Warrior

B

Tired variant on old theme: the modern blood sport of MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) in a fighting family saga.

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Anyone who saw The Fighter, or others example of the genre, might guess that Warrior features two poor fighting sons (Brit Tom Bronson Hardy and Aussie Joel Animal Kingdom Edgerton) of a reformed alcoholic fighting trainer (Nick Nolte with a rasp) living in a stereotypically ugly macho US city (Pittsburgh). If writer-director Gavin (Pride and Glory) O'Connor wrote his plot before The Fighter appeared, he must feel unlucky.

All three male leads have unresolved family issues, so we know they'll all get punch-drunk, drunk, and be finally punched into states of smiling forgiveness and understanding. There'll be one loyal wife hanging around, and a lot of hand-held cameras bobbing and weaving around scenes of bare-chested men.

It takes more than two hours to reach the non-surprising conclusion that the brothers will come to blows in the final of a super-MMA championship. Despite good acting by the leads, it's hard to care about their drives and dramas when their situations and dialogue are tiringly cliched and sentimental. MMA fans will like the movie.

Carnage

B

Petty social commentary whose direction adds nothing visibly special and quartet of stars posture lazily.

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A successful stage play becomes a worthwhile movie if its narrative intensity is heightened by close-ups of actors' faces and reactions. God of Carnage, Yasmina Reza's French comedy of modern parental manners, was a hit in Paris and then (translated by Christopher Hampton) in London and New York, and might have been the basis for a movie triumph in the mode of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Like that stage and cinema classic, the French satirical, farcical and bitter comedy had a quartet of strong acting roles; it was retitled as Carnage, and got an accomplished director (Roman Polanski).

Unfortunately, a whole generation has passed since Edward Albee wrote his truly dramatic play (1962) about an academic's acerbic marriage, for which Mike Nichols directed the 1966 on-screen magic pairing of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. By comparison, four decades later, Reza's 70-minute extended sketch is a weak concoction.

Maybe Hampton's original translation worked well in the theatre. Given a new translation by another writer (suggesting Hampton's disapproval of the film production), which was turned into a screenplay by Reza and Polanski, the story looks and sounds more of a petty social commentary than any sort of indictment of modern parenting or social attitudes. The direction adds nothing visibly special, and the talented quartet of stars posture lazily.

Jodie Foster is an uptight socially-aware very PC prig married, incredibly, to a flabby bullied red-neck housewares manufacturer (John C Reilly). Similarly, Kate Winslet is the ill-matched socially-vacuous second wife of a sneering corporate attorney (Christoph Waltz) who lives through his mobile phone. All four are phony stereotypical metropolitan characters, who've met to deal with the fact that one son knocked out two of the other couple's son's teeth.

The couples' dramatic highlights are the off-screen abandonment of a hamster, and vomit on precious art volumes. The prickly quartet exchange niceties, barbed insults and drunken confidences, and the non-drama's theatrical box-office success may have depended on one actress having to vomit on stage in each performance. In the movies, that's no big deal and nothing else is worth watching.

Devil's double

B

Feebly-linked sequence of cliched scenes for Dominic Cooper's dual role as Saddam son and his double.

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Michael Thomas wrote a few screenplays based on novels or reality in the 1980s, including Scandal (the fact-based tale of a UK politician, prostitutes and Russian spies). In the 1990s, Thomas's Backbeat dramatised the fate of an original Beatle. His latest effort (2011) created a docudrama from the characters of Uday Hussein, Saddam's sadistic oldest son, and the Iraqi lieutenant lookalike (and former classmate) who was compelled to act as The Devil's Double.

The unlucky doppelganger, Latif Yahia, survived to write novels about his dangerous life inside the gilded, debauched, evil palaces of Iraq's "Black Prince". Inevitably, given the man's collaboration on the screenplay (and an uncredited bit part), he's depicted as a moderate moralist who saved his family's lives by taking Uday's place in public and in dangerous situations. The screenplay also shows Saddam and one of his doubles at work but doesn't explain why the dictator's younger son, Qusay, didn't play the same game.

The key factor for such a movie plot is the actor playing the superficially identical characters, and Dominic Cooper fills the two pairs of shoes attractively. This could have been the breakthrough movie for the young English actor, after various good supporting roles recently (An Education, Captain America, Brief Interviews), but Thomas and/or his producers (Europeans) opted not for a subtle psycho-political character study but for the R-rated Caligula/Scarface type of bio-drama, including rapes, beatings, cocaine snorts, wild gunfire and a dis-embowelling.

