The Amazing Spider-Man

Nominative determinism is a theory in psychology that supposes a person’s name has some influence over what they do with their life. Mr Field might grow up to become a horticulturalist, for example and Mr Payne a glazier, or a dentist. So it was predestined that Marc Webb, in only his second feature, would direct The Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel Comics’ hasty re-imagining of their superhero franchise. Even that mild coincidence won’t be enough to distract attentive cinemagoers from the fact that they’ve already seen this film, exactly a decade ago, when Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire’s film (the first in a dwindling trilogy that finally exhausted itself in 2007) kick-started the current renaissance in comic-book blockbusters.

Since Raimi’s Spider-Man, almost every spandex-clad superhero has had a cinema outing: Batman, Superman, Iron Man, even second-tier champions such as The Green Lantern and Captain America. Just last month, Marvel Comics crammed as many of their characters as could possibly fit into one film, and made another billion at the international box-office. So, perhaps understandably, the industry giant thinks the time is right to reinvent Spider-Man for a new generation; anyone under the age of ten and hopeless amnesiacs. Myths and legends are designed to be told and retold, I suppose, but in a market saturated with superhero origin stories, blockbuster sequels and special-effects derived fireworks-displays, The Amazing Spider-Man really needs to live up to it’s over-confident billing.

Maguire has been replaced by the taller, leaner Andrew Garfield – the likeable British actor best known for his supporting role in The Social Network – but apart from a few tweaks, the story is stultifyingly familiar. This time it opens with young Peter Parker being separated from his parents, Richard and Mary (Campbell Scott and Embeth Davidtz) who leave him in the care of their relatives Uncle Ben and Aunt May (Martin Sheen and Sally Field, a great pairing) when Richard’s scientific research causes the family to be threatened by sinister forces. Growing up safe in suburban anonymity, Garfield’s lanky, awkward and now orphaned Peter is skateboarding around his school while tinkering with electronics and throwing forlorn glances at his crush, Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone).

You already know the rest: Peter visits a laboratory and is bitten by a radioactive spider. Suddenly, he’s no longer a geeky beanpole, but a faster, stronger, stickier teenager; a development neatly captured in a scene on a subway where his abilities surprise himself as much as a potential mugger. Having acquired his red spandex suit, and started his campaign against evildoers, the story brings him into the orbit of one-armed geneticist Dr. Connors (Rhys Ifans), whose sense of right and wrong has been clouded by his obsessive scientific experimentation.

Where once superhero movies aspired to little more than recreating the experience of reading the comic-book; a series of set-pieces arranged as flat, highly-detailed tableaux, the genre has matured over time to incorporate credible, well-acted drama that adds credibility to their character’s emotional lives. Webb’s previous film 500 Days of Summer was a lightweight indie rom-com but it had heart and soul, something he carries with him to the superhero franchise, successfully combining shaded, complex characters with grandstanding spectacle, something Raimi’s brightly-coloured rollercoaster struggled to achieve. There are exhilarating moments of airborne acrobatics to enjoy as the whooping hero swoops through the Manhattan skyscrapers at the end of a silvery thread, but the 3D effect is too sparingly-used to justify the extra couple of euro on the ticket price.

In re-building Parker into an introspective, uncertain teenager more typical of his debut, Webb has cast well in Garfield, who might be ten years too old to be a high-school student but brings an air of genial befuddlement that helps to smooth out the bumps in the fantastical, sometimes illogical storyline. Opposite him, Stone’s Gwen is far more than elbow-gracing eye-candy, but a complicated, smart and high-achieving heroine with parental issues of her own to work out. Together, they make for a charming, charismatic screen couple. As Peter Parker struggles to adapt to a changed existence, he must endure meaty dramatic crises, abandonment, grief and sacrifice, given a commendably credible treatment by an in-form ensemble. However, as the plot scurries along, Webb introduces elements of a glossy corporate conspiracy thriller which he then more or less forgets about; leaving the strands of that sub-plot dangling amongst a frayed web of narrative dead-ends.

Killer Joe

Forty years ago, William Friedkin was at the vanguard of a new wave of young filmmakers that revitalised Hollywood; the hotshot director who followed The French Connection with the blockbuster horror The Exorcist. Having tried his hand at just about every genre of film, after 1985s cop conspiracy To Live and Die in LA, Friedkin was a spent creative force. His career went off a cliff in slow-motion, with the Oscar-winner reduced to making low-rent television movies and pilots for series that didn’t make it to air. When he did make films, they were ridiculed (1995s erotic thriller Jade) or poorly distributed (2003s action movie The Hunted).

