Alive and kicking

A-

Pioneer stirring of every known feature of the dance and AIDS genres into a very acceptable emotional stew.

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Originally entitled Indian Summer, the 1996 British feature Alive and Kicking was an early tale of gay love and AIDS written by UK-based American playwright Martin Sherman (best known for Bent and Mrs Henderson Presents). Stage director Nancy Meckler directed the dance drama starring Jason Flemyng as an H-positive ballet star who rejects AIDS treatments in order to continue his career, his real life.

Antony Sher is the AIDS psychotherapy specialist who successfully woos the dancer; every other character is in the dancer's world (including Bill Nighy as the sympathetic company manager and Dorothy Tutin as its Alzheimer's-suffering founding choreographer).

Sherman achieves a screenwriting mission impossible, stirring every known feature of the dance and AIDS genres into a very acceptable emotional stew. The dancers are insecure posturing egotists with big hearts, the lead dancer has a black dyke best friend with a working-class accent, handsome young people get lesions and die, cameras pirouette around agonised faces, gay sexual activity is photographed with cunning lighting schemes, and the whole movie feels as clearly marked for emotional moments as a ballet floor is with spots.

The movie overcomes its screenplay's painstaking contrivances largely due to the credible facial reactions and body language from Flemyng and Sher. Their characters bond in an unlikely pairing, and Sherman's dialogue has memorable moments raging about AIDS. More noticeably, there's a tedious over-dependence on ironic American-accented cliches (which were possibly all de rigeur in London dance circles in the 1990s).

At first sighting, this well-acted mainstream treatment of AIDS and homosexuality should have become a global festival favourite and potential award-winner. It wasn't, maybe because it cast its dramatic net too wide to appeal strongly enough to dancers or the gay market.

Undertow

A-

Simple macho maturity from Peru; as gay movies go, it's one of the better on the festival circuit.

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A scenario that's credible, emotional and dramatic is a rarity in the gay genre (in which even Brokeback Mountain somewhat failed the first criterion). Undertow (Contracorriente) may therefore have been over-rated by the critics, who've been very kind to the debut feature by Peruvian writer-director and co-editor Javier Fuentes-Leon. He also earned the Audience Award at the Miami and Sundance film festivals in 2010, and his Colombian and Franco-German producers deserve big kudos for backing his breakthrough movie (12 years after he directed the first of his two short movies).

The storyline, screenplay and directorial style are observant and restrained. A happily married bearded fisherman in a Peruvian coastal village has also been the secret lover of a well-off bearded painter who stays in the village every year. Villagers have suspicions about the painter but not their dutiful Catholic fishing colleague, who's first seen leading the rites for a dead man's burial at sea after listening to the foetus of his pregnant wife's first child.

When the painter drowns at sea after an offshore tryst and tiff, his ghost returns to the village, visible only to the lover who wouldn't/couldn't acknowledge his existence in life. They chat and embrace, and the former non-believer pleads for the ritual burial and consequent eternal peace, not wishing to be an invisible lover with no contact with reality other than the fisherman. To achieve his lover's wish, the fisherman must come out as a bisexual, accepting his wife's desertion, villagers' hostility and the painter's family pressures.

There are just enough artfully composed scenes of water, sand, fishing boats, male posteriors and village panoramas (cinematographer Mauricio Vidal) to give the movie art-house appeal, while the dialogue and ensemble acting are natural enough to avoid the customary Latin American label of "magical realism". Characters and situations are neatly designed to jerk sympathetic tears but manage to avoid eye-rolling cliches. There's no cop-out "happy" ending; the movie has a simple macho maturity. As gay movies go, it's one of the better on the festival circuit.

Quattro volte

A+

Mind-boggling cinematic pretentiousness ... in a fascinating offbeat art-house creation.

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How much of cinema's status as an art form depends on cinematography? Films with little dialogue and many images blur definitions, as Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) does. An NYT critic thought the Italian movie "reinvents the very act of perception", which amounts to a warning to be prepared for mind-boggling cinematic pretentiousness.

As with his debut feature, The Gift (2003), writer-director Michelangelo Frammartino went on location in Calabria for his 2010 docudrama. In the first segment of the quartet of episodes, an old goatherd subsists on the fringe of a medieval town clustered atop a steep hunchback hill. He dies (after 40 minutes), and the next focal point is a newborn goat, whose fumbling infancy is observed for 20 minutes until it loses itself and goes to sleep (or death) amid the roots of an ancient fir tree.

