries. But he tells her they must wait. Aha! Clever man. He's playing the hard-to-get card. There's no better way to frazzle a woman's neural network than tell her you won't sleep with her. It's going to make her leap on you like a panther. So Bella schemes. She gets him into a bedroom in a house where there are no elders about. (OK, strictly speaking there are no elders, but Edward Cullen, born in 1901, must be 90 years older than her; he makes Lolita's Humbert Humbert look like a munchkin). Bella gets him onto a bed and goes at him. Again he makes her stop. He wants her to wait. He tells her it could be dangerous. What's he got down there?

Three films in, and with not so much as second base achieved, it wouldn't be surprising if Bella ducked off to read He's Just Not That Into You. Though you suspect Edward is just not that into women. Perhaps he is too close to his mummy, or he's a depraved descendent of St Augustine: Lord, make me unchaste, but not yet. No wonder Bella develops confusing feelings for hot-blooded Jacob.

Edward's detumescence could be related to his being a vampire. One presumes his veins runneth dry but he wants to hide this until they get married. His chastity, though, reflects the bizarre, childish nature of Twilight. The films are so clean and the lead characters so conscionable, they suck the story dry of any blood.

Instead, you hope for a jolt or two. And I can imagine this would suit the director David Slade. He's not as capable as Chris Weitz was of handling his cast and he has no feel for sense of place. But in his previous film, 30 Days of Night, he showed he could deliver some serious, sneaky shocks. The script here, however, ensures all the action is signalled in advance, usually by Edward's sister Alice (Ashley Greene), whose intuition warns us of coming trouble. I prefer when vampire films grab you by the neck. Eclipse, when it isn't angsty with teen torpor, is toothless.

It also continues to play against tradition. In Stoker's classic, Dracula couldn't wait to get his pointed pearls into the recumbent neck of a young lady. In a world of Victorian sexual restraint, Dracula was literary porn. Today, in a world of have-whatever-you-like-right-now, the Twilight series makes you feel like you're wearing a chastity belt inside a diving bell. Teenage girls love it. In times past, girls had to get married to get a man. Now they just send a text. I suppose this is an example of society wanting something it can't have.

If there is suspense it comes from Jacob, who prowls after Bella and even gets a snog. Will he just pick her up by the neck and paw her like you want him to do? After three films, she really needs to just get it on.

Predators picks up where 1990's Predator II left off, and is designed for teenage boys who want nothing to do with the sodden romance of teenage girls. Naturally, the film has no bother getting it on. Adrien Brody plays Royce who wakes up freefalling out of the sky. He is wearing battle fatigues and has a huge gun. Our initial shock at finding him in this state is replaced by another kind of shock which wonders why an Oscar-winning star is slumming it in this low-rent film.

The story is borrowed from the classic plot of The Most Dangerous Game. Royce finds other disparate soldiers of various styles and nationalities who have been parachuted onto a planet operated as a game reserve for Predators. It takes a while for them to figure this out. "What if we are dead?" says one. "What if we are starring in Lost?" asks another (ok, that one was me). I started to lay odds on the order of killings: African Warlord guy (2-1); tash-and-tats Mexican gangster guy (2-1); deadbeat, death row prison guy (2-1); noble Japanese Yakuza guy (5-1); noble Russian soldier guy (5-1); duplicitous doctor guy (50-1); token woman (100-1); Royce (100-1).

The characters each come with various weapons that look like big toys. When they stumble upon the Predators' lair, the place looks like a giant BBQ station. But the hanging meat isn't chicken or steak. The prowling Predators, if you remember, have dreadlocks. This would make them unusually aggressive for reggae fans. Director Nimród Antal goes about things with an efficient action hustle. But don't ask him to do anything new or original. He just wants to relive bits from your favourite action films with glorious abandon, relying on jungle disorientation, plot teases and heavy artillery.

Speaking of firepower, to watch Kristin Scott Thomas in the French drama Leaving is to see an actress at the peak of her powers. Just as in I've Loved You So Long, it's a measure of how good she is here that the film gains more weight than it actually has.

Scott Thomas plays Susanna, the physiotherapist wife of a rich doctor (Yvan Attal). He's funding her return to work but she throws it all away for Ivan (Sergi Lopez), a Spanish labourer she has begun an affair with. Catherine Corsini's drama wears its French preoccupations on its sleeve: a clash of class between life under the controlling bourgeois husband who turns nasty and carefree abandon with the labourer. The film would make you wonder if France has insufficient legal protection for separated women. Events do not play out as Susanna expects, and tragedy looms. Scott Thomas is remarkable: every nuance of her emotionally freewheeling character is perfectly measured; her emotional arc, from falling in love to encroaching despair, etched in micro-expressions in her face.

