Disappearance of Alice Creed

If a movie's British, written and directed by a newcomer, it's what? No prizes for guessing it will be a technically adroit crime thriller with one set, basic location work, if any, and a small cast. This time, first-name-less "J" Blakeson (one of the writers for The Descent: Part 2) contrived a clever tale of a rich man's daughter outlasting her two abductors, in The Disappearance of Alice Creed.

The pace is well-maintained, from the dialogue-free opening set-up scenes of the kidnappers' van and home base to the wry ending. The plot is a gripping sequence of twists, in which the audience learns the bearded ex-convict kidnappers are a gay pair, the younger one is a practising bisexual who knew and side-plots with the woman, the older man realises the betrayal, and the woman pulls more tricks before grabbing the ransom and truly disappearing.

Blakeson gained sufficient funding (from the Isle of Man) to recruit a trio of British actors with above-average track records. Gemma Arterton, chained and spreadeagled on a bed much of the time, plays Alice Creed as a spirited young woman who screams and swears while suffering the indignities of nudity, smudged make-up and bodily evacuations. The actress got her breakthrough in the 2008 Bond (as divinely named Strawberry Fields), which led to appearances in Clash of the Titans and Prince of Persia.

Her younger captor is Scottish (Martin Compston, an untrained natural who debuted as the star of Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen). He's the seemingly diffident accomplice of the domineering older man, Eddie Marsan, a character actor who's long worked steadily in the UK and Hollywood, hitting the big time as Inspector Lestrade in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes franchise. He's also worked for Mike Leigh (twice, gathering a handful of Best Supporting Actor awards for Happy-Go-Lucky), Scorsese (Gangs of New York), Mann (Miami Vice) and Berg (Hancock). His forte is looking menacing, and this movie is made to measure for him.

All debut features are so-called calling cards, and Blakeson produced one that should announce his name well. Another name that should be seen more is Mark Eckersley. After more than a decade as an assistant on UK features (including Billy Elliott), this movie is his debut calling card too, as editor.

Carlos the jackal

In Hong Kong, Olivier Assayas is best-known as the ex-husband (1998-2001) of Maggie Cheung, who starred in Irma Vep, his biggest success, and remained amicable enough to make Clean with him in 2004. More recently, the Frenchman (son of director Jacques Remy) is better-known in Europe for directing and co-writing a three-part 330-minute TV mini-series, Carlos. Abridged versions (140/160 minutes) also appeared in 2010 in theatres and on DVD, where its anti-heroic title character was more clearly identified as Carlos the Jackal.

After watching the shorter version's first hour, I paused ... the movie's pace, action scenes, cinematography in various countries, multi-lingual script, edge-of-the-seat edginess, and lead actor (Edgar Ramirez) were so good that I wanted to watch the full version and not miss three hours' worth of detail in the extraordinary life of a revolutionary Venezuelan killer who captured OPEC.

The story of "Carlos", originally given Lenin's first name (Ilich) by his father, provides an historical review of the 1970s and 80s by Assayas and lead screenplay writer Dan Franck. Initially a devoted supporter of the Palestinian cause, the violent terrorist became a media notoriety, a star attraction on a global stage. He was also a bon-vivant serial lover, and Assayas boldly includes full frontal nudity to illustrate Carlos's vanity (and European broadmindedness).

Assayas again chose an ideal lead actor: Ramirez is also Venezuelan, he fattens up just as Carlos did in real life, and he dominates the movie with entrancing images of a fiercely driven professional, charming and chilling, calculating and callous, arousing surprising empathy for a mercenary radical.

The abbreviated movie was a cinematic page-turner, and there's a great chance that 330 minutes of my life will be rushed through very happily by a top-grade TV mini-series that is also very good cinema.

Dream home

Edmond Pang Ho-cheung has a good track record as one of Hong Kong's more inventive directors, and his latest movie earned new appreciation for its leading actress and main producer, Josie Ho. She's one of Stanley Ho's daughters, which makes the theme of Dream Home highly ironic: this is a satirical murder story bloodily highlighting the inflationary horror of Hong Kong's property market.

Media reports suggest that Ho forced Pang to make his scenario even gorier, in order to intensify her movie's marketability. What was produced was a slasher movie that deserves to become a classic in its genre.

Utilising an ever-changing time-frame, Pang builds a back history of hardship, family pressures, slum housing, governmental collusion with property developers, economic lawlessness and marital infidelity to account for the calculated bloody-mindedness of a single woman (Ho) with two jobs and an obsession about buying an apartment with a harbour view.

She'd finally raised sufficient deposit cash, by allowing her terminally ill father to die, at a time when the Hang Seng Index reached its 2007 peak; the apartment sellers jacked up its selling price beyond her funding level. In one evening visit to the apartment building, Ho's calmly amoral character kills 10 people and a pregnant woman in a successful effort to decrease the building's property values overnight.

The side stories for some of them are further condemnations of Hong Kong society at varying levels, and their means of death are imaginative black cinema. The shockingly credible SFX (produced by an experienced Thai team) include a disemboweled punk smoking, a fully broken neck, a lesbian prostitute with a bed strut in her mouth, and a severed penis. Murder weapons such as a screwdriver, hammer, golf club and vacuum-packaging are derived from the side stories, adding to an audience's fascination with a movie presenting Hong Kong cityscapes with beautifully arranged lighting effects and subtle music (Italian composer Gabriele Roberto, who'd worked for Pang on Exodus in 2007).

Several well-known Hong Kong actors play cameos, but the only real character is Ho's determined workaholic. In this movie, she wasn't afraid to show her age, fleshy chin and an independent spirit that should have given her property magnate father sleepless nights. Pang's script, opening review of scandalous property prices, and post-production statement (on the DVD) comprise a bloody assault on his home city's major driving force.

There's an unexpected irony for Pang in the manic rebound of property prices in 2010, making the per-foot prices of 2008 now seem like relative bargains. I suspect there's another irony lying behind the artful front credits, when the floor plan of a vast apartment includes Portuguese translations; it would be truly ironic justice if they're the plans of a Ho family palace.

Matador, The

Documentaries are usually vanity projects: funding difficulties necessitate their being movie-makers' financially unrewarding labours of love or sponsored productions. So it's natural to assume that a Spanish bullfighter's management company funded The Matador, covering three years in the life of an ambitious young man.

In 2003, Granada-born David Fandila (El Fandi), a top-rated 21-year-old set out to be a top ranker. His voice-over interview comments note that most matadors only have six or seven years at their peak and that's when millions can be earned. Fandila's target was appearances at 100 corridas in Spain or South America in one year, a feat only achieved by a dozen other matadors during the ritual sport's recorded history.

One of them, with whom Fandila often co-starred, was Enrique Ponce, a box-office champion who broke the 100-plus record ten times running. A non-aficiando can sense, from the brief extracts shown, that the older Ponce had a calm, classical style of choreography and posing in the ring. Fandila's youth only partly explains his faster, flashier temperament.

Outside the ring, however, he's portrayed as a quietly determined professional, wanting to achieve the glory that had eluded his corrida-crazy family for four generations. Fandila had aped matador moves at the age of four; a family video shows him as an eight-year-old going through the motions with a calf. He and his more reserved brother were well schooled in competitiveness, becoming members of the national ski team. The brother became his personal assistant when Fandila junior switched to bullfighting.

First-time director Stephen Higgins needed to collate material from various sources (family archives, film of El Fandi's early corridas and visit to Lima, B&W media prints, and interviews with the family, managers, bullfighting commentators and a girlfriend who appears only once for an al fresco family meal). Wisely, the production including comments from, and footage of, Spanish anti-bullfighting campaigners (and also sensibly employed a veteran documentary maker, Nina Gilden Seavey, to co-direct it).