They gave the directing job to a known talent, New Zealander Lee (Die Another Day, Next, Along Came a Spider) Tamahori (who'd only worked on action-adventures after the failure of Mulholland Falls in 1996 and the lost promise of his 1994 multi-award-winning Once Were Warriors). Maybe the screenplay he had to work with already included poor-quality newsreel clips from Iraq's wars with Iran, Kuwait and the US, as well as its feebly-linked sequence of visually and verbally cliched scenes.

The overall tone is patronising and semi-racist. All characters speak English with bad accents, which demeans them, a la Arab stooges for Indiana Jones etc (except, remarkably, on account of his actor's facial firmness, Saddam). Cooper's two loads of changing accents are interchangeable, whether he's camply maniacal Uday or primly outraged Latif.

Uday's henchmen are heavy-smoking slouching mafiosi, the female interest who deserts Uday for Latif is an undesirably deadpan actress, and Latif's mournful court mentor and indiscreetly gay social organiser are dramatic contrivances with no dramatic purposes.

There possibly was an interesting story to be woven from the life and times of Uday/Latif. Let's hope the screenplay/s that will docu-dramatise Gaddafi's heir apparent will be a better vehicle for another deserving actor.

Cowboys & aliens

B

Painfully trying to be comic and cool, like geriatric Harrison Ford.

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There's a great satisfaction to be found in a commercial disaster when it's been engineered by Hollywood honchos high on hubris. As was Cowboys & Aliens.

His self-promotional Wikipedia entry indicates that a Scott Mitchell Rosenberg parlayed a profitable business from comic book rehashes and personnel poaching. His claim to movie business fame was his development of the Men in Black scifi action comedy (a claim IMDb does not appear to credit).

He then, self-reportedly, created the genre-bending concept of a Wild Western town in which a gang of cowboy bandits would be obliged to join forces with a cattle baron's gang, the sheriff's posse and the local Indian tribe to save scores of townsfolk abducted by giant alien bugs whose enormous spaceship is sucking gold out of the hills prior to their eventual destruction of Earth. But there's a hero to unite the anti-ETs: he's an amnesiac escapee from the spaceship and he's taken one of its death ray wrist bracelets.

The resultant screenplay for that indigestible brew of bizarre concepts was written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, who'd previously collaborated on TV series, The Island and Legend of Zorro (2005), Mission Impossible 3 (2006), Transformers 1 and 2 (2007/9) and the Star Trek reboot (2009): a track record of entertainment blockbusters to make Hollywood accountants salivate.

Yummy, salivated Steven Spielberg, I'll executive produce this sure-fire sucker! Let's spend about US$160 million. My old pal Harrison Ford can play the old rancher. He's very convincing playing old men a la Henry Fonda. We'll pay that Brit Bond Daniel Craig to be the macho antihero with a blank Eastwood-meets-Bronson face.

Somewhere in the Hollywood witches' brewing room, it was realised that the trademark Spielbergian potion of sentimentality was lacking. So the coven added a refugee woman from another planet, the macho man's dead wife, a boy and a dog, the rancher's whimpering bully boy son (Paul Dano) and loyal Indian sidekick - and a kindly preacher and a scared saloon keeper and his Latina wife. A black? No, even Hollywood witches know not to push their luck too far.

Finally, though, to make sure the film was totally incredible and could be seen painfully trying painfully to be comic and cool, like geriatric Harrison, Jon Favreau was given the director's megaphone and the SFX talents were let loose.

Characterless, constantly clanging with cliches, cant and cringe-worthy dialogue, this cornfield of movie-making managed to gross little more than its ludicrously over-ambitious budget. It's probably one of 2011's biggest net losers. Deservedly.

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.

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.

Hop

An Easter cinema confection for 2011, Hop was conceived by the team that produced the above-average Despicable Me animated comedy. Blending live action and animated figures, Hop is a below-average, flimsy tale of the Easter Bunny heir apparent's desire to get out of the family business.

He (sporting Russell Brand's irritatingly self-pitying voice) has set his mind on being a drummer in Hollywood, where he escapes to and accidentally lands up the life of a layabout human house-sitting in Beverly Hills. He's played by James Marsden, a sweetly comic Prince Charming in his support role for Amy Adams in Enchanted. Now in his late 30s, the actor looks too facially ravaged to portray an irresponsible, cute dropout who ends up running the Easter Bunny empire (an underground candy factory with a workforce of Easter Chicks on, of course, Easter Island).

