The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists 3D

Beloved British animators Aardman return to cinemas after a six-year hiatus with their first stop-motion film since Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Adapted by author Gideon Defoe from his bestselling series of children’s books, The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists is the studio’s first 3D outing and their first collaboration with Sony after making three full-length films with DreamWorks but everything else about the film fits within their carefully crafted body of work; being visually and verbally witty, rousingly entertaining and a treat for kids of all ages.

The title might be a little awkwardly punctuated but it tells you all you need to know about the plot, capturing something of the misplaced enthusiasm of the hapless buccaneer protagonists and the real-life (if humorously re-imagined) historical figures of Charles Darwin and his fellows at the Royal Society, under the patronage of a seemingly psychotic Queen Victoria. Better known recently for his tabloid-busting exploits than his movies, Hugh Grant emerges from semi-retirement to voice the prosaically named Pirate Captain, another in Aardman’s long line of loveable-loser heroes.

The Captain might see himself as a blood-thirsty, salt-encrusted sea-dog but he and his crew are more interested in slicing up joints of meat on his ship’s celebratory Ham Night feasts than dividing chests of ill-gotten doubloons. With his luxuriant beard and puffy shirt, The Captain has long held a dream to be crowned Pirate of the Year but faces stiff competition from his more daring rivals, including Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven) and Cutlass Liz (Salma Hayek).

In an effort to impress the judge (Brian Blessed in full voice), The Captain and his crew (including Martin Freeman, Brendan Gleeson and Ashley Jensen) start a campaign of boarding every ship they spy through their telescopes, eventually attacking The Beagle and kidnapping a terrified Darwin (David Tennant). Having quickly assessed the pirates as being of little threat to his well-being, Darwin advises them that their beloved parrot Polly is in fact the last surviving dodo, which can be exchanged for gold and glory in London. The trouble is that Queen Victoria (a seething Imelda Staunton) is virulently anti-pirate, requiring the crew to don a series of inventive disguises in order to present their prize as Darwin and his house-trained chimpanzee butler (who dryly comments on the action with placards, in the style of Wile E. Coyote) threaten to steal it for themselves.

The Pirates has all the key qualities of an Aardman film: the stop-motion animation is meticulously executed and distinctively charming, the voice acting is perfectly pitched and, perhaps most importantly, every frame contains a studio in-joke, a witty movie reference or a gag pulled groaning from an old Christmas cracker. There are moments of slapstick, character comedy, ridiculous puns, thigh-slapping one-liners and a whole series of jokes that will sail over the heads of the younger audience members, including an audacious cameo from The Elephant Man. Central to the success of Aardman’s film is the very British combination of frozen-smile embarrassment and crippling insecurity that Grant has been assiduously mining for the past two decades, although he has only rarely been as likeable. Despite a palpable sag in the middle, where the story could have used a twist or two, Aardman’s wondrous imagination and subversive sense of humour carries the film to a stirring finale with a series of frenetic chase sequences that recall their best work in The Wrong Trousers.

From the lovingly detailed pirate ships to the cobbled streets of Victorian England, Aardman’s stop-motion animation renders a wholly convincing, endearing world whose scope and detail are enhanced by subtly used computer graphics, which beautifully complement the animator’s eight-inch high Plasticine models.

Once Upon A Time In Anatolia

A slow-burning meditation on the relationships between men and women disguised as an obsessive police procedural, Turkish maestro Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s mesmerizing Once Upon a Time in Anatolia plays out like Andrei Tarkovsky’s CSI: Ankara, a two and a half hour epic about a parade of cops and killers trawling the remote hillsides around a rural town, searching for a murder victim’s corpse.

Outlining the plot takes substantially less effort than the commitment and attention Ceylan’s film requires. After an unhurried preamble that introduces us to a man about to die, the story opens with a static shot of a convoy of three cars winding along a rough country road at night, their headlights streaming across a grassy hillside. The three cars contain a stern group of middle-aged men, including Prosecutor Nusret (Taner Birsel), Police Commissioner Naci (Yilmax Erdogan) and hospital Doctor Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner). In the back of the police car, they have a grim, bruised prisoner, the self-confessed killer Kenan (Firat Tanis). Kenan, who barely speaks, has agreed to lead the policemen to the corpse, but is having trouble remembering the exact location. There is a tree, he says, and a stream beside a field. But there are a lot of trees and streams and fields. The search will take all night.

Ceylan uses a three-part structure, with a few short scenes serving as transitions. The convoy visits a series of locations in the rural hinterland before they take a break at a small village. There, they all sit around in circles eating a meal as the local mayor fills their ears with requests for funds to help modernise the village. The final act brings the convoy back to town, and the sterile halls of the hospital, where the doctor, his cantankerous assistant and a police recorder undertake a lengthy post-mortem, dissecting the body they have disinterred, and the events we have just watched.

This description might make Once Upon a Time in Anatolia sound prosaic, even dull, but this is a film so delicate that any attempt to analyze it might, like an archaeologist digging through an Egyptian tomb, cause everything to crumble into dust. Ceylan’s screenplay (co-written with his wife Ebru and his Three Monkeys screenwriter Ercan Kesal) contains a whole world of suggestion, forcing the audience to piece together the tiny details of everything that came before. What appears to be a simple cop story evolves into a complex, multi-layered human drama, a compelling examination of Turkish manhood and a cutting critique of an economically depressed country on the cusp of European assimilation. Ceylan constructs his film through a careful accretion of terse exchanges, quick glances, gestures and passing moments that remain suggestions, implying a story far deeper and darker than the one being told.

What ties the three sections together is the introduction of a female presence into this all-male world. In the first sequence, the police captain’s wife calls him on his mobile to remind him of an errand while later the prosecutor tells the doctor a story about a woman of his acquaintance who prophesied her own death. In the second section, a bridge between night and day, a beautiful girl emerges from a house in the village to send each of the men into a stunned reverie, underlined by a quick shot of a burning lamp surrounded by moths. Finally, in the concluding part, the victim’s wife appears at the hospital to witness his post mortem, her stoic silence acting as a blank wall against which Ceylan bounces a series of unanswerable questions.

This mature, involving and endlessly fascinating drama was a deserved winner of last year’s Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix. Ceylan the visual stylist places his characters in a spectacularly moody nocturnal landscape, but it is the emotional resonant characters and the inquisitive performances that are the most compelling. The questions continue long after the credits roll.

John Carter

Given that it’s based on a groundbreaking work of early science fiction, it comes as no surprise that Disney’s 3D adventure based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, John Carter carries an musty air of pastiche; being a hodgepodge of elements that have been borrowed by every fantasy filmmaker in the hundred years since it was first published.

As directed by Andrew Stanton, the story opens in 1881 with Burrough’s himself as a young man (played by Daryl Sabara) inheriting the estate of his recently deceased uncle John Carter (Taylor Kitsch). Among his effects, Burroughs finds a leather-bound journal that tells a story of interplanetary travel, war, romance and heroism that seems, extraordinarily, to be a true account. Carter was a Confederate soldier in the Civil War, brought West after the peace to prospect for gold. No sooner does he discover a cave full of nuggets than he is mysteriously transported to another realm: the planet Mars, which the locals call Barsoom.

