Bridesmaids

Getting hitched has no end of hitches in Paul Feig’s uproarious Bridesmaids, which shares some of the same comedy DNA as The Hangover but manages to transcend the dreaded “chick-flick” tag by being funny for everyone, regardless of gender.

In her first leading role, Kristen Wiig (who also wrote the script with Ann Mumolo) plays Annie, a thirtysomething singleton living a lonely life in the drab city of Milwaukee. Opening with an excruciatingly embarrassing sex scene between Annie and fatuous man-child Ted (Jon Hamm), Bridesmaids starts as it means to continue, being gloriously crude, unashamedly unsophisticated and cheerfully foul-mouthed.

The morning after the night before, Annie finds herself unceremoniously dumped as Ted declares himself uninterested in a relationship; uninterested in anything, in fact, other than himself, his car and his hair. Annie, a talented baker, once owned a cake shop but she went bust in the recession and is reduced to sharing a tiny house with insufferable British siblings (Rebel Wilson and Matt Lucas). She mans a counter at a cheap jewellery shop owned by the greasy Don (Michael Hitchcock), a job arranged by her mother (Jill Clayburgh), as a favour. With an uneven smile and a mostly cheerful disposition, Annie is frantically maintaining appearances but she knows she is nearing rock bottom; alone, broke, hopeless and desperate.

Her outlook darkens even further when her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) announces she’s marrying her wealthy boyfriend and asks Annie to stand for her as bridesmaid. No sooner has Annie begun making her pre-nuptial arrangements – engagement party, dress fitting, hen night – than she finds a rival in snooty Helen (Rose Byrne), the ice-queen wife of Lillian’s fiancé’s boss who has seemingly usurped her position as Lillian’s best pal. While Helen busies herself taking over the arrangements, mostly by throwing money around, Annie struggles to remain in control of her colourful brood of fellow bridesmaids (Melissa McCarthy, Wendi McLendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper), her floundering personal life and her friendship with the bride-to-be.

Although men are firmly sidelined in this story, a potential romance appears when Annie meets expatriate traffic cop Rhodes (Chris O’Dowd), a gentle, kind-hearted policeman who eats a few of her cup-cakes and takes her out on a date. A later scene, in which Annie does all she can to get his attention while driving alongside his parked patrol car, is one of the film’s funniest moments, with O’Dowd’s default confused expression acting as a hilarious counterpoint to Wiig’s exuberant mugging.

Given Hollywood’s popularity-seeking tendency to fetishise every clichéd element of the matrimonial experience, Bridesmaids' central idea that tying the knot is more a collection of unnatural social obligations than a white-rose-tinted daydream is a real breath of fresh air. The fact that the film is funny – often side-splittingly so – is an added bonus. Feig’s success, achieved through lively improvisation, is in marrying outrageously over-the-top comedy set-pieces with far more subtle insights into female friendship, social mores and the hopelessness of sudden unemployment. Wiig’s bubbling insecurity keeps the frantic comedy grounded in a palpable reality, the laughs emerging naturally from the situations rather than feeling like a series of interconnected skits.

Bridesmaids doesn’t all work (and at a little over two hours, there’s a little too much of it) but the stuff that does works extremely well, with the razor-sharp ensemble mining a rich seam of crude belly-laughs. The standout from the cast is Melissa McCarthy as Megan, a short, round accumulation of base instincts who crashes though the story without a shred of self-consciousness and with a true vulgarian’s love of salty language.

X-Men: First Class

When your superhero franchise winds up in the clumsy hands of journeyman hack Brett Ratner, as X-Men: The Last Stand did in 2007, it’s time for an injection of new blood. Having made a sarcastic attempt at popping the superhero bubble in Kick Ass, British producer-turned-director Matthew Vaughan blows a bubble of his own with X-Men: First Class, the first in a proposed new trilogy of prequels designed to reboot a moribund franchise in much the same way as Casino Royale did for 007 and Christopher Nolan continues to do for Batman.

The story, from a long list of writers including original director Bryan Singer, Thor writers Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz, alongside Vaughan and his regular collaborator Jane Goldman, opens in the same place as Singer’s 2000 film did, at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. There, a young Jewish boy named Erik is separated from his mother and uses his uncanny magnetic powers to crumple the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” iron gate. Brought before the Mengele-like camp doctor Schmidt (Kevin Bacon), Erik is made to demonstrate his extraordinary powers, with a life hanging in the balance. The tragic outcome of this episode instils in Erik (Michael Fassbender) a life-long thirst for revenge, using his boiling rage to amplify his extraordinary abilities.

