Ondine

Neil Jordan’s first original screenplay in a decade sees him return to Ireland for a gentle, unassuming fable about family, faith and love. Ondine’s lyrical title derives from German folklorist Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s 1811 novella Undine, where a water-nymph bewitches a Saxon knight. The story has formed the basis for dozens of films, including another beautifully photographed Irish-set fairy-tale, The Secret of Roan Inish, which John Sayles and cinematographer Haskell Wexler made in and around Rosbeg in Donegal in 1994. Although that film was a bit of an oddity for the passionately political Sayles, you can’t say the same about Jordan, who has always shown a fascination with fairy-tales and fantasies; alternate worlds where alternate things happen.

Syraceuse (Colin Farrell) is a fisherman who operates a boat out of a harbour on the Cork coast. Once married to the shrewish Maura (Dervla Kirwan), he has given up the drink and devoted himself to looking after their sweet young daughter Anna (Alison Barry), who is on kidney dialysis and uses a wheelchair to get around. One day, while trawling the green waters, Syraceuse finds a beautiful woman (Alicja Bachleda) half-drowned in his nets. When she is revived, she explains she has no memory of who she is, or what happened to her. Syraceuse puts her up in an old cottage and promises to keep her presence a secret. But his daughter discovers the woman, now called Ondine, and believes she is a selkie; a mythical mermaid who looks human and can walk on land but who belongs to the sea.

Ondine is a strange girl, and strange things happen when she is around. Syraceuse had been struggling to land a catch but when she sings a song from his deck, the fish jump into the nets. Later, her presence seems to have a curative effect on Anna, who has been waiting for a kidney transplant. Could Ondine really be a magical being, come to land to find love and bring good luck? Meanwhile, Syraceuse is struggling with his sobriety, regularly attending confessions with the local priest (Stephen Rea) in lieu of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Farrell has emerged from his shallow Hollywood period as a decent actor. He struggles with the sing-song strangulations of the Cork accent (sounding at times like he is laughing and choking in the same breath) but beyond that, this is a mature, involving performance. He plays Syraceuse in a minor-key, resolutely understating the potentially unwieldy sweep of his character and searching out moments of intimacy and empathy. Opposite him, Bachleda is well cast as the tattered waif Ondine, almost silent for the most part but communicating an ethereal presence throughout.

The middle section of the film, a collection of deliberate distractions and odd character moments, is almost entirely horizontal. It’s as if Jordan is treading water, waiting for the right moment to bring his finely-spun elements together. But he delays too long, the story drags and his characters wilt. The twisted knots of the plot are not nearly as complicated, sinister or compelling as they might have been. Whatever elusive magic the story contained dribbles away. Indeed, audiences might entertain themselves during the late-stage longeurs in trying to guess how this fantastical story will resolve itself in the real world. There are few options and Jordan picks the obvious one.

The story might be bumpy and the dialogue uneven, but Jordan is immensely skilled in creating mood. Ondine is, simply, a beautiful film to look at. Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s lush, hazy images are underlined by a haunting score from Kjartan Sveinsson, the keyboardist in Icelandic band Sigur Ros.

Capitalism: A Love Story

Capitalism: A Love Story is director Michael Moore’s call-to-arms against the robber barons that have brought America to its knees, a mix of comedy, outrage, economic theory and shock tactics fashioned into an effective, and entertaining, documentary about how the American Dream went sour.

Moore’s thesis is that democracy was corrupted to allow capitalism to prosper. It started with Ronald Regan dismantling the American unions, undermining the workers to increase profits. It continued with the deregulation of the financial services sector, which allowed sub-prime mortgages to evolve, massive debts incurred by people who could never hope to repay them. According to Moore, the simple dreams of the post-war generation – a house, a car, an education – have been perverted by greed, corruption and aspirant popular entertainment into demands for mansions, limousines and easy celebrity. “Capitalism is evil”, he declaims, “and you cannot regulate evil”.

Moore’s populist, rabble-rousing persona is one he adopts in order to make topical issues entertaining to Cineplex audiences. His films are all made up of the same elements: snippets of news-reel and old cartoons, startling statistics and, as always, an embarrassing stunt where Mike takes to the streets to embarrass some pompous jobsworth in a suit. This time, he attempts to make citizen’s arrests on the board of wobbling insurance giant AIG while draping yellow “crime-scene” tape on the granite edifices of Wall St brokerages.

The animations, cut-ups and montages are all very amusing, but as before, it’s Moore’s new reportage that works best. He interviews families in mortgage arrears as the banks foreclose, his camera watching as the police arrive at the door to carry out an eviction. Later, he meets with community groups and union leaders who are forcibly re-housing homeless families to save their neighbourhoods, or staging sit-ins in order to receive their rightful redundancy payments. Moore knows that the human face of any story is the most effective.

The director is outraged that the American banks, with the support of the police, can throw people out of their homes or their jobs without negotiation. Moore returns to his home town of Flint, Michigan, which has deteriorated even further since he made his first film, Roger & Me, there twenty years ago. The place is a ghost town now, filled with empty spaces where there used to be a city. In the film’s most touching moment, Moore accompanies his elderly father on a visit to the site of the factory he used to work at, a flattened wasteland of concrete rubble and twisted steel where a massive industrial plant once stood. The film isn’t an attack on corruption, stupidity, greed and bad governance, but an attempt to discredit capitalism as a social system. According to Moore, Westerners are blinded by the notion that capitalism is the same as democracy. That making money is God’s work and good work, that progress is the nature of things, that we must make new stuff to replace old stuff in a constant flux of consumption.

But what Moore fails to realise, or come to terms with, the fact that American capitalism is no longer about massive industrial plant, armies of workers and manufacturing for export. The complications of the modern money systems are beyond him (as they are beyond me), so all he can offer is a baffled shrug at the complexities of a mutated system. Moore is a fine pathologist, but he can’t offer any prognosis. He can identify what is sick about the American economy, but cannot say what will cure it.

Micmacs

Amelie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new film Micmacs is an entertaining and inventive caper about the international arms trade told with the director’s signature visual flair. Opening with a bang, the first section races through the early life of Bazil (Danny Boon), whose solider father is killed by a landmine in Algeria. His distraught mother is taken away by the men in white coats, and young Bazil ends up in an orphanage. Years later, he’s working as a video-shop clerk when a stray bullet from a gangland shooting ends up lodged in his brain.

Out of hospital, broke and homeless, Bazil falls in with a group of eccentric misfits, the Micmacs of the title, who live in a cocoon of recycled rubbish on the outskirts of Paris. The gang is led by the maternal Tambouille (Yolande Moreau) and includes numbers genius Calculette (Marie-Julie Baup), human cannonball Fracasse (Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon) and contortionist Caoutchouc (Julie Ferrier).