July 11, 2010

Reviewed: Inception 5/5 ; Toy Story 3 4/5 ; Good Hair 2/5 ; The Concert 2/5

2010-12-30T12:48:00.001Z

My goodness but this summer has been full of badness. From lazy sequels, to kick-started franchises and the latching on to lazy 3D, popular cinema is beginning to feel like a bad swim, the kind where you're trapped under water and not allowed up for air. Christopher Nolan's Inception, then, is just the fix. The film takes you up for breath – a dizzying blast of oxygen in a brand-new bedazzling environment. This sci-fi sizzler is a reminder of just what Hollywood can do when it chooses to go down the rabbit hole.

Inception is the director's seventh film and builds upon the fractured narrative of Memento and the action-powered psychological thrills of The Dark Knight. It plays like a sci-fi heist movie, with a recursive plot and a twist on the usual: the goods that are traditionally for stealing are in this case for planting — inside the mind of a man.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, an intense American exile who lives the life of an 'extractor'. The story is set in the future where it is possible to roam around a person's dreams with the aid of a strong sedative and extract whatever it is the dreamer is hiding. This technology has found use, naturally, in the field of corporate espionage.

Now Cobb's paymasters want him and his newly-assembled team of experts (Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy) to do the reverse and plant an idea into the mind of a business empire heir, Robert Fischer Jr (Cillian Murphy). The pay-off for Cobb is he will be allowed to see his family again. But the inception is dangerous and difficult. It means having to go very deep into the subconscious of Fischer, so he will believe he created the idea himself. The team will have to go within a dream within a dream within a dream.

In other words, the film is built like a Matryoshka doll. Each time they go deeper, time expands exponentially. What are a couple of seconds in one dimension are minutes in another. Go too deep and die in the dream, and you run the risk of getting caught in psychological limbo, where time is an eternity. The thought of this is enough to make you claustrophobic.

The film's surfaces are very much inspired by the mathematical art of Escher, where staircases travelling downwards lead you back up. Even Paris is made to fold in on itself, a sight that is staggering to behold. The film, though, is propelled by action. There are gravity-shifting fight sequences that are inspired by Kubrick but are given the kind of fresh electricity you felt when you first watched The Matrix. And there's a femme fatale threatening to up-end the entire project, a woman who is a projection of Cobb's own guilt.

As the 'heist' was being set up, I started to worry. There is too much talk and explanation of the kind that usually sinks a film with dead weight. I began to fear that the plot – built like a towering ziggurat – could collapse like a house of cards. But it doesn't. Where James Cameron sought with 3D in Avatar to facilitate total immersion, but only succeeded in papering over the cracks of a weak story, Nolan achieves the opposite: you feel yourself being sucked in deep through the sheer craft of the storytelling. The form of the film becomes a metaphor for filmmaking.

As the film tunnels deeper and deeper into four levels of reality, you find your brain holding on to the seat wishing you had been taking those fish oils. Even Ellen Page's Adriadne begins to wonder. "Whose subconscious are we going into exactly?" she asks, seemingly for the entire audience. It's a fair question. The film gives you that mind-bending Marienbad feeling, but there are explicit differences. Where Nolan has an arthouse bent, his instincts are for the crowd. He allows the viewer to lose themselves in the story but does not seek to alienate them. Visual references are carefully edited to act like markers so you always know where things are.

As a generality, I'm wary of such clever constructions. The engineering tends to be an end in itself, leaving no room for emotion – the vital alchemy that brings film to life. Inception is largely a cold film, but it is saved by an emotional through-line that carries right into the last scene, a moment that left me struck dumb in my seat. This is savvy and intelligent, unashamedly high-fibre yet big-crowd stuff. It's the kind of filmmaking popular cinema needs right now.

Night and Day, the dazzlingly eccentric short film that precedes Toy Story 3, makes a fine point about the desire for originality. It contains a recording from self-help author Dr Wayne Dyer, which blares: "They are afraid of new ideas. They are loaded with prejudices, not based upon anything in reality, but based on: 'If something is new, I reject it immediately because it's frightening to me.' What they do instead is just stay with the familiar. You know, to me, the most beautiful things in all the universe are the most mysterious."

Toy Story 3, which opens tomorrow, is a minor miracle then. Pixar takes what should be a horse on its way to the glue factory and reworks it for the racetrack. The film is both sweet and swift and an impeccable example of family film story-telling. But you cannot escape that nagging feeling you've seen it all before.

The story reunites us with Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and the rest of the toys as they sit stuffed in Andy's old playbox. He's now 17, is off to college and is taking Woody with him. When the other toys are sent accidentally to a dubious day-care centre, Woody comes to the rescue, while the plot begins to rework The Great Escape.

The film's visual palette is a marvel: the glossy surfaces are attuned to the slightest shift in light and atmosphere. The story is animated in gestures so fluid and dynamic, even live-action filmmakers would do well to take note. Childhood, as seen through the eyes of the toys, is shown as a precious yet fleeting moment. The film creates an awareness of time passing by, the kind of pathos that goes unseen and unfelt in most other cartoons. And yet I can't say this has the heft of Up or Wall-e, the Pixar film that has set the bar for all other animation. Where Wall-e distilled the essence of what makes us human into the wonder of a mute robot, it also took the viewer to heights they'd never been. And that just can't be beaten.