Interviewees apologetically stress the sport's cultural, tradition-conscious values, and several corrida scenes do successfully illustrate the beautiful barbarity of a spectacular entertainment and people's ballet. Fandi's massive leg scar, presumably from an early goring, is unexplained, but the movie's audiences do see him tripped, poked, unclothed, and then badly gored by different bulls.

The latter goring occured during the third match in a home-city corrida in which he fought all six bulls. Proudly shooing away nervous ring personnel, he completes the kill, strides out and undergoes back-stage surgery, returning to the ring and fans' oles after 45 minutes to complete the corrida. That was in 2005, when he finally reached his 100-plus target and was the year's top-ranker matador (having appeared in 72 corridas in 2003 and 97 the next year).

Relentlessly supporting a personal staff of six and all his loving family's pressure and needs, El Fandi gives one a sense of the money-making roles that Tiger Woods, Liz Taylor, Michael Jackson et al were obliged to play.

Strangely, the movie's been truncated. First screened in cinemas (in 2008) at a length of 106 minutes, it runs for only 75 on its DVD version. Maybe the producers reckoned that the bullfight's ritual three episodes for a matador's displays would look too much the same to maintain a TV or mainstream audience's interest and respect, so a half-an-hour of them were shunted into a DVD extra. (It doesn't explain the traditions of corrida dress code, and whether genitalia can only be flaunted on the left side.)

I am love

Food is a favourite film fetish, as I Am Love (Io sono l'amore) reminds its audience fitfully.

A mansion-inhabiting rich Milanese industrialist's Russian-born wife (Tilda Swinton) meets her son's bearded friend, a chef (Eduardo Gabbriellini), during a grand Yuletide family dinner (he's baked a birthday cake for father-in-law's retirement day). The story moves to springtime, when an eggplant and elderflower appetizer convinces the son to back the chef's planned rustic restaurant near San Remo. Mother is soon excited by the chef's freshly blow-torched biscuit (for son's engagement party), and then cinematically and orally ravished by a luscious, artfully lit prawn dish (at the chef's city restaurant).

With one son engaged, her daughter's lesbianism suddenly revealed, and her marriage in a state of polite stupor, the mother is clearly primed for a full meal of sensuality. When she and the chef visit his farmland, the audience is only shown a quick blurred kiss, followed by a cut to black and Swinton portraying a feast of facial delight.

Her next course is a business dinner menu discussion (an excuse for the duo to have a day together in the wilds of close-up shots of insects and plants), which leads to a Russian fish soup (whose serving confirms the son's suspicion about his mother's fidelity, and results in his death in the family's swimming pool).

Highly symbolic Italian melodrama, the movie was reportedly a project in the minds of co-producers Swinton and writer-director Luca Guadagnin ever since they'd worked together on the 1999 London-set murder-docudrama The Protagonists. In 2002 the Sicilian movie-maker and Scottish actress made a documentary short, Tilda Swinton: The Love Factory. By then, Cambridge grad Swinton had her breakthrough role in fellow-Scot Danny Boyle's The Beach (2000). Sidestepping from UK art-house movies (honing her talent with Derek Caravaggio Jarman and Sally Orlando Potter) and European indies to the mainstream (the Narnia franchise), she won a Golden Globe (Best Actress, 2001, The Deep End) and BAFTA and Oscar Best Supporting Actress awards (Michael Clayton, 2008) and gained further recognitions for Julia (in France) and Burn After Reading (for the Coen brothers).

The redhead's distinctive chiseled features suited modern audiences' appreciation of bony beauty -- Cate Blanchett, Kristin Scott-Thomas and Gwynneth Paltrow among others following in the footsteps of such angular actors as Katherine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Mia Farrow and Helen Mirren. (In reality, maybe Monroe, Gardner, Bacall and other voluptuous beauties were exceptions rather than standard models.)

Swinton is, as always, a pleasure to watch, as are many of the movie's locations (particularly the family mansion). Some supporting roles are good (Pippo Delbono as the frosty husband, Maria Paiato as the loyal housekeeper, veteran Marisa Berenson as the matriarch); the second son is a redundant character and the Sikh Indian-American M&A financier is a ludicrous distraction. Saddest of all, food fetishists don't have enough on which to feast their eyes and imaginations.

Secret of the magic gourd

The Disney company joined up with a Hong Kong animation company (Centro) and a China film group to create a CGI/animation studio producing films for the PRC. First off the SFX artists' assembly lines, in 2007 after two years' work, was The Secret of the Magic Gourd.

Designed for children rather than adults, and obliged to present government-approved images of ethical behaviour (and official disbelief in supernatural agents of happiness), it tells the tale of a work-shy lad who learns that a magic gourd brings more troubles than delights when it tries to do its master's bidding. It's a Chinese children's story with various Western equivalents: be careful what you wish for.

Somewhere in a Chinese city (Hangzhou locations), a lazy primary schoolboy who's slightly plump and comparatively big-eyed has handsome well-off middle-class parents, a cute sister and a granny and they all live in a pretty big house. The boy likes fishing, which is an ideal sport for lazy souls, wishes life could be easier, and catches a magic gourd. It's small and chatty, fits in his pocket, and is a below-par CGI animation with a pair of beady eyes and an emotional mouth.

This genie (called Bailey in the movie's dubbed English version) interprets the new master's wishes literally. The boy wants to capture a chess piece, so it helps him swallow them all; he likes a toy shop's products, so they all fly and march to his home. He needs help in a math text, so it lifts all the characters off a class-mate's paper, including her name, which gives him another black mark in the eyes of his pretty wise teacher (Hong Kong's Gigi Leung wasted). No one knows the secret of the grumpy boy's failed tricks, but his teacher and audience know that he must and will learn to study hard and do his own thing, which is winning the school's relay swimming race and thereby gaining self-confidence and Bailey's disappearance.

Standard Disney family fare translated into a modern Chinese context, the story has little to amuse adults (and a few typical bogus bloopers by Bailey in a DVD extra). Bailey remains too small a character physically and figuratively in the live-action movie, and his only animated sidekick is a little frog who croaks. The CGI effects are occasionally cute, but the movie over-focuses on the boy and his pals, to no dramatic effect.

This movie felt like a trial run, a Disney taster meant to reassure mainland censors and educators. Sales returns may have justified the dubbed version for the English-speaking DVD market; Disney's Buena Vista probably didn't even try to distribute it to cinemas.

At the end of daybreak

Movies with unlikable characters are difficult to watch, hard to enjoy. Yet, when lead characters, and the actors portraying them, are intensely credible, a movie such At The End of Daybreak holds its audience's attention and respect. The 2009 feature, aka Sham Moh, was written and directed by Malaysian-Chinese Ho Yuhang, an award-winner for Min (2003) and Sanctuary (2004).

His latest film earned Best Actress (HK Film Critics) and Best Supporting Actress (Asian Film fest and Golden Horse) awards for veteran Kara Hui Ying-hung, who'd last won a major HK acting award in 1981 for My Young Auntie, a Shawscope action movie. She plays a struggling heavy-drinking grocery keeper whose feckless husband shacked up with her younger sister, leaving her with an only child. At the age of 23, he loafs around the shop, plays pool with a pair of other young Chinese drifters (in an undefined Malaysian town) and has casual flings with local girls.

