Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino has been talking about his WWII film, Inglourious Basterds for a decade, and writing it for fifteen. A wild fantasy made up of elements of a combat adventure, alternate history, character comedy and exploitation horror, the film is not so much a running story as five segmented chapters revolving around a central nub.

First, a note on the film’s title which is Tarantino’s deliberate misspelling of an obscure 1978 Italian war adventure, his declared inspiration and the first of hundreds of references to other films Inglourious Basterds contains. The film proper opens with another, a nod to Sergio Leone in the scene-setting chapter heading “Once Upon A Time in Nazi Occupied France”, in which a French dairy farmer who is hiding a Jewish family is visited by the film’s bad guy, Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christopher Waltz). In a few deft strokes, the director lays out the scene as Landa interrogates Denis Menochet, who plays the dairy farmer, at his kitchen table. It is the best section in the film, brilliantly played, nerve-wracking and daring and among the finest in any Tarantino movie.

The story then switches to the exploits of Lt Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a tough-talking hillbilly soldier with an unexplained scar around his neck. Raine commands the Basterds, a specially-recruited squad of vengeful Jewish soldiers sent on a secret kill-on-sight mission behind enemy lines. He has charged each of his men to deliver him one hundred Nazi scalps; an act of barbarism intended to strike terror in the hearts of the German ranks. Of the eight men in the troop, only half are introduced to us by name and only a couple are given a back-story, evidence of the amount of editing Tarantino’s decade-long script required in order to release the film at a tolerable length.

In a parallel story, we meet Soshanna Dreyfuss (Melanie Laurent), a young Jewish girl who watched her family killed by the demonic Col. Landa and is living under an assumed identity as a French cinema-owner in Paris. The next three chapters combined tell the sometimes long-winded story of the Basterd’s finest hour; an audacious mission to bomb Soshanna’s cinema during the screening of a propaganda film attended by Hitler and his high command. Helping them is German movie-star turned spy Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), who presides over a massively over-extended sequence set in a French cellar bar where the Basterd’s and Michael Fassbender’s clipped British Lt Archie Hicox (a former film critic, no less) mingle nervously with the Nazi’s over a card game and a pint. Meanwhile, in Paris and unbeknownst to the Basterds, Soshanna has hatched her own plan to blow up the cinema, using a pile of highly combustible nitrate celluloid as explosive.

Even more than his last film Death Proof, a misjudged celebration of sleazy 1970s exploitation cinema, Inglourious Basterds is a love-note to cinema. Almost every major character has a direct connection to the world of film; there’s a producer and a critic, a cinema-owner and a projectionist, an actor and an actress. Although Tarantino’s most immediate reference point is gung-ho war caper The Dirty Dozen, Inglourious Basterds is composed of sketches derived from another dirty dozen entirely; an arch pastiche of obscure spaghetti westerns, forgotten B movies, gory giallo horrors and 1930s German expressionist drama.

If the fragmented story is tricky to follow, it proves impossible to keep pace with the director’s catalogue of influences, name-drops and cameo tributes. Best not to bother. The film is intended as an experience, not a lecture in cinema sub-genres or, given the licence the director takes with history, a documentary on WWII. Through the blur of homage, violence, gore and snappy backchat, what emerges is a vision of Tarantino’s alternate, hyper-realistic world, a place peopled by movie characters, where anything is possible. This is a film about sensation and spectacle. It’s about that indefinable, impalpable quality: cool.

Leaden in parts and talkative to the point of irritation, Inglourious Basterds is no masterpiece but it is still Tarantino’s best film since Jackie Brown. I am prepared to forgive the director his egotism, his fetishism, his know-it-all arrogance and his verbosity because when he is good, he is really very good indeed. There is the nagging sensation, however, that Tarantino is serving up junk food when he has all the ingredients for a sumptuous banquet.

Read my interview with Tarantino for Death Proof here

Mid-August Lunch

Mid-August Lunch is a miniature gem, a simple, unassuming comedy of manners that plays out over a sunny weekend in a few dusty streets in central Rome.

Gianni (played by writer and first-time director Gianni Di Gregorio) is a middle-aged bachelor who lives with his widowed, elderly mother (Valeria De Franciscis) in an old apartment block. Unemployed and undemanding, Gianni’s life revolves around looking after his mama. As the film opens, he is reading her to sleep, a chapter from The Three Musketeers. In the morning, he makes her breakfast. She accepts his ministrations with queenly grace. What time Gianni has outside the house is spent with his drinking buddy Viking (Luigi Marchetti), sipping wine in the shade outside the local shop.

The day before the August bank holiday known as the Ferragosto, when the citizens traditionally escape the city heat for the coast, Gianni’s landlord asks him to take care of his mother for the weekend. In exchange, he will settle some of the service charges Gianni has ignored for years. Strapped for cash, Gianni is forced to accept. Treacherously, the next morning, the landlord arrives with two old dears, the mother (Marina Cacciotti) and Aunt Maria (Maria Cali).

Overwhelmed by the prospect of a houseful of elderly women, Gianni feels a little faint, so he calls his friend, a doctor. After a reassuring examination and some wheedling smalltalk, the doctor foists his own mother on him, “just for one night”. Crammed together in the small apartment, at first, the four women bicker over access to the television and the dinner menu. Soon, however, they have bonded over palm-reading sessions around the kitchen table as Gianni runs around, catering to their every need.

Di Gregorio fills out his story with a series of offhand moments; a mortifying romantic fumble on the couch, a trip across the deserted city to buy fish from the banks of the Tiber, a much-debated recipe for pasta bake. Elegantly played and emotionally lively, Mid-August Lunch is might be small but it is perfectly formed, deftly revealing over the course of it’s seventy minute running time, the obsessions of the Italian male; mama, food and hypochondria.

A kitchen-sink comedy is not the sort of film you would expect from Di Gregorio, who co-wrote the gritty mafia drama Gomorrah (one of the best films of last year) with director Matteo Garrone, who produces here. As a director, Di Gregorio moves the camera around the cramped apartment with seamless grace but even in the golden summer sun, the results are at best, perfunctory. Still, it's not about chocolate-box photography, it's about character.

Astonishingly, none of the women have acted before. As the lead, and essentially playing himself, Di Gregorio maintains a good-natured stoicism, dealing with whatever minor dramas the old women throw in his face but the curtailed nature of the story, more an anecdote than a fully-fleshed drama, doesn’t allow Gianni much room to develop. He seems perfectly happy with things the way they are, and when they are as simple and pleasurable as this, who can blame him?

Orphan

Movies have been trying to tell us for years that children are inherently evil. From little Patty in The Bad Seed to Damian in The Omen, via Rosemary’s Baby and The Children of the Corn, there is an entire nursery of demon movie kids whose only purpose is to wreak havoc when brought into ordinary families.

Families like the Coleman’s in Orphan; Kate (Vera Farmiga), John (Peter Sarsgaard) and their two children, 10 year-old Daniel (Jimmy Bennett) and adorable six year-old Max (Aryana Engineer), who was born deaf. In an effort to put the pain of a recent miscarriage behind them, Kate and John plan to adopt a third child. On a tour of a local orphanage, they meet little Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), and strike up a rapport with the bright, intelligent child.

Russian-born Esther is unfailingly polite and immaculately turned out in Victorian pinafores with delicate frills. She paints with a talent beyond her years; naïve, faintly surreal canvases that cover her bedroom walls. She can sit down at a piano and belt out a lively Tchaikovsky number. So why, after only a few weeks in her new home, is her adoptive mother so scared of her? As the film’s poster proclaims, there is something wrong with Esther.

