His & Hers

Ken Wardrop’s first feature length documentary His & Hers opens with an Irish proverb: “A man loves his girlfriend the most, his wife the best, but his mother the longest.” While this cute aphorism might suggest that the subsequent film will focus on the loving men, the director turns the line on its head and concentrates on the women of his native midlands region and their life-long relationships with the men in their lives. Portarlington-born Wardrop, whose talent as a filmmaker has been obvious since the first short films he made with his producing partner Andrew Freedman, comes to cinematic maturity with this work, as vibrant and life-affirming a film as we are likely to see all year.

The film is deceptively easy to summarise. 70 women, from babes-in-arms to elderly grandmothers, discuss the men in their lives; fathers, boyfriends, husbands, sons and grandsons. Opening with a silent shot of an infant being laid on a blanket, and proceeding sequentially in ascending order of age, the women sit in front of Wardrop’s immobile camera and talk, openly and honestly, about their experiences with the opposite sex. The women remain anonymous and unnamed and the stories they tell are stripped of context, other than what emerges in conversation. But even as they share social and geographical backgrounds, these women are discrete and individual. They might all be talking about the same thing, but the glory in the film is the infinite variety in the way in which the stories are related.

They are sometimes exasperated, sometimes funny and sometimes sweet. As the film progresses and the women grow older, a note of poignancy creeps in, enhanced by the sensitive photography from Michael Lavelle and Kate McCullough and Wardrop’s measured editing, which allows each vignette flow seamlessly into the next without ever being distractingly random. The images are beautifully underlined by an unobtrusive, melodic score from composer Denis Clohessy. The stories are connected by the form the film takes, entering the room through doors or staircases, sat on couches or easy chairs, the few exterior shots framed by views from kitchen windows.

His & Hers is not a discussion, or at least not formally. There is no interviewer apparent on the other side of the camera, so there is no further exploration. The film is what it is, a statement, a collection of memories and moments, dreams and desires. Wardrop makes a feature of the restrictiveness of his central conceit, opening up a world of honest emotion from what, in another’s hands, might be nothing more than a series of fireside homilies.

We hear about first loves and marriages, the births of children and the trials of raising noisy, messy sons. There are monologues about the intimacies of marriage, sharing hot water bottles, watching television, domestic routines and quotidian details. The key to happiness, one woman tells us, is separate laundry. There is pride, contentment and, at times, sad regret. The most touching moment arrives with a woman telling the story of how her husband passed away in her arms after a slow dance at a relative’s wedding. You’d need a heart of stone not to be moved by it.

Anyone who spends time in the picture house will grow fat and listless on a diet of ersatz emotion. When we are confronted with the real thing, it can be overwhelming but it is invigorating too. This is a special, beguiling film; human and sensitive, delicate and kind. You will walk from the cinema with a smile on your face, and call your mother.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

If Nicholas Cage is a little unhinged in Bad Lieutenant, Jake Gyllenhaal is literally climbing the walls as the acrobatic Prince of Persia in The Sands of Time, a breakneck adventure based on the 1990s video game.

Those of you prepared to read beyond the words “based on a video game” won’t be surprised to discover that Prince of Persia isn’t much of a film. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, is hoping to establish a new franchise in the vein of his multi-billion dollar Pirate of the Caribbean behemoth, and so fashions an old-fashioned quest from the same popcorn elements; swashbuckling action, bickering lovers, glittering special effects, exotic locations and a dash of the supernatural. It doesn't work.

Gyllenhaal, all hair extensions and enviable abdominals, plays the dashing hero Dastan, a street urchin adopted by the 6th Century Persian King Sharaman (Ronald Pickup) and brought to live in his glittering palace. Raised alongside the King’s two princes, firebrand Tus (Richard Coyle) and the more level-headed Garsiv (Toby Kebbell), Dastan spends most of his time climbing walls and jumping over buildings in an ancient approximation of the modern sport of free-running.

When the King’s brother Nizam (Ben Kingsley) enlists the princes to lead an army against the city of Alamut, Dastan is determined to prove himself a brave hero and so hares off over the battlements in his inimitable style. In a not-so-subtle Iraq allegory, the city is suspected of hiding weapons of mass destruction but after a thorough search, the armaments cannot be found. Instead, Dastan discovers a magical dagger called The Sands of Time, which, at the press of a ruby button, shifts time backwards by a couple of seconds.