They say there are no second acts in American lives, but at 76, Friedkin is enjoying a late-career run of something approaching his old form. Reunited with the playwright Tracy Letts, who wrote his last film, the needless to say little-seen 2006 psychological thriller Bug, Killer Joe is a deep-fried Southern redneck noir that feels like the work of a director half his age. A bleakly comic story of murder, duplicity and sexual exploitation, Friedkin’s film fizzes with scuzzy, fidgety energy until a fatally overcooked finale undermines everything that has gone before.

Skipping though the potholed puddles in a torrential downpour, ragged drug-dealer Chris (Emile Hirsch) turns up unannounced at mobile home where his dim-bulb father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) lives with his slatternly stepmother Sharla (Gina Gershon) and his virginal teenage sister Dottie (Juno Temple). Repeated cutaways to a vicious pit-bull snarling and pulling on its chain remind us that this is a dog-eat-dog world, and someone is going to get devoured. Chris is desperate for money to settle a debt with a local drug lord, who is threatening to kill him, and so proposes a Double Indemnity plan in which they kill his unseen mother, Ansel’s first wife, collect her $50,000 insurance payout and split it among themselves.

Reluctant to do any killing themselves, Chris tells his father about a police detective who has a lucrative sideline as a contract killer. Killer Joe (Matthew McConaughey), is an ice-cold, Stetson-wearing assassin who is totally bad and quite possibly mad. With everyone agreed on the course of action, and already counting their share of the loot, the plan hits a snag when Chris is unable to come up with the hefty deposit for Joe’s unique services. Looking around the trailer and not seeing much in the way of collateral, Joe’s cold eye falls on the innocent Dottie, a child-woman who speaks in drawled nursery rhymes and sleeps surrounded by teddy bears. The deal is quickly sealed, but can Joe get the job done before the family tears itself apart?

Letts, who won a Pulitzer for his latest play, August: Osage County, has an aficionado’s understanding of disreputable genre cinema and a finely-tuned ear for how people talk to one another. Both Bug and Killer Joe are adapted from stage plays and although Friedkin does his best to open out the story, trailing his characters along endless strip-malls and through neon-lit strip-clubs, something of the story’s three-walled, stage-bound sensibility lingers. He has cast the story well, finding actors who can convincingly transform themselves into trailer-trash caricatures and giving McConaughey his best role in a decade.

But if you make a film about essentially nasty people, you risk making a nasty film. Friedkin, by turns amused and revolted by his characters sleazy shenanigans, is uncompromising in depicting the violence, abuse and degradation they endure. Where he errs is in making that violence the film’s sole reason for being. In its closing stages, Killer Joe becomes an unapologetic wallow in the mire, with a final scene so repugnant that the black comedy stops being comic and the film is just black, full stop.

Cosmopolis

After a decade-long run of accomplished and exciting films, David Cronenberg suffers an excruciating blow-out with his stilted, stuttering adaptation of Don DeLillo’s short novel Cosmopolis, the story of a twenty-something billionaire taking a limousine ride across Manhattan. Inert, stage-bound and self-conscious, Cronenberg’s journey is not worth the destination.

Twilight star Robert Pattinson stars as Eric Packer who has accumulated vast wealth by speculating on the international currency exchanges and all before his thirtieth birthday. Self made and “raised by wolves”, Packer has built up his massively-resourced corporation to be a globe-spanning money-machine. Isolated by his fortune, he has taken to sitting in a black leather throne in his stretch limo, surrounded by the latest information technologies and cocooned behind an inch of bullet-proof glass. From this impressive perch, Packer and his young, tech-savvy cohorts practise rarefied business strategies that allow them to predict currency fluctuations based on vast amounts of data collected from any and all available sources.

As the film opens, Packer has decided on a whim to travel across Manhattan to get a haircut from his childhood barber. His bodyguard Torval (Kevin Durand), one finger constantly pressed to his earpiece, warns him about the complications presented by a presidential motorcade, an anti-capitalist protest and what he refers to as a “credible threat” against Packer’s life. To make things worse, the tycoon has made a huge bet against the Chinese Yuan and his constantly updating computer screen isn’t delivering him any good news.

