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.

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.

X-men origins: wolverine

A+

It shows, a la Spiderman, that an action-fantasy can dare to have thoughtful conversational pauses.

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Two years after its release date (2009), X-Men Origins: Wolverine looked better than I'd thought it would. The director's name, Gavin Hood, deserved research, as he should have gone on to further glory on the block-buster scene. [*]

Hugh Jackman also gave himself an above-average supporting cast. Liev Schreiber was an ideal equally indestructible elder brother with murderous mutant skills and vicious extendable finger nails. Danny Huston yet again perfectly personified sweet-talking evil intent as the obsessed Dr Hyde of mutant research.

Fellow mutants were cameo roles played competently (including Ryan Reynolds in a breakthrough comic macho performance). Even the female interest, a First Nation Canadian schoolteacher, was well written and characterised (played by Texan Lynn Collins).

The SFX were handsomely explosive: it was clear why Jackman lost his cool when an un-effected print was stolen and widely spread on the internet.

The good and innocent victims were too good to be true, but they always must be in the graphic novella empire of Stan Lee and Marvel DC comic books.

This spin-off from the X-Men franchise did more than fill in Logan/Wolverine's background (originating two centuries earlier according to the comic-book military capers sequence in the brothers-at-war action prologue). It showed, a la Spiderman, that an action-fantasy can dare to have thoughtful conversational pauses.

[* South Africa-born Gavin Hood's career path stumbled. After the former lawyer and actor studied film at the Uni of California, he wrote, directed and took the lead role in the SA-set 1999 award-winning A Reasonable Man (co-starring Nigel Hawthorne). Replacing the sick director of a Polish film on location in South Africa (2001) and the follow-up TV mini-series, he stayed there to write and direct his breakthrough 2005 Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner, Tsotsi, adapted from an Athol Fugard novel. That led to Hollywood giving him Rendition, a 2007 political thriller that flopped. Subsequently, he directed three TV series/dramas while preparing Ender's Game, his adaptation of a Mormon author's sci-fi fantasy, due for release in 2013.]

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.

Pusher

A+

Within its action-thriller genre, a small-budget masterpiece.

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Nicolas Winding Refn rated highly for Valhalla Rising and Drive; it was time to watch the Danish writer-director's first Pusher movie, his 1996 debut feature, an action-thriller about Copenhagen drug gangsters.

Within its genre, it's a small-budget masterpiece. It won no awards in Denmark other than a Best Supporting Actor accolade for Croatian-born Zlatko Buric (as Milo, the Yugoslav top drug dealer). Unfortunately for Refn, the competition that year included not only Lars von Trier's Oscar-nominated Breaking The Waves but another multi-award-winner, Jan Troell's Hamsun, starring Max von Sydow.

And that was also unfortunate for Kim Bodnia, a stage actor taking his first major screen role as stocky, tattooed Frankie, a middle-ranking dealer with an attitude problem and a girlfriend who's a whore keeping her heart of gold open for him. He has a loyal best friend too, Tonny, played with dazzling flair by then-young Mads (Casino Royale, After the Wedding, Clash of the Titans) Mikkelsen, sporting a bald head with the word Respect tattooed on it.

Day by captioned day, the docudrama-style plot and hand-held cameras follow the week of Frankie's progress from carefree contentment to imminent death, while deals are made, go wrong, and lead to gory deaths and mutilation. Refn's Copenhagen is a low-lit, shadowy city that feels as if it belongs in a black-and-white and very noir thriller.

Refn had no training (having abandoned film school after a month, when he gained the funds to transform his projected short into this feature), but his father was a Danish film director and his mother a cinematographer. Childhood environment probably counted for more than genes did, as with the offspring of many other entertainment industry professionals.

Intriguingly, Pusher was remade in 2010, with the same title, as a Hindi-language production set in the UK. Even more amazingly, it's now been re-made again in English as a low-budget British production due for release in 2012; its cast includes Buric reprising his role as Milo.

