Cold Fish

Inspired by an infamous case of serial murder which took place in the Satima province in 1993 (and is still winding its way through the Japanese courts), cult Japanese director Sion Sono’s macabre serial killer drama Cold Fish is a full-throated, blood-soaked examination of a murder and mayhem in Tokyo.

Meek, bespectacled Shamoto (Mitsuru Kukikoshi) owns a tropical fish shop beside a busy highway in Tokyo. His home life is almost as cold-blooded as his floating stock; his rebellious daughter Mitsuko (Hikari Kajiwara) despises his second wife Taeko (Megumi Kagurazaka), while she in turn has become bored with the quiet life they live behind the store. One night, Mitsuko is caught shoplifting in a supermarket but before the manager can call the police, another customer, Murata (Denden) talks him out of it. By coincidence, Murata also owns a tropical fish shop, so invites Shamoto and his family around to take a look at his elaborate set-up. Within a couple of hours, the boisterous Murata has talked mild-mannered Shamoto into a high-priced business deal, arranged a job in his shop for his new partner’s teenage daughter and made a clumsy pass at his lubricious wife.

At first, everyone is pleased with these new arrangements but the over-bearing Murata and his smirking wife Aiko (Asuka Kurosawa) have a sinister ulterior motive. Murata might be a successful businessman but he is an equally adept and ruthless serial killer who boasts of having murdered fifty eight people over the years, sometimes for money and sometimes just for fun. Together with his willing accomplice Aiko, he typically poisons his victims before carefully dismembering their bodies and leaving no forensic traces, a process the killer calls “making them invisible”. Soon, Shamoto has been drawn into the couple’s murderous scheme, blackmailed into helping the killers to dispose of the body of a business investor they have killed for money.

And that’s just the start; it’s gets a lot messier from there. Veteran character actor Denden (who usually cast in comic roles) plays Murata as an explosive extrovert, a charismatic, seductive bully who does whatever he wants, regardless of the cost to others. Timid Shamoto, who spends his free time at the planetarium dreaming of the stars, is harder to get a handle on. Is he just a frightened weakling, easily pushed into doing the unthinkable, or has there been murder in his heart all along? We don’t know for sure because the character doesn’t seem to know, with Sono drawing out the suspense across a nerve-shredding two and a half hours before a jaw-dropping finale.

Not one for the squeamish, Cold Fish takes no quarter yet the film cannot be easily dismissed as just another exploitative genre horror. Amidst all the sleazy carnage Sono mounts a serious exploration of the tensions between obedient Japanese conformity and the sensational thrill of transgressive criminality. The director asks significant questions about the human capacity for evil and carefully analyses his findings. As compelling throughout as it is stomach churning and unsettling, Cold Fish slowly builds into a nightmare of brutality and pain; brilliantly acted, daringly edited and scored with a thunderous soundtrack of crashing drums and squealing violins.

Sucker Punch

Zack Snyder made his name directing faithful, frame-by-frame adaptations of the popular graphic novels Frank Miller’s 300 and Alan Moore’s Watchmen, but he’s got nobody else to blame for the farrago of Sucker Punch; his first original screenplay and an unmitigated disaster from start to finish.

Taking his cue from Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Sucker Punch takes place across three different levels of reality. The story opens in the “real world”, sometime in the 1950s, with a twenty year old woman (Emily Browning) witnessing the death of her mother at the hands of her abusive stepfather. When she subsequently tries to shoot him, she is locked away in an all-female asylum where she will undergo a lobotomy at the hands of a corrupt doctor (Jon Hamm) in five days time.

As a way of coping with her terrible fate, the young woman imagines a fantasy world where the grim asylum is transformed into a colourful brothel and she is a burlesque dancer named Baby Doll. In this reality, she befriends the other women, including sisters Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) and Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung). With them, she conceives of an escape plan that will require stealing five essential objects from under the nose of the brothel manager, Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac).

The success or failure of the escape plan rests on Baby Doll’s uncanny ability to hypnotize the brothel patrons with her dazzling dance moves while the other women secure the items required to carry the plot forward; a map, a knife, a cigarette lighter and so on. We, the audience, are not privy to Baby Doll’s distracting dances. Instead, we are transported further into Baby Doll’s fevered imagination, where the five women don lingerie and automatic weapons and fight their way through a succession of violent action sequences, from a World War I battlefield (complete with trenches and pointy-helmeted soldiers) to a dragon-filled castle lifted straight from The Lord of the Rings. The exotic dancers are trained in their gyrations by Dr Gorski (Carla Gugino, affecting an inane Polish accent) while later, in bullet-flinging girl-power mode, they are guided by a craggy-faced sergeant major known as Wise Man and played by an expressionless Scott Glenn.

Even if viewers follow Baby Doll’s lead and try to block out all the bad stuff, Sucker Punch is still difficult to comprehend and impossible to care about. It’s as if Snyder choreographed a series of flashy fight scenes and then attempted to frame a narrative to tie them all together. This he achieves by flicking through his DVD collection, lifting concepts and plot devices from a host of better films, video games, music videos and cartoons. Individually, his scenes have no shape; taken together, they are repetitive and derivative.

Sucker Punch is a triumph of digital image-making over storytelling and sensation over substance. The characters are shadow puppets, the story is witless and the dialogue is prattling nonsense. Snyder strains to inject drama into proceedings but settles for noise and sparks. The endless set-pieces of slow-motion carnage eventually congeal into an unappealing digital bilge, scored with a tone-deaf soundtrack of pounding rock covers. Snyder’s heavily-armed, skimpily-costumed heroines are supposedly empowered to fight back against their oppressors but as the cast writhe around in their underwear, the nagging question arises: whose fantasy are we watching, exactly?

The only suckers being punched here are those who might pay good money for a ticket to see it. Just be thankful it’s not in 3D.

Rewind

PJ Dillon’s Irish thriller Rewind opens with a young woman sitting in a circle at an AA meeting, wordlessly mouthing the Serenity Prayer. Karen (Amy Huberman) is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, but has been clean and sober for seven years. A city girl, she was wild in her twenties but has settled down with her husband Brendan (Owen McDonnell), a successful businessman, and their 4 year old daughter in a satellite town, somewhere outside Dublin. Life is boringly normal, precisely the way Karen wants it to be.

Then Karl (Alan Leech), an old boyfriend, turns up unexpectedly having been “away” for a few years. Karl, whose surface charm barely hides a sinister, unstable personality, knows things about Karen’s past. “That was a different life”, Karen says, but soon Karl is interfering with her future, the plans she has made and the life she has built for herself and her family. With his easy smile and con-man's instinctive understanding of propriety, the interloper worms his way into the family home, pretending to be a long-lost cousin. Brendan, who knows his wife had problems with substance abuse in the past, is suspicious, but what can he do? Then, a package containing a video tape turns up and Karen has to take a road trip with Karl in a desperate effort to keep her past where it belongs, buried deep and out of sight.

Cinematographer turned director PJ Dillon’s debut feature looks terrific, as you’d expect, washed in cool blues and ominous greys by Director of Photography Ken Byrne, and is keenly paced and tightly edited. The script, from Dillon, Ronan Carr and Roger Karshan, is cleverly conceived but even over a terse 80 minute running time, feels as if it is missing a twist or two. The staging is sometimes stiff, the dialogue lacks polish and Huberman and Leech’s game attempts at inner-city Dublin accents at times sound like poor impersonations. The later stages of the plot hinge on an absurd and improbable coincidence, undermining Dillon’s otherwise carefully constructed realism.