Another Hong Kong-born actor, Chui Man-kin, is a convincingly bored yet loyal son with a hardened streak, revealed at the start of the movie when he disposes of a trapped rat with boiling water. He's having a non-romantic sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl (excellently played by newcomer Ng Meng-hui). Her only sibling has been sent to study in Australia, she's a lazy student, her parents are poor role models, and she's happy to gossip about a schoolmate's pregnancy. Her parents discover she's got birth-control pills and spot a chance to squeeze money from the young man's mother by threatening to charge him with statutory rape.

Every character is a selfish egocentric and, somewhat predictably, the movie develops into a bleak example of the "accidental noir" genre, a murder story without any mysteries. It does so well in cinematic terms, dispensing with the standard surpluses of explanatory dialogue, symbolic side-plots and moody music. Instead, the camera focuses on the characters' increasing levels of tension and their inability to communicate any feelings. They don't have many, it's clear. They're simple sad humans trying to live with their empty selves.

Enter the void

It isn't necessary to know about a movie director's spouse in order to appreciate the movie. Sometimes, though, especially with long films that outstay their welcome, such knowledge helps a viewer fill dire patches with musings that may be more amusing. Thus I'm idly curious how the Argentine-born Frenchman Gaspar Noe meet his kindred spirit and wife, Lucile Hadzihalilovic (from Bosnian immigrant parents), a film school graduate two years older than him.

Which parts of their first English-language movie, Enter the Void (2009) did she, as Noe's credited co-writer, draft? Did he collaborate on her 1996 writing-directing debut feature about child abuse, La bouche de Jean-Pierre? They go back a long way. She produced, co-edited and acted in his breakthrough 1991 short film, Carne, in which a butcher kills a man he wrongly accuses of raping his daughter.

They worked together on a set of sex-education short films in 1998 (hers was called Good boys use condoms, his was Sodomites). In the same year, she edited his feature-length follow-up on the vengeful butcher, Seul contre tous (I Stand Alone). Six years later, she was on her own, perhaps, directing her adaptation of a Wedekind story set in a disturbing girls' school (Innocence). By then, he'd already gained international fame and funds from his infamously violent take on misogyny, rape, homophobia and brutal vengeance, Irreversible (2002). They could now afford to develop a favourite project inspired by drug-tripping hallucinations.

A young North American drug dealer, initially a first-person character seen only in a mirror, is shot dead by Tokyo police during a drugs raid. His spirit wanders above the city to watch over the adored younger sister who'd joined him in Japan, working as a pole-dancer. For various reasons (its photogenic neon lights and harsh anti-drug laws), Tokyo was Noe's ideal location.

As in Irreversible, Noe takes us out at night a lot, into dark valleys and strobe-lit discos, neon-dazzled streets and interiors, scruffy corridors and lurid bedrooms. Couples have rough or indifferent sex, male and female genitalia are exhibited non-erotically, and unpleasant gay characters lounge around. In swathes of non-linear flashbacks, when Noe's hovering hand-held camera returns from cranes and helicopters to ground level, we follow the baby-faced young man's interactions with his sister, a wiser friend, and a young Caucasian client and his randy mother. The last two characters are played by professional actors (from the UK), as is the sister; other lead characters are first-timers with varying levels of screen talent.

Noe also flashes back frequently to show the infant siblings getting a lot of nude bathing experience with their voluptuous mother, who dies in a car crash with their father while the kids are traumatised in the back seat. Throughout, there are trippy CGI scenes recalling old kaleidoscopes, pinhole cameras recording blood vessels, and apparent tributes to Kubrik's spaced-out visions in 2001.

When that movie first appeared, trendy folks used to book front-row stalls seats, smoke grass and Wow! at magic scenes. Grass might help one better to get into the spirit of Noe's void, where the deliberately hazy blurriness of the camera film he chose to use probably looks better too. Even the front-credits are perversely offbeat, presented strobe-style at high speed together with mind-banging electronic musical noise. Other affectations thrust in an audience's face include brief cuts to black to simulate the young man's eyes blinking, florid CGI enhancement of cityscapes and sets, and a pair of much longer cuts to black during the final sequence illustrating the conception and birth of a baby.

That truly climactic ending's two black pauses are akin to cinematic coitus interruptus. They follow an exhausting set of overhead shots of couples copulating and licking noisily, some kinkily, in a love hotel's blurry bedrooms. The tip of a penis is shown (via a pinhole camera or CGI) preparing to ejaculate, as seen from within a woman's body, which may be that of the drug-addled sister, whose finally child emerges in a big blur, to have its umbilical cord cut and scream at its entry into the signposted void. Noe may have hoped it was his final tease, which is why there are no end-credits, which were flashily zipped through at the beginning. Our audiences will leave exhausted, debating who the father is, the obsessed Noes may have thought.

Painful, pretentious, occasionally pretty, most appropriately watched on DVD with a Fast Forward button, Enter the Void is unforgettable and only slightly forgivable cinema.

Missing lynx, The

There is definitely a vast global market for cartoon or CGI animation movies; they're the ideal family entertainment. Disney made fortunes out of them, as have Pixar, Dreamworks, the creators of South Park and The Simpsons, Tim Burton, Aardman and specialist Japanese studios. Art houses often show other nations' efforts, often grimmer or more bizarre, from Czechs, Danes, Israelis, French, Irish, Australians and Brits other than Nick Park. Other countries entering the competitive animation lists include Spain, whose The Missing Lynx [El lince perdido]was "presented" by Antonio Banderas (Shrek's now-spun-off Puss in Boots).

Released for the Christmas 2008 market in Spain, the original movie ran for an unlikely 140 minutes according to its Wikipedia page, lasted for 97 minutes when it went elsewhere in Europe, and is listed as a 75-minuter in the U.S. market. I saw the medium-length version and could see why cuts could have been made to speed up its pace.

The title character (appropriately, an Iberian wild cat) is an accident-prone comic hero whose menagerie of unlikely allies comprises a feisty goat, a paranoid chameleon, a convalescent hawk and a half-blind double-agent mole (like the movie's title, that must also be a wordplay in the Spanish language). Naturally, a lynxette arrives on the scene, along with an evil hunter, a pair of his bumbling henchmen, a flighty flamingo, and a modern-day Noah with a scifi ark.

In addition to this line-up of standard animated characters, there are other acknowledgments to classics in the scenery and plot developments (from The Lion King to Mouse Hunt). Above all, the animators do what all their peers do - display their talents for creating trickier effects such as dust and shadows, water and changing light, reflections and vehicular speed. They're admirable as are some of the animals' solo scenes, but group scenes exhibit a static staginess also evident in poorly-directed movies featuring human actors not transformed into an ensemble.

Lead writer and co-director Raul Garcia is a veteran from Asterix, the Smurfs and Disney. Co-writer Stephen Hughes has lived and worked in Spain since 1986, has worked on other animated projects there, and provides the voice of the vengeful hunter. A trio of English voices join him to render the whole animal cast in the English-language version (one channeling the intonations of Kenneth Williams), and they don't add depth to the overly-cute flawed personalities.

Several minutes in the final chase sequence exhibit a pace, flair and visual excitement that capture a viewer's sceptical mind. But most of the movie is no worse than many recent sub-standard Hollywood efforts, and that's damning it with a faint praise.

Kids are all right, The

Will the Academy dare? LGBT movie fans hold bated breaths, to see if either Annette Bening or Julianna Moore, or both, will be nominated for 2010 Best Actress Oscars for their roles as lesbian moms in The Kids Are All Right. This could also be the year that the Academy might nominate Jim Carrey and/or Ewan MacGregor for playing homosexual lovers in I Love You Philip Morris (which is scheduled, for a third time, to finally get some sort of initial distribution in North America in December 2010).