Ignoring all advice, Packer gets into the car and makes his meandering way across the city, like Leopold Bloom in a very expensive suit. From time to time, people in his life arrive at the car to have hollow, didactic conversations about nothing in particular. His snooty wife (Sarah Gadon) tells him she’d rather write poetry than consummate their marriage. His art-dealer (Juliette Binoche) tells him about a fabulously expensive Rothko painting that has just come on the market, while his financial guru (Samantha Morton) delivers an incomprehensible lecture about “the narrative quality of money”. His doctor arrives and, in the film’s sole attempt at humour, gives the billionaire a prostate examination as his head of computer security watches, aghast. Meanwhile, Packer’s car gets caught up in the simmering anti-capitalist protests on the city streets, which will eventually spill over into a tepid, tired-looking riot.

In Pattinson’s hands, the po-faced, frozen financier is really not a character you’d want to spend an hour and a half trapped in a car with, regardless of how plush the upholstery. Blandly handsome and wearily dull, the actor doesn’t help matters by being as wooden as a garden fence, delivering his convoluted dialogue in a tuneless monotone, complete with long sighs and pouted sneers. Like the film itself, there is nothing going on under the surface. The late arrival of Paul Giamatti as a half-crazed would-be assassin ups the ante on the non-stop chatter as Pattinson’s quest devolves into a twenty-minute snippet from a one-act play. The two characters bounce around an overdressed set, yapping interminably about inequality and injustice. Or at least, I think that’s what they’re talking about. By this point, Cronenberg’s dialogue has collapsed into a tedious, airless jumble of barely-connected words that escape coherence or meaning.

Adapting DeLillo’s 2003 novel himself (his first screenplay credit since 1999s Existenz) Cronenberg’s script comes off as an over-considered lecture on the amoral excesses of corporate America. Among all the jargon and double-speak, there is no perceptible anger. The director stages a riot, in which a man sets himself on fire in the manner of a Buddhist monk, and the scene has all the energy and impact of a sputtering candle on a birthday cake. Intended as a denunciation of the elite one per cent, this vapid, strained drama offers nothing but shiny emptiness.

Casa De Mi Padre

A joke that has to be explained isn’t really a joke at all. You get it or you don’t. Things that are kind-of funny are also kind-of not funny while stories that start out funny don’t always end up that way.

For his new comedy, Will Ferrell spoofs the peculiarly Mexican soap-opera known as the telenovela, supersaturated serial melodramas in which moustachioed men strut about in tight pants while scheming women heave their bosoms and throw random dagger-eyes. A particularly Mexican celebration of sex, death, glitz and trash (and watched by millions) the format hasn’t travelled to this side of the Atlantic. And neither does Casa de mi Padre, although unfamiliarity is only part of the reason why Ferrell’s parody is a dud. Stilted, choppy, weird and woefully short on laughs, what might have been a riotous eight-minute skit in a sketch show – or a viral sensation on Ferrell’s own Funny or Die website - feels horribly overextended at feature length.

Wide-eyed and innocent farmhand Armando Alvarez (Ferrell, speaking fluent Spanish) is the second son of a dairy rancher (the late Mexican actor Pedro Armendáriz Jr. in his last role) who lives deep in the backcountry in a hacienda filled with coloured tiles and heavy wooden furniture. Armando, devoted to the land, couldn’t be more different to his flashy older brother Raul (Diego Luna), who left the ranch to make it big in the drug-trade in Mexico City. When their father finds himself in financial difficulty, the prodigal Raul returns in his gleaming white limousine, with his gorgeous fiancée Sonia (Genesis Rodriguez) in tow, to save the homestead. When she stands and listens to her awkward soon-to-be brother-in-law expand on his notions of the ideal woman – someone who shares his love for the soil, Mexico, cattle and cactus-flowers – Sonia realises that this curly-haired buffoon is her soul mate. But how can Armando betray his only brother? And who will protect their homestead against the ruthless rival drug lord La Onza (Gael García Bernal)?

From the flashy opening credits to the obviously painted backdrops, the film mimics the sun-faded look of old two-reel serials, with undisguised rear-projections, intentional continuity errors and stuffed toys standing in for wild animals. Furthering the illusion are skipped frames, orange bursts of overexposed film and scratch marks that recall Tarantino’s 2007 retro-exercise Grindhouse.  There’s even a moment, about half way through, where everything comes to a dead stop as the filmmakers read out an apology for the shabbiness of their special effects, blaming the chaos that resulted from an unfortunate coming together of a wild tiger and a bag of cocaine. A lot of time and effort has been spent making this pricey studio comedy look like something cobbled together on a shoestring in the 1970s, but nothing like the same level of care and attention has been paid to the script. What Casa de mi Padre lacks are funny jokes that follow, one after another, in a reasonably paced progression.