At the same time, in America, a telepathic young man named Charles Xavier meets a strange, shape-shifting girl named Raven and adopts her as his sister. Now in their early-twenties and studying at Oxford, Charles (James McAvoy) and Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) imagine a new world in which mutants can live openly, co-existing with the rest of mankind. When CIA agent Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) discovers Charles’ research into genetic mutation, she recruits the pair to join a new agency, fighting a new threat. Dr Schmidt, now known as Sebastian Shaw, has formed a team of highly-powered mutants (including January Jones as ice-queen Emma Frost), with the simple aim of destroying the world. Smooth-talking Charles joins with the hot-headed Erik to stop Schmidt from enacting his plan, stymie the Soviets and force the humans to accept their mutant brethren.

Expanded beyond the super-powers and spandex of the comic-books, X-Men: First Class is composed of a rich blend of elements and influences that help to ground the story in its time and place. There are strong flavours of the well-tailored jet-setting of the early Bond films, the alternate histories of Euro-thrillers such as The Odessa File and the Cold War paranoia of Dr Strangelove (including an homage to Ken Adams’ elliptical War Room set). The story pivots on a moment that threatened the future of humanity, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. As the Americans and the Soviets face-off in the Caribbean Sea, we see John F Kennedy’s dream of optimism and prosperity curdle on a black and white television. There are correlations drawn with another dreamer, Martin Luther King, in the mutants’ determination to claim their own civil rights although this avenue is not explored as thoroughly as it might be.

It’s about the only trick that Vaughan misses. First Class is extraordinarily busy, driven by a tearaway plot. The story skips from scene to scene, circumnavigating the globe in a breathless rush, from Oxford to Las Vegas, Argentina to Geneva and Washington to a beach in Cuba. As Charles and Erik go about recruiting special individuals for their secret mutant army, the film becomes overstuffed with characters and incidents, friendships and enmities. Each of the recruits has a back-story that requires explaining and a special power that must be demonstrated. Vaughan makes heavy going of inspecting the troops, ticking their names off his list before collecting them in a glass-walled room and having them explain and demonstrate everything again. Just about the only omissions in the mutant parade are Shaw’s bad-guy henchmen, including Jason Flemyng as a crimson-faced demon, who are not given the courtesy of an introduction, let alone anything other than highly-choreographed fight-scenes to perform.

Just at the point where the film seems to have become a roll-call of special-effects derived introductions, Vaughan rouses his story for a stirring climax, as the might of the US Navy faces off against the Soviets along an imaginary line drawn in the ocean while, careening over their heads, telepathic mutants do battle between a futuristic jet-plane and a nuclear submarine. X-Men: First Class might be needlessly repetitive and awkwardly staged but it brims with youthful energy, giving a much-needed shot in the arm to a series that had become piteously anaemic.

The Hangover Part II

“It’s happened again” groans a sweat-drenched, filthy Bradley Cooper from the roof of a Bangkok hotel minutes into the inevitable follow-up to 2009s smash hit comedy. The Hangover Part II is more of the same - exactly the same - with an added dose of cultural stereotyping and even cruder humour.

Written by returning director Todd Phillips with Craig Mazin and Scot Armstrong, the story picks up two years after the debacle that was Doug’s (Justin Bartha) Las Vegas wedding. This time around, it’s dentist Stu (Ed Helms) who is about to tie the knot with the lovely Lauren (Jamie Chung), in her parents’ home country of Thailand. Mindful of their little escapade in Vegas, Stu manfully attempts to turn a pancake lunch with Doug and best friend Phil (Bradley Cooper) into an official stag do. He is merely postponing the inevitable. Once they’ve arrive in Thailand, having collected half-baked hanger-on Alan (Zach Galifianakis) and Lauren’s 16 year old brother Teddy (Mason Lee), the “wolf-pack” bring a six-pack of beach for a harmless pre-wedding toast.

Cut to Cooper’s bleary-eyed face as he wakes up face down on the unutterable floor of a fleapit Bangkok hotel, scattered with empty bottles, the bodies of his lifeless friends and a chain-smoking capuchin monkey. Quickly they discover they are missing someone. Teenage Teddy, an academic genius, musical prodigy and light of his father’s life, is nowhere to be found. With the help, or hindrance, of squealing Korean gangster Mr Chow (Ken Jeong), the boys must retrace their steps through the fleshpots of the steaming city to find the youngster and make it back to the beachside resort in time for Stu’s big day.

