14 Genre Films from 2011

As a sort of adjunct to my Best of 2011 list, this is a list of my favourite Genre films, all released in the UK in 2011:


FASTER
(George Tillman Jr.)
Alongside Jason Statham, the most dependable action star presently working in American cinema is Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson. He is utterly convincing in action sequences - this is a man who could cause serious damage if he felt like it - he can act just enough to never become laughable in emotional scenes, and he has an appealing ability to inject irony and wit into his performances where appropriate. He perhaps makes too many family films, but his regular forays into action are generally more than worthwhile.
Faster is exceptional; a taut and tight revenge thriller with a post-Tarantino sensibility to its characterisation, especially in the supporting cast, some brutally lucid action, a great Clint Mansell score and Johnson playing a driven, emotionless killer with commendable intensity.

ELITE SQUAD: THE ENEMY WITHIN
(Jose Padilla)
This somewhat schizophrenic Brazilian film is an angry cry of frustrated rage at the police and government corruption which besets the Country, told with the staccato rhythm of a documentary. But its also a ferocious action film in love with the adrenaline rush of violence, and fetishizing weaponry at every opportunity. There are massive shootouts with assault rifles in the Rio favelas, there are amped-up chases and beatings scattered regularly amidst the political debate. Somehow it all holds together coherently, and what's more, even works quite well.

THE EAGLE
(Kevin MacDonald)
An old-fashioned sword-and-sandal mini-Epic which could have been made, with only a few alterations, in the 1950s. I write that as a good thing, since it means an emphasis on strong storytelling, on classically shot scenes, and on solid characters and plotting. The two leads - Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell - should be the weak point, but they are both good here, and the action scenes are excellent; rousing and visually interesting but never gory or exploitative. Better than last years superficially similar Centurion, which I also liked.

THE MAN FROM NOWHERE
(Jeon-Beong Lee)
There are three Korean films on this list, testament to how well that particular national cinema handles genre material. Of the three, The Man from Nowhere is the most commercial and unoriginal, a familiar (in conception at any rate) action thriller about a hollow shell of an ex Government Agent tracking down the little girl next door who has been kidnapped by gangsters. Leading man Won Bin is a Superstar heartthrob in his homeland and he excels in the brilliant action scenes here, each of which crackles with visceral energy and bravura style. Added to that is a surprising dose of emotional weight and that inimitably Korean tonal variance which makes films like this so unpredictable and exhilarating.

THE MECHANIC
(Simon West)
Statham, playing your standard existential focused hit man - frowny, liable to have planned how to kill everybody in the room and get away Scott free at any moment - gets involved in a mash-up of two hoary old genre plot stand-bys. "This time its personal" meets "the student turns on the teacher". But this is a tight, commendably stripped down action film with strong set-pieces, Statham in the kind of role he's best at, Ben Foster offering great support as another of his damaged wild cards and slick direction from ex-Blockbuster genre hack West.

HANNA
(Joe Wright)
I love the collision of the art house and the action genre. Here Joe Wright takes the chilly European setting and choppily edited action of a Bourne film, blends in some fairy-tale whimsy, a little Godard, a touch of Brit sitcom, some Fassbinder, a little techno, and makes a thoroughly modern action film. Saoirse Ronan puts that unearthly quality to great use in the lead, the supporting cast are pure-breed class and having great fun, and the Chemical Brothers score is another example of a recent trend for dance, electronica and trip-hop musicians excelling while scoring movies. Add to that the best action scene of the year: Eric Bana fighting multiple agents in a subway. In a single take. Awesome.

13 ASSASSINS
(Takeshi Miike)
I had issues with Miike's distancing and deconstruction of the samurai genre in this film. But they all fall away, to some extent, during the lengthy carnage of the central battle, in which the 13 warriors face hundreds in classic fashion, and where Miike tries to have his cake AND eat it (ripping the genre to shreds while also indulging in it's greatest excess) and largely succeeds. Full of casually immortal classic action beats, face-offs and heroic deaths, and lots of blood. Lots and lots of blood.

IRONCLAD
(James English)
Speaking of blood, this ultra-violent siege and battle B-film has plenty of it. A small group of hardened warriors defend a castle from a larger force in a series of gritty, brutal clashes. James Purefoy has become something of a specialist at sword-wielding lead roles and he is central here as the killing machine Templar caught up in this fightnon his way back from the Crusades. The moment where he finally unleashes a massive broadsword he has held back is built up by director English and the chaos he causes with the weapon shows why. Paul Giamatti adds some class as the villainous King John, snarling and scenery-chewing his way through the film.

I SAW THE DEVIL
(Ji-Woon Kim)
A serial killer thriller so violent, intense and disturbing, it was cut for release in Korea, a country not exactly famed for squeamishness where cinematic standards of violence are concerned. A serial killer butchers the fiancee of a Special Agent, whose revenge is to make the murderers life a living hell in a game of cat and mouse, repeatedly hunting him down, beating and mutilating him, then releasing him only to do it all again. Undeniably overlong - its 140 minutes could have been cut down to 90 or so - but the genuine emotion of the first act infuses the entire film, giving it a weight denied to much work in this genre, Director Ji-Woon Kim stages, paces and shoots each scene brilliantly,particularly the set pieces, and its two leads are great.

DRIVE
(Nicolas Winding-Refn)
If this had come out in 1978, or 1983, it would have been taken for what it is; a cool, stylish little genre flick. A little bit Michael Mann, a little bit Walter Hill, a little bit To Live & Die in LA Freidkin allied to a pretty classic action-Noir plot (from James Sallis' smart little novel), it allowed Refn to show how good a technician he is, gave Ryan Gosling a movie star role to bask in, and somehow appealed to hipsters and a certain brand of Cineaste both. It's empty, beautiful, and full of pure cinematic pleasures.

DETECTIVE DEE AND THE MYSTERY OF THE PHANTOM FLAME
(Tsui Hark)
This slightly overripe, consistently ravishing Kung Fu epic shows Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes movies how this sort of material should be done. Andy Lau's Detective Dee investigates the spontaneous combustion of a couple of Government officials and gets into a fistful of sprawlingly impressive fights; all set against a vividly realised historical backdrop. There is also a talking deer, some dodgy cgi compositing, and Tsui Hark's direction, as imaginative and authoritive as ever.

INSIDIOUS
(James Wan)
The first half of this low budget shocker is absolutely terrific; creepy, disturbing, and atmospherically tense throughout as it lays out a generically familiar tale of the haunting of a typical suburban family. The central couple are played - very well - by the ever-excellent Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne, who invest it with more emotion than this material usually warrants. It all falls apart to some extent in the second half, with explanations mixed in with climactic narrative pyrotechnics, but this is still an interesting, high-quality horror film.

THE YELLOW SEA
(Na Hong-Jin)
No guns, but the most visceral and thrilling action film of this year concerns a taxi driver who gets into debt and agrees to carry out a hit for the mob. Only things get complicated - not least by his own plan to murder his cheating wife, once he's done - just as he's about to do the job and soon he finds himself on the run. Rooted in a grittily realist view of people scrabbling to make money on the margins of society, Na Hong-Jin's film showcases a series of brutal, awful knife fights and exhilarating chases through the city, and every minute of it has terrific impact. It starts off as a Noir, turns into a chase thriller and ends up a mix of gangster and action film, each element extraordinarily well-directed and gripping.

R
(Tobias Lindholm, Michael Noer)
Grim, hard-as-nails Danish prison film with some superficial similarities to Audiard's A Prophet. A young man ends up on a wing full of terrifying lifers during his first stint inside and has to learn the ropes fast; which means getting involved in the Prison drug business, selling to the Muslims in another wing. But that only makes his life more complicated. Starkly, intimately shot in mostly tight close up, full of moments of uncomfortable tension, dreadful suspense and horrible explosions of violence, and with a cast full of nastily-memorable character actors glaring at each other, this is a sort of perfect model of how to do this genre well: relentless, compelling, always convincingly hard-worn, with a cruelly unhappy ending.

20 from '11

This just gets harder every year. I've reviewed most of these over at Capsule In Space, so head over there if you want more in-depth views. I'll be doing a separate list of genre films over the next week too, hopefully.

My Top 20; based on films released in Cinemas in the UK in 2011:

20. RANGO
(Gore Verbinski)
Pop surrealism in a ludicrously beautiful, utterly bizarre cgi- animated Kids Western. Might be the strangest corporate product released this year, and hurrah for that.

19. THE YELLOW SEA
(Na Hong-Jin)
The grittiest, most exhilarating thriller of the year in a year of great Korean action thrillers. Amazing set pieces, real emotional grip, brilliantly put together: all action films should aspire to this level of impact & quality.

18. DRIVE
(Nicolas Winding Refn)
Sheer style and sensual pleasure over the backing of solidly familiar genre beats, with a movie star front and centre. That this was greeted with such reverential reviews shows just how rare that kind of thing is nowadays.

17. COLD WEATHER
(Aaron Katz)
A lovely little drama-cum-detective comedy, rooted in the real world, beautifully directed.

16. THE GUARD
(John McDonagh)
The funniest film of the year. Also beautifully acted - Brendan Gleeson can seemingly do no wrong - and even quite gripping. Takes a few shots at cliches of rural Ireland along the way.

15. THE EAGLE
(Kevin MacDonald)
An old-fashioned adventure film; full of solid storytelling, action, archetypal characters, derring-do, and incredible landscapes. Give me something like this over Transformers 3 any day.

14. ANIMAL KINGDOM
(David Michod)
Nightmarishly intense crime saga, sharply characterised and directed with a real sense of tone and atmosphere.

13.WUTHERING HEIGHTS
(Andrea Arnold)
Arnold's film captures the wilds of Yorkshire within a 4:3 aspect ratio only to unleash it within Brontes characters and watches, swooning, while they suffer.

12. KILL LIST
(Ben Wheatley)
A wrenching horror, a glimpse of the pagan England beneath the out of town shopping malls and the motorway services, a genre film that isnt, quite. Unforgettable.

11. POST MORTEM
(Pablo Larrain)
The coup in 1970s Chile as personal disaster, the moral decay of a nation mirrored within one sad, lonely individual. Haunting, mesmeric, expertly directed.

10. WARRIOR
(Gavin O'Connor)
Manipulation so well-done it's a pleasure in and of itself. But also a magnificently acted, emotionally brutal study of the recession era, and an astoundingly great formula fight film. Should have been massive.

9. TAKE SHELTER
(Jeff Nichols)
Watch the skies. Michaell Shannon finds a role miraculously suited to his eerie presence, and acts the hell out of it. He's matched by the precision and control of the creeping dread Nichols orchestrates, right unto the awful, Shyamalanesque climax.

8. MEEKS CUTOFF
(Kelly Reichert)
A fine Western which ignores most all the genres rules and settles for a tensely claustrophobic(!) battle of wills between well-drawn characters in an impossible situation. Hypnotic, beautiful, provocative.

7. BEGINNERS
(Mike Mills)
A quirkfest that transcends its own language and assumptions, and approaches profundity with a real gentleness of spirit. Lovely.

6.TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY
(Thomas Alfredson)
Forensic study of deceit and decay, of class and intrigue, of England and the Cold War. Stupendously acted, miraculously adapted from complex material.

5. TRUE GRIT
(Coen Brothers)
The American creation myth in a rollicking Western, filled with great passages and performances, visually superb and absolutely entertaining.

4. A SEPARATION
(Asghar Farhadi)
Intricate, gripping drama/thriller of a dispute between two Tehran families. Sympathetic, tonally exact, and absolutely agonising in its precise evocation of a spiralling argument and its wider resonances and casualties.

3. OSLO, AUGUST 31st
(Joachim Trier)
Poetic, sublime study of Nordic depression (that makes Lars Von Trier's beautiful Melancholia look like the confused oddity that it is) without ever becoming depressing itself. Instead it is exhilarating: rapturous, nostalgic, full of longing.