For all its flaws, mostly attributable to the scant production budget, Rewind is superbly acted with Dillon making the most of finely judged performances from his talented cast. More familiar as a smiling, carefree presence in Cowboys & Angels and Man About Dog, Leech plays a convincing scumbag, conniving and dangerous while Huberman, wide-eyed and cold-hearted, perfectly expresses Karen’s shame and fear of discovery. As the panicking husband, McDonnell brings a recognisable bewilderment and sympathetic panic to what is an underdeveloped role.

Like Margaret Corkery’s inky black comedy Eamon and Conor Horgan’s soon-to-be-released apocalypse drama One Hundred Mornings, Rewind was financed by the Catalyst Project, a practical creative initiative from the Irish Film Board, supported by broadcasters and training agencies, which has resulted in three films completed for a total budget of less than €800,000. All three films are of a quality that belies their micro-budget origins and all have won awards at festivals at home and abroad. Although there are issues surrounding distribution and promotion, expensive endeavours not covered in the original budget, the Catalyst Project has been remarkably successful and fully deserves to be renewed.

The Company Men

The legacy of the global financial crisis and the collapse of the American manufacturing economy are addressed in John Wells’ sombre downsizing drama The Company Men, a timely exploration of the human cost of unemployment on three men, all working for fictional conglomerate GTX.

The story opens with brash sales manager Bobby (Ben Affleck) sweeping into the company car park in his white Porsche before taking a thirty-second meeting with the Human Resources executive Sally (Maria Bello), collecting his office ornaments in a box and getting back in his car. In order to cut costs and stabilise the company share price, Bobby and 4,999 other GTX workers have been made redundant by CEO James Salinger (Craig T Nelson) in an attempt to bolster the company share price. Now-former colleague Phil (Chris Cooper), a fifty-something executive who worked his way up from the factory floor, offers mild condolences but he is too concerned about his own position to care much. Bobby’s erstwhile mentor Gene (Tommy Lee Jones), Salinger’s closest confidante and right-hand man, heads the company’s ship-building division. He’s an old fashioned executive doing an increasingly old-fashioned job, making big, expensive things from iron and steel.

Initially, it is difficult to sympathise with the problems of three guys in incrementally costly suits, grinding their teeth about having to forego expensive green fees, luxury cars or private jets. Wells overcomes this instinctive aversion through the accretion of small, realistic details and well chosen dialogue, making sense of events as the characters do. Bobby and his wife Maggie (Rosemarie DeWitt) have not been planning for a rainy day. Once he is let go, they have nothing but his redundancy payments, no savings, no shares in the company. Everything is invested in their house, which is now worth a lot less than they paid for it. Maggie goes back to work as a nurse while Bobby spends his time looking for a new job, but money is still too tight. With two kids to feed and funds dwindling, he takes a job with a small construction company owned by his brother in law Jack (Kevin Costner), swallowing his pride, breaking a sweat and learning to live within restricted means.

In a sense, the film is a rejoinder to Jason Reitman’s slick Up In The Air, which made a mid-life drama out of the financial crisis. Superficially the same story (but told from the point of view of the guys who get fired) The Company Men takes a more serious approach, emphasising common sense, ethics, hard work and earned reward. Roger Deakins sensible photography reinforces the sober mood. Gradually, however, the precision and bite gives way to broadly-painted sentiment: going from clear to misty-eyed, sometimes within the same scene.

This sudden soft-centeredness might be the result of fitting four (including Coster’s) storylines together, but the resulting manipulation has the same deflating effect. First time feature director Wells has significant pedigree, producing and directing small-screen series’ like ER and The West Wing, but doesn’t have the same space in 100 minutes to tell a story that might comfortably fill twice as much time on television and the results are condensed and overemphasised.

Veterans Jones and Cooper are reliably intense and self-contained but Affleck’s struggles to find any real depth in Bobby with his performance limited to variations on mystification, impotence and rage, like a man who has stubbed his toe while looking for his keys. Best of the lot is Costner as the laconic carpenter, the epitome of blue-collar, beer-and-barbeque America. The film would have benefited from spending more time with him.

It might be ungainly and uneven but The Company Men cannot be faulted for its sincerity, ending on a hopeful note that emphasises resilience, self-belief, changing priorities and starting again. Timely, like I was saying.

The Adjustment Bureau

In The Adjustment Bureau, screenwriter and first time director George Nolfi expands and elaborates on a Philip K. Dick short story that imagines a vast bureaucracy of mysterious beings pulling the strings on humanity, arranging everyone’s lives to fit a vastly complicated, pre-determined plan.

The story opens in the middle of a political campaign as charismatic young Senate candidate David Norris (no, not that one) takes to the stump. His campaign, managed by shrewd best friend Charlie (Michael Kelly), is going well until an embarrassing photograph of Norris at a party is leaked to the press and his support collapses. While preparing his concession speech in a hotel bathroom, Norris meets free-spirited dancer Elise (Emily Blunt), who laughs at his nervousness, kisses him on the lips and leaves him utterly besotted.

Some time later, Norris bumps into Elise on a bus. Kismet, you might think, but a group of mysterious men have been following the politician with the aim of stopping him from ever meeting Elise again. When he walks into his office and discovers a squadron of futuristic stormtroopers engaged in wiping his staff’s memories, Norris is captured by smooth-talking Mr Richardson (John Slattery from Mad Men) and given a unique peek behind the universal curtain.

These cosmic agents, in well-cut suits and sporting natty fedoras, operate under the control of an all-powerful Chairman, tinkering with fate to nudge mankind in a pre-set direction. Norris is told that Elise is “not part of the plan” and that the Bureau has decided what’s best. They also threaten to wipe his mind if he tries to find her. Clinging to deep-rooted notions of free will and fortune, and determined to track down the love of his life, Norris resists. He finds an ally in Harry (Anthony Mackie), a sympathetic agent who patiently explains how everything works and sets him on his way.

Dick’s novels and short stories have provided sci-fi screenwriters with a packed slate of mind-bending films, from Ridley Scott’s eternal Blade Runner to Richard Linklater’s curious cartoon A Scanner Darkly. The Adjustment Bureau is not the worst adaptation of the writer’s work (that would be a toss-up between John Woo’s Paycheck and Lee Tamahori’s Next) but the film nevertheless falls into the same trap as many of its predecessors by taking the germ of a bizarre, provocative idea and expanding it to fit the standard form of multiplex Hollywood cinema. The original short story had no pair of star-cross’d lovers, was set mostly in a suburban garden and featured a talking dog in a pivotal role. After a snappy, head-scratching set-up, Nolfi’s lop-sided film disintegrates into a drearily breathless, mechanical chase, with Damon and Blunt thrown together in a gallop around photogenic New York landmarks, pausing only to clarify the philosophical nuances in clumsy gulps.

Nolfi’s attempt to blend Dick’s fantastical notions with a political conspiracy thriller and a romantic melodrama – and then justify it all - means that all traces of Dick’s formless dread and itchy paranoia fade into the background. What replaces it is not nearly as interesting.