It’s not the kind of implement that will allow you to breakfast with cavemen but the ornamental blade is handy, if like Dastan, you need to sidestep a swooping scimitar, dodge a rain of arrows or what have you. When the king is assassinated with a cloak of fire and Dastan is wrongly accused of the murder, he goes on the run to clear his name. Rather, he goes on the hop, skip and jump. Along for the ride is the vaguely supernatural Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton), a kind of vestal virgin without the virgin who is charged with protecting the sacred, time-reversing knife. Together they cross the desert, encountering an ostrich-racing Sheik (Alfred Molina), a gang of milky-eyed Hashhashin killers and sundry other ornately-costumed threats.

In an effort to pad out the inherent scrawniness of a script built around a button-bashing game, the writers have thrown together a handful of one-dimensional character types to enact a one-directional quest, scattered with a series of sword-and-sandal clichés. Taken together, this hodgepodge procession of energetic incidents and special effects sequences is supposed to add up to a story, but it never does. Remove the state of the art visual effects and Prince of Persia would be indistinguishable from the 1924 Douglas Fairbanks version of The Thief of Baghdad, albeit without the same measure of charm or daring spectacle.

The direction, from Harry Potter’s Mike Newell, favours exposition over characterisation and feels leaden and perfunctory. The performances are adequate, but no better than that. Gyllenhaal has the physical presence but none of the charisma required. Artherton does better as the spunky princess, but has almost nothing to play against until Molina’s ostrich arrives. Prince of Persia has its moments but they are fleeting, eye-pleasing diversions in a running time that nudges against two hours and feels decidedly longer.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Abel Ferrara’s bleak 1992 cult classic Bad Lieutenant is remade by Werner Herzog under the clumsy title Port of Call: New Orleans, but where the original film was a punishingly grim descent into hell for star Harvey Keitel, this version has Nicholas Cage as the punishingly entertaining Terrence McDonagh, a New Orleans detective addicted to narcotics and gambling.

As the film opens, McDonagh and his partner (played by Val Kilmer) rescue a convict from a jail cell about to be inundated by the rising waters of Hurricane Katrina. Shortly afterwards, the detective, who is covering the pain of a back injury with copious amounts of illegal narcotics, is asked to investigate the bloody murder of a Senegalese family by a gang of drug-dealers, led by the flamboyant Big Fate (Alvin Xzibit Joiner). While he maintains the pretence of his day job, McDonagh is supplying his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes) with cocaine, is trying to reconcile his alcoholic father (Tom Bower) with his equally drunk wife (Jennifer Coolidge) and avoiding the increasingly frantic demands of his bookie (Brad Dourif), to whom he owes a lot of money. McDonagh’s transgressions are not limited to inhaling narcotics. He steals whatever he can, shakes down Frankie’s customers for drugs, hallucinates slithering iguanas and the break-dancing souls of the recently deceased and, finally, steps over to the wrong side of the law in making a deal with the smooth Big Fate.

Cage hasn’t been this much fun to watch since the early days of his career, in films like Vampire’s Kiss and Raising Arizona. He is truly off the rails in Bad Lieutenant, bursting with nervous energy, his eyes popping wide, limbs constantly in motion. It helps, of course, that his character really is out of his mind. Herzog directs the performance with consummate facility, allowing his star to run wild and collating the results into a jittery black comedy thriller.

Although Cage maintains his mania throughout, the imbalance his histrionics brings about leads to significant problems in the second half of the film. Having spent considerable time establishing McDonagh’s problems, Herzog resolves them all in one hyper-realistic scene, a rush of conclusions played out with a blankly theatrical flourish. It’s as if the cop’s mounting problems don’t matter, or if they do, they don’t matter to Herzog. The story, from William Finkelstein, is far less important than the performances. No-one else in the cast can match Cage, but it doesn’t matter. His wild, untrammelled act turns the film into a one-man show. Despite these narrative bumps, or perhaps because of them, this version of Bad Lieutenant is a dark and devious delight, an anarchist film noir that seems, at times, almost as unhinged as its protagonist.

Hilary Swank & The Reaping

[My buddy John McKenna made the point that all the interviews I've posted on-line to date have been with male actors or directors. This 2007 interview with Hilary Swank, albeit for the tepid horror film The Reaping, is intended as a first step towards correcting that imbalance.]