The finest flattery for the film came from Refn himself. After the failure of his Fear X English-language feature bankrupted his production company, Refn hurriedly wrote and directed two further Pusher drug-dealing thrillers to capitalise on his first film's commercial success. The first sequel (2004) focused on Tonny (Pusher 2: With Blood on my Hands), for which Mikkelsen collected a handful of Best Actor awards; the next (2005) on Milo (Pusher III: I'm The Angel of Death).

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.

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.

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.

Captain America

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wu xia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let the bullets fly

Great film comedies demand at least two screenings. The second is needed to check if one missed a visual joke or cinematic reference while still giggling over and/or trying to fully comprehend an engrossing sight gag, farcical set-piece, non-sequitor or wild slapstick scene. I suspect Let The Bullets Fly may need a third viewing, because it's one of modern China's cleverest send-ups of, and salutations to, a host of film comventions. It's also devilishly complex.

An honest bandit chief has six lieutenants, two of whom are gay and one a virgin. A fake provincial governor pretends to be his own dead counsellor, thus obliging his wife to sleep with the bandit. Both the men gang up to outwit Goose Town's master criminal, who employs a retarded double as his stand-in and lives in one of the southern China's landmark multi-storied Western-style citadels.

Those bare bones of an early 20th Century dimsum Western (that's also a black comedy and morality tale) are fleshed out with visual delights, such as the governor's deluxe railway train being driven along its tracks by a team of white horses; fifty geese and no townsfolk following the heroes to confront the gangster; a dozen gunmen enduring a mass stand-off because they're all wearing the same mask; a gunman accused of eating two jellies cutting open his stomach to prove that he only ate one.

There are quotations from and tributes to a host of other Western films, in both meanings of the term from oaters and Eastwood to Patton and crime noir. Asian films get nods too, from kung fu epics to Kurosawa and Kitano. Very visibly, but not pretentiously, writer-director Wen Jiang clearly had enormous fun adapting a Sichuanese writer's original story and giving himself the role of the honourable bandit. His co-stars clearly shared his gleeful mood, with Ge You (the conniving pseudo-governor) and Chow Yun-fat (the evil grinning gangster and his idiot double) twisting their cheeks and laughing maniacally while still portraying credible dramatic personae.

The supporting cast is excellent too, and it's tempting to rave about another commercial success from the multi-talented Jiang (including In the Heat of the Sun, Devils on the Doorstep, and The Sun Also Rises as writer-director, Red Sorghum, Black Snow and The Soong Sisters for acting). Shrewdly issuing his movie in Sichuanese as well as Putonghua, he produced an all-time box-office triumph in China in 2010 (grossing more than US$100 million).

Movie industry insiders usually preferring art-house fare, the only Asian Films award it won was for costume design (Hong Kong designer and director William Chang). The grand big-screen cinematography wasn't even nominated, but veteran Zhao Fei, who's worked with top Chinese New Wave directors (and three times with Woody Allen) doesn't need recognition.

Most admirably, a Chinese movie seen by millions can also be seen as a quilt of sly anti-governmental anti-sloganese humanity that slipped past Beijing's censors.

This is another movie whose top rating may be reviewed downward after a second viewing, when unalloyed admiration for its audacity and flair have mellowed. I hope not.

Adjustment bureau

Prolific novelist and short-story writer Phillip K. Dick created concepts that have inspired more than a dozen scifi, fantasy and mystery movies, including such blockbusters as Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report. He died from a heart attack at the age of 53 in 1982, after five divorces, substance abuse and a visit from God (he claimed). His work, full of cinematically ideal mysteries and chases, continues to be adapted, as in The Adjustment Bureau (2011).

Fellow-American George Nolfi, a philosophy and political science graduate who switched to writing screenplays, crafted the storyline from Dick's Adjustment Team short story. He'd already successfully adapted Michael Crichton's Timeline for a UK-produced science thriller, one of his own screenplays as the basis for the Oceans Twelve sequel, another writer's novel for his co-production of Michael Douglas's Sentinel, and joined the team adapting The Bourne Ultimatum.