There, blessed with super-strength thanks to the lower gravity, Carter meets the Tharks; a race of green-skinned, six-armed creatures who are struggling in a thousand-year war. Their adversaries are the technologically advanced Zodangans, whose arrogant leader Sab Than (Dominic West), has just acquired a new weapon of mass destruction from a shape-shifting, blue-skinned demi-god known as Matai Shang (and played by Mark Strong). The third faction in the battle for Barsoom are the Jeddak (Ciaran Hinds) and his beautiful daughter Princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins), who are looking for a hero to unite them against the belligerent Zodangans. They find their man in Carter, with the bemused Earthman quickly cast as the chosen one and leading the united forces of the planet in a quest for peace.

Stanton, who directed Finding Nemo and WALL-E and had a hand in writing all three Toy Story features, follows his Pixar colleague Brad Bird in moving from the elevated world of gorgeous, rightly-lauded digital animation to the hustle and bustle of the live-action cattle-market. Despite the presence of novelist Michael Chabon among the scriptwriters, dramatic coherence loses out to visual flair with the result that John Carter is more a series of thunderous incidents than a gracefully composed story. The time and patience required to thread a route through a troika of warring factions, a rogue’s gallery of good guys and bad guys, a mystical back-story and an interplanetary romance is sacrificed for another jumpy effects sequence or 3D wow. There is too much going on and little of it makes much sense on a single viewing.

All this means John Carter is more of a passing diversion than an immersive experience. Stanton has all the technological bells and whistles that a reported $250 million budget can buy, but he struggles to carve any meaning out of his pretty effects. The characters remain broad types, the plot is confused and saggy while the essential otherworldly nature of Carter’s adventure is never given a moment to settle. It says a lot when, having waited his turn for a century, we still don’t know much about our eponymous hero after two hours of extravagant spectacle. Fittingly perhaps, for a film set on Mars, there is a distinct lack of atmosphere, with the director eschewing the usual flame-red Mars template for something that looks like what it is; a snag-toothed yellow desert straight from a John Ford western.

Taking the lead role for the first time, Kitsch is entirely convincing as a rippling action hero, with his straggly hair, tattered loincloth and nipples that follow you around the room like the Laughing Cavalier’s eyes. He meets his match with Collins, a capable, courageous heroine with unconventional looks and a whip-smart mind, whose skimpy costumes might come to define puberty for a generation of teenage boys (if any of them actually go to see it) in the same way as Carrie Fisher did in Star Wars thirty years ago. The secondary characters are well delivered; Strong is good as the monkish puppet-master pulling the strings on planetary politics, Hinds does extremely well to overcome a pantomime costume and reams of explanatory dialogue while Prufroy adds a winning smirk to his otherwise perfunctory factotum.

The nagging thought remains that if Disney believed John Carter was good enough to fight for a spot in the crowded, lucrative summer marketplace, we wouldn’t be watching it in the chill damp of March. There's also something disconcerting about their decision to truncate the title, removing "from Mars" and making their hero indistinguishable from a geography teacher or, according to Google, the heroic hospital doctor Noah Wyle played on E.R. Regardless of all their tinkering, what Disney has on it's hands is a pretty decent sci-fi action picture, targeted at but unsold to the middle-teen market, that contains some intriguing ideas, gutsy performances and a few enduring moments, mostly from the special effects work. John Carter could have been much more: the story could have been more clearly deliniated, the effects work could have been cleaner, it could have been more exciting and Stanton could have made us care something for his characters. It’s no classic but neither is it a fiasco. Not out of this world, then.

This Means War

It’s only March but This Means War is already the frontrunner to be the worst film of the year. One thing is for certain, 2012 has nowhere to go but up.

A tuneless cover version of Francois Truffaut’s classic love-triangle Jules et Jim, the latest brain-numbing romantic comedy from Charlie’s Angels director McG plays out like an ultraviolent toothpaste commercial; visually ugly, politically gruesome and desperately unfunny. In fact, the only thing that McG does right is to cower behind his abbreviated moniker. If you made films this bad, you wouldn’t want people to know your real name either.

The Jules character is known as F.D.R. (Chris Pine), while the Jim is Tuck (Tom Hardy). They are best friends and co-workers at the CIA, who seem to spend every waking moment together. Reese Witherspoon plays bubbly blonde Lauren, a lonely-hearted singleton who signs up for a dating website and attracts the malignant attention of the two emotionally-arrested agents. She doesn’t know that they are CIA agents and best friends and are fighting each other for her amorous attentions. Also unbeknownst to Lauren, they are using sophisticated espionage technology in order to more accurately pitch their woo.

They tap her phone, install listening devices in her home, trawl through her private records and track her every move using hidden cameras and satellites. Having diverted the vast resources of the CIA into gathering a bank of information, the two men then sit and watch each other trying to seduce the young woman, eavesdropping as she gets advice from her exhausted-looking friend Trish (Chelsea Handler). Not only is their behaviour immoral and illegal, it’s inordinately time consuming, even in terms of the shiny, brutal fantasy world that McG strains to invoke. But worse, all this supposedly fun snooping about takes Witherspoon’s already ridiculous character and turns her into nothing more than a target for well-equipped stalkers. And that’s just creepy.

As all of this is going on, F.D.R. and Tuck become embroiled in a vendetta waged by grim-faced European bank robber Heinrich (a scowling Til Schweiger) in a sub-plot that does nothing but provide a hint that there is a world outside the over-designed halls of their CIA office. An opening shoot-out between the tuxedo-clad agents and Heinrich’s heavily-armed goons is staged in a manner that is both logically implausible and visually incoherent; the latter deficiency intended to disguise the former. If these sequences weren’t there, nobody would miss them, with the added advantage that the film would be about thirty minutes shorter.

This Means War sees modern romance as a battlefield where there is no such thing as personal space or privacy, where aggressive bullying is mistaken for charm, gunplay is confused with foreplay and women are reduced to prey. These characters are not people, or even action-movie exaggerations, but toothy zombies with short skirts, rippling biceps and itchy trigger fingers. Their dialogue is a blithe catalogue of lies. Their smiles are artificially whitened and their eyes have been carefully brightened by some diabolical software programme, but their hearts remain pitch black. In one scene, the two goons team up for an operation and end up assassinating about a dozen people between them. They saunter away from the bullet-strewn mayhem without a care in the world, cheerfully discussing their ongoing plans for romantic capture. The fantasy being conjured here is not love, or even sex, but death without consequences.

Witherspoon’s character works for a company that conducts market research on new products. As a kind of consumer advocate myself, be warned that This Means War is not fit for purpose and, in fact, contains such corrosive poison it might eat away at your soul.

Rampart

Anyone who followed the TV series The Shield will be familiar with the basic premise of Rampart, written by crime novelist James Elroy and directed by Oren Moverman, based on a real-life corruption scandal that shattered the reputation of the Los Angeles Police Department in the late 1990s when a squad of police officers assigned to investigate gangs became gangsters themselves. Moverman’s film doesn’t even attempt to tell that story (which took The Shield seven seasons to unravel), but employs the mood of distrust and disgrace as a backdrop for a sun-kissed noir, familiar yet jarringly strange.

Renegade Officer Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) is a racist, violent scofflaw in a crisp blue uniform who enforces what he calls a “military occupation” on the multicultural streets of East LA. His home life is equally idiosyncratic. Dave lives in bohemian comfort in two neighbouring suburban houses: one occupied by his estranged wife (Anne Heche) and the other by his ex-wife (Cynthia Nixon), who happens to be his wife’s sister, and their two daughters.