Bening and Moore complement each other well as a short-haired alpha-female doctor and somewhat dizzy wannabe landscape designer. Bening went to an agency to find an acceptable sperm donor and, 18 years later, her daughter (Australia-born TV child actor Mia Alice in Wonderland Wasikowska) is ready to go off to college. Her 15-year-old brother (veteran child actor Josh Cirque du Freak Hutcherson) is another product of the same donor's sperm, given to Moore; he wants to find out about his dad. An 18-year-old is legally able to do if the donor agrees, so the girl enquires on his behalf and they both meet the donor, who rides a motorcycle and is an organic farmer and restaurateur (Mark Ruffalo in his regular curly-haired twinkling-eyed form). You'll know by now that the movie's set in California.

Apparently, state law does not require the second parent's approval before contact is made with a donor. Just as incredibly, Ruffalo's character has no qualms about meeting his sperm's offspring after a one-minute phone call. Director and co-writer Lisa Cholodenko (High Art, Laurel Canyon) expects her audience to accept other dubious screenplay ploys, from Moore's gay character's remarkably eager bedroom activity with Ruffalo to the son's inexplicable friendship with a coke-snorting lout and Bening's soberly sentimental rendition of a Joni Mitchell song.

The talented cast dispel disbeliefs, doing wonders with dialogue that is mostly wry and witty as well as contrived. For much of the time, though, audience attention is side-whacked by a loud pop soundtrack, suggesting that the director and her co-writer (Stuart Keeping the Faith Blumberg) set out to attract teen movie-goers to a film focused on middle-aged parents.

The film won praise at Sundance, did well at the US box office (US$25 million versus a US$4 million budget) and can be classified as an above-average TV movie (with a G&L plot and bedroom scenes that wouldn't be allowed on US network TV). Bening and Moore make it work; I'd wager that Bening will be nominated (and lose out for the fourth time).

Other guys, The

There is some fairness in the world: middle-aged men are getting more attention from Hollywood. Naturally, one key factor accounting for such non-teen marketing savvy is the aging quality of so many former Hollywood action stars. Let's call them The Other Guys, which is what writer-director Adam McKay called his bunch of NYC comic cops.

They're an oddball assortment of fat, floundering or forlorn cops trying to succeed in the shadow of the station's hot-shot pair of self-promoting celebrity cops (Samuel L Jackson and Dwayne Johnson). The station chief (Michael Keaton) is moonlighting in retail to support his son's bisexuality classes, while gullible aged nerd and forensic accountant Will Ferrell is paired with deeply depressed desk cop Mark Wahlberg. He'd accidentally shot a top Yankee player and learnt ballet dancing; Ferrell's character is a reformed pimp who's married a hot ER doctor (Eva Mendes).

Plot developments try frantically to maintain the weird and wacky style, and the opening car-chase mayhem indicates there'll be loads of SFX slapstick for the teens to enjoy en route to the predictably happy end of another odd-couple buddy movie.

McKay and Ferrell, who worked on Saturday Night Live for several years, have produced a caper every two years since 2004 (Anchorman) and their fans may discuss if that was the best of the crop, or Talladega Nights (2006) or Step Brothers (2008). The Rotten Tomatoes scorecard settles the argument: critics overall gave their latest collaborative effort top marks (77%), Ferrell's highest rating other than Elf (84%).

The Other Guys, a silly screwball comedy with some high-speed witty patter, was a success (US$163 box-office gross). Its ludicrously high reported budget of $100 million suggests that everyone involved paid themselves a fortune. That's a cute irony as the plot focuses on multi-billion-dollar fraud, with Steve Coogan playing a wicked Brit financier whose cliche-driven dialogue includes an OTT Gordon Gecko update.

Ferrell presumably misses the era of live-action impromptu comedy, zany improv skits and wild bombast, because umpteen artfully-scripted scenes of such comic megalomania are shoe-horned into the scenario (with Mendes looking understandably nonplussed and plain ugly when she has to join Ferrell in a reprise of "Pimps Don't Cry", a song he and McCay co-wrote).

What begins with some promise of comic originality becomes an irritating and contrived bore, its failings highlighted every time the camera focuses on close-ups of Ferrell's fattening face (which is very frequent, and comically unrewarding). He and McKay will surely work together on a biennial basis as long as they can get themselves US$100 million budgets. Ferrell's fee for his first project with McKay was reportedly US$20 million; he's surely upped the ante since then.

The movie's final irony lies in the snazzy animations during the end credits. As in the trendiest anti-capitalist documentary expose, pointedly diagrammed facts and figures outline the stupendous expansion of the wealth gaps in the USA. I fear many US movie-goers who stay to the end may think the incredible mathematical figures are also jokes.

Tokyo story

Celebrated Japanese auteur Tasujiro Ozu was reportedly inspired by Leo McCarey's melodramatic Make Way For Tomorrow (1937) to create Tokyo Story in 1953. Seeing the older film for the first time was a compelling reason to watch the Japanese equivalent (also re-issued on DVD by Criterion).

Both are B&W, stagy and very dependent on the skills of the ensemble casts. They are totally different in style, story line and pace, of course. One is derived from Broadway, the other builds on the traditions of Kabuki and Noh theatre. The movies' themes are the same: ageing parents and generation gaps, family neglect and youthful selfishness. But where McCarey plumped for melodrama, Ozu presents subtler scenes. The major problem is his old-fashioned Japanese approach: he takes twice as long to tell his story.

Written with Kogo Noda (the co-writer for 13 out of Ozu's 15 post-War films), the movie watches a couple in their late 60s travel from a seaside town to Tokyo for the first time, to visit a son, daughter and the widow of their second son. He'd died in the Pacific War, and it's remarkable how the movie never refers nationalistically to the war and American occupation. I sensed a level of self-censorship; no character expresses any post-War bitterness. (There's even an odd, to Western eyes, product placement for Rinso washing powder.)

Much of the time in the first hour, the family members express little except standard Japanese conversational politenesses and male grunts. Plot developments occur off-screen and are referred to as past or future events. This is apparently an Ozu trait, as are the sudden cuts to details in stark townscapes (especially children walking, smokestacks and bare skies) with musical accompaniment. The most notice trait is constant usage of low-level camera positions.

This tatami-level cinematic viewpoint can be wearisome when it only shows doorways, corridors and women criss-crossing kitchens. In Western cinema, other than in Welles' truly ground-breaking sets, the device was usually a method for showing (and showing off to) audiences that a movie had been filmed in real locations with ceilings and natural lighting. In the Japanese context of households, designed for kneeling and squatting, the low-level angle does make sense. It also heightens the effect of close-up facial shots during reveries and conversations (when Ozu's characters are usually seen speaking direct to camera).

Roger Ebert commented memorably that in this movie Ozu had allowed his camera one tracking shot, which was much more than he usually did. The camera follows the old couple for a minute as they walk along an undifferentiated piece of pavement. They've decided to leave Tokyo, and it is a turning point in the scenario, but is it really so crucial that its audience needs to have significance emphasised?

The staginess in Ozu's plotting is clear from the frequent front-of-centre fixed camera position. Initially alienating, the formula captured my attention in the second hour, when the characters begin to draw back the curtains of their self-consciously two-dimensional lives. Scene by scene, one watches a cinematic version of an animated slide show.

The pace moves from a slow stroll to an almost sprightly amble while the mother dies and her family gathers again in their parents' home town. The widowed daughter-in-law and single younger daughter are the most dutiful and loving members of the younger generation, but the screenplay only hints at the obvious conclusion: children who marry inevitably make their own lives, create their own families, and will also end up alone.