Animal Kingdom

“Crooks always come undone”, someone warns at the start of David Michôd’s ice-cold, brutally efficient Australian crime thriller Animal Kingdom, a masterful examination of how, precisely, that undoing comes about.

After his mother dies from a self-inflicted heroin overdose, and with nowhere else to turn, teenager Joshua (James Frecheville) is taken in by his estranged grandmother Smurf Cody (Jacki Weaver, Oscar nominated for the role). A bottle-blonde Lady Macbeth with painted eyebrows and a lizard’s smile, Smurf lives with her three adult sons; Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), Craig (Sullivan Stapleton) and Darren (Luke Ford) in an anonymous house in the Melbourne suburbs. From there she controls the family business – selling drugs and robbing banks - sending her boys out to do her bidding and taking a share of the spoils. It isn’t much, but it’s enough to get by, with Smurf maintaining order and boosting morale through a strict regimen of hearty meals, bear-hugs and creepy, full-mouth kisses.

Shy and withdrawn, Jay is soon accompanying his uncles as they scout the city, looking for their next job. Pope, the eldest, is also the most dangerous, having inherited his mother’s cunning and added a few murderous new tricks of his own. Hyperactive Craig is the most unpredictable, liable to fly off into a murderous rage without much provocation. Darren, only a few years older than Jay, has less of an appetite for crime, acting as a reluctant foot-soldier for his older brothers. When the brother’s ignore a caution from a crooked cop to “keep their heads in”, they come to the attention of the city’s Special Branch, led by Detective Leckie (Guy Pearce). Good cop Leckie, an honest family man with a trustworthy moustache, wants to catch the Cody gang and thinks Jay offers a chink in their armour but he also believes the young man can be rescued from the lion’s den, and is worth saving.

As the title suggests, what follows is a snapshot of ruthless predators and their prey. The dialogue and exposition are stripped back to the bare minimum, with Michôd trapping much of the action inside the Cody’s tiny bungalow or Leckie’s close-walled interrogation room. Frecheville plays Jay as if the young man is constantly holding his breath, afraid that the tiniest movement will draw attention to him. His sense of dread permeates throughout the film, with the tension building inexorably in the second half of the story before a shock twist delivers some measure of relief. Writer and director Michôd has clearly studied at Scorsese’s knee (the film might well be re-titled G’Day Fellas) but effortlessly carries his weighty influences, aided by a sharply plotted, momentum-filled story and superb performances from his ensemble cast.

Paul

British comedy duo Simon Pegg and Nick Frost attempt to replicate the success of their cult British genre comedies Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz with Paul, their first American studio comedy, their first screenplay and, crucially, their first film without director and co-writer Edgar Wright. The results are a so-so mix of boisterous male-bonding, sci-fi references and chasing around; not particularly good but not awful either.

After a prologue that might have come directly from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Paul opens with sci-fi nerd best pals Graeme Willy (Pegg) and Clive Gollings (Frost) wandering through San Diego’s geek festival Comic Con as preamble for a road trip through America’s best known UFO hotspots. Their first stop is Roswell, a town deep in the Nevada desert famous for an alleged crash landing by an alien craft in the late 1940s. After a close encounter with a pair of violent rednecks (David Koechner and Jesse Plemons), Graeme and Clive meet Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen), a wise-cracking, chain-smoking alien being who is on the run after escaping from the US military base known as Area 51, where he has spent the last sixty years advising the government.

Faced with evidence of life on other planets and jumping at the chance to live out a real-life ET fantasy, Graeme and Clive take Paul into their wagon and hit the road. Paul must make his way to Devil’s Mountain in Wyoming where his mother-ship will be waiting to take him home. Things get more complicated when the trio accidentally kidnap Ruth (Kristen Wiig), a one-eyed Bible-basher who wears a t-shirt that depicts Jesus shooting Darwin in the head. Her father (John Carroll Lynch), fearing his daughter has been abducted by aliens, gives chase with his shotgun. Meanwhile, mysterious Man In Black Agent Zoil (Jason Bateman) is hot on Paul's trail, aided and abetted by clueless FBI agents Haggard (Bill Hader) and O'Reilly (Joe Lo Truglio), all taking commands from an unseen female agent known as ‘The Man’.

With Pegg and Frost having been clutched to Hollywood’s bosom following the cult success of their previous films at the American multiplexes, expectations were high for Paul. And, although there are obvious similarities and clear comparison points, Paul is a very different film to those the duo made with Edgar Wright; broader, more commercially appealing and gentler than its predecessors. The central pairing have bags of chemistry, as you’d expect from real life best friends, a natural energy that transfers well to the screen. Still, their screenplay is short on surprise, thin on plotting and is lacking a few jokes. It’s also curiously lacking in any kind of interpersonal conflict, the root of much of the laughs in the pairs previous outings. It’s perhaps unfair to criticize the pair for not forming a better bond with a CGI cartoon, but while Rogen’s tiny, grey alien is well written and skilfully rendered, he is never convincingly real.

Paul contains so many nods to the sci-fi genre, Pegg and Frost are in danger of ending up in neck braces. Almost every frame of the film contains a reference to a classic space opera, to the point where the story is consumed by homages and name-drops. The story becomes a procession of reference points – connected by the chase – leaving the characters and their relationships hostage to predictability. Unlike the pair’s British films, there is no element of subversion in this pastiche, no sly inversion of expectations and therefore, no surprise.

Never Let Me Go

Mark Romanek’s beautifully realised adaptation of the 2005 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go is a gloomy romance set in a parallel universe, familiar to us but subtly different.

Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield star as Kathy, Ruth and Tommy: twentysomethings who have grown up in 1970s Britain in Hailsham, a peculiar elite boarding school hidden behind high walls in the countryside. The headmistress (Charlotte Rampling) tells her pupils they are “special” and insists on a long list of draconian rules, including dire warnings about what will happen if they leave the school grounds. Hailsham might seem privileged but is a contained world, hermetically sealed from the outside. Then a new teacher (Sally Hawkins) arrives and makes a startling revelation to the children about who they are and why they’re there. We jump ahead in time to 1985, where the three teenagers are now living as part of a group on a remote farm, free to wander the countryside but living under curfew. Another jump in time brings us to 1994, and the old friends and lovers are reunited to deal with the ramifications of their sinister past.

And that’s about all I can say about the plot. Rather than give away the ending, revealing much more about the particulars of NLMG might ruin the beginning; this is one of those films where the less you know going in, the more rewarding the experience is likely to be. In attempting to replicate the spare, thoughtful prose of the novel, Romanek’s film emphasises mood and atmosphere over rigid explanations. The world in which these characters live and breathe remains almost unexplored, the bureaucracy that governs their lives is unexplained and the true horror of their situation is only alluded to. At first, this blank slate is disconcerting, mirroring the cloistered confusion the characters feel, but Alex Garland’s screenplay sticks closely to the mood and spirit of Ishiguro’s novel, slowly drip-feeding information to the audience. This reluctance to explain the real nature of NLMG’s parallel world might explain the film’s sense of restraint and resignation. As the reality of their situation dawns on the characters, they look among themselves for answers, bringing only more confusion.

The shy love triangle that forms the spine of the story offers a different dramatic reward to seeing a wrong righted and a villain vanquished. NLMG is too subtle for all that obvious noise and fuss, perhaps too subtle for its own good. The circumstances become more compelling than the drama, the mystery more intriguing than the characters trying to figure it out, the science more interesting than the fiction, if you follow me.