As one of the primary repositories of supernatural stories in our culture, it’s not surprising that the Bible has so often provided filmmakers with their inspiration, particularly when the ancient scribes arranged the juiciest bits in neat sequences, like the mortal sins in Se7en, the splashy gore of Stigmata or the ten plagues of Egypt, a gruesome succession of afflictions which form the basis of the spooky new Hilary Swank psychological thriller The Reaping.

It’s been raining heavily for days, leading to a suitably biblical flood coursing through the narrow streets of Barcelona. Although I managed to jump the deeper puddles on my way to meet with Swank, the cuffs of my pants are dripping into my shoes as I sit waiting for her to join me. No such discomfort for the actress, who wanders in wearing a floor-length grey silk gown, red carpet style, her brown hair lifted off her angular face and a discreet but very sparkly diamond in each ear. In the movie Swank plays Katherine Winter, a former Christian missionary who lost her faith after her family was killed and has since devoted herself to studying and rationally disproving religious phenomena. When she is called upon to investigate strange events in a small Southern town called Haven, where the river has turned to blood and there’s been a rain of frogs, she gets caught up in a mystery that causes her to question again her lost faith, and challenges her notions of science. The first question, the most obvious one, is she religious herself? “That is the most obvious question, isn’t it, but I have to say I’m more of a spiritual person than someone who is part of any church, you know. I was never baptised or anything like that but I do believe in a higher power.”

“I wanted to do this film because I had never read anything like it before. The script was a real page tuner, and the ending caught me by surprise, which doesn’t happen that often. When it came to sitting down with the director, Steven Hopkins, he had me read Exodus, the part of the Bible that deal with the ten plagues of Egypt because that was our inspiration, but I have never read the whole thing. I also read some of the books that are out there about those people whose job it is to travel the world and perform a scientific analysis of myths and miracles and strange phenomena. Almost every miraculous event out there has a rational explanation, so a lot of the time it’s a question of being able to make a leap of faith, to accept that there can be a rational and irrational answer. We know how the sun shines but that doesn’t make it any less amazing”.

In one of the film’s best moments, Swank’s character gives a rational and reasonable scientific explanation for each of the ten plagues and how the effects of one led on to another. “When I read that part of the script, I thought it was a really interesting monologue that gave the scientific side of a historical story and an insight into how Katherine’s mind works; how she rationalises the events around her and forms logical connections”. I mention to her that right now there’s a case of an Italian nun who believes that writing the name of the late Pope John Paul II on a scrap of paper cured her of Parkinson’s Disease. “I haven’t heard about that but I am certain that for all the people who are making the case for divine intervention, there are people working to disprove it. That’s how it goes. Before we did the movie, I read a lot of copies of a magazine called The Sceptical Enquirer, which opened my eyes to these strange and weird things in the world. I’m fascinated by those things that are outside our normal experiences and I am definitely more of a believer than a sceptic and doing this movie didn’t change my views on that. If I sit and think about where I come from, and where I am now, I’d have to believe in miracles”. She laughs but she isn’t joking.

Swank was raised in a trailer park on the outskirts of a small rural town in Washington state, a tough upbringing that became even more difficult after her parents divorce. Although she showed promise as a gymnast, she was bitten by the acting bug early. “I knew I wanted to be since I was nine years old. I had a teacher who had us all write and perform a little skit before the class and something came alive inside of me. I loved it and even though I was very young and didn’t exactly come from a place where people could have those kind of ambitions, I knew I had found my calling, you know, the thing you are supposed to do in life”.

Years of junior theatre led to Swank and her mother moving to Los Angeles in the early 1990s, where they lived in their car until they could afford the rent on an apartment. Small roles in sit-coms and bit parts in movies led to a couple of months on Beverly Hills 90210. At the end of the season, her contract wasn’t renewed but her newfound confidence led to her securing what would become a breakout role as the gender-swapping Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry and her first Oscar. Another followed in 2004 when she played waitress turned boxer Maggie in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby. Swank was just 30 years of age. “When I was a teenage actor, I’d see those people who won Oscars on TV and think, wow, that will change their lives, but that isn’t the reality. Although I do get offered more projects and have more opportunities as an actor, for which I am grateful, my life is more or less the same. I go home at night, like everybody else and I have the same ups and downs, the same challenges and the same obstacles I had before. People also have this impression that because of success, I don’t have to work as hard anymore, which is just crazy. There is so much more I want to learn, and working with great actors and directors gives me that opportunity”.