The tree is cut down by the townspeople for an annual festival, sporting a stark tree canopy far above the town's roofs. Then it is chopped up and added to an intricately constructed charcoal oven (seen in full smoky operation in the movie's pre-title opening sequence). The charcoal is distributed, and smoke rises, as it has intermittently during the film, from a chimney on the town's roofscape.

Are the four segments a cycle of reincarnation? Or facets of the divine comedy of human life and vast variety of nature? Or, as a cynic might suspect, one shortish dramatic film with a trio of scenic documentary shorts deployed to double the overall length to one closer to that of a full feature.

The old man's story is an exquisitely composed slow-paced non-speaking parade of set pieces, a storyboard movie that turns fine photographic images into moving pictures. Many are bewitching, such as those illustrating the goatherd's ritual potions of holy dust and his awareness of an ant crossing his face. One long-pan depiction of a barking herd dog causing a runaway lorry to unloose the goats is a wonderful comic compilation, delightfully plotted and stage-managed. Similarly, the goat kids' gambols are deftly-edited, delightful documentary fun.

The lack of dialogue and background music is no handicap: attention is focused on the dogs' barks, the goats' bleats, their clanking bells, the occasional lorry trip, the dying herder's coughs.

This movie may not warrant four viewings, but a second is deserved: cinematographer Andrea Locatelli is another young talent well boosted by this offbeat art-house creation.

Horrible bosses

B-

Foul-mouthed incredible screenplay about three white male losers conspiring to kill impossibly nasty bosses.

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Slightly more frequently than a blue moon, a movie is so badly written that a viewer with more than one brain cell will soon abandon all hope of it developing interesting plot lines or characters. It will be walked out of or ejected. Horrible Bosses is one such stinker. The key facts to note are the names of the people responsible for it, to ensure one approaches their future efforts with much caution.

The foul-mouthed story and totally incredible screenplay about three white male losers conspiring to kill their impossibly nasty bosses were created by Michael Markowitz, a US TV series writer who worked on Becker and Duckman. It appears that he accumulated a bottom drawer of story ideas and supposed jokes that had been judged too racist, homophobic, misogynistic or crude for TV, and recycled them into a movie concept, reportedly earning a six-figure auction bid from New Line Cinema.

Six years later, the screenplay had been adjusted by him and a pair of other writers. Young John Francis Daley, a TV series actor (Bones), had previously written a screenplay just once, for an episode of Bones. Older Jonathan Goldstein was a veteran TV series producer who'd also never written for the cinema previously.

Another TV specialist, Seth Gordon, got the director's chair. His only previous movie feature was Four Christmases, a seasonal effort for New Line starring Vince Vaughan; it was relatively successful (its box office gross doubling its hefty US$80 million budget).

Horrible Bosses had a more sensible budget of less than US$40 million, despite having a trio of minor star names playing the ludicrously non-amusing bosses (Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey and Colin Farrell). Another fading star, Jamie Foxx, took a humiliating cameo as a black murder consultant called "Motherfucker", apparently changed at his request from "Cocksucker". There are quite a lot of cock-sucking jokes strewn around the self-proclaimed black comedy.

The trio of "pussies" plotting their bosses' demise are typical 21st century Hollywood serio-comic anti-heroes (a la Hangover etc), played with stereotypical wry grins and wan smiles by bland actors. Charlie Day, a youngish supporting player in Drew Barrymore's Going The Distance, cringes as a registered sex offender working for offensively lustful Jewish dentist Aniston. Middle-aged TV comedian Jason (SNL and 30 Rock) Sudeikis is a dead-pan accountant for Farrel's coke-snorting imbecile boss, and charming Jason (Arrested Development) Bateman looks very tired of being an inconsequential foil for Spacey's megalomaniac character.

None of the bosses are OTT comic figures, not even black-comedic symbols. None of the anti-heroes deserve chuckles or cheers, yet this film's box office gross truly was: US$210 million and still counting, before going to DVD. The coven of writers must know they've found a mother lode: all those obscene and inanely unfunny ideas they dust-binned during TV brainstorms will sell tickets galore to movie-goers eager to wet themselves in a cascade of dirty words.