None of which should be taken as a reason not to see the film, which evolves through the fog of parable and suggestion into an achingly sad story of futility, albeit one told at a polite remove. The performances from the three main players are exceptional, Mulligan in particular gracefully capturing the ethereal nature of her character, who narrates the story. Her gently lulling voice calmly describes her struggle to make sense of her life with an uncanny combination of seemliness, rage and grief. Knightly and Garfield are likewise superb, investing their characters with a sweet innocence that develops into a touching empathy. Later, Domhnall Gleeson and Andrea Riseborough play a devoted Irish couple, graduates of a school similar to Hailsham, who want to escape their programmed lives. It is also worth noting the meticulous care taken in selecting the children who play the younger versions of the characters. All three bear striking resemblances to their older counterparts, adding another layer of the uncanny to what is a strange, shivery film.

True Grit

Jeff Bridges reinvents the iconic role of Rooster Cogburn in the Coen Brother’s vastly entertaining horse opera True Grit, more a re-working of Charles Portis’ original novel than a straight remake of Henry Hathaway’s John Wayne starring 1960s Western.

As the film opens, 14 year old Mattie Ross (played with tremendous facility by newcomer Hailee Steinfeld) arrives in a western town to enlist the help of Bridge’s one-eyed, hard-drinking Marshal to help her find and kill Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the man who shot her father dead in cold blood. Mattie might be young, but she is feisty, able to defeat all comers in argument with the unerring application of logic. No sooner has she identified his body, and put his coffin on the train, than she gets down to business.

First, she settles her late father’s accounts, selling his horses back to the vendor and paying off his debts. Then she tracks down Cogburn because she has heard that he has ‘true grit’, a tough, battle-scarred quality that she prizes above all others. Having convinced the grizzled veteran to take the job, and now clad in her father’s oversize coat and ten-gallon hat, Mattie insists on going with Cogburn to track Chaney through the badlands. Joining them on the quest is LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), an elaborately moustachioed, rawhide-wearing Texas Ranger who hopes to bag Chaney himself, for a large reward.

Bridges, who distinguishes himself from Wayne’s Oscar-winning performance by wearing his eye-patch on the other eye, is superb as the whiskey-addled cowpoke, delivering his razor-sharp dialogue in a captivating growl. Damon, whose character slips in and out of the story when required, is likewise in fine form as the vain Texan, quick to take umbrage at any perceived slight. But the film belongs to Steinfeld, who holds her own against her more experienced co-stars, with the relationship she forges with Bridges carrying the story along at a tremendous lick.

The Coens direct True Grit with a light touch, their whip-crack dialogue providing unexpected laughs that contrast with the tough story, the stark violence and the bleak desert scrub setting. Their first true Western, following the zero-sum game of No Country For Old Men, True Grit is a place of spilled blood and severe consequence. Much like Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter, which the Coens quote both visually and musically, True Grit is a parable of good versus evil, only here the lines between the two are blurred to the point of invisibility. Nobody is entirely good, but nobody is entirely bad either. These are everyday heroes formed by circumstances and by accident, not ready-made to fit an archetype and not looking for or deserving of a place in the pantheon.

As they have done throughout their careers, the Coen's complete their tale with a post-script that casts what has gone before in a new light, set in the campground of a travelling Wild West show, many years later. Here, a grown-up Mattie sees what showmen and hucksters made of the Old West of her youth, costumed cowboys in fringed suede with a supporting cast of luridly painted natives. As always, the Coens returning collaborators add considerably to the director’s ambitions, with Roger Deakins’ striking widescreen photography and Carter Burwell’s full-blooded score, a selection of old hymns and reels, adding another layer of gloss to what is one of the year’s best films.

The Fighter

Arriving in cinemas laden with Oscar nominations, David O. Russell’s The Fighter is an old-fashioned, unashamedly crowd-pleasing boxing story, flawlessly acted and brilliantly directed, that tells the true story of welterweight “Irish” Micky Ward’s unlikely journey to a world championship belt.

Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale) once went ten rounds with Sugar Ray Leonard, briefly knocking him down, and has been regaling the neighbourhood with the story for years. By the time the story begins Dicky, “The Pride of Lowell”, has descended to drug addiction, spending most of his days cowering in an abandoned house, sucking on a pipe. He’s still recalling his glory days, but this time it’s to a documentary film crew who are following him around. Dicky has been training his younger brother Micky (Mark Wahlberg) for years, getting him ready for local undercard bouts and dreaming of a crack at a championship.

Micky’s domineering mother Alice (Melissa Leo) is also his manager, setting up his fights and creaming a percentage from his meagre winnings. When his two advisors allow him to take a beating from a fighter who outweighs him by 20 pounds, Micky starts to face facts: he’s got a powerful left hook but no stamina. Without professional training he will never win anything. And he has got to get as far away from his family as possible. Then, along comes Micky’s new girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams), the no-nonsense bartender from the local tavern, to act as a buffer between the fighter and his dysfunctional family, restore his confidence and get him back in the ring.

If there was an Oscar for Originality, The Fighter wouldn't win it; the magic of this story is all in the telling. Russell, working with four credited screenwriters, constructs the film in part as a fake documentary, employing the device of having the characters followed around by a team of filmmakers and talking to camera but using the resultant footage in a particularly inventive and dramatically satisfying way. The Fighter has bags of style but is never showy, carefully weaving strands of fact and fiction while retaining a tough, pacy core of storytelling.

Bale’s performance is the standout in an excellent cast, brilliantly capturing Dicky’s jerky physicality, the last few dregs of his boxing fitness topped up with stimulant drugs. His appearance ebbs and flows throughout the story, at times appearing skeletal to the point of disappearing, his eyes little more than glinting marbles. Bale is superb but his efforts are matched by Leo as the Massachusetts Lady Macbeth, elbowing her way to the best position, supported by her shrieking chorus of her seven cauldron-stirring daughters. Wahlberg might be the supposed hero but Mickey is very much a silent presence in his own story. Bullied by his mother and despairing of his feckless brother, Mickey only wants enough peace and quiet to train and box. Wahlberg smartly understates his performance, anchoring the chaos boiling around him with shrugged shoulders and stoical grins.

Even before a youtube video of him screaming at Lily Tomlin on the set of I Heart Huckabees emerged, Russell had developed a reputation for being a difficult director. The critical and commercial failure of that film (released in 2004 and Russell’s last) didn’t help his cause, making The Fighter is as much a triumphant comeback for its battered director as it is for Irish Micky.

Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan sees the writer and director turn his yellow eye to the fiercely competitive world of classical ballet. Natalie Portman plays a high-stepping ingénue whose body and mind collapse under the strain of taking on a dual role in a modern retelling of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

Following the enforced retirement of his prima ballerina Beth MacIntyre (Winona Ryder), domineering choreographer Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) is looking to re-launch his company with a bold production of Swan Lake, which will have one dancer play both the virginal White Swan and the sensual Black, Odette and Odile.

Graceful, ambitious Nina Sayers (Portman) is the obvious choice for the White Swan, but Leroy believes she is too sweet and wholesome to play the dual role. Nina lives with her overbearing mother Erica (Barbara Hershey), a failed dancer turned amateur artist who maintains a tight hold on much of her daughter’s life. When lithe and sultry newcomer Lily (Mila Kunis) joins the production, Nina faces competition for the lead role for the first time in her career. Lily lacks Nina’s precision and determination but has charisma and sexual energy to burn.