With technically competent CGI work and likable cartoon characters, the movie might appeal to very young viewers. They were transported to it in box-office-topping numbers for two weeks in the USA, and their parents may still be wondering why the Easter Bunny was English, as was his fretful father (Hugh Laurie). The jealous chief chick flatters and fumes with a Mexican accent (Hank Azaria's voice going south of the border again a la Birdcage, muy macho this time).

In 1988, Who Framed Roger Rabbit created a high bar for comedies putting actors and cartoon characters on the same sets. Hop's producers should have at least tried to reach the same heights of narrative development and clever characterisations. Sadly, the even older generation of Disney family movies appear to have had a stronger and more crippling influence on the storyboard. Its lead pair of writers (Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio) had adapted Dr Seuss's Horton Hears A Who! and Sergio Pablos's Despicable Me successfully, but this original effort fails to shine on any level.

Sammy's adventures

Belgian producer-director Ben Stassen specialises in making movies for IMAX and 3D screens. A few shorts led to his first feature-length animation, the little-seen Fly Me To the Moon 3D (2008), which was followed in 2010 by Sammy's Adventures: The Secret Passage, whose English-language version was released in the UK in 2011 with new British voices. It hasn't gained American distribution despite also being given new voices for that market (including Melanie Griffith and Ed Begley Jr).

Sammy, a green turtle (Dominic Cooper) is born, meets and accidentally rescues the love of his life (Gemma Arterton), meets and accidentally loses a hyper-talkative life-long friend hatched on the same day, and travels the world encountering all manner of evil and foolish man-made disasters. As a 50-year-old grandfather, Sammy is a wise old turtle (John Hurt) teaching his next generation to put its best flipper forwards.

Presumably designed to be acceptable eco-entertainment for school parties in the USA, the agents and vessels of human wrong-doing sport English-language names (signposting oil spills, plastic flotsam, whalers, sewage). By contrast, the unpolluted oceans provide gloriously coloured images of marine paradises, decked with dazzling coral and tropical fish.

Sammy pals up with various fauna on his way to the end of the eco-fable, which is a bland statement that humans will have to do more to help turtles survive. The kindergarten style of the screenplay is highlighted by the frequent fading to black between episodes illustrating this or that aspect of mankind's ecological sins. This is a hi-tech 3D slide show.

The lack of a driving narrative flow and strong characterisations is excusable if the movie is viewed simply as a meaningfully pretty lesson for young children. Its 3D setpieces are enjoyable conceits even in 2D, and the CGI craftsmanship is admirable in the animators' usual testing areas of water and shadow effects and movements.

However, inevitable comparison with Pixar's Finding Nemo is not so favourable for Stassen's team's dramatic skills. There was just one noticeable improvement, to my ears: the non-presence of the whining voice of klutzy Albert Brooks as the tedious voice of Nemo's father.

Beaver

As a director and actress, former child star Jodie Foster works well with stories about children. She's also been a surprisingly strong counter-balance to aggressive male screen figures, and The Beaver may have seemed an interesting challenge to her.

A toy company chief executive (Mel Gibson), sinking further into depression, is eventually rejected by his wife (Foster) and elder son (Anton Yelchin). After failed suicide attempts, he puts himself into the care of a domineering glove puppet reject (the title role beaver). It takes control of his left arm and his voice, which now proclaims dangerously cute rough love of him in the tones of Michael Caine.

His infant son is enchanted, his wife is won over, but the son remains aloof. So did I. The son's a class genius, completing papers for fellow students for a fee. A top-graded girl (Jennifer Lawrence) needs a speech, and she'll pay up to a thousand dollars for it, believe it or not. I didn't.

She had a brother who ODed, and she casts aside her expensive honeyed phrases to tell her class about everyone simply needing love, which inspires her speech-writing lover to rush and embrace a father who'd cut off his left arm to free himself from the puppet. That's the plot and it's hard to imagine why Foster thought she could fashion such a pig's ear into cinematic silk.

Harvey and Walter Mitty meet Lars and evil blood-thirsty puppet stereotypes (Chucky, Puppet Master, Gremlins and Child's Play franchises) on the way to an Ordinary Family? Writer Kyle Killen, a new hack on the Hollywood block, sold his concept to Foster and her producers. They lost most of their $20-30 million investment; at least Gibson got a chance to show that he's a charismatic middle-aged actor who's willing to look and act his age.