2. MARGARET
(Kenneth Lonergan)
A complex, marvellously intimate epic, part character study, part polyphony, compulsive throughout.

1. TREE OF LIFE
(Terrence Malick)
Malick makes cinema a wondrous tool for exploration, and the resulting film, for all its flaws and missteps, is unlike anything made by anybody else. Vauntingly ambitious, ridiculously beautiful, always personal, this is the work of an artist who makes most directors look like mere photographers.

Bubbling Under:
You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger
Blue Valentine
The Fighter
Ballast
Armadillo
Senna
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
La Quatro Volte
Treacle Jnr
Contagion
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Hugo
Snowtown
Moneyball
Black Swan
Passenger Side
How I Ended the Summer
Norwegian Wood
Bridesmaids
Melancholia
Archipelago


You Can't See Everything (and I missed these):
Tyrannosaur, Las Acasias, The Artist, Mysteries of Lisbon, The Turin Horse, Poetry, The Future, Pina, Incendies, The Skin I Live In, Miss Bala, Dreams of a Life

FEVERISH ANTICIPATION

  Some films due for release in 2012 that I'm quite keen to see. And why.
 
THE GRANDMASTERS
(Wong Kar Wai)
A Wong Kar Wai biopic of legndary Martial artist Ip Man, you say? With Tony Leung and a trailer that looks frighteningly like the rain-lashed finale from The Matrix Revolutions? Well, yes. But if youre looking for a traditional Kung Fu movie crossed with an Ip Man biopic, then Donnie Yen already did that. Odds on here then, that Wong's version will be heavy on mood and period athmosphere, full of lovely, mysterious scenes of romantic longing, nostalgic for the Hong Kong of old, and thronged with beautiful women surrounding Leung, easily the great Chinese leading man of his era. Sounds pretty good to me..

JOHN CARTER
(Andrew Stanton)
The source material is ridiculous, but a great kind of ridiculous. Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs also created John Carter, Warlord of Mars, a Confederate Soldier from the American Civil War era who is transported to Mars via astral projection where, granted great speed, strength and agility by the gravity of the planet, he becomes involved in the complex wars between the various species of Martian he encounters, falls in love with a beautiful copper-coloured Martian Princess, and generally swashes his buckle. James Cameron's Avatar was a sort of updating on John Carter, mixed with Anne McCaffrey, but this is the real deal. People have been trying and failing to adapt Burroughs' character for decades without success, but Stanton suggested he had a visionary quality to him with the superb Wall-E, and that combined with the smooth, mythic purity of the storytelling evident in the best of Pixar's output makes me confident that he might have got this right. An immense budget, a great cast and that enigmatic first trailer, stuffed with glimpses of beautiful imagery, only increase that confidence. The second trailer is more about the action and the scale, and it makes the film look part Lawrence of Arabia, part Star Wars, and part Run of the Arrow. Sounds good to me. If you've seen Friday Night Lights the tv show then you'll know that lead here Taylor Kitsch is a star, he just needs the right vehicle. This year he's got three, following this with Peter Bergs Battleship and Oliver stones Savages. John Carter is the great unknown in the coming year of cinema; could be awful, could be incredible. It's out in March and I can't wait.


RUST AND BONE
(Jacques Audiard)
Audiard has earned loyalty by never making a bad film. The last two - A Prophet and The Beat That my Heart Skipped - were both brilliant, so I'd watch anything he decided to do. But it definitely helps that I'm a big fan of "Rust & Bone" by Craig Davidson, a short story collection focusing on gamblers, boxers, losers and outsiders on the make. Audiard is adapting some of those stories, which should prove a perfect fit with his own low down, character-based sensibility. Marion Cotillard leads the cast, which is never a bad thing, either..

POST TENEBRIS LUX
(Carlos Reygadas)
Mexican visionary Reygadas follows the amazing Silent Light with this mysterious, semi-autobiographical project. He said it will be a film where "reason will intervene as little as possible, like an expressionist painting where you try to express what you're feeling through the painting rather than depict what something looks like." He really knows how to sell a film, no?
His talent sells itself, is the unfunny truth.


THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
(Christopher Nolan)
THE AVENGERS
(Joss Whedon)
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN
(Marc Webb)
Another Summer Blockbuster Season, another Superhero invasion. Nolan's third Batman film will probably be the biggest film of the year, and for all I think that his approach has its flaws - namely excessive seriousness, shoddy action scenes and a slightly cringeworthy inability to prevent his characters from explaining his themes to the audience - he is still an interesting talent, and we are lucky he makes big summer tent poles with some intelligence and fine craftsmanship rather than the likes of Michael Bay or Brett Ratner. His Batman films are set in a clearly defined world, brilliantly cast, impressively epic, and are refreshingly (by superhero standards) cerebral. This one brings in some exciting actors - Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon Levitt - and Nolan's conception of villain Bane sounds far more interesting than The one from the comics. However, the trailer is slightly underwhelming, and crucially, for this Bat-fan; almost entirely lacking in Batman. What gives?
The Avengers looked silly from a distance; all those characters - Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Hawkeye, Black Widow - thrown together in their silly costumes, when a common problem faced by the super hero genre is overstuffing. But Marvel have been so canny with the lead-up to this film, nicely setting up Thor and Captain America in cleverly pitched films, never being too ambitious, allowing their Universe to work on its own terms, and the trailer is so poppily exciting that I'm cautiously excited about it. Whedon understands the dynamics of the group in genre storytelling, as evinced by Buffy, Firefly and a stint writing X-Men comics, the cast is a fine balance of star power and acting chops, and it promises the biggest, loudest, most outright Superhero thrills of the summer. Plus: the Hulk fighting an alien invasion. Nuff said.
Spider-Man gets a needless reboot courtesy of 500 Days of Summer director Marc Webb, promising a younger, edgier take on the character. Webb brought some style to the romcom in that film, but the Amazing Spider-Man trailer looks dull and generic in a genre best-served by personality and strong storytelling. Nevertheless, Andrew Garfield seems a good choice in the lead, the Lizard is a great villain, and Emma Stone is an upgrade on Kirsten Dunst, for me. But still, the point isn't exactly obvious.

THE MASTER
(Paul Thomas Anderson)
The new Paul Thomas Anderson. A period drama about a Scientology-style Cult and its founder. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, score by Jonny Greenwood.
Anderson is quite probably the great American Director of his generation, as There Will Be Blood confirmed. Anything he does is something I have to see.
You need to know anymore?


THE SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK
(David O. Russell)
Having rejuvenated his career with the success of The Fighter, Russell returns to the comedy-drama of Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees with this adaptation of Matthew Quick's novel starring Bradley Cooper as a man newly released after a 4 year stint in a mental hospital, who moves back in with his mother and tries to rekindle his relationship with his estranged wife. Sounds weird and maybe a little uncomfortable. That's good, both those things Russell does well.

COSMOPOLIS
(David Cronenberg)
Yes yes, it stars RPatz. But it's Cronenberg does Delillo, which is either a perfect meeting between author and director or too much of a good thing. Should be fascinating, either way.

LOOPER
(Rian Johnson)
A sci-fi time travel action movie from the young talent behind Brick, starring Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon Levitt and Emily Blunt. The reviews of an early cut of Looper have been pretty rapturous. Johnson seems a unique talent - Brick is quite unlike anything else I've ever seen, and quite remarkable, and The Brothers Bloom, while suffering from unmistakeable "difficult second album syndrome" is filled with good things - and this middle ground between mainstream genre thrills and personal indie filmmaking is exactly where he should be at this point in his career.

ONLY GOD FORGIVES
(Nicholas Winding Refn)
Refn, having finally got some recognition from hipsters with his study in 80s cool, Drive, reunites with Ryan Gosling on a Bangkok-set Noir about Thai boxing. He's long been one of World Cinemas more interesting directors, and this can be nothing less than fascinating.

THE WETTEST COUNTRY
(John Hillcoat)
Just like The Proposition, a Nick Cave/John Hillcoat collaboration, this prohibition-era Bootlegger drama has a strong cast (Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska) and subject matter seemingly perfectly suited to the director. Hardy and Shia Lebouef play two moonshine-making brothers. Violence, romance, and very probably some hard-bitten poetry ensue.

SHAME
(Steve McQueen)
McQueen and Michael Fassbinder reunite after the brilliant Hunger on this drama about a youngish marketing executive and his sex addiction in modern Manhattan. It's gotten very mixed reviews, but the Trailer is brilliant and Fassbinder is the real deal; a leading man movie star who can act. He's joined here by Cary Mulligan.

THE ASSASSIN
(Hou Hsiao-Hsien)
One of the Worlds great cinematic masters, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien has never made a martial arts film before. The Assassin has been in the works since 2007, stars HHHs frequent leading lady Shu Qi alongside Chang Chen, and concerns a female assassin. How his trademark style will work in the context of this genre is impossible to say, but I cant wait to find out.

THE BURIAL
(Terrence Malick)
Malick. Not actually called The Burial, either. A youngish cast (Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Olga Kurylenko, Barry Pepper) and - a first for Malick aside from the Sean Penn sequences in Tree of Life - a contemporary setting. Probably won't be out til 2014, but you never know...


HAYWIRE
(Steven Soderbergh)
Am I alone in loving Soderbergh most when he experiments in the boundaries of commercial cinema? When he uses his post Out of Sight heat to make an LA-set English Gangster movie by way of Alain Resnais? Or turns the second Oceans film into an insane collage of techniques and skits? Anyway, this is written by Lem Dobbs, his collaborator on The Limey, features an astounding cast of actors for real-life Martial artist Gina Carano to beat her way through (Michael Fassbinder, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas), locations in Barcelona, Dublin and the US, and looks a pretty stock double-crossed spy tale, only with fight-scenes shot the way they should be: with brutality and true impact. It's got a David Holmes score too...


EXTRATERRESTRIAL
(Nacho Vigalondo)
Vigalondo's debut, TimeCrimes, was a clever, stylish, gripping genre piece which suggested he might some day do great things. This unclassifiable sophomore film follows a man who wakes up beside a beautiful girl, in her apartment one evening with no memory of the drunken night before. He is Julio, she is Julia. Soon they discover an alien ship hovering above the city nearby. So then we get a romcom, a drama, and a genre film, wrapped up in a lovely little Spanish package. Looks brilliant.

THE BOURNE LEGACY
(Tony Gilroy)
Gilroy returns to the franchise his script began, Jeremy Renner replaces Matt Damon, playing not Bourne but another Treadstone Assassin, and I imagine it'll be more of the same globetrotting-gritty-wetwork stuff, only - given Gilroy's disparaging words about Paul Greengrass' direction of the last two Bourne films - probably more classically directed. Gilroy's Michael Clayton is one of the better American films of the last few years, but his Duplicity was a clever bore, so all bets are off here.

COGANS TRADE
(Andrew Dominik)
Dominik finally follows the sublime The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford with an adaptation of George V Higgins 1974 novel. The book is typical Higgins; told almost entirely in dazzling dialogue which reveals a tightly wound, beautifully simple plot about a card game heist and the vengeance wrought upon the hold-up men by the mob. Brad Pitt plays the mob fixer charged with finding and punishing those responsible, and Dominik has surrounded him with some fabulous character actors including James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins and Sam Shepherd. If Dominik's last film showed anything, it's that he has the talent to take a formidably distinctive novel and turn it into a distinctive film. This could be brilliant.

APRES MAI
(Olivier Assayas)
Assayas follows the impressive Carlos, which studied the politics of Europe and the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s, with this drama about a young man dealing with the social and political upheavals of Europe in the1960s. Assayas is one of the most consistently interesting filmmakers in France, making films which are accessible and involving but always deal in ideas and substantial themes. As a stylist he improves with each film, and this return to a slightly more intimate world after Carlos' epic canvas is a welcome move.