Matter-of-factual and docu-dramatic, the film is rated by many critics to be Ozu's masterpiece and an all-time great. Not in my eyes and mind, which are not looking forward eagerly to watching other Ozus.

Make way for tomorrow

Make Way for Tomorrow was a little-appreciated family drama in 1937, when it earned no Oscar nominations. Its director, Leo McCarey, did win the Best Director award the same year for a comedy feature (The Awful Truth, starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant); he told the Academy it had acknowledged the wrong movie. It was clear why: his non-winner was a filmed version of a Broadway play (itself an adaptation of a novel), it had no big stars, no happy ending and little credibility.

Seven decades later, following a Criterion DVD re-issue, its up-front-credit message might ring just as true in another troubled economic era comparable to that of the late Thirties: Honor Thy Parents. However, Criterion's marketing, including an admiring extra by Peter Bogdanovich (citing Orson Welles and Hitchcock), cannot make a silk purse out of a stagy melodrama.

An elderly couple (comedian Victor Moore and studio contract actress Beulah Bondi) suddenly advise their four grown-up East Coast children that the family home has been foreclosed by the bank. The old folks will be homeless in two days; none of the children has room to take in both parents. One son (Thomas Mitchell) takes in his mother, to share his daughter's bedroom, and a daughter can let her father sleep on a sofa, while everyone waits for the snooty eldest daughter to arrange accommodation for them both in her home.

Selfish attitudes rouse disputes in the family's three generations, and the production has the hard task of constructing an appealing bitter-sweet tale. It failed because the basic premise defied belief: the self-centred parents had kept their plight secret for six months and then thrown it in their surprised children's laps. Selfishness ran in the family genes; like molasses in the final cavalcade when the old pair treat themselves to complimentary drinks, dinner and a dance at their honeymoon hotel after happily taking a free auto ride to get there.

The cringe-worthy drama (adapted and opened out for the screen by the same writer who earned an Oscar nomination for The Awful Truth) also includes an eye-rolling elderly Yiddish shopkeeper who muses about wives and children with the father and, yes, an eye-rolling plump black maid who gets on nicely with the mother.

The B&W movie was definitely worth preserving, for its ensemble acting, effective use of back projections, and make-up expertise in adding 20 years to the face of Bondi. If only her role had been less of an unbelievable split personality as an overly ideal wife and incompetent mother.

Au revoir Taipei

Audiences at a handful of international film fests in 2010 (from Berlin to SFO) gave it their top awards, with good reason: Au Revoir Taipei is a charming adolescent rom-com. It's a happy little lightweight cinematic souffle, a tasty entertainment from Arvin Chen, a first-time writer-director whom Wim Wenders co-executive-produced (perhaps explaining why experienced Caucasians are credited with the cinematography and editing).

As so often with Chinese debut features, there's an over-reliance on the Wong Kar-wai "look" - doorways painted red, green lighting and purple lips, rain-soaked back lanes and sloppy cafes, neon lights and strange angles. Pretty to look at and far from menacing in Chen's quirky tale of oddball, goofy Taipei kids during one night of slapsticky gangland antics.

At times, the cuteness and the characters' comic non-viciousness are cloying, especially when the French motif is overstated in the soundtrack of pretend-Parisienne cafe violin music and jazz. The movie's starting point is the dream of slim young graduate Kai (Jack Yao) to follow his girlfriend to Paris. He doesn't act or look old enough to have graduated, he works in his parents' noodle cafe, and he sits on a bookstore's floor teaching himself French. He's mildly cute, while the bookshelf stockist Susie (Amber Kuo) is really cute and a delight to watch.

The supporting cast do wonders with characters who are simple-minded or foolish oddities: shy convenience store clerks, an orange-uniformed gang of ugly young real-estate touts, plain-clothes policemen with girlfriend and obesity hassles, bumbling middle-aged gangsters and a fey and lanky gangster wannabee whose hair-style and moues suggest a Taiwan Peewee Herman.

The moral of the crime caper is predictable: who needs to go to Paris when Taipei's own nightlife, street markets, gourmet snacks and transportation systems are so convenient and friendly? Naturally, Taipei's tourism authorities helped to fund the movie. They got good value if they were intending to appeal to unsophisticated Asian teenagers. Candy is cute, even if it's not very nourishing.

This Taipei is a far cry from stilted old black-and-white Chinese melodramas and crime flicks, clips from which are viewed critically and scornfully, yet lovingly, on late-night TV by various characters throughout the movie. Another cuteness possibly added primarily for its own sake, for the writer-director's amusement. Luckily, many audiences will share the joke.

Ajami

Not surprisingly for a Hollywood-based membership club, the Oscar academy has given nominations for Best Foreign Language Film to many of Israel's offerings. The third of three successive nods went to Ajami, a bilingual Hebrew-Arabic docudrama co-written, -directed and -edited by Scandar Copti (Palestinian) and Yaron Shani. It portrays life in Ajami, a run-down ethnically-mixed district in Jaffa.

Copti also plays one of the lead characters in a Crash-style quilt of five overlapping tales about violence and death, and religious (Muslim-Christian) and racial (Jewish-Arabic) antagonisms. No character is happy with their life; many are killed by accident or design, and no person, authority or race emerges with honour at the end of the two-hour docudrama.

The scenario holds few dramatic surprises: Ajami is an inner-city area as prone to urban warfare as that of The Wire or movies set in Belfast or Balkan lands. What is exceptional is the ensemble acting by a cast of local non-professionals, including former Israeli policemen, Muslim schoolchildren and middle-aged housewives. Coached by a professional acting teacher and the two directors, the amateurs role-play and interact in the classic styles of Method Acting and Mike Leigh movies. They had no scripted dialogue and "lived" their parts (as shown neatly in the movie's DVD extra).

Several of the family scenes, whether in Hebrew or Arabic, sound and look like cine-verite. Some set-pieces are eye-opening cultural revelations, as in the traditional Arabic parley to decide the compensation costs of a lethal inter-family feud, and the melodramatics of a grieving Jewish family.

The fly-on-the-wall documentary style of the movie is heightened by abrupt pauses for "chapter" numbers, sudden changes in plot chronology, cuts to black, and repetition of events from a different viewpoint or with extra information that deliberately overturns previous audience assumptions. The increasing tension of the movie is maintained well, however, as it becomes increasingly clear that one evil always led to another and will continue to do so.

The Israeli film industry was wise in 2009 to choose this film as its official flag-bearer. A harsh critic might accuse the movie of spending too much respectful time on the Jewish family's grief at losing a soldier son and comparatively far less on the many Arab deaths; the movie had to appeal to its primary audience. A kind critic would congratulate the movie's creative pair for depicting evil intentions and deeds committed by both races no matter what their religion is.

Bubble

Supposedly the first of six low-budget HD-video projects by director Steven Soderbergh, Bubble was released simultaneously in a few theatres and on cable TV in 2005; four days later, its DVD was issued. Shot on location in Ohio, using non-pro actors, the short (73-minute) feature movie is a murder mystery whose outline plot was written by Coleman Hough, an actress whose previous screenplay effort had been a relative disaster for Soderbergh (Full Frontal in 2002).

In a rundown town, a middle-aged woman crafts faces in a small factory making moulded baby dolls. A younger male colleague is a friend she drives to and from work. A younger woman, an unmarried mother, joins the company, and is found strangled to death. A detective talks to all concerned, and the murder solves itself. All the non-pro actors did good jobs and the technical work was fine; So What? is the cruel question.