Having worked twice with Matt Damon, Nolfi was able to sign up the star actor, enabling him to raise production funds and secure Emily Blunt, the very busy Brit actress (Young Victoria, Devil Wears Prada) as his lead actress. He was ready for his debut producer-director-writer feature.

The storyline visualised the typical Dick scifi mystery well. Damon plays a NY congressman running for a senate seat. He meets a contemporary dancer (Blunt) by chance, in a men's toilet. They banter, chat and kiss, and the chemistry between the two, and the snappy dialogue, shows them falling in love at first sight, credibly. So much so that audiences root for them once their romance seems doomed and Damon must combat the forces of an invisible Chairman (ie God) and his earthly agents (angels visible only to Damon due to a time-warp slip-up one of them makes).

Damon's politician is destined to be a US president; Blunt's ballerina to become a world-famed choreographer. Their lives are recorded in four-dimensional books administered by the Chairman's bureaucracy, displaying very human irritations and frustrations with their tasks.

Damon must outrun and outwit them, and change their plans, if his love for Blunt is to live. The storyline doesn't tell us why Fate hadn't contrived to give a potential US president a suitable mate, or fully clarify why a previous plan for the couple's romance (explaining their instant attraction to each other) had been changed. Other red herrings and loose ends also don't matter at the time because Nolfi's fast-paced screenplay sprints charmingly to its inevitable happy ending.

En route, a good supporting cast includes Anthony (Hurt Locker) Mackie as a sympathetic black angel, Michael (Criminal Minds) Kelly as Damon's best pal, and Terence Stamp as the menacing divine enforcer of heavenly planning. Adding cameos of "reality", playing themselves, are various famous faces (Jon Stewart twice, James Carville and Mary Matalin, Madeline Albright, Michael Bloomberg and other NY personalities).

Nolfi created an acclaimed and profitable relatively "low-budget" (US$50 million) small-scale version of Nolan's Inception, jumping merrily through time warps, false illusions and four dimensions. He owes a lot to his lead actors, and Dick, but he can claim a lot of credit for himself in Hollywood.

Harry Potter 7-2

All good things must come to an end. That even felt desirable after the dreary cinematography, tired acting and muddled plotting of the seventh Harry Potter movie. It's hard to believe that the eighth and final instalment was made at the same time, with the same director (Peter Yates) this time achieving a level of imposing block-busting action-adventure almost as award-worthy as Peter Jackson's final TLOR spectacular. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 is a fitting conclusion to cinema's all-time best-selling franchise.

Yates shouldn't get an Oscar nomination, however. Far too many times, he pauses the action and the narrative flow for a ponderous rear view of Potter thinking or nothing happening. If the resultant static frame contained eye-catching designs or 3D effects, fine. When they didn't, they were like soft flicks from a towel dotted with masonry images.

The lead trio remained a constant reminder of the crucial initial success of the franchise's first director, Chris Columbus, to oversee the assembly of the appropriate mood, cast and visual style (all of which were deliberately designed for the long haul rather than short-term spectacle). For a decade, Radcliffe, Grint and Watson gave many months of their young lives to the franchise. They've earned good money, satisfied Potter fans and may manage to create new cinema personas.

The likeliest non-technical Oscar nominees could be Best Supporting Actors Alan Rickman (his Snape a commandingly complex character for a decade) and Ralph Fiennes (an increasingly mesmerising evil presence as Voldemort). Compared to them, or the roles Rowling created and they personified so well, other fine British actors have just been having fun, playing cameos for laughs or titters.