With a film like The Reaping, a flashy, spooky horror movie from Joel Silver’s Dark Castle franchise, Swank is certainly looking for new horizons. I ask her if she found if difficult to adapt to a very different kind of filmmaking, one that relies on special effects and computer generated imagery to support the storytelling. “Well, I didn’t have a lot of experience with special effects and really nothing like this, so I was relieved when I got on set and found that Steven had a lot of practical elements there for us to work off of. We didn’t use all that much blue-screen, add-it-later stuff. We shot everything on location in Baton Rouge in Louisiana and on the day there would be a way to make the effect more real for us as actors. Like in the scene with the locusts, where you see hundreds of thousands of these locusts invading the house, we had maybe two thousand there on the day. They were big suckers too, with a lot of legs. If it’s true that acting has a lot to do with re-acting, you know, that was not a problem. In that scene, when I get covered in locusts and get up and start thrashing about, there weren’t any insects on me, and I’ve never personally been covered in bugs, so I had to imagine it”. She throws her arms up in the air, thrashes her head around and lets out a mock scream. “I call it ‘sandbox acting’ because it’s like a child using its imagination at play time. It’s obviously ridiculous and if you were standing around watching, you’d think I had lost my mind, but you have to commit to it and just do it”.

Swank spent a couple of months at the end of last year in Dublin filming with Richard La Gravense on the adaptation of Celia Ahearn’s blockbuster novel PS I Love You. Swank claps her hands together and smiles a very big smile when I ask her about her experiences on the movie, which is set for release in the autumn. “Oh, I loved every minute of it, she sighs . “I was drawn to it in the first place because it is a beautiful, sweet romantic comedy and, like The Reaping, that’s different to any movie I had done before. But it gave me the chance to work with a great cast, like Gerry Butler, who is just gorgeous, Kathy Bates who plays my mom and Lisa Kurdow is my best friend. Isn’t that great? It’s one of those movies, the kind of movies I love, where you just laugh through the tears, you know?” I nod encouragingly but maybe a little unconvincingly. “Well, you probably don’t know, but it reminded me of what is really important in life, to hold onto the people you hold dear and not take them for granted, because you just never know what’s going to happen tomorrow”.

Four Lions

A gang of bumbling Muslim suicide bombers hatch a plot to blow up London in Chris Morris’ debut feature film Four Lions, a raucous, courageous comedy about stupidity. Morris, a clever media prankster who made his reputation provoking the public and the media with the television series Brass Eye, has created a relentlessly funny and deeply subversive film that says more about home-grown terrorism than acres of newspaper editorial ever could.

Shot in a loose, faux-documentary style, the film opens with our anti-heroes sitting before a bed-sheet in an anonymous terraced house, filming their own martyrdom videos. The gang’s principled and intelligent leader Omar (Riz Ahmed) is operating the camera while his best-friend, dim-witted Waj (Kavyan Novak) brandishes a toy sub-machine gun. From behind the camera, Barry (Nigel Lindsay), a radicalised white convert, suggests that in order to avoid MI5 surveillance, they should all eat the SIM cards in their phones. Timid, frightened Fessal (Adeel Akhtar) doesn’t say much, he’s too busy hatching a plan to fly bombs into buildings on the back of trained crows.

If at first, Four Lions seems like an Al Qaeda video re-enacted by the Keystone Kops, Morris gradually reveals his knockabout farce to have much sharper teeth. The first hint of this comes when Omar and Waj visit Pakistan at the invitation of a radicalised uncle and join a terrorist training camp in the mountains. It doesn’t go well, for hilarious reasons that I cannot reveal, and the two are soon returned to Britain, having learned little more than they have much to learn. At the same time, Barry has recruited another martyr, wannabe rapper Hassan (Arsher Ali), whose father owns a costume shop.