Bad things happen around the dark-eyed child with preternatural regularity. A school friend falls from a playground climbing frame, or a parked car rolls backwards down a steep hill. There is an unsettling air of examination in the child’s placid stare, and a queasy self-awareness in her eager innocence. Esther’s everyday conversations seem to carry a note of spiky threat or psychological cunning.

The Little Bo Peep outfits are one thing, but why does she insist on wearing thin black ribbons on her neck and wrists? And what’s with the tattered black Bible she carries everywhere? That can’t be good. When Kate begins to suspect that the source of all the family problems is the new cuckoo in the nest, she becomes a target for Esther’s devious manipulations.

Orphan is an effective and entertaining horror that generates enough old-fashioned dread to carry it through its many implausible moments. Although solid throughout, Farmiga and Sarsgaard are comprehensively out-acted by their much-younger co-stars, with newcomer Fuhrman in particular giving a delightfully mordant turn as the mini-monster.

Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra has never given any indication he had the talent to pull off a story like this in his previous films, the Paris Hilton-starring House of Wax and football sequel Goal II. Cleverly, rather than drown his story in flashy special effects, Collet-Serra relies on tried and trusted horror techniques, mostly played in-camera, to ratchet up the tension, topping the thrills with an audacious, elegantly played last-reel twist.

Antichrist

Pretentious, preposterous and utterly vile, Danish provocateur Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist is a graphic, Gothic chamber piece about a woman going through a violent mental breakdown. Buoyed by a wave of controversy since its debut at Cannes, the film is a great glob of self-loathing and despair, hurled directly onto the screen as a form of primal therapy.

After a set of provocative, hand-scrawled title cards that read ‘Lars Von Trier’ and ‘Antichrist’, respectively, the film opens with a prologue in which a married couple, known only as He and She (Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) make love in a room while, in another part of the house, their infant son falls to his death from an open window. Shot in black and white, entirely in slow-motion and scored with an aria from Handel, the sequence would be indistinguishable from a fancy perfume advertisement if it wasn’t for the flashes of unsimulated sex and splattered blood.

She descends into a spiral of guilt and depression so deep she is hospitalised and heavily medicated. Her husband, a therapist, insists he knows better, demands that she abandon her medication and undergo his own brand of talking therapy. The two make a trip to their remote country house, named Eden. There, he subjects her to endless, merciless psychobabble, relentlessly chipping away at her behaviour, beliefs and defences. He talks and talks, but nothing of what he says is memorable, or as it turns out, all that effective.

Antichrist is Von Trier’s version of the Fall of Man, his take on the passages in Genesis where Man is cast from Paradise and Satan is introduced to the world. Into that, the director adds his own greasy, malformed theses on the subjugation of women through history (dubbed ‘Gynocide’) and the process of undergoing psychotherapy. According to Von Trier’s Gnostic reasoning, it was Satan, not God, who created the world, so nobody should be surprised when bad things happen. Evil is part of the design, represented here by a spurious star-map showing three constellations; the deer, the fox and the raven. All three animals show up at various points in the narrative, in various forms of distress. By far the most startling, and inadvertently comic, is the talking fox, who pops up from a thicket to croak “chaos reigns” (in the director’s voice) at an unfazed Defoe.

The fox, as it turns out, is right. For his big finale, Von Trier takes a clumsy lurch into the voguish realms of the torture pornography found in Hostel or Saw. Haunted by visions of her child’s death and goaded into action by her husband’s incessant talking, She turns violent, knocking Him out, drilling a hole in his leg and inserting a millstone. Later, she takes a heavy wooden block to his crotch, castrating him, before mutilating her own genitals with a scissors.

Von Trier shows us these actions in graphic detail, seeming to delight in degrading his actors and repulsing his audience. The director is more concerned with putting his audience through the wringer than with saying anything interesting. For a film full of signs and signifiers, some more subtle than others, it is damning that the violence that Von Trier inflicts on his characters, and on us, carries no symbolic weight whatsoever. These scenes seem to exist only to allow Von Trier exact his own revenge on the characters. This is torture as a taunt, with the director goading the viewer into revulsion, wallowing in his own childish ability to upset, a repugnant, self-indulgent misanthropy.

Chaptered into four sections, each given a portentous title, there is no rhyme or reason to the events that occur, they happen at the whim of the director. In interviews at Cannes film festival, Von Trier claimed to have been in the throes of an incapacitating depression while writing Antichrist and there is evidence of a disturbed mind in every frame. Or at least, there is a facsimile of madness, which might well be the joke. This being a Von Trier film, there has to be a joke, however sour.

Von Trier saves the biggest laugh for the end titles, an incongruous dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky that should be an apology to David Lynch. There isn't a sniff of the Russian master anywhere, but there are allusions to Lynch’s films throughout Antichrist; strange machine noises, banks of circling fog, timeless slow-motion sequences, sinister landscapes and skies filled with star-maps. Other images recall the work of visual artists like Hieronymus Bosch or the Chapman Brothers; tangles of human limbs, misshapen creatures and nightmare visions of teeming humanity. Von Trier is free to make whatever film he likes, but he should at least make it his own.

Full marks for hype and top score for spectacle but as a film, Antichrist fails utterly and absolutely. Watching it is the equivalent of being beaten into submission. Its cruelty is unrelenting and terminally dull.

Moon

This year being the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, the timing couldn’t be more appropriate for Duncan Jones’ admirable, if derivative, low-budget science-fiction think piece Moon; a pared down exercise in minimalism that serves as a one-man show for its edgy lead, Sam Rockwell.

Co-writer and director Jones covers the opening ground quickly, a mock television commercial explaining that Earth’s energy needs are now met by mining the moon for Helium 3, converting rocks into fuel in massive robotic factories. Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a Lunar company employee who is coming to the end of a three-year stint as the sole human inhabitant of the mining station Selene. He is not entirely alone, however. His companion is a computer named GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey in a soothing monotone) who looks after the mine’s complex systems and thanks to a robotic arm, assists Sam’s in his work.

Owing to a problem with the communications satellite, his only communication with his Earth-bound wife (Irish actress Dominique McElligott) and baby daughter is via pre-recorded videos. The constant routine of work, exercise and sleep increase Sam’s sense of cabin-fever, his isolation and paranoia. With only a fortnight to go in the mission, Sam starts hearing and seeing things. When a routine operation goes badly wrong and he is knocked out for a couple of hours, the now-bedraggled astronaut awakes to discover that things have changed in his absence.

Watching Moon, it is virtually impossible not to be reminded of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, and there are nods also to other sci-fi classics of the 1960s and 1970s; Silent Running, Outland and Alien, films that posed questions about the nature of humanity or considered the possibilities of the future. To say much more might ruin some of the surprises in the film's sparse, delicately positioned plotting. Jones immerses the viewer into a future world, quickly explains the mechanics of the narrative and uses the rest of the time to marry the intricacies of the story into a wider theme, in this case asking moral question about human identity in a world where creating life has become laboratory science.

This is not the kind of cosmic environment evoked by Star Trek, a chummy club of adventurers scooting around the universe surrounded by safe, reliable technologies. This is a cold, indifferent place, where machines built by humans are corroded by use and contain built-in errors. Jones constructs a credible, realistically grimy space station interior, a modular, utilitarian place instantly familiar and satisfyingly real, at least to genre fans. There are ironic touches everywhere, from Gerty’s simple emoticon interface to Sam’s wake-up call, a shrill blast of Chesney Hawke’s 'I Am The One And Only'.