Ferrell does his usual deadpan innocent but the story only occasionally allows him to play to his strengths; child-like bemusement, simmering frustration and flights of surreal lunacy. The few times that the actor does get to let loose are, unsurprisingly, the best moments in the film, particularly an inspired moment where Armando sits with his ranchero buddies (Efren Ramirez and Adrian Martinez) at a campfire and signs a plaintive love song, pausing to clean the spit-valve on his trumpet before starting a bumptious solo. But it’s too little, too late for a film that clocks in at just 84 minutes but feels considerably longer. No mi gusta. No mi gusta one bit.

The Dictator

From Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator to Mel Brooks’ The Producers and Team America’s puppet of Kim Jong-il, cinema comedy has a rich tradition of deflating the egos of tyrants and despots with deft satirical pinpricks. Dedicated to the “loving memory” of the late North Korean leader, Sacha Baron Cohen’s new comedy The Dictator is a jumpy collection of skits and set-ups – arranged as a kind-of romantic comedy - that starts promisingly but quickly exhausts itself.

Reunited with director Larry Charles, Baron Cohen continues to mine the same seam as Borat and Brüno in establishing an outlandishly foreign, monstrously egotistical idiot as a grandly exaggerated caricature before letting him loose on America. The difference this time is that rather than construct a mockumentary travelogue, The Dictator follows a conventional narrative line, albeit one with a decidedly scatological edge.

Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, the ‘beloved oppressor’ of fictional rogue state Wadiya, somewhere on the Horn of Africa. A founding member of the Axis of Evil, Aladeen enjoys a life of gilded privilege, built on the backs of his enslaved populace. Clad in a golden military uniform with a spray of unearned medals over his heart, the trigger-happy Aladeen prances around his kingdom with his uncle and second-in-command (Ben Kingsley), executing those who disagree with him at whim. But dark clouds are gathering, expressed in snippets of real-life speeches from Obama and Hilary Clinton, which threaten the despot’s reign. His plan to build a nuclear bomb and aim it at Jerusalem has met with a visit from the UN weapons inspectors. War looms unless Aladeen visits the United Nations in New York to explain himself.

Once arrived in America, Aladeen is kidnapped by the CIA (personified by casual racist John C Reilly), is shorn of his trademark luxuriant beard and let loose on the city. Adrift in Brooklyn, he meets protestor Zoey (Anna Faris), who offers him a job at her vegan feminist supermarket. Assisted in varying degrees of helpfulness by the right-on Zooey and a former Wadiyan rocket scientist (Jason Mantzoukas), Aladeen struggles to restore himself to his former position and keep his country free from the scourge of democracy.

The Dictator is obscene, scabrous, vulgar and crude but it is only occasionally funny. Aladeen is a rather tired comic character, especially when compared to Baron Cohen’s predecessors. The script pushes every conceivable outrageous button, but what is sorely missing is the candid-camera interactions with real-life people that used Borat and Brüno’s bottomless ignorance to expose shades of the same bigotry and racism in those he met along the way.

After eighty minutes or so of hit-and-miss political incorrectness, Baron-Cohen finally hits his stride in a scene where Aladeen stands before a press conference and delivers a subversive speech against dictatorships that lists, in a mercilessly detailed way, the similarities between the classic model of tyranny and the current American political landscape. It is a moment of real wit and invention that has the effect of making what has gone before seem even cheaper and shabbier.

The Raid

Every now and then, an action movie comes along that gives the much maligned genre a shot in the arm, and changes the game for all that follow suit. Writer and director Gareth Evans’ Indonesian cops and robbers martial arts epic The Raid is such a film: a breathless, heart-racing series of bone-crunching fight sequences built on a constant rush of adrenaline. An extraordinary cinematic experience, best enjoyed with a crowd of like-minded aficionados in a packed auditorium, it is the finest action film I have seen in a decade.