While this sequel will likely match the $500m worldwide box office of the original, Part Two proves that, in movies, lighting rarely strikes twice. Although the ensuing adventure is not without a handful of funny moments, far too much of the film seems happy enough to re-enact variations on its predecessor. The element of surprise, crucial to the success of the first film, is impossible to replicate, with the knock-on effect being a dearth of invention and comic energy. Punchlines are rarely funny the second time around and Phillips, on some level, seems to be aware of this, filling his running time with a couple of extended musical numbers and packing the soundtrack with an eclectic selection of jukebox hits, all played over interminable montages.

While Helms and Cooper provide the majority of the plotting, the funny bits are delegated to the Galifianakis as the unpredictable “stay-at-home-son” and Jeong, whose jive-talking, danger-loving criminal is given an expanded role. There is almost no place for women in this world of men behaving badly, with Chung and the returning Sasha Barrese reduced to pleasantries while Gillian Vigman as Phil’s wife Stephanie carries a fixed smile through which she doesn’t deliver a single word of dialogue. The mean streets of Bangkok provide a colourful, if predictably prurient, backdrop but even those flashes of gritty vibrancy are lost in the film’s deadening adherence to formula.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

This summer, the big studios will release a record 26 sequels to cinemas around the world, mechanical iterations of the same characters and situations that betray a fundamental lack of imagination and originality, yet all heralded as ‘blockbusters’. No longer confined to mere follower-uppers, 2011 will see five fifth sequels (Fast Five, Final Destination 5, Puss in Boots, X-Men First Class and Winnie the Pooh), two seventh sequels (The Muppets, Rise of the Planet of the Apes) and the eighth Harry Potter movie, itself the concluding part of a film released last year. And they say Hollywood has run out of ideas…

At two hours and 15 minutes, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the fourth film in Disney’s multi-billion dollar franchise, is the shortest in the series but it still feels endless; overproduced, overstuffed, easily distracted and needlessly convoluted. A new director, a trimmed-down story and some key cast changes do little to make this installment ship-shape. The fact that it’s in 3D - because everything is in 3D now - doesn’t do much to liven up proceedings. The new technology can’t help these cardboard cut-out characters or the theme-park world they inhabit, with all the extra effort reduced to thrusting the pointy end of various scimitars and cutlasses at the screen, now and again, in order to make the audience jump.

That’s not to say that there aren’t a few thrills to be found. Broadway musical director turned filmmaker Rob Marshall (Chicago) takes over for Gore Verbinski, who directed the first three movies. Marshall’s ability with staging and choreography is apparent in an early pell-mell chase scene as Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow escapes from the red-coated army of a bloated King George II (Richard Griffiths) along, above and below the cobbled streets of London. Shortly thereafter, Sparrow crosses swords with his old flame Angelica (Penelope Cruz), a cunning Spanish privateer with flashing eyes and a heaving bodice, in a fluidly-staged fight scene played out among the barrels in the basement of a grotty inn. Later, when Sparrow is back on the bounding main, his ship comes under attack from a shoal of beautiful mermaids, with long fishy tails and sharp vampire teeth, in a sequence that contains the majority of the film’s jumpy moments.

As for the plot (not that it matters much), Cap’n Jack is kidnapped by the beautiful Angelica and dragged on board the Queen Anne’s Revenge, the ship belonging to the fearsome, voodoo-practising Blackbeard (Ian McShane) on a quest to find the fabled Fountain of Youth. The buccaneers are being trailed by the Spanish Navy, the English redcoats and Jack’s deceitful old nemesis Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), all of whom want to get their hands on the magical waters.

Its the stuff that happens in between; the chattering dialogue, cyclical plotting and repetitive exposition, that makes the latest Pirates such a bore. It’s all swash and no buckle. When audiences are meeting most of these characters for the fourth time, why bother constructing a story around them? It’s far easier to have the special effects and the production design, both of a high standard, do the job of telling the story. The biggest draw in this franchise remains Depp’s flamboyant Cap’n Jack, a mincing gadfly in eye-liner and floating scarves with a steady supply of nimble reactions and throwaway quips. He gets decent support from newcomers Cruz and McShane, with Geoffrey Rush reliable as always as the duplicitous peg-legged pirate Barbossa. A sub-plot involving a romance between an earth-bound mermaid (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) and a heaven-bound monk (Sam Claflin) adds nothing to proceedings but time.