From that point on, the four would-be jihadists stumble from one crisis to another in their quest to overthrow Western capitalism by blowing up the London Marathon, hiding their backpack-bombs under fancy dress costumes. Morris, who co-scripted alongside Peep Show writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, has lifted elements from real-life atrocities for the spine of his story, using the terrifying reality of radical Islamic terrorism as a springboard for chaotic laughs. In the same way that Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove twisted the bleak concept of nuclear Armageddon into a riotous comedy about bureaucratic stupidity, Morris sifts through the hysteria surrounding The War on Terror until he finds pearls of wise, cutting comedy.

Four Lions is both a hilarious farce and a brilliant deconstruction of the absurdity of fanaticism. At the heart of the film is the notion that terrorists are people too; as incompetent and petty and dim-witted as the rest of us. But the most subversive and unsettling scenes in the film are those Omar shares with his loving wife Sophia (Preeya Kalidas), a hospital nurse who is fully aware of her husband’s plan, but offers nothing but support and encouragement. Now that is terrifying.

Iron Man II

The first blockbuster of the summer season, Iron Man II arrives on a tsunami of hype and expectation following the commercial and critical success of its predecessor. But by the time the special effects boffins have sated their thirst for bombast and pyrotechnics, what remains is an ordinary follower-upper which delivers more of the same, just louder and longer.

The previous Iron Man benefited from being an unfamiliar superhero property in an over-subscribed genre. Just 18 months later, the novelty may have worn off but returning director Jon Favreau and his new screenwriter Justin Theroux (who penned the scabrous action comedy Tropic Thunder) still cannot muster enough momentum to make the continuing adventures of playboy arms dealer Tony Stark feel fresh and vital. Instead, we get noise, confusion, overplayed stunt-work, irrelevant distractions and underdeveloped story lines.

The sequel picks up shortly after the events of the first film, with Stark (a rejuvenated Robert Downey Jr) admitting to the world’s media that he is the metal-clad superhero Iron Man. No sooner has he revealed his alter-ego, than the US military arrive at his door, demanding that he share his technology for weapons development. Leading the call for an army of robotic GIs is Stark’s bitter rival Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), an oily opportunist who has the support of a crooked congressman, played by comedian Garry Shandling.

At the same time, in Moscow, a villain emerges. Ivan Blanko (Mickey Rourke), the son of a failed Soviet engineer, has developed an all-powerful electrical weapon which he intends to use to assassinate Stark and restore his family name.

The bad-guys established, the story turns in on itself, with Stark struggling to develop a cure for an adverse reaction to his metal heart while transferring control of his corporate empire to his loyal assistant and love interest Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). Late in the day, a little too late as it turns out, Stark teams up with government spook Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) and the deadly Natalie Rushman (Scarlett Johansson) to prevent Blank and Hammer from developing a rogue army of killing machines, sent to destroy them.

From that point on the film bounces through the various plot permutations in less than compelling fashion. The middle section of the story, heralded by a crushingly stiff party scene, contains all the technical finesse a $200m budget can buy but doesn’t hold anything like the same narrative grip of the first film. For a film with a multitude of villains, there is very little at stake in the story, with the only real threat being made to Stark’s shiny new technological exhibition, a kind of World’s Fair for science geeks. What happened to saving the world?

Iron Man II suffers the same fate as most Hollywood sequels, being determined to revisit all the same elements audiences responded to in the first film without having enough new material to justify a second run out. That’s not to say the movie lacks charm, Downey Jr’s performance alone is reason enough to buy a ticket, but fans might be left feeling their Iron Man has turned into a tin god.

Dogtooth

Winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at Cannes last year, Greek writer and director Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth is an extraordinary film; weird and provocative, whimsical and titillating, like Big Brother re-imagined by David Lynch.

A businessman (Christos Stergioglou) and his wife (Michelle Valley) have convinced themselves that the best way to rear their children is to completely isolate them from the world. He goes to work in a factory every day, but his wife remains in their remote house, surrounded by a high fence, with their two unnamed teenage daughters (Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni) and their twenty-something son (Hristos Passalis).

The children live simple lives. They are only taught what their parents choose to reveal to them about the world, and this is very little. The intentionally misleading cassette tapes, recorded by their parents, tell them that ‘ocean’ is another name for a chair and a zombie is a yellow flower. Every once in a while, the father brings home a female security guard, Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou) to sleep with his son, sex being considered just another bodily function.