A few decades ago, this would have been a very competent B feature or an above-average TV drama. Bubble reportedly cost US$1.6 million and its main fascination lies in trying to imagine why Soderbergh made it. He directed, photographed and edited it: was the Oscar-winning multi-millionaire seeking a hands-on reminder of his basic Sex, Lies, and Videotape origins in 1989?

Was he trying to create a production team that could provide new talents (even the previously-used Ms Hough) with training grounds? Did he think a B-feature production company was needed by the ever-hungry cable-TV industry? Let's see whether the other five HD-video movies are made.

Parking

Chung Mong-hong's Parking contains a remarkable trio of debut performances, as writer, director and cinematographer, by the young Taiwanese movie-maker. The 2008 showcase for his talents was screened at many film festivals, collecting awards in Taipei (Golden Horse for Best Art Direction, and Critics award) and Hong Kong (Best New Talent, and Audience Favourite).

At first sighting, many audiences may have dismissed it as an overly eager tribute to Hong Kong's Wong Kar-wai and his key art director/editor (William Cheung) and cinematographer (Christopher Doyle). Wong usually wowed critics with scrappy scenarios soaked in artful lighting and colour effects. For Parking, Chung inter-wove five plots in the tale of an unhappily-married young man, whose car is trapped overnight in a Taipei street by double-parkers. Chung's art director adorned the sets with Doyle-style dabs and swathes of colour or moody shadows.

The man is on his way to his estranged wife for dinner and stops to buy cakes. Blocked from driving away from the run-down street, he seeks the double-parked car's owner and encounters a one-handed barber making fish-head soup, an old couple and their grand-daughter who think he's their executed son and father, a mainland Chinese prostitute and her vicious pimp, and a bankrupt Hong Kong tailor pursued by a gang of loan sharks.

It's just about feasible that such a motley and melodramatic crew of characters might all inhabit the few occupied units in neighbouring buildings. Some of the deliberately stagy conversations are not so easily acceptable; neither is the man's willingness to enter these strangers' lives and risk his life for them. Yet the allegorical ambitions (if not the meanings) of the movie are clear, prompting an audience to forgo reality judgments. The fine cast of actors dispel any lingering doubts: they present credibly interesting people living on knives' edges. If there's a link between the sub-plots, other than danger and death, it's motherhood; the characters provide enough oddball interest.

The pimp is played by Leon Dai, who gained the screenplay and directing Golden Horses the next year for his own creative debut, No Puedo Vivir ...; the tailor is a rich cameo role for Hong Kong's Chapman To; lead actor Chen Chang is a much-nominated actor who's worked in various Wong films.

Several loose ends are tied up in the finale, with a recited moral conclusion, that may have upset movie critics. Hong Kong audiences loved it, though, and Chung's second film (2010), Fourth Portrait, will be watched with high hopes.

Scott Pilgrim

What to make of a movie that notches up an 81% rating on the Rotten Tomatoes scoreboard and ends up labelled one of the biggest box-office bombs of 2010? Has it been over-rated or under-appreciated?

Scott Pilgrim vs The World is the adaptation of a graphic novel series created by a Canadian (Franco-Chinese) cartoonist telling the epic tale of young Scott Pilgrim's battles with the seven death-threatening exes of his heart's desire. As a witty overview of modern youngsters' love and personality issues, and a spectacular spoof of action fantasies, it's a rare comic romp.

Universal Studios entrusted the screen adaptation and direction to a new kid on the block of movie comedies, Edgar Wright. His spoofs of horror and crime genres, starring fellow-Brit Simon Pegg, (Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) had scored well, even in the USA. For the title role, they signed up Michael Cera, a Canada-born actor in the critically-acclaimed three-season Arrested Development TV comedy series who'd also earned good ratings for Juno and Superbad.

The studio then further defied the nationalist traits of American cineplex crowds by maintaining the comic hero's home city as Toronto and casting other Canadians in lead roles. Cameo roles went to some better-known American actors (Jason Rushmore Schwartzmann, Chris Fantastic Four Evans, Brandon Superman Returns Routh, Thomas Hung Jane), but none of them had major drawing power.

Wright was expected to create big-screen MTV-stylishness, trendy special effects, a stream of high-amp pop music and a cool, comic tone that would wow the teens and amuse their elders. I suspect the producers were more interested in the US$30 million of Canadian tax credits that reduced their budget to US$60 million. As the movie grossed little more than US$30 million at the USA box office, Wright's reputation is branded with a flop.

For a smaller-budget production, Cera would have been ideally cast as the diffident accidental hero, as would his attractive supporting cast. Newcomer (from TV) Ellen Wong is a bubbly delight as Pilgrim's Chinese-Canadian girlfriend, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (US TV child star seen recently in Grind House and Die Hard IV) plays his dream girl well a la Drew Barrymore. But none of them could carry a big-budget movie into a strong opening weekend.

Another young Canadian TV veteran, Alison Pill, is memorable as the freckled drummer in Pilgrim's band, whose band competitions parallel his own high-kicking action-punched battles with a wide variety of typical screen villains (including a pair of Japanese popsters). There's a comically OTT lesbian battler, and Pilgrim's older room-mate is gay (Kieran Igby Culkin in good form), and maybe their roles added extra frissons of a Canadian-style openness that doesn't go down well south of the border.

The unusual, and visually exciting, movie could have done with stronger plotlines and star names. Wright's co-adaptor must share the blame: Michael Bacall is an experienced minor actor, but he'd only written two other nondescript features before working on Scott Pilgrim. Most important, the movie he and Wright created lacked any big Wow moments (in SFX, hi-impact action, tuneful musical set-pieces, sexual fantasies) that give a movie word-of-mouth buzz on the social networks. Toronto and Ottawa should be understandably miffed.

Wall Street: money

Did Citibank contribute production funds for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps? The allusion to a well-known corporate advertising slogan might account for the subtitle given to the sequel to Oscar-winner Wall Street. Or maybe it's an in-joke by director Oliver Stone. Such irrelevant musing was provoked by the movie's product placements (starting in a big blatant way for Bulgari) and the necessity to ponder something more interesting while the movie unreeled itself.

Stone's 1987 original anti-capitalist saga accidentally glorified its villain, Gordon Gecko. Played with scene-chewing chutzpah and charm by Michael Douglas, he entered movie and finance industry immortality with three words, "Greed is good". Just as important in the modern morality tale was the relationship between an honest unionist father (Martin Sheen) and his money-seeking broker son (Charlie Sheen). The third key dramatic element was the deus ex machina who enables Gecko's downfall (Terence Stamp, as the very Brit angel of vengeance).

Why did Stone and Douglas agree to do a sequel? And do it so badly? The plot is ungainly: Gecko hits the big time again through a young broker (flimsy Shia LaBeouf) who's marrying his long-estranged daughter (ethereal Carey Mulligan), but the youngster's financier father-figure (weepy Frank Langella) has been driven to suicide by an uber-Gecko (eye-rolling Josh Brolin) who chomps on cigars even more masterfully than Gecko. Douglas is still a pleasure to watch (and wonder why he needed a credited "dialogue coach"); the rest of the cast is pitifully miscast. There's further embarrassment from watching veterans in cameo parts: Susan Sarandon (youngster's money-chasing ex-nurse mother), Eli Wallach (banking patriarch), Sheen Jr back to the future.

The screenplay was reportedly co-written by finance industry experts; much of it is an alphabet soup or lecture on fusion, of no dramatic interest. Stone seems to have been aware of the film's lack of vitality, as he added a waterfall of background music from Craig Armstrong and an extended CD-ful of songs from Brian Eno, David Byrne and others. Music even tinkles, irritatingly, during the initial speech by the re-appeared Gecko when he's hawking his how-to-get-rich manual to a fawning audience of finance industry whizkids.