Cruising the streets in his shiny patrol car, smoking endless cigarettes and swigging occasionally from a bottle of whiskey, Dave imagines himself as a kind of Wild West sheriff, imposing harsh order on the chaos of the city, when in reality he is a rabid dog who has been let off the leash. When he is filmed by a passerby beating a Hispanic man half to death, Dave is hauled before the authorities (represented by cameos from Sigourney Weaver and Steve Buscemi) where he brazenly claims to have been acting in self-defence.

It’s not Dave’s first time to get into trouble and he knows the disciplinary procedures intimately, cleverly negotiating his way through the cracks until he glimpses an escape route. Constantly popping the pills he extorts from a local chemist, Dave holds hushed summits with a retired veteran cop (Ned Beatty), who tips him on ways to steal money. He starts an affair with a lawyer (Robin Wright), even though she has been sent to bring him to justice and stages a series of angry confrontations with a fellow policeman (Ice Cube) who believes he has gathered enough evidence to finally throw Dave off the force.

Ellroy and Moverman are more concerned with crafting a character than negotiating their way through a plot, sometimes to the detriment of the film. The story leaps from moment to moment, arranging Dave’s misdeeds in an untidy pile, primarily so we can get a sense of how power wielded by the unworthy can be so dangerous. Moverman directs the film as if he had shot bits and sequences without any conception of his final structure, content to trail Harrelson as he interacts, briefly, with a gathered cast of shadowy secondary players. None of them stick around long enough to make much of an impression, as they all fall victim to Moverman’s scattershot style. The pieces could be shuffled around in any order without making much difference to the storyline. A scene with Harrelson, Weaver and Buscemi is ruined by the director’s awkward camera movement, the tension evaporating as the viewer is distracted, while later, the introduction of Ice Cube’s righteous policeman’s policeman is sidelined into a short series of dead ends.

Despite the film’s flaws, Harrelson gives a performance of extraordinary power as the dirty cop at the centre of an unravelling system, the most compelling anti-hero cop since Denzel Washington in Training Day. He seems to thrive among the snatches and snippets of story, crafting a character whose worldview was formed by his father, a policeman in the LA of the 1950s, who taught him to shoot first and avoid questions later. With his glinting sunglasses and vulpine smile, Harrelson brings both a nervy intensity and cocky self-confidence to his unsentimental performance. Dave is an unrepentant monster and a dark-hearted villain but he is only as warped and corrupt as the society that allows him to prosper.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Stephen Daldry take on Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is an extremely laboured and incredibly contrived melodrama that follows a young boy’s struggle to make sense of his father’s death in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre. Insufferably saccharine and sanctimonious for its entire two and a half hour running time, Daldry’s literary adaptation aims high, which only gives it further to fall.

“The worst day” is how twelve year old Oskar Schell (newcomer Thomas Horn) repeatedly refers to 9/11, the day his jeweller father Thomas (Tom Hanks) died in one of the twin towers while there for a business meeting. As seen in generous flashbacks, Oskar and his father had a close relationship, with the older Schell concocting all manner of intellectual games for his young son who, it is hinted, has Asperger’s Syndrome. Socially awkward Oskar is bright and inquisitive but suffers from a mass of private fears and phobias, made even more pronounced by his father’s death. His mother (Sandra Bullock) is a busy office worker and played no part in bringing the youngster out of his shell, a distance that has grown since her husband’s death. On that fateful day, young Oskar had returned to the family’s empty apartment where he listened to six increasingly agitated messages from his father on the answering machine. He swapped the machine for a duplicate and used the tape as the centrepiece of a shrine he has constructed to his father in a cupboard, where he listens to his dead father’s voice over and over, looking to make sense of what happened. His mother knows nothing about it.

A year after the tragedy, Oskar finds a mysterious key in an envelope with the word “black” written on it. Seeing this as another clue in the games his father would play, Oskar takes it upon himself to find the lock that the key will open. He determines that “black” is a surname and decides to visit (on foot, as he is afraid of the subway) every one of the hundreds of people with that name in the New York phone book. This leads to a lengthy quest across each of the five boroughs as he visits a wide spread of likely stereotypes, looking for the message he is sure his father has left him. So beings a seemingly impossible task as Daldry’s trailing camera follows the youngster as he knocks on doors, talking to strangers, with only an elderly mute man known as The Renter (Max von Sydow) for company. The Renter – who has the words Yes and No tattooed on his hands - has a secret too, even if it is one that would not require an endless urban hike to uncover.

As he was written in Foer’s novel, the workings of Oskar’s mind were absorbed at the pace of the reader. On screen, there is no respite from his shrill, mile-a-minute voice-over, his incessant activity, his deadening precocity. If Oskar wasn’t insufferable enough, Daldry makes him carry a tambourine around the place as a kind of musical security blanket, which might well be comforting for the youngster, but set my teeth on edge. Horn is in almost every frame of the film, constantly throwing out references to his phobias and whimsical trivia. “If the sun were to explode, you wouldn’t even know about it for eight minutes”. Daldry’s film is one that would make you think eight minutes is not such a very long time to embrace oblivion.

Because of the enormity of the tragedy of 9/11, Daldry and his producers might expect their film to be greeted with hushed reverence and dabbed eyes. But a bad film is a bad film, regardless of what real-life events inspired it: had Oskar’s father died in a train crash, the boy’s grief would not have been any less. To extract meaningful drama out of mass tragedy requires skill, judgement and sensitivity, rather than co-opting the iconography of the event for gimmicky reconstructions, sentimental artifice and unmerited uplift.

The Muppets

After a gap of more than a decade, it’s once again time to play the music and light the lights with the return of The Muppets to the big screen. The fuzzy felt franchise, which topped the box office with 1979s Muppet Movie and 1981s Great Muppet Caper, went into steep decline following the untimely death of creator Jim Henson in 1989.

The loss of the Muppets driving force is not the only challenge facing this reboot. Frank Oz (who voiced Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear) is pursuing a directing career of his own nowadays and declined to take part, while the kids today, reared on a diet of indistinguishable digital cartoons, think a muppet is something else entirely. Wholesome, music-hall inspired knockabout puppet comedy isn’t fashionable nowadays. As Kermit the Frog might tell you, it’s not easy being green, anymore.

Director James Bobin’s approach seems to be to embrace the fact that times have changed. This is clear from the opening scenes, where we watch home-movie footage of a young Muppet named Walter (voiced by Peter Linz) and his human brother Gary (Jason Segel, who also co-wrote the script with Nicholas Stoller). Walter and Gary might be different species, one being fleshy and the other fleecy, but that obvious difference is never acknowledged. They are brothers, pure and simple, with the older Gary constantly looking out for his half-pint, hand-operated sibling.

When Walter discovers an old VHS tape of The Muppet Show, he realises how different he is and sees, for the first time, how his life could be. Obsessed with the show, and devoted to Kermit (voiced by Steve Whitmore), Walter tags along when Gary brings his sweet-natured fiancée Mary (Amy Adams) on a romantic trip to Los Angeles. There they visit the old Muppet Theatre, now a crumbling, cobwebbed museum and discover that the site is in danger of being torn down by Tex Richman (Chris Cooper), a sinister oil tycoon with no time for nostalgia. The race is on for Walter and Gary to reunite the original Muppets and host a fundraising television special to restore the theatre, and its furry players, to their rightful glory.

Kermit, now living in splendid isolation in a vast, empty mansion in Beverly Hills, is the first recruit and the gang pile into his Rolls Royce and hit the road. Their first stop is to rescue Fozzie Bear (Eric Jacobsen) from a Muppet tribute band with a residency in a dangerous dive bar. Animal is lifted from an anger management therapy clinic, Gonzo rediscovered in a plumbing supplies warehouse while Miss Piggy has become, what else, the editor of French Vogue. Reunited and their confidence restored, the Muppets enlist a host of cameo stars to join them on the show, while Cooper’s greedy capitalist (whose moustache-twirling so outraged the conservative Fox News network) waits in the wings.

