Consequences of love

From its ten nominations for the 2005 Italian film industry's Davids, The Consequences of Love (2004), won five top awards: film, director and screenplay (a trio for Paolo Sorrentino), cinematography (Luca Bigazzi) and actor (Toni Servillo). Its editing, sound, music and lead supporting actor were worthy nominees too, and for its first 45 minutes this movie was heading straight into the top rating level.

A middle-aged heavy-smoking Italian businessman has rented a Swiss hotel room for eight years. He sits in the hotel lounge, writes notes to himself, utters off-screen thoughts, eavesdrops on his impoverished neighbours, plays cards with them, is a creature of habits : weekly heroin, periodic blood transfusions, frequent money laundering trips, constant dispassionate stares at the world around him. It includes the hotel barmaid, who seems to be fascinated by him, and his estranged wife and three adult children, who hate to even talk to him on the telephone.

The writer-director's plot and character developments are finely paced, slowly but with exquisite, beguiling framing and depth of colour. He seems to exist only to receive suitcases of US dollars from an unknown woman, and drive them in a private car to a private bank. The overall concept and treatment appears to be a stylish precursor of The American, in which George Clooney played a similar foreign man of mystery.

Then, with increasing lack of credibility, Sorrentino injects a rash of overblown subplots. Wild threads, some leading to tangled loose ends, others tied up risibly with illogical acts by the anti-hero and his Mafia bosses and their brutal underlings.

Actor-director Servillo also starred in Il Divo, winning another Best Actor David on 2009 (having won it the previous year as well for The Girl By the Lake). He was a star turn too in Gomorrah: his facial tics and tiny smiles could launch a thousand screenplays.

With restraints on his writing imagination, Sorrentino could win greater glory as an exceptional movie director. Sorrentino's subsequent films include L'Amico di famiglia (2006) and Il Divo (2008), both highly-rated and worth seeing saspo.

Bran nue dae

The origin of a movie title that looks oddly Welsh is easily guessed if it's pronounced with an Aussie accent: Bran Nue Dae (2009), a musical comedy first staged in 2000.

"There is nothing I would rather be than an Aborigine, and watch you take my land away!", is the ironic refrain of the curtain-closing final song. A cast of scores of black Aussies sing and prance, Broadway-meets-Bollywood style, led by Geoffrey Rush in priestly robes. Occasionally, elsewhere in the red-dirt outback of north-west Australia, a line of Aborigine youths in war-paint leap and smile to the same song. Then a heart shape frames the faces of the black teenagers who have finally found true love. Cliches? No surprise: they'd been endless for almost 90 minutes.

This painfully patronising love story with unmemorable songs was obviously an entertainment devised for white audiences in Oz, akin to B&W minstrel shows and a universe away from Porgy and Bess or the South African black version of Carmen.

Geoffrey Rush rises way above his material, eyeball-rolling and hamming wonderfully as a deeply-accented German mission school headmaster trying to guide one likely good lad (relatively handsome plump newcomer Rocky McKenzie) in the late 1960s on the path to goodness, a good girl and doing good for his people.

The rest of the cast support them with weak character props: a German hippie (who's actually the priest's son) with a van for the ensemble's road trip, a comic bearded black sage (who's going to turn out to be the hero's dad), a "Roadhouse Betty" with wobbly breasts (a cameo for Magda Babe Szubanski), a loving mum, black football team and temperance march, which is the excuse to get to a beach for the final singalong.

Director Rachel Perkins co-tweaked the stage show as a movie, and may have done the best anyone could with a concept that was cringe-worthily corny. Her first feature (Radiance, 1998) was a well-received Outback drama; her second film was a one-hour TV Outback drama (One Night The Moon, 2001) that also earned critical favour. This film's RT rating of 53% is too kind.

Archipelago

Think Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman; imagine them having lobotomies and going for R&R in the Scilly Islands with a upper-middle-class-Brit family which is, stereotypically, a non-communicative set of repressed and bruised psyches. Does anyone need to see writer-director Joanna Hogg's 2010 soph movie Archipelago?

Its improvised scenes self-consciously filmed in chronological order (a la Ken Roach's reality-seeking school of auteurs), the movie wends through wind-swept insular scenery and solitary souls in little gusts of conversational non-action. They are punctuated purposelessly by little-varied vistas of clouds.

A middle-aged mother (Kate Fahy) has rented an island house as a two-week holiday home for her family: a reserved angst-filled son going on voluntary service in Africa for a year (Tom Hiddleston), a shrewish daughter (UK TV actress Lydia Leonard), and her husband, who never joins them, indicating family relationship problems via phone calls. The mother employed a young housekeeper to cook their meals and a painter (Christopher Baker) to give her art lessons. The latter can eat with them; the cook can't.

Static framing of stilted group conversations emphasises the gathering's frigidity, false niceties and basic pointlessness. The three family members are such self-obsessed neurotics that one tends to understand the absent father's unwillingness to join the mournful charade.