The story unfolds in a series of disjointed vignettes, each of which build towards a picture of intimate madness. The children cower in terror of airplanes, which they believe to be about the same size as birds. They are terrified of what their father call’s “man’s mortal enemy”, a cat. The children are starved of stimulation, imprisoned in the blank white house and square green garden. Their lives are governed by rules and procedures, but they have no moral tuition at all. They invent elaborate games in which they inhale anaesthetics, and slash at each other with knives when the fun turns sour. They build themselves into crescendos of hysterics over trivial disturbances to their routine. Later, Christina smuggles in a VHS copy of Rocky, which one of the girls watches. The mere suggestion of a world outside the fence is enough to upset the equilibrium of the household and the father must go to even more extraordinary lengths to maintain his hold.

These snippets are arranged in a way that suggests that these lives are being lived in a constant cycle of dysfunction and boredom which is slowly eroding the foundations of the parent’s experiment. The imprisonment and abuse of the children recalls the horrors of the Fred and Rosemary West case, or the more recent atrocities perpetrated by the Austrian Josef Fritzel, but Dogtooth is intended as an allegory for the wider society that breeds monsters, rather than a story about the monsters themselves. The film’s greatest success is that we accept the twisted premise completely. The film poses a multitude of questions, which the audience will instinctively try to figure out, but this process of connection doesn’t overwhelm the story. In fact, Lanthimos doesn’t seem to care if his viewers reach any conclusions at all. Nothing is explained, nothing is determined. Dogtooth stands alone, regardless.

The denial of identity is underlined by the immobile camera that rarely shows the characters in their entirety, mirroring their isolation and their distorted view of the world. The deadpan dialogue, some of which is nervously funny, collapses at times into a babble of nonsense when the children reach the limit of their curtailed vocabulary.

Odd, brutal and troubling, Dogtooth will not suit all tastes but the extraordinary performances from the small cast and the eerie, otherworldly atmosphere make for an experience like nothing else currently in cinemas.

The Ghost

Inevitably, the release of the new Roman Polanski film is going to be overshadowed by the 77 year old director’s ongoing personal troubles. Not that Polanski helps matters entirely by choosing to make a film about an internationally famous figure turned pariah, who is fighting extradition to a foreign court. The director has always jumped from genre to genre; his last film was a version of Dickens’ Oliver Twist for children, before that it was the harrowing holocaust drama The Pianist. Even so, there is a temptation to point out the analogies between the director’s problems and those of his central character. But just because you can draw parallels, it doesn’t mean you should. The Ghost, adapted from Robert Harris’ novel, deserves to be judged on its own merits.

Former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) has written a memoir that his publisher doesn’t want to print. It’s not that it contains sensitive material about how Lang colluded with the Americans to lead Britain into an illegal war in Iraq. They don’t want to print it because it’s a desperately bland collection of family history, airy reminiscences and well-told anecdotes. So the publisher (played by Jim Belishi, for some reason), calls in a ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) and offers him a huge fee to travel to the east coast of the United States and punch it up a bit. The deadline is set for a month.

McGregor’s character, who is only referred to as “the ghost” jumps at the chance to make some quick money, but when he arrived at Lang’s compound he discovers he is not the first writer to attempt the make-over, and his predecessor died in an apparent suicide. The mood in the compound is tense. The suave and superficial Lang (who might as well be called “Phony Flair”) is attempting to put a brave face on his exile, but is terrified at the prospect of being indicted by the International Court of Justice and being dragged to The Hague. His scheming wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) maintains a calm exterior, but she is rattled by suspicions that Lang is having an affair with his officious assistant Amelia (Kim Cattrall).

Soon, the ghost has been drafted in to punch-up press releases and help with the damage control surrounding the PM, as the throng of protesters gather at the gates. The more he digs around in Lang’s past, the more he finds that things do not add up. The more the ghost goes through Lang’s memoir, the more he discovers has been omitted. But the guy that came before must have seen the same connections, and he ended up dead.

From that point on, Polanski smoothly joins the dots on a packed plot with consummate facility, anchored by a fine performance from McGregor. The Scottish actor acts as our point of view, a detective, a writer and a guide, taking the audience through the complications of the story, each twist and turn being as much of a surprise for him as it is for us.