Moon never quite reaches the heights of its inspirations, but neither does it explode on the launch pad. In his feature debut, Jones (who is no doubt sick to tears of people going on about him being David Bowie’s son) displays an impressive technical command of his budget-restricted special effects, spinning a spare, genre specific chamber piece into a thoughtfully considered and consistently inventive story filled with ideas, even if some of those were originally Kubrick’s.

Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince

Harry Potter and his magical chums are all grown up in The Half Blood Prince, the sixth film in JK Rowling’s franchise, which has darkened considerably since the jolly schooldays fun of The Philosopher’s Stone back in 2001. The Half Blood Prince is a stop-gap film, designed to drag these characters into young adulthood while providing Harry with the motivation to confront his evil arch-nemesis Lord Voldemort in the series finale The Deathly Hallows, now split into two parts for release over the next couple of summers.

The film opens with a wordless shot - in what will become a signature inky monotone - of Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), battered but victorious after the events of The Order of the Phoenix. The story closes, two stirring hours later, at a sensational moment familiar to readers of the book, a time when all hope seems lost. The Half Blood Prince is a film made up more of fleeting emotions, moods and tones, than a strictly plotted story. Harry has returned to Hogwarts school for the start of another year when the demonic Death Eaters, led by Voldemort, start wreaking havoc throughout the country, including attacks on Muggles, ordinary people not connected to the wizard world. Sworn to protect their leader, and destroy Harry, a covert Death Eater has followed him to Hogwarts and begun hatching a sinister plan.

Harry has his suspicions, but his friend and headmaster Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) is more interested in preparing the young wizard for his most dangerous mission so far, the discovery of a vital clue to destroying Voldemort known as a Horcrux. The key to finding this fragment of Voldemort’s black soul is known only to Hogwarts’ new Potions Professor, Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent), information Dumbledore can retrieve from his memories and display on a shining bowl of silvery water. At the same time, Harry is benefiting from helpful notes jotted in the margins of one of his schoolbooks, a battered old text that used to belong to a young prodigy who signed himself “the half-blood prince”.

Meanwhile, teenage hormones are casting a spell of their own. Harry’s moon-eyed pursuit of Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright) is developing into something deeper, helped by their shared skills on the quidditch field. Harry’s best friend Ron (Rupert Grint) has spurned his long-time crush Hermione (Emma Watson) and become entangled in the lavish affections of Lavender Brown (Jessie Cave), to everyone’s annoyance.

The ins and outs of Dumbledore and Harry’s quest might prove confusing to the uninitiated, but otherwise Yates and his screenwriter Steve Kloves draw clear, clean lines through the reams of Rowling’s original text, dropping everything that doesn’t contribute to their ever-darkening theme of momentous change. In the process, characters like Robbie Coltrane’s ungainly Hagrid and Maggie Smith’s pernickety McGonagall are relegated to remember-me cameos or solitary, declamatory scenes.

If there is no real urgency in The Half Blood Prince it is because we have waited so long for these events to arrive, and are still awaiting a final conclusion, that the film feels like it is spanning a gulf in time and development rather than standing alone as a narrative. Everything is pointed at the catharsis of the final reel, meaning much of the rest is incidental; a series of comforting comic asides, cleverly introduced flashbacks, distractions and side-bars. They might mean very little but these sequences are beautifully rendered by Yates and his creative team, who create a tangible atmosphere of foreboding with muted, spectral light, innovative angles and a sparing use of the series’ occasionally intrusive special effects.

Read my set-visit and interview with Daniel Radcliffe here

35 Shots of Rum

The films of French director Claire Denis are maddeningly reticent and ephemeral things, wisps of character and story that, depending on ones disposition, will either linger long or disperse at the slightest breeze. Her latest, 35 Shots of Rum is a bittersweet story of a phase in family life told with the director’s signature languor.

The first time we meet Josephine (Mati Diop), she is buying a rice cooker, an everyday item that becomes a symbol of the young woman’s growing independence. A student and part-time worker, Josephine lives with her train-driver father Lionel (Alex Decas) in an apartment in a modernist block on an anonymous street in the outer ring of Parisian suburbs. Their life together has settled into a comfortable household routine which often sees them sitting together at the table and eating steaming plates of rice, topped with scarlet harissa.

Their chain-smoking taxi-driving neighbour Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) holds a lingering flame for the leonine Lionel, waiting for him on the stairs and writing poetic love notes. Upstairs, the suave, jet-set Noe (Grégoire Colin) is cautiously circling the feline Josephine, batting away rivals for her affections and catching her eye with meaningful glances.

Halfway through, the story that Denis is forming appears to be about this foursome pairing off in their own romantic directions, but the director aspires to more subtle methods than that. Gentle ripples begin to appear that reveal a smaller, more intimate story that the director wants to show us, not tell us. A night out that doesn’t go as planned leaves all four stranded in a cafe where they drink, flirt and dance to The Commodores’ Night Shift. Later, father and daughter take a road trip to Germany; a journey that explains how father and daughter came to be living together alone just as Josephine will soon leave home.

The trouble is that by the time these critical moments come about, they might pass unnoticed among the rest of the perfectly photographed, comfortably meandering incidents and trajectories. Does it mean anything that Lionel’s colleague has recently retired? What, if anything, are we supposed to glean from the lecture about the Breton Woods System that Josephine delivers to her classmates?

Suitably for a film that opens with a ten minute montage of trains, 35 Shots of Rum is more about the journey than the destination. Denis is reluctant to signpost anything, preferring to gently nudge her characters into place and have the viewer decide what is important. Her way of telling a story places manners and behaviour over action or plot, working a delicate web of gestures and actions that threatens, at times, to not form into a film at all. This kind of construction requires a talented cast to make it work, and Denis ambitions are well realised by fine performances from the ensemble, in particular her regular male lead Descas, who brings power and dignity to what is a slightly-written character.

Public Enemies

The short, sensational life of 1930s Chicago gangster John Dillinger passed into folk legend even before his corpse grew cold. During the Great Depression, Dillinger robbed the banks that in turn had robbed the public, in the process becoming a hero to the public and a lightning rod for gangsterism. He was the first crook dubbed “Public Enemy Number One” by J Edgar Hoover’s newfound FBI, who eventually cornered their man outside a Chicago cinema, the Biograph. In time, Hollywood even came to made films about him; Lawrence Tierney scowling down the barrel of a tommy-gun in 1945’s mostly fictional Dillinger and Warren Oates repeating the trick in John Milius’ ribald 1970s retelling.

Now, following his redundant attempt to revitalise Miami Vice, Hollywood’s specialist crime auteur Michael Mann brings us his biopic of the ‘gangster’s gangster’, with Johnny Depp playing an unlikely but mesmerizing Dillinger. It is an electrifying story, brilliantly told by Mann from a historically precise script based on Bryan Burrough’s book of the same title, adapted by Irish writer Ronan Bennet, which casts the bank robber as a man caught between criminality and celebrity, a real life movie character.