Above all, though, the most deserving Oscar nominee is screen-playwright American Steve Kloves, one of the few non-Brits to be accepted into JK Rowling's circle of trusted interpreters of her words into big-screen validity. An Oscar and BAFTA nominee (for his acclaimed adaptation of Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys in 2000), his only other previous award-nominated work was his original screenplay for The Fabulous Baker Boys back in 1989. His adaptations of the Potter series have steeped surely, albeit stodgily at times, through Rowling's fantastic blend of children's fiction, ancient myths, sorcery and teenage angst. Inevitably, he couldn't adjust any of her less skillful plotting, such as Voldemort's unbelievable belief that Potter had died or the Malfoy family's last-minute changes of hearts or Snape's willingness to simulate loyalty, kill Dumbledore and sacrifice himself.

Has 3D added strength to HP 7-II? It's worth finding out; the 2D version was good cinema, and it is nice to imagine that it might be even more thrilling.

The American friend

Patricia Highsmith's mysterious, psychopathic and talented con artist Mr Tom Ripley has inspired varied film versions of her five novels featuring him (the "Ripliad"). With The American Friend, prolific German writer-director Wim Wenders presented Ripley as a cowboy American character played by Dennis Hopper in a Hamburg setting.

He's one part of a 1977 audience-maximising screenplay that also includes a French supporting actor, Gerard Blain. Conveniently, he can speak English, as can the lead character, a dying man Ripley recommends as a hired assassin. He's played well by the film's real star, Bruno Ganz.

Based on Highsmith's Ripley's Game (later remade by Lilianna Cavani as a vehicle for John Malkovich), the Wenders screenplay transforms amoral Ripley from an urbane and effete bon vivant into a petty criminal with a soft heart. Hopper makes him credible, but the quantum character leaps attributed to Ripley and the Ganz character (a picture framer with a terminal blood disease) are harder to believe.

Two famous film directors joined Wenders. Nicholas Ray played the supposedly dead painter whose "discovered" works are touted by Ripley, and Samuel Fuller is a Mafia boss whose operations are targeted by a suave French gangster (Blain, a star previously in Chabrol andTruffaut features).

Much of Wenders' two hours of mystery comprises eye-catching cinematography in which artful dabs of primary colours enrich dreary cityscapes and tawdry apartments. They're effectively alienation effects, deliberately drawing attention to specially-painted walls and carefully-positioned colourful props, clothing and autos.

When the screenplay's pace speeds up, as Ripley (an experienced killer) assists the picture-framer to kill and survive, Wenders lets the action and actors fill the screen without distractions, so masterfully that the plot's creaking illogicalities only strike the viewer at the end.

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.

True grit

The Coen brothers, renowned for offbeat indie movies, are not averse to working on mainstream remakes of classic period pieces. They and Tom Hanks clearly had fun reworking (and failing to outshine) the British comedy thriller, The Ladykillers, and the brothers' latest commercial gig is True Grit.

The new version of John Wayne's Oscar-winner should have been a smooth-riding vehicle for Jeff Bridges, a natural casting choice for Wayne's role as garrulous, one-eyed, drunkard Marshall Rooster Cogburn. Instead, the Coens focused on newcomer Hailee Steinfeld, playing self-assertive Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old girl determined to avenge the shooting death of her father by a bandit.

Josh Brolin is wasted in that role, seen in a few scenes at the end. The story's only other key role is the Texas Ranger who joins the girl and her marshal. Matt Damon seems not so much out of his depth as pushed into the shallows by the production; his role's personality should be a stronger contrast to that of the marshal. Instead, Damon dead-pans, downplays his character's territorial arrogance, and shows little body language. There's more panache in Roger Deakins' long-distance landscape cinematography.

The Coens may have wanted to let the story speak for itself, but the interactions between the characters seem dreadfully, non-dramatically, tediously under-stated. Apart from them, though, the Coens' usual ability to elicit forceful supporting cameos is delightfully clear.