Good Hair, meanwhile, can't be beaten for sheer inanity. Comedian Chris Rock combs through the billion-dollar industry that surrounds black American hair. We watch Rock joke weakly with women in hair salons as he discovers how black hair blossomed from frizzy fuzz into silken locks. Apparently they either burn it straight with dangerous sodium hydroxide or wear $1,000-plus hair meshes. Wow. I'm glad we got that sorted.

The Concert is a screeching, clunky comedy full of bum notes. It's the story of Moscow janitor Andrei Filipov (Aleksei Guskov) who was once the renowned conductor of the Bolshoi orchestra. Humiliated by the Soviet regime, he still has the chops and concocts a plan to bring a fake Bolshoi orchestra to Paris. He even has the temerity to ask for Anna-Marie Jacquet (Mélanie Laurent), a world-renowned violin virtuoso. Can he gather together the raggle-taggle musicians he needs to make an orchestra without alerting the authorities?

Roman director Radu Mihaileanu plays the comedy embarrassingly broad, the kind of film that finds funny a running gag of mobile phones going off. And it is chock full of ugly stereotypes: a father-son pair of Jewish musicians don't turn up in Paris because they are busy making money; while all the Russians are unruly, ruined alcoholics. It makes a late attempt for seriousness, addressing Soviet-era ghosts, but it never escapes the whiff of the ridiculous.

July 18, 2010

Reviewed: White Material 4/5 ; Shrek Forever After: The Final Chapter 2/5 ; When You're Strange 2/5 ; Tetro 2/5

2010-12-30T12:46:00.002Z

Trying to get to grips with the films of France's premier arthouse filmmaker, Claire Denis, can be as exciting as it is exasperating. They play like smoke on the wind: her images disperse on screen, curl around you and fold in on themselves.

In the 2004 film The Intruder, she pushed into full-on experimental territory, locating the story within internal experience – film unfolding as memory. And then, in last year's 35 Shots of Rum, she showed her signature style: a lovely lyricism that somehow evokes the toughness in people's lives. Her characters don't talk much, but that's alright: Denis creates an intuitive connection with them so that you know what they are thinking or feeling without them having to say much. Her latest, White Material, seems to occupy a bit of both of these worlds.

This is a picture of Africa devouring itself. It's strange and subtle, enigmatic but an altogether gripping film. Denis, who grew up in French colonial Africa, creates an extraordinary sense of place. This is an unnamed place of red dust and dry scrub, of landscape that rests magisterial against the sky. And at the centre is a French colonial coffee plantation, owned by an imploding family who seem oblivious to an oncoming rebel war.

As is the way with all Denis characters, they are quiet and mysterious, so you have to watch them carefully. At the centre of the story is Madame Vial, or Maria, a French woman who runs the plantation. She is played by Isabelle Huppert as only Huppert can: with iron filings in her red-rimmed eyes. With her scraggly red hair, she has a cold aloofness that makes her seem as calculating as a fox.

Most of the film plays out in her memory. A rebel child army is coming in the plantation's direction. Its leader, a man called The Boxer (the inscrutable Isaach de Bankolé) is injured and Maria finds him hiding out in her shed. Meanwhile, a French helicopter flies overhead and warns her to leave. Instead, she stays. Her local harvesters are fleeing in droves but she pleads with them to stay. When they don't, she takes her ex-husband's child out of school on the pretext that it's for his safety, when really she needs him for work. She goes off and finds men who are so desperate they can't afford to turn her down. She lies and says things might even be safer now.

Her ex-husband André (a wrinkled Christopher Lambert), who has remarried and had a child with a native woman, is scheming to skedaddle and sell the plantation from under her nose to a conniving local mayor. He needs Maria's sick father (Michel Subor) to sign. And then there's their teenage son Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), an indolent, shifty mope who has grown soft, or dangerous, in the heat.

There is a strange stillness to most of this film. But there is a sense always of trouble like a gathering storm cloud. At the beginning, we see what we later learn is the plantation in smoking ruins. So the film becomes an examination: why do people stay when really they know they should go? In the recent documentary, Mugabe and the White African, the question was asked: is it possible to be both a white person and an African? There, too, the inhabitants stayed despite an oncoming invasion. Denis is not interested, though, in asserting the rights of occupation. She is interested in the white pride and arrogance of her characters. And madness, too.

Unlike most films, where characters are in control of their destiny, Denis shows these people at the mercy of the world. They cannot see around the next corner. For the viewer, too, things are so intimate, it can be hard to see the big picture. Denis deliberately leaves out the kind of sign-postings that help viewers around. You start to feel like a character who can only know things from your own perspective. You have to live inside it.