The trouble is that puzzle may solve itself in your head long before the flatly staged chases and confrontations of the third act. Still, with Polanski, it is all about sustaining an atmosphere of paranoid tension and whether it’s an ominous rain-shower, the reaching shadows of a desolate ferry-port or a strange man staring from across a room; The Ghost proves he hasn’t lost his touch.

Kick Ass

Arriving on a tidal wave of excitable hype, owing to a canny pre-release internet campaign, director Matthew Vaughan’s adaptation of Mark Millar’s best-selling comic-book series more or less lives up to its imperative title. Kick Ass is an endearingly shambolic, eye-wateringly violent action comedy made with obvious affection for the genre.

After a funny pre-credits sequence, the story opens in classic comic-book style, with a meditative narration from Aaron Johnson’s geeky teenager Dave Lizewski. Dave has been beaten up, for the umpteenth time, by a gang of local hoodlums and is wondering, as geeky teenagers do, why nobody has ever tried to become a superhero in real life. So he goes online, buys a wetsuit and a pair of truncheons and transforms himself into Kick Ass, tireless defender of the defenceless. The first time he goes out to patrol New York, he gets his ass kicked. While recovering in hospital, Dave discovers that he has developed his own particular super-power, the inability to feel pain. The next time he goes out to fight crime, his exploits are filmed by a guy with a camera-phone, and he becomes an internet sensation.

Meanwhile, as the on-screen interstitials have it, Dave’s new fame brings him to the attention of a local Mafia boss, Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong). D’Amico thinks Kick Ass is responsible for recent setbacks in his drug-distribution racket. Enlisting the help of his own geeky teenager Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), the gangster determines to uncover the new hero’s identity. But Kick Ass has found allies to help him in his quest, the father-and-daughter vigilante team of Big Daddy and Hit-Girl (Nicholas Cage and Chloe Moretz), who are heavily armed, well trained and absolutely ruthless.

The story, only slightly adjusted from Mark Millar’s original comic book, is hastily established and thereafter delivered in chunks of arch dialogue scattered amongst the high-kicking mayhem. As with the first installment of any potential superhero franchise, the focus is on how the hero came to be and who his mortal enemy is. The rest of it can wait for the inevitable sequel.

Kick Ass shares the same problem as one of its myriad inspirations, Watchmen, in attempting to frame a superhero fantasy in the real world. Vaughan shows us what it’s like when real people try to do what superheroes do, then allows his anti-heroes take on some of the characteristics of the supermen he is attempting to subvert. Slowly but surely, Kick Ass mutates into an ultra-violent, luridly coloured cartoon. That’s not altogether a bad thing, but it could have been so much more.

For all its constant references to other comic book, its hip dialogue, complex fight sequences and joyful sense of violent abandon, the thing you are most likely to remember from Kick Ass is the performance from 13 year old Chloe Moretz as the cute-but-deadly pre-teen assassin. The young actress is terrific in the role but if her blood-thirstiness and profanity-riddled dialogue are slightly overplayed, Vaughan makes a fatal error, late on, in subjecting the youngster to a particularly gruesome physical assault at the hands of the film’s bad-guy. It's a mistake, but that aside Kick Ass is a spirited and insistently outrageous cross between a superhero film and a high-school comedy, likely to repel as many as it charms.

Zonad

For his first film since the break-out success of the low-fidelity musical Once, writer and director John Carney teams up with his brother Kieran for a crude and charmless one-note comedy about a small-time con-man who fools the people of a small Irish town into believing he is an alien from outer space.

Simon Delaney plays the title character Zonad, who has recently escaped from an alcohol rehabilitation centre and is looking for somewhere to lie low. He stumbles into the town of Ballymoran as the locals are out looking at a rare comet streak across the sky. When the Cassidy family return home to find a drunken man sprawled on their living room carpet, Liam (who has by now squeezed into a red spandex jumpsuit) invents the character Zonad and pretends to be E.T. arrived from a distant world to study humanity. Mum (Donna Dent) and Dad (Geoff Minogue) make their visitor feel at home, but Zonad is already making eyes for their nubile schoolgirl daughter Jenny (Janice Byrne), their whiskey and their DVD player.