The pressure is too much. When the charismatic Leroy tries to kiss her, something in Nina cracks and she starts to see visions of herself as a dark-eyed doppelganger, hears whispered ghostly voices and feels strange new sexual impulses. Half starved, in constant pain and hopelessly isolated, Nina’s dark feelings fester into something more malignant; crippling paranoia, breathless panic and a desire to hurt those around her.

In its best moments, Black Swan combines the Technicolor melodrama of Powell & Pressburger’s The Red Shoes with the lip-smacking camp of Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and the backstage hysterics of A Chorus Line, a newly-fused hybrid of opera and horror, archly theatrical and claustrophobically intense. Framed initially as an oestrogen-soaked drama, then as a psychological thriller, Black Swan eventually reverts to Grand Guignol, devoted to splashing blood and crunching bones, broken hearts and fractured minds and all within a diamond-forming atmosphere of pressure and strain.

As in The Red Shoes, the simple pleasure Nina finds in dancing slowly contorts into a nightmarish compulsion to put her new feelings into physical gestures, however dangerous and devastating they prove to be. Portman is captivating as Nina; her ecstatically wounded expression capturing the confusion of a repressed young woman adrift in a world of danger and carnality with frightening veracity. The rest of the cast are extraordinary, the standout being Kunis’ manipulative minx, every word and gesture open to interpretation as a compliment or a threat.

It seems absurd to describe a film about ballet as jumpy but Black Swan is an intensely disturbing experience, dazzling and disorienting in equal measure. Cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s camera never settles, winding around the characters like an unseen ghost. Aronofsky’s characters are monstrously hateful and mean, without a single redeeming presence. Nina is in almost constant physical pain, rarely at rest and suffering cramps and strains that match her ever-deteriorating psyche. Her visions are haunted with ghosts, demons and doubles. Aronofsy's film is pitch dark, perhaps so dark that the formal beauty in the film is overwhelmed by shadow. Regardless, this is must-see cinema, an overpowering sensory experience pushed to the ragged edge by Portman’s extraordinary performance.

127 Hours

In April 2003, twentysomething American hiker Aron Ralston fell into a crevasse in Utah’s isolated Blue John Canyon. An 800 pound boulder fell with him, landing on his right arm and pinning him against a rock wall and trapping him for the 127 Hours of the title. Director Danny Boyle’s follow up to his Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire is a story of survival, obviously, but the director and writer Simon Beaufoy, working from Ralston’s book 'Between A Rock And A Hard Place', expand the gruesome true story into a coming-of-age tale in which a young man facing death assesses how he has lived his life to that point.

The film opens without preamble with an excited Ralston (James Franco) hurriedly preparing for a long bike ride and trek through his favourite wilderness. A couple of hours into the trek, he meets a pair of young women hikers (Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn), shows them a few of the area’s sights and continues on his way. Shortly afterwards, distracted by the thoughts of the young women’s party invitation, he falls and gets stuck. Jammed against the rock face in a position that would bring tears to the eyes of a yogi, Ralston has only a bottle of water, a small amount of food, his climbing gear and a blunt all-purpose tool with which to survive. Nobody knows he is there and the chances of a rescuer stumbling by are remote.

From then on, which means for most of the ninety-five-minute running time, we’re alone with Franco in a ditch so narrow the light from the sun only enters for a precious fifteen minutes a day. An experienced engineer and enthusiastic outdoorsman, he first attempts to hack at the stone with his dull knife before rigging a complicated rope system to try and extract himself. Nothing works. His mind wandering through exhaustion and dehydration, Ralston ruminates on his short life and imminent death; recalling his family and friends, his ex-girlfriend Rana (Clémence Poésy) and the future life he will not now live in a series of vivid dreams and surreal hallucinations. As his options dwindle, the visions darken. If he is going to get out alive, he must do the unthinkable and amputate his own arm.

The magpie Boyle never makes the same kind of film twice but if there is a running thread through all of his work it is his ability to capture and distil the energy of youth; exuberant, sometimes thoughtless but always quick and exciting. He has the perfect lead in James Franco who plays Ralston as a cocksure thrill-seeker who races out into the world without a thought for his own safety, telling no-one where he is going, looking for total freedom. He finds the exact opposite; a prison made of red rocks and sand. It’s a credit to the director that he doesn’t flinch from depicting the terrible reality of what Ralston had to do to free himself. Squeamish audience members can always shut their eyes (as I did) during the worst of it but, ever the sensationalist, Boyle extends the torture with teeth-grinding sound effects, doubling the intensity of what is already an extreme moment.

For all his recklessness, Ralston’s accumulated regrets amount to little more than white lies, social gaffes and graceless behaviour, a scattered few incidents of awkward stupidity common to all young men. Deep in the pit with death creeping closer, he comes to understand the simple joy in being alive, the importance of family and friendship and the need to be kind.There isn't a lot of suprise to be found in the lessons Ralston learned, what is astonishing is that he lived to learn them.

Monsters

British director Gareth Edwards DIY creature-feature Monsters is a mis-matched romance, a dystopian sci-fi about alien invasion, a sly allegory about illegal immigration and a showcase for the kind of special effects work that can be constructed, with a little talent, from consumer-level digital cameras and laptops. Semi-improvised and made on a shoestring budget with a crew of two people, Monsters is a considerable achievement for the first time director, a sensitive and involving science fiction romance rich in atmosphere and mounted with distinctive style.

A short pre-credits sequence establishes that the US-Mexican border has been infested by dangerous alien beings (resembling a cross between giant spiders and glowing octopuses) that have turned the desert into a no-go zone. World-weary photographer Andrew (Scoot McNairy) has travelled to Mexico to take photographs of the aliens for a newspaper. Travelling through the “infected zone” is incredibly dangerous, with the wandering aliens attacking any humans they encounter. While waiting at the border to cross, Andrew meets rich-girl adventurer Sam (Whitney Able), who happens to be his boss’s daughter. Charged with bringing the wealthy heiress back to safety, Andrew and Sam enlist the help of a gang of local mercenaries and trek through the desert, hoping to reach the safety of America by any means necessary. The locals aren’t too concerned by the alien’s presence; they are more worried about the American military patrols scouring the desert, poisoning the land with chemical weapons.

Like every couple in every road movie ever made, cynical Andrew and cosseted Sam don’t like each other very much in the beginning but their straightened circumstances and the constant threat of imminent death slowly brings them together. The film might be titled Monsters but it might as well be called Humans, as Edwards keeps his focus on the bickering pair as they play out a tender romance against the backdrop of the alien invasion. Rather than undertake a confrontational quest to destroy the aliens, or save the world, Andrew and Sam simply exist in their changed world, getting on with their own lives as chaos falls around them.

Without the budget to deliver wall-to-wall visual thrills, Edwards places his special effects sequences carefully throughout the story, suggesting more than he shows. We catch glimpses of the alien beings from time to time, a tentacle tracing a graceful arc across a television screen or a strange glowing light emerging from the desert night. Although he is working with fewer resources, Edwards creates a complicated mood similar to the South African sci-fi District 9, combining the day-to-day practicality of getting on with things with the blind panic that comes from the threat posed by something unknown and unknowable. Monsters also shares the same underlying social critique as Blomkamp’s film, explicitly asking who are the real ‘monsters’ in the story; the aliens trying to survive in a strange world or the humans who greet their arrival with a vast military blockade?