One day, while diving through a skip for fresh junk, Bazil notices that the two buildings on either side of the street have very familiar corporate logos. One is the firm that made the bullet in his cerebellum. The other made the landmine that did for his dear papa. Charged with a determination to put an end to both companies, he teams up with the Micmacs to pitch both company CEOs (Andre Dussolier and Nicolas Marie) against one another.

Jeunet prefers to show his audience the story, rather than have his characters explain it, so Micmacs is packed with short, snappy, almost silent sequences that, taken together, closely resemble a plot. The elaborate stings which Bazil and friends mount on the two arms dealers make up most of the film’s running time and each is more entertaining and elaborate than the last, using all of Jeunet’s considerable wit.

The execution and editing of these cinematic conceits is astonishing, as is the director’s complicated set design and hand-made props. With Boon’s mobile face and graceful movement, Micmacs is a live-action cartoon, like Buster Keaton’s take on Snow White & The Seven Dwarves, a mood further enhanced by the thunderous score taken from the archive of 1940s noir at Warner Brothers. Micmacs is a master-class in production design and visual invention, but that’s about all it is. Jeunet’s many fans will be thrilled but those seeking a deeper story, or any story at all, might be disappointed.

A Single Man

A Single Man is told from the point of view of its hero, George (Colin Firth), the single man in question. George is 52 and gay. It has been eight months since his partner Jim (Matthew Goode), died in a car accident while visiting his family, alone, in Colorado. In the house they shared together in Los Angeles, George still grieves. His work, teaching English at a local college, gives him no joy. His only friend, fellow ex-pat Charley (Julianne Moore), is a sad, lonely alcoholic who, like George, has no other friend in the world.

The film opens on what might be the last day of George’s life, in 1962. The first thing he does is check the pistol sitting in a bedside drawer, so the conclusion that he might use it at some stage is unavoidable. George is an obsessively neat man, and performs the same daily routine as he always does, setting out an immaculate suit, finding the perfect tie, polishing his already gleaming shoes. He heads off to class, where he uses a lecture on Aldous Huxley to talk about the myriad ways that humans differ from one another. His students don’t pay much attention, except the cheerful Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), who has a bright smile and handsome face and wonders if his lecturer will take drugs with him. George is tempted, but he has made his plans. And so the day unfolds in a series of careful arrangements, chance encounters and heartbreaking memories.

There’s a line of dialogue that passes almost unnoticed in a scene that acts as a touchstone for the entire film: “Sometimes awful things have their own kind of beauty”. A Single Man is directed by fashion designer Tom Ford, who made his name re-inventing Italian fashion house Gucci in the 1990s. Ford adapted Christopher Isherwood’s dark novel himself, and when no studio was willing to finance the film, paid for it out of his own pocket. The result is a fine debut, impressively photographed and composed, delicately phrased and paced.

Oscar nominated for the role, and hotly tipped to take home the statue, Colin Firth firmly puts aside memories of his Bridget Jones caricature to deliver a performance of astonishing restraint and emotional grace. Unable to reveal his true nature, George has lived his life from behind a mask, assuming an identity that, after decades, is finally starting to chafe. His tasteful furnishings, perfect clothes and gentlemanly demeanour have replaced his real self, with Ford emphasising the cool, coldly flawless world he has built around himself; his pristine house filled with tasteful furniture, his spotless car and down to the clinically white handkerchief George wears in his lapel pocket. The film belongs to Firth, who turns this sad character study into a tender, universal story of heartache and loss.

Invictus

Adapted by South African writer Anthony Peckham from a book by journalist John Carlin, Invictus tells the story of how Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman, finally) conspired with Springbok captain, Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) to turn the 1995 Rugby World Cup final into a moment of national solidarity.

Invictus opens with a prologue taken from the day, five years previously, when Mandela was released from Robbin Island prison after 27 years in jail. Now elected president, and beset on all sides by racial, economic and diplomatic problems, Mandela is casting around for a symbol of the new South Africa. He finds it in Pienaar’s rugby team, long ostracised from international sport, which not only play host to the world’s players, but have a slim chance of winning. Mandela’s support for the Springboks is not without controversy. They are a predominantly white team, with just one black player. They wear the green and gold, the same colours as the flag of the apartheid South Africa, and they play rugby, the white sport of privilege.

Telling a vast national story in under two hours requires judicious editing but Eastwood’s narrative contractions and compressions are occasionally jarringly clumsy. Mandela’s estranged wife Winnie is never seen and is represented by a broken beaded bracelet, a symbol of their broken marriage. A series of flashbacks to Mandela’s time in prison, brought about by Pienaar and the team visiting the island, come across as overly poetic and corny. Eastwood also turns Mandela’s security team, made up of black ANC members and white former Special Branch officers, into a co-operative melting-pot emblematic of the new society. These sequences, although earnestly played, come off as trite and underdeveloped, shoehorned into the wider narrative in an effort to provide an emotional background.

There are times in the middle section of the film when the momentum slows down to a lumbering trot; lengthy re-stagings of key moments in the tournament mirrored by equally ponderous political machinations taking place backstage. Far too much time is devoted to bloodless recreations of tackles, tries and drop goals, cut between endless shots of the multi-cultural crowd waving rainbow flags.

Even if you don’t know the difference between a ruck and a maul, Eastwood’s film closely follows the set trajectory of the triumphal sports movie, even down to the final being settled on the last kick of the ball. Given such a predictable outcome, is Invictus a story worth telling? When Freeman is on screen, it is. Like the man he plays, Freeman exudes charisma and gravitas in equal measure. He has captured Mandela’s stiff stance and the awkward cadences of his speech perfectly, but to his enormous credit, the performance is more an inhabitation than an impersonation.

Still Walking

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s unassuming Japanese family drama Still Walking opens, like so many Asian films, with images of food being prepared. A lavish meal is assembled in a small kitchen by the elderly Tosiko (Kirin Kiki) and her young daughter Chinami (the monosyllabically named Japanese cult actress You). They are getting ready to host their son Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), his sweet new wife Yukari (Yui Natsukawa) and her young son Atsushi (Shohei Tanaka), the first time he has visited since he got married. Rightly or wrongly, Ryota believes his taciturn father Kyohei (Yoshio Harada), a retired doctor, disapproves of his marriage to a widowed mother and despairs of his chances to find a career as an art restorer.

At the same time, Chinami and her dopey, always-smiling salesman husband are hoping to move into the spare room, a proposal that her mother finds less than appealing. She is settled in her ways, tending to her husband and their garden. The already tense family gathering is made more uncomfortable by falling around the anniversary of the death of the family’s eldest son Junpei, a doctor like his father, who drowned while saving another man’s life a couple of years before. Junpei’s absence haunts the film like a ghost, particularly for Ryota who believes his parents would have preferred that he had been the one to die.