None of this should work, really. The "save the theatre" plot is tired, the structure is rickety, the star cameoes are decidedly low-watt and the central puppet characters, owing to death and disputes, don’t sound like they should. What saves the film is a vivacious, witty tone, familiar to older fans of the original series and easily absorbed by a new generation. Segel and Adams bring an infectious sense of humour and a purposefully awkward charm to a knockabout series of song-and-dance routines that combine new songs (from Flight of the Conchords star Bret McKenzie) with the welcome reprise of a few old favourites, including a show-stopping version of Kermit’s Rainbow Connection.

The Descendants

Eight years on from Sideways, director Alexander Payne returns with The Descendants, a quiet story about a family tragedy that is also an uplifting character comedy. Payne has always been able to inject his identifiably flawed, ordinary Joe characters with unexpected darts of humour and heart but his unique knack of subtly shifting moods and maintaining a complicated tone has never been more skilfully applied. Nominated for a host of Oscars at this month’s ceremony, this is a wonderful film, beautifully acted and delicately presented, as funny as it is moving.

Adapted from Kaui Hart Hemmings’ 2007 novel by Payne and comedy writers Nat Faxon and Jim Rush, the story unfolds over the course of a week in Hawaii, where busy lawyer Matt King (George Clooney) is busy deciding the fate of a huge tract of land he inherited from his founding-father ancestors. As the head of a trust established to maintain the unspoiled paradise, now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Matt has to decide whether to sell the land to competing developers looking to build a resort and divide the fortune that accrues among a gaggle of distant cousins. A self-confessed workaholic, Matt hasn’t been much of a father to his two young daughters, precocious ten year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) and tear-away teenager Alex (Shailene Woodley). When his wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) falls off a speedboat and hits her head, lapsing into a coma, Matthew must try to find a way to keep his family together as they face up to an accidental tragedy.

Beset on all sides, Matthew’s problems are compounded when his daughter, who despises him for sending her to a boarding school, insists on bringing her maddeningly laid-back boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause) along wherever they go. At the same time, his gruff father-in-law (Robert Forster) directs his grief at his daughter’s bleak prognosis towards Matthew, blaming his frugality for her accident. As Matt prevaricates over his decision to sell the land, he meets Cousin Hugh (Beau Bridges), whose head-nodding affability hides a determination to cash in on the family fortune.

Everybody in the film might carry an aloha smile and wear a flowery short-sleeved shirt, but that doesn’t make them easy to classify as simple, backwater characters. “Don’t be fooled by appearances,” Clooney intones in a witty voice-over, “In Hawaii some of the most powerful people look like bums and stuntmen.” Emotionally and financially, there is a lot at stake in The Descendants, which gradually crystallizes into a story about how hard it is to close the gap with family and the land when some vital connection is broken. Threading his way with extraordinary facility through Matt’s legal, family and emotional troubles, Payne plays drama against comedy and light against shade, without ever forcing his hand, until the moment that Matt realises how all his problems have coiled together in a clump.

As he has done throughout his career, Payne balances the fallout from his dramatic revelations with brilliant darts of sharply chiselled humour. There are funny lines, and lots of them, but Payne’s real talents lie in his character’s silences, glances and gestures. Matt’s response to his daughter dropping a bombshell on his marriage is to struggle into a pair of ill-fitting sandals and flip-flop his way over to his neighbours house in a fog of sweat, with Payne’s camera following him every drenched step of the way. Never more lively or sympathetic, Clooney carries the film with a beautifully underplayed performance. Onscreen nearly the entire time, and adding a sometimes bitter voice-over, he never puts a foot wrong, except on purpose. Opposite him, and similarly essential to the film’s success, Woodley transforms convincingly from a callow girl unable to see beyond her own issues into her father’s stalwart defender, aiding and abetting him as he tries to figure everything out.

Payne’s unfussy approach gives a believably lived-in atmosphere to a place we might only know from postcards, contrasting the sumptuous landscape with images of traffic-filled highways and sprays of high-rise spreading up a bright green mountainside. The soulful soundtrack of Hawaiian songs from Hawaiian musicians is also essential to the mood, alternately joyful and subdued.

War Horse

Recently, cinema has been rediscovering its own history; something up to now it has always tried to do covertly. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist are inspired by the early days of movies, recreating key moments of the classics. Steven Spielberg’s latest film War Horse is based on the children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo (and the smash-hit stage adaptation) but it is also a tribute to the filmmakers that have inspired him; from Lewis Milestone’s WWI epic All Quiet on the Western Front to his friend Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory and from John Ford to David Lean. War Horse is an old fashioned film, and I’m not certain that I mean that as a compliment. It is pure Spielberg; emotional, uplifting, richly photographed and carefully composed but it is a film that might have been made at any time in the last hundred years. This old warhorse is, by title and design, a traditional standard.

The film opens with pastoral views of the Devonshire countryside and an equally cloying flourish from John William’s ever-present score, as a young foal is born in a field. Looking on is poor farmer’s son Albert (newcomer Jeremy Irvine), who falls in love with the horse at first sight. When his father Ted (Peter Mullan), stubbornly outbids his landlord Lyons (David Thewliss) at an auction to buy the horse, Albert gladly takes on the seemingly impossible task of turning the thoroughbred into a working farm horse. With the help of his long-suffering mother (Emily Watson), Albert fits his prize with a bridle and, in a tediously overplayed prologue, teaches the slim-ankled horse to plough a rain-soaked field.

Then 1914 rolls around and war is declared against Germany. The horse, now called Joey, is sold to a kindly cavalry captain (Tom Hiddleston) and shipped off to the green fields of France. From that point on, Spielberg tells the story of the war from the point of view of the horse, with vignettes from the recently-enlisted Albert’s experience in trying to track him down. Even less suited to battle than to pulling ploughs, Joey is soon deployed in an ultimately disastrous dawn raid on a German camp in France.

Captured by the enemy, Joey begins a journey across the frontlines of the war, where he encounters a spread of likely types, each with a different view of the conflict. There are two German brothers (David Kross and Leonard Carow) who use him to escape their fates as infantrymen, a French grandfather and his precocious granddaughter (Niels Arestrup and Celine Buckens) whose fruit farm is in the way of the advancing Germans and a brave Tommy (Toby Kebbell) and a German sharpshooter (Rainer Bock), who rescue the horse from a tangle of barbed wire.

There are times when Spielberg’s touch with emotions and show-stopping individual moments still pack a wallop. An early cavalry charge might recall a better one in Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, but it is still heart-stoppingly intense and heart-breakingly futile. Later, a moment when a group of horses react when a fallen horse is put down is simple and brilliant and one of the rare occasions when the film feels genuine and alive.

But as Joey gallops from one set of hastily-sketched characters to the next, War Horse loses clarity and focus. Because the film is aimed at a young audience, Spielberg cannot show us the real horrors of the First World War, even if they might struggle to sit through the entire 2 hour and 20 minute running time. At the same time, the film is too broadly played and dramatically unsophisticated for adults, who might find themselves questioning the wisdom of following the fortunes of an animal at war when millions of men, with wives, children, fathers and mothers, are dying in the trenches.