Hogg may need a change of inspiration: her first movie feature Unrelated (2007) also portrayed a family on holiday in Tuscany and was critically acclaimed in the UK. Hiddleston and his sister Emma had supporting parts. She has no other screen credit, but Tom (a double-first in Classics at Cambridge and RADA-trained) had already leapt from Brit TV to Hollywood, as close-to-camp Loki, the jealous brother of Thor (and Marvel's forthcoming New Avengers product).

He's worth watching, but not as much as the two lead women: both Irish-born Fahy, the wife of Jonathan Pryce, and Leonard convey inner rage and despair tellingly. They'd have been even better with a real script. So might wooden Baker, a movie first-timer muttering moodily about art and self-confidence; the equally nicely-accented cook chats with Hiddleston about food and self-confidence.

The film's scorecard in Rotten Tomatoes logs 16 favourable reviews from 16 Brit critics, some of whom may be undeclared chauvinists, feminists or upper-middle-class snobs. One non-logged top US critic is rightly scathing. The film is unforgivably boring, to look at and listen to.

Cars 2

Larry the Cable Guy (or LTCG, real name Daniel Whitney) is a "Redneck" comedian, a member of the American "Blue Collar Comedy Tour" foursome, the star of the LTCG: Health Inspector movie, and a former radio personality. His pseudo-Southern accent and grating vocular style apparently enchanted Pixar, which designed a self-glorifying comic vehicle ("Mater") for him in Cars, the 2006 movie co-written/directed by John Lasseter.

The least satisfying of all Pixar's profitable productions, packed with only a few good gimmicks (such as racing enthusiast Paul Newman's voice) rather than the usual well-rounded animated characters, Cars was a noisy, colourful bore. Lasseter, clearly passionate about automobiles and grass-chewing hicks, gave the go-ahead for a TV series (2008-10) of ear-grinding mind-numbing one-joke shorts pun-painfully entitled Cars Toons: Mater's Tall Tales.

Getting back into a director's chair, the Pixar/Disney mastermind has now churned out Cars 2, also in 3D and IMAX versions. Its major virtue is its revelation that even Pixar is not an infallible movie-making genius. Technically, its 12th production is great to watch, but the concept's inherent CGI mission impossible is making a car's lights and grill represent an interesting, touching animated character. Working with similarly limited "faces", Pixar succeeded with robots in Wall-E; on Cars, not.

Obsession

Hitchcock made Vertigo in 1958, which inspired Paul Schrader to write and Brian de Palma to direct Obsession. Bernard Herrmann wrote original music for both films, earning a posthumous Oscar nomination for his characteristically melodramatic work on De Palma's 1976 mystery thriller.

Choristers mourn, horns wail and strings cascade while Cliff Robertson woos and plans to wed an Italian art restorer (Genevieve Bujold) who's a ringer for his dead American wife. She'd been presumed killed 15 years earlier in a car crash, along with their young daughter, following a failed kidnapping. Property developer Robertson met the young woman when he joined his long-time partner (John Lithgow, with a heavy Southern accent) on a business trip to Florence.

It's quickly apparent that there are no other lead characters, ensuring that the plot's simplistic surprise twists can be fully anticipated. Consequently leaving its audience's brain on hold, the film encourages deeper appreciation of its lush, shadowy cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond. An Oscar-winner for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and a nominee four other times (most recently, at the 76, for The Black Dahlia), the veteran talent still maintains his long working association with Woody Allen.

Robertson, a long-time B-list actor born in 1923, was a surprise Oscar-winner for Charly (1968) - as a retarded man, one of the best ways to get recognised by schmaltzy AMPAS members. Maybe sensing that the competition was too strong, Roberston didn't attend the parade, for which he gained more votes than Alan Alda, Alan Bates, Tony Curtis and Peter O'Toole (who won the year's Golden Globe) as Lawrence of Arabia. He stopped working after his recent supporting role as Ben Parker in Spider-Man (2002).

Strange accents add little mysteries to the movie, mostly laughably, with a French-named (Brie) police inspector in New Orleans, Lithgow's Southern drawl and his character's declamation of Italian dialogue, and Bujold's dying mother's Italianate-English. De Palma was better served by his cinematographer and composer; he simplified the screenplay so much that Schrader virtually disowned it. Hitchcock was reportedly angered by the conceptual rip-off, which certainly lacked the depth of characterisation that made his psychological fantasy more credible.

Despair

Some movies are easy to admire and hard to like, particularly those of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The prolific German director had made 31 movies by the age of 31; next up was his first English-language work, Despair. Based on a Russian-langauge novel by Vladimir Nabokov, the screenplay was crafted by Tom Stoppard. The lead role was another cinematic gift from Europe for the super-expressive eyes of Dirk Bogarde.

Bogarde's character, Harmann Herman, is a Russian chocolate tycoon living in pre-Nazi Berlin with a wife (French actress Andrea Ferreol, still working now after 167 movie/TV credits) who's having an affair with her failed-artist cousin (Volker Spengler, a Fassbinder regular). They and most other characters speak English in naturally thick Germanic accents or, in Bogarde's case, with a wide-ranging European accent.

Herman, whose double name is a typical Nabokovian clue to his personality disorder, is going mad, observing himself critically, craving a new existence, then planning to create it by murdering a tramp (Klaus Lowitsch) he wrongly thinks is his doppelganger.