13 Assassins

Takashi Miike’s elegant samurai adventure 13 Assassins is a loose remake of Eiichi Kudo’s 1963 film of the same title, itself a reworking of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.

Japan’s most prolific and notorious filmmaker, Miike is primarily known as a provider of ultraviolent, transgressive horrors like Audition and Ichi The Killer. But the writer and director can turn his hand to anything, dabbling in Westerns (Sukiyaki Western Django), musical comedy (The Happiness Of The Katakuris), crime drama (Agitator) and avant-garde art-house (Gozu). Now, following in the footsteps of masters like Kurosawa, Gosha and more recently, Takeshi Kitano, Miike turns his hand to the period samurai epic, the much-beloved, much-abused genre known to the Japanese as chanbara.

Set across a handful of small, rural towns in Feudal Japan in the mid-nineteenth century, Miike opens his story by detailing the horrific crimes of Lord Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki) as he travels the countryside with a platoon of bodyguards. A psychotic sadist, Naritsugu kills and rapes without conscience, protected from punishment by being the half-brother of the Shogun. A senior government official realizes the situation will become even more disastrous when Naritsugu is tipped for high office. He must be stopped, so a trusted older samurai Shinzaemon (the legendary Koji Yakusho) is secretly hired to assassinate him.

Semi-retired and having given up his “dream of a noble death”, Shinzaemon is re-energised by the prospect of a righteous cause and gathers a crack platoon of eleven more samurai, including his star pupil Hirayama (Tsuyoshi Ihara) and his nephew Shinroukuro (Takayuki Yamada). Having trailed their target across the country, the newly-formed dirty dozen devise a plan to ambush the nobleman and his retinue as he crosses a bridge into another kingdom.

The sober, considered first half of the film is dedicated to the selection and training of this elite group with the equally painstaking last hour devoted to a breathless, hyperkinetic action sequence that follows the samurai as they pitch a running battle against a vast army twenty times their size. It is a spectacular action sequence, a non-stop succession of sword-fights and stand-offs, operatically staged and choreographed with sparing use of special effects.

From the gripping overture, which focuses on the face of a disgraced samurai as he commits seppuku, to the closing close-ups of the few survivors, Miike is more interested in exploring the character of his samurai than exploiting the blood they spill. 13 Assassins is grounded in history, both real and cinematic, but Miike sees the way of the warrior, and the code that bound them as emblematic of a brutal, dysfunctional society. His noble samurai, sworn to die, inhabit a corrupt world that thrives on violence and death and they know it. In Miike’s mind, there is nothing honourable about the mindless adherence to a code of loyalty, especially if it means protecting evil people who do not deserve it. Brilliantly realised and hugely entertaining, this is swashbuckling cinema of a high order.

The industrious Miike, who has directed more than 70 films since 1990, has already completed his follow-up film. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai screened in competition at this month’s Cannes film festival, in 3D.

Hanna

Atonement director Joe Wright recruits his teenage star Saoirse Ronan for Hanna, an eccentric mix of modern day fairy-tale and action movie free-for-all, like Walt Disney’s Jason Bourne.

The film opens with a series of beautifully composed sequences set in the remote forest 60 kilometres below the Arctic Circle as Ronan’s Hanna silently hunts a reindeer with her bow and arrow. The teenage girl lives with her former CIA agent father Erik (Eric Bana) in a wooden hut, cut off from the rest of the world. There, he trains his daughter to be a killer, knowing that when she does return to civilisation, his enemies in the intelligence community will be coming after her. Under his guidance, Hanna has become expert in weapons, hand-to-hand fighting and stealth. He has taught her to speak a dozen languages but almost everything she knows about the world has come from a tattered encyclopaedia or a book of Grimm’s fairy tales and Hanna is hungry for more.