Somewhere

A rich and famous movie star on a promotional tour is stuck in a bland hotel room for a prolonged period, time he passes eating bad food, having unfulfilling sex, staring out the window and wandering around the neighbourhood. The star, jaded with celebrity, eventually meets a young woman with daddy issues and the pair form a tight bond while exploring the city around them. But this isn’t Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation its Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere, with Los Angeles replacing Tokyo, Stephen Dorff standing in for Bill Murray and Ellie Fanning substituting for Scarlett Johansson.

The story opens with Johnny Marco (Dorff) checking into the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard on his own. Marco has a new movie to publicise but he spends most of his time attending parties with his best friend (Jackass alumnus Chris Pontius), drinking and chasing women. Marco is restless and troubled. A fall downstairs resulted in a broken arm and a heavy cast, his new Ferrari isn’t running smoothly and someone is sending him anonymous, aggressive text messages. When his ex-wife turns up to tell him she’s leaving town for a while, he takes in his little-seen eleven year old daughter Cleo (Ellie Fanning), whose busy pre-teen schedule of ice-skating lessons and video-game sessions offers Marco the chance to freshen his soul-deadening routine.

And that’s about it for plot in Somewhere, a film about boredom that is, for the most part, boring. Coppola never finds the emotional pulse of the story, which flat-lines its way through a series of loosely connected incidents in a yawning manner before dwindling away into pretension. At times Coppola’s studied distraction is focused into moments of melancholy observation. Marco attends a press conference where he is asked a series of inane questions by the sun-addled foreign press corps, who can’t think of anything more insightful to say about his dumb action flick. Later, he sits for an hour, immobile in a chair, while special effects technicians make a mould of his head and make him up as an old man. He stares into the mirror for a long time, horror-struck not by what he will become but by who he already is.

Somewhere might be intended as a satire on the vacuous nature of modern celebrity but all traces of acid comedy have been neutralised by Coppola’s chalky treatment; endless, static scenes of vacant luxury that take us on a tour of indistinguishable hotel rooms, glassy swimming pools, chattering casinos and leather-bound car interiors, where father and daughter have stilted conversations about nothing in particular. In another kind of movie, wise-beyond-her-years Chloe would disrupt Marco’s mild debauchery, forcing him to face up to his newfound status as a responsible father. But that doesn’t happen here. Chloe just nestles under her father’s armpit as he goes around in circles, bringing light and joy and asking for nothing in return. Its undeniably cute stuff and Fanning gives a charming performance but without any hint of crisis or drama the story drifts and dwindles aimlessly, fuzzy and self-absorbed. The closing scenes are bewilderingly opaque, reinforcing the sensation that Somewhere is going nowhere.

The Best and Worst of 2010

2010 comes to a close with the traditional "Best & Worst" list. I have listed my favourites in no particular order here, but if I must pick one above all the others, it would be the sublime French prison drama A Prophet. Jacques Audiard’s powerhouse saga of how a young criminal works his way up the pecking order in a tough prison had me gripped from start to finish. As has become the barometer of these things, over the years, it is the only film I watched again in a cinema after seeing it at a press screening.

The rest of the Best:

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
(Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
Spellbinding and mystifying in equal measure, Apichatpong continues to invent new forms of narrative cinema.

Dogtooth
(Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece)
Disturbing, bizarre and utterly compelling, this study of extreme familial dysfunction is a deadpan black comedy about paranoia, fear and freedom.

Mother
(Bong Joon-ho, South Korea)
Korean director Bong’s brave and assured Oedipal thriller took brilliant characters, placed them in immersive locations and had them do fascinating things. He makes it look easy, but it really isn't.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
(Werner Herzog, US)
Herzog remade Abel Ferrara’s stomach-churning New York cop movie as a lurid psychodrama in sweltering New Orleans and extracted a late-career best performance from a deliriously loopy Nicholas Cage.

The Secret In Their Eyes
(Juan José Campanella, Argentina)
There’s not a note missed or a breath wasted in this richly scripted, involving thriller; a gripping story of love and death centred on an unsolved crime in 1970s Buenos Aires.

Samson & Delilah
(Warwick Thornton, Australia)
The bleak lives of two aboriginal teenagers are depicted in Thornton’s emotionally honest, visually stunning and semi-improvised drama.

Inception
(Christopher Nolan, US)
Christopher Nolan’s mesmerising metaphysical head-scratcher was devilishly complicated but beautifully shiny and new.

The Social Network
(David Fincher, US)
Top marks to Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher for making a vital mainstream studio film from the most unlikely subjects; the internet, business ethics and the legal process. A true Geek tragedy.

His & Hers
(Ken Wardrop, Ireland)
Wardrop’s deceptively simple and beguiling documentary was a series of sweet interviews with Irish women about the men in their lives and a word-of-mouth success at the box office

I Am Love
(Luca Guadagnino, Italy)
A sumptuous, floridly erotic Italian opera with a powerhouse performance from Tilda Swinton and the finest production design of the year.

Another Year
(Mike Leigh, UK)
A talented cast, made up of happy and unhappy characters, come together over the course of a year in Leigh's finely observed comedy drama.

Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, US)
Scorsese's hallucinatory homage to the B-movies of his childhood.

Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, US)
Woody and the gang wave goodbye in this funny and poignant series-ending sequel from Pixar.

Exit Through The Gift Shop
(Banksy, UK)
A sly, uncertain documentary about street art and bullshit artists.

The Worst Films of 2010

Mercifully, Matthew McConaughey did not appear in a film in 2010. If he had done, it would be listed in this space.

Sex & The City II
(Michael Patrick King, US)
Carrie and her superannuated chums reprised their hymn to conspicuous consumption just at the time when the money ran out.

Leap Year
(Anand Tucker, US/Ireland)
If the economy hadn't collapsed so spectacularly, this unwatchable collection of Oirish stereotypes would have been the greatest disaster to befall this country in 2010.

Zonad
(John & Kieran Carney, Ireland)
If there was a joke here, I didn't get it, no matter how often it was repeated.

Vampires Suck
(Jason Freidberg, US)
If the Twilight franchise wasn’t anaemic enough, this lazy spoof was entirely bloodless. Proof that shooting fish in a barrel is tougher than you’d think.

The Collector
(Marcus Dunstan, US)
The last whimpers of the torture-porn movement. Nobody will miss it.

The Last Airbender
(M Night Shyamalan, US)
M Night Shyamalan made a kids movie. Poor kids.

Enter The Void
(Gaspar Noe, France)
The first hour of Gaspar Noe’s psychedelic point-of-view odyssey could easily have made the “Best Of” list. If only he had stopped there.

All About Steve
(Phil Traill, US)
Sandra Bullock follows her Oscar win with a dreadfully mistimed comedy about a mentally challenged woman stalking a news cameraman. Oh, the humanity.

Takers
(John Luessenhop, US)
A flashy menswear catalogue brought to life as a forgotten episode of Miami Vice.