Superb photography and production designs play with an audience's mind through mirrors, reflections and illusions. Berlin-born cinematographer Michael Ballhaus won Oscar nominations for Broadcast News, The Fabulous Baker Boys and Gangs of New York, and also worked for Scorsese on Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence and The Departed. For this glittering work, he only collected a top award in Germany. Restored handsomely in Bavaria in 2011, the movie's DVD version glows with OTT colouring, especially for Herman's lilac-tinted chocolate factory. As usual, wherever Fassbinder looked, he found exquisite angles and heavy-handed symbolism in his recurrent visions of unbared German psyches and naked plump actresses.

The narrative is dotted with intellectual Stoppard lines. For a stage play, the director and cast would know how much time an audience would need to recognise, comprehend and appreciate a quote-worthy sentence's wisdom and wit. On film, no director wants to insert artificial pauses and disrupt a movie's pace, resulting in the screenplay's occasional brain-teasing thoughts slipping past, possibly improperly heard (the restoration warranted optional English subtitles).

Not that there's a steady narrative flow. Nabokov's formulaic characters perform symbolic scenes, the movie surging in fits and starts, relying heavily on Bogarde's face, and striking lighting of it, to hold an audience's attention. The stagey story might have worked better on screen if it had been filmed in German.

People on Sunday

People on Sunday, a silent B&W German docudrama from 1930, was restored by the Netherlands, splicing pieces from reels surviving in its and other countries' archives. Criterion's DVD package, using its secondary Janus label, marketed the film both as a precursor of neo-realism and a historic showcase of the talents of a film-making cooperative of Berlin-based youngsters. Most were Jewish, and soon left Nazi Germany.

Its losses were Hollywood's multiple gain:

* the movie's concept creator Kurt (aka Curt) Siodmak, a former newspaper reporter, became a Hollywood horror-writing specialist, as for the original (1941) Wolf Man.

* his younger brother and the movie's main co-director Robert (The Killers) Siodmak, a prolific maker of film noir movies in the USA, who returned to Germany in the 1950s, winning a Golden Bear for The Rats.

* The Siodmaks' cousin, Seymour Nebenzal, the film's key producer (borrowing funds from his movie-producer father Heinrich). He later made Fritz Lang's M and Testament of Dr Mabuse, then movies in Paris, before fleeing to the USA, where his independent production company's many titles included Douglas Sirk's Hitler's Madman and Summer Storm, and Joseph Losey's re-make of M.

* Czech-born co-producer Edgar G Ulmer, who'd returned from the States (and returned there too, to become the director of Black Cat, Detour and Ukrainian-language and Yiddish niche movies in the USA).

[He was blackballed from Hollywood work after he had an affair with Shirley Castle (he eventually married her and she became known as Shirley Ulmer), who at the time was the wife of B-picture producer Max Alexander, a nephew of powerful Universal Pictures president Carl Laemmle. Ulmer spent the bulk of his remaining career languishing at PRC, the lowest rung on the ladder of Hollywood's poverty row studios.] [IMDb]

* co-writer Billy Wilder, multiple Oscar-winner for The Apartment (film, direction, co-writing), Sunset Blvd (co-writing), and The Lost Weekend (director, co-writer), with 14 other nominations. The former journalist's main chore for the film was holding the sun-reflector.

* cinematographer Eugen Schufftan, later aka Eugene Shufftan), who invented a self-named camera special effect and won an Oscar for The Hustler. The DVD package includes the charming Schufftan-directed 1929 B&W short comedy Ins Blaue Hinein (Into the Blue), with soundtrack added, telling another happy-go-lucky tale (of three men and a girl crashing a car and starting a dog-grooming business).

* assistant cameraman Fred Zinneman, Oscar-winning director of A Man for All Seasons, From Here to Eternity, and a documentary short (Benjy).

* assistant cameraman Ernst Kunstmann was invited to the USA with Schufftan, returning to work in Germany until the 1960s (including Triumph of the Will in 1935), dying at 97 in his home city of Potsdam.

The film's non-professional actors' fates were less illustrious. The four lead roles were played by:

* Erwin (Splettstoller), who only had two other acting credits, in Robert Siodmak movies in 1930-1. The wannabee comic actor died in a car accident (according to co-star Brigitte).

In the film, chubby, affable Erwin is a taxi-driver leaving his fashion model girl-friend oversleeping in bed, to go to the Wannsee lake beach on a pre-planned trip with his friend ...

* ... Wolf(gang von Waltershausen), who made one more film for Siodmak, and another with Siodmak and Wilder, returned to his family estate in southern Germany, per Brigitte.

En route to the beach, the two friends meet up with a girl Wolf had chatted up in the city on a weekday ...

* Christl (Ehlers), whose real-life Jewish family fled to Spain, then England and America, where she had one bit part before marrying an aircraft company owner; they died in a plane crash in 1960.

Joining her for the lake excursion is her blonde best friend, a salesgirl for the Electrola record-player and disc company ...

* Brigitte (Borchert) who only made this one film; in 2000 she and Curt Siodmak were interviewed for a 30-minute documentary commemorating the restoration, Weekend am Wannsee (part of the Criterion DVD); Siodmak, then 98, couldn't recall her name and didn't like the restoration. He looked and sounded mentally active but died that year. Brigitte died in 2011, aged 100.