The production tried to be news-worthy, leveraging (the inevitable word to use) itself on the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the zillion-dollar bail-outs, rip-offs and bonuses that gave Wall Street an even worse name than Gecko (an astute usage of the Javanese-inspired word for a lizard as a surname without any ethnic connotations).

Big bubbles float skywards at the movie's beginning and end, a possible tribute to or pastiche of Forrest Gump's leaf. Maybe the whole film is a pastiche, an in-joke by Stone that's as confused as his W seemed to be.

"In Greed We Trust", the animated end credits show on a dollar bill; they also show a dying tulip and, saddest of all, snapshots designed to hint at a further Wall Street sequel.

[The full context of the original "Greed" quotation is a reminder of how good the past Gecko was as a Hollywood creation: Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.]

Social network, The

Director David Fincher has often been nominated for major awards, notably for Zodiac and three movies starring Brad Pitt (Seven, Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). The Social Network, the docu-dramatised tattle-tale of Facebook's founders and foes, could be the movie that finally earns him Hollywood's top accolades.

It'll gather other Oscar nominations too, for screenplay (Aaron Sorkin's adaptation of Ben Mezrich's reportage in The Accidental Billionaires), lead actor (Jesse Eisenberg as amoral Mark Zuckerberg, the nasty nerd who dreamed up Facebook) and supporting actors (Justin Timberlake and Andrew Garfield as contrasting semi-vile and semi-valiant Facebook co-founders). There should also be nods for cinematography and editing, and it must surely be a Best Picture nominee because this is a successful mainstream product with the rare quality of demanding audience attention and involvement.

Zuckerberg is depicted (brilliantly, by the screenplay and Eisenberg) as an Internet wizard with mental ailments, a socially inept and class-conscious Jewish undergard with chips on his shoulder and a personality that's close to autistic. His vicious streak and egocentricity seem part and parcel of the Facebook model. He gains the grudging sympathy of the audience partly because an even less admirable Internet entrepreneur is a dramatic figure of comparison. Amazingly, Sean Parker (the man who co-founded Napster) hasn't sued anyone, possibly because he considers Justin Timberlake's impersonation to be devilishly attractive, probably because he still owns a 7% chunk of $25-billion Facebook.

PR stories of Zuckerberg's acceptance of the book and the movie are also hard to believe, unless being a billionaire is also enough compensation for having one's unpleasantness spotlit in public. Eisenberg doesn't overplay Zuckerberg's pathological nature; this anti-hero isn't a Citizen Kane or Rain Man, he's a sad self-absorbed soul, a friendless "arsehole".

The sharply-honed screenplay begins boldly with a long, strained conversation in a crowded bar between the arrogantly egocentric Zuckerberg and the dismissive female fellow-student at Harvard who prompts the creation of Facebook. Difficult to see and hear, their exchange sets the tone of the movie brilliantly: Facebook, designed to be an exclusive dating service for Ivy League brats, became a platform for solitary Internet users to post self-serving news about themselves.

Sorkin's screenplay and Fincher's direction switch backwards and forwards constantly, highlighting Facebook's start-up, re-designs and exponential growth, focusing on the relationships and bitter law suits involving Zuckerberg and one of his Jewish roommates (Andrew Garfield as the Brazilian-born creator of the first key algorithm). The jigsaw plot also incorporates another suit brought by out-smarted site developers (privileged Harvard brothers and their ally), and the involvement of delusional, paranoid, drug-taking Sean Parker. None of them is an admirable character, least of all the former Harvard President Larry Summers. The least despicable person is the Jewish girl who sparked Zuckerberg's misogynistic brainwaves and she's the dramatic device providing the apt dramatic sting in the tail of an exceptional biopic.

Good movies need to be seen more than once, to answer questions they raised. Did the movie address the issue of personal privacy? Did it even acknowledge that Facebook's success depended on its ability to commandeer the names of every potential friend from the memory of a member's computer?

Perrier's bounty

Another star-studded home-grown feature film from the UK and/or Eire. Will its cast include Jim Broadbent and/or Brendan Gleeson? Of course; both, and Cillian Murphy. Will it be a gangster thriller/chase? Another silly question; thankfully, there are some surprises in Perrier's Bounty, starting with its title. If an Irish gang boss is called Perrier, you can guess the movie is a comic caper trading on Brendan Gleeson's star role In Bruges.

He's announced a bounty for the capture of a late-paying loan-taking minor hoodlum (Murphy), whose sleep-repressing coke-snorting dad (Broadbent in splendid form) turns up coincidentally. So does the end of an affair for a downstairs neighbour, an English girl (Jodie Venus Whittaker). When she accidentally kills a bounty hunter, the accidental trio of anti-heroes are pursued across Dublin by Perrier and his gang (including the dead goon's gay partner), a pair of professional burglars who'd tried to cheat Murphy, and Garda cops.

Screenwriter Mark O'Rowe (Boy A) adds a load of rhythmic Blarney, warrior dogs and the voice of Gabriel Byrne (as the Grim Reaper) to the mildly intoxicating brew, which is directed effectively in understated Richie style (that is, in a less flashy and jump-cutty manner) by Irish TV veteran and movie newcomer Ian Fitzgibbon.

An above-average example of entertaining nonsense, this is a movie that deserves to be seen only for one good reason: Broadbent playing superbly with an Irish accent, comic facial expressions and charismatic body language.

American, The

The American was a compact European-model vehicle for lead actor George Clooney. The low-budget (US$20 million) movie grossed well in terms of arithmetic (close to US$60 million), it's definitely a one-off success, not a new Bourne or Salt franchise.

Co-producer Clooney chooses his films -- whether blockbusters, art-house projects, action adventures or comedies -- carefully, and usually successfully. He knows his name can "open" a movie on wide release in the American and world markets, but he also has been masterful at obtaining above-average plots, directors and supporting actors.

The American succeeded even though it is an American movie in name only. It's very much a European movie, filmed in the steep and winding cobbled lanes of a medieval Italian mountain town (Castel del Monte) and the stark rural landscape around it. With its slow pacing, colour-saturated cinematography, and sequence of small events building to a disturbing conclusion, it's clearly directed by a European. Anton Corbijn is a Dutchman best known for music videos and one previous English-language pop-related feature, Control. Although it's based on English mystery novel (Martin Booth's A Very Private Gentleman), and is an English-language movie, it's visibly and atmospherically a European art-house production.

Clooney's character, Jack or Edward, is first seen in Sweden, escaping an assassination attempt and having to kill a girlfriend in the process. An apparent secret agent, he is told to hide out in the small town and avoid the folly of having any more friends. In Italy, he has drinks and soulful exchanges of words with the local priest (veteran Paolo Bonacelli, whose credits range from Salo to MI3), he rents and starts to date a local prostitute (actress-singer Violante Placido), and his boss sends a hit-woman with a commission.

The agent and bogus photojournalist is also a master gunsmith, and the ending of the film is one of the few possible permutations to be expected from a storyboard with few characters and minimal character developments. Much of the movie's undeniable tightening grip on its audience results from the frequent close-up shots of Clooney's face. Few other actors can convey such a compelling range of doubt, anxiety, love and focused attention. Clooney's craftsmanship is remarkably under-stated, as is the director's style.

Salt

There's a fresh spy-fi franchise to welcome to the ranks of Bond and Bourne. Hotel-keeping's three golden rules may be "location, location, and location"; spy-fi-making's trio are more complex: plot, plot, plot. Without them, top-rated stars, directors and editors (and photogenic locations) are wasted. Salt made a good start with a screenplay that was almost too cleverly plotted.