Like the recent Departures, Still Walking is a film about coping with grief through repetition and ritual. Some, like anointing a gravestone with water, are benign, but the other ceremonies that have built up around the tragic death are more sinister. From a cast of talented actors, Kirin Kiki stands out as the blunt and bickering grandmother. She is superb in every scene, her quick hands providing the family with delicate edible treats and her equally quick tongue providing the film with its best moment as she explains the malevolent thinking behind her façade of kindness to the boy her dead son saved. “I'm not cruel,” she tells her son, “It’s normal”.

There are moments throughout that recall the Japanese master director Yasujiro Ozu; lengthy, floor-level domestic still-lives and delicate images of the colourful garden that surrounds the house. The tone, like Ozu’s, is melancholic, tense and muted. At the heart of the film is the dining table, where the family eat, bicker, gossip and, slowly, unburden themselves. The story, which takes place over a single day and night, builds through an accretion of tiny details, oppressive silences and muttered asides, fleeting glances and fluttering gestures. Conversations begin at one point and, almost imperceptibly, conclude at another, some way distant. The root of the drama is revealed obliquely, a slow simmer of long-held grievances that never quite boils over. Restraint, in the end, wins out, but this grimly-held control only highlights the bright flashes of realistic emotion scattered all the way through what is a captivating film.

A Prophet

A Prophet, the new film from French genre stylist Jacques Audriard (The Beat That My Heart Skipped) is a remarkable crime epic, told with the director’s signature visual flair, centred on a young French Muslim’s struggle to survive a six-year sentence in a tough prison.

A petty criminal, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) arrives for his first day in the prison as an innocent thrown to the lions. Almost silent and obviously terrified, Malik is not yet a true criminal as much as he is a desperate young man. We are told he knows nobody in the jail, has no friends or family outside, no education, no resources and no plan for survival. The story of A Prophet is about how Malik comes to formulate a way out, not through the traditional escape of digging through walls but the construction of a new life outside, financially and psychologically.

The first movement of Audiard’s crime opera has Malik fall under the benign spell of Cesar Luchiani (Audriard favourite Niels Arestrup), a Corsican Mafioso who threatens to kill him unless he murders a fellow inmate, Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi). As the Corsican keeps a close eye on proceedings, Malik puts his plan to befriend and seduce the target, practising the execution in his cell. He has no choice but to kill, and from that point on Audiard slowly and masterfully tightens the noose around the young man’s neck as the Corsican returns with further favours to ask and threats to enforce. In the film’s most audacious move, Reyeb returns as a ghost to train his own killer in how to survive.

From that point on, Audiard moves Malik carefully through an occasionally confusing maze of criminal characters, divided loyalties, sensational set-pieces plans and absorbing confrontations. A Prophet is worth seeing if for no other reason than the intensely powerful central performance from newcomer Tahar Rahim who reminded me throughout of a young Robert De Niro, bristling with energy and an ability to twist his lumpy face into extraordinarily sincere expressions.

Audriard’s toneless palette of concrete grey and criss-crossed steel makes the prison a vision of a modernist hell, the cell walls looming over the inmates, their tiny rooms filled with remnants of the outside becoming shrines to regret and revenge. The photography and editing is exemplary; the early scenes shot with a half-closed iris emphasise Malik’s new claustrophobia before the camera finds the courage to stalk the corridors, trailing the young hoodlum as he finds his feet and a way out.

Audriard and his co-screenwriters Thomas Bidegain, Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit have combined to tell an elegantly structured story in which the accretion of tiny details and fascinating characters make A Prophet gripping from beginning to end. This is a sinewy genre story about hard nuts doing hard time that has the capacity and intelligence to address issues like social exclusion, criminal rehabilitation, state corruption and French national identity. It might be only the end of January, but A Prophet is one of the films of 2010.

Up In The Air

Writer director Jason Reitman follows his charming teen-pregnancy comedy Juno with an adaptation of Walter Kim’s novel, Up In The Air, in which introverted HR specialist Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), travels around the US firing people from struggling corporations.

With his perfectly knotted ties and dapper suits, Bingham comes across as smooth and successful executive but he lives a strange life. Home, a mostly-empty apartment in Omaha, is just somewhere to store his suitcases. There is no Mrs Bingham, and he avoids contact with his family, even as his younger sister (Melanie Lynsky) prepares to get married. In his wry voice-over, he tells us all about the “322 days a year” he spends in airports and hotels, sharing a few tips about how to be a savvy frequent-flyer. Among his most prized possessions are various loyalty cards, oblongs of embossed plastic that allow him to access the jet-set lifestyle - perks and upgrades - with a sweep of his hand and a smile.

Bingham works for a company run by the up-tight Craig (Jason Bateman), who specialise in firing employees for corporations that lack the skills or the decency to do it themselves. Business is booming. Every day, he arrives at reception, sets up a desk with his list of names and piles of severance brochures and starts his spiel about “seeking out new opportunities”. Throughout the film Reitman employs long sequences of face-to-face interviews with the newly downsized as they talk about unemployment. If you’re wondering why these people seem normal and sincere, it’s because they are. Barring a few extended cameos from familiar faces JJ Simmons and Zach Galifianakis, these are ordinary real people telling their own stories of how they coped with losing their jobs.

Even with those touches of poignant realism, Up In The Air remains a comedy derived from a character study. The story, like Bingham’s face, lights up when he meets kindred-spirit Alex (Vera Farmiga) in a hotel bar and they start comparing the size of their stacks of plastic, like Las Vegas gamblers. Before long, they are synchronising their calendars and arranging rendezvous on the road, pit-stops across America that slowly thaw Bingham’s frozen concepts of romance. Then, new developments at work pose a challenge to his set routines. Natalie (Anna Kendrick), an ambitious junior executive, has come up with a new way of firing people over the internet. Bingham is appalled. Not only does the technology threaten to do to him what he has been doing unto others for years, it removes the human equation from his work. His well-practised common-sense lines will sound hollow when coming through a tinny computer speaker. His sympathetic brow-wrinkles and comforting nods will lose their effects when played out on a flat-screen monitor.

Even if the sight of a smiling George Clooney in a well-cut suit has become a cinematic cliché, the actor extends himself in the role of a lonely executive to give an honest, heartfelt performance that plays up to his own image as a smooth-talking charmer as much as it exposes him as a solitary figure, lost in a plush, premium-grade world of single-serving meals and tiny shampoo bottles. His performance is matched in nuance and vulnerability by Farmiga, who is much more than mere romantic window-dressing and whose back-story, when revealed, offers a salty ironic bite.

Although fashioned from the pain and misery of sudden unemployment, under Reitman’s certain direction Up In The Air finds a delicate balance between zeitgeisty comedy and trenchant reportage to become a signature film for our recessionary times.

The Road

The Road is one of the most frightening, dark and despairing books to have been written in the last decade but it struck a chord with readers, selling millions of copies around the world and winning the Pulitzer Prize for its author, Cormac McCarthy.