Heavy on homage and thick with carefully-crafted atmosphere, War Horse is an admirable attempt to find another way in which to tell an old story but Spielberg’s fuzzy storytelling and sentimental embellishments make for a gelding where there should have been a stallion.

The Iron Lady

Director Phyllida Lloyd reunites with her Mamma Mia! star Meryl Streep to recount the life and career of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady is part hagiography and part biopic but it’s all Meryl, all the time.

Streep’s uncannily accurate impersonation of Thatcher is the best thing about the film, which flits through the highlights of the politician’s controversial leadership like a bored reader ruffling through another political autobiography, looking for the glossy wedge of photos. Opening in the present day, we see an elderly, unsteady Baroness Thatcher, buy a pint of milk from a corner shop. She has dementia and returns home to subdued bedlam as her police protection squad and devoted daughter Carol (Olivia Colman, wearing an ill-advised prosthetic nose) wonder where she’d wandered off to.

Chastened and calmed with a G&T, Thatcher stumbles through the house, haunted by the imagined ghost of her late husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent), as they share their recollections of her past triumphs and disappointments, political and personal, in a stream of hit-and-miss flashbacks.

The first trip down memory lane brings us all the way back to the beginning, as grocer’s daughter Margaret Roberts (played by Alexandra Roach) is being interviewed as a prospective Conservative candidate for the Dartford constituency. Sat at the end of a table full of local political bigwigs, a nervous Margaret sticks her chin out and defies them to ignore her. One of the guests is businessman Denis (Harry Lloyd), who takes a shine to the rising politician and asks her out to a tea dance. Sometime later, after a failed election bid, he asks her to marry him and they soon form a double act: he works to support their two children while she pursues her career at the polls. Eventually elected to Parliament, one of the very few women in the house, Thatcher quickly makes strides in the Conservative party; becoming Education secretary in 1970.

From the time of her election to Prime Minister nine years later, to her eventual resignation in 1990, director Lloyd and her screenwriter Abi Morgan trace the contours of Thatcher’s political career in broad strokes, relying on news footage to fill in the detail. These montages of familiar footage – bolstered by a quick scene with a pair of edge-sanding political spin doctors – serve to show Thatcher as she was seen by the media, which is not necessarily how she was seen by the British people and undoubtedly not how she saw herself. When the going gets especially tough for her leadership in the early 1980s, with Britain’s manufacturing economy failing, deepening social division and deep-rooted problems such as long term unemployment and an unwieldy public service, Streep’s unquestionable ferocity is tempered by the sensation that there is a lot of this stuff to get through, so Lloyd is going to make it quick.

What saved Thatcher’s skin, in the first instance, was the Falklands War, which Lloyd cannot resist treating as an afternoon with Dr Strangelove with Streep glowering at one end of the table while her generals bluster. The rest of her premiership is treated in the same fashion; the miner’s strike and the Brixton riots dissolve into a blur of fuzzy newsreel clips followed by one of Streep’s trademark imperious stares. It’s a selected highlights reel, with the vicious situation in Northern Ireland at the time barely meriting mention, with the hunger strikes sidelined to a couple of lines of dialogue and a few waved black flags on television. No “out, out, out”.

By the time it comes for Thatcher to step off the political stage, her fall is almost a relief. Lloyd gives tantalising glimpses of the political chicanery that brought her down, as her key ally Geoffrey Howe (Anthony Head) gradually turns against her while the ambitious Michael Heseltine (an underused Richard E Grant) flicks his cowlick in the background. But the situation is too briefly explained for dramatic satisfaction and the film ends on a long, drawn-out note of treacly sentiment. Through all this, Streep’s Thatcher is alternately tough and single-minded, patronising or unspeakably rude but The Iron Lady only rarely allows her to be all those things at once. Nevertheless, it is the veteran actress’s performance that lifts the film out of the banal.

The Artist

I can’t think of a better way to start the New Year than by seeing Michel Hazanavicius’ charming homage to the early days of cinema, The Artist; an (almost) silent, black and white film that demonstrates such meticulous mastery of the form that it could be mistaken for a rediscovered lost masterpiece.

The film opens in 1927, when lantern-jawed matinee idol George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) is still the top draw at Kinograph Studios. With his slicked-back hair and carefully clipped pencil moustache, the smiling Valentin is, essentially, an avatar for Douglas Fairbanks, playing the dashing, undaunted hero of countless swashbuckling adventures. Adored by the public and cosseted by his profit-minded studio head (John Goodman), Valentin lives in a sprawling mansion, packed with tasteful objets d’art, where his icy wife (Penelope Ann Miller) aims daggers at him across the breakfast table.

The domestic chill doesn’t cramp Valentin’s style and together with his faithful manservant Clifton (James Cromwell) and his irresistibly charming Jack Russell dog, he swings and swaggers his way through the cardboard streets and houseplant jungles of the studio sound-stages, which Hazanavicus recreates in loving detail. When Valentin meets Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), a chorus line hoofer with big dreams, he contrives to give the ingénue her big break, never thinking that she will soon surpass him. The Artist tracks Peppy’s ascent from background extra to leading lady as Valentin, unwilling or unable to make the transition to sound, enters a spiralling decline. He is yesterday’s man, quickly forgotten in the rush to embrace the new technology and collapses into poverty, alcoholism and bitterness, his loyal dog his only remaining fan. But Peppy hasn’t forgotten the man who gave her a start, who helped craft her public image and who she subsequently fell in love with.

There were hundreds of stories like Valentin’s in the early days of Hollywood: stars that glimmered brightly only to burn themselves out. He might have Fairbanks’ natty moustache and a whiff of Rudolph Valentino’s smoulder but his fall from grace most closely matches that of John Gilbert. Remembered now, if at all, for his on-and-off screen love affair with Greta Garbo, Gilbert was billed as “The Great Lover”, but his dashing presence didn’t survive the leap to talkies, hamstrung by a shrill speaking voice. He died in obscurity in 1936, at the age of 38. The film’s greatest trick, and its enduring joy, is that this Hollywood story is itself told as a monochrome silent picture, a movie within a movie complete with arched eyebrows, snappy title cards, Vaseline-smeared close-ups and a constant musical accompaniment.

Borrowing heavily from A Star Is Born and Singin’ in the Rain, The Artist wears it’s pastiche of influences with a bubbling confidence, bursting with affection for an era of cinema that most audience members will have all but forgotten. The Artist has the starry-eyed soul of a silent film: the characters are irrepressibly debonair, the romance is beguiling, the comedy is fresh and effervescent and the unexpected touches of sadness, when they arrive, add an elegant, piquant savour. The performances are uniformly superb, with Dujardin and Bejo making for an indelible screen couple, bursting with charisma and charm from the moment they first meet right through to a spectacular dance routine that tops the story with an exuberant flourish. These are the first great silent film performances in almost 80 years.

Lovingly rendered and perfectly put together, like Scorsese’s Hugo, Hazanavicius’ film might reignite an interest in silent movies - which represents a quarter of the history of cinema - but it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t: The Artist is still a delight.

The Best & Worst of 2011

The approaching change in the calendar brings with it the irresistible urge to look back over the year and compile a list of the best, and worst, films of 2011. I have listed my favourites in no particular order but if I must pick one above all the others, it would be Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, as entrancing as it was baffling. As has become the barometer of these things, over the years, it is the only film I watched again in a cinema after seeing it at a press screening.

The Best Films of 2011

The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick tackles life, the universe and everything with his semi-autobiographical, epoch-spanning film about a boy growing up in 1950s Texas, by way of the Big Bang. Poetic, spectacular and only occasionally overblown, there was enough food for thought to serve whole banquets of leftovers in the weeks that followed. At least there was for me.