Crazy, stupid, love

A-

Tangy bitter chocolate becomes saccharine mush.

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When two talents direct a scintillating, satirical and star-studded debut comedy about a gay con man, their admirers will let them make such a way-above-average comedy about anything. Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa almost did, lining up Steve Carrel, Julianne Moore and Ryan Gosling for their second intricate romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love., written by Dan Fogelman. The seemingly redundant punctuation marks are a sign of the production team's awareness of verbal values (visibly not shared by the distribution company's poster design).

The directorial duo's first little-seen (in the USA) comic mini-masterpiece was I Love You Phillip Morris. Its screenplay, an adaptation of a biographical magazine article, was co-written by them too. Their previous writing included Bad Santa (way above average too) and Cats & Dogs. Fogelman's track record was built on cartoon screenplays (Cars, Bolt, Tangled), which are tough testing grounds for comic inventiveness.

For its opening half-hour, the trio's joint effort was a classic in the making, a sequence of cunningly comic introductions to its lead characters: a nervously talkative wife (Moore) shocking her laid-back husband (Carell) by announcing her desire for a divorce; their 13-year-old son telling his 17-year-old baby-sitter, after she's found him masturbating, that she's his fantasy passion; her trying to tell Carell that she adores him; and self-pitying Carell getting adopted by a kind-hearted bar-hopping ladies man (Gosling) who promises to teach him how to make his wife rue her folly.

The consequent plot permutations show early potential, especially in cameo parts for Marisa Tomei and Kevin Bacon as the married couple's adulterous flings. The direction and editing are snappy, edgily and funnily so in terms of camera angles and timing.

For their debut feature, portraying madcap manic farce (finely carried off by Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor as gaily besotted homosexuals), the directors could get away (outside North America) with very gay surrealist satire because it was a true story. Unfortunately, for their new fully fictional film, they and Fogelman had to conform to Hollywood rules: it must have a happy ending adorned with family values, a sermon about love, and brave smiles.

In ye olden days of self-censored Hollywood, couples were compelled to be married, always wear pyjamas, and never have both feet off the bedroom floor at the same time. Even in 21st-century Hollywood, cynics and cads must be redeemed, infidelity rued and forgiven, while teenagers must be shown to understand that they love their parents even more.

Such a screenplay cop-out also marred the end of Little Miss Sunshine. Once again, tangy bitter chocolate becomes saccharine mush, satisfying the movie-going needs of sweet-toothed North American families and their hypocritical movie industry. This potentially above-average has earned a small fortune obeying the rules; chocolate connoisseurs might abandon it half-way.

Kung fu panda 2

A+

More action-packed than the first, if less character-driven, a successful extension into the 3D dimension.

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The most favourable comment on Kung Fu Panda 2 is that it looks (in 2D) as if it's an unusually effective if over-busy usage of 3D effects.

The original CGI cartoon movie's creatures reappear (with the same megastar voices). The colourings are lovely to look at, and one new creature (a China-threatening peacock) has a much more expressive face and character than the bland "Famous Five" heroes helping the obese and mildly comic panda anti-hero perform his predestined duties.

The peacock's finely boo-able voice is that of yet another Brit-accented gift to conniving cartoon-world villainy (Gary Oldman, channeling moments from Jeremy Irons et al). Jack Black is inoffensively easy to listen to as the bumbling hero. Dustin Hoffman self-effaces well as the divinely patient kung fu master. Less admirably, James Hong's characterisation of the panda's father figure, a noodle-shop-owning duck (Mr Ping), sounds almost racially offensive, depicting the obsequious creature as a whining maudlin Chinese hand-wringer.

Director Jennifer Yuh might claim that character is true to human life. She surely deserves great credit for her debut feature, having been promoted by Dreamworks from her leading artist role on the first Panda. For that she composed a bewitching sequence of Chinese-style shadow puppetry, which is utilised well again as the intro to the fast-paced CGI saga.

More action-packed than the first, if less character-driven, this is a successful franchise extension into the 3D dimension and good ocular entertainment. That's all, folks, and that's good enough.

Limitless

Limitless is a good old-fashioned B movie with an up-and-coming near-the-top actor (Bradley Cooper) and director (Neil Burger).