It also had an ideal star lead in Angelina Jolie, seeming to revel in her best action-adventure role since Lara Croft. The director, Australian Phillip Noyce, had an ideal track record too (the Tom Clancy/Harrison Ford Jack Ryan thrillers) and he'd directed Jolie happily before (The Bone Collector). One film editor was a double Oscar nominee (Briton Stuart Baird) whose recent work included Casino Royale; the other skilled editor, John Gilroy, had earned high marks for Michael Clayton. The producers then signed up an Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood) and commissioned original music from another veteran multi-award-winning talent, James Newton Howard. Another golden rule had been obeyed: splurge on top behind-the-scenes professionals.

Writer Kurt Wimmer's recent credits for original and adapted screenplays include Street Killers, Equilibrium and Law Abiding Citizen. In Salt, he amalgamated many spy-fi themes, doing so at a frantic pace that precludes audiences from having time to recognise plot devices from Missions Impossible, North Korean settings, and action-thrillers featuring murdered loves, moles, triple agents, high-speed auto chases, full-facial masks and vengeful secret agent societies. It was no surprise to learn that Salt was originally designed for Tom Cruise, and that yet another veteran talent, Brian Helgeland, was employed to adjust the screenplay for Jolie.

At the end of the movie, the extent of the movie's trickery becomes clear. Could one really have even half-believed that Jolie would be able single-handedly to out-trick and out-kick cohorts of FBI, CIA and modern KGB agents, set out to assassinate two presidents, withstand water-boarding, be a mistress of all martial arts and have a Russian father-figure, a spider-loving German husband and a cute dog? Yes, Salt is a successful live-action animated movie.

Ever-reliable supporting actors completed its winning package: Liev Schreiber as the Washington ally, and Nigerian-Briton Chiwetel Ejiofor as the secret agent primed to be Jolie's partner-in-justice in a well-deserved sequel.

Eat pray love

A Brad Pitt company co-produced Eat Pray Love, the adaptation of a chick-lit memoir that Julia Roberts identified as an ideal vehicle to drive. The book was written by Elizabeth Gilbert, an American freelance writer who obtained a publisher's advance large enough to finance a year's travel and research for Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. That's the sort of market-savvy title that gets optioned by publishers, pushed on the Oprah show (twice) and turned into a chick flick.

Gilbert self-portrayed herself as a miserable travel-feature-writing wife who has an affair, gets divorced, and sets off to find her true inner self through flings with great foreign food (Italy = Eat), eastern spirituality (India = Pray) and swarthy men (Indonesia, specifically Bali, where she doesn't meet an Indonesian, but a more market-acceptable rich Brazilian = Love).

It is assumed that Gilbert knew exactly what her three chosen foreign lands represented: dream destinations for frustrated female readers of chick-lit. Conveniently for simple readers' memories, each chosen country begins with a capital I, and the resultant egocentric puff-pastry literary confection slid into the best-seller lists for more than three years, which it might not have done if she'd ventured on a diet-conscious cook's tour of Iceland, Iraq and Iran.

Commercial considerations have been a writing industry staple since long before Dickens mastered the craft. Gilbert's goulash of popular ingredients is akin to many other escapist fantasies, and its success ensured the attention of Julia Roberts. One might have expected Jennifer Aniston to be a prime casting option, but one thing (Mrs Brad Pitt) or another (box-office credibility) may have scotched that idea.

Julia Roberts is good at driving vehicles; although her acting machine has only a few gears (stare, frown and wistful smile) she uses them well to coast around any dramatic corners she meets in a screenplay. There are no corners in the shallow screenplay designed by writer-director Ryan Murphy, previously best known for his creation of TV's Nip/Tuck and Glee. Jennifer Salt, an older Hollywood hand, worked on Nip/Tuck and assisted Murphy in writing this feature film debut.

A small squadron of good actors waste their talents in support of Roberts: Billy Crudup (the husband who doesn't meet her needs), James Franco (the lover who doesn't ditto), Richard Jenkins (the father-figure pal in her Indian ashram) and Javier Bardem (the Brazilian romancer she beds in Bali). Actresses also appear here and there, and it's demographically convenient that Roberts' character has a black best friend (Viola Davis). When no one else needs to be on set, Roberts strides meaningfully or mournfully through pretty locations, whining to the audience. She is saved from being the most cringe-making person around by an ever-smirking dentally-challenged 9th-generation pseudo-Balinese fortune-teller whose tourist-English pop-philosophy would curdle coconuts and make Jackie Chan look and sound like Lord Olivier.

Elizabeth Gilbert is either a very shrewd writer or a tedious narcissist. Or, to be fair, both. In real life, she found a new life-partner and created another best-seller, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. A cynic will assume the book's title came first.

Funny games (2)

Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke won the Best Foreign Film Golden Globe in 2010 for The White Ribbon. It was such a starkly menacing B&W depiction of pre-Nazi Germany that its failure to win that year's Oscar caused surprise. Maybe the following quotation [in Wikipedia] from Haneke's writings helps explain the deliberate rejection by so many Oscar voting members:

"My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus." [From "Film as catharsis"]

Maybe Hollywood also never forgave him for his US$15-million 2007 English-language replica of his U$5-million 1997 German-language psycho-thriller, as Funny Games U.S. It doesn't so much empower its audiences as strip their souls naked, forcing them to see themselves as voyeurs and puppets. European film-makers often do that; Hollywood doesn't. It enjoys making Cape Fears, Saws, Hostels and Elm Streets galore, but they are not designed for audiences to look deep into mirrors of self-loathing. American movie-goers are trained to expect endings that are happy, virtuous, up-beat and escapist: Good triumphs and Evil is vanquished. Reality is different, and Funny Games rubs its audiences' noses in that brutal fact.

Naomi Watts executive-produced the remake, in which she stars as Ann, a rich housewife arriving for a summer vacation with her husband George (Tim Roth) and young son at their lakeside estate. Their neighbours are entertaining a pair of young men, one of whom walks over to borrow some eggs. When his pal enters the scene, he admires a golf club, and uses it to slaughter the family dog (off-screen) and break one of George's legs. The family will die in a time-limited game, the polite young men announce. Lacking any background music and with no sudden nasty shocks, the expected tension and horror do not materialise, and Haneke soon explains why not.

One of the young men makes occasional to-camera comments, preparing his audience for one of the nastiest directorial tricks; it slaps Hollywood conventions in the face. Does the audience expect a "plot development"?, one of the killers asks ironically.

The only visible difference between the two films is the decision to dress both the white-gloved young men (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) in white tennis shorts in the US version; in the original one of them wore black shorts. The four lead actors in the US production are not as effective as the German-speaking cast, and the whole faithful re-make (including set design details) is impossible to justify.

Watts (Welsh-Australian) and Roth (Brit) lack the somewhat patrician air of their German counterparts, and Pitt (The Dreamers) doesn't display the menacing maturity of the original. He and Corbet are barely credible as fresh-faced psychopaths, but they (and Haneke's dialogue) do manage to side-step an audience's inevitable assumption of homo-eroticism or incestuous brotherhood. They also, maybe coincidentally, remind an audience of the deadpan faces of the repressed children in The White Ribbon.

Haneke has created two movies out of a slim plotline that's only worth a 30-minute short or staged play. He spun out his material with long static shots that heightened neither cinematic tension nor dramatic intensity. The opening's sunlit aerial shots hold great promise of a nail-biting psychological horror show, but one of Haneke's characterless killers deliberately sneers at an audience which expects promises to be kept, even if they're false.