There is a huge sense of disconnection among these characters – from themselves and from what is going on. Maria shows no sense of responsibility as an employer or mother/daughter. She even ignores a death warning of a sheep's head among the coffee beans. She walks about with a machete in hand, while Manuel shaves his head and rides off on a motorbike with a rifle over his shoulder. You can sense the crazed ghost of Colonel Kurtz watching fondly overhead.

If White Material takes you to a place you've never been before, Shrek 4, or Shrek Forever After: The Final Chapter, to give it its full title, gives you that crawling-out-of-bed-I-don't-like-Mondays feeling. I don't know about you but I'm tired of looking at that big, putrescent green head. Even Shrek isn't happy. He growls and grumps because life has become a drudge: squealing infants, heckling wife and tiresome routine. You can hear the writers' furious head-scratching trying to make things fresh. It's time for a midlife crisis.

Cue Rumpelstiltskin, a snivelling little snot who tricks Shrek into signing away his entire life just for a day's peace and quiet. Shrek is transported to a parallel universe where Rumpelstiltskin reigns supreme, Princess Fiona was never freed by Shrek, Donkey is a pack mule, and Puss in Boots is a fat, cream-fed lump. Worse, the place is devoid of all that pop-cultural nod and wink that gave Shrek its original sizzle, but which was exhausted by film number three. The story becomes It's A Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart turned into a green globule. This is back-to-basics stuff: a fairytale frolic for families with the lingering aftertaste of fast food.

When You're Strange, Tom DiCillo's documentary about the life of The Doors, recounts the strange days of the band – their formation, their superstardom and their self-destruction – with plenty of original colour footage from the period.

DiCillo explores the theme of the band as trailblazers for '60s counterculture, with Jim Morrison as the victim of his own egress. DiCillo can't get enough of him: we watch him driving around the desert (he looks like a tumbleweed driving a sports car), while Johnny Depp's voiceover comes across as daft eulogy: "You can't burn out if you're not on fire." Depp reads out extracts from Morrison's poetry, though that would be best left in the '60s.

The music still sounds fantastic, but there's not much to this really. You could even make one yourself at home: stick on The Doors best-of album, read out the band's Wikipedia entry in a portentous voice, find a drug-addled wino, and ask him to recite some gibberish as poetry.

There's plenty of poetry in Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro. The story, set in Argentina, is captured in sumptuous black and white. It turns the face of Vincent Gallo, who plays the troubled titular hero, into a great wall of unspoken sadness. This is a tale of familial and artistic rivalry, staged with flashes of Coppolian flair.

There's Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich), a 17-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio lookalike who arrives in Buenos Aires in search of Tetro, his lost older brother. Tetro abandoned the family in the US a decade before. What accounted for his leaving? Bennie acts as a catalyst to the past, opening old wounds that even he will wish he had left alone.

The film is best when it is intimate, exploring the emotional dynamic between the brothers set within the confines of Tetro's flat. (The lovely Maribel Verdu, as Tetro's kind girlfriend Miranda, acts as a pressure valve.)

But as the film expands into Patagonia, it grows increasingly bizarre and disjointed, beginning to look and feel like something Almodovar would have put together on a bad day. There is a play within the film, slices of Red Shoes-style operatics, and then there's the awkward melodrama that spirals into a sink of silliness.

Disappointing.

July 4, 2010

Reviewed: Whatever Works 2/5 ; Get Him to the Greek 3.5/5 ; When In Rome 2/5 ; The Collector 1/5

2010-12-30T12:44:00.002Z

Woody Allen and New York used to be the best of friends. Who can forget those opening moments of Manhattan, his 1979 masterpiece, where the city, captured in widescreen monochrome, took on the expression of Allen's feelings for it? Gordon Willis' camera turned the city into silver. Skyscrapers strutted proudly. Streets slinked romantically in the shadows. It looked so great, George Gershwin's clarinet squealed with delight. The city could hardly contain itself: it burst into fireworks like great blushing cheeks. Woody Allen never even had to say the words, but we knew this was his kind of town.

And then the films began to slip. And Woody went to Europe in search of energy. Like a Powell without his Pressburger, a Gilbert without his Sullivan, Woody, it seemed, was at a loss without Manhattan. So here we are, with the romcom Whatever Works, and the pair are reunited, though so much has changed. New York, brightly lit, looks bland and begrudging, sulking like a great city not being called upon to give the film some soul. And Woody Allen? Well, he's not the director or the writer he once was.

Woody was always the best man to play his own material. You suspect that when he writes, he hears the jokes in his own voice. When he acts, he hums and haws, but it is always a clever aid to his comic timing. Yet with Larry David, the excoriating writer-comedian of Curb Your Enthusiasm, he has found a second suit. David plays Boris Yelnikoff, a 60-something whose misanthropic musings would curdle fresh milk. He doesn't so much hum and haw as tirade tyrannically, a virulent motor-mouth.