Yale-grad Burger made his mark as a writer-director in 2002 with a mockumentary, Interview with the Assassin, telling a clever fiction of JFK's "second" assassin. Four years later, Burger had worked with some of Hollywood's top talents, directing his own screenplay adaptation of a Steven Millhauser short story, The Illusionist. Starring Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti, it won many nominations and awards for its composer (Philip Glass), costume designer (Ngila Dickson), lead actress (Jessica Biel) and cinematographer Dick Pope, (the British long-time associate of Mike Leigh also collecting his first Oscar nod).

Burger's Iraq-veterans comedy, The Lucky Ones (2008), co-written by him, had a less stellar line-up (Rachel McAdams, Tim Robbins and Michael Pena) and didn't win box office or award kudos. Maybe that was why he was next given a directing-only job, where the irony is that his zoom-along kinetic imagery is such refreshing cinema it makes the screenplay by Leslie (Hairspray update) Dixon seem a flimsy framework. The talent of a Burger as a co-writer was needed for the adaptation of the first (2001) novel, The Dark Fields, by Irish writer Alan Glynn. He'd followed the scifi-reality path well-trodden by Philip Dick, imagining a drug that would enable a man to have instant access to all global knowledge, a "limitless" ability to know everything, be a real stock exchange master of the world, and learn any foreign language.

In such supernatural fairy tales, the drug will have unpleasant side-effects (great excuses for a director to show off technical skills with multiple zoom and fish-eye lenses). There will also be a scheming corporate master-mind (another excuse for Robert De Niro to sell his talent for sweet-talking nastiness) and cruel gangsters (Russian, of course). Throw in a long-suffering girlfriend and an addicted ex-wife, for limited female attractions, and the formulaic product just needs its charismatic male lead.

Until now, Bradley Cooper had usually been type-cast as a comic co-lead actor, adding a handsome lack of depth to the very shallow Hangover franchise and Sandra Bullock's All About Steve. The TV series veteran (Alias, Nip/Tuck) sensibly invested his own capital in the highly profitable movie, his first production venture. Cooper will not be a Cruise but, with four other features due out in the next two years (one with De Niro as his supporting co-star again), he's a potential Cage. His bank account won't care if it's damned with such faint praise.

Cameraman

Cameraman, a documentary overview of "The Life & Work of Jack Cardiff", appeared in 2010, the year after the Oscar-winning 94-year-old British cinematographer died. Directed by Craig McCall, who also edited and produced the tribute feature, it expands on McCall's previous short studies of Cardiff's use of cameras as an artistic medium, showing how much Cardiff was consciously inspired by artists as varied as Vermeer, Turner and the Impressionists.

The cross-references are truly illuminating, unlike the humdrum words of praise from Hollywood celebrities and some of the director-cameraman's living leading ladies. Cardiff's genius with colour composition, shadows and framing is confirmed though, most clearly in the one Oscar nomination of his that succeeded: for The Black Narcissus, in 1948 (also winning the Golden Globe that year). He gained other cinematography nods for Fanny (1962) and War and Peace (1957); in 2001 he was awarded the first Honorary Oscar given to a cameraman (who was commended as a "master of light and color").

Although he directed more than a dozen commercial features, he only had one major success. In 1961, Sons and Lovers earned an Oscar for its B&W cinematographer, Freddie Francis (another Brit), and eight more nominations, including one for Cardiff as director. He did collect a Golden Globe for it as best drama director, but Billy Wilder's comedy The Apartment was that year's Oscar-winner.

It would have been interesting to hear Cardiff talk about his two jobs' differences and their particular difficulties, and why he found it necessary to re-focus his career behind the camera after the British film industry collapsed. His life from clapper boy to Rocky II's cameraman covered seven decades, and he appeared to be a modest talent who chose to memorise funny moments on and off the sets rather than the "hypocrisy and hyperbole" that he found in Hollywood. The trouble with modesty is that it can make its subject seem inconsequential.

Shine a light

The Rolling Stones in concert, as seen by Martin Scorsese. What more needs to be said? Shine a Light (issued in 2008) is a set of slick recordings, an exciting tribute and a wry documentary as well as a superb showcase for five extraordinary old men (including Scorsese himself, once again showing himself off as a film editor with an exceptional ear for pop music).