  

Animal Kingdom

David Michôd’s Australian crime drama was a masterful examination of a gangster family collapsing under the weight of their own corruption, with a superb performance from Jacki Weaver as the Machiavellian grandmother.

Take Shelter

Better than von Trier’s overblown Melancholia, writer-director Jeff Nichols and his intense star Michael Shannon tell a low-key, anxious story of a man plagued by visions of an impending apocalypse. It captures the unsettled global zeitgeist better than any other film this year.

Black Swan

Top notch performances from Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis anchored Darren Aronofsky’s wildly melodramatic study of a ballet dancer disintegrating while preparing for her role in a production of Swan Lake.

The Skin I Live In

On the surface, Pedro Almodóvar’s latest was a lurid melodrama about the extremes of body modification, but beneath the shocks and twists lies a masterfully told story about guilt, identity, obsession and redemption.

True Grit

The Coen Brothers’ fascination with the tropes of the American Western comes to a natural conclusion with this vastly entertaining horse opera, featuring a breakout performance from newcomer Hailee Steinfeld.

The Guard

John Michael McDonagh’s hilarious black comedy was the most invigorating Irish film of the year, with an indelible performance from Brendan Gleeson as a devil-may-care rural Guard.

 

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Tomas Alfredson, director of 2009s best film Let the Right One In, brought a new atmosphere of damp and decay to his adaptation of John Le Carre’s classic spy novel aided by a stellar cast, especially Gary Oldman as the meticulous George Smiley.

13 Assassins

More than a decade after Audition prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike finds the same masterful touch with the chanbara genre as he did with horror, and almost did with all the westerns, romantic comedies, noir thrillers and cannibal musicals he's filled the time with since. His remake of Kudo's 1963 film is an instant samurai classic; boldly told and beautifully visualised without the use of computer effects.

Senna

Asif Kapadia told the story of Brazilian Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna through a masterfully assembled flow of television footage and home movies. In a fine year for documentary (which included Project Nim, Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Knuckle) Senna was the stand-out. 

Very Nearly Great: Drive, Kill List, The Fighter, Poetry, Bridesmaids, Knuckle, Cold Fish, We Need To Talk About Kevin, I Saw The Devil.

The Worst Films of 2011

Matthew McConaughey had three films released in 2011 but none of them made it over here. So this year's Worst list was short three places, for about ten seconds. "We make a lot of shitty movies", a guy called Ron Meyer said in November. He's the president of Universal Studios. 7 of the 10 top-grossing films at the US box office in 2011 were sequels. The other three were remakes, of one stripe or another. Five of those seven sequels were actually three-quels, or more.

The Green Lantern

The mucoid green colour palette was the most appealing element of this disastrous superhero film.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides 3D

Once more unto the breech for Johnny Depp and his accountants in Disney’s hyperextended franchise installment which was as loud and obnoxious as it was boring.

Larry Crowne
Say it ain't so, Tom Hanks. This is one of those movies Ron Meyer was talking about.

Dream House

Jim Sheridan’s hopelessly muddled, haphazard and half-hearted haunted house horror wasted the talents of Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, and the time of anyone unlucky enough to watch it. Another one of Ron's.

Kaboom

Greg Araki’s sexual soap opera gets top marks for daring and no marks for everything else.

Cars 2

An unrequested sequel to their weakest film and Pixar’s first real turkey, Cars 2 was little more than a cynical exercise in merchandising.

Sucker Punch

Zach Snyder’s lingerie-scattered CGI fantasy was dumb, derivative and fatally creepy.

Transformers Dark of the Moon 3D

Empty vessels make the most noise and there are few in Hollywood quite as resoundingly hollow as Michael Bay. A deafening digital dirge, the extra dimension here isn’t depth of field but brain-melting stupidity. And Shia LaBeouf is fast becoming the new Matthew McConaughey.

The Three Musketeers 3D

More 3D slops with this foolish fantasy that gives Dumas’ classic swashbucker an unnecessary contemporary spit-and-polish.

Your Highness

David Gordon Green’s comic slacker fantasia had a decent cast and a promising idea but floundered on a limp screenplay which didn’t include any funny jokes. A little Danny McBride goes a long way.

I spent most of the year reading Patrick O'Brian's outstanding 20-volume Master & Commander series, which didn't leave a lot of time for movie books - but the most entertaining cinema read of the year was Brian Kellow's biography of film critic Pauline Kael, A Life In The Dark; which spurred me into re-reading some of Kael's collected criticism, among them Going Steady, I Lost It At The Movies and Raising Kane and other essays. All superb (Raising Kane in particular contains a thrilling idea on almost every page) but more than 20 years after I first picked up one of her collections, I find I still don't agree with her half the time.

Hugo

Growing up in New York’s Queens district in the late 1940s, Martin Scorsese was a sickly child, often bedridden by asthma. He couldn’t play in the streets, so his parents began to bring him to the local cinemas, where he immersed himself in the fantastical worlds created by Howard Hawks and Michael Powell; brightly-lit places where nobody wheezed.

Now, decades later, Scorsese makes his first children’s film with Hugo, an adaptation of Brian Selznick’s best-selling illustrated book The Invention Of Hugo Cabret; the story of a lonely child saved from abandonment by the magic of movies. It is a film that the young Scorsese would have loved, one that captures the enduring draw of cinema, old and new, in a fantasy about dreams, adventures, family and inventions.

Using the latest 3D technology for the first time, Scorsese’s Hugo opens with a panoramic sweep of a glittering Paris that tracks all the way into the tiny crevices in the walls of a train station where Hugo (Asa Butterfield) lives among the steaming pipes. An orphan since the death of his clockmaker father (Jude Law in cameo), Hugo lives in the spaces between the walls of the station, surviving alone on whatever he can scavenge as he keeps all the station clocks wound and in good order while dodging the Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), a martinet in knee-high boots and a kepi. 

Hugo’s only remaining connection to his father is a mysterious metal automaton, a moving sculpture of a man with a pen, that he is trying to repair using the scattered cogs and wheels he finds among the machinery. That obsessive quest for gears leads Hugo to a confrontation with the bitter old man (Ben Kingsley) who runs a toy shop in a quiet corner of the station, who confiscates the boy’s treasured notebook and makes him work in order to return it. The old man also has a granddaughter of about Hugo’s age named Isabelle (Chloe Moretz) whose free-spirited quest for adventure has been encouraged by the books she borrows from the crammed bookshop run by M. Labisse (Christopher Lee at his most crepuscular). When Isabelle’s derring-do leads Hugo to discover an important component for his automaton, the two adventurers join forces to uncover a long-forgotten secret that throws new light on who her grandfather really is, or once was, following a course that takes them back to George Méliés and the birth of cinema itself.

Scorsese’s 3D experiment is visually flawless but the new technology brings with it a requirement to expand the frame with a series of overly frantic chases as Baron Cohen and his massive dog pursue Hugo through the train station, tripping over an entire company of underutilised British actors including Richard Griffiths, Frances De La Tour and Emily Mortimer. As adapted by John Logan (who scripted Scorsese’s The Aviator) Hugo’s story elements fit together like the well-oiled machinery that so commands the boy’s imagination. The performances, however, are as broad and inconsistent as those of the silent cinema that Scorsese adores, with the young duo appearing, at times, to be over-directed to the point where their natural liveliness is quelled to allow the camera sweep around them.