Public Enemies opens at a gallop in 1933 with Dillinger already infamous and the head of his own criminal gang. Brought to a vast Ohio prison in shackles, Dillinger turns the tables on his jailors and breaks his gang out of the jail, including Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum), Harry Pierpont (David Wenham) and Alvin Karpis (Giovanni Ribisi). The gang are soon back doing what they do best, robbing banks across the American mid-West, a series of increasingly audacious robberies that makes Dillinger’s capture the priority for Hoover (Billy Crudup) and his best FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale). As the cops start their pursuit, Dillinger becomes involved with Billie, a half-French nightclub dancer, played by Marion Cotillard in her first role since winning the Oscar for La Vie En Rose.

This is the crime movie stripped down to bare essentials; fedoras, sub-machine guns, bags of loot, fast cars, spinning headlines and lipsticked molls. Mann takes all these creaky devices and uses them to make an old story feel new and unexpected, exhilarating and emotionally moving. From the straightforward biography of a daring thief, Mann spins a multi-layered history that documents the seismic shifts in both crime and justice that defined the era; the establishment of a continental police force, the FBI, and the rise of the Mafia, who see Dillinger’s attention-seeking methods as dangerous to their way of life. However, Mann’s deliberate paring has the effect of rendering some of the secondary cast, including Stephen Dorff and Shawn Hatosy, almost completely anonymous.

Photographed with digital cameras in glorious deep focus, Public Enemies moves at a breathless pace, banging out the story in a series of staccato set-pieces and illuminative diversions. Jailbreaks are followed by bankheists and getaways in a tumble of adrenal scenes before the tension is broken by a moment of character, like an eerie sequence that sees Dillinger walking alone through a police station, looking at his own photograph on the wall. Better yet is a surreal scene, in a packed cinema, where Dillinger sits and watches a newsreel clip that asks the audience to check of the man sitting next to them isn’t the infamous gangster.

Depp plays Dillinger with effortless charisma and confidence, a timelessly glamorous cross between Robin Hood and Clark Gable. Opposite him, but relegated by the story into a grim-set cipher, Bale does well as the clenched, driven Purvis. There is a gripping inevitability to the way in which Mann places two opposing forces at either end of the spectrum and gradually, carefully brings them to a point of violent convergence, as he did in Heat, or Last of the Mohicans. With Public Enemies, this payoff happens during a bullet-ridden shootout at a remote hotel, filmed at the actual historical location, where Dillinger and his gang, including Stephen Graham’s Baby Face Nelson, are corner by the G-Men and must shoot their way out. It is an extraordinary centrepoint scene; frantic, percussive, bloody and brutal.

*Read my interview with Micheal Mann for Heat here.

Year One

Writer and director Harold Ramis has had a lean time of it since the days of Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day, a run that continues with Year One, an epoch-spanning comedy about a couple of Palaeolithic morons who get caught up in a series of scrapes with various Old Testament characters.

Jack Black and Michael Cera play caveman buddies Zed and Oh, literally an old-school double-act composed of obnoxious, zinger-spouting mammoth hunter and meek, straight-man fruit gatherer. When Zed eats a golden apple from a forbidden tree, they are both exiled from their village at the end of a pointy spear. Their quest proper begins when they stumble into the middle of the last argument between Cain and Abel (Cena’s Arrested Development co-star David Cross and Paul Rudd).

Things quickly go from bad to worse when Zed and Oh are sold into slavery and marched across the desert by the imperial Romans, led for some reason by the deeply unamusing Vinnie Jones. They escape their bonds, only to inadvertently intervene during a delicate moment between a sword-wielding Abraham (Hank Azaria) and his timorous son Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), at the top of a mountain.

From that point on, the story dissolves into a series of skits build around Biblical stories with much unprintable merriment derived from a visit to the notorious city of Sodom. There, the duo's aim is to rescue their slightly more evolved romantic interests, Maya (June Diane Raphael) and Eema (Juno Temple), taken as slave girls by the scheming Princess Inanna (Olivia Wilde).

Flat, broad and unnecessarily scatological, Year One is slow to get going and never quite picks up the kind of pace it needs to carry it forward. There are a few genuinely funny moments; a trip on an ox-driven cart and a discussion about the origins of circumcision, but far more gags fail to find their mark and many scenes seem to end before time or drag unnecessarily.

Although admirably mounted and photographed (with scant use of cheap computer graphics), the same care hasn’t been taken with the script, which draws heavily on Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part 1 by way of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s 1940s Road To… farces. These are jokes that have been told MCVXX’s of times before and there's little the cast can do to make then fresh again.

The bully Black should creates sparks opposite Cena’s withdrawn nerd but the dynamic doesn’t quite come off. As character comedians, both actors have staled badly; Cena’s drawling dreamer festering into an awkward passive-aggression while Black's energetic charm has been exhausted on almost-funny comedies like, well, like this one.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

The first instalment of the revitalised Transformers franchise was a well-crafted piece of summery distraction formed from a combination of spectacular special effects and a funny, self-aware script. For the sequel, Revenge of the Fallen, it is clearly director Michael Bay’s intention to deliver more of the same, a lot more. This instalment is almost two and a half hours long, features 42 separate robot characters and a bizarre, unintelligible story that spans the globe. What was spectacular before is mundane and prosaic now and what was witty and clever irritates the second time around.

Here's what I made of the story: Two years on from the events of the first film, the good Autobots remaining on Earth have allied with the US military to prevent further attacks from the bad Decepticon robots. Meanwhile, the boy at the centre of the story last time around, Shia LaBeouf's Sam Witwicky, is trying to forget that he discovered a race of gigantic robot aliens and is concentrating on his first year in college and concerned about how to maintain his relationship with his ridiculously oversexed girlfriend Mikaela (the returning Megan Fox). Unfortunately, as Autobot leader Optimus Prime solemnly intones, ‘fate never calls on us at the moment of our choosing’. The Decepticons have returned to resurrect their leader Megatron, at the behest of an ancient and evil Transformer known as The Fallen, who plans to reignite a super-weapon hidden in the Great Pyramid at Giza and destroy the Sun.

So, Transformers II is patent nonsense but the first film was too and that didn’t stop it from being entertaining. It is obvious from the outset that, a series of vast action sequences aside, Bay and his returning writers Ehren Kruger and Roberto Orci don’t have any clear idea of what form their sequel should take. The plot is baffling, a hodge-podge of pubescent college humour, soft-porn pouting, military jingoism and blurred special effects. The sense of wit that saved the first film is replaced by a constant procession of dull one-liners and strained slapstick. Events and locations become blurred and difficult to follow. The gang go looking for an allied robot at the Air & Space Museum in Washington, break down a wall to escape and emerge in a vast airplane graveyard, in the desert, ringed by snowcapped mountains. If Bay cannot keep track of this thing, how are we supposed to?

This bloated leviathan even boasts its own Jar Jar Binks – the blabbermouth aquatic creature that single-handedly ruined Star Wars - in two awful new characters, a pair of bickering African-American inspired compact cars with an endless torrent of unfunny, ethnically derived epithets. This is a film that doesn’t know when to stop, reaching its dramatic climax around half way through, in a well-realised scene set in a forest, before lumbering on regardless for another hour of flat fight sequences, eardrum-shattering noise and stroboscopic visual effects. Bay, who drops a series of blatant references to his own back catalogue of films, has suffered the same malaise before with the interminable Pearl Harbour or the over-blown, obnoxious Bad Boys II.