Boris is a retired, self-proclaimed physics genius who teaches kids chess, then shouts at them for being stupid inch-worms. With wings of grey hair and eyes like pencil lines wincing through glasses, Boris keeps smiling as if he is in on a cosmic joke. The joke in Allen's world, of course, is that life is meaningless, but we still need to play the comedy called love. And so romance abounds, though none of it is convincing. The film plays like a recession-ready Manhattan: it has been asset-stripped of character and complexity, and cobbled together with careless abandon. Some laughs remain.

Evan Rachel Wood plays the love match Melody (though she's no match for David). She arrives from the deep south and wangles her way into Boris's house for a few nights. He calls her an idiot. She becomes a Pygmalion in pigtails. Boris looks like her granddad. Naturally, they get married.

Her mother Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) comes to New York after a failed marriage, faints when she sees Melody's new husband and turns every scene into a Tennessee Williams melodrama. I never thought I'd say this but Patricia Clarkson is dreadful: she drops Allen's best lines like dead weights. Marietta connives to set Melody up with a smooth-talking bland British actor called Randy (Henry Cavill). Meanwhile, as if waiting in the wings of a farce, Melody's father John (Ed Begley Jr) arrives looking for his old wife back.

Allen reserves all his energy for Boris's rants. But everything else has a startling lack of vigour. The writing is weak. The characters are shallow caricatures. Scenes begin to wilt like dying flowers in front of you. The dialogue drones on without any pep or rhythm, or any kind of cinematic flair to balance out the chatter.

You hang on to Larry David for dear life because he is the only thing worth watching. His virulent misanthropy is almost Shakespearean in its fury, and nobody else can get a look in. You can sense Allen giving the audience what they want. But there's something amiss.

In his best films, his comedy was often at the gentle expense of his central characters. He exposed their inadequacies and made fun of their social milieu. Here, the humour sounds like that of an angry old man. It comes out sneering and smug. Boris sees nothing good in human nature and Allen finds two-cent laughs in the conservatism of Melody and her family. He turns Melody into a cynic, Marietta into an artist with a live-in menage a trois, and in the space of one scene – the most embarrassing and lazy thing Allen has ever done – turns her dad into a homosexual.

The moral message of Whatever Works – the hectoring message, in fact, for Boris keeps breaking the fourth wall to lecture us on what the film is about – is that we need to stop being idealistic about our relationships, and to embrace whatever works. It's a message Woody Allen fans learned to live with a long time ago.

If Larry David is pretty much playing a version of himself, the same can be said for Russell Brand in the riotous comedy Get Him to the Greek. Brand's Aldous Snow, the bad-boy rock star he played in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, is expanded here into a star vehicle. His supporting part was too big for that film. Yet you can barely fit him into this. He's like a black hole sucking in all the furniture.

Somehow, Jonah Hill, with his low centre of gravity, keeps things balanced. His Aaron Green is a record company minion who has 72 hours to escort Snow from London to LA for an anniversary concert. Fat chance. Trying to handle Snow is like trying to hug a tornado. Brand brandishes every brat tendency in the book. He drinks London dry, turns Aaron into a drug mule, levels Las Vegas and destroys Aaron's relationship.

Brand was born for this, but I wonder if there's anything else he can do. (Surely anything else would require that he cuts that hair.) Hill plays him scene for scene. He has quit forcing one-liners and finds a natural, easy humour playing it straight.

Nicholas Stoller's second comedy ridicules the music business and borrows its emotional choreography from Metallica's Some Kind of Monster. But its trajectory sticks to formula: the straight guy gets a kink in his laces; the wild one is reined in. Stoller is a sentimentalist but finds a lovely balance between the sweet and outrageous. And he knows how to keep generating the laughs.

Sarah Marshall, aka Kristen Bell, is to be found these days in When In Rome, a daft but endurable romcom without a split second of originality. Bell plays Beth, an uptight Guggenheim curator who can't find a man. That is until she travels to her sister's wedding in Rome. There she steals a few coins from a Trevi Fountain stand-in and is suddenly beset by a bevy of men whose wishes she stole. One of them will be her true love, sports journalist Nick (Josh Duhamel). The other four are broad cartoons, led by Danny DeVito and Jon Heder. The comedy is borne along by cheap slapstick, while the script is so thin, it's liable to be blown away by a sneeze.

The Collector is so dark I had to reach into my film critic's kit bag for the night vision goggles. What a hellish vision did I behold. Marcus Dunstan's torture porn horror is set in a house that has been booby-trapped like a bad Bugs Bunny cartoon. Or the medieval dungeon of a Spanish inquisitor. Josh Stewart's Arkin is a burglar who, of all bloody nights, chooses this one to break in. He holds his breath while The Collector, a psychopath of hidden face, walks around the house slowly with ponderous step. Perhaps the sicko is musing over the myriad tripwires he's set up. Or what spiky-headed weapon to use next on the poor family he is conducting his vivisection experiments on.