Realising the extent of the native’s stupidity, and the fact that Ballymoran (Baile An Amadán, in case you don’t get it) seems to exist in a strange combination of 1950s Americana and a Britney Spears video, Zonad knows he is on to a good thing. He is the talk of the town. People gather in the pub to buy him pints, he is fed steak and chips and women throw themselves at his feet. The only one to see through Zonad’s story is American import Guy (Rory Keenan), a high-school jock with a varsity jacket, a duck’s arse haircut and a butler. The “gentleman’s gentleman” is agonizingly modelled after Wodehouse’s Jeeves (way after) and played by David Murray’s eyebrows.

A little background: Zonad was first attempted as a short film, starring a then unknown Cillian Murphy, that was shot in the late 1990s, edited over a couple of years but never finished and never publicly screened. Murphy has wisely avoided a reprise and the Carneys might have done the same. Short films that are essentially genre pastiches are short for a reason, typically comprising of one good idea, if you’re lucky, and two solid jokes. The riff does not extend over 80 minutes.

If there is a joke here, I didn’t get it, no matter how many times it was repeated. The story, presented as a series of skittish encounters, is bolstered by a series of running jokes that exhaust themselves in trying to be vulgar. Crudity aside, every scene is played with an air of compromise and panic in as broad a manner as possible. The few weak gags, up to and including an excruciating Raging Bull homage, are lost in the wildly uneven tone and clumsy, anxious direction. When everything is spontaneous, nothing is.

Much of Zonad plays on the same tired old notions about the Irish as gullible country yokels and unsophisticated stooges. Carney’s approach to character is to present these stereotypes and caricatures and then invert them – in the most obvious and puerile manner – by giving them racy sex lives or dirty mouths. There’s nothing wrong with poking fun at ourselves, if the jabs are accurate. Graham Linehan’s Father Ted, for instance, used the mechanics of the sit-com farce to say something about who we are, who we were and who we might become if we’re not careful. There is nothing like that in Zonad because there is nothing at all in Zonad.

Shutter Island

In his first dramatic feature since he won Oscars and box-office esteem with The Departed, Martin Scorsese turns Denis Lehane’s creepy novel Shutter Island into a dark, intense thriller about madness, trauma and violence arranged as an elaborate homage to Hollywood’s less respectable genres.

The prow of a boat emerges from a billow of fog, revealing a pair of grizzled detectives in fedoras, nervously smoking cigarettes. It’s 1954 and US Marshals Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), are making their way to an asylum for the criminally insane on Shutter Island, a remote spot of land in Boston harbour.

They have come to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer), a patient who vanished without trace from a secure cell. Dr. John Cawley (Ben Kingsley), the head psychiatrist, explains that Rachel, who was incarcerated for killing her three children, is semi-catatonic and unable to look after herself. Not long after their arrival, a hurricane gathers in the harbour, providing Teddy and Chuck with enough of a diversion to sneak around the hospital. Scattered clues seem to point at a massive conspiracy, involving Nazi doctors, human experimentation and government cover-up. Soon, the mysteries are piled up in a heap, with Teddy crumbling under the pressure to put events in order.

This is Scorsese’s fourth collaboration in a row with DiCaprio, a partnership that has come to define his recent films. The actor does extraordinarily well with what is a difficult, slippery character, driven and distracted at the same time and, in each one of the various layers of the story, spot on his mark. Around him, the rest of the formidable cast take their turn in devouring rich, meaty characters, but more than that, Scorsese pays individual tribute to these character’s long history in B-movie cinema. The camera creeps up behind a chair to reveal Von Sydow’s scowling face in a crash of lightning, a malformed prisoner steps forward from the shadows in the corner of his cell, Kingsley’s evasive doctor fiddles with his bow tie as his eyes dart across the frame.

Scorsese’s ambition with Shutter Island is to distil the essence of all the old RKO chillers, inky noirs and cop thrillers of his youth into one dizzying concoction. There’s no better man for the task. Scorsese is the master of American cinema genres and has attempted all of them bar the Western; Musicals, Bible films, road movies, gangster epics and remakes. The director has an encyclopaedic knowledge, not just of titles and genres, but individual shots, moods, tones and compositions. Shutter Island is his chance to reveal the depth of that appreciation.

There are flaws, particularly in the over-explained final section, but none of them are damaging enough to detract from what is a devious, beautifully crafted folly. Shutter Island is not the neo-noir classic it might have been, it’s a touch too flashy and unhinged for that, but it is an energetic and entertaining B-Movie, as intended. A B+ Movie, in fact.

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.