The first Transformers was, evidently, a blip. Bay has fallen back into the habitual formulae that he believes make for entertaining cinema. His storytelling senses have been so numbed by noise and sparks that it has atrophied away almost entirely. His sense of the spectacular is waning too, the slo-mo, one-on-one robot ballistic ballets from the first film are far less interesting when played out by a cast of dozens. As the clanking battle rages on screen, it becomes impossible to distinguish one robot from another or figure out what anyone is supposed to be doing. Long before the explosive final scenes, Transformers II has become a celluloid headache, a numbing, mind-wearying exercise in bombast and excess.

Terminator Salvation

With Batman on hiatus, Christian Bale’s back-up blockbuster franchise finds him playing John Connor, leader of the human resistance in a futuristic war against artificially-intelligent robots. Connor’s destiny, as laid down in the first trilogy, is to lead the human resistance army against the evil technological empire of Skynet, a defence system that turned on its creators. Opposite Connor stands Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a death-row inmate who donates his body to science in 2003, only to wake up, bruised and baffled, in 2018, in need of an oil-change. The process of re-establishing these characters and fitting them into a pre-determined timeline forms the majority of the story in Terminator Salvation. The rest of it is composed of fight-scenes and explosions.

Those arriving fresh to the story are not given much in the way of explanations to help figure out the tangled storyline or the significance of certain moments in the franchise’s long mythology. Frantic, confused and undeservedly self-important, the storytelling in Terminator Salvation is as grindingly mechanical as the robot villains. Fans of post-apocalyptic science-fiction will get some satisfaction from the occasionally arresting images of ash-strewn devastation but the action sequences, the main draw for the summer audience, are disappointing.

McG throws the camera around with abandon but, barring a couple of genuinely thrilling moments, the effect is more like playing a video game than watching a movie. It is understandable, given the iconic status of the series, that the new film would reference the Terminator franchise, but the director’s reliance on nods to other classic films; from The Great Escape to War of the Worlds, Alien and Blade Runner, are far less forgivable. Either McG is worried that his images will not carry any weight without echoing a greater work or, as I suspect, he is simply incapable of creating something original.

Bale is an actor that is at his best when grim-faced and taciturn, but he goes too far in his characterisation of John Connor, turning this legendary hero into an action-movie caricature. Monotonously intense and belligerent, Bale does achieve something original - or at least I have never seen it before – managing to shout each line of dialogue through gritted teeth. I was surprised to see Connor take orders from a squad of generals, headquartered in a secret submarine, as the Terminator mythology had consistently established that Connor was the boss. His mantle as the last messiah is further undermined by equipping him with a newly-developed gadget that, with a few frantic button presses, overrides the robot’s defence systems. Doesn’t that make the gadget the real hero? And isn’t the gadget a machine and therefore part of the problem?

Intended as a reboot for a long-dead franchise, Terminator Salvation lacks the emotion and innovation of the first two films, being a closer match for Jonathan Mostow’s uninspired third instalment than James Cameron’s original diptych. The script, which has passed through the hands of dozens of screenwriters, is constructed along an unswerving trajectory through a series of action set-pieces. Bale and Worthington aside, none of the secondary characters are given an introduction, arriving in the story when required before disappearing into the digitally composed background. The lack of connection with the characters means it doesn’t matter what happens to them, the effect is like watching a stranger crack open a toaster with a lump-hammer. There is a lot of noise and sparks but in the end, it is impossible to care.

With Bale having already signed up for two more Terminator films, the last ten minutes are spent setting up the sequel. On this pre-programmed evidence, the war might already be over. The robots won.

Drag Me To Hell

Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell might be considered cinematic loose change in comparison to the excesses of his billion-dollar Spiderman trilogy but this old-school genre horror comedy is nevertheless a pointed return to the director’s low-fidelity roots, a queasily entertaining mix of giggles and gore.

After a short prologue that establishes the supernatural roots of what is to come, we are introduced to bank official Christine (Alison Lohman) as she listens to an improve-your-diction tape on the drive to work. Her first customer on the day is Mrs Ganush, a cloudy-eyed old gypsy woman (played with uncommon verve by Lorna Raver), who is behind on her mortgage payments and looking for an extension. Christine, who is striving for a promotion and unwilling to disappoint her boss (David Paymer), turns her down and the crone retaliates with a curse.

After a showdown in a parking garage, Mrs. Ganush snatches a button from Christine’s coat and utters a croaking incantation. “Soon it will be you who comes begging to me,” she swears, before disappearing in a swirl of creepy mist. But the witch dies before Christine can ask her to lift the hex, leaving our every-woman heroine with no-one but her sceptical boyfriend (Justin Long) and a floundering pseudo-psychic (Dileep Rao) to help her escape her fate. Christine has been given just three days to live, while being increasingly tormented by a goat-like demon (a visual nod to the ghoul in Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon), before a fiery chasm will open beneath her feet and claim her.

With a straightforward plot and a scant back-story, Raimi’s objective here less about reinventing cinematic horror than it is to push all the genre-mandated buttons, in the right order. He does this by relying on the things he does best; flinging the camera around his carefully dressed sets in a series of pans and crash zooms, using creeping shadows and screeching sound effects to create inexpensive mood and splashing around the fake blood and crawling maggots in order to make the audience squirm in their seats.

Considering the current economic climate, it is perhaps strangely apposite to watch a banker being tormented by the malign spirit of a defaulting mortgage holder but given that Raimi and his brother Ivan wrote their script back in 1992, it is difficult to ascribe any particular political intention to his rollercoaster creep-show. Timeliness aside, what carries the film is its wicked sense of humour, each gruesome moment matched by a macabre gag, the narrative improbabilities and clanging coincidences becoming less important as the jokes pile up. It’s no classic, but it is a lot of fun.

Angels & Demons

Ron Howard’s film of Dan Brown’s best-seller The Da Vinci Code is one of the most profitable films of the decade so far, propelled by hype and expectation to genuine blockbuster status, although you would struggle to find anyone - even fans of the book – who actually enjoyed it. Angels & Demons is a better film than The Da Vinci Code, but then they all are.

Tom Hanks reprises his role as Robert Langdon, esteemed Professor of Symbology, for another far-fetched lesson in medieval conspiracies, this time set in the Vatican. As the film opens, the Pope has died and the College of Cardinals, led by the sinister Strauss (Armin Mueller-Stall) and Deputy Pope McKenna (Ewan McGregor), is gathered in conclave to elect a new church leader. Then, four eminent cardinals are kidnapped with the announcement that one will be killed each hour leading up to a bombing that will destroy St Peter’s Square.

The kidnappers identify themselves as the Illuminati, a mythical sect of apostates that, three hundred years before, tried to reconcile religion and science. Summoned to Rome, Landon is asked by the hierarchy to decipher a series of arcane clues scattered around the city’s churches. He is assisted by Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), an Italian scientist who discovered the combustible anti-matter, stolen to provide fuel for the Illuminati bomb.

The plot, which is far less elaborate than Howard would have you believe, is essentially the same collection of cod-history and pictorial rebuses as before, the difference being the biblical inventions of the first film are replaced by the dread spectre of contemporary terrorism. Hanks races through the inane dialogue with the same bemused expression as before, like a man working out a particularly fiendish sudoku, in pen, while being chased by rabid tigers. Opposite him, as the sexy scientist, Zurer has little to do beyond provide nodding confirmation for some of the story’s more elaborate fictions.

The relationship between the pair never develops into anything more than hero and sidekick, despite him being a mere symbologist (who can’t even read Latin) and her being a particle physicist with a white coat and a laboratory at Cern and all.