At first sighting, the movie's most promising talent is clearly the cinematographer. Exciting angles, shadowed lighting, story-advancing close-ups, exceptional grid-work framing and high-speed photography from moving vehicles provide bewitching images of a happy-go-lucky laid-back Berlin on a Sunday, contrasted uncritically with the city's weekday bustle. In cinematographic albums with few signs of poverty and none of oppression, the Siodmaks' self-described "reportage" presents a self-content middle-class view of the pre-Depression capital city, in which the cameras nod somewhat jocularly in the direction of Soviet Russian expressionism and Eisenstein moments.

Nothing much happens, but it does so charmingly. Wolf, an experienced philanderer, fails to hit on Christl during the foursome's picnic, but succeeds in seducing Brigitte. The girls resume their friendship on a giant pedalo boat, wryly watching the men flirt with a couple of oarless female rowers. Wolf agrees to meeting Brigitte again the next Sunday, before Erwin reminds him they'd already planned to go to a soccer match.

The DVD company's judgment is valid: not a Criterion-calibre classic, the film's a preservation-worthy Janus product.

Air doll

In 2007, Lars and the Real Girl enabled Ryan Gosling to have an actor's ball partnering an inflatable lover. Two years later, innovative Japanese director Hirokasu Koreeda played well with the same concept in Air Doll, his screen adaptation of a manga written the same year by Yoshiie Gouda (entitled, self-mockingly, perhaps, "Gouda's Philosophical Discourse: The Pneumatic Figure of a Girl").

Nozomi, the life-size plastic doll dressed as a maid (with optional costume changes), is the pampered companion of a lonely middle-aged waiter (Arata, whose movie debut in 1998 was in Hirokasu's After Life). He chats with her during dinner, takes her out for wheelchair rides, has sex with her and meticulously washes her detachable lower part. One day, the doll lurches to life, acquiring puppet-like cold-skinned movement, a heart and soul, abilities to sketch, hold memories and mimic human words, and lands a job in a video store, where she falls in love. Played with po-faced big-eyed mystified innocence by Donna (The Ring Virus, Host, Linda x 3) Bae, Nozomi is an enchanting fantasy character.

At its original 125-minute running length, the movie was dismissed by many critics as an over-long fable. Eight or more minutes were cut out for foreign markets; the effects are frustrating at the end of the movie, when Nozomi inexplicably enters and changes the lives of local lonely characters she'd met on her wandering. Her expanding role, growing heart and inevitable death become a series of fairly silly tableaux, and may have been more credible and meaningful within an extended narrative context. For the first hour, though, the switches from wry reality to magical realism are very acceptable logical nonsense.

I guess Japan's movie-goers (even more than those in the USA) require a movie to last at least two hours, to justify high ticket prices. That could explain the lengths that film producers need to go to, often working with slender plots. One side benefit of that is the necessity to employ directors who can fill time with rich details, artful lighting and exquisitely composed scenes; Hirakasu achieves all that, creating an intriguing visual essay on urban loneliness, human frailty and love's and life's substitutes. "Pretty basic philosophy" sounds dismissive, but isn't meant to be.

Gallants

Nostalgia is a winning formula brightly brewed by Clement Cheng and Derek Kwok for Gallants. The award-winning 2010 kung fu comedy is a delightful showcase for various 1970s Hong Kong action stars and veteran actor-musician Teddy Robin (Kwan). The gnome-like and far from handsome comic character chews the scenery charmingly as a randy, bullying kung fu master awakened from a three-decade-long coma.

Many of the usual comic kung fu figures are gathered in a rural restaurant that the master's two loyal ageing weary-boned pupils (Chen Kuan-tai and Yeung Siu-lung) operate in his former martial arts academy. A bumbling estate agent wimp and wannabee fighter (Wong Yau-nam) arrives from the big city, meeting local gangsters, a bullied old schoolmate who's become a US-educated show-off fighter (rapper MC Jin), a pretty girl from Shanghai (JJ Jia) and an old lady doctor (Susan Shaw Yin-yin) with unrequited love for the mischievous master.

When the cliches are cobbled together, with a 30-year-old duck carcase and high-speed action choreography, the audience ends up with a predictable low-budget version of Kung Fu Hustle. Like that Stephen Chow masterpiece, this is a movie that shows its love for old-style Hong Kong movies, and respect for vintage actors who still make the right moves when a director zooms, pans and swivels around them with TLC. Robin's background music recalls the Spaghetti Western era, and the screen is infectious fun when he fills it with wild eyes and craggy features.

Andy Lau was one of the film's producers, and his faith in Kwok's concept was rewarded when the film won the 2010 Hong Kong Best Picture title and awards for Best Supporting Actor (Robin) and Supporting Actress (Shaw). Small is beautiful when it's so clearly heart-felt.

Neds

Scottish actor/writer/director Peter Mullan has reportedly said that "Nine out of 10 delinquents are frustrated actors" and he illustrated it well in his third full-length feature, Neds (2010). His first award-winning self-directed screenplay was Orphans (1998), followed by The Magdalene Sisters (a Venice Festival winner in 2002).