Notebook on cities and clothes

Egocentric Dutch director Wim (My American Friend) Wenders attempted the impossible with Notebook on Cities and Clothes: he had been commissioned by the director of the Pompidou Centre to look at the fashion industry through a 1988 documentary centred on the working style of Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, a long-haired man in black clothes constantly.

Initially, Wenders focused on his own thoughts about cities, life and identity in the digital age. That provided a rationale for including camcorder replays of Yamamoto interview comments on materials, inspirations and other fashion pointers.

When the designer speaks Japanese, subtitle translations convey the words of his thoughts clearly even if the thoughts are vague. Unfortunately, most of the time Yamamoto murmurs in the English language, hesitantly as well as vaguely. It's hard, and unrewarding, to try and follow his chugging trains of thought.

Wenders' cameramen watch Yamamoto in his workhop, snipping and arranging cloth. Truly inscrutable and seemingly shy, the designer is not an exciting documentary subject to observe or listen to. So Wenders takes him to a billiards hall to ask some questions in a livelier and slightly more colourful setting than in Yamamoto's monochromatic environment.

[Interestingly, Yamamoto subsequently developed a second career as a movie costume designer, including work on four productions for the prolific actor-director Takeshi Kitano between 2000 and 2005.]

[Wenders, also a workaholic, has directed a further 26 titles so far, 15 of which were full-length features or documentaries. He's garnered nominations for an Oscar and a BAFTA (for Ry Cooder's scintillating 1998 documentary Buena Vista Social Club), having already won a BAFTA for Paris, Texas in 1984.]

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.

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.

Route Irish

Movies on DVD have to overwhelm their viewers, compel them to sit like an obedient dog, panting, unwilling to let their gaze wander. Route Irish did that with an intensely intriguing 10-minute first "act" showing a man of Irish-accented mystery in Liverpool coping with the bombing death of his best friend in Iraq. Then, mercifully it feels, director Ken Loach and his regular screenwriting associate, Paul Laverty, give their audience a breather, cutting to a crowded pub setting.

Unfortunately it's a cut not to the quick but the cliched, in yet another of the creative pair's polemical docudramatics. Their very unlikeable foul-mouthed anti-hero (Mark Womack) is a retired soldier who became a mercenary "contractor" in Iraq and invited his best childhood friend to join him there. The pal sees a manic colleague shoot up a taxi, killing a family of four and a couple of kids, and then the pal and his team members die when an IED explodes on "Route Irish", the dangerous road linking Baghdad's Green Zone and airport. The anti-hero and his pal's widow join vengeful forces (and unhappy bodies) to find truth and justice.

Loach, who's retained his socialist beliefs during more than four decades of movie-making, hired other favourite veteran talents including cameraman Chris Menges and composer George Fenton. As usual, the Loach-Laverty team employed little-known local actors to add the required air of cine-reality (and consequent amateur theatricals) and wove archive newsreel and emotional dialogue to illustrate blood-thirstiness by Allied forces and insurgents alike. There are some striking camera shots, telling narrative moments and effective editing, but the overall effect is yawnfully uninvolving. The promise of the initial setting evaporates.

Tempest

It hasn't been a happy decade for Julie Taymor, the acclaimed American theatre and opera director whose Frida (2002) earned six Oscar nominations (and two wins, for make-up and for original music by her spouse Elliott Goldenthal).

Her triumphant Lion King stage show (1997), for which she designed more than 100 costumes and collected Tony Awards for them and for direction, was followed a decade later by her disastrous disaster-prone direction of, and sacking from, Broadway's Spider-Man musical in 2011.

In film, her adaptation and direction of Shakespeare's Titus [Andronicus] (1999), starring Anthony Hopkins, was critically respected but lost big money (a gross revenue of only 10 per cent of its US$20 million budget). Undeterred, in 2010 she then released her re-working of The Tempest. Its budget was similar, the critics howled, and its gross ticket sales were less than $350,000.

Its lead actor, Helen Mirren as gender-changed Prospera, was award-nominated, and its costumier, Sandy Powell, earned her ninth Oscar nomination. No one else in the star-studded production boosted their CV, and the, ahem, role-call of flat performances includes David Strathairn, Chris Cooper, Alfred Molina, Alan Cumming, Tom Conti and Djimon Hounsou (Caliban, almost nude, naturally, sporting clownish make-up and middle-aged spreads). Russell Brand is atrociously unfunny as Trinculo, but at least he's playing at his standard level.

