Sherlock Holmes 2

A-

Holmes doesn't play the violin in this second romp through Victorian London settings, where the movie's salvation is the depiction of Moriarty.

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If Alvin and the Chipmunks can have a Squeakquel, can Sherlock Holmes be allowed a "shequel"? Such an atrocious wordplay may have prompted some of the plotting for A Game of Shadows, credited to (Mr and Mrs) Kieran and Michele Mulroney. Their only previous joint credits are as writers and directors of a 2009 bomb, Paper Man, a gossamer-weight comedy in which Jeff Daniels almost died and Emma Stone glistened weakly.

Whatever, somebody at Silver Pictures decreed (and wasn't second-guessed by director Guy Richie, Village Roadshow or Warner Bros), they can carry on the new Holmes tradition. Presumably, for a cheaper fee than the previous writers.

Their Holmes (Robert Downey) had a brother, Mycroft (Stephen Fry), who called him "Sherley", and eyes were raised during that initial reboot of the Holmes franchise by homoerotic overtones in the dialogue and body language of Holmes and his trusted associate, Dr Watson (Jude Law).

This time, the new creative team decided, Holmes would don drag and lipstick in order to protect the honeymooning doctor and his wife (Kelly Reilly) from the evil plotting of Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris). Later, Mycroft/Fry had to parade his semi-frontal nudity and outspoken rejection of female companionship, while double entendres flapped feebly, more explicably for UK audiences which know that Fry has long been a very out personality in real gay society.

However, just to be sure that global audiences don't get too many queer ideas about the new version of a 19th-century sleuth who's a cocaine-addicted chemicals-imbibing psychotic character, Holmes's original female interest, Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) is brought back ... so that she can be killed off (through an injection of instantly fatal TB) by the dastardly professor and his sharpshooting English hitman (Paul Anderson as a credibly devoted lieutenant).

Holmes doesn't play the violin in this second romp through Victorian London settings, but the non-stop musical soundtrack (Hans Zimmer) includes cascading Celtic string bands as well as almost every known version of mood-heightening ear-challenging orchestral outburst. Thus Holmes has more screen time to indulge in 19th-century forensic science, ride a donkey, shoot and punch various evil henchmen, lurk in comical wigs and bad disguises, and meet a gipsy fortune-teller (Noomi Rapace) whose face-lifted brother will present an explosive conclusion.

Although the efforts at wit and whimsy are not quite as condescending and cringe-worthy as those foisted on Downey in his second Iron Man outing, they are as strained as Law's face is much of the time. The movie's salvation is the character and depiction of Moriarty. Jared Harris, the 50-year-old son of Richard Harris and Elizabeth Rees, finally has a lead movie role that suits his talent and looks, augmenting the TV reputation he's gained since 2009 in Mad Men.

He and Downey swap tricks of their trades, one-upmanship IQ ploys, arch glances and speedy chess moves, with convincing brio, and Richie rightly lingers on their clear rapport as actors with faces worth watching. The director is less forgiveable for his over-frequent slow/stop-motion sequences anticipating or explaining a fast-action setpiece of calculated fighting finesse.

At the end of the movie, however, when Holmes hasn't died in the Swiss waterfall and Moriarty may have, no one should over-analyse such a broth of cinematic fun and games. It's a beguiling entertainment, and I do hope Moriarty returns. It's a great change to see an abnormally-clever villain who's middle-aged, looks normal, and is a worthy match for a foolish hero like the new Holmes.

We need to talk about Kevin

A-

Swinton conveys states of mind brilliantly, as do the faces of the playing Kevin as a pre-teen manipulative little monster and spiteful narcissistic 15-year-old planner of a massacre.

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Tilda Swinton was plucked from the ranks of little-known and gifted indie British actresses, by fellow-Scot Danny Boyle, and put on The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio in 2000. It took a few years for the oddly beautiful and charismatic talent to became a mainstream top-billed star in the UK and then the USA; her latest award-winning role (2011) also arrived courtesy of another Scot: director Lynne Ramsay.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is based on the Orange Prize-winning novel of the same name by Lionel Shriver (a London-resident American woman who adopted a male name, as many successful female writers have done). Probably influenced by the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, it examines the development of a psychopathic child. His character is reviewed through the recollections by his mother following his murder spree.