Perhaps recognising how flat and static the first film turned out, Howard and his returning cinematographer Salvatore Totino keep the camera in constant motion this time around, adding energy to Langdon’s incautious adventuring and keeping the viewer from realising that what they are watching is patent nonsense. The approach cannot, however, cover the fact that the film exists in an absurd and distracting time-frame which gives the characters mere minutes to discover the clues, figure out what to do next then negotiate their way through the damnable Roman traffic to the next location. The only joy in the join-the-dots narrative is seeing how Langdon distinguishes which of the ancient statues are pointing at vital clues and which are merely pointing.

Timing aside, screenwriters David Koep and Akiva Goldsman follow the ruts in the road laid down by Brown’s source book but arrive at a point where they must reveal the identity of their solitary hit-man far too soon; leaving the identity of the villain pulling the strings as the only mystery. Angels & Demons shares many of the same problems as its predecessor, being talkative, clumsy and po-faced but the biggest repeat offence is Howard’s plodding direction. The film, which leaves the door open for a third iteration, might make a lot of money but I cannot think of anyone who would want to watch it.

Synecdoche, New York

Charlie Kaufman, the writer of head-melting movies like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, makes his directorial debut with the curious and complex Synecdoche, New York, a film about creative life and death.

First, a word about the daunting title, a typically Kaufmanesque word-play that connects the New York town of Schenectady, where the film is set, with the similarly-sounding synecdoche, meaning a play on words in which a part may be used for the whole or the whole for a part, like saying “wheels” in place of “car”. In the film, Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays theatre director Caden Cotard, who tires of adapting other people’s plays and sets about staging his own in a vast warehouse, a replica of his own life played out by a vast cast of actors, but one that can never end.

When we first meet Caden, his life is starting to unravel. Plagued by mysterious illnesses, he is suffocating in his own feelings of mortality and alienated from his artist wife Adele (Catherine Keener). Then, after a minor success in a regional theatre, Caden unexpectedly receives a grant from a wealthy arts body which allows him to stage a vast play of his own devising. As the fake world inside the theatre starts to consume his life on the outside, Caden stumbles through a series of personal crises. Adele leaves him, taking their daughter, and becomes a celebrated painter in Berlin. Alone at home, Caden has an unfulfilling flirtation with Hazel (Samantha Morton), who works at the theatre box office, before marrying Claire (Michelle Williams), an actress in his cast.

All of this happens in a fractured narrative that is as difficult to perceive as it is to explain. Time leaps forward sometimes in the course of a single scene or conversation, sometimes by months, sometimes by years. Characters age, marry and have children in moments, as do the actors in the play who are portraying them. Caden seems to exist in multiple worlds, as multiple people, awake and asleep. Kaufman and Hoffman construct the character from a combination of waking and dream states, realities and unrealties, blending the lot into an intricate dance across decades of time.

Later, when he hires an actor to play himself (Tom Noone), Caden discovers aspects of his true personality that he might prefer to keep hidden but are easily perceived by anyone who would care to look; his hypochondria, his vanity, his impotence. The endless play, about himself and the people around him, is Caden’s way of dealing with the difference between the man he thinks he is and the man he actually is. It’s an agonizing process of self-discovery, not helped by his depression and his constant struggle to be emotionally honest in his art. Caden is dying of women, as the poet puts it.

Synecdoche New York is, for better or worse, pure, undiluted Kaufman. Crammed with ideas about life and death, art and creativity, relationships and heartache, this is Kaufman’s 8 ½; a film about how hard it is to do much of anything at all, much less muster up the energy to make a film. If Fellini’s masterwork is a touchstone, Kaufman also pays homage to his literary heroes, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Philip K. Dick, generating the same sense of temporal instability, social paranoia and bodily discomfort.

But the strange spell doesn’t hold. As Caden cannot finish the play, Kaufman cannot finish the film. Synecdoche implodes in the third act as the director loses his grip on the story. Just at the point where he might have distilled his ideas about life and art into a grand unified theory, the film collapses into a mess of self-indulgent surrealism and non sequiturs. The complications and contemplations that had held such fascination are given a couple of twists too many and lose their elasticity becoming, if not tedious, then disappointingly slack. It ends on nothingness, a blank wall of white, like a canvas before the paint or a freshly opened notebook.

Star Trek

JJ Abrams’ comprehensive re-boot of the long-moribund Star Trek science-fiction franchise is nothing short of a cinematic miracle. With an all new cast, a punchy script and a determination to have fun, Abrams blazes his own trail through the dusty mythology of the 40 year old space opera franchise, boldly going where dozens have gone before. This is Star Trek, but not as we know it.

The film gets off to a thunderous start with a long prologue in which the USS Starship Kelvin is attacked by a gigantic, multi-pronged Romulan warship that emerges, suddenly, from a black hole. When the captain is lured to the enemy ship and assassinated by its commander Nero (Eric Bana), first officer George Kirk stays on board to ensure the escaping crew, including his pregnant wife, reach safety. While he dies, selflessly, she gives birth to their son James Tiberius, played as a twentysomething by Chris Pine.

Kirk grows up in a town beside a Federation training base, a rebellious young man who finds focus when he meets an older Starfleet officer (Bruce Greenwood), who knew his father. Meanwhile, on the planet Vulcan, Spock (Zachary Quinto) has endured his own difficult upbringing, his identity divided by his dual heritage, Vulcan and Human. Certain he will never be accepted as a true Vulcan, he joins Starfleet, leaving behind a privileged life as a government scientist to seek adventure. We are then introduced to the rest of the key cast in a series of quick-fire encounters; the beautiful language expert Uhura (Zoe Saldana), grumpy medical expert Bones (Karl Urban), Russian pilot Chekov (Anton Yelchin) and later, Caledonian engineer Scotty (Simon Pegg). The adventure proper begins when all the cadets are gathered on the bridge of the Enterprise, called out to answer a distress call from the planet Vulcan which bears eerie similarities to the attack that killed Kirk’s father twenty-five years previously.

Abrams’ warp speed storytelling balances the melodrama with invigorating shots of honest humour and eye-catching special effects. A standout sequence, inspired perhaps by Iain M Banks’ novel ‘Matter’, has Kirk, Lt Sulu (John Cho) and an ominously anonymous red-uniformed ensign, sky-dive down through the atmosphere to disable an enormous Romulan drill that is boring an apocalyptic hole through the planet Vulcan. Abrams peppers the shoot-outs and fist-fights with literal cliff-hangers, as characters repeatedly find themselves dangling over the edge of a steep precipice.

Abrams and his long-term writing collaborators Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman retell the story from the beginning; wiping clean the old cast’s incarnations of the characters and removing the stale crust of apathy that has built up over the decades. Unlike, say, Christopher Nolan’s re-imagining of Batman, Star Trek doesn’t contain any overt political allegories or moral conundrums; this is the straightforward story or how a group of people came together added to an age-old battle between good and evil. It redefines the characters without betraying them, or the fans who sustain them. Abrams remains true to the legacy of the franchise, taking the time to plant repeated references to key moments from the television series and subsequent films.

The flawless production design creates, from the opening frames, a familiar but far better looking environment. Visually, Abrams overuses his signature shaky-camera technique, further distorting the images with flares of fragmented light bouncing off every shiny surface that delight initially but become distracting. Later, the straightforward story runs slightly flat; having spent too much time establishing all of the good guys and not enough on making Bana’s time-travelling Nero as evil as he could have been.

Abrams’ brave new Star Trek is the first great blockbuster of the summer. It is sure to satisfy existing Trekkers while providing solid entertainment to the uninitiated, and with the promise of more to come.