No sooner does she get her wish and announce her presence to the world, than an American military squad captures her and places her in a seemingly impregnable underground compound. There she awaits the arrival of wolfish CIA agent Marissa (Cate Blanchett), who holds the key to Hanna discovering her true identity and why she is the way she is. When Hanna escapes, and makes her way to Southern Spain with a family of holidaymakers, Marissa makes her pursuit,

What saves the film from going toe-to-toe with Zack Snyder’s glass-jawed Sucker Punch is Ronan’s certain performance, convincingly dangerous and, with her pale face and bleached eyebrows, unnervingly otherworldly. She might be called upon to say and do some odd things, but she rarely misses her footing, injecting her character with a potent combination of mystery, vulnerability and menace. Ronan’s thousand-yard stare is deeply disquieting; her big, blue pools suggesting either deep thought or dangerous detachment. Bana is tough and tender as the father, even if his abilities tip over into to the realms of the superhuman when his character swims across what seems to be the Arctic Sea in a two-piece suit. Blanchett’s evil agent makes for a threatening presence initially but is hampered with a character that is never more than a collection of bad-guy mannerisms and tics, adopting a Southern accent that stretches every vowel into an elongated threat. There’s also a deeply curious turn from Tom Hollander as a sadistic German mercenary charged with pursuing Hanna across mainland Europe, while whistling a jaunty tune.

Plausibility aside, the problem with Hanna is that it just isn’t exciting to watch. Wright throws his camera around with customary abandon but to little avail. His specially-commissioned soundtrack from The Chemical Brothers is all very energetic but Wright makes the MTV mistake of editing his action scenes to the flurrying music, rather than have the score underline and complement his images. The result is a swirl of camera juggling tricks (including Wright’s trademark 360 degree merry-go-round), blinking lights and juddering jump-cuts that together, give merely an impression of style. Technically, it’s well composed and carefully considered, but none of the director’s swoops and swirls add anything to how we feel about the characters or the story. The conclusion is that these things don’t matter as much and that’s a shame.

As Hanna makes her way out into the world, the people she comes into contact with seem less real than the pictures in her book of fairytales. This is as true for the good people, like the squabbling family of tourists headed by Olivia Williams and Jason Flemyng that Hannah stows away with, as it is for the bad people, like Blanchett’s narrow-eyed villain and Hollander’s lip-smacking killer. As the story winds down to an inevitable series of stand offs and confrontations, Wright’s efforts to make an action movie from a bedtime story become increasingly strained, relying on cliché and clanging symbolism to carry him over the finish line.

Thor

Another summer season begins with another blockbuster adaptation of a Marvel comic book and the launch of yet another superhero franchise. First published in 1962, Stan Lee’s comic book about the Norse god Thor never quite matched the success of his illustrious comrades, Spider-Man and Iron Man. Nevertheless, the mid-year marketplace requires a constant supply of new material, so the hammer-wielding behemoth has been given a complicated origin story, a cast of star actors and a shiny 3D veneer.

The opening sequence, set in New Mexico, has astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), her mentor Dr. Erik Sevig (Stellan Skarsgard) and student intern Darcy (Kat Dennings) investigating a strange cosmic phenomenon deep in the desert. As the three boffins stare in disbelief at a funnel of coloured light descending from the heavens, a bearded, muscular stranger named Thor (Chris Hemsworth) lands in the sand.

From there, the story ships back and forth beween Earth and the realm of Asgard, where Thor’s father Odin (Anthony Hopkins), fills in aeons of back story in growling, kingly voiceover. On the day Thor is set to ascend to Odin’s throne, ahead of his brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), the impetuous young prince picks a fight with Asgard’s mortal enemies The Frost Giants, led by the sneering Laufey (Colm Feore). When Odin intervenes to stop a war breaking out, the burly god of thunder throws a noisy tantrum and is punished for it.

Stripped of his super-powers and banished to Earth Thor must find his magical hammer Mjolnir, make nice with the toothsome Jane, reconcile with his father and battle the investigating government and an all-powerful metal contraption known as The Destroyer before he can reclaim his rightful place in Asgard.

If Thor sounds busy, that’s because it is, breathlessly so. The constant shifts between the earthly and celestial realms make for a lot of unnecessary repetitions, as the differences between worlds are repeatedly reinforced. Thor proves a deeply unlikeable protagonist for most of the story, partly because the character is bellicose and brattish but partly because Hemsworth is a bit of a ham. The arrogant warrior’s conversion to burnished hero, central to the plot, is unconvincingly swift and simplistically played. Thor at least has the benefit of having his name over the door; his supporting players including Renee Russo as Queen Frigga, Idris Elba as gatekeeper Heimdall and an entire quintet of loyal soldiers are either clumsily introduced or remain anonymous.