Seven cinematographers were at work in New York's Beacon Theater at the end of 2006 for the special charity concerts staged during the band's A Bigger Bang Tour. The last show was attended by Bill Clinton, his family and invitees, whose photo ops were better managed than the music line-up. Scorsese doesn't get the song list until a moment before the Stones strut on stage for their opening number, Jumpin' Jack Flash.

Smurfs

The Smurfs was a 1958 Belgian creation, a comic book (Les Schtroumpfs) for a nation that possibly needs a big sense of humour in order to contemplate itself. Their world of teeny blue comic creatures, featured in an animated series on US TV from 1981 to 1990, was finally licensed for a big-budget (Sony Animations) Hollywood production. Issued in 2011, scorned by the critics, it scooped up half-a-billion US dollars globally at the box office. The sequel, quickly green-lighted, will appear in 2013.

By then, a new generation of 6-10-year-olds (the cute, coy and cuddly creatures' natural market) will be ready to drag their parents off to premium-priced 3D cinema seats for depressingly derivative CGI-figure-populated live-action farce. By then, Neil Patrick Harris, a TV sitcom and Broadway stage star, may regret having accepted the lead human role, even if his bank account is healthier. The producers will have decided whether huge-nosed shaved-head Hank Azaria should be allowed to reappear (with his CGI-manipulated ginger tom accomplice) and again overact madly (as any other self-respecting comic actor would do to keep his sanity in such a film).

Director Raja Gosnell was already a known talent for his pedestrian (and occasionally commercially successful) directorial efforts on seven other comic efforts: Home Alone 3, Drew Barrymore's Never Been Kissed and Beverly Hills Chihauhua, Martin Lawrence's Big Momma's House, two Scooby Doos, and Dennis Quaid's Yours, Mine and Ours.

This time too, he didn't have much to work with. The lookalike bug-eyed pug-nosed Smurf characters have one-note traits revealed by their names (a la 7 Dwarfs), their world is threatened by an evil wizard (a la Tolkien etc), they have a portal to NYC (a la Enchanted), and the self-proclaimed screenplay-writers shall be nameless: a few wordplays winked in the direction of parents don't justify paying dutiful attention to the petty plot and trite dialogue.

Kids loved it, Drew must love Raja, and that's Hollywood reality.

Arietty

At the end of 2009, Studio Ghibli promoted one of its chief animators, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, into the director's chair for The Secret World of Arietty. Based on Mary Norton's classic (1952) English children's novel The Borrowers, the tale of the endangered species of tiny household spirits had already inspired many English-language film versions (most recently another BBC production, starring Stephen Fry, Christopher Eccleston and Victoria Wood).

Ghibli and its co-founder Hayao Miyazaki won the animation Oscar in 2002 for Spirited Away (the first foreign-language film to do so) and may hope to do the same when Disney distributes the latest film in North America in February 2012. It won't.

It suffers from the disadvantages of Miyazaki's dominant themes. When a story doesn't have enough action, interesting characters and pacing, the studio's customary motifs of ecological awareness, feminism, anti-capitalism, humanity and pacifism are pretty tedious.

The Borrrowers was a gentle, genteel saga, a pining for older days and ways, and it lent itself ideally to Miyazaki's ethos. The only child of a house's last couple of surviving Borrowers, 14-year-old Arietty, is introduced by her father to the frightening world of the huge humans, from which small essential supplies must be "borrowed". In scenes of miniaturisation akin to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Arietty is spied by the sickly boy of the house, who befriends her and helps her family escape from the clutches of a grumpy housekeeper.

The hand-drawn imagery of ivy, raindrops, hidden passageways and spring flowers is brilliantly imagined, manoeuvred and coloured. Such work is a world away from the traditions of Disney or Pixar, and the Japanese conventions of adorable big-eyed children, animals with conflicted characters and boo-able grouchy old ladies are maintained handsomely. There just aren't enough dramatic developments or side-attractions to grab a non-Japanese viewer's attention. The specially-commissioned music (by Cecile Corbel, the French-Bretonne singer and harpist whose sound resembles that of New Agers such as Ireland's Enya) has a similar languor.

[The DVD version watched had an unfortunate typo in otherwise excellent subtitles: the Borrowers' neighbours are called "human beans".]