The last film adapted from one of McCarthy’s novels, The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, went on to win four Oscars, including Best Film, and similar success looks likely for Australian director John Hillcoat’s hypnotically bleak film, a chilling vision of the end of days that sticks closely to the story McCarthy hammered out in his unique staccato style.

The apocalypse is a recurring theme in recent cinema, with filmmakers tripping over themselves to forecast how the curtain will drop on planet earth. Roland Emmerich’s tongue-in-cheek adventure 2012 bewildered us with neutrinos before scrambling for the safety of the Ark. Hillcoat gives us, simply, fire. An unexplained cataclysmic blaze races across the world, turning everything in its path to ashes. An unnamed man (Viggo Mortensen) and his ten year old son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) walk through a country reduced to embers and swirls of smoke, an unchanging grey sky smothering a blasted planet in sooty rain. There is almost nothing to eat and little clean water. Everything is covered in choking ash. The man and his son are pushing a shopping-trolley with their few possessions along an endless road, moving south in the hope of finding the sun and any sign of life.

As the two walk, they encounter other survivors, a blind old man (Robert Duvall), a thief (Michael Kenneth Williams, Omar Little from The Wire), and an unseen assailant with a bow and arrow. The man keeps a gun strapped to his chest with just two bullets remaining, a safeguard against being captured alive by the gangs of cannibals who roam the roads, looking for survivors. He snatches a few hours of sleep when he can, disturbed by dreams of his wife (Charlize Theron), who deserted them years ago, when she walked out into the blaze, unable to contemplate the future.

To say any more would ruin the story for those who have not read McCarthy’s book. Hillcoat and his screenwriter Joe Penhall have removed some of McCarthy’s more gruesome episodes and placed their emphasis on the spiritual elements of the story but much of the overwhelming threat, violence and despair remains. The Road is a feel-bad film, relentlessly so, but it is a beautiful one; conceived and realised with dreadful exactitude.

The Best and Worst of 2009

The Best Films of 2009

1) Let The Right One In

Swedish director Tomas Alfredson adapted the bestselling novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist for this darkly atmospheric vampire story about a 12 year old boy called Oscar and his friendship with an unusual young girl named Eli. As delicate, evocative and poetic a film as you are ever likely to see, the film’s complex ambiguities and haunting mood stayed with me throughout the year. A Hollywood remake is in the works. See it now, before they ruin it.

2) The White Ribbon
There are more scary kids in Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winning film about a black cloud of mysterious violence that passes over a Northern German village on the eve of WWI. Shot in stark monochrome and with a constant air of menace, The White Ribbon is extraordinarily gripping but frustratingly slippery, with Haneke deftly refusing to answer the questions he asks about family, community, faith and how they combined in the minds of the young people who would allow the Nazis to prosper. A singular film.

3) A Serious Man
The Coen Brothers follow the frothy caper Burn After Reading with this mordant, pleasingly pessimistic re-telling of the Book of Job as the story of a 1960s mathematics professor plagued by injustice and iniquity who attempts to find comfort in the teachings of his rabbis. A Serious Man is one of the very few films of 2009 that I watched twice.

4) Il Divo
Paolo Sorrentino offers a scathing analysis of former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, told with consummate style, wit and a towering central performance from Tony Servillo.

5) Up
The first twenty minutes of Pixar’s 3D animation Up are amongst the finest ever committed to film, an emotionally devastating thumbnail sketch of a quiet American marriage. The rest of it is pretty special too.

6) The Wrestler
Mickey Rourke had come a long way since his heyday in the 1980s, but the trajectory was mostly downward. By the time he was offered the title role in The Wrestler, Rourke had become a parody of himself. His director, visionary wunderkind Darren Aronofsky wasn’t doing all that better, smarting after the costly commercial and critical failure of The Fountain. The Wrestler saved them both: Rourke will play the baddie in this summer’s Iron Man II while Aronofsky is currently filming the thriller Black Swan.

7) Slumdog Millionaire
Danny Boyle swept the Oscars with this rollicking rags-to-riches story about a young man from the slums of Mumbai who appear on the Indian version of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”. Breathless and beguiling, Slumdog Millionaire boasted the best final scene of the year; a Bollywood-style dance-off staged at Mumbai train station.

8) Mesrine I & II
Vincent Cassel excelled in this tough, stylish diptych about the life and crimes of notorious French gangster Jacques Mesrine.

9) The Hurt Locker
Katherine Bigelow’s stylish and gripping war film told the story of a bomb-disposal expert as he completes a tour of duty on the streets of Iraq. Tightly focused, horribly claustrophobic and seething with anger and adrenaline, this is the best film yet about the war in Iraq.

10) Anvil: The Story of Anvil
The documentary of the year, this touching portrait of a failed Canadian heavy metal band was like Spinal Tap made real, up to and including the brilliantly redemptive finale.

The Next Ten Best:
Bright Star, Broken Embraces, District 9, Doubt, Frost/Nixon, Frozen River, Gran Torino, Katyn, Moon, Rachel Getting Married.


The Worst Films of 2009

1) The Boat that Rocked
The Boat That Sank, more like. Richard Curtis’ appalling comedy about a 1960s pirate radio station was noisy and busy and extraordinarily lengthy, but never funny. Not even once.

2) Love Happens
This ghastly rom-com about a relationship between a bereaved self-help author and a lonely florist is told as a series of fatuous homilies about ‘recovery’. This entire list could have been composed of failed, foolish American studio romantic-comedies.

3) The Ugly Truth
Like this one. Charisma vacuums Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler combine to losing effect for this charmless comedy black hole. See also: Bride Wars, Marley & Me, Couples Retreat…

4) Lesbian Vampire Killers
The stars of TV’s Gavin & Stacey squander their reputations on this lazy, puerile comedy homage to Hammer Horror.

5) Dragonball Evolution
Or, indeed, any film that has been adapted from a video game, ever. Unwatchable garbage designed to appeal to unusually dim-witted thirteen year old boys.

6) Triangle
A sailing-party of pretty young people are lost at sea and wind up wandering through a rip off of Kubrick’s Shining, brandishing shotguns and unresolved mommy-issues. Pointless.

7) Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
Limerick writer Darren Shan has written twelve Cirque du Freak books. The costly failure of the first adaptation, a cheap-looking, poorly-acted shambles, means it looks like we will be spared the rest.

8) Last House on the Left
Like the similarly pointless Friday The 13th, a glossy, gory remake of a 1970s horror that serves only to highlight Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy.

9) Transformers II
Micheal Bay fails to repeat the trick with his second film about shape-shifting space-robots. Eye-wateringly stupid and agonisingly lengthy. See also: X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Terminator Salvation.

10) Creation
The dullest film of the year, or any other year, Jon Amiel’s plodding story of Charles Darwin’s struggle to write On The Origin of Species saw Paul Bettany share a scene with an orang-utan, who acts him off the screen.