SKYFALL
(Sam Mendes)
I've never really liked a Sam Mendes film. He's obviously an intelligent, talented chap, with impeccable taste. But his films, for all that they all contain fantastic elements, great moments, lovely passages, for all that, they all feel a little safe and predictable. That may mean he's the perfect fit for a film in a series which demands some safety, something predictable. He's also the perfect age to understand what a Bond film should be, can be, must be. Daniel Craig is joined by a ridiculously classy cast: Ralph Fiennes (rumours suggest as Blofeld), Ben Whishaw (Q), Javier Bardem, Naomi Harris and Albert Finney. Roger Deakins, master cinematographer, shoots. A Bond film with serious pedigree.

THE LAST SUPPER
(Lu Chuan)
A big Chinese period drama. A bunch make it over here every year. But this one is directed by the talented Lu Chuan, who made City of Life and Death and Mountain Patrol, and that's reason enough to make me excited about it.


TWYLIGHT ZONES
(David Chase)
A semi-autobiographical debut film from an American director set in 60s New Jersey about a group of friends who form a band and try to make it big? Sounds like the kind of thing that goes straight to DVD in the UK with a cast of young prettyboys and generic starlets, a couple of whom might surprise us by making it big a few years later. Only this one is directed by David Chase, creator of the Sopranos, which often played like the longest movie ever made anyway, and suggests that this could be something better and more sophisticated. But then Ricky Gervais had made a couple of sublime tv series, and his first film - a comedy drama about a group of friends in Suburban England in the 70s - was a bit fa misfire, so who knows? Tv and cinema, for all their similarities, are very different.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA
(Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Ceylan's latest has gotten lots of paise at festivals, and sounds like a Change of pace for him, since it has genre elements. It's a 140 minute drama, methodically following a murder investigation in rural Turkey, and its reportedly brilliant.


DJANGO UNCHAINED
(Quentin Tarantino)
Tarantino finally makes that long-promised Western, and it turns out it's not really a Western at all, but a "Southern", a tale set in the South during the Civil War era, following a slave turned Bounty Hunter as he sets out to rescue his wife from a brutal Plantation Owner. But the title suggests it'll be full of references to Spaghetti Westerns, it's already got a great cast (Jamie Foxx as the bounty hunter, Leonardo DiCaprio as the Plantation Owner, Kurt Russell, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Kerry Washington, Christoph Waltz, Don Johnson, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Samuel L Jackson in other parts) and it's Tarantino.


BIG HOUSE
(Matteo Garrone)
Garrone burst onto the International scene with the ferocious Gomorrah, and his follow-up is this Drama about the modern obsession with fame and celebrity. Not much else is known, but he's been working on it for three years, and expectations are high..


THE DICTATOR
(Larry Charles)
Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles complete a sort of "idiot trilogy" with this comedy about a Middle Eastern Dictator who may bear resemblance to certain real-life despots. For all the latters evident flaws, both Borat and Bruno made me laugh as much as anything I've seen in a cinema in years. Cohen is a brave comic, and Charles seems to get the best out of him. The trailer is middling but I'm there anyway.

PROMETHEUS
(Ridley Scott)
Scott is famously better at world-building than he is at narrative or characterisation or any of that boring old storytelling crap. That explains why all of his historical dramas - even the ones with massive flaws - are all set in vivid, beautiful worlds. He often feels more interested in the background than foreground action. That is a gift well-suited to sci-fi. But he hasn't made a sci-fi film since the one-two punch combo of Alien and Blade Runner established him as a giant of the genre thirty years ago. Prometheus is his return, and the images that have escaped the set so far and the arresting trailer promise a predictably visually strong production. The early confusion over whether or not it was an Alien prequel suggested a troubling amount of rewriting, but Losts Damon Lindelof seems a safe pair of hands, and Scotts work is rarely without a personality; Prometheus will be the film he wants to make. The cast is promising, too, full of mature class-acts from Michael Fassbinder and Charleze Theron through Idris Elba and Patrick Wilson to Guy Pearce and Rafe Spall.


KILL BIN LADEN
(Kathryn Bigelow)
That's not the title, only a rumour. Nobody knows the title yet. What is known is that Bigelow's follow-up to The Hurt Locker is this factual account of the Hunt for and Black Ops mission to assassinate Osama Bin Laden. The only confirmed cast members so far are promising character players Chris Pratt and Jason Clarke (better known from great work on tv in Parks And Recreation and Brotherhood, respectively) but you can be sure a director of Bigelow's talent - and expertise with action - will make this an exhilarating, intelligent, hot button thriller.


PARKER
(Taylor Hackford)
Jason Statham playing Richard Stark's Parker is worth a post all of it's own, but it's not an entirely terrible notion. And the fact that this is a Stark adaptation at all is a very good thing. The rest of the cast is very true to the noirish nastiness of Starks worldview: Nick Nolte, Michael Chiklis and even Jennifer Lopez could all have stepped comfortably from the pages of any of the Parker novels. As it happens this one is an adaptation of Flashfire, one of the recent books - Stark, a pseudonym for Donald Westlake, retired Parker for 23 years between 1973 and 1997 - and the only thing that really gives me pause is journeyman Director Taylor Hackford, who seems to have mediocrity running through his artistic veins.

LOVE
(Michael Haneke)
Haneke films are an event, even small-scale dramas like this one. It centres on an elderly couple whose relationship is tested when they have to care for their daughter (Isabelle Huppert) after she has a stroke. Haneke is on an incredible run of film's - his entire career, really - and him working with Huppert for the first time since The Piano Teacher is an exciting prospect.


SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS
(Martin McDonagh)
McDonagh follows In Bruges with this dark comedy about a screenwriter caught up in a dognapping plot, which sounds very mid-90s post-Tarantino. The cast includes Colin Farrell, Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson and Abbie Cornish. If it's half as good as McDonagh's debut film, that'll be fine with me.

DREDD
(Pete Travis)
Yeah, another Judge Dredd movie, sixteen years after the fudged Stallone version came and went with so little impact. This one is written by Alex Garland, whose track record as a screenwriter includes 28 Days Later and Sunshine, uncommonly interesting takes on familiar old genres both, and directed by the slightly less inspiring Travis, while the versatile Karl Urban plays the Lawman himself. As a character, Dredd could have been made for cinema: visually strong, suited to insertion into any plot or sort of story, his world is rich, funny and bizarre, and should always be full of visual wonders. Hopefully the film is too..

ELYSIUM
(Neil Blomkamp)
District 9 had its detractors, but it was an accomplished, ambitious, unusual sci-fi film from a filmmaker with a clearly defined aesthetic sensibility and a storytelling style all his own. His next film - actually due in 2013, I believe - is another sci-fi film, starring Matt Damon, Sharlito Kopley, Jodie Foster and a host of Latin actors (Diego Luna, Alice Braga, Rodrigo Mora). Its set 150 years in the future, concerns aliens and humans, Damon plays a convict; and aside from that, nobody really knows anything. Blomkamp has a big budget and big stars here, so I'm hoping the larger canvas doesn't overwhelm him, because this could possibly be something very special.

BULLET TO THE HEAD
(Walter Hill)
I find it inspiring that veteran Walter Hill, who made a fistful of pared down action classics in the late 70s and early 80s (The Warriors, The Driver, Southern Comfort), peaked commercially with the definitive buddy-cop movie (48 Hours) and has consistently made the best Westerns of the last few decades (The Long Riders, Geronimo, Wild Bill) is still directing. Here he's collaborating with another couple of veterans in the form of Sylvester Stallone and producer Joel Silver on an adaptation of a French Graphic Novel about a Hitman and a cop teaming up to solve some murders. I'm hoping for at least one slow motion action scene from Hill, once the master of the form.

NO
(Pablo Larrain)
Larrain has announced himself as a serious talent with his last two studies of the moral corruption of Chile under Pinochet. Both Tony Manero and Post Mortem were beautiful, disturbing, blackly funny and shocking, and here Larrain again takes on his countries past in a story tracing the experiences of aN advertising executive who devises a plan to beat Pinochet in a 1988 referendum. Larrain's rising status is signalled by the fact that Gael Garcia Bernal plays the executive.

THE LONELIEST PLANET
(Julia Loktev)
Bernal stars again here, working with young Russian-American director Loktev - whose last film, the extraordinary Day Night Day Night indicated that she might be an enormous talent, with a sensibility more Russian than American - on an adaptation of a brilliant Tom Bissell story about a young couple on a holiday Trek across the mountains of Georgia who run into some complications with the locals. I missed it at the London Film Festival, but all I've seen and read make it look and sound brilliant.

WHAT RICHARD DID
(Leonard Abrahamson)
Abrahamson is the Irish director of Adam & Paul and Garage, minor classics both, and this is an adaptation of Kevin Power's terrific novel " Bad Day in Blackrock", which fictionalised the murder of a young man outside a Dublin Nightclub by a group of affluent Teens and in doing so, skewered the condition of Celtic Tiger Ireland in all it's moral confusion. If anybody can do such a book justice, it's Abrahamson, who has displayed a great feel for tone and place alongside an ear for black comedy in his work so far.


GRAVITY
(Alfonso Cuaron)
Cuaron is, I think, the real deal; something of a visionary. This sci-fi drama reportedly follows two astronauts who have been accidentally cut loose in the middle of a space-walk and are floating into the void, alone together. They are played by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney and rumours suggest Curaon is attempting to shoot the whole thing in what will looks like one Russian Ark-like single unbroken take. The script had better be good to support such an idea, but I have faith in Cuaron, and that starry cast suggests the material is strong too. Sounds incredible,

THE RAID
(Gareth Evans)
The trailer and festival responses to this Indonesian action thriller - directed by an expatriate Welshman - suggest that it's one of those envelope pushing b-movies, an efficient machine which delivers a succession of pummelling action scenes one after another. The concept finds a SWAT team raiding a building filled with dangerous criminals, then having to fight their way through it, room by room, floor by floor, man by man.

SNOW PIERCER
(Bong Joon-Ho)
Koreas most eclectic and interesting mainstream director (he made Memories of Murder, The Host and Mother, all excellent) returns with this Post-Apocalyptic story, adapted from a French comic and following a Disparate group of survivors travelling across the icy waste aboard a train...

SAVAGES
(Oliver Stone)
Don Winslow's novel is one of those books that reads like it was written to be adapted; it features strong, bold characters, a simple, compelling plot, and plenty of action. The story depicts two youngish middle class Californian drug producers who suddenly find themselves taking on a murderous Mexican Cartel who want their business. The cartel play dirty, abducting the duo's shared girlfriend and blackmailing them for their product. Only they decide to fight back.. The cast for Stone's version skews young (Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson as the duo) and classy (Benicio DelToro and Salma Hayek as Cartel management) and he has some form with Noir and the crime genre in the shape of the entertaining U-Turn. He's also due a hit.

I WISH
(Hirokazu Koreeda)
Koreeda is a true master, capable of finely-tuned, perfectly weighted, surprisingly moving dramas, and this, like his earlier Nobody Knows, focuses on children. It tells the story of two young brothers, forced to live in different cities by their. Parents separation, and their dreams and attempts to be reunited. Some of the directors films have never made it to the UK, so fingers crossed that this on will.

MOONRISE KINGDOM
(Wes Anderson)
Wes Anderson directing Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzmann, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton and Bruce Willis, set in the 60s, Alexandr Desplat score. Oh yes. 

Vintage Trailer of the Week 54

Whatever happened to Christopher Crowe? Well, I know what happened, he now owns a business constructing racing cars for NASCAR, having apparently been a Racing Driver before he began his career in film. But what I mean is: what happened to that film career?