Dream House

Director Jim Sheridan finds himself deep in arrears with Dream House, a daft and derivative haunted house horror that falls some way short of its top-of-the-market valuation.

As the story opens, literary editor Will Atenton (Daniel Craig) has resigned from his job at a New York publishing house to spend more time with his family; wife Libby (Rachel Weisz) and their two young daughters, Trish and Deedee (sisters Taylor and Claire Astin Geare). Will has moved the family to a big house with a big lawn somewhere deep in the suburbs, where he is hoping the change of air and newfound quiet will help him complete his first novel, now just a tangle of scribbled false starts. With Libby giving the house a lick of paint and the two children busy exploring, everything is going well until Will has a run in with their scowling next-door neighbour Jack (Marton Csokas), divorced from Ann (Naomi Watts) and fighting for custody for their daughter Chloe (Rachel Fox).

Unsettled, Will returns to the house only to find his daughters have started seeing a sinister hooded figure in the snowbound woods and Libby has discovered eerie echoes of the house’s former inhabitants; pencil marks on a door jamb recording the children’s heights and an abandoned playroom, filled with tattered toys. The first sign of real trouble comes when Will, woken from sleep, has to chase a gang of ludicrously over-enunciated punk teenagers from his basement where they were holding a candlelit vigil for the previous inhabitants, a slaughtered family whose ghosts are said to haunt his home. This is news to Will, of course, but not to anyone who has seen The Shining, or any of the dozens of films that followed in Kubrick’s wake.

To say any more would spoil the remaining hour of Dream House, although if you have seen the two-minute trailer, the studio’s marketing people have already done that for you. The second half of the film focuses tightly on Craig’s increasingly craggy face as he starts the not-so difficult process of putting together the puzzle that the house presents, while coming to terms with a severe case of buyer’s remorse. The local police are no help but Will finds a local doctor with a scratchy surveillance tape who, between pauses and rewinds, carefully spells out Will’s part in the mystery and with it, the rest of the story.

From that mid-way point, Dream House implodes into a long parade of misjudged scenes, over-emphatic exposition, clumsy set-pieces and tacked-on special-effects sequences as the players grind out a denouement that we have already been told. The film is a mess but the real mystery is not what secrets the house might hold but why a pedigree cast and a supremely talented director saw any merit in David Loucka’s limply convoluted, unambitious screenplay. Craig does what he can to make his collection of tics and trembles into a convincing character but is continuously wrong-footed by the tissue-thin supporting characters. Weisz’s role as the dutiful wife is anaemically underwritten while Watts and Csokas struggle with momentary parts that require them to fix an expression – baffled blankness or stink-eyed menace, respectively – and stick to it.

Sheridan, a gifted storyteller once he has a story worth telling, proves a poor match for this sort of tepid genre material. Reportedly unhappy with the results and not having control over the final cut of the finished film, the director threatened to take his name off the project unless he was allowed extensive reshoots. The extra effort wasn’t worth it, with Sheridan unable to find any traction with the script’s mishmash of hackneyed inspirations and crucially, never generating anything resembling a moment of genuine dread or suspense. The film aimlessly switches between timelines and tones as the story collapses into splinters. In film, as in architecture, a lasting construction requires deep foundations.

Moneyball

I know nothing at all about baseball and even less about statistics but I was enthralled by Bennett Miller’s stirring adaptation of Michael Lewis’ 2003 non-fiction book Moneyball; a film about how America’s national sport was transformed not by a talented new player or an inspirational manager but by a guy with a spreadsheet.

Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, a retired baseball player who, after failing to fulfil his promise on the field, became the general manager of the impoverished Oakland Athletics, who are struggling in the Major League. Beane’s already desperate situation becomes even more hopeless when, just before the start of the 2002 season, the owner of the club sells three of his star players. After a fruitless search for replacements, hampered by a dwindling salary budget, Beane meets and is impressed by a pudgy Yale economics graduate named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) who proposes a new formula for sporting success.

With his thick glasses and sheen of sweat, even when sat at his computer, Brand is nobody’s idea of an athlete but he has developed a statistical analysis that values players based on their core competencies. In short, Brand argues, an ordinary player who can be relied on to do what is required a certain percentage of the time is worth more than a naturally skilful player who will do something extraordinary once in a while. Brand hasn’t reached his conclusions by watching a lot of baseball; he absorbs reams of statistics that tell him what combination of players will produce the most runs and stop the other team from scoring. The Corinthian spirit of sport doesn’t enter into the equation; success is all about the data. It sounds simple, but Brand’s theories are revolutionary in a sport that still clings to heart-warming notions of soul and tradition. Burrowing into the depths of his computer, Brand emerges with a ragtag squad of seemingly washed-up players that can fit in the new system and, more importantly, the team can afford to buy. Beane has tried it the old way and it hasn’t worked. He’s ready to try anything.

Despite vehement objections from his backroom staff, Beane hires the players the computer has selected, including a pitcher with an unorthodox throw Chad Bradford (Casey Bond) and Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), whose injuries have left him with no feeling in his left arm. Beane’s taciturn team manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is baffled into near silence but sure enough, the team starts to win. And then they can’t stop winning.

Director Bennett Miller and his screenwriters Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian cut through the complications of the sport itself, and Brand’s mathematical formulas, to tell a sharp, simple story about a mismatched pair of underdogs, the gung-ho jock and the deadpan boffin, who beat an unfair game. Beane is the former baseball prodigy still frustrated by never quite making it as a star while Brand is the smartest kid in the room, whose genius with numbers goes unappreciated. The chemistry between this decidedly odd couple carries the film as they struggle to form a working language somewhere between macho maxims and mind-bending mathematics. It’s a fine comedy double act, perfectly pitched. As the season is played out in a combination of archive television footage and convincing reconstructions, we learn more about Pitt’s Beane. A maverick loner, divorced from his wife (Robin Wright) and seemingly friendless, Miller’s attempts to give Beane a fully rounded character fall prey to sentimentalism at times but even a couple of dewy-eyed songs from his guitar-strumming daughter (Kerris Dorsey), can’t dent Pitt’s fine performance.

Like last year’s The Social Network, also written by Sorkin, Moneyball turns an unlikely subject into something fascinating; an All-American fable about the value of innovation, trusting in instinct and beating the odds.

Wuthering Heights

An audacious but ultimately inert attempt to revitalise Emily Brontë’s much-adapted 1847 Gothic novel Wuthering Heights for a new generation, Andrea Arnold’s gritty film shares strands of DNA with Cary Fukunaga’s recent Jane Eyre in framing a historical fiction in an ultra-realistic physical and emotional landscape.

Forget notions of Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon striding across a sound-stage moor. This is not your grandfather’s Wuthering Heights. Opening with images of a rain-soaked, wind-swept Yorkshire, Arnold takes us inside the drab eponymous farmhouse where young teenager Cathy Earnshaw (played first by newcomer Shannon Beer and later by Kaya Scodelario) lives with her stern father (Paul Hinton) and cruel older brother Hindley (Lee Shaw). One night, the father returns from town with a stranger, a young black escaped slave who he takes into the house as an act of charity. Although her first reaction is to spit on the bedraggled young man, Cathy and Heathcliff (Solomon Glave, and later, newcomer James Howson) soon become friends. 