The Marxist Glaswegian, a familiar face in independent movies and British TV, won the Best Actor award at Cannes in 1998 for his title role as a recovering alcoholic in Ken Loach's My Name is Joe. He'd also been a supporting actor for Loach's Riff Raff (1991), Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, and Mel Gibson's Braveheart. He's co-starred in many other movies (including Mike Figgis's Miss Julie (1999) and Michael Winterbottom's The Claim).

Although his craggy face can express sensitivity well (Boy A), it's best suited to surliness (Young Adam), and he cast himself as the menacing father of his latest film's anti-hero, John McGill, first seen as a plump school swot with promise. In 1974, at secondary school, his family history and genetics, abetted by his environment and peers, he matures into a typical bullying thug, a Non-Educated Delinquent, played with frightening sweet'n'sour realism by thick-set newcomer Conor McCarron.

Mullan's semi-autobiographical docudrama is a damning two-hour portrait of gang-ridden housing estates in Catholic Glasgow districts, where fathers are mean-spirited drunks, mothers are put-upon worn-out nonentities, and sons can only imagine becoming criminals, bouncers or dock workers (or policemen and soldiers). A few escape, as Mullan did (via university).

His Neds are a convincing bunch of non-professional youngsters, set amid the look and feel of the Seventies (from long leather jackets to Kubrick movies, TV's Monty Python to women's perms). All the Scottish supporting cast perform well, notably as no-nonsense schoolteachers and policemen coping with suppressed social unrest.

Towards the end, in an effort to explain his anti-hero's mental conflict, Mullan created a sequence of far-fetched serio-comic fantasies in which the confused, belligerent teenager has a knife fight with a Jesus statue, plans to kill his father, and guides one of his mentally-disabled victims through a pride of lions.

The youngster's angsts are thickly signposted, but his character changes are unconvincing plot developments. During one short summer break, the polite swot becomes a sassy rebel, and then transforms himself into a gang leader, insane anarchist and murderous homeless wretch before going back dutifully to school. Many scenes ring true, compellingly, but the whole movie doesn't.

Chocolate

Muay Thai (kick boxing) martial arts movies, akin to Hong Kong's kung fu spectacles, gained wider international attention in 2003 through Ong-Bak, The Thai Warrior, co-written and directed by Prachya Pinkaew, starring Tony Jaa. The two men went to Australia for The Protector (2005), whose lead writer was the single-named Napalee. A sequel of it is in production by them, after Jaa had worked with Panna Rittikrai on two Ong-Bak sequels. Panna, who'd also co-written the original story, and is an experienced stuntman, became Jaa's co-director.

In the meantime, Prachya groomed a young female taekwondo fighter to learn kick-boxing moves for the lead role in a 2008 feature, Chocolate. It was co-written by Napalee and director Chukiat (The Love of Siam) Sakveerakul. Their ingenue lead actress, Yanin Vismitananda (now aka JeeJa), was made to look good by the film's action choreographer - who was Panna, not too surprisingly in the close-knit world of Thai action movies.

JeeJa is certainly prettier to look at than Jacky Chan, but the movie's stunts are not as complex as his, nor as much gory fun as Kill Bill's. In order, probably, to minimise novice JeeJa's acting weaknesses, her character is the autistic daughter of a Thai gangster's moll, who left him to marry a Bangkok-based Yakusa chieftain (workaholic ex-model Hiroshi Abe). Faced with death threats from the mobster, she tells the Japanese to leave the country for ever and later discovers she's pregnant.

Several years later, a bullied chubby young boy is given a home by the moll, who works as a cashier for a Japanese restaurant. That key plot development takes only a few seconds of unexplained screen time, whose meaning is left to a movie-goer's instinctive understanding that such a character must emerge in the genre. So must the gangster's bevy of lady-boy hitmen, inspirational kick-boxers on B&W TV and an adjacent school, and an epileptic be-spectacled spindly teenage boy who must eventually challenge the autistic girl. And let's not ignore a gaggle of female boxers and gang of sword-wielding hoodlums who appear from nowhere in the final multi-sequenced battle. It pitches the girl and her terminally ill mum and badly-wounded Japanese dad against the minions of a mortally-wounded Thai villain who takes a very long time, and lots of falls, before dying.

Scores of stuntmen also appear in order to be foot-kicked, tossed and tumbled into cringing submission or grisly death in neatly-choreographed set-pieces fought single-handedly by the girl, abetted meekly by her chubby pal. They had decided to collect money owed to the mother from her gangster days, in order to pay for her worsening cancer's treatment, leading them to wage martial justice in the photogenic settings of an ice factory, candy depot, Japanese-style mansion, and, most memorably, on the wall and neon signs of a four-storey building facing a sky-train elevated railway in the finale. Yep, there's not much time for character development in this genre.

Where's the "Chocolate"? My instincts led me to guess that the girl's passion for Smartie-like chocolate-coated candy balls is somehow fundamental to the story, but there was no clear, or even sly, sign that the sweets gave the supergirl the necessary sugar rush or brain buzz to overcome her autism and standard stilted movements. I suspected instead that there were various deleted scenes that provided a fuller chocolate-filled narrative, and they were cut so that audiences could be rushed through the childhood period and into the action scenes.

