The best of Film 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best films of 2010

1. A Prophet (Jacques Audiard)

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

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

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

3. Inception (Christopher Nolan)

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

4. Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)

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

5. Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois)

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

The next best 10 (in no particular order)

Kick-Ass (Matthew Vaughn)

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)

The Other Guys (Adam McKay)

I Am Love (Luca Guadagina)

Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton)

Another Year (Mike Leigh)

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call (Werner Herzog)

Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)

A Single Man (Tom Ford)

Up In The Air (Jason Reitman)

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

Most pretentious film: Enter The Void (Gasper Noé)

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

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

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

Best male performance: Tahar Rahim (A Prophet)

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

Best female performance: Tilda Swinton (I Am Love)

Runner-up: Leslie Manville (Another Year)

Best director: Jacques Audiard (A Prophet)

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

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

Best cinematographer: Eduard Grau (A Single Man)

Best documentary: American: The Bill Hicks Story

Best animation: Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)

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

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

December 26, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 19, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 12, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 5, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 28, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 21, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 14, 2010