Johnny English reborn

Sometimes a pastiche imitates its source too lovingly to be as funny as it could be. That's the case for Johnny English Reborn, a 2011 re-appearance for Rowan Atkinson's bumbling Bond-ish Brit spy. Looking as good for his age as Connery and Moore did at the end of their 007 stints, 56-year-old Atkinson is still a good actor with a gurning face, bulging eyes, squirming physique and unique screen presence.

The writing team knew what they were doing. Lead co-writer William Davies, for whom Arnie's Twins was a happy first feature, had co-written the original Johnny English (2003). Second-credited writer Hamish McColl had joined Atkinson and his long-time comic associate Richard Curtis on Mr Bean's Holiday (2007). Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (both given "characters" credits) worked on the first English film and co-wrote the last four real Bond films. They're together as usual for "Bond 23" too, now being directed by Sam Mendes.

Which might explain why much of JE2 comprises concepts and scenes derived from the JB franchise. Viewers who tire of watching Atkinson can amuse their memories instead, recalling when JB went into high-speed action in the Alps, at sea, in souped-up Rollers, etc.

All the usual characters are in action, played by an assortment of British acting talent: Johnny's female espionage boss (honorary Brit Gillian Anderson), MI7's suave Eton-educated double-dealing Agent 1 (Dominic West), a severely-disabled gadget boffin (Tim McInnerny), a beautiful MI7 behaviourist destined to save and love Johnny (Rosamund Pike, whose first big-screen major role was in JB's Die Another Day) and a naif 20-year-old black Brit assistant agent (talented and handsome Daniel Chatroom Kaluuya).

Remarkably, JE2 manages to look like a lavishly-produced update of an early Bond film, and director Oliver Parker should gain kudos for making a $27 million budget fill a wide screen so handsomely.

What matters most is spoofs, send-ups and sly variations that both display Atkinson's comic skills and the writers' creativity. Early on, hopes are raised high by a lengthy sequence of ingenious comic ploys enabling the ageing JE to chase and outwit a lithe Chinese gangster over Kowloon roofs and Hong Kong harbour. It's a typical Bond conceit, well-paced and musically thunderous, which maintains a tricky balance of silliness and smartness for the JE character. Maybe that set the bar too high too quickly, and the film's comic volume became muted when JE went into action in Switzerland (protecting China's premier from an assassin).

The Chinese angle played well for a key market, and Atkinson and his producers again shrewdly screened their movie widely in overseas markets months before they let it open in either the UK or North America, where critics could be expected to pooh-pooh it. Once again, the move paid off: JE knows where Mr Bean's most loyal fans live. They know that Atkinson will deliver above-average comic entertainment, and he does.

Meek's cutoff

Why does a critically well-rated and attractively-cast Western from a production team with a classy track record fail to get adequate distribution and promotion? Why did Meek's Cutoff only gross one million US dollars during its limited run in North American art-houses?

The history-based tale of three pioneer families lost on their 19th-century Oregon Trail wagon-ride was edited and directed by Kelly Reichardt, a multi-award-winner for Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008). Neither was mainstream fun; both were based on short stories by Oregon novelist Jon Raymond, a protege of indie director Todd Haynes. In the first, two friends go camping in the mountains; the next film followed a hassled woman (Michelle Williams) and her beloved dog (played by Reichardt's own pet).

Reichardt, Raymond and Williams pooled their talents again for the 2010 Western, adding Bruce Greenwood in the title role of Stephen Meek, a long-haired bearded mountain man employed as a guide. Besides Williams, as one of the group's three submissive wives, the cast also included Will (The Postman) Patton, Paul (There Will Be Blood) Dano and Shirley (Life During Wartime) Henderson. Haynes was an executive producer.

Chris Blauvelt (who worked on Haynes' I'm Still Here) was the cinematographer, and the production designer, David Doernberg, knew Reichardt from her (and his) first feature (River of Grass, 1994). Their work on the arid locations is a joy to watch, in small doses, and might have looked even grander if directed by a Terence Malick. The actors play reserved, tired, dead-panned 19th-century emigrants lost in a wilderness, lost in a tiring cinematic diorama.

Ron Rondeaux, in his first featured movie role, played "The Indian" captured by the ox-wagon train and forced to lead them to water. He's an experienced stuntman who'd also worked on The Postman. In the film industry, jobs arise more often from who you've worked with than from those you just "know": it's commonsense to employ talents that are tested and trusted.