The best film book I read this year was Stephen Prince's keen analysis of the life and work of Akira Kurosawa in The Warrior's Camera. The worst was Robert Sellers' idiotic, priapic Bad Boy Drive. Away from the picture-house (although not that far removed) I really enjoyed reading Patricia Highsmith's quintet of Tom Ripley books.

Song of the year was RL Burnside's See What My Buddy Done from the album Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down.

A Serious Man

The new Coen Brothers comedy A Serious Man is a jagged, absorbing and brilliantly acted fable about one man’s struggle when a seemingly endless rain of problems starts to fall on his head.

The film opens with a short prologue set long ago in a Polish shtetl, in which a man and his wife are visited by a kindly old man. The suspicious wife thinks the visitor is a dybbuk, a kind of Jewish zombie, and dispatches him without thinking. Has she saved their lives, or cursed countless generations forever? We never know for sure, but the suspicion remains.

Flash forward to an unnamed American city in 1967. Mathematics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is attempting to explain Schrodinger’s classic thought experiment to his bored students. A cat, he tells them, is put in a sealed box with some radioactive material that might kill it at any time. Until the box is opened, we can observe the animal exists in two states; alive and dead, saved and cursed. The students don’t really understand, but perhaps Larry isn’t explaining himself very well. He’s in an unstable box himself.

There is catastrophe - or worse, potential catastrophe - wherever he looks. At home, his marriage to the brash Judith (Sari Lennick) is failing, his son is preparing for his bar mitzvah by smoking pot and watching television and his teenage daughter is demanding a nose job. Then there’s the matter of his deadbeat (Richard Kind), a deeply annoying moocher with a mysterious medical condition. At work, things are no better; A South Korean student is bribing him for a better grade and someone has been sending unflattering letters about Larry to his superiors.

Faced with this onslaught of calamity, Larry seeks the comfort and guidance of three Rabbis, a series of uproarious consultations that provide the story with a firm backbone. Can any of these learned men help him stop his life from dissolving around him and help him become an upstanding person – the serious man of the title; a mensch? But what can Larry make from the ramblings of his religious leaders when he struggles to articulate his questions? “God doesn’t owe us anything,” Rabbi Nachtner tells him. “The obligation runs the other way.” But why, Larry wonders, won’t He fix any of life’s problems? “He hasn’t told me,” the rabbi responds.

A Serious Man is the first Coen brothers film with an autobiographical edge and it perfectly captures both the time and culture of growing up Jewish in the heartland of 1960s America. The film acts as a distillation of the themes and techniques that have occupied the filmmaking brothers for their entire careers; a witty, idea-packed script that tells a compelling and engaging story, filled with cinematic and literary references, visual winks, cultural touchstones and delightfully complicated dead ends. The film is brilliantly acted by the unfamiliar cast, predominantly stage actors, the standout being Stuhlbarg’s floundering Larry, a study in panic trying to understand why God has cursed him to suffer. Shot in luminous tones by their usual cinematographer, Roger Deakins, and scored by their regular composer, Carter Burwell, A Serious Man is a darkly funny and wholly absorbing film that is deliberately, deliciously evasive, right up to the final scenes. It is one of the films of the year.

The White Ribbon

Austrian auteur Michael Haneke’s superb new film The White Ribbon is a stark and gripping period drama about a German town on the eve of WWI plagued by a series of violent incidents that act as a dark omen of the horrors to come.

The story, narrated by the film’s central character, a young schoolteacher (Christian Friedel), is structured around a string of misfortunes that befall the citizens of Eichwald, a rural village in Protestant Northern Germany. Half of the townspeople are dependent on the thunderous Baron (Ulrich Tukur) for work and the other half take their spiritual sustenance from the church minister (Burghart Klaussner), who wields the power of the pulpit with understated force.

The film opens as the local doctor (Rainer Bock) is thrown from his horse by a tripwire, strung between two trees outside his home, and is badly injured. It was obviously no accident, but the culprits cannot be found. Not long after, a woman working in the Baron’s mill falls through a splintered wooden floor and is killed. Then, over a period of weeks, several children are taken from their homes and found severely beaten in the woods. Later, the Baron’s hay barn is set on fire. Who is behind these troubling events, and what possible motive could they have for destroying the peace? Carefully placed in between these horrors are glimpses of the daily life of the village: the brutal punishments handed down to the children for the slightest infractions, a little boy questioning his nanny about the nature of death, a boy nursing an injured songbird back to health, a sun-dappled courtship between the teacher and a sweet-natured girl (Leonie Benesch).

Photographed in lustrous black and white and stunningly composed with a rigidly static camera, Haneke constructs his story with surgical precision, revealing the dark spots of human behaviour with a delicate scalpel. The White Ribbon is like The Village of the Damned rewritten as Greek tragedy, except the Greeks had a reason for everything. Haneke’s story is not so much a whodunit as a ‘who didn’t’ that contains elements of fable, morality tale and thriller. Like his earlier film Cache, Haneke steadfastly refuses to solve the mystery at the heart of his film. In the end, it doesn’t matter. The White Ribbon is an audacious parable about the psychology of fascism, a portrait of a dysfunctional society, built on mistrust, injustice and fear, which is headed for the chaotic destruction of the First World War. The society these characters have created will not survive the war, but Haneke’s film is about the world that follows after the defeat. Thier children will go on to create an evil and unjust society, built on arrogance, hatred, greed and violence. Where did they learn that from?

Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, The White Ribbon is a bold and troubling film that exerts a powerful narrative hold. It’s extraordinary energy and exactitude confirms Haneke as one of contemporary cinema’s most provocative and perceptive minds.

Bright Star

Bright Star, writer-director Jane Campion’s first film in six years, tells the story of the English romantic poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and his relationship with Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). Their love affair was short and unconsummated, cut short by the poet’s death from tuberculosis in 1821, at the age of 25. She was just 18. Loosely based on Andrew Motion’s biography of the poet and the 40 surviving letters he wrote to Fanny, Bright Star is a sublimely lush and tender film about star-crossed love bolstered by a delicate treatment and exemplary acting performances.

His first book having been published to general indifference, the penniless Keats arrives in a leafy corner of Hampstead to stay at the house of his friend and patron Charles Brown (Paul Schneider). Fanny, the girl next door, is a quick-witted young woman who lives with her mother (Kerry Fox), younger brother Samuel (Thomas Sangster) and darling little sister Toots (Edie Martin). Fanny’s beauty and wit offers the young poet respite from days spent sitting in dark, smoky rooms narrating his poems in a near-trance to Brown. Dark-eyed and wan, Keats is lost in melancholy, distraught by the death of his younger brother and by his perilous financial situation. Fanny recognises his anguish and makes a determination to get to know him, and his work, arranging lessons in appreciating poetry and having him eat at her table. But Brown, who is footing the bill, sees Fanny as an unnecessary distraction, a nuisance whose incautious flirting will deprive the poet of the time he needs to write. At the same time, Fanny’s mother regards Keats as a charming houseguest, but without any means, an unacceptable match for her eldest daughter.