The screenplay by Ramsay and her partner Rory Kinnear took several years to get into production (by BBC Films and the UK Film Council, with extra funds from Steven Soderbergh and other movie angels. Ramsay's previous movie was Morvern Callar (2002), which followed her breakthrough debut feature Ratcatcher (1999). She remains a distinctive indie director, utilising hand-held cinematography, non-linear narrative and assertive editing effects to engage her audience's attention. Excessively so in her over-usage of symbolic red (as blood, in a festival of tomatoes, highlighted in jam, lights, lampshades, dresses and more) to reflect the mental states of the anguished mother and amoral child.

Swinton conveys states of mind brilliantly, much of the time without dialogue. Her eyes, facial lines, footsteps and glances mesmerise. So do the faces of the two young actors playing Kevin as a pre-teen manipulative little monster who refuses to communicate or get toilet-trained, and then as a spiteful narcissistic 15-year-old planner of a massacre. One day, near his 16th birthday, he takes his longbow to school and slaughters fellow students, having already shot down his father and young sister.

He'd previously blinded her in one eye, and the story stretches credulity with its failure to suggest that no person other than the mother was ever worried about the boy's personality (which supposedly only flowered when his mother reads him a story about Robin Hood's archery skills). Almost risibly too, the father (John C. Reilly playing yet another spineless non-character) always makes excuses for a child whose malicious cunning he doesn't see or sense.

Barely credible too is the decision of the mother (a published travel book author) to stay in the overly hostile and vengeful local community, and become a travel agency assistant, visiting her son's prison each week only to sit silently and avoid looking at him. At the movie's end, reached slowly via an increasingly tense sequence of flashbacks, the son - facing a "new school" in adult prison - shows nerves and expresses self-doubt for the first time.

The mother embraces him, coolly, and her audience will be no wiser whether she's proof that evil is bred in genes and/or nurtured by misguided parents. All that matters in the end is Swinton's spell-binding performance, well worth a 2012 Oscar nomination [which it didn't get].

Winnie the Pooh

A-

Old-style tribute to older tastes, adorned modestly with golden honey scenery, childish songs and cute 2-dimensional use of printed words.

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Disney's first animated feature based on the Winnie the Pooh tales of AA Milne (The Many Adventures of WtP), issued in 1977, combined three existing featurettes. Consequently, the 2011 "remake" is effectively the Pooh's first dramatised animated feature. Mistakenly, at little more than an hour long, it's not a full-length movie. That surely partly accounted for its relatively poor gross box office takings: only US$33 million globally, barely covering half its reported budget cost of US$30 million.

It's a sweet movie, fittingly for the ever-hungry honey-loving bear. The hand-made drawings are the usual old-fashioned Disney delight, the cels creatively given CGI visual enhancement through the cute device of using the books' printed words, paragraphs, letters and pages as film-stage props.

English accents are rightly maintained for all the characters, from Christopher Robin (a very characterless schoolboy) to Pooh and his pals. Jim Cummings voices both the bear and Tigger, while John Cleese enunciates the narration well, without histrionics. Other voices remind the audience that Eyeore, Piglet, Kanga and Roo are very thin characters and boring fall guys.

Adult jokes or wordplays are rare, though long, big words remain the semi-comic speciality of pompous Owl. Overall, this is a simple tale designed for pre-teens. There are minor potential threats from a forest setting and a comic yeti-like Heffalump (whose appearance at the end suggests a putative spin-off that won't happen).

The short duration of the film, and the relatively small budget, indicate a lack of fully-funded confidence in the old product by Disney's animation team (now headed by Pixar's John Lasseter). They created an old-style tribute to older tastes, adorning it modestly with golden honey scenery, childish songs and an appropriate two-dimensional use of printed pages in honour of Milne's original book and its classic characters. More likely, their primary intention was to create advertising material for valuable Pooh merchandise.

The people vs. George Lucas

A-

Love-hate docu complexity for Star Wars and its creator.

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Documentary features can be entertaining ways to learn things one didn't know, or even realise one wanted to know. The People vs. George Lucas took 90 minutes to show me that a true force of film fans willingly exhibit a love-hate complexity for Star Wars and its creator.