The Uninvited

There’s a significant twist in The Uninvited, a mangled remake of South Korean director Kim Jee-Woon’s exemplary chiller A Tale of Two Sisters. The fundamentals of the last-act surprise (which I cannot, obviously, reveal) remain intact but there is a vast gulf in how the two films arrive at the same point.

In short, The Uninvited offers certain proof, if it were required, that Hollywood should leave Asian horror to the Asians. The teenage demographic this workmanlike effort is aimed at might never have heard of Kim’s original and likely couldn’t care less one way or the other but they should know they are being short changed.

After almost a year in a mental hospital, Anna (Emily Browning) returns to her unfeasibly beautiful waterfront home with scarred wrists and a faraway look in her eyes. Soon, her only sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel) has filled her in on the new domestic set-up. Their novelist father (David Strathairn) has overcome the trauma of their late mother’s death in a mysterious fire by shacking up with the young blonde nurse (Elizabeth Banks) who was employed to look after her. So far, so Brothers Grimm, but Anna is plagued by visions of her dead mother and visitations from three spectral children. And that’s before her boyfriend starts pressing her for sex.

Browning has the open face and wide-eyed stare required to communicate her character’s innocence and shows some skills in communicating Anna’s mental fragility without resorting to hysterics. Beside her, Kebbel hasn’t the talent to keep up. Her cause is not helped by the script, credited to three screenwriters, which fails to develop the relationship between the two sisters. The original title might have been a clue.

Although stranded by his scant handful of scenes, Strathairn is a dud as the conflicted father, giving a performance that is casual to the point of invisibility. It falls to Banks as the sneaky step-mother to steal the show, for what it’s worth. Her deliberately ambiguous mix of public concern and private spite keeps the ground moving under what might otherwise have remained a character lifted from a fairytale.

The original film had a twist that came as a genuine surprise. Here, for the last twenty minutes, it’s all there is to think about, even if you don’t know its coming. This genre-mandated predictability suffocates the modicum of dread created by directing brothers Charles and Thomas Guard’s expensive-looking but unoriginal visual effects. Originator Kim, who went on to make the blistering mafia shoot-em-up A Bittersweet Life and the recent The Good The Bad The Weird, did more with far less.

State of Play

Adapted from the 2003 BBC miniseries of the same name, director Kevin McDonald’s complex contemporary thriller State of Play opens with a series of seemingly unconnected incidents. In one, a man flees for his life before being shot dead in a Washington back alley. The next morning, a beautiful young political intern commits suicide by jumping under a train.

Seemingly unconnected, that is, until grizzled veteran journalist Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) starts sniffing around. He’s a close friend of the dead girl’s boss, rising U.S. Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), who soon admits they were having an affair. Collins is deeply involved in a congressional investigation into a Haliburton-like private military corporation, so cannot afford the scandal. But there is much more to the story, as McAffrey and his newspaper’s bright on-line blogger Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) come to realise.

Essentially, the story boils down to an analysis of two conjoined systems, government and journalism, and the individuals that get chewed up in their gears when an outside party tosses in a spanner. Director Kevin McDonald (The Last King of Scotland) has reams of story to get through but he frames his tangled conspiracy against a backdrop of topical headlines: the challenges faced by print news, the rise of private security firms, the collusion between arms companies and the military. His well-weaved references and allusions add consequence to the thriller, even if some of them flash past too quickly for comprehension.

State of Play races through the story in a series of fleeting moments, quick scenes that hint at further developments whiz by, sometimes hidden in exciting action scenes, sometimes buried among the everyday chores of a working newsroom. You have to keep at least one eye open to even begin to follow a story in which everything might be significant, a consequence of trying to cram the original series’ six-hour running time into a cinematic timeframe and I am not certain the rewards justify the exertion.

The screenplay, from Matthew Michael Carnahan, Tony Gilroy, and Billy Ray, gives us so much material to sift through, and at such pace, that it is tempting to watch the film with an editor’s red pencil. In comparison, there isn’t a word out of place in Alan Pakula’s All The President’s Men, which had the added challenge of being condensed from real events.

Crowe brings an authentic dishevelment to his role, his pasty body wrecked by hours sat at a desk, eyes reddened from peering at a screen; he looks exhausted in the opening frames, flipping crisps into his mouth as he drives to a crime scene. The actor maintains the sense of fatigue all the way through, but he is still enormously vital, quick-witted, strong and determined.

Rachel McAdams is well able for Crowe as the tough-cookie on-line reporter, matching him beat for beat through tricky dialogue and carrying her role’s heavy metaphorical weight lightly. In the secondary cast, Jason Bateman excels as a cynical PR guru who tries to talk himself out of a desperate situation while Helen Mirren does her clipped and acid turn as the British editor trying to keep the paper from going under. Robin Wright Penn, as Collins’ humiliated wife, channels her anger and desire for revenge into a series of tiny gestures, all designed to hold herself together.

A taut, well-acted thriller that also acts as a love-letter to print journalism, State of Play overcomes some unsubtle plot gyrations and a creeping sense of fragmentation with the brute intelligence of the dialogue and careful direction.

In The Loop

Writer and director Armando Iannucci expands on the world of his satirical political sit-com The Thick of It for In The Loop, a razor sharp, deeply cynical farce about the symbiotic relationship between Britain and the US in the run up to the second war in Iraq.

The film opens as the Prime Minister’s foul-mouthed Director of Communications Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) lambastes the new Minister of International Development, Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) for saying in an interview that “war is unforeseeable”. Tucker is a ferocious government attack-dog, more-or-less based on Prime Minister Tony Blair’s notoriously ruthless press secretary, Alastair Campbell, who is reviled and revered in Whitehall for his loathsome tongue. Nobody messes with him twice, except the ambitious Foster, who blithely repeats his opinionated error at a meeting with US officials. There he finds new allies in the scatterbrained State Department maven Karen Clarke (Mimi Kennedy) and US General Miller (James Gandolfini), busy fighting their own pro-war faction, led by gimlet-eyed neo-con Linton Barwick (David Rasche).

Looking for a justification for war, Barwick seizes on another stupid statement Foster makes during a kerbside interview where he urges Britain to “climb the mountain of conflict.” Tucker is incensed at Foster, not so much for speaking out of turn, but for having an opinion in the first place, so insists that he accompany him to Washington for a series of high-level meetings at the UN that will determine whether or not the warring factions will be given the green light for war. As a palate-cleansing sorbet, Iannucci offers us a minor domestic crisis as Foster battles an angry constituent (Steve Coogan) in his Northampton district over the status of a crumbling garden wall.

The inspired script, co-written by Iannucci and the writing team of Jesse Armstrong and Simon Blackwell (from the similarly acid Peep Show) balances rich, meaty satire with a masterclass in swearing. Apparently, Iannucci employs a specialist writer, known only as The Swear Doctor, whose only function is to go through the script, adding new and eye-wateringly vivid obscenities from the blackest depths of his imagination. Tucker takes the lion's share of these tirades, spewing language so salty at times it seems to crystallize mid-air.

These frequent and sustained outbursts of base language are shocking, malignant and extraordinarily funny. In The Loop is one of the few times this year when I have laughed out loud at a movie, but the film is far more than a litany of foul expressions; Iannucci and his cast revel in the rich, arcane language of politics and the meaningful ambiguity of governmental double-speak, tying each other up in Gordian knots of nonsense.