As terse and efficient as the title suggests, The Raid opens with rookie SWAT team cop Rama (Iko Uwais) reciting his morning prayers on a mat before kissing his pregnant wife goodbye and going to work. The police mission is simple: infiltrate a tower block in the Jakarta slums and extract the notorious crime lord Tama (Ray Sahetapy). Having filled the building with his own soldiers, spotters and sympathisers, Tama sits at a bank of television monitors in his room on the top floor, watching everything that movies. Within minutes of gaining entry (a sequence reinforced by total silence on the soundtrack) Rama and his colleagues come under sustained attack from Tama’s forces as they inch their way up, floor by floor, to a grandstand confrontation. Complicating matters is the fact that most of the cops in the unit are desperately inexperienced and that their cocksure lieutenant Wahyu (Pierre Gruno) has a cavalier attitude to their survival.

And that’s about as much plotting as the movie is concerned with, or needs. When the advancing SWAT team meet a young boy on a stairwell, and he races to trigger an alarm, it’s the cue for an all-out war. The ensuing 90 minutes are a hand-to-hand, elbow-to-face, machete-to-throat pitched battle, with a few wild-eyed machine-gunners thrown in for good measure. There are a handful of narrative twists – a helpful tenant with a sick wife, a potential turncoat in the squad, a possibility of redemption for one of the gangsters – but for the most part, The Raid is exuberantly uncomplicated. Good guy, bad guy, fight.

Once Evans kicks off the action, he never relents. Fists, feet, bullets and blades all swirl in a bravura display of violent invention, all captured by Evans’ constantly mobile camera. Uwais, who was working as a truck-driver before Evans cast him in his first Indonesian action movie Merantau, is a practitioner of a ruthless form of martial arts known as Pencak Silat and the fight choreography is blindingly quick and smooth. It’s an extraordinary performance of physical force and eye-grabbing charisma that announces Uwais as a martial arts star for a new generation.

Freely inspired by the best of the 1980s cult action movies, from John McTiernan’s Die Hard, John Carpenter’s Escape from New York and John Woo’s entire back catalogue, Evans’ creates a grimy, grimly realistic world within the claustrophobic setting of the tower block. But The Raid is not another ironic exercise in strip-mining the past for grindhouse thrills. Evans uses old-fashioned methods to make an old-fashioned movie that comes from an instinctive understanding of the grammar of action cinema. Time and again Evans displays remarkable creativity in his action sequences, showing us spectacular things that simply have never been seen before. It is violent, it is brutal, it is cheap and nasty but it is also exhilarating. Evans and Uwais make it look effortless but their ingenuity, economy and control are masterful.

Winner of both the audience and critics’ awards at this year’s Dublin International Film Festival, the screening of The Raid met with a three-minute standing ovation from a crowd that gasped and shrieked their way through the film. See it before the inevitable Hollywood remake focus-groups all the fun out of it.

Dark Shadows

Over the years film directors have allied themselves with their favourite actors to form lasting partnerships, combinations that lead, in some cases, to their best work. John Ford made more than twenty films with John Wayne, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro were inseparable before Leonardo DiCaprio came along, Neil Jordan and Stephen Rea remain seemingly joined at the hip while Woody Allen made a film a year with Mia Farrow in the decade from 1982 to 1992, until it all got a bit weird.

Getting weird doesn’t seem to bother Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. In fact, they seem to thrive on it. For Dark Shadows, their eighth collaboration in the twenty years since Edward Scissorhands, the pair has composed a Gothic valentine to an almost-forgotten occult-themed daytime television serial, which ran from the late sixties to the early seventies in America but never made it to screens on this side of the Atlantic.

Having taken more than a billion dollars in box-office receipts for his reimagining of Alice in Wonderland, Burton has been given a sizeable production budget with which to play dress-up. The production design is slick and sumptuous, the cast is filled with stars, the costuming and special effects are superb. However the story is a shambles, to say nothing of the sense of fatigue that surrounds watching, once again, an archly mannered Depp wandering through elaborate sets in pale greasepaint while speaking in a strangulated voice.

Pitched somewhere between horror and comedy and missing both marks by some distance, the story opens in 1760 as the well-to-do Collins family leave Liverpool for a new life in the New World. Having established a fine house and a thriving fishing business in a town they modestly call Collinsport, young Barnabas Collins (Depp) has fallen in love with a beautiful young woman (Bella Heathcote), spurning his housekeeper Angelique (Eva Green), a jealous witch who is a dab hand with a curse. Furious, Angelique dispatches Barnabas’ true love to a watery grave and turns the young man into a vampire, sealing him in an iron coffin for two hundred years.