The director rustles up some rudimentary shocks before handing you over to the work of The Collector. The first half-hour is spent making everybody look suspicious, so by the time they are all in trouble, you have little sympathy for them.

Like all torture porn, it is a torture to watch.

June 27, 2010

Reviewed: His and Hers 4/5 ; Please Give 3.5/5 ; MacGruber 1/5 ; Wild Grass 2/5

2010-12-30T12:43:00.002Z

Here's a film they should have called Magnolia. His and Hers, Ken Wardrop's multi-ensemble documentary, is shot in ordinary homes around the midlands and the wall colour is everywhere. It gambols up gables, crouches behind couches, bestrides blandly beside blinds. Then there are the bolder houses. The houses of reckless abandon. There are living-room walls laid out like sick patients slapped in iodine; walls the colour of slippery snot or Saturday night hurl. The houses of the Irish become unexpected characters, lurking behind the heads of Irish mammies who spend much of the film talking about their sons. Listen to the walls exclaiming boldly behind them: we too are your children!

Ken Wardrop is certainly an original. And His and Hers is the blossoming of a voice. His first full feature is a formally-conceived documentary beaded together in bite sizes. A parade of 70 or so females, from children to grannies, discuss in beautifully framed, snappy stories the men in their lives. We watch the women. We imagine the men. A picture of life emerges.

The film's 80-minute lifespan grows old with its protagonists. Like that devastating sequence in Up, where the cuddly couple grew old together in a quick series of knotted ties, Wardrop's film is a document of time. A child crawls through a doorway and another emerges older on the other side. Young faces grow knowing then harden. Long hair sneaks up from shoulders until it sits short and grey on shrivelled faces. Men die and leave empty chairs. The women live on alone. Some of them have sons for comfort.

Don't expect anybody to say anything mean about anyone. Little girls talk affectionately about annoying daddies. They become young ladies and daddy slips from view. The men in their lives become young fellas. The young fellas become their fiancés, their husbands, fathers to their children, their companions in later life when the children leave, the ghosts that stalk the house when they die.

A gentle humour and sweetness bubbles throughout. "I had to give him a tenner to get him to sleep," says one mammy of her young son. "I took it back when he fell asleep." One mollycoddling mother tells us: "When he gets older, he's going to mind me." (Let's see what he says in 10 years.) Males are all kinds of everything: carefree, careless sons; daddies who play football, who tell their daughters to drink their milk, who teach them to drive. There are husbands that cook meticulous curries but leave carnage in the kitchen. There's the joker who built a pond in his garden and hangs a life-ring outside it. And there's the man who fancies a younger woman and cheats on his wife. (Sorry, wrong film: see Please Give below).

Where Up could move you to tears, Wardrop, you begin to suspect, doesn't want any pain at all. "The small things are the big things," says one woman, speaking of her dead husband. And Wardrop advances with his eye on the mundane. The just-cleaned-for-the-camera houses reflect a false neatness in the film's form. Stories are too tidy; every tale is nice. Men are bizarrely trouble-free. We are insulated from any of the difficult undercurrents of life that it is the job of the artist to expose and explore. Without those shadings, the film is in danger of being twee.

There is a poignancy, though, that creeps in and it is worn in the frayed faces of the elder aged. This achieves its greatest depth in scenes with Wardrop's own mother – a woman whose entire frame drips with sorrow. She starred in Wardrop's terrific first short, Undressing My Mother, and perhaps there is a natural advantage: her story is more keenly felt than all the others.

Wardrop displays a real interest in real people and their stories. But I can't help but feel he is assuming the role less of a documentarian probing real stories, than that of a stereotypical mammy: he wants to see the best in everybody.

The cinematographers Kate McCullough and Michael Lavelle overcome a major obstacle: how to make the anodyne architecture of Irish homes interesting. They frame rooms like postcards and create careful symmetry by splitting rooms in half. The camera peeks through doorways or watches from the Irish mammy's viewpoint of the kitchen window. The images revel in the familiar. But they create something spiritual out of the mundane.

Nicole Holofcener's wry drama Please Give is an unashamed women's picture with an understatedly high IQ. Unlike Sex and the City 2, you don't need to get drunk to see it. It might not be glamorous, but this film brings more depth and breadth to modern women's lives than a century of SATC sequels.

Holofcener actually directed some SATC TV episodes but this is her fourth film. It is set in New York and follows the travails of a family and their next-door neighbours: there's Catherine Keener's Kate and Oliver Platt's Alex, husband-and-wife retro furniture re-sellers and their acne-addled teen daughter Abbey (Sarah Steele). Next door, there's caring breast-cancer radiologist Rebecca (Rebecca Hall, quietly terrific), her cold, self-centred sister Mary (Amanda Peet) and their bitter, superannuated granny (Ann Guilbert).