She teaches him to speak English, sitting patiently with him as he struggles to speak or wandering the muddy hills, watching the birds. Heathcliff is treated as a member of the family, but when Mr Earnshaw dies and Hindley inherits the farm, the youngster is reduced to the level of a servant and sent to live in an outhouse, where a hatred for the people who once praised themselves for their good work festers. Heathcliff continues to feel close to Cathy, a free-spirited, bright girl, even when she is encouraged to spend time with their wealthy neighbours the Lintons, forming a bond with their eldest son that might result in a beneficial marriage. Years later, the connection that formed between the young teenagers will return to damage both of them in tragic ways.

Working from a script by Olivia Hetreed (who previously adapted Tracy Chevalier's Girl With A Pearl Earring), Arnold deserves respect for radically reinterpreting a classic novel, coming at the familiar story from a new perspective of gender, race and class division. Taking her lead from Brontë’s description of Heathcliff as “a dark-skinned gypsy”, the director has, for the first time, cast a black actor as the anti-hero, a novel touch that quickly becomes irrelevant; Glave and later, Howson, give performances that are far deeper than the colour of their skin. But the same cannot be said for the rest of the cast who, typically for Arnold, are made up of a combination of professional and non-professional actors. 

The film’s greatest weakness lies in the fact that the story does not survive the mid-way switch between younger and older characters, the later players being unable to match the emotional honesty of the first half, despite the story’s intricate complications being laid out in an unerringly straight line. There is little dialogue, with the characters speaking in an odd blend of archaic and modern language, a distracting touch that sits uneasily with the director’s carefully crafted naturalism and cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s tactile and immediate images. Nimbly photographed in a free-form hand-held style, interspersed with tightly framed images of decomposing nature, dead animals and rotting fruit, Wuthering Heights is a chilly, curiously lifeless film; over-considered, over-extended and ultimately, underwhelming.

Sensation

Writer and director Tom Hall’s droll and daring Irish sex comedy Sensation is the coming of age story of a timid Limerick farmer who meets a New Zealand call girl, falls in love for the first time and learns something about how the world works.

Opening with a scene where lonely, mid-twenties Donal (Domhnall Gleeson) masturbates in a field while his flock of sheep look on, bemused, Hall sets a confidently complicated tone pitched somewhere between comedy and tragedy. Returning to the farmhouse, Donal finds his widowed father dead on the stair-lift and, having buried the old man with due reverence, immediately sets about spending his inheritance on sex. Using the internet handle "sweetdick", virginal Donal books an appointment with Courtney (Luanne Gordon), a call girl in the city, who arrives on a house-call to the farm and stays the night. Smitten and sated, Donal makes breakfast the next morning as Courtney explains that she is in fact Kim, a wandering Kiwi who fell into sex work during her time in London and now works independently from an apartment in Limerick city.

Soon, Donal and Kim's relationship has moved from strictly service-client into something more enduring, and endearing. Too long living under the strict gaze of his father, whose notions of sexual relationships are medieval at best, Donal is ready to experience something of life. Flush with cash, he sees the potential when Kim explains her long-held ambition to open her own escort service. The two join forces. He sells his flock of sheep and makes plans with the local property developer Liam (Owen Roe) to unload the land while Kim goes about recruiting some young women. With Kim providing the know-how and Donal putting up the money, they rent an apartment, launch a website and wait for the customers to arrive. Donal’s only friend, the otherwise idle Karl (newcomer Patrick Ryan) volunteers to work the door, providing both the apartment and Donal with the illusion of security.
 

Operating as discreetly as is possible in a small community, they start receiving clients and making money but emotions soon get in the way. Having gained some gumption by his exposure to the worldly Kim, Donal is transformed into a better groomed, sharper dressed and more confident young man, no longer tongue-tied around pretty shop-assistant Melanie (Kelly Campbell) and able to stand up to Roe’s sleazy huckster as he tries to hustle him into a bad deal for the farm. But Donal’s late-arriving loss of innocence doesn’t include any instruction on how to deal with relationships and as quickly as they came together, Donal and Kim find themselves drifting apart.

“This isn’t Pretty Woman”, Kim says in a heated moment, and she’s right. Sensation isn’t a glamorised story of outlaw entrepreneurship or a how-to-guide for budding sex-workers, but rather a faintly desperate story of rural isolation and social unease, where the overriding emotion is repression and shame. What prevents the straightforward story from slipping into simplicity interesting are the superb performances from the entire cast, with Gleeson proving he can carry a movie on his own and Gordon providing a convincing mix of brittleness and sensitivity. Credibly played and intelligently scripted, Sensation is a curious film (not least because Irish cinema rarely addresses sex as a theme), but one that will reward a enquiring audience.

The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of The Unicorn

The life’s work of Belgian illustrator Georges Remi (whose nom de plume was Hergé), the Tintin comic series – originally published in French between 1929 and 1976 – has evolved in the intervening decades into a multi-billion euro business that includes dozens of international translations and more than 200 million sales, animated television series and films, two live action movies and even a dedicated museum in a Brussels suburb. A mysteriously youthful journalist with an even more inexplicable tuft of ginger hair, together with his devoted dog Snowy, Tintin resolutely follows his nose for a story as it takes him around the world, solving mysteries, exposing villains and engaging in swashbuckling adventures.

Now, thirty years after he first secured the film rights, Steven Spielberg has joined forces with fellow producer and director Peter Jackson to add a new chapter to Tintin’s tales, grafting state of the art 3D performance-capture technologies onto a characteristically fast-paced, globe-trotting treasure hunt, The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of The Unicorn. After a sweetly animated opening credits sequence, which outlines the story to follow in abstract vignettes, we first meet baby-faced Tintin (Jamie Bell) as he is getting his caricature painted in a Brussels street market. As he pockets the artist’s familiar line-drawing, Tintin’s attention is drawn to a complex model of a 17^th century sailing ship called The Unicorn. Having bought the model for a couple of pounds, Tintin is buttonholed by the sinister Sakharine (Daniel Craig), who offers to buy the ship from him, at any price. Despite being warned of dire consequences if the model is not restored to the original owners, Tintin declines to sell it on and is quickly drawn into an intrigue involving a vast treasure lost at sea centuries before, when a certain Captain Haddock’s ship was sacked by the dread pirate Red Rackham (also played by Craig).

With the only clue to the origins of the treasure stolen by a pick-pocket, who is in turn pursued by bumbling detectives Thompson & Thompson (Simon Pegg & Nick Frost), Tintin is kidnapped by Sakharine’s goons and thrown in the hold of a steam ship, hijacked from the grizzled Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), the only surviving descendant of the doubloon-losing original. Teaming up with the whiskey-soaked skipper, Tintin undertakes a daring mission to solve the mystery, taking in shipwrecks, plane-crashes, swashbuckling duels and dangerous feats of derring-do.

Spielberg’s first animated feature film is, essentially, a throwback to his original Indiana Jones trilogy, a slapdash, rip-roaring adventure that balances the stirring romance of old-fashioned serial adventures with the limitless toy-box of slick modern computer-generated imagery. In a succession of dazzling set-pieces, the director takes full advantage of the total freedom offered by the computerised medium but the script from British talents Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, values complicated action and a breakneck pace above the solid basics of character, wit and progress. The big set-pieces are exquisitely handled but the human details are found wanting. Tintin, in short, remains a rather dull fellow (even for a Belgian), dependant on the supporting cast of colourful caricatures and the curiously weightless stunt sequences to give him life.

Even with his bank of computers and an army of highly-skilled technicians (the end credits run a full eight minutes) Spielberg doesn’t quite match what Hergé managed with pen and ink. The first in a proposed trilogy, a cliff hanger ending sets up the next installment, to be directed by Jackson.