The action brightens when Thor arrives in the sunny New Mexican desert, but what faces him is a series of anti-climactic fight scenes, more inter-dimensional pinball and lots of time spent establishing a sequel. With the focus on eye-popping visuals, the romance between the superhero and Portman’s goofy scientist is not given the time or space to develop, their supposed attraction limited to significant glances in crowded rooms and cute aphorisms yelled across exploding streets.

Complain all you want about 3D, it’s like Canute railing against the pounding surf. When employed correctly the technology brings something new and immersive to the cinema experience but Thor was not filmed in 3D, the effect was added later in post-production. The result is muddy, under-lit photography, juddering camera movement and over-processed special effects. Ultimately, audiences respond to stories and performances, not stuff flying indiscriminately at their heads.

Perhaps the sole surprise in Thor is that it was directed by Kenneth Branagh. The Shakespearean specialist knows his way around an epic tale but he is unable to invest the quieter passages with any weight and the results are a uneven mix of special effects fireworks and dramatic damp squibs. When a $150 million 3D blockbuster calls to mind the wobbly pantomime of Mike Hodge’s 1980s kitsch-fest Flash Gordon, someone is bound to get hammered.

Snap

Playwright turned filmmaker Carmel Winters makes a confident and courageous debut with Snap, a scathing psychological drama about how a mother and her estranged teenage son cope with a family tragedy that becomes a media scandal.

Snap opens with middle-aged recovering alcoholic Sandra (Aisling O’Sullivan) inviting a documentary crew into her apartment to “get everything out in the open”. As she sits, smoking, in her scrupulously clean kitchen, Sandra looks into the camera and explains that three years previously her 15 year old son Stephen (Stephen Moran) kidnapped a toddler from a local park. He brought the child to an isolated house owned by his grandfather (Pascal Scott) and kept him there for five days. We don’t know why he did it and neither does Sandra, but she has her suspicions and so do we. As Sandra tries to explain what happened the story flashes back to the event itself, as the teenager sits with the toddler in the isolated house, feeding him junk food and watching old films on a battered television.

Even as Sandra attempts to make sense of her situation in a tumble of denials and confessions, Winters further fractures the story into dozens of fragments. An unseen hand pauses and rewinds the raw documentary footage, looking for unguarded moments. As Sandra explains to the camera, she has become a pariah, painted as the epitome of evil by sensationalist newspaper coverage. Even now, three years later, she is being plagued by nuisance phone calls and poison pen letters, which she burns without reading. She has kept the old newspaper clippings from the case, analysing them for mistakes and inaccuracies. She seems coldly indifferent, but she is angry and obsessed.

Between these uncomfortable scenes, an objective camera watches as Stephen wanders around the old house, watching images of the toddler’s parents on television, pleading for the child’s safe return. He also watches old 8mm home movies of himself as a young child with his grandfather, learning to ride a bicycle and blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. Winters then returns to Sandra as she bounces around her apartment, afraid to go out, passing the day with her brash best friend Chris (Eileen Walsh) and a deeply uncomfortable encounter with a dishevelled drunk she picks up in a local chip shop (the late Mick Lally, in his last role).

At first, Snap seems like an unsolvable jumble but Winters has a keen sense of the art of storytelling, slowly unravelling the puzzle to bring clarity to her jigsaw construction. Throughout, the director maintains a mood of imminent horror, a sense that the awful things that have been revealed are nothing when placed against what remains hidden.

The broken narrative is given a firm grounding in O’Sullivan’s intense, searing performance, monstrous and sympathetic at once. Winter’s script allows the actress to build her frustration into moments of full-throated fury, which O’Sullivan delivers with unerring force. As the damaged, emotionally inert Stephen, Moran remains a blank slate at all times, completely internalising the dire events boiling around him. The director’s background is in theatre, but her scenes never feel stage-bound, cutting between timelines and visual formats with consummate delicacy and framing the action for maximum emotional effect.

Cold Fish

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

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

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

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

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

Sucker Punch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rewind

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

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

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

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

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

The Company Men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Adjustment Bureau

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

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

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

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

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

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

Animal Kingdom

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

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

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

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

Paul

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

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

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

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

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

Never Let Me Go

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

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

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

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

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

True Grit

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fighter

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Swan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

127 Hours

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

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

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

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

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