The answer seems to be that he emerged in television, and after a few cinematic projects of varying quality, he returned to television. Then, he just walked away. But he left a couple of intriguing credits behind him. Most obviously, he shares a writing credit with Michael Mann on The Last of the Mohicans, perhaps Mann's most accessible and downright entertaining film. He also wrote James Foley's Fear, a middling home invasion thriller with a Pre-stardom Reese Witherspoon and Mark Wahlberg. His best known tv work is probably the time travel show Seven Days or the Twilght Zone-aping The Watcher.

He wrote and directed two films which received theatrical distribution. In 1992, the derivative, badly cast erotic thriller Whispers in the Dark may have ended his budding directorial career, so abject was its failure.
His first feature, made in 1988, had marked him out as a director of promise. That film was also a thriller, only it was set in modish 60s Vietnam, in a city crawling with servicemen and the scum who feed off them. It was called Off Limits in the US, but given a better, far more evocative title in International territories; Saigon.

Coming near the end of that second, strangely eclectic cycle of Vietnam movies - which included comedies like Good Morning Vietnam alongside the likes of Platoon and Full Metal Jacket - it pairs Willem Dafoe and Gregory Hines - back when both still seemed like possible stars - as M.P. Investigators, hunting a killer who is murdering Vietnamese prostitutes. When they realise the man they're after may be Top Brass, a whole new World of corruption and other words commonly used in trailers for thrillers opens up to them. The plot may be pretty standard for the erotic thriller genre, but the movie is sweatily atmospheric and intense, with a great sense of place and a sure tone throughout. The performances are also strong in the main - Fred Ward is as reliably good value as ever - and in comparison to much of the genre cinema produced in America in 2011, it seems an impressively mature piece of work, for all its melodramatic excesses. It suggests that Crowe may have made an exceptional genre film, sooner or later, and that NASCAR's gain is cinemas loss.



Full trailer: http://youtu.be/2ehPfwCg3wk

Going Dutch

Kenneth Branagh loves a Dutch Angle. That's when a frame is tilted, or "canted".
Here's an example from Thor, which is full of such shots:





That's not a problem for me. After all, you could argue that the Superhero genre is the home of the Dutch angle, historically at least:





But occasional attempts to pay tribute to the visuals of that series - which remains a fantastic, hilarious watch, fun, satirical, archly camp and knowing but never smug - have not always worked out well:





Brian DePalma may be the saviour of the Dutch angle. He loves them, utilises them in most of his work, and even incorporates them thematically. In Mission Impossible he tilts his frame whenever Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt feels he is being lied to (but also at other times):









A DePalma Superhero movie, now that would be worth watching. And give you a pain in the neck...

We Are Family

There was an interview with Irish author Roddy Doyle in the Guardian last week which discusses, in some detail, his work as writer on the 1994 BBC mini-series Family, its reception and the effect that had on him.
I thought nobody else remembered Family. It's hard to find mention of it, even on the Internet in these days of finding everything on the Internet. This despite the fact that it was written by Booker-winning bestselling novelist Doyle and directed by subsequent Arthouse Superstar Michael Winterbottom. Also despite the fact that Doyle's novel The Woman Who Walked Into Doors was a spin- off from the series, focusing intently on one character.

Well, Family was a big deal in Ireland at that time. As Doyle describes in the interview, Ireland was finally emerging into the 20th Century in the early 90s, with European Union money going into infrastructure and technology. The Irish National football team had qualified for two consecutive World Cups, and Riverdance, of all things, had been a massive feelgood success on its debut at the Eurovision Song Contest that year. Then came Doyle and Winterbottom's Family, with its poverty, criminality, drug abuse, domestic violence, chronic alcoholism and suggestions of incestuous lust. People - the kind of people who ring radio phone-ins - were appalled. But Family was an incredible piece of television drama; brilliantly written, uniformly well-acted and directed with Winterbottom's considerable feel for place and people.




Doyle's script is somewhat novelistic, attempting a polyphonic portrayal of these people, with each episode focusing on a different character. It begins with John-Paul, the eldest son, who is just beginning Secondary School, then his smalltime criminal father, Charlo, then the eldest daughter, Nicola, who is becoming uncomfortable about the way Charlo is looking a her, before finishing with Charlo's abused wife. Her emancipation and new self-respect gives the series an unexpectedly upbeat ending, but much of the preceding action is the bleakest Doyle ever wrote. Not that it's unrepresentative, on the contrary it captures working class Dublin perfectly, which is partly why it was so controversial. Sometimes looking in a mirror can be uncomfortable.

The performances are perhaps what make Family so memorable. Sean McGinley pops up in every major American or British production shot in or about Ireland or the Irish in a supporting role - there he is in Braveheart, Gangs of New York, The General etc - but as Charlo he is electric, full of rage and self-loathing and confusion but never too sympathetic, never downplaying his characters more monstrous side. Ger Ryan, mostly a jobbing actress on Irish television, more than matches him as Paula, and her transformation from long-suffering victim to independent single mother is the emotional uppercut of the climactic installment.

Family is finally released on DVD in June, which will hopefully restore it's reputation as one of the great tv dramas of the last couple of decades.

Live By the Sword

Why have the folk storytelling traditions of the British Isles never really been reflected in the cinema produced here? These Islands are rich in myth and have an ancient tradition of storytelling, but British cinema has long seemed oblivious to both. Partly the success and influence of American cinema is to blame. In America, the first narrative film set the tone; it was a Western, a uniquely, distinctively American genre, and that genre was instantly embraced as the American genre, somehow embodying the American national myth.
Genres that were not native were rapidly Americanised: the Gangster story made more sense in America during and after the Depression and Prohibition than it ever had anywhere else before, and Hollywood took that area and established iconography and modes for it only slightly less powerful than the ones it had crystallised for the Western before it.

So British genre cinema already had a model in the earliest years of the medium as a commercial concern. And though British studios made thrillers and War films and adventure films and crime dramas, they were all, on some level, imitations of the American films playing in British cinemas. Most European Nations had similar issues: they made Westerns in Germany in the 1920s, and in France and Italy the dominant genres in the early years of Film were crime thrillers. German expressionism elevated the horror film but this was a brief aberrative period and American Cinema absorbed what those German films had done and made it mainstream and normalised. What Europe did well, even at that point, was heritage drama, costume period pieces akin to the traditions of much European theatre and literature. This was as true of Britain as it was of France.

But the big British National myths: the likes of King Arthur, Robin Hood, Dick Turpin and even the lesser-known Spring-Heeled Jack, they were never definitively tackled by British cinema. Director Percy Stow made a silent Robin Hood film in 1908 but in 1922 Robin Hood, an American silent starring Douglas Fairbanks, was released and became a massive hit. The version of the character featured in that film - the swashbuckling, mustachioed hero - entered into the collective cultural consciousness and that iconic figure was solidified by the 1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn. Here was a British figure as interpreted by American Cinema, British myth repackaged for a Global Market by American tastes. King Arthur suffered a similar, though far less commercially successful, fate, even suffering the indignity of becoming a massively popular musical on stage and screen. Both icons would in time become the subjects of Animated Disney Films, making them culturally fixed as American icons as much as British.

Later British television would repeatedly address these characters, but they had been already co-opted by Hollywood and these portrayals are generally revisionist reimaginings working in the shadows of the American versions. The popular 1980s series Robin of Sherwood, for example, replaced the primary colours and straightforward manichean conflicts of most Robin Hood stories with a dirty realist visual approach - most likely taken from Richard Lester's superb Robin and Marian - and stirred in some Celtic mysticism and a little historical licence (one of Robin's Merry Men was a Moor), but British cinema, by the 1980s, never really waded into such waters.
All of this left Britain - from early on in its history as a film-producing Nation - without a natural action genre of its own. British adventure films had no fixed form; there were Colonial films set in the jungles of the East, the occasional American-style period swashbuckler, the odd Western-aping Highwayman film, War dramas and Spy stories, which could have been Hollywood productions if the accents of the performers were to change.
In contrast a nation like Japan already produced a steady supply of Samurai films and China had a rapidly developing Kung Fu cinema industry. Both these genres had similarities with the Western, but this was not quite a disadvantage, as the happy influence of John Ford, say, on the films of Akira Kurosawa suggests, and they were clearly indigenous genres which could have been developed nowhere else.

In the last few decades, the commercial instability of British cinema, by now a fraction of the industry it was in the 1940s and 50s, much of its creative and technical personnel at the service of American money, has meant that a couple of sub genres have tended to dominate production here. Britain has excelled at realistic drama since the "kitchen sink" movement of the 1960s, and much British output still takes this approach. High-profile directors like Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and even Shane Meadows all fall under this broad umbrella-term. Costume drama, driven by the continued popularity of television productions made by the BBC and ITV, is a consistently successful British form, much of it based on an unparalleled National literature, from Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen and the Brontes to Evelyn Waugh and William Golding. And the British sense of humour means that Comedy is still a thriving genre, with television providing a steady stream of creative comedic talent for Cinema. But action subgenres tend to copy Hollywood forms to a slavish extent; with the post-Tarantino mockney Gangster films of the 1990s ( which altered little about the American gangster genre) an obvious and dispiriting example.




Sword and sandal films, however, for lack of a better term, have recently begun to crop up in a fascinating little mini-Wave. Britain has the history, landscape and creative and technical know-how to thrive in this genre, but these films are really a sub-genre, albeit currently quite a rich and fertile one.
The release this month of Kevin McDonald's The Eagle offers up a fascinating contrast to the films I'm discussing. It is a big prestige Hollywood production, featuring a few rising stars( Channing Tatum, Jamie Bell, Tahar Rahim), made by a Director becoming a solid, somewhat anonymous craftsman, with strong production values, a massive marketing budget and the intention of being a classy, roundly entertaining epic.
Compare it to Neil Marshall's Centurion from last year, a film with a near-identical settting and somewhat similar premise. Marshall's film is a B-movie, quite proudly a bloodthirsty, action-heavy genre film with a budget roughly half that of McDonald's. The films share some characteristics; these days, dirty realism rules in period portrayals of the Medieval or pre-Medieval World, and so we get to see a world of mud and rust, dirt-streaked skin and tattered clothing, mostly rudimentary buildings, harsh weather and inhospitable landscapes.
But while McDonald's film is somewhat ambitious - it wants to be about Rome and colonialism, it wants to develop it's characters and give them journeys (it's not entirely successful in fulfilling these ambitions) - Centurion only has one ambition: it wants to be a ride. It prizes narrative momentum and exhilarating action scenes above all else, charging along in one long pursuit, interrupting itself only for violent combat and one inevitable romantic interlude.
Both films heavily feature sword battles, and it is perhaps here that Marshall's film reveals it true nature most freely. The violence in The Eagle is serious and visceral, reflecting McDonald's desire for the film to have some impact, and yet it remains strangely tasteful throughout, too sober in intent and careful in execution. The violence in Centurion is almost exploitative, with eye-stabbings and clubbings and limb-choppings featuring prominently amidst a sea of blood.

There is a long tradition of ultra-violence in Sword & Sandal cinema, some of it even originating in the genre's Half-brother, the Historical Drama. Orson Welles' Chimes At Midnight is notable for horrendously visceral battle scenes, and Robert Bresson's Lancelot du Lac juxtaposes its angsty conscience-wrestling and philosophising with Knights beheading one another so graphically it's worthy of Sam Peckinpah (and was soon parodied by Monty Python). Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (in the restored version from the 1990s, at any rate) features a couple of eye-popping action scenes, as does Clive Donner's Alfred the Great, and Mel Gibson's Braveheart, a film heavily influenced by Spartacus, pushes that angle even further, featuring extended Epic battles of stunningly gratuitous brutality: picks stud eye sockets only to erupt out of skulls, maces crush cheekbones, torsos are wrent asunder, limbs casually lopped off.