They, and Alexandre Philippe's interesting film essay, initially appear to be making a lot of fuss about nothing really special. Bit by bit, though, the charges leveled at Lucas add up to a damning indictment of the commercial film industry (and its unstated dumbing-down of movie audiences).

1. Lucas's "special editions" of the initial trilogy re-wrote Hans Solo's character so that he wouldn't be seen cold-bloodily shooting an assassin. The fans' rage isn't directed at hypocritical PC squeamishness by Lucas's Hollywood associates.

2. The introduction of Jar Jar Binks as an unfunny (to the older fans) creature apparently designed for a new generation of kids expecting silly voices and fart jokes.

3. The prequel trilogy's diminution of "The Force" into a genetic disturbance.

4. Lucas's control-freakery and apparent deliberate slights for Star Wars fans.

5. The fundamental commercialism of an entertainment industry that either overpowered Lucas or encouraged him to exploit, preventing him ever making another creative film, instead devoting himself to a Darth Vader-like existence running his Star Wars empire.

The most damning evidence of the sixth charge is the Star Wars Christmas [aka Holiday in Wikipedia, probably for the usual modern pc reason] Special for TV in 1978, which Lucas subsequently attempted to deny and destroy. A quarter of the two-hour disaster reportedly comprises an un-subtitled setpiece of growling for Chewbacca and his newly-introduced family.

Although the documentary tries to present a balanced critique of aspects of Lucas's achievements and failings with Star Wars, the non-cooperation by his empire and Hollywood production associates leaves the field clear for the fervent fans' rants (most of which are fairly comical, including an early Simon Pegg send-up).

Clips from many of the fans' home-filmed parodies, satires, animations and denunciations (one re-working Misery to great effect) provide the heart of the documentary, and confirm its claim that Star Wars inspired a generation of film-goers. Lucas "raped their childhood", some fans assert, self-mockingly, even though his sins provoked a new art form of amateur cinematics.

The professionals do the best job though: an excerpt from South Park's condemnation of the Lucas-Spielberg re-launch (depicted as a two-man rape of Indiana Jones) offers the blackest comic commentary on the whole business.

Mission Impossible 4

A-

It's soon clear why Tom Cruise and his multi-million-dollar production team entrusted the ageing star actor's very valuable franchise to Brad Bird.

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The subtitle of the fourth Mission Impossible would only interest movie geeks seeking a Trivial Pursuit triumph with Ghost Protocol. More geeks and most mainstrean movie buffs will probably remember that it was the first non-animated feature from director Brad Bird (whose Pixar hits included included Ratatouille and, most memorably, The Incredibles, which featured his own unforgettable super-shrieky voice-over for its bossy fashion dominatrix).

It's soon clear why Tom Cruise and his multi-million-dollar production team (including MI3's director JJ Abrams) entrusted the ageing star actor's very valuable franchise to Bird. Their action-adventure vehicle is virtually an animated CGI movie itself, employing a few competent humans to stare, fret, sweat and leap out of the stances stuntmen got them into. At that level of film-making, MI4 is almost as good and definitely less credible than The Incredibles.

Cruise has assembled an able new team. Paula (Deja Vu) Patton joins him for the first time as a gungho lite-black (Obama-style) fighting woman, along with Jeremy (Hurt Locker) Renner as an IMF analyst and new tough buddy role. Simon Pegg, the back-office comic IT boffin in MI3, returns as a field agent, a bumbling Brit smiler counterpointing his US partners' deadly seriousness.

What they are all doing, why and how is little explained. The scenario rushes from one of the setpieces of mega-bucks explosions and car crashes to one of the seconds-counting procedurals in which wires are spliced, magnets and robots teeter, and face masks are manipulated.

There is a stereotypical group of well-cast villains, spies, Russian henchmen and anti-terrorists pirouetted by the screenplay around a calmly mad Swedish nuclear mastermind. Their antics in Moscow are worth the location work around the exploded Kremlin. Similarly, Cruise's gecko-style climbing of Dubai's tallest tower is jolly scenic sensationalism, albeit with an unimpressive sandstorm. India gained a less admirable image for its tourism industry by allowing the team to create a lavish Bollywood ball in which Anil (Slumdog Millionaire) Kapoor had to squander himself as a Lothario billionaire buffoon with supposedly crucial codes to a satellite.