The standardised treatment for a literary biopic would be to concentrate on the poet’s struggle with his muse. Campion does something far more interesting with the material, she makes Fanny the focus of her story. The film opens, not with an inky quill crossing paper, but with a scene where Fanny sits at her bureau embroidering a piece of cloth. The young woman is a 19th century fashionista; a dedicated amateur seamstress who delights in clothing and style and boasts that hers is “the only gown with a triple-tiered mushroom collar in the whole of Hampstead.” When a jealous Brown offers a snide remark about her self-designed clothing (“It’s the well-stitched Miss Brawne”), she mentions that at least she makes some money from her craft.

Nothing of Fanny’s correspondence with Keats has survived, so the director is free to create a woman who would be, within the restrictions of the time she lived in, as inspired by fashion, stitching and needlework as her poet love is by words. Her emotional journey becomes the engine of the film, as the poet and his poems fill the wondrously detailed background. This delicate treatment extends to the intimate pacing, which is carefully graduated to allow the chaste lovers to come together naturally. We know their love affair will not last, but Campion presents their joy in each other in such a precise and vibrant manner, that knowledge doesn’t intrude on the story.

There are poetic graces too in the telling, with Campion’s static camera searching out stolen frames of everyday life in the household, piling on the detail to create an immersive world. These moments are counterpoised with grand dramatic sweeps that climax in heaving gulps, a sun-dappled kiss, a heavy loss, a long separation. Campion favours a striking image to a page of dialogue, so conversations are short and sparse. Saying that, there is a fascinating scene early in the story where Keats responds to Fanny’s sincere questions about the proper understanding of poetry that seems to capture the meaning of the film itself. “A poem needs understanding through the senses”, the poet tells her. “The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought”. It’s not being overly lyrical to suggest that the same is true of Bright Star.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Writer and director Wes Anderson rebounds from the back-to-back commercial disappointments of The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Ltd with his first animated film, Fantastic Mr Fox, made in the directors signature fastidious manner using old-fashioned stop-motion techniques. Roald Dahl's 1970 children’s book about a family of wily foxes and their woodland friends eluding the predatory attentions of the local humans has been transformed by Anderson, co-writer Noah Baumbach and a team of dedicated animators into an idiosyncratic, charmingly hand-crafted tale of family dysfunction and middle-class tedium.

The second talking-fox movie this year, following Lars von Trier's Antichrist, Fantastic Mr Fox opens at the same pace it maintains throughout, breakneck. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) and his beloved vixen wife (Meryl Streep) are out hunting chickens when they are caught in a trap. She chooses the opportunity to tell Fox she is expecting their first cub, and makes him promise to give up his dangerous, chicken-stealing ways and settle down. Twelve “fox-years” later, their son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) is a weedy, self-conscious teenager, further embarrassed by the arrival into the den of a talented, athletic cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson, the director’s brother).

In deference to his wife’s more refined tastes (she’s wears an apron and dabbles in landscape painting) Fox has foresworn his hunting instincts and taken a job as a newspaper columnist. But Fox’s instinctive appetite for pullet-poaching has returned. With the help of a dim-witted opossum (Wally Wolodarsky), Fox plans his “one last big job”, robbing the three nasty farmers, Boggis and Bunce and Bean (Michael Gambon), “one fat, one short, one lean”, who live on the opposite hill. Tired of the impudent fox raiding their supplies, the farmers resort to increasingly desperate measures to capture and kill him, eventually putting all of the woodland creatures (including Bill Murray’s Badger and Willem Dafoe’s Rat) in danger.

This being a Wes Anderson film, much of the joy comes from tuning into the director’s unique visual sensibility. Unlike the seamless, polished image-making of the computerised animations, Fantastic Mr Fox pursues a roughly-hewn aesthetic that gives enormous energy and wit to proceedings; as stylized and inventive as anything Anderson has done previously. The stitch-perfect costuming, brilliantly textured character design and gloriously autumnal backgrounds aside, there are a plenty of highlights: Mr Fox and his chums burrow through geologically precise soil strata, our woodland chums hide from the humans in a vast cider-bottle warehouse, they stage their climactic shootout in a gorgeous facsimile of an Olde Worlde British village, complete with sushi bar and courier service.

It might be a cartoon, but Mr Fox is still a Wes Anderson film, through and through with the same attention to detail, eclectic soundtrack, airily witty dialogue and chaptered storytelling that have delighted his fan base in the past. They should be delighted again, even if younger audience members might find much of the precious chatter about existentialism, crème brulees and yogic meditation unfathomable. Incidentally when I met Anderson during the publicity tour for The Life Aquatic, he was wearing the same copper-coloured corduroy lounge suit that Foxy sports in the movie. If you share the director’s taste for fine retro tailoring, you might just like Fantastic Mr Fox.

Thirst

Korean Park Chan-Wook’s Thirst is a variation on the horror-standard vampire origin story, imbued with the director's signature visual bravado, narrative contortion and deadpan comic touch.

Sang-hyun (Korea’s best known actor, Song Kang-Ho) plays a Catholic priest who follows a vocation to help people and travels to Africa to take part in a medical experiment investigating a strange blood disorder. It doesn't go well. After his life is saved by a blood transfusion, the priest gradually realises he’s been turned into a vampire. A good, God-fearing man, he finds himself unable to resist his new desires, particularly when he meets the beautiful Tae-Ju (Kim Ok-Bin), a married woman with an idiot husband and an interfering mother in law.

With all of his superhuman senses now awakened to the possibilities of life (while technically, undead), the priest falls in love with the girl and they conspire to find a way to be together forever. He is determined to fight his new-found desires and tries to cause as little harm as possible to the humans he feeds on, but she loves her new unnatural nature and enthusiastically pierces the neck of anyone who comes within her grasp.

Thirst might not be the greatest vampire movie ever made (it is certainly not the most coherent) but there is something utterly unique and unsettling about the way it is presented, performed and considered. A note in the press material reveals that Thirst is loosely based on Emile Zola’s ‘Thérèse Raquin’. The reference would have passed me by, but the book is about a murderous marital affair and an interfering mother-in-law. More so than the narrative skeleton, Park seems to have been inspired by a note Zola made in the preface to the novel, where the writer explains his goal was to “study temperaments, not characters”. There is more here than mere blood-soaked fun and games. The clue to Park’s film is in the title. Thirst is about sensation, need and appetite.

Bold, brave and frequently beautiful, it isn’t quite in the same class as the director’s masterpiece Oldboy but it is still a million times more interesting and involving than the trendily fanged flirting of Twilight. There are, perhaps, deeper seams in the story than Park can mine in the finished film. Park’s priest never comes to deal with the philosophical question of being, or loving, one of the undead. More prosaically, the film feels too long, with Park spinning the central section into a repetitive dance around a single idea, allowing the attention to wander just at the time it is most required.