Insidious

Insidious is a dream movie, a movie producer's wet dream that is: the low-budget feature grossed close to US$100 million within three months of its April 2011 opening. It proves that there's always a big audience for a ghost movie focusing on haunted houses and a normal family undergoing paranormal attacks. This time the winning twist was a comatose boy.

The movie's marketing campaign had two strong selling points. First, it announced that it was produced by the team that made Paranormal Activity. Second, and more interestingly, its writer-director duo had appetising track records.

Australian Leigh Whannell (actor-writer) and Malaysian James Wan (director) palled up at film school in Oz, created a nine-minute short horror film that grew into a nine-year wonder, Saw. The pair left the franchise in other hands after Saw III, to make Dead Silence in 2007 (featuring an evil ventriloquist's dummy). In the same year, Wan established himself further in Hollywood, directing Kevin Bacon and John Goodman in Death Sentence.

For Insidious they dreamt up screenplay details that assured its success as a date movie. That genre demands frequent moments in which youngsters can do nothing but shiver, giggle nervously and clasp each other tightly. Ghoulish well-made-up and artfully-costumed "entities" suddenly appear in windows, macabre creatures flit past the cameras, screeching twangs of musical instruments pierce tense silences, actors' eyes roll, and malign spirits rush into the viewer's face and mind.

Such material is a popular art form, and the Aussie pair are now skilled artists. They can also attract more than competent acting talents: Patrick (Little Children) Wilson and Aussie Rose (TV's Damages) Byrne are the credibly loving parents of three young kids, one of whom suddenly falls into a coma. A grandmother (Barbara Hershey) introduces them to an old friend (splendidly convincing veteran Lin Shaye) who's a psychic working with a young pair of serio-comic high-tech ghost busters (one a low-profile role Whannell gave himself to act, well).

Judged by the critical standards of its genre, it's a top-rated possible start of a new franchise. Its opening credits are notable (a quick mind-bending sequence of visual tics) and its abrupt ending is cleverly shocking. Without employing gore, outre horrors or cheap tricks, Whannell and Wan made a little classic, managing to incorporate the genre's obligatory patches of wrily comic light relief.

Source code

With a track record comprising two Species video features and one scifi TV movie, Ben Ripley needed to show Hollywood that he could also write a classy screenplay. Most important, he needed producers who'd back it. They were Vendome (whose only other product so far is Larry Crowne, suggesting it's probably a Tom Hanks venture) and Mark Gordon (best known for Criminal Minds and other TV series). They bought Ripley's concept of a scifi disaster-thriller, Source Code, in which a near-dead pilot's brain is returned to an exploded train's dead passenger's body, in repeated eight-minute sessions, on a mission to discover the bomber who's planning to annihilate Chicago.

Keeping the budget low, the production hired one minor star name for the lead role (Swedish-Ashkenazi Jake Gyllenhaal, recently panned for the Prince of Persia Disney/Bruckheimer epic bore), and a sophomore Brit director (son-of-David Bowie David Jones, freshly successful with Moon). Ex-model Michelle Monaghan (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Eagle Eye) smiles well as the sudden love interest aboard the train, while Ukrainian-American Vera (Up in the Air) Farmiga and Jeffrey (Angels in America) Wright fret attractively as the pilot's military mind controllers. Location filming in Montreal also kept the costs down, and everyone concerned boosted their reputations (including the rousing old-fashioned title-music composer and slick technical teams).

Director Jones, needing to work at a much faster pace than for Moon, and in a world of railway sounds and effects, sped the plot along appropriately, adding just a few presumably deliberate WTF moments in the far-fetched tale of "time reassignment". One scene in a washroom with the pilot and one of his chief suspects is repeated, out of sequence and then three times, in a possible tribute to Christopher Nolan's maddening Memory. If so, it was irritatingly pointless.

After the movie, the biggest non-sequitors remain unexplained. The pilot does re-write history, which the storyline said he wouldn't be able to, and he's apparently stolen a previously-living man's mind, body and girlfriend, which he shouldn't have. But he does so in order to die at peace with himself and his estranged father, so that's all right folks, schmaltzy Hollywood-style.

Cold fish

Black comedy, softcore porno, serial killers and gory horror are favoured elements in mainstream Japanese movies. Writer-director Shion Sono gave his audience their money's worth of all such macabre big-screen entertainment with 144 minutes of Cold Fish. Of its kind, its many genres, it's excellent.

An avant-garde poet and actor, Sino's first feature as a writer-director (in 1990) was Bicycle Sighs. His 2002 gory cult hit Suicide Club (aka Circle), and its 2006 sequel, Noroko's Dinner Table, brought him commercial and critical success, as well as global film festival attention.

Cold Fish is loosely based on a pair of serial killers who owned a pet shop. The film's alpha-male middle-aged extrovert madman owns a grand tropical fish store, and he matter-of-factly tells his chosen new business assistant that he's made 58 people "invisible". The younger man, a weak-willed nerdish pet fish shop-keeper, is easily trapped when the happy maniac rescues his bolshie teenage daughter from shoplifting charges.