The really crucial plus factor for MI this time is its musical soundtrack. It was hard to imagine any further variations on Lilo Schifrin's mesmerising and ideally tense driving themes being created, let alone the addition of complementary new music which pounds a cineplex's walls and brilliantly underscores the fast-moving action and stunts. Composer Michael Giacchino (who worked on both The Incredibles and Ratatouille for Bird) should be nominated for an Oscar, alongside the sound crew.

(A personal thankyou will go to the first reviewer who explains, with citations from the screenplay, why Ethan Hunt's wife was, and then wasn't, killed and why she - Michele Monaghan - then appears in the movie's very jejune epilogue.)

The epilogue also suggests that Ving Rhames will be returning to the franchise as the MI5 team's boss (replacing the assassinated and uncredited Tom Wilkinson). Maybe Cruise realised that he needs to give himself a bit of female company if his Ethan Hunt is to measure up better beside Bond, Bourne and all the other ageing action stars.

Punished

A-

Looks like a mediocre TV series segment, whose lack of tension is announced by bland background music.

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Punished has a slim storyline that could have been compressed into a couple of episodes of a standard TV detective series. But Hong Kong does have a movie industry that needs to deliver Cantonese-language products to cinemas at home and abroad (and dubbed Mandarin versions to mainland cinemas and genuine DVD stores).

The 2010 product from the Milkyway production team (led by Johnny To) can only be damned with faint praise: it's a competent vengeance movie with the crime genre's regular themes of middle-aged male bonding, corporate loyalty, painful violence and unfilial spoilt children.

The first third of the stretched-out 90-minute action thriller piques an audience's interest with flashbacks from and to the choking death of the obnoxious ransomed daughter of a property developer (Anthong Wong as angst-ridden as ever). His palatial home houses a second wife who's a young business brain, a housekeeper who's a black-clad mystery character, and a right-hand man (Richie Ren) who's a divorcee with an objectionably dismissive schoolboy son.

Having already paid 50 million HK dollars for the girl, the developer pays his loyal henchman the same amount to exact revenge on the kidnappers. Observers might want to know who they were and why they killed the girl, even though her death held no dramatic import, but soon realises that they had none either. They are disposed of, brutally, one by one, after low-calibre fisticuffs, and the screenplay had to add an inconsequential sub-plot and schmaltzy surreal conclusion to fill its allotted time.

Director Law-Wing-cheong does nothing to flesh out the skimpy tale. The movie looks like a mediocre TV series segment, whose lack of character or tension is announced feebly by its bland background music.

West is west

A-

With incredible contrivances, the Brit-Paki plot is neither full comedy nor coming-of-age drama, neither culture-bridging nor racially sensitive.

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West is West, released in 2011, was a belated sequel to 1999's East is East, a semi-autobiographical comedy featuring the dysfunctional family of a mixed marriage in the north of English (Salford) in the late 1960s.

Punjabi-born Indian actor Om Puri returned in the role of Pakistani George Khan, grumpy owner of a chippy shop and husband of English Ella (Angela Bassett). It was his 205th credited film role in a 35-year career, her 54th, and their inter-racial love is still credible. Another Indian actor, Rajasthani Ila Arun, provides a strong third adult character as Khan's first wife.

The screenplay's central figures are the family's two half-English sons. The weak-willed elder brother can't find a wife back in his father's home village, while the teenager has coped with racism at school and divided loyalties outside by becoming a truant shoplifter. The father takes him back to Pakistan to force him to accept a Pakistani heritage.

Very much a storyboard construction with incredible coincidences and contrivances, the plot is neither full comedy nor coming-of-age drama, neither culture-bridging nor racially sensitive. There's a stereotypical wry English-speaking sage with no apparent livelihood and a smiling acolyte who becomes the teenager's pal, daughters who have no roles to play, and a nephew who on-screen purpose is never revealed. Loose ends are left loose, except for the older son being married off to a sassy village girl from Rochdale whom he'd never noticed.