Disinterred by a gang of soon-to-be-drained construction workers in 1972, Barnabas sets about reuniting with his descendants. The surviving Collins’, led by matriarch Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer) have fallen on hard times. The once proud mansion is falling down around their ears and their fishing business has failed. Pretending to be a distant English cousin, the vampire moves in and sets about restoring the family to their former glory, convincing Elizabeth that he poses no threat to her, her brother Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), brattish teenage daughter, Carolyn (Chloe Grace Moretz) or Roger’s troubled young son, David (Gully McGrath). 

The other residents of the house are not so easily convinced, including alcoholic child psychiatrist Dr Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter), newly-hired nanny Victoria (Heathcote again) and dogsbody janitor Willie (Jackie Earle Haley), who Barnabas quickly makes his personal Igor. The only person standing in Barnabas’ way is Angelique, his cauldron-stirring nemesis from two centuries ago, now a wealthy fishing magnate with porcelain skin, ruby-red lips and a predilection for low-cut evening gowns who is still obsessed with either winning Barnabas’ heart or driving a stake through it.

A stranger in an even stranger time, much of the film’s sense of fun is derived from fish-out-of-water Barnabas’ nonplussed navigation of the early 1970s, his courtly manners and frilly cuffs allowing him to pass as a gentlemanly English hippy while he wanders around his former home, delicately fingering period relics like Macramé knitted doilies and lava lamps. The beautifully constructed mansion, filled with carved wooden statuary and cleverly hidden secret rooms, is a pleasant enough place to pass the daylight hours but Burton’s story soon runs out of things for his undead protagonist to do, with the repetitive gags stranding Depp somewhere between The Addams Family and Austin Powers. A scattered few sexual innuendoes and unsurprising character developments provide events with a limp frisson, but even these seem shoehorned into a rapidly dwindling central narrative that is palpably exhausted far before the end.

Depp extracts as much juice as he can from his deadpan vampire with the singsong voice but has played this character, or a variation of it, far too many times for Burton and the results are nothing new. Barnabas is a funny character that Depp cleverly underplays but without an engaging story to provide him with some impetus, he slowly fades into the background. He’s all teeth and no bite. Opposite him, Green plays her vampish witch with particular relish, her flashing eyes signalling a tone of wolfish humour and camp morbidity that the rest of the film only achieves in fits and spurts. Reunited with her Batman Returns director, Pfeiffer is the only secondary character that Burton doesn’t seem to lose interest in and provides a consistent presence, even as the scattershot story collapses into a mess of flaccid jokes, narrative dead ends and elaborate special effects set pieces.

Headhunters

Obsession, betrayal and murder are some of the rich ingredients in this entertaining Norwegian noir crime thriller that has more twists than an old road and the blackly comic sensibility of a nation that spends half the year in darkness.

Adapted from the novel by best-selling Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø, Headhunters opens with a short pre-credits sequence that nimbly introduces us to a masked Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) as he breaks into a house and snips an expensive painting from its frame. Roger’s salary as a corporate headhunter isn’t enough to fund the lavish lifestyle he sees as his due; his multi-million euro house, sleek suits and his gallery-owning trophy wife Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund). So to make up the shortfall, he steals art from well-to-do Oslo houses, selling it through his seedy security-guard intermediary Ove (Eivind Sander).

So far, so Thomas Crown. But things are not all that they seem. Crushed by his own sense of inadequacy, Roger lives in fear that his wife will leave him for somebody else: someone taller, richer and willing to give her the child she desperately craves. With his stash of money running out, and a payment on his enormous mortgage due, Roger meets the tall, wealthy and urbane Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), who he immediately identifies as a perfect fit for an executive position at a high-flying technology company. More to the point, Clas lets slip that he has inherited an original painting by Rubens, stolen by the Nazis and stashed in his grandmother’s apartment. Clas and his priceless Old Master seem like the perfect target for Roger’s covert sideline. For the first time in his criminal career, however, the mark is prepared to fight back; first by apparently sleeping with Diana, then by letting slip that before beginning his climb up the corporate ladder, he was a highly-trained soldier and is still very handy with handgun and knife. As Clas comes looking for that which was stolen from him, Roger flees for his life, kicking off a brilliantly sustained hunt for vengeance that is consistently exciting and frequently surprising, falling somewhere between a morally indifferent Coen Brothers thriller and a Warner Brothers Road Runner cartoon.