Both men have sexy young wives with enhanced breasts and lesbian tendencies. The madman was sexually abused as a boy by his father. The daughter is a bad-mannered bitch who detests her young step-mother. Carnivorous fish are also featured, and a madly menacing hoodlum working for the aquarium boss. Various corpses are butchered methodically, by candlelight, their flesh and bones anointed with soy sauce before burning.

For two hours, the nerd is drawn further into the murderer's mayhem and mindset, and then, inevitably, the worm turns with horrific results. And any viewer who doesn't giggle and gasp, sitting spellbound by the blackly comic audacity, cannot be human.

The actors all present remarkably credible characters (even the voluptuous breast-bared wives) as psychotic misfits living in a loveless world of pain. The editing is well-paced, the camera-work exciting without being too flashy, and sound (especially rain) and music (pop and classic) effects underscore the moods tellingly. This is black comedy at its best, streaked with lots of red blood and wild-eyed scenery-chewing. Yet the only award it's collected was for best screenplay at a fantasy festival. It deserved better recognition.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

One of the teasers for next year's Oscar nominations may be the handling of Andy Serkis. The Armenian-English master of "motion capture" acting gave LOTR a star turn as Gollum, and also worked wonders for director Peter Jackson in the title role of King Kong. He has now assured the success of Rise of the Planet of the Apes through his representation of Caesar, the apes' leader. Will it earn him a Best Supporting Actor nomination? Or will New Zealand's WETA (LOTR, King Kong and Avatar) CGI technicians, who transformed his movements and facial expressions into convincing pixels, win all the glory?

Serkis, who provided the motions "captured" by the technicians, will probably have to wait for any Oscar reward until the reboot of the franchise ends. In any case, John Lithgow is a surer bet this time as an Oscar nominee (it would be his third) for his finely-gauged cameo as a retired piano teacher afflicted by Alzheimer's Disease.

His son, a medical researcher (James Franco, nicely under-acting), discovers a virus that repairs brain cells, and secretly improves his father's. His authorised test victim is a female chimpanzee, who runs riot and is shot before her secret day-old baby boy is discovered. The fact that none of the preceding sentence's script aroused instant disbelief and chuckles in the cinema audience is a tribute to sophomore Brit director Duncan Wyatt. His breakneck pace, quick cuts and smooth editing flattered the story, ably driven forward too by brash old-fashioned symphonic music composed by Scotsman Patrick (Bridget Jones' Diary, Gosford Park) Doyle, most-awarded recently for the Goblet of Fire instalment of HP.

Other supporting cameos, with deliberately understated nastiness, show ape-abusers who are heartless (Scot Brian Cox), vicious (Tom Felton, best known so far as HP's Draco Malfoy) and exploitative (UK TV actor English-Nigerian David Oyelowo). Niceness is served luke-warm by Bombay-born Frieda Slumdog Millionaire Pinto as Franco's characterless love interest, and Canadian Tyler Labine as his agonised research pal. The key focal point, literally in terms of close-ups on his highly expressive frowns and green-tinted eyes, is Caesar, the orphaned chimp nurtured secretly by Franco and Pinto for eight years (another totally implausible plot detail). He gains superhuman intelligence and potential world dominion (to come in the next episode, hinted at during the end credits, via NYC).

Caesar's new-found simian allies are a mixed bunch, almost laughably so for an over-jowled ludicrously dreadlocked lump (Maurice), a "circus orangutan" who understands sign language (like Caesar), and is a CGI creation based on an actress's captured motions. She and most other human-simian models clearly don't have the expertise and fluent body and skin linguistics of Serkis. His Caesar is a marvel to behold, amazingly moving and masterful, while the CGI experts have a field day with the army of apes using brute force to attack San Francisco.

The DVD's deleted scenes or commentary may reveal what happened in up to 10 minutes of screen time cut from the original reported length. One loose end that slips past shows Caesar reacting to the sight of a dead female ape referred to previously by humans; if the original screenplay had included an aborted love interest for Caesar, its deletion was wise.

Maybe the commentary will also note and explain the decisions to cast a black actor as the profit-driven boss of the medical research company, call him Dr Jacobs and have him ceremonially killed by a facially-deformed bonobo he'd experimented on. The non-pc aspects of the storyline were probably camouflaged by casting an English actor as Jacobs.

The original 1963 novel (La Planete des singes) by Frenchman Pierre Boulle had been first adapted for Hollywood in 1968, starring Charlton Heston. Four sequels followed, as did an inconsequential Tim Burton version in 2001. Remarkably, this reboot's writer-producers (Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver) had no significant track record, and top dogs at the Dune and Fox production companies must be tickled pink (richly) by the success of their risky investment of almost US$100 million in the project, together with the equally risky choice of young outsider Duncan Wyatt as the director.

His first full-length directorial feature had been back in the UK: The Escapist (2008), which he co-wrote. Its cast included Brian Cox (who'd also appeared in the second of Wyatt's previous two short films). It needs to be sought out, to see what qualities in it prompted Hollywood to give the young Brit such a pricey responsibility. He succeeded, brilliantly in commercial terms and very credibly in technical terms; his film and the re-born franchise deliver pleasing big-screen cinema, a live-action cartoon whose illogic doesn't diminish its entertainment value.