Racial characteristics are not explored with wit or insights, and religious factors are ignored completely. Even in the plot's time setting (1976) it is not possible to believe that none of the characters would have thought and talked about Islam, Western materialism and ancestors. Such a world of semi-comic make-believe can just about be imagined in rural Indian Punjab (where the film was made) but not across the border in rural Pakistan.

[Retired UK TV series actor Ayub Khan-din, born in Salford, wrote East is East as an award-winning play, which was staged in London in 1997. It was soon filmed, winning more awards and many for Irish director Damien O'Donnell. Maybe it was better fun.]

Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy

A-

Le Carre's plot was more of a period overview, a socio-political portrait, than a straightforward spy thriller.

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Viewing the original BBC TV serialisation (1979) of John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy before watching its 2011 movie version ensures that one knows who the mole is. This has two advantages.

Undistracted by red herrings, one can better assess the screenplay's ability to compress almost five TV hours of dense, albeit slow-paced, drama into two hours of cinema. And compare two generations of British actors (and cameos by two actresses).

After 32 years, the TV serial was a mixed blessing on its BBC DVD. Good value is given by a one-hour documentary extra, The Secret Centre, made in 2000. It includes an interesting set of autobiographical comments by Le Carre, excerpts from the Smiley films, interviews with relevant figures (his ex-wife, college mentor, KGB and East German spymasters), and readings from the books (by Le Carre himself, aka in the real world as David Cornwell). If only more money had been spent on re-mastering the seven TV episodes' fluctuating sound and murky lighting. Their award-winning direction (James Irvin) and cinematography were diminished by the antique film qualities.

Although the serial looked its age, its dialogue rarely sounded dated. It'll be interesting to hear how the 2011 version presents bitter anti-materialist opinions that match those of the current Occupy movement.

It's easy to see how almost redundant characters in Le Carre's plot could have been dropped for the modern movie, including Smiley's nymphomaniac wife (Sian Griffiths), an exasperated schoolmaster (John Wells), a sacked research maestro (Beryl Reid), exasperating ex-spies (Nigel Stock and Joss Ackland) and an eight-year-old schoolboy who's a retired agent's protege (credited as "Duncan Jones", and already looking like the adult film director son of David Bowie, even though Jones's PR reps or IMDb haven't yet wanted to put two and two together).

The discredited spy (Hywel Bennett) who provides information leading to the mole plays a bigger role in the storyboard, too big, seemingly being an excuse both for some overseas location filming in Lisbon and the appearance of a female agent and sexual side-attraction in Le Carre's novel. Le Carre's key KGB maestro, Karla, is seen only as a non-speaking role in a flashback showing Smiley's feeble efforts to turn him (an unrecognisable bearded Patrick Stewart).

Such gratuitous roles were sharp reminders that Le Carre's plot was more of a period overview, a socio-political portrait, than a straightforward spy thriller. The identity of Russia's mole in the British secret service is signposted very early, simply because he's the only one of four possible traitors shown to have relationships with other people. All members of the quartet are stereotypical figures of post-War Britain, the upper class providing a glib bisexual cynic, a pompous fool and an embittered poseur, while the working class was mined for a Communist thug's son holding a technical role in the corridor of power.

Many of them smoked and puffed pipes heavily; that will have to be revised in 2011? And the homosexual overtones (Le Carre's acknowledgment of the characters of two among the "Cambridge Five" spies) might need spelling out even more clearly for modern audiences? If so, the preparatory school setting for another character may well be abandoned for the film to better fit into mainstream US audiences' comfort zone.

The lead characters in the 1979 serial must be the same in 2011. Chief investigator and forcibly retired spymaster Smiley (deadpan Alec Guinness) wasn't as cunning as my memory had expected, while the betrayed spy (close to emotive Ian Bannen) played a larger role than it recalled. The only active brain in the intelligence "Circus" (Ian Richardson) brought his saucer-lidded cup of tea into meetings in a giveaway fashion, just like a disaffected outsider would, and Smiley's aide (Michael Jayston) was too clever and loyal by half to have been allowed to remain in the service.

Although Smiley and his team, and the top civil servant empowering him unofficially, mention concerns about the mole being aware of their activities, his apparent total failure to do so is hard to credit (but may well illustrate the Oxbridge amateurishness of British espionage during the Cold War).