The entire cast is superb but much of the film’s success is owing to an outstanding central performance from Aksel Hennie, whose character starts out smooth as glass but winds up shattered into tiny fragments. Goggle-eyed Hennie (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Steve Buscemi) plays the covert criminal as an engaging combination of skilled resourcefulness and panicky idiocy. It’s a neat trick, because each new indignity the story throws at him, from being run to ground by Coster-Waldau’s unstoppable nemesis to being flattened by a speeding truck and dunked in an open sewer, transforms this self-serving Napoleon into a sympathetic character. With his sharp tailoring, smug smile and deep concern for how his hair is looking at any given moment, Roger is a smarmy creep; it says a lot for Hennie’s performance that we are willing to root for him, regardless, all the way to a breathless, blood-splattered finish.

As Roger is slowly stripped of everything he possesses and his prospects for survival darken, the story spasms deliriously into a rapid-fire series of ever more violent twists, exposing the characters as deeply flawed and compromised individuals, providing the film with substance as well as style. Director Morten Tyldum never allows the pace to flag, sustaining the finely-wrought tension and not allowing the viewer enough time to question whether the intricacies of the plotting are entirely sound. Similarly, there isn’t room for any of Wallander’s windblown moping or the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s expositionary chatter with Tyldum racing through his story, dextrously skipping over the numerous plot holes, determined to cram in another outrageously gory thrill or gallows-humour gag.

The Cabin in the Woods

Drew Goddard’s splashy horror comedy The Cabin In The Woods expertly plays with audience expectations in a sly, cynically self-aware take on the slasher film. Not since Wes Craven’s Scream back in 1996 has a horror movie so cleverly subverted the genre with such devious wit, taking the bare bones of the clichéd camp-side teen massacre and spinning it into something deliciously dark and wildly entertaining.

The less the audience knows about the film beforehand, the more satisfying the payoff will be for a film where the merest suggestion of the workings of the simple plot might be considered a spoiler. Co-written by producer Joss Whedon and his Buffy the Vampire Slayer collaborator Drew Goddard (making his directorial debut), The Cabin in the Woods works as a gleeful rejoinder to the recent rash of rapidly uninteresting torture-porn horror films, delicately balancing the genre’s requirements for buckets of blood with a newly minted, and deviously uncomplicated, back-story that re-examines the ancient stories and myths that were the progenitors of what we find terrifying today.

The opening sequences set the stage with commendable efficiency. Five college students pile into a truck and head out to a remote woodland cabin, borrowed from a friend of a friend, for a long weekend. All five fit easily into broad character types, for a reason. There’s the athletic Alpha-male (Chris Hemsworth), the brave and brainy black guy (Jesse Williams), the blonde cheerleader (Anna Hutchison), the befuddled pot-head philosopher (Fran Kranz) and the wholesome, virginal good-girl (Kristen Connolly). Having arrived at their destination, despite dire warnings of doom from a scrofular stranger they meet on the way, the five set are soon exploring the cabin’s creepy basement. There, as decades of cinematic instruction have left the audience in no doubt, a greasy death awaits.

And that’s about all I can tell you. Although Whedon and Goddard’s script does find ways for their stock characters to surprise us, they are never developed into more than the sum of their standardised exteriors, making it difficult to care much about their fates. But that becomes much less of a problem when it becomes clear that the five imminent corpses are little more than pawns in a far greater game, as the story ingeniously enlarges. From an opening conversation between two seen-it-all scientist types (brilliantly played by Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) to the glimpses of international atrocities glimpsed on television screens and similarly inspired by folklore, there are signs that the gory events are being manipulated from the shadows.

The thrill is all in discovering who, or what, is pulling the strings as the terrifyingly unpredictable story piles on the genre subversions and upends every stereotype in the book. The greatest trick The Cabin in the Woods plays is in somehow refreshing a genre that had become tediously stale and unambitious. Funny, creepy and delighted with the cleverness of its own irreverent conceit, it’s the most entertaining teen horror movie in years.

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists 3D

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once Upon A Time In Anatolia

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Carter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Means War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rampart

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

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

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

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

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

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

The Muppets

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Descendants

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

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

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

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

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

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

War Horse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Iron Lady

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Artist

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

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

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

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

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

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