Marshall is the sort of director who is surely aware of this history. His previous film was the derivative movie geek wet dream Doomsday which mixed Escape from New York, Luc Besson and Mad Max to mediocre effect, but he would surely understand that many fans of Sword and Sandal films love the genre chiefly for its old-fashioned action, for men fighting with swords. Peter Jackson, another movie geek Director, understood this and his adaptations of Tolkein are filled with lavishly detailed and brilliantly executed battle scenes which crib from Kurosawa and Kung Fu movies as they go. These new British Sword and sandal b-movies all appreciate that bloody mayhem is a huge part of the appeal of their genre, and they are made by writers and directors who are extremely aware of the many ways such mayhem has been approached in the past.

So Centurion is really a revisionist 70s chase Western in disguise, with Picts replacing native Americans and Roman Legions instead of U.S. cavalry. But British history is long and interesting enough to have room for this story to be told - it could even have been set in an entirely different era with different sets of combatants; Vikings or Normans, the Civil War era, the Dark Ages - and still have qualified as a Sword and sandal film. Christopher Smith's Black Death, for instance, follows a disillusioned monk and a jaded bunch of Mercenaries during the 14th Century plague outbreak as they journey into eerie marshlands in search of a town reputedly free of infection. Financed and shot in Germany, Smith's film qualifies as British because of its setting and key creative personnel. Some of its most important influences are uniquely British, too. It seems to refer to three cult classics which all investigate the old, weird Britain of isolated rural communities and surviving pagan traditions; The Wicker Man, Blood on Satans Claw and Witchfinder General. In Smith's film, the Mercenaries, led by Sean Bean's iron-willed homicidal zealot, are searching for Witchcraft and they get that and more in this creepily mellow community (a sidelong suggestion of contemporary New Age worship is set with the costume design). The directors three previous films were all horror movies and he does a fine job here of maintaining a sense of dread and foreboding throughout, though the avoidance of the supernatural and ultimately human nature of the evil they encounter adds to this film's pessimistic impact. The coda is devastating, and if Black Death does have some aesthetic ambition, it's heart seems resolutely pulpy. It's battle scenes are filmed with real relish and gory aplomb and Smith has described it as a "men on a mission movie".




There are quieter, almost meditative moments in Black Death, however, and passages of it reminded me fleetingly of Andrei Tarkovsky and most particularly his extraordinary Medieval Epic, Andrei Rublev, which is, amongst other things, a fine example of Dirty realism in this genre. The Continental European approach to treatments of these eras has long differed from that presented by Hollywood. Directors like Frantisec Vlacil, Tarkovsky and Grigori Kontisev each depicted a muddy and brutal world where life was difficult, violence never distant, and death close behind it. Yet each was able to broach big, often awkward themes in his work: Kontisev's Shakespeare adaptations are as close to the complexity of the plays as any of the English-language versions, Vlacil's superb Valley of the Bees and Marketa Lazarova both examine themes of faith, loyalty and morality, and Andrei Rublev is a searching investigation into art, creativity and spirituality. Yet each made spectacular and beautiful films, convincing in their historical detail and authentically atmospheric. Perhaps the finest example of European art cinema treating the Medieval era, however, is Robert Bresson's fabulous Lancelot Du Lac, a mysterious, subtle yet grotesquely violent treatment of the Arthuran legend which Is unique in Bresson's filmography for it's strange Peckinpah-reads-a-courtly-romance effect.

These new English films resemble those European productions only visually; in their production design and photography (although those films were generally in black and White the effect of their muted looks are well-suggested by modern cinematography). The artistic ambition and imagination of those European directors is no longer present in Sword and Sandal films. Even in Mainland Europe, art films no longer command large enough budgets to allow for period recreation on anything but a small scale. So a modern Russian Medieval film is more likely to be a copy of an American production like the Conan-plagiarising fantasy Wolfhound. Even Sergei Bodrov's impressive Genghis Khan biopic Mongol plays more like an American Epic biopic such as Alexander or Braveheart than a uniquely Russian, artistically ambitious piece of work like Andrei Rublev.

Much of this has come about because of the huge success of Ridley Scott's Gladiator. A massive worldwide commercial and critical hit which won Awards and made Russell Crowe a star after many near misses, Scott's film also suggested that the public retained an appetite for sword and sandal movies, done right. Many of the American films which attempted to repeat it's success floundered on one or more elements of the recipe required - in the case of Oliver Stone's Alexander, Wolfgang Pederson's Troy and even Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, they all miscast their leading man after Gladiator had demonstrated the need for an actor capable of suggesting some old-fashioned masculinity without sounding silly speaking the Cod-English accented dialogue the established conventions of the genre demand.
The look of these newer English films is directly influenced by the first sequence in Gladiator, where Maximus' troops battle barbarians in wintry Northern Europe. The cold grey-blue muddy look established by Scott in that sequence - and repeated in the early European scenes in Kingdom of Heaven - has been a feature of all these films, and the majority have also borrowed Scott's approach to the first major battle there: an approach he in turn took from Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan, involving shaky handheld cameras, rapid cutting, shallowness of field and overexposed film. One film obviously indebted to Scott and which has proven surprisingly influential upon the films I'm discussing here is Antoine Fuqua's King Arthur with Clive Owen and Keira Knightly. It plays almost like a stylistic template for this material: it has the dirty visual pallette, the gritty production design, the Orc-like native barbarians, the gratuitous combat violence, the Kurosawa lifts and the Shaky-cam action scenes which have all now become commonplace. Unfortunately, it also has a terrible script, predictable plot and some downright bad acting, all of which make portions of it feel hilariously camp.

The success of Gladiator obviously indirectly led to the creation of HBOs Rome, too, and that show has given this new English wave one of it's leading men. James Purefoy had been a jobbing British actor for years, popping up in lead roles on stage and in tv in all sorts of material but never making the big breakthrough any actor needs. His role as a proud and lusty Mark Antony was one of the most memorable turns in Rome and it demonstrated that he was comfortable with period dialogue and looked good in armour, as did his small but crucial turn in A Knights Tale.




In England, when a film like Jonathan English's Ironclad needs a leading man, it finds Purefoy. He plays a classic archetype; the Warrior who has seen too much War and suffers for it. He plays a Templar who has taken a vow of silence after years of butchery in the Holy Land but is dragged into a new conflict in England. This film appears to have a little ambition, it's story of Nobility in conflict with Royalty fairly quaking with heft and import. And yet, English is plainly most interested in the gritty detail of his protracted battle scenes, and his character arcs make sure to focus on the way these men are changed and effected by the violence they experience. An hour or so in, after a couple of gruesome deaths by blunt instrument and a few disembowelments, the central idea - that these common men are fighting for their right to a voice - has more or less dissipated amidst the clouds of blood. English steals liberally from the usual sources. His early "getting the team together again" scenes especially echo Seven Samurai, and he displays a fine understanding of the dynamics of these sorts of action sequences: the scene where Purefoy first unleashes his immense broadsword is terrifically done and appropriately awesome in it's violence.

Ironclad in fact picks up where Ridley Scott's Robin Hood left off; with the signing of the Magna Carta. This make a comparison between the films inevitable (it doesn't hurt that Jonathan English is obviously a big fan of Scott's historical films). Robin Hood, like The Eagle is a big budget studio tentpole production, with big stars (Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett), massive action sequences, a bloated running time and a script that is a bit of a mess. Scott focuses far more than English upon the issues behind the creation of the Magna Carta, with much debate on rights and motivational speechifying from Crowe's Robin. This makes much of the film stolid, leaden and weighed down by it's determination to be serious. The action scenes are impressive enough - though the massive beach battle at the finale does feature a lazy slo-mo "Noooooo!!" - but English accomplishes more with a quarter of the budget. Crowe, with his brawny old-fashioned masculinity, was born for such meaty Historical roles and he carries the film as few actors could. Purefoy matches him, projecting an intensity that fits well with the sombre, bloody tone of the film. He had similar success in Solomon Kane, another violent semi-British historical pulp epic, where he played Robert E Howard's Puritan Warrior as a lethal, haunted West Country gunslinger, battling demons while praying to God.

Films like Solomon Kane and Nicolas Winding Refn's extraordinary Valhalla Rising don't quite belong to this sub-genre, though they are associated. Refn's film was shot in Scotland and is just as violent as any of the others I've mentioned, possibly moreso in it's unrelentingly savage first act, but it has aesthetic ambitions; a layer of pretension, even, which is beyond them. Comparable recent American productions, the Nicholas Cage-starring Season of the Witch, say, wander directly into camp territory even Centurion avoids, aided by a distinctively British yobbish sensibility. This is tricky material, a difficult period to get right, with a potential for a pantomime quality increased by the costumes and sets and hairstyles, but most of all by the language. Suggesting an archaic brand of speech in modern English is delicate, and having banal conversations about historical figures treads perilously close to Monty Python territory. Or, as one character in Centurion puts it: "A wall? Is that Hadrian's great plan?"

Much as I admire this rich young British sub-genre, I still mourn the absence of any films that really do capture the folksy, rural traditions of storytelling in Ireland and the U.K. instead of applying bastardised American genre principles to British history. But then European Cinema contains little of the kind of film I mean. The only example that springs readily to mind is Nils Gaup's excellent Finnish 1987 Pathfinder (Ofelas in Sami) which adapts a Sami legend into a taut, eerie and exciting adventure film which feels like it could almost have been made at any time over the last fifty years. I can't imagine anything like it ever getting made in a modern Britain so enslaved to mainstream cinematic modes and genres. And that's something of a shame.

Anticipation: Our Day Will Come

It has undoubtedly been noted before how different to his father Romain Gavras is as a director. Costa-Gavras is best known for his political thrillers; the likes of the brilliant State of Siege, Missing and Z, all leftwing, politically engaged yet engrossing narratives with thriller elements. It says much about the contemporary global film industry that Romain's earliest notable work has been on music videos instead of low budget or independent films. After establishing a reputation in that area for boldness, stylistic fluency and an originality of vision, he has graduated to big time advertisements and his first feature.

That Feature, Notre Jour Viendra (Our Day Will Come) takes the central premise from his most famous work, the video for MIA's "Born Free" and takes it off in another direction. The setting is a world like our own, except in this world, redheads are subject to discrimination and abuse. In the "Born Free" video, we see a team of shock troops take a Ginger young man from his home by force, herd him onto a bus with a bunch of other Ginger men, drive them all out into the desert, and then force them at gunpoint to race across a minefield.
The money shot is the evisceration of a teenager into chunks of blood and bone in loving slow motion.
If that all sounds ridiculous, well it does serve as a sort of primitive satire, and is redeemed by Gavras' direction. He combines the slickness of a modern Hollywood director with a great eye, ruthlessly rhythmic editing to the song his images serve and a subtly European humorous artsiness (some might call it pretension) which you will either find amusing or infuriating. It combines to make a unique and unforgettable video:

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

For me his other great music video is for Justice's "Stress", a gritty, ultraviolet yet strangely haunting collision between La Haine and Gaspar Noe:

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Just from those two promos a couple of his quirks are evident: he has a slightly adolescent awe of violence, a nice way of incorporating homage into his work ("Born Free" plays to me like a big tip of the hat to Peter Watkins' great Punishment Park), exemplary technical control, and a well-balanced mix of European and American sensibilities. All of this then suggests that Our Day Will Come should be worth waiting for. It stars Vincent Cassel, and is set in a Ginger-prejudiced world, evolving into a road movie as Cassel and a young red-haired friend journey across France towards Ireland, reputedly safe haven for all Gingers. It looks bizarre, in an interesting way, and even from the trailer you can tell it was made by a real Director:

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It was released in France last year and already available on DVD there. Since then, Gavras' most high-profile work is the new Adidas spot, "Adidas Is In All" which showcases the new Justice track, "Civilisation", and is a pretty storming piece of brand iconography, filled with beautiful imagery. I love this longer version, much though I resent Lionel Messi having to share the screen with mere basketball players and skateboarders, and worse, Katy Perry:

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Gavras founded the collective Kourtrajme with Kim Chapiron in 1994 and they worked on shorts and around the outskirts of the Parisian music industry for years before finding success (Chapiron was the first to direct Cassel in Sheitan) . This background explains his longstanding relationship with Justice. As well as the Adidas spot and the "Stress" video, he directed their tour documentary, A Cross The Universe, which he edited into a great little trailer-cum-video for their song "Phantom II":

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A couple of his other more interesting Videos follow (for Simian Mobile Disco and DJ Medhi) together with an advert for Yves St Laurent which is quite different from the majority of his work in tone:

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Our Day Will Come is presently without a distributor in the UK. It would be a shame not to see the debut feature work of such a visually muscular director on the big screen here, but it's not too late...