The original novel by Charles Portis was a teasing portrayal of Wild West conventions, simultaneously glorifying and satirising them. It was an incredible tale of an insufferably pious girl learning the facts of adulthood, not Life. She naively pursues her father's killer into Indian territory, accompanied unwillingly by a pair of contrasting old-style lawmen, gains retribution and falls into a life-threatening snake pit. With the book, readers are left to wonder whether adult Mattie, rich and religious and lonely, has invented much of her wild western story.

The Coens toned down the girl's self-righteous arrogance, but they rightly kept the book's display of artfully well-mannered and long-winded 19th-Century English-language usage. That helps, as in the book, to portray all the characters as belonging to an era that looked and sounded very different to modern America. Portis mocked and admired his characters; the Coens seem tired and not amused by them, making this audience member tire of the poorly-paced movie well before it ended.

Steinfeld, a Californian of Filipino descent, was the same age as Mattie when she made the movie (her first feature after a few shorts and TV appearances). Her reported fee of US$100,000 was a bargain for a leading role in a low-budget ($38 million) movie that grossed a quarter of a billion (and still counting) for producers Rudin, Spielberg and the Coens. The young actress surely boosted word-of-mouth recommendations, and she gained a slew of deserved nominations and awards. Her next role is supposedly stellar: she's been signed for a re-make of Romeo and Juliet rewritten by the UK's prolific peer of upper-class sitcoms, Julian Fellowes. Her co-star is not yet cast, making the project a doubly iffy choice for the budding star.

X-men: first class

It will be no tragedy if X-Men: First Class doesn't make enough bucks to spawn the expected next two parts of a second trilogy. The major plus factor for failure would be the release from multi-year franchise servitude of four good actors and a director with great potential.

If a franchise extension does occur, it will in large part be the result of their efforts. When a block-buster action-adventure fantasy employs such top talents, it does improve its chances. The original trilogy gained much from using a pair of top-rank English thespians as its father-figure-superpower lead actors, Patrick Stewart (wheelchair-bound smiling goody Professor Xavier) and Ian McKellen (evil-minded metallic Magneto); former mutant buddies who were leaders of opposing mutant forces.

They've been replaced in the prequel by two younger British star talents, James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender. Their major breakthrough roles were, respectively, the fawn in the first Narnia movie, and an Irish revolutionary in Hunger. Since then, both have been busy at home and in Hollywood, McAvoy as a thinking man's Hugh Grant and Fassbender as a likely candidate to be the next James Bond. If they aren't stuck with spells in X-Men biannualquels, they could be making a few more films that better utilise their strong talents. They may need to grow into their roles. McAvoy, looking too youthful to be an alpha leader, channels Stewart's supercilious smile (without the repressed menace); Fassbender looks too much older and doesn't yet have McKellen's tone of impish nastiness.

It's also regrettable to foresee constraints on movie-making time for another fast-developing English actor, Nicholas Hoult. Outstanding as a child actor (About the Boy), teenage TV star (Skins) and Hollywood import (A Single Man), he'll be trapped for a few years in the guise of hairy Beast, just as Hugh Jackman lost time (and gained big money) as Wolverine. Sadly for the American film industry, one star talent who'll also lose chances to be cast in meatier roles is Jennifer Lawrence. Her lead role in Winter's Bone brought her more than 30 award nominations (including Oscar and Golden Globe); she's now wasted as the blue-toned Raven (aka Mystique) on Magneto's team.

Developing a well-known brand-name with an above-average track record at the box-office, the producers could afford to take risks by using such actors little-known in the US market. They saved money too by employing Michael Vaughan, a British director whose only previous major feature was Kick-Ass, a comic fantasy featuring super-powered kids. He maintains a steady pace while assembling and balancing plot contrivances that introduce the many characters, through flashbacks recording how and why the opposing forces gathered (side-stepping to eliminate uncredited Jackman's Wolverine pseudo-comically). The stage has been set, competently, for the next franchise instalments.