Is the 2011 version a deeper study of intelligence masters at work? Its task is easier, in my eyes, after the relative flatness of the 1979 original.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dancing dreams

Pina Bausch, a leading German modern dance choreographer, died in 2009, during the completion of a documentary report on her teaching style for young people, Tanztraume (Dancing Dreams).

Then aged 69, she did see the class of more than 30 non-professional teenagers complete their eight-month course of Saturday morning dance classes and perform her "Kontakhof", first staged in 1978, in a German theatre.

An ideal exercise for young beginners, the lightly comic dance revue shows teenagers exploring their own personalities, needs and sensual bodies through a sequence of varying dance styles. The documentary focuses on and follows the learning steps of a handful of youngsters who were likely lead roles in the "graduation" performances.

The true stars are Bausch's two middle-aged dance mistresses, visibly loving their work as Bausch's disciples and the apprentices' dance teachers and life counsellors. Bausch herself, a gaunt poker-faced heavy smoker with an imperial stride and smile, only appears in the rehearsal room occasionally, to assess the project's progress and make casting choices. As with documentaries showcasing similar busy cultural icons (Anna Wintour, YSL, etc), the dedicated assistants, their masters' apostles, are the true cultural heroes.

The students are an interesting bunch, some from first or second-generation Germans (from the former Yugoslavia and its Romany migrants), while other dance-curious youngsters sport gelled hairstyles, male earrings and black faces. Overall, they present an almost incredibly happy image of well-adjusted, ethnically-diverse German urban teens, forming a friendly team in which the only foreign influence is the occasional usage of "international" English and French words for limbs and steps.

Although the youngsters' interviews include moments of grief, shyness and despair, it's primarily a self-effacing record of an aspect of Bausch's work. No more, no less, and therefore disappointing. Although a study of dance shouldn't look so pedestrian, it does clearly illustrate Pausch's belief in using modern dance to liberate a teenager's self-esteem.

Midnight in Paris

Writer-director Woody Allen's biggest box-office success is his latest (2011) European confection, Midnight in Paris. The English title gave it a romcom tilt, but the French title may have better suited Allen's intentions (and customary egocentric genre), Monsieur Le Souris (Mr Mouse).

Once again facing up to reality, the veteran American auteur employs a substitute for himself in the leading role of a weak-willed questioning American intellectual. This time, it's Owen Wilson, who fits the bill very well, and he's a Hollywood screenwriter and wannabe novelist visiting Paris with his fiancee (Rachel McAdams) and her parents.

As always, guest stars flock to Allen's sets because he does give them the chance to have a little fun for a good cause, which is Allen's special aura. The French have long adored, and his long opening sequence of a host of picture-postcards shots of Paris, from the air, by day, in the rain, by night, illustrates his love of the French capital and its romantic and artistic history.

Wilson starts his visit in 2010, meeting an arrogant American academic (Michael Sheen) showing off to a Parisian museum guide (Carla Bruni, aka Mme Sarkozy). Rejecting his US-centric fiancee's worldview, fretting about his novel, tipsy and wandering Wilson is whisked away, after the peals of midnight, by a vintage Peugeot driven by F.Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (more Brits, this time Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill). Transported back to the 1920s, he meets practically tout le monde, from Cole Porter to Bunuel to TS Eliot and Picasso.

After further historical-name-dropping scenes, a movie-goer is doubly challenged when the significance of the painters, writers and personalities is not clearly spelled out at the same time was the audience is trying to recall who is who among the fast-tracked parade of international up-and-coming stars of stage and screen. Only Kathy Bates (as Gertrude Stein) and Marion Cotillard (as one of Picasso's mistresses) shone in this latest Allen version of cinematic charades.

At one stage, when Bates/Stein was also talking in French and Spanish, the game was nearly risible. I don't know of the actor who played Hemingway dourly, and Adrian Brody's Dali failed to register at all. When Wilson and Cotillard found themselves horse-and carriaged back to the 19th Century Belle Epoque, meeting its great painters (including an inevitably small cameo for Toulouse-Lautrec) at Maxim's restaurant, the game ended for me.