Even promising youngsters sound jaded and move wearily: Felicity Jones, as Miranda, and Reeve (Snow Falling on Cedars) Carney as Prince Ferdinand. Sadly for talented Ben Whishaw (Perfume, Criminal Justice), Taymor envisaged Ariel as a genitalia-free nude will'o'the'wisp with ugly make-up.

The film stock used seems to have been salvaged from pre-War vaults. The locations chosen in lava-strewn or wooded Hawaii were not picked for their cinematogenic quality. Most wrongly, Taymor paced out her production in stagy, theatrical terms. Compounding the tragedy of errors, she obtained sub-standard SFX and commissioned tedious or trifling music from her spouse. One small consolation for Shakespeare buffs: the DVD's English subtitles only omit or mis-write a few spoken word. A bigger one is the ten minutes or so cut from the film's official length before it went to DVD.

Is there a word for a movie that lacks depth, vision and visual flair? In the age of 3D, this is a failed 2D movie, so perhaps it can be best categorised as 1D. To be seen only for Mirren's eyes.

Business of strangers

Good actors need great breaks in order to become A-list stars. Stockard Channing, whose movie career began in 1971, has done very well on Broadway and US TV (her own sitcoms and The West Wing), but her first big lead role in Grease (at 33, playing a teenager) may have typecast the vivacious show-stopper. Only one later film earned her Golden Globe or Oscar nominations (Six Degrees of Separation, 1993). She gained less kudos for The Business of Strangers in 2001: the indie psycho-sexual mystery cost six million dollars and only grossed one million.

It was the Sundance-backed debut feature of writer-director Patrick Stettner, an award-winning student film-maker, who has only directed one more feature, The Night Listener (2006), another over-talkative psychological thriller (starring Robin Williams, co-written by Stettner with the story's originator, novelist Armistead Maupin). Apart from a credited "thanks", among many, on 2010's Oscar-nominated Winter Bones, he's had no IMDb entry since then.

Short in stature but high in eyeball appeal, Channing has an unforgettable face and charisma. She's a dedicated, divorced corporate executive unexpectedly promoted to CEO, over-nighting in a deluxe hotel suite. Her new multi-tattooed technical assistant (Julia Stiles) was late for a meeting, got fired, is stuck at the airport, and ends up talking to Channing's regretful character in the hotel bar. So does the self-assured male head-hunter (Frederick Weller) Channing had summoned when she thought she was going to be fired. It turns out that Chiles knows his rapist history, Channing believes her, and they drug, tie up and strip him, writing his sins on his skin (maybe Stettner had read a Swedish trilogy's first instalment).

The barely believable parcel of coincidences could have led to a psycho-sexual kaleidoscope revealing lesbian and gender-bending tensions, if the screenplay and two-thirds of the three-part acting team had been stronger cinematic elements.

Stiles does pinch-eyed tight-lipped meanness well enough, but Stettner lets her do it all the time, without developing her proclaimed role as a non-fiction writer enjoying the "sloppiness" of real life. Her manipulation of the older couple isn't credible, and neither is TV actor Weller's ill-defined character as a plaything for angry females.

When she's in focus, Channing projects a frisson into the static scenes, her eyes darting, seemingly looking for meat on the writer-director's bare bones of a plot. At 75 minutes, it's a cinematic novella of inconsequence.

Cecil B.Demented

Few directors have been as faithful to their birthplaces as John Waters was to Baltimore. It was the home-town setting for several Barry Levinson films too (and TV's The Wire), but Waters really put the city on the cinematic map. In 2000, with Cecil B.Demented, the subversive writer-director made the Maryland capital a farcical exemplar of American movie-making mayhem as "The Hollywood of the East" and the proud location for sequels such as "Gump Again".

One of Waters' less appreciated comic fantasies, the DeMille pastiche earned only one award nomination, given to Melanie Griffith for the Worst Actress Razzie (luckily for her, it was the year Madonna made The Next Best Thing).

She's not that bad, and the opening scenes of her arrival in Baltimore as the star of a mainstream Hollywood drama at its premiere are enjoyable depictions of a bitchy foul-mouthed two-faced actress at work. After she's kidnapped by a gang of anarchic young film-lovers, led by Cecil B.Demented (dead-eyed Stephen Dorff), to be the lead actress in their reality "cinema terror" epic attacking the industry, the focal point shifts woefully.