The sole major American player is Kevin Bacon, happily emoting as the Nazi medical experimentalist who engineered the young Magneto's inborn mutant flair for controlling metal masses. Bacon's good, but this franchise has never rivalled the ability of others to create joyfully complex villains that are Hollywood gifts to actors like Dafoe and Molina (in Spiderman) and Hackman (Superman).

Disappointingly, the movie's special effects were not too special, particularly a laughable levitated submarine and a final beach scene that looked like a flimsy tribute to Lost. There are better curtsies to cinematic cliches from Cold War and Holocaust genres to Star Trek and James Bond.

After watching the clumsy inter-mingling of X-Men fiction and actual newsreel from the Cuba missile crisis, many younger viewers may believe that mutants did save the world from nuclear disaster then.

Pirates 4: on stranger tides

Who can blame Johnny Depp for making another Pirates of the Caribbean? On Stranger Tides is the third sequel (2011) in a franchise that's transformed an offbeat indie actor into a Hollywood stalwart. Let him make his pension while he can, collecting a reported US$55 million for headlining such a bad blockbuster.

If only he was really a modern-day Errol Flynn, with the power to veto the appointment of plodding Rob (Chicago, Geisha, Nine) Marshall as the replacement director for the series' imaginative creator, Gore Verbinski. Obviously, sadly, Depp could not argue with executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Walt Disney Studios, and the pair of writers (Ted Elliott and Terry Russio) who'd concocted the initial trilogy based on the Disney theme park ride and became executive producers too.

This time, with Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley having wisely walked away from their tired format, the screenplay mechanics tinkered with ideas from an optioned 2009 pirate novel. The only major character to stay aboard their latest creaking craft was devilishly-wicked ludicrously-bewigged Geoffrey Rush as peg-legged Captain Hector Barbossa. He and Depp's comically-camp macho-mincing Captain Jack Sparrow have become a heavily-mascara-ed pseudo-comic odd couple. Without them, the franchise would be meaningless; with them, it's barely forgivable.

Joining them on the truly sketchy storyboard is Penelope Cruz as Sparrow's former lover, and daughter of infamous Blackbeard (Ian McShane wasted in a role the champion scenery-chewer was clearly instructed to understate, lest he out-ham the Depp-Rush combo). Cruz also gets a load of make-up, and even the movie's ageing Hollywood production committees must have realised they were launching a ship of relatively old piratic fools.

Seniors are surely a growing movie-going demographic segment. Why else have Keith Richards re-appear self-teasingly and pointlessly with his wrinkled face and upper-crusty English accent, and insultingly ask Judi Dench to take a teeny cameo as a dowager wowed by a kiss from Sparrow. There is also a grumpy chorus of elderly English actors playing court to a puffed-up Richard Griffiths as King George II.

Therefore, per basic market research principles, they added a pious young English missionary (tick for Middle America demographics), tied to the main mast so that he can meet and exchange eye-watering devotion with a young mermaid (tick teen market). Their badly-written poorly-acted relationship looks and sounds like a leaky band-aid stuck on the plot, an attempt to inject a couple of drips from a fountain of youth into a geriatric movie.

Even its SFX are feeble, and rarely humorous or arresting. A truckload of blazing coal and school of man-eating mermaids were cute ideas inadequately visualised, and the overall lack of explosive visual magic, exciting pace and thrilling sounds is a nagging reminder how action-adventures used to be made for Indiana Jones, James Bond and even Caribbean pirates.

The frequency of dimly-lit night scenes also deprives the film of lighting effectiveness, and a 2D screening offered no hints when and why the movie's 3D format would be worth watching. Hans Zimmer's basic music theme is more noticeable - and irritating, repeated excessively as a noisy background substitute during unimpressive scenes of supposed action.

Occasional pun-ishing word-plays and double-entrendres encourage audiences to listen harder, in the hope that deeper ideas or characterisations, or just some wittier verbal crudities, might be found by the attentive. A foolish hope, akin to expecting Bruckheimer to nurture a once-delightful fantasy into Bond-like immortality.