Innit.

I once overheard a colleague and former film student say "No good films ever come from England". A stupendously ignorant claim, as Time Out London's terrific list of the 100 Best British Films suggests. Their list - and the many contributors individual lists - are a good reminder of the cinematic traditions of the UK and the richness and breadth of films produced here over the decades. For some reason, they ignored me, but I love a good list, as regular readers will know, and so, in no particular order, a Top 10:

(I'm excluding the likes of Blow Up and Barry Lyndon, which would both breeze into this list, since they're directed by foreigners, and would therefore seem to be about as British as, say, An American Werewolf in London)

Bad Timing (Nicholas Roeg, 1980)
Roeg's most challenging and rewarding film, elliptical, disturbing and erotic, it's an amazing piece of editing as style, with Roeg shuffling scenes, time frames, moods and emotional states to powerful effect.

Wonderland (Michael Winterbottom, 1999)
One of the only films to truly capture modern London, without tourist landmarks or mockney Gangsters, but in all it's beautiful energy and occasional desolation, Winterbottom's multi-character drama is lovely, brilliantly acted and benefits from one of Michael Nymans greatest scores.

Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)
Devastating, arty yet accessible, beautiful yet horrifying. Fassbender is extraordinary.

Nil By Mouth (Gary Oldman, 1997)
Grim but brilliant, Oldman takes what he learned from Mike Leigh and Alan Clarke and makes a social realist drama set in working class South East London, confronting big issues like domestic abuse without a hint of a flinch, and all of it is cinematic, remarkably visceral and visually exceptional.

Went the Day Well (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1942)
A subtle, darkly funny satire on the nature of Englishness and English self-image and also a thrilling WWII action thriller with some shocking scenes, nicely handled by Cavalcanti.

The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1965)
Watkins virtually invents a genre and creates a thrilling piece of cinematic propaganda in the process. Traumatically frightening and incredibly powerful, too.

Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2000)
The best New wave British Gangster film, tipping a hat to Frears' great The Hit but entirely new with it's mix of moods and sub-genres, its moments of fantasy and Glazers stylish command. Ben Kingsley: awesome.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell, 1943)
Any one of six Powell and Pressburgers would do, but this is my favourite, a sweet comedy on the life of a man and a Nation. Ravishing, too, like all their work.

Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963)
The least-dated of the kitchen sink films of the 60s and more universal in it's account of a dreamer planning an escape he'll never attempt. A great sense of place, too, and the best performance Tom Courtenay ever gave. Julie Christie doesn't hurt, either.

The Hill ( Sidney Lumet, 1965)
Brutal, remorselessly powerful stockade drama. Lumet was always happiest with his camera focused on faces, and this showcases that powerfully. Connery leaves 007 behind fully for the first time.



An Alternative 10 it hurts too much to leave unmentioned:

Winstanley (Kevin Brownlow, & Andrew Mollo,1975)

Elephant (Alan Clarke, 1989)

Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1989)

Radio On (Chris Petit, 1979)

Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968)

Bill Douglas Trilogy (Bill Douglas, 1972)

Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981)

Mona Lisa (Neil Jordan, 1984)

A Hard Days Night (Richard Lester, 1964)

Accident (Joseph Losey, 1968)

Vintage Trailer of the Week 53

I've written here before about how I adore Elmore Leonard's Western writing; I think its his best material. Not nearly as dialogue-led as his Crime fiction - altough the dialogue is still tough and witty - his Western books and stories showcase his exceptional descriptive prose, fine storytelling and unmatched facility for creating brilliant villains and thoroughly impressive, capable heroes. My favourite of his Western books is Hombre, which was made into a terrific and seriously underrated film by director Martin Ritt in 1967.

Ritt and Newman were habitual collaborators at that time, with Hombre standing as their sixth - and last - film together (the most famous and celebrated of that series is probably the fabulous Hud (1963)). Ritt was a successful director for almost three decades but his reputation had declined since his death in 1990, perhaps because of the worthy, stolid nature of some of his more high-profile late work, particularly the likes of
The Front (1976) and Norma-Rae (1979) and the awkward stiffness of some of his earlier literary adaptations, such as The Sound and the Fury (1959) and the Newman co-starring Hemingways Adventures of a Young Man (1962). In this, he reminds me of Richard Brooks, a peer of his who liked risky literary adaptations (including films of Lord Jim, In Cold Blood, and The Brothers Karamazov) but whose gifts as a storyteller and technical expertise mean that his most lasting work is the genre material he occasionally lowered himself to, such as the Westerns The Professionals (1966) and Bite the Bullet (1975).

Similarly, Ritt's genre films are his most satisfying work. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965) is a brilliantly dour, grim LeCarre adaptation, and the best of his social issue films is the one with genre elements: labour dispute drama The Molly Maguires (1970) with its gripping undercover plot. But Hombre is a purer genre film and a tense, exciting, well-mounted cinematic experience all round. It has the classy cast and James Wong Howe photography of an Oscar contender, and a fine Newman performance at its centre too. Its one of the best Leonard adaptations - certainly the best version of one of his Westerns - which alone should make it compulsive viewing...

Count for the Down: My 2010 in Cinema

Somebody asked last year why I never go for a reverse Countdown on my top 10. So I thought I'd give that a go this year. Enjoy the crippling suspense.
So: All 2010 UK releases, from 15 to 1, with some also-rans and interesting failures below:



15. Greenberg (Noah Baumbach) -
Opening with a mini Rohmer movie following a seemingly aimless young woman through the ordinary hours of her days, Baumbach's character study-cum-comedy goes on to introduce its titular character and becomes something else altogether. How many films devote so much time to creating characters flawed and loathsome the way Ben Stiller's Roger Greenberg is? And manage to remain interesting, funny and even moving? For while we may cringe and laugh at Greenberg's intractability and stubborn insistence on being awkwardly himself, he is a recognisable human being, his interactions brilliantly authentic and truly felt. I love how Baumbach textures his world - his use of pop music is fantastic, as the Steve Miller Band track which opens the film shows best, and Harris Savides' lovely cinematography presents an LA just slightly askew from the one we are accustomed to from a thousand tv shows and movies. Here LA is bright yes, but oddly bleak, as our protagonist is frequently isolated in big frames, most stunningly in the early shot finding him awkward and alone at a party in a big backyard.
Stiller is splendid, twisting his nervous energy into something sad and damaged. Some of the moments of comic awkwardness are masterful, and yet the central relationship is curiously affecting, despite Greenberg himself coming across, ultimately, as a bit of a heel. At least he's an interesting heel..



14. White Material (Claire Denis) -
Claire Denis' amazing hot streak continues with this study of the effects of an armed revolution in a Francophone African country upon some colonial plantation owners. As always with Denis, its breathtakingly beautiful, from first shot to last - she has a fabulous eye. But her storytelling here is less elusive than it has been on occasion; the narrative is still elliptical and oft dreamlike, but the plot moves at a fair clip, and there is an impressive sense of dread and tension throughout. Her use of a shuddery handheld camera in some over-tight close-ups in the early scenes throws you off and recovering any equilbrium is never allowed; with a flashback structure and shifts in POV maintaining the unease of the viewer. The subtle - and not so subtle - digs at colonial exploitation, and indeed native brutality - are impressively controlled, and Isabelle Huppert is exemplary, as ever.



13. The Way Back (Peter Weir) -
Not for Peter Weir the spectacular, attention-grabbing money shot, no. His focus is solely on storytelling, and his mastery is unquestioned and exceptional. This historical endurance epic is beautifully mounted, gripping throughout its gruelling length, and refreshingly old-fashioned in its concentration upon characterisation and story.
Seven men escape a Soviet Siberian Gulag during the Second World War, and begin a long trek to freedom, thousands of miles across Mongolia and Tibet to India. The supporting characters - the likes of Colin Farrell and Ed Harris - are more interesting
than Jim Sturgess' lead, but Weir's understanding of this sort of Boys Own material is matchless, as Master & Commander and Gallipolli have proved in the past, and he makes this a great old yarn, immersive and intense, always intelligent and interesting, and magnificently well-made. He also makes some points about the horrors of totalitarianism and the comforts of faith and friendship, but never at the expense of his tale.
This is the kind of film that a 10 year old could enjoy just as much as an 80 year old, which is a rare quality these days, and Weir is one of the few Directors truly capable of making such Cinema. Long may he continue...



12. Centurion (Neil Marshall) -
If its genre thrills you're after, B-Movies are where its at. They do what they do without the bloat or pretension or excess of the bigger, more expensive Hollywood blockbusters. Neil Marshall's chase Western (replacing American Indians with Picts and Cavalry with Romans in Scotland) is a case in point. Roman legionaires flee Picts. 97 minutes. Thats it.
Yes, its full of cliches, but Marshall loves his cliches, embraces them, invests them with real feeling, and so they work. Yes, it rips off tons of other, better films, but Marshall understands why the elements he steals work, and he uses them cleverly.
Its a 70s-style allegory for whatever conflict you like - Vietnam/Afghanistan/Iraq - but really all its concerned with is forward momentum and butchery. The action scenes are incredibly bloody. Lead Michael Fassbender is something special - a great actor (see Hunger for proof) and also a leading man capable of credibly carrying an action movie, and he has the credible support of the likes of Riz Ahmed, a ripe Dominic West having a high old time and a dour Olga Kurelyenko as the implacable villainess.



11. The Social Network (David Fincher) -
Aaron Sorkin makes every story the story of a boys club. But he writes stories of boys clubs so well, I can't complain. Here he takes a modern subject - Facebook, the most modern subject - and sort of ignores it, concentrating instead on classical dramatic subjects: friendship, rivalry, greed, betrayal. In doing so he is able to comment obliquely on the way one geek made us all geeks, everyone reduced to staring at a computer screen. There are problems: halfway through the characters are all reduced to ciphers, it seems, the fast-talking semi-autistic Facebook crowd led by the wonderful Eisenberg, who I think makes Zuckerberg slightly less vile than Sorkin's script suggests, the wounded puppy dog of Andrew Garfield's Eduardo, who exists in the last act only to be hurt over and again, Timberlake's cartoon villain, but Fincher's slick, chilly stroytelling makes it all flash by in a ridiculously entertaining jiffy. Its major flaw - more apparent on a second viewing than a first, when its dazzle is so distracting - is the shallowness of its appeal. There seems to be little beneath Sorkin's wordplay and Finchers smooth control, little meaning, little meat. Its appearance at the top of countless Critics Polls may seem somewhat confusing, until one considers that this is a film about geeks and loners, concerned with geek hierarchy and vengeance. Critics and bloggers saw a movie about themselves, and they love nothing better...