Waters' screenplay bogs itself down in non-funny verbiage and antics, trying to give juicy cameo roles to a dozen actors (including Maggie Gyllenhaal) instructed to ham and camp as wildly as possible. Griffith does her best to play a professional mainstream actress swimming in a tide of amateur theatrics, directed forcefully by the obsessive Dorff character, who insists on sexual abstinence until the movie's completed.

His adopted name, and the names of other directors tattooed on the cast's bodies or scattered around the outre sets in a dilapidated movie theatre, cannot be seen as in-jokes. They are petty name-dropping examples of Waters' failure to create valid satire from a potentially rich concept: "We believe technique to be nothing more than failed style ... there are no rules in outlaw cinema". There is one rule, that Waters obeyed well at other times: amuse a mainstream audience even if you shock it, as he did with Hairspray, Pecker and Cry-Baby.

One appropriate casting touch is the use of Waters regular Patricia Hearst (the notorious victim of a real-life kidnapping) as one of the film crew's mums. Among the young cast, Andrew Grenier later found long-term employment on TV in Entourage, Lawrence Gilliard Jr appeared in The Wire for two years, Michael Shannon (and Gyllenhaal) enjoyed mainstream careers. Ricki Lake was another member of Waters' own entourage.

He made another unsuccessful film four years later, in 2004 (Dirty Shame), but has been visible more often this century in documentaries, providing first-person accounts of America's gay and cultural revolutions. He was one of their flag-bearers, ironically using good technique to display fun-filled messages much of the time. Not so well this time.

Transformers 3

It's a perverse pleasure to watch an atrocious blockbuster. Sadly, Dark Side of the Moon, the third Transformers travesty from producer-director Michael Bay, is not bad enough to be a cult hoot. It's merely a compendium of many of the worst features of Hollywood commercialism, of which Bay is a shining example of wanton wastefulness of massive funds and mighty technical skills.

Stephen Spielberg's association with the Hasbro toymaker's mindless franchise, as its lead producer (through Dreamworks), demeans a director who used to have creative skills and artistry as well as money-making ambitions.

Any franchise that features an actor as stunted in physique and talent as Shia LaBeouf to portray its lead human character is obviously designed to be a live-action cartoon. LaBeouf, who once again shouts, screeches and kvetches tediously, has the charisma of a half-defrosted chicken corpse.

His adolescent unattractiveness was partly excusable the first time round (in 2007) when his parents were introduced. They are a stereotypical pair of hicks presumably intended to appeal to male movie-going US teenagers' hatred of loud-mouthed, pushy and stupid parents. The third time round, when they and LaBeouf are still pretending that he's teen-aged, their fake affability and crude jokes are as funny as suppurating warts. It is not surprising that LaBeouf never thinks about them after shooing them out of Chicago before the bad machine aliens invade it.

Bay has never treated women characters with delicacy either. Megan Fox's derriere and luscious lips have been replaced by an English model's ultra-long legs and lips that may be puff pieces for Botox. She is an inadequate actress, starring (like a plastic lamp might) in her first movie because she'd previously worked with Bay on his advertising films for Victoria's Secret, which employed her as its lead model. Other models have made acceptable transitions to film sets, but this woman's facial resemblance to Cameron Diaz was no guarantee that she could match that super-model's acting ability and charisma. She can't even disguise her English accent.

It's amazing that Sino-Americans have not yet mounted street demos protesting the portrayal of a bespectacled, nerdish, cliche-ridden Chinese rocket scientist as a despicably risible lavatorial idiot. There is also a ludicrous Germanic character, with a lousy accent, camp gestures and vacant expression.

A handful of normally good actors must have been paid good money to squander their talents as other cardboard figures propping up pathetic storylines. John Malkovich, John Turturro (masochistically returning to the franchise) and Frances McDormand might have provided light comic relief if they had been given dialogue and antics worthy of raising a smile, even a simper.

Which leads us to the principal cause of the movie's awfulness: the one credited writer, Ehren Kruger. He shared a Razzie for Worst Writing with the two co-contributors of the second (2009) Transformers screenplay, and can look forward to winning it all by himself for his latest effort. His movie career began in 1999 with the screenplay for Arlington Road, and has gone downhill ever since (most disappointingly for what he single-handedly wrote for Terry Gilliam's dire The Brothers Grimm).