As the DVD's 9-minute "making of" featurette is as self-consciously slow, static and prosaically framed as the movie, it can be assumed that Reichardt deliberately set out to make a docudrama without much drama. The conclusion is probably the least conclusive (or satisfying) of any Western ever made outside Russia. The movie's limited run is clearly explicable.

Whistleblower

A debut feature wins major awards at the Seattle and Whistler film festivals. It's a docudrama thriller re-telling post-civil-war Bosnian scandals (child-sex slavery and human trafficking). They were connected to a U.S. military contractor (Dyncorp), covered up by the U.N. and revealed by a Nebraska policewoman working for the U.N. as a highly-paid contract peacekeeping monitor. She's The Whistleblower, who went to the U.K. courts to seek justice for wrongful dismissal, and won her case. You can safely bet that, even if such a film was made by Angelina Jolie, it wouldn't get made by any commercially-minded American company.

Instead, it's a Canadian-German production, written and directed by Toronto-born Larysa Kondracki, mostly filmed on location in Romania. Remarkably, it attracted top acting talents for walk-on cameo parts. The Brit contingent included Vanessa Redgrave and Benedict Cumberbatch; Italy's Monica Belluci, Denmark's Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Californian David Strathairnalso appear.

Rachel Weisz is convincing as the real-life heroine, Kathryn Bolkovac, an increasingly angry professional disgusted not just by the Bosnian realities of racism, religious bigotry, sexism and callous brutality, but also by the tainted multi-billion-dollar business of international aid, corporate fraud and dishonesty, and international diplomatic connivance. As with Erin Brockavich, the twice-divorced whistleblower's personal failings are noted, but unfortunately for this woman's fight, the direction doesn't have a similar cinematic panache. It reports the horrors of the trafficking trade, but shies away from the necessary melodramatics that would better explain the policewoman's angst and anger.

This is a competent TV movie, akin to the European Storm production starring Kerry Fox as another real-life female campaigner. Worthy, but inappropriately flat.

Win win

When a movie's first word of dialogue is "Shit", and it's whispered by a cute infant girl and then repeated by every character in a comic drama, you know the movie is an indie production. Win Win (2011) is writer-director Thomas McCarthy's third feature, and although it didn't boost his commercial cred (grossing only US$10 million), its charming credibility proved that The Station Agent (2003) and The Visitor (2007) weren't fluke film festival successes.

It isn't a damnation of faint praise to feel that Win Win could have been a TV movie. Its theme and characters are more mainstream than those of McCarthy's previous features.

As always, McCarthy's major talent is his ability to create and cast exceptional ensembles, comprising slightly screwball normal characters relating gingerly to each other, developing their special web of relationships that blend family love, friendship and humanity.

This time, McCarthy's core character is Paul Giamatti, fully inhabiting his role as a small-town attorney who coaches a high school wrestling club in the evenings. Business is poor for the family man, and he grabs a chance to land himself a high monthly commission from an elderly client with early dementia.

One downside soon appears in the form of the old man's blond-dyed dropout teenage grandson, played with dead pan style by newcomer Alex Shaffer, a former US state wrestling champion. It would be no surprise to learn that McCarthy met Shaffer first, then created the movie character of a troubled teenager who's a wrestling champ (with a drug-addicted mother).

Bobby Cannavale, who'd acted in The Station Agent, works with McCarthy again, as the coach's former college wrestling pal. Amy Ryan, a TV stalwart (most recently in The Office) is his judicious loving wife, Jeffrey Tambor his law practice partner, and veteran Burt Young (multiple Rocky appearances) the old man. All of them shine quietly, as does Kiwi Melanie Lynskey (Kate Winslet's schoolgirl ally in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures and Martin Sheen's foil in Two and a Half Men) in the tricky role of the druggie daughter. Each one of them presents a distinct voice, an attractively "normal" different speaking style, as distinct as the personalities and dialogue McCarthy wrote for them.

McCarthy also earned praise for co-writing Pixar's Up, and he's been a busy TV actor too since 1996, including seasons of Boston Public and The Wire. His all-round talent might not thrive in Hollywood's squillion-dollar commercial film industry, but it'll be a pity if his next movie also needs a four-year gestation period.