10. The Headless Woman (Lucretia Martel) -
Lucretia Martel is a phenomenal talent, of the type that has seen her become one of the major figures in Contemporary World Cinema after only three films. This disturbing, unusual drama may be her best.
A middle class woman from the Argentine interior hits something in her car. Thinking it was a person, she drives on. But the psychological effect of the incident seems to shake her loose from the world and she floats in a haze of guilt through her affluent, privileged life, following her daily routine; going to work, seeing her lover, gossiping with her friends and family. Only all of it has been given a new tint by the car accident, the banalities of everyday life recontextualised by violence, death, deception.
Martel uses this to consider the morality of modern Argentine life - the way the class system forces servants into such an uncomfortable yet anonymous intimacy with their employers, and indeed, the very fact of the class systems existence, the cosy moral avoidances of a bourgeois Argentinean couple and what happens when they are confronted with a moral imperative they cannot ignore (sort of; turns out they basically ignore that too), together with a sidelong look at the strains and strengths of an extended families bonds.
Martel's visual style is astounding, her compositional sense isolating her protagonist in shallow focus to emphasise her widening distance from her servants, family and friends, her lighting generally painterly and lovely, her camera gliding smoothly through complex. That combined with fantastic sound design - many scenes contain almost nightmarish ambient soundscapes - make the film something of a darkly atmospheric headfuck that stayed with me for days afterwards.



9. I Am Love (Luca Gaudagnino) -
Its a wonderful thing to see a Director arrive fully-formed, and though this is Gaudagnino's third film, it feels so thrillingly poised and fresh that it is the first time the true extent of his talent has been revealed. A big, old-fashioned family saga, all of the elements are superb - a layered script full of ambiguity and telling observation, perfectly judged performances, lovely cinematography, dynamic use of some of John Adams' music, and most especially Gaudagnino's direction, which somehow combines both stateliness and sensuality. The story concerns the wife of a Milanese Magnate who falls in love with her son's friend and how her feelings - she is the I of the title - enrich her rigid existence and ultimately destroy her family. So yes, its a story about rich people enduring emotional crises in opulent surroundings, bourgeois cinema at its most bourgeois. But Gaudagnino is aware of the dangers of this type of tale, and his camera dissects these people, noting their flaws and prejudices as well as offering some sympathy for the pain the story inflicts upon them. His camera is a marvellous observer; attentive to every nuance in every scene and alive to the sensual pleasures of food and sex in a way I have never really seen before in cinema. He composes his frames intelligently and elegantly and always trusts his story - this is an unabashed melodrama, Adams' music only underlining its operatic dimensions. Swinton is magnificent, as she so often is.



8. The Road (John Hillcoat) -
Cormac McCarthy's book is perhaps the only novel of the last few decades that I can imagine being told as an oral story around a campfire hundreds of years from now. It has that sort of mythic heft and simplicity: a man and a boy walk through a ruined world. As such, I'm sure there will be other attempts at adapting it. But I cannot imagine any of them doing as fine a job as John Hillcoat does here. His film is beautiful and horrifying, grim, tense and moving. It is always enthralling. Joe Penhall had an easy job, in one way; all of the dialogue and narration come verbatim from the novel. Viggo Mortensen and the boy are both great, as is the photography and score, altough that does stray into sentimentality on one or two occasions. But most impressive is the fact that the film gets the book, and does it a sort of justice. Whether I can ever bear to watch it again is another story entirely...




7. The Secret In Their Eyes (Juan Jose Campanella) -
This slick and engrossing Argentine thriller somehow triumphed at the Oscars to win Best Foreign Language film, beating out the vastly superior A Prophet and The White Ribbon in what was an exceptionally strong field. And while its not a patch on either of those masterpieces, it is a fine film, combining its generic elements seamlessly with its emotional narrative of a love story that never-quite-was bubbling to the surface once again 25 years later. It stars the great Ricardo Darin and plays like a Classic Hollywood thriller made for grown-ups, only even better, because it has excellently drawn characters, a script rich in great one-liners and speeches and is full of finely-observed details. Its also brutal, dark, disturbing and finally quite moving. The manner in which it allows the awful realities of late 20th Century Argentine History to colour the plot is subtle and hugely important to the impact of key plot elements: this is a film which links politics to violence, but never explicitly or stiffly.
Whereas most Argentine films feel low or at least medium budget, this is classy and well-made throughout, Director Juan Jose Campanella showing some great chops, particularly in the amazing sequence where the police hunt a suspect at a Football match, made to seem as if it was done in one seamless awesome take. Darin, one of world Cinemas great Movie Stars, is, as ever, superb.




6. Valhalla Rising (Nicolas Winding Refn) -
Unlike anything else I have ever seen, Refn's film is a Viking epic, an action film, a sci-fi tale of exploration and alien encounter, slow cinema, and a consideration of faith in extremis. It vaguely resembles much other work in one element or another: there are traces of Tarkovsky and Malick, and some of Herzog's Aguirre the Wrath of God and a little-seen indie from a few years ago called Severed Ways alongside the definite genre touches - Refn designs some scenes to play out like they are in a horror film, and his action scenes betray the influence of Kurosawa. It is also extraordinary: breathtakingly beautiful, maddeningly slow and obscure, sickeningly violent. Some will see it and find it empty and pretentious, others will sense greatness in its hypnotic visual poetry and Refn's slow narrative. I was utterly transported. Mads Mikkelsen deploys his movie star charisma in a wordless role and carries the whole thing along, and the sound design - that howling wind, the ambient music - is almost as arresting as the awesome photography. The only thing preventing it placing even higher in this list is the suspicion that Refn didn't really have much in mind when he made it, and it is immaculately executed but probably meaningless. But despite that, to quote an old Time Out review of Once Upon a Time In the West: Critical tools needed are eyes and ears. This is Cinema.



5. Dogtooth (Yorgos Lantimos) -
Funny, disturbing, oddly erotic, baffling allegory of, well, whatever you want. Political dictatorship, organised religion, the power of the media? A man and woman in modern Greece keep their (grown-up) children prisoners in their house through the propagation of a series of lies about the state of the outside world and its manifold horrors and dangers: cats are dangerous killers, airplanes are the same size as toy planes. The way this affects the development of the children is the meat of the narrative, but the frequently hilarious details of the parents deceptions are just as important. Such a simple idea, so well executed. The direction - controlled, patient, sometimes painterly - is inspired.




4. City of Life & Death (Lu Chuan)-
In his 1961 review of Gillo Pontecorvo's Holocaust drama Kapo, then critic (now much-lauded Director) Jacques Rivette did not summarise the plot or give a close reading of the aesthetics except to describe one scene and more specifically one shot: "Look however in Kapo, the shot where Riva commits suicide by throwing herself on electric barbwire: the man who decides at this moment to make a forward tracking shot to reframe the dead body – carefully positioning the raised hand in the corner of the final framing – this man is worthy of the most profound contempt."
Lu Chuan's City of Life & Death made me think of Rivette's criticism, which is raised whenever a Holocaust film or any film about real-life instances of man's inhumanity to man is released.
This film is a somewhat impressionistic portrayal of the rape of Nanking, one of the great war crimes of the Second World War and a source of continued tension between China and Japan to this day. The first half is an elliptical, almost dreamlike, floating account of the Japanese conquest of the city, full of ferocious battle sequences and unwatchable mass murder. The second half shows the way the Japanese ran the conquered, half-destroyed city: by executing hundreds of civilians, sytematically raping women and throwing children out of windows.
It is often difficult to watch so much unending brutality, and this is where Rivette's criticism is relevant, for Chuan's film is also incredibly beautiful. The sumptuous black and white photography summons up a series of indelible, unforgettable images: small boys playing war with abandon in the ruins, surrounded by corpses, mere seconds after the firefight they just participated in has ended; a chapel full of keening, terrified refugees shrinking from a handful of Japanese soldiers ; the tips of executed mens heads above the sand as their executioners dance around them, flattening the grave.
Chuan is a new sort of Chinese filmmaker, combining the depth and artistry of the 5th generation with the technical mastery of a modern Hollywood director, and his approach here is radical. He does not linger too long on any one character, his narrative always moving along, observing all, context developing as the story progresses. And yet he is even-handed - the film has been massively controversial in China due to the humanity it allows its Japanese characters.
I can't agree with that criticism or with Rivette. This is a profound, magnificent , difficult film.




3. Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-Eda)
For a film by a leading Japanese filmmaker to so openly address the legacy of Ozu through a modern family drama with obvious echoes of Tokyo Story is a bold move. But Hirokazu Kore-Eda, a half-dozen films in to his career (most of them frustratingly never released in the UK) has an established, distinctive voice of his own, and he has made Still Walking an absolute triumph. So many films attempt to wring drama out of an everyday family gathering only to find themselves peddling in a sort of downbeat soap melodrama (Mike Leigh, I'm looking at you). But Kore-Eda avoids this by a quiet insistence on the truthfulness of his characters and their scenes together. Nothing much happens on a plot level, but the story is all in the pauses, the unseen facial expressions, the arguments which start but never climax, the non-sequiters and jokes, the misunderstandings and unspoken sentiments. The story follows a family gathering for the memorial of the death an adored eldest son twelve years before. His younger brother returns to his parents home with his wife, widowed with a young son, while his elder sister comes with her loud husband and children. Meanwhile their mother takes solace in religion and gossip and their father, a retired doctor, nurses resentments and gripes but never lets any emotion show through his grumpy facade.
They eat, chat, visit his grave, eat some more, bathe, chat. It is sublime. Delicate, always realist and more moving because of that, it is a snapshot into the life of three generations in all their tensions, frustrations and joy. Each of the Kore-Eda films I have seen has been rich with emotion, and this is no different. The cast all seem effortlessly real - testament to Kore-Eda's embrace of improvisation as well as the beauty of his script and understated, disarmingly simple direction. It came out in Japan in 2008 and he's made two films since, which is very good news if they ever get released here...




2. A Prophet (Jacques Audiard) -
Audiard's film is outstanding, a remarkable triumph. Somehow, here, and in his last two films, he has shown that he is capable of the rawest of realism and a you-are-there immediacy, and yet this film has some sublime grace notes, moments of silence and poetry and great beauty. Telling the story of a young man imprisoned at 19 for a minor offence who works his way up through the political criminal power structure inside through cunning and opportunism, it is gripping literally from the first shot to the last, the tension rarely slackening. It possesses all of the requisite qualities of the prison and gangster genres and yet is so much more. It functions as a criticism of French penal law, a riveting crime story with a couple of superb, brilliantly mounted set pieces, and an intriguing and sensitive character study. As such, debutant lead Tahim Raki is excellent. Charismatic, and brooding, he suggests the boiling, always whirling thoughts beneath the placid gaze of his young hero, and his intensity more than matches Nels Arstrup's moody Corsican gang boss. The prison itself is just as powerful and interesting a character in the film as either of these protagonists - vividly evoked by Audiard's roving, intimate handheld camera. Audiard has joined a small band of Directors who have made wholly satisfying genre cinema which is so fine it transcends its genre. A Prophet is that good.