The characters spark hilariously off each other and leap off the screen. Keener's Kate is used as the pivot in the story and Keener has never been better: she frets about her attractiveness and advancing age, cannot communicate with her troubled teen, doesn't notice her husband is having an affair and has so much empathy she doesn't know what to do with it. If it sounds like soap opera, it's not: the scenes feel organic and most of Kate's preoccupations we learn just by watching Keener's extraordinary face.

Holofcener, in particular, is interested in the notion of duty. She examines both Kate and Rebecca's self-imposed guilt, from feelings that they are not doing enough in their lives for other people, and gives it a sympathetic airing.

MacGruber, meanwhile, takes every 1980s action-hero cliché and rapes it with idiotic irony. Will Forte as an inept MacGyver in a mullet smirks stupidly, like a man who doesn't realise '80s pastiches have been de rigueur for some time. After 15 minutes, my thoughts were: how can I make this stop? And then: how can I really make this stop without getting arrested? I started to drift. I wondered at what age do Eskimo children start hunting fish. (It must be dangerous.) I started counting the number of syllables in floccinaucinihilipilification. (Answer: 12.) Then I looked at my hands and wondered how many lines are there in a fingerprint. I started counting. (The answer: 102.) I looked up and, unfortunately, MacGruber was no closer to catching Val Kilmer's fat-faced, hammy baddy. So I imagined I was flying over the Andes in a helicopter being steered by the orangutan Clyde from Any Which Way But Loose. He looked hilarious wearing pilot earphones and kept getting excited when he was supposed to be handling the controls. I asked him to sit down and concentrate but he refused and threw a banana out the window and leaned out to watch it drop. It was at that point I began to wonder how I would survive if he crashed the chopper and we got stuck in the Andes. (Answer: I'd eat Clyde.) With relief, when I looked up, MacGruber was over.

Like the elderly lady in His and Hers, who is learning the accordion and the internet ("I think I am going to live forever"), the French veteran Alain Resnais is sticking two firm fingers up to old age. The great director of films such as Night and Fog and Hiroshima Mon Amour is now 88. His latest film Wild Grass is an adult fairytale of sorts. It follows on from his 2006 film Private Fears in Public Places and again casts both Sabine Azéma and André Dussollier as strangers compellingly drawn towards each other.

Azéma wears her hair like somebody just threw a toaster into her bath. Dussollier is cranky and cragged. The story makes them look like confused, impetuous teens. Resnais has a way of suggesting that even in middle age, we don't know what the hell we're about. It's very beautifully shot by Éric Gautier, his gliding camera creating the smooth feeling of fantasy. But it tries too hard to create the effects of a novel. As the story drifts from glib comedy with dark undertones into bemusing absurdity, it gets too eccentric and disjointed for comfort.

June 20, 2010

Reviewed: Greenberg 4/5 ; Brooklyn's Finest 3/5 ; Black Death 3/5 ; Letters to Juliet 1/5

2010-12-30T12:41:00.001Z

Some people don't think too deeply about life. They're too busy living to give it much thought until life comes along with a crisis and boots them in the pants. Others, such as Roger Greenberg, the character study in Noah Baumbach's laugh-out-quiet comedy drama, are so busy worrying about life they can't live it. At 41, life has passed Roger by and he cannot account for those wasted years. He's like a loose cog fallen to a machine room floor. He can't click into place.

Baumbach's film is an antsy yet strangely affecting, low-key study of a helpless neurotic. He seems to have wrung out the nastiness that infected his previous film Margot at the Wedding, which is fine, because the last thing Ben Stiller's Roger needs is someone else on his back. He is the kind of prickly soul who causes enough trouble for himself. When he's lonely, he pushes people away. He wants love but is terrified of intimacy. He gropes around for meaning while avoiding anything meaningful in his life. "I'm just trying not to do anything," he tells everyone he meets. "That's brave at our age," says his ex (Jennifer Jason Leigh). You want to shake him. But by the end of the film, after Stiller has made him so painfully vibrant, you want to give him a hug.

Roger is on the upswing out of a nervous breakdown when he begins housesitting his brother's LA home. He plans to build a kennel for the family mutt and meets Florence (Greta Gerwig), the family nanny who minds the dog. Gerwig is extraordinary. Her Florence is excruciatingly real – a passive drifter as aimless as an arrow shot into the sky. Roger is a generation older, but they are kindred spirits and a relationship (sort of) forms. It plays out in an amusing series of near misses. They nearly go for a drink together. They nearly have sex. They nearly like each other. And so on. Baumbach inhabits that awkward space between two people and sets up camp. When they first attempt to have sex, you wish the camera wasn't there. "I'm wearing kind of an ugly bra," she says. "It's like a bandage," he says. Thankfully they stop.