The best film book I read this year was Steven Bach's saga about the making of Heaven's Gate, Final Cut (even if I was a little late in getting round to it). I also really enjoyed Simon Louvish's definitive double-biography of Laurel and Hardy, Stan & Ollie: The Roots of Comedy and Ruth Barton's temperate biography of Hedy Lamarr, The Most Beautiful Woman in Film. The worst film book, by some distance, was Kevin Smith's semi-literate masturbation diary, My Boring-Ass Life which, like his recent films, is just awful. My song of the year was Wayne Smith's 'Under Mi Sleng Teng', an early-80s electro reggae track which featured on the soundtrack to Shane Meadow's tv series This Is England 86.

And that's it. Happy New Year!

Machete

What began as a fake trailer inserted in the middle of Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s failed hymn to the glories of exploitation cinema, Machete (the exclamation mark is implied) has now been expanded by writer and director Rodriguez into a real movie. He mightn’t have bothered; it was better as a two minute spoof.

In his first starring role in a 25 year career, leather-faced Danny Trejo plays a former Mexican policeman nicknamed Machete who is hired to assassinate a Texan politician (Robert De Niro) by a wealthy political fixer (Jeff Fahey). The fixer, in turn, is working for a Confucius-spouting drug lord (Steven Seagal) who is in league with a crooked white-supremacist sheriff (Don Johnson).

Helping Machete overthrow the devils oppressing his immigrant countrymen are his brother, a heavily- armed parish priest (Cheech Marin) and a twinned pair of scantily-dressed all-action women, a revolutionary truck-stop café owner (Michelle Rodriguez) and a sympathetic FBI agent (Jessica Alba). Later, Lindsay Lohan defies casting to type in a cameo as a dumb blonde, strung out on drugs, taking her clothes off on the internet “to please her fans”. When Machete’s mission goes wrong and he becomes a wanted man, he connects with the secretive immigrant underground in order to hatch an elaborate revenge.

What follows is essentially an extended elaboration on the same tittering exploitation themes Rodriguez really should have gotten out of his system after Grindhouse. Told in a series of breathlessly camp and eye-wateringly violent scenes of random butchery, sleazy nudity and grisly visual humour, Machete is realised as a live-action cartoon, albeit one strictly for grown-ups. The thin plot unfolds exactly as you might expect; a blizzard of crosses and double-crosses, beheadings and dismemberments, shootouts and standoffs.

Trejo has an unforgettable face but he makes for a less than charismatic leading man. His blazing eyes and rolling shoulders carry tremendous threat but he lacks the range to turn his sleazy angel of vengeance into anything other than a caricature of a mangled tough guy. Almost silent and dripping with knives, Machete beats the lining out of every man he encounters while every woman falls swooning at his feet. Rodriguez also employs his outcast anti-hero as the conduit for a series of pointed political messages, among them a parody of the recent attempts in Arizona to build an enormous fence along the border with Mexico and a racist election campaign television advertisement, which imagines illegal immigrants as scuttling cockroaches beneath the heel of the senator’s cowboy boot.

These moments of social commentary, studded throughout the wider narrative, are where Rodriguez finds the room to do what he does best: quipped one-liners, cynical visual jokes and self-consciously shabby, home-made special effects work. The director is less successful in sustaining his thinly-sketched characters as they jump through the various hoops in the story, with the result that when his film isn’t being randomly entertaining, it’s deathly dull. With a running time of just under two hours, perhaps the surprise is not that Machete wears out its welcome but how quickly it does so.

Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows Part 1

Harry Potter is heading off. The first in a double bill of farewells, The Deathly Hallows Part 1, is a passable thumb-twiddler for impatient fans but the beginning of the end for this dwindling saga fails to generate the tension required to maintain interest in the conclusion to follow (in swanky but unrequested 3-D) next July.

As the last installment The Half Blood Prince hinted, the world of Harry Potter has become a scarier, more threatening place. This story opens with a series of poignant sacrifices as Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) leave the comfort of their families and the alma mater of Hogwarts behind and strike out on their own. Harry’s mortal enemy, the now all-powerful wizard Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) has taken control of the Ministry of Magic and declared the teenager to be “Undesirable No. 1”. The Orwellian Ministry, now overseen by psychotic housewife Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton), has started a campaign against mudbloods, wizards born to Muggles, the echoes of Nazism underlined by black-shirted soldiers carrying scarlet banners.

Harry’s only hope of stopping Voldemort lies in his finding and destroying the mystical horcruxes, fragments of the Dark Lord's septic soul hidden throughout the magical world. The late, lamented Dumbledore has left behind a series of clues but the central trio must venture out on their own to locate the hidden objects by decoding symbols and tracking down lost witches and wizards, all without the support of their usual champions. Then, suddenly, the trio is split. Paranoid, jealous Ron leaves Harry and Hermione to continue the quest on their own, with director David Yates employing the divide to spin the series’ most unstructured, free-form chapter yet, a lumbering, bleak winter spent camping out, going from shadowy forest to windblown cliffs, as the trio join the dots on their quest while engaging in a timid teenage bicker.

Even with returning screenwriter Steve Kloves cleaving Rowling’s 700 page novel in two more or less equal halves, Yates’ film stumbles under the weight of its awkward exposition. The tone is richly gloomy but the choppy story never achieves the same uniform tenor, unfolding as a procession of crisis moments played as interchangeable action sequences; flashily photographed and edited and awash with impressive CGI effects but essentially inert and uninvolving. Far better are the film’s few quiet moments; the central trio’s bleak trek through the wintry British landscape, a beautiful shadow puppet-inspired animation that explains the origins of the title and a late scene in a snowbound cemetery that is one of the few occasions of emotional honesty in the entire franchise.

It’s not only the story that has matured; these characters have grown up in front of us. Harry’s serious face now sports tufts of wispy stubble, tomboy brain-box Hermione has matured into a sensible romantic heroine while Ron has gone from squeaky-voiced scaredy-cat to square-shouldered hunk. No longer able to hide behind the tag ‘child-actors’, these young veterans, who have been playing the roles for almost a decade, must carry the vast weight of this film entirely on their own. Radcliffe and Grint emerge as the victors, with Watson looking uncomfortable, even when sitting still. What is sorely lacking is something conclusive for any of them to do, with Part 1 only a drawn-out set-up for the last hurrah to come next year. And not a moment too soon.

Another Year

British director Mike Leigh's latest film tells the story of twelve months in the life of a happily married couple, Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) as they interact with a series of unhappy people; family, friends and work colleagues. Not as light-hearted as Leigh’s last film, Happy-Go-Lucky, or as sombre as the long run of films that preceded it, Another Year falls somewhere in between, an acutely observed, bittersweet character comedy.

The film opens with a series of tense, terse scenes where a depressed, middle-aged woman named Janet (Imelda Staunton) visits a doctor for sleeping tablets, before attending – under protest – a session with Gerri, the clinic’s counsellor. In another Leigh film, we might follow Janet’s story but in this one she is never mentioned again. We’re interested in Gerri, and so follow her home to the suburban London house she shares with her husband, the place where they raised their thirty year old son Joe (Oliver Maltman) and where they entertain, now and again, small groups of friends over a bottle of wine. Patient, calm Gerri spends as much time tending to her family and friends as she does to her neat garden and blooming allotment. For his part, steady, sturdy Tom works as a geologist specialising in building foundations, the bedrock of the city. They’re literally the salt of the earth.