Maybe the high box-office takings were accounted for by returnees eager to catch all the names that were dropped, all the talents that were employed on the screen. They possibly helped some viewers to overlook the fact that Allen had given Wilson woefully unwitty and non-cerebral dialogue, while getting him to walk, talk and comment off-screen a la the older Allen who cineastes worshipped for good brain-tickled reasons. This younger Allen is a boring mouse, and there may be a good reason: Allen wanted all the Parisian residents of the past to declaim their aesthetic ideals and ambitions with an historical passion no 21st-Century Hollywood hack (Wilson's screen character) would dare to pen. Or else Allen doesn't want to create a version f himself that's both younger and just as clever.

Bridesmaids

Kristen Wiig, a five-year SNL regular, teamed up with fellow LA comedy team ("Groundlings") member Annie Mumolo to write a slick chick-flick comedy, Bridesmaids. Wiig featured in Paul and Judd Apatow's Knocked Up, and Apatow helped produce her first self-starring screen effort, alongside Barry Mendel, another successful backer of above-average comedies (from Wes Anderson, Joss Whedon) and weightier dramas (Speilberg, Shyamalan). The direction was handed to movie fresher Paul Feig, a TV veteran (The Office, Arrested Development, Nurse Jackie). They all knew exactly what they were doing: tweaking a formula.

Wiig goes where many TV comics have gone before: into the safe genre of the multi-buddy movie, where a variety of stereotypical characters indulge in stereotypical comic set-pieces. This time, Wiig's group is a quintet of maids of honourable intentions arranging their mutual friend's marital rites.

Envelopes were pushed wickedly, enabling ladies who lunch to chatter about licking male genitals, coping with sons' masturbatory excesses, and shitting on sidewalks in wedding dresses. Happily, such gross scenes are offset by some above-par wit and farcical set-pieces and occasional spots of wryly-written female bonding.

Maya Rudolph (ten-year SNL regular), as the bride-to-be, plays a mature character of colour balancing Wiig's egocentric and dizzy blonde Fey-like late-30s loser. Aussie Rose (Damages) Byrne scintillates as a socially aggressive rich bitch (partnering Wiig marvelously in a doubles tennis match and an extended game of microphone one-up-manship). Wendy McLendon-Covey (another Groundlings member, for nine years) was given some juicily raunchy dialogue as a frustrated suburban mom. Ellie Kemper (from US TV's Office) got the weakest role as a tiny cloistered soul while naturally large Melissa McCarthy has multiple scenery-chewing moments as a fearsomely friendly tomboy who loves dogs and an air marshal (distastefully so, not amusingly, in a bizarre end-credits insert of a love feast including ham slices on his nipples).

Irish comic actor Chris O'Dowd (UK TV's The IT Crowd) provides the movie's major male love interest, as a highway patrol officer, for Wiig's former cakeshop-owner; the other man in her life is a selfish sex interest, nicely self-ridiculed by Greg Tuculescu. There are also some bijou comic roles, an audience-friendly bonus in inventive comedy writing: a twitchy child with a warped mind, obnoxious sibling roommates (Matt Lucas and Rebel Wilson), jewelry customers.

As a distaff version of the standard parade of male dirty talk for teenage audiences, Bridesmaids is good entertainment. Not good enough for its inevitable sequel, but neither was Hangover.

Monga

A-

Good-looking tapestry of gang motifs.

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Every country with a film industry makes movies about gangs of youths, to satisfy ready-made audiences eager to buy tickets for big-screen battles starring their proxy selves. Taiwan's 2010 successful version of the genre, set in the mid-1980s, was Monga.

Named for an old rough and raunchy Taipei district, the movie shows locale-specific scenes of young male bonding, homoerotic friendship, street battles and adult gang reality. Five stereotypical young men have fun and games and fights, following character outlines that highlight comic cuteness or simple-mindedness, dramatic leadership qualities and perfectly-posed outsider stares.

Director Doze Taipei 24H Niu (who also plays a mainland gangster) and the excellent cinematographer (Taiwan-resident Jake Pollock, Yang Yang and Pinoy Sunday) wove a good-looking tapestry of gang motifs. The lead actors preen, puff their cigarettes, sport their pecs and make gangsterdom look an adorable lifestyle, until it turns, as film industry morality demands, nasty.