Captain America

It's a summertime delight to note that Hollywood can still deliver good old-fashioned action-adventure blockbusters. Happily, "good" is a fair adjective to apply to the newest Marvel Comics movie franchise, Captain America: The First Avenger.

All concerned with the production must be chuffed that one of the first choices for director, Jon Favreau, backed out of the project. This enabled a veteran talent to step in: Joe Johnston, whose first feature was the 1989 hit, Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Since then, he's only made six full-length film features. They're an impressive line-up of above-average mainstream entertainment: The Rocketeer, Jumanji, October Sky, Jurassic Park III, Hidalgo and The Wolfman.

He'd already won an Oscar, in 1981, for Best Visual effects in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and his latest feature further demonstrates his SFX and design mastery. He employed a phenomenal 13 specialist FX companies, whose hundreds of credit names take up many minutes at the end of the movie.

Johnston puts production funds where they count, also hiring top-rate actors to boost the lightweight script. Chris (Fantastic Four) Evans has classic Hollywood pairings of good looks and twinkling eyes, all-American heroics and good-mannered modesty. His Captain America, a weedy lad transformed Atlas-like into a supermanic hunk, is a live cartoon that's very humanly animated. The role of his similarly-engineered arch foe, Red Skull, was entrusted to an actor whose voice and strut grandly inhabit a nonstriking physique: Australian Hugo Weaving, who's segued remarkably from The Adventures of Priscilla to The Matrix and the LOTR series, while adding off-screen timbre to Rex in Babe and Megatron for Transformers.

The Captain's military commander is a gruff ally, played with similar panache to Rambo's (Richard Crenna) by Tommy Lee Jones. The love interest, an English WW2 intelligence agent, is a token role smartly posed by Hayley (Pillars of the Earth) Atwell. There are various well-acted buddies; Stanley Tucci delivers a classy cameo as the obligatory anti-Nazi German emigre boffin.

It will be interesting to compare this beguiling blockbuster with the one that Jon (Iron Man) Favreau made instead, Cowboys & Aliens. It'll be even more astonishing to see how Marvel copes with putting a clutch of its extra-large comic-book eggs (and egos) in one basket when Joss Wheldon's The Avengers appears in 2012, teaming up Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow and Hawkeye under the command of Nick Fury.

Wu xia

Four years after The Warlords (2007) earned him Golden Horse awards (best film and director), Peter Chan has new grounds for being seen as one of Hong Kong's grandest movie-makers. His Wu Xia is an intriguing martial-arts period (1917) piece blending the concepts of David Cronenberg's The History of Violence, US TV's CSI franchise, Tsui Hark's Detective Dee, Guy Richie's Sherlock Holmes and Kitano anti-heroes.

A seemingly humble paper miller (Donnie Ip Man Yen) becomes a rural community's unexpected hero when he tackles a pair of notorious bandits and is "lucky" enough to kill each of them by accident (in the first of three action scenes directed by Yen). The magistrate (ubiquitous Takeshi Kaneshiro) inspecting the case suspects that skilled martial artistry accounted for the luck, and is shown, through slow-motion replays and imaginary in-body fast tracks, proving his forensic conjectures.

Yen's humble character eventually admits that he's the son of the maniacal leader of an evil gangster sect. He'd left his father, finding peace with a young woman (enchanting Wei Lust, Caution Tang) whose husband vanished leaving her with one son. The couple's own son is sought out by the vicious grandfather, leading to the son's self-amputation of an arm and a final stand in which the scientific mind of the detective and the swordsmanship of the miller prevail.

Unlike recent Chan movies, this one doesn't flaunt a cast of thousands and epic scenes. Musical interludes do pop up like Greek chorus routines, sung/declaimed in dialect, and there are the expected showcases for Yen's martial choreography, but the film is mostly a character study and real drama. Much credit (and many awards, surely) must go to screenwriter Aubrey Lam (Chan's frequent associate).

The cinematography by Yiu-fai (Confession of Pain, 2046) Lai and Jake (Yang Yang, Monga) Pollock would also be noteworthy if it hadn't used film that looks like a suitable case for re-mastering. Too often, scenes were murky, their dullness contrasting badly with vivid sound effects and lively acting.

Multi-lingual Japanese-Taiwanese Kaneshiro yet again rules the acting roost, with a restrained Depp-style individuality. Yen performs the necessary acrobatics well (finely utilising a trio of veteran character/kungfu actors whose facial acting pushes bland-faced Yen out of an audience's focus), but his character's non-stop niceness is not credible given the past evils and despicable parentage shown on the screen.

Once again, Hollywood's Weinstein team quickly identified a possible winner and also bought the re-write rights for the US market. Understandably, they've abandoned the literal translation (Swordsman) and opted for a snappier title that has nothing to do with the story (Dragon). Although that sounds like counter-productive product marketing, the Weinsteins usually know their markets well. Maybe they'll add a suitable subheading, CSI China 1917, if Bruckheimer would let them. No way he will; he'd probably commandeer the concept himself.