Gerri’s closest friend is medical secretary Mary (Lesley Manville) they’ve worked together for twenty years. Scatterbrained and man-hungry, Mary likes to drink and talk, both of which tend to get her into trouble. Then there’s Tom’s childhood friend Ken (Peter Wight); a big, boozy Northern bachelor who comes to visit on his weekends off. As we gradually get to know these characters, not much of anything happens. Mary buys a second-hand car and it is a disaster. Joe brings home his new girlfriend Katie (Karina Fernandez) and she’s lovely; cheerful and chatty and easygoing. Gerri harvests some nice tomatoes. Tom worries about his brother Robbie (David Bradley). Ken gets drunk and falls over.

Chaptered into four separate sections, each titled after a season of the year, Leigh presents all of this in his typically unshowy manner, light on plot but heavy on character, filled with tiny moments of observational comedy and sneakily delicate drama. What distinguishes Leigh from his contemporaries is his ability to make a compelling story out of the material that other filmmakers use as filler. A cup of tea and a stray word turns into a crisis moment in a friendship, a fraught drive to the railway station hinges on an excruciatingly fumbled kiss, a rushed arrival at a summer barbeque opens up questions about the latecomers state of mind. All of these delicate moments might be lost in a busier story but for Leigh they are the reason for making the film in the first place, the entirety of the thing.

As we have come to expect from this consummate actor’s director, the performances from the entire ensemble are outstanding, intricately constructed, richly detailed and profoundly moving. It is a pleasure to spend a couple of hours in their company, even the sad and lonely ones. Especially them.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Oliver Stone continues his late-career run of unwatchable duds with Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, a sequel to his era-defining original, released just two months after Black Monday in 1987. The story of the fall from grace of Michael Douglas’ greedy Gordon Gekko might have been intended as a cautionary tale but it came to be regarded as an advertisement for the culture of excess it condemned. Twenty years later, everything is different. The markets might be volatile, but turning the ongoing financial collapse into a compelling and satisfying cinematic story requires a surer hand than Stone can provide.

As the new film opens, Stone’s semi-demonic anti-hero Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) is being released from prison after serving an eight year stretch for insider trading. Shortly afterwards, the irrepressible Gekko has regained his place at the trough, writing a bestselling book about the state of the markets that garners him plenty of press attention and a lucrative lecture tour. “You're the NINJA generation—no income, no job, no assets,” he tells a crowd of applauding acolytes, including young investment banker Jacob Moore (Shia LaBeouf), who just happens to be engaged to Gekko’s estranged daughter, left-wing blogger and activist Winnie (Carey Mulligan). Jacob starts meeting with Gekko behind Winnie’s back, pumping the financial guru for career advice in exchange for facilitating a family reunion.

Not content with one villain, Stone introduces a new breed of reptile in Josh Brolin’s swaggering Bretton James. James came of age in a time when Gekko’s personal credo of “greed is good” became an aphorism, the first line on the first page of the Wall St trader’s handbook. James also serves to introduce rising talent Jacob to the good life, displaying his expensive art and lighting fat cigars and, later, challenging him to a macho race through upstate New York on expensive motorbikes.

Stone and his cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto bring a glitzy look to the melodrama, turning Manhattan into an arrangement of ornate structures and kaleidoscopic lights. Stone’s determination to decorate his moral sewer with glittering jewels reaches a climax in a bizarre scene at a glamorous reception where the camera glides through the crowd, settling on the enormous, sparkling earrings of the women in the crowd. Having arranged a seamless baker’s dozen of these elaborate jewels, the director hammers home his point about ill-gotten glories by closing on Mulligan’s demure pearl studs.

With characteristic modesty and subtlety, Stone is attempting to distil and define the recent financial collapse as a pantomime of good versus evil, pitting his cardboard cut-out characters against one another while, in the background, the world they inhabit collapses. In the underdeveloped script there are long passages when nothing seems to happen for long periods before a sudden tsunami of emotional crests all arrive at once. The death of Jacob’s mentor (a well-used Frank Langella) collides with his proposing marriage to the soporific Winnie. Later, the revelation that Winnie is pregnant, and Jacob’s realisation that he is soon to be a responsible family man, is crowded out by a quickfire series of Machiavellian manipulations from Gekko’s grinning villain.

Perhaps the time he spent with Fidel Castro for his documentary Comandante has eroded Stone’s faith in American capitalism. Wall Street II is not an investigation into the movement of modern money, or how lax banking regulation eventually breeds corruption, but rather a series of carelessly arranged vignettes on the themes of honour, loyalty and shame. The result is that while Stone’s second wander down Wall St never wants for incident, it is impossible to care about any of his characters and the story floats off into a sloppy, soppy conclusion.

Savage

IADT graduate and prolific short-subject writer and director Brendan Muldowney’s debut feature film Savage is a timely story about an increasingly violent Irish society undermined by ponderous characterisation and moments of frothy hysteria.

Darren Healy plays jobbing photographer Paul Graynor, who spends his working life outside the Four Courts, snapping criminals as they emerge from the back of police vans. Lonely and withdrawn, the only person Paul talks to, other than his elderly, ailing father, is the old man’s nurse, Michelle (Nora-Jane Noone). Having plucked up the courage to ask her out, Paul and Michelle start a tentative relationship. But on the way home from their first date, Paul is mugged in a side-street. His attackers respond to his cowering fear with an even more brutal assault, which leaves Paul with horrific injuries. Unable to come to terms with what has happened; mild-mannered Paul retreats to the isolation of his city-centre apartment where he hatches a plan for revenge.

Impressively photographed, edited and scored, Savage is a slick looking film, even more so when the very low production budget is taken into consideration. However, the glossy production work isn’t enough to override the fundamental flaws in the greasy story. The film is littered with moments of clanging implausibility. The assault Paul suffers (which, in fairness to the potential audience, I cannot reveal here) is burdened by an unnecessary metaphorical weight that the rest of the story struggles to carry.

Later, Paul’s interactions with authority figures, policemen, doctors and psychiatrists, are improbably perfunctory and glib; a complete misreading of the post-traumatic psychiatric care process and something that could have been rectified by further research or the application of common sense above cinematic expediency. These clumsy exchanges are not intended to help Paul but rather to push him towards his transformation into an agent of bloody vengeance. The point is hammered home in a sequence where Paul watches a reactionary television pundit espouse about our “brutal society” being at a “tipping-point” before pledging to kill anyone who breaks into his house.

The two leads give performances of more nuance than the material they have to work with. Healy is entirely convincing as the traumatised young man, struggling to come to terms with changed life prospects while Noone is both hard-edged and soft-hearted as the pragmatic nurse, looking to help him. But as the story develops, it becomes increasingly difficult to sympathise with Healy’s fascistically-drawn Übermensch, shaving his head, necking illegal steroids and waving a big knife while Noone, an angelic sounding-board, offers nothing but timid objections. Muldowney is clearly influenced by films such as Taxi Driver, Death Wish and Straw Dogs in depicting a man who reacts to the violence he meets by becoming violent in return. But the writer and director fails to capture the dangerous ambiguity of his genre predecessors and Savage deteriorates into a didactic lecture about the dangers of vigilantism. For all its flaws, Savage is a statement of intent from Muldowney and his producer Conor Barry, a film that shows their considerable promise for the future.