Roger reconnects with his old friend Ivan, played by Rhys Ifans with an old soul like a tattered jacket. Ivan is haggard, sad-eyed and a reformed alcoholic and doesn't seem to mind that self-centred Roger takes no interest in his family life. He takes Roger to a party and when they get there, Roger panics and doesn't want to go in. Inside, the editor cuts back and forth among his different conversations creating a mosaic of a fractured, aimless man. Later, when it is his birthday, Ivan takes him to a restaurant. Roger moans that people don't call him on his birthday anymore. Then, when singing waiters bring out a birthday cake for him, he gets embarrassed, insults them and storms out.

Roger's character seems to me to be closely based on the titular hero of Saul Bellow's great novel Herzog, a fellow traveller recovering from a nervous breakdown. They both glance sidelong at life instead of rushing at it. Roger, too, writes whining letters to everybody because the world does not run the way he thinks it should. He obsesses over the past. While under his nose is Florence, a woman who just might be able to save him.

Baumbach crafts a more intimate vibe than his caustic satire The Squid and the Whale. This feels like posh mumblecore – that US independent film movement which funnelled the spirit of Cassavetes and Rohmer into talky, $1.50-budget films using non-actors who discussed their feelings. Greenberg is filmed in houses that never saw the hand of a production manager. The rooms are as lived-in and messy as the film's ultra-real characters.

Ben Stiller accounts for one of the film's chief delights. He has quietened down, taken his ego and stuffed it in his socks. And all that twitchy self-loathing beloved of his mainstream comedies has been turned in on itself, so that it seeps out of his pores like a slow, poisonous leak. But watch him long enough and you start to see how vulnerable Roger is.

And that's Baumbach's shtick. He creates characters that can't help themselves. He allows them to make infuriating mistakes and, in so doing, humanises them. In The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding, his family members could not help but betray one another. Here, Roger betrays himself, over and over again. Part of his problem is he can't accept life for what it is. "It is huge to finally embrace the life that you never planned for," Ivan tells Roger at one point. It is the saddest, truest and most touching line in the film. Baumbach has blossomed into a director of rare sensitivity.

In Brooklyn's Finest, Training Day director Antoine Fuqua does a working man's job of sensitivity. He climbs inside the minds of three burly Brooklyn cops, each struggling to keep with the beat, and drives them to the edge. There's Ethan Hawke's highly-strung Sal, a detective who desperately needs more money for a new family home; there's Don Cheadle's earnest-eyed Tango, an undercover cop who wants to get out from a complicated set-up; and Richard Gere's alcoholic Eddie, a veteran layabout with one week to retirement.

Fuqua does away with any notions of strict morality and plays it like a man who knows the streets. Brooklyn has no respect for the cops. The cops have no respect for themselves. Good and evil are narrowed down to cynical strips of grey. He nudges the three characters to a precipice where a big-bang showdown awaits. Cheadle is impressive, exuding almost too much soul for the role. Richard Gere, meanwhile, has the soul of a basking shark that has been killed, gutted, cured and hung to dry for six months. In Iceland they'd eat him. To the rest of us, he stinks.

The tense and enjoyable supernatural thriller Black Death is as hard as a medieval mace. It tells of a band of Christian fundamentalists who travel through plague-ridden England in search of a necromancer (Carice van Outen) who claims to be able to protect her villagers from disease. Sean Bean is the grizzled head in charge and Eddie Redmayne plays an intense, naïve monk, while our own John Lynch's haggard, sad-faced Wolfstan should be an advertisement for big-picture roles.

Unlike Ridley Scott's gazillion-budget Robin Hood, this low-budget fare makes a better meal of medieval England. It's dark, grim and grisly. Men have faces like gnarly trees. The place is all misty marshes and forlorn forests. The toughness befits its times. Director Christopher Smith moves swiftly from swordplay to supernatural surprises and he directs the fight scenes with cleaner lines than a lot of Hollywood helmers. He channels a pinch of Bergman's Seventh Seal and a large dollop of Reeves' Witchfinder General. It operates with a demented purpose without ever losing its head. If you are squeamish, though, this won't be for you.

With less armour and more amoré, you would imagine Letters to Juliet is a sunny reprieve. It is set in modern-day Verona where US restaurateur Gael Garcia Bernal (acting like he's addled with antidepressants and needs the paycheck) takes his fiancée Amanda Seyfried on a 'pre-honeymoon'. He's opening a restaurant so spends his time meeting slow-food suppliers. Imagine that: a free tour of the finest Italian food. Come and taste some truffles, he says. No, she says, I'm bored by your fascination with Italian cuisine. Instead, I'm going to go to the statue of Juliet where broken-hearted women write weepy letters to a Shakespeare character and I'm going to answer one that is 50 years old and the letter writer, Vanessa Redgrave, will come to Italy and I will help her find her Lorenzo, while her grumpy grandson Chris Egan will turn out unexpectedly to be much nicer than you and more attentive too, so stuff you and stuff your restaurant.

I'd rather stuff this insidious, insipid, insect-brained film into a plate of ravioli and wash it down with a glass of red-ripe Valpolicella.

Burp.

June 13, 2010