1. Carlos (Olivier Assayas) -
Setting aside the politics, the approach to history, the glamour of the violence and the globetrotting for a moment, I love Assayas as a stylist. As befits a director who admires Michael Mann and Hou Hsiao Hsien and Vincente Minelli, Assayas is a stylist whose ability to infuse his scenes with a sensual charge is vital to the success of his films. The very first minutes of Carlos bear this out; the first shot is of a man rising naked from bed, a woman beside him. He dresses in the gloom and she sits up to smoke. You can smell that room, the chill on their skin, the warm sheets. The man meets a violent fate outside and that event is given weight by the reality of what has preceded it; this sets quite a tone for Assayas' Epic.
The next scene finds the title character arriving in Beirut, and again that city is beautifully, swiftly evoked, a whirl of colour, the back of a taxi drivers head. We are located in this narrative already, we are there with this young, cocky Venezualan who wants to head his own cell of terrorists in Europe. Almost 6 hours stretch before us.
And they are the quickest 6 hours of cinema I have ever experienced. Part of a small but important group of films seemingly influenced by the likes of The Wire (I would suggest that Soderbergh's Che and Fincher's Zodiac are other high-profile examples of this school of cinema) to adopt a sort of Epic Intimate Historical realism, cataloguing events with little authorial viewpoint made overly explicit, allowing the flow of history to develop its own rhythm and meaning, Carlos benefits by its superb, innately fascinating choice of subject matter and its classy pedigree.
The central passage - Carlos' 1975 attack on and seizure of the Vienna OPEC conference - is a riveting, pacy, brilliantly made mini-movie of its own, and it is often the tangents and solos of the material that bring its long stretches to life; Angie's escape from the "Revolution", Nada's fate, and Carlos' acquiring some middle-aged flab and bourgeois certainty in Budapest. But it is Edgar Ramirez's spectacular performance which holds the whole enterprise together. Ramirez portrays a complex man, passionate, intelligent and flawed, aware that sometimes he was shallow and weak but also vain and sensitive to his image. The scene in which Carlos first murders a man - a long, sweaty suspense set-piece - brings out the best in him as we see it all dance in his eyes through his mounting fear and exhilaration. But he and Assayas ensure that Carlos' private life is just as interesting as his "career". His many women and travels, his difficult relationships with various colleagues, all made human and grippingly real in this telling.
We are with his Carlos throughout, maturing from ambitious freedom fighter to symbolic legend and beyond. The rest of the cast match Ramirez all the way, and Assayas' direction is always calm and stylish, assured and flawless in its capture of tone and atmosphere. For such a big undertaking, its a remarkably coherent work, Assayas' use of a superb Post-Punk Soundtrack and his stylish storytelling giving it an easy accessibility surprising in a film with such a complex story containing multitudes of characters and locations.
A good sign; writing about it makes me want to watch it again, right now.


Almost, not quite, interesting but bad, or not good enough:

The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Chodolenko) -
Why has American comedy largely gone down the path it has? I mean the comedies made by Hollywood studios, with big stars and high concepts and a strange mix of leftfield and broad humour. The success of the big comedies of the late 70s and early 80s seems somehow to blame, and the major casualty is the adult comedy. That can be a difficult term, so lets say I mean the type of comedy which takes place against a real setting, in something resembling the real world, with recognisablly human characters at its centre. Woody Allen, to his credit, has been making adult comedies for decades now, as have the Brookses, James L and Albert. Not too many young directors seem to be emulating these men though. Lisa Cholodenko is. Her last film but one, the sublime and underseen Laurel Canyon, had moments of sharp comedy, but was a relationship drama. The Kids Are All Right treads more evenly between comedy and drama.




The Town (Ben Affleck) -
Another mournful Bostonion crime drama from Ben Affleck means another triumph: the Town is that rare Hollywood production; a genuinely classy and grown-up genre film. Affleck knows to hire strong collaborators: a cast including Pete Postelthwaite, John Hamm (whose handsome charisma balances the film, preventing it from becoming a wholesale glorification of the criminality it depicts), Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall and Chris Cooper; and photography by Robert Elswit mean that his film is always good to look at. It may at base be a load of old macho rubbish, but the script is solid, the characterisation meaty, plausible, and Affleck handles the action scenes surely so that they provide muscular surges of excitement. Engrossing and serious, the film creeps up on you; I was surprisingly moved by the ending, because without knowing it I had come to care about these characters. A critic (Guy Lodge?) wrote that if Eastwood had directed it, it would have been acclaimed as a masterpiece, and hes right. As it is, this is better than anything Clint's done in a long time...


Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich) -
Pixar: Magicians. But: not as smooth in its storytelling as (the virtually faultless) Toy Story 2, for all that it is a tremendously moving experience. How they can engineer films that are so emotional, consistently funny - and funny in all shades, from slapstick to satire, and verbal wit to the broadest of stereotypes - while also delivering a steady rolling wave of incredible and inventive action sequences just about defies belief. We are blessed to live in this Pixar era.




Alamar (Pedro Gonzalez Rubio) -
The closest of all these films to cracking that list of 15, this is a wondrously pure & simple semi-documentary rhapsody of the ocean, the love between a father and a son and the glory of the natural life. Absolutely beautiful, and quietly moving too.

Up In The Air (Jason Reitman) -
The most middlebrow film I've ever seen.




Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe) -
Gaspar Noe and his relentless need to rub our noses in it. Hes never seen an aborted fetus in a bloody kidney dish he didn't feel the need to shoot in close up. Or a traumatised teen fellating a japanese salaryman in a fire escape he couldn't observe for a minute or so, or a sex scene he couldn't "improve" with a shot from inside the vagina. In saying that, this film is Pure Cinema, an awesome sensory experience, and has one of the best credit sequences I've ever seen. Noe is worth all of the unavoidable issues his films drag along with them, and this has to be seen, in the biggest, loudest screen available....


Ondine (Neil Jordan) -
Jordan's best in a long long time. Doing what he does best - an adult fairytale with a mystical sense of beauty and poetry mixed with pulp storytelling. Farrell - enjoying a renaissance since he started doing character parts and stopped trying to be a Hollywood lead - as good as he's ever been, Chris Doyle photography, Sigur Ros music and a happy ending. Shouldve been a bigger deal than it was.




Agora (Alejandro Amenabar) -
A cerebral, relevant and cinematic Epic from Alejandro Amenabar, Agora is that rare thing in modern spectacle cinema: a film of ideas. Amenabar examines religious extremism and piles up the parallels with our world while also devoting lots of time to issues of philosohy and astronomy. But his film never stints on its own Epic trappings, and it is a handsome and fascinatingly detailed recreation of Roman Alexandria without recourse to empty CGI showcase. The balance between the rhetoric of the scholarly debates and the violent action of the religious strife that sweeps all away is kept beautifully organic by a filmmaker always true to himself. Rachel Weicz is great in the lead.


The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom) -
Casey Affleck confirms the suspicion aroused by Assassination of Jesse James, Gone Baby Gone and Gerry thats hes the great American actor of his generation. And though Winterbottom gets as close as anyone ever has to a real adaptation of Jim Thompson, he still misses. Good though his film is, it lacks some of the savagery, some of the pain and queasiness of Thompson. Its a little too intent and deliberate in its period set dressing, in its gingham and vintage automobile glory, for Thompson's brute lyricism. But some things are always there with Winterbottom - his fine eye and sense of rhythm, his ability to capture what feels like the real world, Our world, and his way with actors (Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson, Simon Warner and Elias Koteas all lend Affleck fine support).




Black Death (Christopher Smith) -
in what would make a great double-bill with Valhalla Rising, Christopher Smith's medievel horror-western-thriller follows a group of knights during the black death in search of witchcraft and necromancy into a town seemingly untouched by the plague. Smith is a bright young UK genre talent and the accomplishment and power of this, his fourth film, really surprised me. It is thrillingly dark, unafraid to cover some weighty thematic ground, and yet founded on strong, clear storytelling redolent of classic Hollywood filmmaking. That the film also refers to Witchfinder General, The Devils, The Wicker Man and even Andrei Rublev - and yet always remains distinctively its own beast - is a testament to Smith's growing skill as a director. Each of his films has been a marked improvement on the last. Here he displays a great eye, finding some arresting imagery in his story, a good ability with his cast, and control over atmosphere which remains taut and eerie throughout. A film which deserved better than it got in the UK.


The Maid (Sebastian Silva) -
A lovely, perfectly observed little story of the maid to a bourgeois family in modern Santiago and her struggles with ageing, loneliness, unwanted competition and semen stains on adolescent bedsheets.




The American (Anton Corbjin) -
I love an existential Hitman movie. Echoes of Leone and Melville abound in Anton Corbjin's piece of designer pulp. Actually, it only gives in to the tug of convention in the last act, when the gunplay begins. Until then its quite spare and atmospheric, a 70s-style portrait of a lonely American enduring a European Winter with the help of a beautiful Italian prostitute. Yes, that is an unbearably cliched idea, but Corbijn's visuals are so lovely, the films pacing so languid and patient in its portrayal of star George Clooney's quiet routine, that it acquires a sort of hypnotic power. Clooney is perhaps the film's greatest flaw, dampening down his own charisma but unable to shake the baggage of his own persona - I kept on expecting him to grin. If I say that this is basically The Limits of Control minus any sense of humour, you will understand that I mean in as a compliment..

Monsters (Gareth Edwards) -
Forget the sci-fi element for a moment. What is most impressive in this low budget British film is director Gareth Edwards' superb eye. The long passages as his characters travel through Central America are illuminated by his ability to pull beautiful tableaux from out of the air. He observes reality, and enhances its beauty with his camera, an exciting talent in a young director. Meanwhile, his script and actors are fine, his high concept sells itself, and that climactic scene with the aliens at the Petrol station is genuinely awesome, and somehow, even moving.




Somewhere (Sofia Coppola) -
I love Sofia Coppola's aesthetic: her poetic realism is delicate, nicely observed and generally perfectly judged. Sure, her films are all studies of birds in gilded cages, but she is plainly intelligent enough to realise this, which is perhaps what helps her prevent them from becoming utterly insufferable. Here her subtle wit and the quiet, clever performances of her leads make this sketch flicker to life then snuff itself out again without leaving much impression beyond her command of atmosphere and visual style, though the ambiguous ending seemed exceptionally bleak to my mind.

Inception (Christopher Nolan) -
The great thing about Chris Nolan is his ambition. Warners give him untold Millions to make them a new blockbuster, and he spends it on a 2.5 hour maddeningly complex and personal action/heist thriller. Rather that than a third Transformers film for most people, I would imagine.
Nolan has the control and skill to enable him to bring his ambitious visions to the screen. Moreover he does it in the context of massive action spectacles, which is an odd but laudable position for a filmmaker to adopt. But it is a problem, too. Because Nolan is not a good director of action. Take, for example, the zero-gravity battle at the heart of Inception, between Joseph Gordon Levitt and a henchman, spinning and flying through the turning Hotel corrdiors. That should be an amazing, unforgettable scene, an action scene stuffed with images and ideas you have never seen before. Only its not, its just ok. The imagery is fine, but the action does not have the impact expected of spectacle at this high level. The later arctic battle becomes tedious within minutes. His Batman films suffer from the same problem, which is surely some sort of crime in a film about a character renowned for his combat acumen. Here, its a minor issue against the many other conversation points presented by the film. But it niggles at me, still.

How To Train Your Dragon (Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders) -
Dreamworks Animation, from the inauspicious beginning of Shrek, has become a Studio producing
absolute top quality Heroic fantasy films for pre-teens. Kung Fu Panda was a joyous entertainment, and this is even better, stuffed with wit, filled with brilliantly conceived and executed action sequences, and peopled with memorable characters. Few of the blockbusters aimed at "adults" in the last year worked as well at delivering thrills and laughs as part of a satisfying narrative. Plus, this - reflecting the role played by Roger Deakins as visual advisor - looks totally beautiful throughout.

Also of Note:

Shutter Island, Solomon Kane, Robin Hood, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Winters Bone, Down Terrace, Restrepo, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Buried, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, Sons of Cuba, Gentlemen Broncos, Four Lions, Lebanon, Splice, Black Dynamite, Police; Adjective, Secret of Kells, Repo Men, Revanche

Films I missed that might have figured in this list:

Certified Copy, Please Give, Our Beloved Month of August, A Single Man, Father of My Children, Scouting Book for Boys, Lourdes, Beeswax, Life During Wartime, 24 City, Vincere, Wild Grass, Gainsbourg, Mother, Cyrus