It's troubling to ponder how talents as mediocre as his and Bay's get employed by Hollywood power-brokers. Bay made his mark as a director of fast-paced commercials and music videos, learned some dark arts of Hollywood with mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and is clearly now an experienced impresario of sound and visual effects. Some critics claim that his usage of 3D cameras for this film is as skilled as James Cameron's pioneering work with them on Avatar. That's a small justification for churning out clunking cinematic garbage in which automotive monsters are indistinguishable CGI cartoon figures, humans are characterless caricatures, and overloud surroundsound comprises grossly irrelevant song tracks, funereal choruses, mechanical drumming and mind-numbing explosions.

Bad enough to despise, not good enough to guffaw at, it's a movie that insults its audiences and helps to perpetuate their belief that Hollywood is sick at heart and in its communal brain.

Unfaithful

In 2009, writer-director Claude Peres pushed the envelope of gay movies beyond most movie-goers' tolerance level. The Frenchman's first feature, Unfaithful (Infideles), showed his night of sex with Marcel Schlutt, a German model, escort and professional gay porn actor.

Peres had a storyboard on the wall of the apartment in which they met, but there was no film crew. Peres was his own cameraman, editing the footage caught by fixed cameras (in positions fixed between scenes) and mobile cameras (hand-held by him and Schlutt). He recording what they said to each other (in English) and the ambient sounds of the apartment building.

Peres's first film, a short made in 2006, showed a man viewing photos of a kiss and recalling homosexual love (La memoire vive). His feature's in-your-face directness was not a complete novelty in France, as lesbian director Emilie Jouvet had already filmed live action with a similar intellectual g-string of sexual discussions added to the hard core. Most of that is hidden from view, though, in darkness, inadequate lighting of out of the fixed camera's position.

The concept had value, and it would have been interesting to experience an honest exchange of views and sexual activities by a pair of strangers. It need not have been at the self-consciously and overly intellectual level of My Dinner with Andre, but it did need two people with an ability to communicate in words and body languages. However, a coy Frenchman and blase German cannot be expected to spark verbal wonders in the English language when neither of them are fluent in it. Peres adds voice-over comments without adding to the overall impact or meaning. This film is "so not about sex", he comments, but fails to prove it.

As the DVD extras show, neither of the men is bursting with extrovert intelligence. They are nice young Europeans with good bodies, and their movie merely proves a basic fact of sexual life: that horny men are faithful to nothing but their penile urges. They are polite, considerate, use condoms, smoke joints and have breakfast; they don't teach their audience enough about male sex and bonding, or the relationship between a director and an actor, in terms of reality or symbolism.

Twisted romance

The first feature movie from Jose Campusano, an Argentine writer-director, was Twisted Romance in 2008. Rotten Tomatoes indices suggest that in some markets it was re-named Vile Romance in 2011. Either way, it is another indication that Buenos Aires is not a city of loving normality.

Joe Orton would have appreciated the storyboard, and been tempted to exploit its comedy noir potential. The central character is an acned teenager, a non-mercenary practising homosexual. His wrinkled cackling mother and wild-eyed manic sister earn their living as a duo providing therapeutic sexual services for needy middle-aged men. Presumably eager to find a father-figure, the lad picks up a long-haired weed-smoking be-ringed ultra-macho gay divorced man who's a gun merchant and bitterly separated from his young daughter.

The older man is a violent love-maker, and averse to the sensitive and dim-witted lad's wish to take his turn as the active partner. Inexplicably, unless it's an Argentine politeness thing, the women in his family are eager to host the lad's older friend for dinner, an offer which the older man accepts. This leads to the daughter deciding to get the same action her brother is getting.

Picking up a young Spanish visitor (symbolically, perhaps, the film's only good-looking and likable character), the lad gets his sexual need satisfied, but the Spaniard has probably been affected by the Argentine sun or psyche, falls in love with the lad, follows him home, and ends up, the audience must assume, gorily slaughtered by the older man.

The lad pretends to ignore that happening but is still upset about his treatment in bed. So he invites the older man home for dinner again, possibly knowing that the wacky sister will make good use of the big kitchen knife and he can take the old man's jewellery and home for himself.

Within a year of this film's release, Campusano had created Vikingo, and it is awaited with a masochistic level of interest: the tale of a "rude motorcyclist whose rigid principles are honor and respect" could be another character in search of an Orton.