The Invention of Lying

Fiction - and the imagination that dreams it up - is essential to the smooth running of society, from the little white lies of social etiquette to the bigger questions that can’t be answered, can’t even be properly formulated, without making an imaginative jump from one point to another. Ricky Gervais’ second big-screen outing as male lead is a high-concept comedy, set in a horrible alternate world where everyone tells the truth.

In The Invention of Lying, Gervais plays Mark, a struggling screenwriter who is in danger of losing his job at the film studio where, in the absence of fiction, they make dreary historical documentaries, read out by actors sitting in armchairs. Even so, Mark is about to be fired. He has run out of things to write about. Broke and despairing, while standing at a bank counter one day, Mark has a brainwave. Instead of telling the cashier how much is actually in his account, he makes up a number. She hands over the cash without question, after all, Mark must be telling the truth. (Incidentally, this does not work in real life.)

So Mark tells another lie at another bank, and then another, and is soon flush with cash. Money and the confidence it bestows makes it a lot for Mark to woo the lovely Anna (Jennifer Garner), who had previously considered him “genetically inferior”. Mark goes back to work and presents his boss (Jeffrey Tambor) with a new script, a ‘real-life’ epic, forgotten in the archives, about a 1st century between the massed armies of men, dinosaurs and space ninjas. Then Mark tells another story, this time to his mother (Fionnuala Flanagan) as she lies in a hospital bed. It’s a story about a wonderful place you go where you die, where all your family and friends are waiting and everything is great. But the yarn is overheard by doctors and spreads like wildfire. Nobody doubts that it couldn’t be true. Mark has accidentally invented God.

Like Moses on the mountain, Mark stand in front of a vast crowd of disciples and preaches a deviously complicated sermon about the rewards of living a good life. It’s a well-worked scene that plays to Gervais’ strengths as a stand-up comic, blustering double-takes and exaggerated flop-sweats, but like his tablet-wielding inspiration, Gervais is leading us into a narrative desert. His elevation to messiah, however inadvertent and unwanted, tires badly when syrupy emotion and redeeming messages start to fill the space that should contain jokes.

A world where people can only speak the truth is an interesting notion for comedy, but in fact Gervais’ characters don’t so much speak honestly as speak without self-censorship, which is not quite the same thing. It’s a narrative cheat that reduces the altitude of the high-concept but is less of an issue than Gervais casting himself once again, following Ghost Town, as an ordinary guy, touched by fate, who overcomes his misanthropy to use his powers to help those around him. If telling lies is a sin, vanity is too.

Opposite Gervais, Jennifer Garner overcomes the obvious lack of chemistry with her leading man to deliver a dryly amusing, well-rounded performance as the innocently offensive career woman with a heart of gold. There are funny moments too from an underused Tina Fey as Mark’s assistant and Rob Lowe as a slimy love-rival. Filling out the cast are comedians Jonah Hill and Louis C.K., as a suicidal neighbour and a boorish best-friend, but neither serves any purpose in the second half of the film other than to provide Mark with someone to save. With a tighter script and better direction, all the good ideas in The Invention of Lying might have coalesced into something special. As it stands, it’s just OK. Honest.

Up

The opening fifteen minutes of Pixar’s latest digital animation Up is the finest quarter hour of cinema I have seen so far this year – a jaw-dropping sequence that would be the pride of any of the American greats; Chaplin, Welles, Kubrick or Spielberg.

In a few deft, deliberate strokes, directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson encapsulate the life-long love affair between the square-headed Carl Fredericksen and his delicate wife Ellie, from their first meeting as children through marriage, middle-age, happy retirement and, brace yourself, her death. Yes, death. It’s an indication of how advanced and ambitious Pixar have become that the company not only write stories for human (as opposed to superhuman) characters, they have the courage to put them into emotionally realistic (and, going by the stifled sobs at the screening I attended) quietly devastating situations.

From that point on, viewers who can keep their eyes dry will witness one of the sweetest, funniest stories the animation studio has produced yet. Widowed and retired from his balloon-selling business, 79 year old Carl (Ed Asner) wants only to live out his days in the house he built with Ellie. But, a giant construction company wants to buy him out, and after a series of unfortunate incidents, Carl must concede. Rather than move to a retirement home, however, Carl straps 25,000 helium balloons to the roof of the house, prying it from its foundation and carrying it skyward.

Carl intends to fly his house to Venezuela and visit the Lost World he heard his childhood hero Edward Muntz (Christopher Plummer) talk about, seventy years before. However, he’s got a stowaway in the form of Russell (Jordan Nagai), a chubby boy scout who happened to be standing on the porch when the house took off. Together, the two mismatched heroes begin an adventure that takes in forgotten explorers, gawky 15-foot rare birds and a platoon of talking dogs.

Although it’s easy to forget as you get caught up in watching it, Up is a film that is aimed at children. Notwithstanding the continuous movement and endless incident that the family audience demands, Pixar have crafted an incredibly refined and delicate picture, which places visual beauty and hard-earned emotion ahead of flashy sensation and pop-culture references. The computing power required to generate the wondrous 3-D images is one thing, but the real cinematic craft on display here is the same one that has been exercised since the dawn of movies – careful, considered writing.

The scripting and characterisation that acts as the foundation for Pixar’s success is so well-engineered it can support any flight of fancy the filmmakers care to build on top of it. This bedrock extends to the perfectly chosen voice cast, with brilliant turns from a gruff Asner and a smooth Plummer matched by nine year-old first-timer Nagai as the tireless Russell.

Up must be the first kid’s film to feature an extended homage to Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, along with nods to The Boys From Brazil and Indiana Jones. Keen-eyed viewers will also spot Pixar’s recurring in-jokes; a voice cameo from actor John Ratzenberger (who has appeared in all of the companies films), a prominent use of the alpha-numerical code A113 (after the room at CalTech where the Pixar boffins studied) and another drive-by from Toy Story’s Pizza Planet delivery van.

The Soloist

Director Joe Wright’s third feature is a significant departure from his two previous movies, Pride & Prejudice and Atonement. Those were both period dramas, adapted from beloved literary sources, which focused on the social and romantic complications of the British aristocracy. The Soloist, by contrast, is adapted from a series of articles from journalist Steve Lopez that appeared in the Los Angles Times in 2005 and is set on Los Angeles’ skid row; Wright’s customary bonnets and blushing belles replaced by crack-pipes and down-and-outs.

The film, like this year’s other journo-drama State of Play, opens with a loving montage of newspapers flying through a printing press before we are introduced to the LA Times star columnist Lopez, played by the always watchable Robert Downey Jr. Lopez is in need of a good story, anything to placate his peevish editor, and ex-wife, Mary (Catherine Keener). While out driving one day Lopez encounters a homeless busker Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), playing a virtuoso solo on a two-stringed violin.