Iannucci hasn’t done anything with the larger, more expansive canvas of cinema to distinguish the film from television, maintaining the same hand-held, fly-on-the-wall aesthetic and blabbermouth dialogue. The same small-screen methods apply to the episodic story, which lands us in right the middle of these unpleasant characters without much in the way of explanation then asks us to keep up with a steadily trotting narrative, occasionally diverting the flow with one of a series of bubbling sub-plots that marry the passion of politics to the thrill of clandestine sex.

In the post-Bush era, some of his jibes land with less force than they might have done a year ago but in the end, the films lack of timeliness doesn’t detract from the joy in how cleverly Iannucci re-imagines the “dodgy dossier” scandal as a black farce, played out by idiots in a world of savage absurdity.

Let The Right One In

A lonely twelve year old finds his soulmate in a mysterious vampire girl in the beautiful and enigmatic horror fantasy Let The Right One In, one of the films of the year.

Adapted by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own bestselling novel, the story opens in Stockholm in 1982 where the ghostly pale Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) lives with his divorced mother in a modernist apartment block. A withdrawn and uncertain child, Oskar is being bullied at school and spends much of his time alone, hanging around the complex’s courtyard, playing with his hunting knife and dreaming of revenge. One night, he notices a new family moving in next door; a young girl around his own age and an older man, probably her father. The next evening, they meet at the playground and she introduces herself as Eli (Lina Leandersson). She is a misfit too, dressed in strange clothes, with filthy hands and casting a strange smell.

Eli lives with Hakan (Per Ragnar), an odd, older man whom the locals assume is her father but he is in fact her familiar, a serial killer she sends out at night to kill on her behalf. As the two become friends, Eli encourages Oskar to stand up to the boys that are bullying him, urging him to strike back or be forever cowed. This he does, with brutal efficiency, his thirst for revenge as strong in its way as her desire for blood. Slowly, the two form a bond, without saying much, sitting together in the courtyard. When she arrives unannounced one night in his bedroom, Oskar asks her to be his girlfriend. “But I am not a girl”, she answers. Later, he finds the courage to ask Eli if she is a vampire. He already knows the answer, and doesn’t care. He has a friend.

Eli being either too small or too vulnerable to feed herself, sends Hakan out to find her meals. This is his job, something he prepares for meticulously, but things sometimes go wrong. Hakan stalks the streets, gassing his victims and draining their blood into a plastic barrel before dragging it home. This is not the sexualised, intimate bite of Dracula or Nosferatu, it is something closer to alcoholism, a desperate desire to drink without sustenance or satisfaction. But Hakan is getting old and careless. Eli, it seems, has more than friendship on her mind; she needs a minder, someone who will do what is required to allow her to live. Is Oskar capable of murder, or is his violence a passing phase? Does Eli really love him, or is their relationship just an elaborate seduction?

Alfredson elegantly places this darkly gothic story against the brutal backdrop of high-rise concrete buildings, snow-covered walkways and empty streets. His carefully framed, calmly static camera seeks out detail everywhere it settles; the tangled colours of a Rubick’s cube, the torn pages of Oskar’s murder scrapbook, the dark splash of blood on snow. His film is beautifully photographed and tautly edited, benefiting from sparse, carefully placed special effects and an indelible atmosphere of threat and promise. His delicate use of sound adds a further dimension to the story, particularly when Oskar and Eli use Morse code to communicate through the walls of their adjoining apartments.

The two young actors perfectly embody their characters; their pale faces, photographed close-up, drawing out deep reserves of pain and isolation with little more than glances and sighs. They give flawless performances as the supposed innocents crafting an escape from lives that have become intolerable and dangerous.

Let The Right One In is a remarkable film, brilliantly conceived and hypnotically told. It makes the recent Twilight look the antics of the number-crunching Count on Sesame Street.

The Boat That Rocked

Six years on from the gruesome Love Actually, writer and director Richard Curtis returns with a limp comedy, set on board a 1960s pirate radio ship, that springs a leak soon after the opening credits and takes over two hours to sink. Nominally inspired by the real-life history of Radio Caroline, The Boat That Rocked is actually set in an alternate dimension, call it Curtis World; a jaunty, predominantly white and middle class place where silly people get up to all sorts of harmless fun and games.

The familiarity with which the film establishes the time and place is the first hint of trouble. A flashy arrangement of swinging stereotypes, fashioned after Richard Lester’s Help!, serves as shorthand for the burgeoning Age of Aquarius. Representing, in no particular order, youth, innocence, the audience and the absent Hugh Grant, fresh-faced, floppy haired teenager Carl (Tom Sturridge) is sent to be looked after by his louche godfather Quentin (Bill Nighy) when he gets into trouble at school. All Savile Row suits and charming insouciance, Quentin is skipper and owner of Radio Rock, a ship anchored in international waters off the British coast that broadcasts a steady stream of pop music to culture starved teenyboppers, a market ignored by the conservative mainstream.

The ship serves as studio and sleeping quarters for the all-male staff of DJs, led by alpha-male US import The Count (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), whose only stated desire is to be the first man to say 'fuck' on the radio. The rest of the ensemble is made up of Curtis’ standard British romantic-comedy archetypes; the eccentric one, Bob (Ralph Brown), the thick one, Kevin (Tom Brooke), the sole female one (Katherine Parkinson) and, later, the outrageous one, Gavin (Rhys Ifans). Much of the early action is devoted to Carl losing his virginity to any one of the dozens of dollybirds that descend, when required, on the ship like a Biba-clad horde. This momentous event appears imminent when he falls for worldly groupie Eleanora (Tallulah Riley) but, maddened by the pull of fame, she ends up with the fat one, Dave (Nick Frost). Curtis likes this bed-hopping joke so much that he repeats it twenty minutes later, when the sad one, melancholy breakfast presenter Simon (Chris O'Dowd), is gazumped by a rival on his wedding night. Yes, wedding. There is always a wedding in Curtis World.

The free-loving hippy DJs require an establishment against which to rebel so Kenneth Branagh arrives as the uptight square, Sir Alistair Dormandy, squirreling around Whitehall determined to find a loophole that will shut the pirates down. To this end Curtis gives him a sidekick named Twatt (Jack Davenport) and a comical moustache and then, as with all the other subplots, seems content to leave it at that.

It’s lame stuff indeed. The period sixties setting distinguishes the film from the rest of Curtis’ gelatinous repertoire, a feature the director hammers home in a series of extended Austin Powers montages that nestle uncomfortably between the casually sexist romps, nauseatingly contrived dance sequences and tired visual slapstick. Every so often Curtis cuts back to the mainland for a series of reaction shots; short sequences of everyday listeners responding to what is coming through the wireless exactly as they would if there was a movie camera pointed at them. Here too there is dancing but little evident joy.

Without anything of interest in the story to cling to, the extended running time turns what might have been a bright nostalgia trip into a deadening trudge. Unable to chart a steady course through his various storylines, Curtis is content to skip distractedly from skit to sketch but even with a well-chosen soundtrack of classic songs, he cannot sustain a mood and the film flags. His characters remain thin caricatures and look uniformly adrift in between the funny bits. Eventually, the film runs out of those; more than once an actor is asked to face the camera and lip-sync along to a song on the soundtrack, like karaoke. It is a striking waste of a talented cast, many of them mainstays of the director’s informal repertory company.

The Boat That Rocked might not be the worst Richard Curtis film ever, but it is the worst yet.