He and Disney were rightly nervous, following the below-par earnings of Pirates 3, reducing the budget from US$300 million (Pirates 3) to US$200 million. That largely explains why the film is cheapskate non-entertainment. One hopes Depp's retirement fund is now large enough for Captain Jack to sail off to oblivion.

Fast five

Soderbergh, Clooney and Damon may never assemble Ocean's gang again, but Vin Diesel and Paul Walker can look forward to making a few more Fast films before Vin gets too pudgy and Walker's hair goes grey. They are Stallone's deserving successors in the craft of milking a winning formula. Fast Five, their latest (2011), eschewed the 3-D format and used IMAX. It could give the movie an above-average shelf-life.

It's the third film in the franchise written by Chris Morgan; executive producer Gary Scott Thompson wrote the first two Fast and Furious features (and Hollow Man, TV's Las Vegas and more). Taiwan-born director Justin Lin also signed on for a third time, and the multi-racial semi-comedic team of tough, sexy or silly sidekicks was reassembled.

A happy new ingredient was Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson as a cool, gungho FBI chieftain hunting down the pair of hi-octane his-peed auto-racers in Rio. That city's hillside favelas and downtown thoroughfares are the scene-stealers when Johnson not in focus, clearly having the time of his movie-making life while showing Diesel how a real action star acts.

The plot is irrelevant of course. Vin meets a new action-woman, his buddy affection for Paul grows, there's an amoral Brazilian drug tsar, a couple of gratuitous races, lots of gunfire and a finely-edited chase scene that defies all laws of physics, mechanics and probability when a ten-ton safe is towed around Rio by the pair of super-fast daredevils.

The best of its bunch so far, Fast Five is a cartoon caper to watch, enjoy and not think about.

Thor

Some blockbusters are manufactured so competently that they defy being criticised as works of cinematic art. They are simply crowd-pleasing products, good of their kind, like a banquet prepared by a kitchen of professionals or a premier league football match. As is Thor, a live-action cartoon saga in which the Norse god lands up, i.e. down, on Earth, in Roswell's New Mexico of course.

The Marvel Comics production introduces a large fledgling actor with a well-honed physique and twinkling eyes (Australian TV's Chris Hemsworth, previously a supporting role in the Star Trek update) as the superhero. He's self-effacingly supported by Anthony Hopkins as Odin, his omnipotent father. Thor, cast out of the Norse heavens, bumps into a stellar space researcher (Natalie Portman) who has a father-figure mentor (Stellan Skarsgard) and a dizzy female assistant. Her faintly comic and dramatically pointless presence serves to make Portman's dizziness, and eye-fluttering love at first sighting of Thor's abs, comparatively less silly. Instead, it looks more like a channeling of Julia Roberts with a silly script.

Thor has an adopted brother, Loki (UK TV's Tom Hiddleston, channeling a lite-camp Alan Cumming) who's actually the abandoned son of an evil king (Colm Feore) in one of the Nine Realms. The rest of the storyboard is a totally predictable barrage of SFX featuring interstellar bridges, a quintet of assorted godly good-guy assistants (including a black, east Asian, woman, comic over-eater and female, naturally), an indestructible automaton killer, and touches of humour.

Remarkably, the production was entrusted to an experienced director, Kenneth Branagh, whose employment may have been inspired by the mildly Shakespearean tone adopted for the dialogue of the gods. His last direction was Sleuth in 2007; he's done his reputation and his bank account no harm by making a truly commercial blockbuster.

One loose end or red herring awaits resolution. When dizzy Ms Portman realises that Thor is going to enter her trailer, she flusters frantically, twice, with a packet of what may be breakfast cereals, clearly called "Golem" (a major bogeyman figure in Jewish folklore). Product placement? If it is, Google hadn't yet registered it. An in-joke? A subtle snub to the breakfast products that refused to pay for a placement?

How many blockbusters have that gripping level of detail?