Dressed in a suit of lights made from dozens of colourful rags, Nathaniel stammers out his story to the intrigued writer. He was once a student of the prestigious Juilliard School of Music before his undiagnosed schizophrenia made continuing his education impossible. He drifted away from New York and migrated to LA, “because you can sleep outside all year round”. Lopez has found his story, and writes it up as a column that is met with a wave of positive reaction from readers. More columns follow and a relationship develops between the two men. A reader’s donation of a cello brings Nathaniel and Lopez into contact with an LA homeless shelter, a place where the troubled man can get respite, if he chooses to take it, and the writer can find his subject when needs be.

Downey Jr played a journalist in David Fincher’s Zodiac and is again, wholly credible as an essentially honest, hard-working professional; his physical fluidity and clipped delivery going to underline his character as a keenly intelligent, doggedly inquisitive mind. The real life Lopez must be delighted with him. As Nathaniel, Foxx is a decent counterpoint to Downey Jr’s restraint, playing a man terrified by his own mind and reliant on music as a respite from the pain of his existence.

Director Wright doesn’t handle the transition to real-world, real-life drama all that well, seeming to prefer artful camera technique and delicate tableaux over the cut and thrust of a present-day drama. Despite Lopez being just a shiny halo short of sainthood and Ayers’ being a deeply sympathetic character, The Soloist fails to do justice to their shared story. This contemporary narrative has the germ of fascination but in Wright’s hands it emerges in lumpy spurts from a series of awkwardly conjoined sequences, alternately pretentious or bland, that settle unattractively into a globular mass of information. There are distracting sub-plots that arrive from nowhere, only to return there immediately, like Lopez's struggle with raccoons that have taken over his garden, and his somewhat less urine-soaked attempts to reconnect with his ex-wife.

Aside from a deftly presented multi-coloured light-show, that hints more at Nathaniel’s synesthesia than his schizophrenia, Wright strains to find any grandeur in his imagery and displays little understanding of his characters or the hard truths of homelessness. Wright’s attempt to depict schizophrenia from Nathaniel’s point of view collapses in a muddle of overlapping sound, crashing edits and indecipherable flashbacks.

For all its sensitivity to the horrors of mental illness, The Soloist ends up feeling a little unhinged itself; distracted, fidgety and self-absorbed. Wright’s regular cinematographer Seamus McGarvey fires off every cannon in his considerable arsenal - long tracking movements, swooping crane shots and delicate compositions - but the camera fails to bring grace to what is essentially a humdrum treatment. Far better is the thunderous score from another Wright regular Dario Marianelli, which amends and underlines a selection of Beethoven concertos to winning effect. Like the two central performances, it deserved a better film.

Stanley Kubrick: Taming Light

Stanley Kubrick is my cinematic idol. He died ten years ago, in 1999, shortly after completing Eyes Wide Shut. As a devotee, I wanted to mark that sad anniversary but in a way that showed how his images and the emotions they evoke are still with us.

So, inspired by a Shining graffito I photographed in Berlin, I decided to host an exhibition of painting, photography and illustration inspired by Kubrick's life and films.

The result is Stanley Kubrick: Taming Light, which runs at the Light House cinema, Smithfield in Dublin from October 1st - 31st.

The exhibition is comprised of new work from a roster of established and emerging artists I put together over six months this year. I am absolutely delighted with the quality, intensity and tender-hearted homage the artists have shown to Kubrick and his films. The show is non-sales, not-for-profit and free to Light House visitors.

The image above is the exhibition poster, designed by the extraordinarily talented Martin Ansin, a Uruguayan artist and illustrator who captured Kubrick and his indelible characters perfectly. The poster is available as a print (in a limited edition of 250 only) at the Light House cafe, signed and numbered by Martin. It is a beautiful, desirable object.

I want to thank all of the artists for taking part in the show and paying their tribute in such a wonderful way. I also want to thank the Light House, for allowing me to commandeer their space for a month, and thank Kubrick, for the films.

If you have Twitter, why not follow the show, or join the Facebook group

The exhibition has a dedicated website, designed and built by the ever-so patient Niamh Redmond, at www.kubricktaminglight.com.

John

Adventureland

The recent rash of quirky teenage romantic comedies continues with Adventureland, yet another skewed coming-of-age story, this time concerning the comical trials of a group of college kids working at a run-down Pittsburgh theme park in the summer of 1987.

On the face of it, Adventureland isn’t much of an advance on writer and director Greg Mottola’s last film Superbad; scattergun stories of slack-jawed youths galloping around colourful locations in search of something to kill the time. But where that raucous comedy was made under the auspices of uber-producer Judd Apatow, Adventureland is a sweeter, more sincere film about first loves and uncertain futures, based on the director’s own experiences.

Awkward, nerdish and virginal, recent college graduate James (Jesse Eisenberg) thought he’d be heading off to “sexually permissive” Europe for the summer but his parent’s Reganomic reality-check has forced him to go looking for a summer job before he can go on to complete his pricey education. Having exhausted all other avenues, James pitches up at the titular Adventureland to operate the rigged carnival games; “the work of pathetic lazy morons”, as his new best friend Joel (Martin Starr) puts it.

The first day on the job, James meets and falls for Em (Kristen Stewart), a cynical slacker with a hang-em-all mentality and mild domestic problems. The rest of James’ co-workers might be comedy stereotypes, but they are well-written and convincingly played. Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig are the dim-witted, married park managers Bobby and Paulette, Margarita Levieva is the sassy other-girl Lisa P and Matt Bush plays James’ obnoxious neighbourhood friend Frigo. The only duff note is struck by Ryan Reynolds as the park handyman Connell, who seems too old and mannered for the role, a married lothario with dreams of rock stardom.

Rather than attempt to re-invent the coming-of-age story, Adventureland is a demonstration of what the genre looks like when filtered through a new sieve. Mottola has a keen ear for dialogue and an all-embracing sense of humour that finds room for visual puns, spiky banter, bodily embarrassments and gangly slapstick. Eisenberg does well as Mottola’s alter-ego, convincingly over-intellectualising everything with inelegant couplets of poetry or allusions to Russian literature. Opposite him, Kirsten Stewart shows, as she did in Twilight, that she can play listless and cool without strain, even if sometimes her performance comes across as an extended photographic tutorial in lip-biting and coy glances than what you might call acting.

Adventureland, like all the other quirky indie teenage films that have gone before it this year, attempts to mix ribald humour with bittersweet observation but never really comes down on one side or the other. The funny is funny, but rarely to the point of laughing out loud. The characters go through the standardised coming-of-age process but the lessons they learn, while engaging and empathic, don’t gather enough force to burrow under the skin. The almost forty songs on the potent period soundtrack, everything from Falco to Judas Priest to The Replacements, bring constant aural entertainment even if the film at times seems to be merely going through the paces.