Snowtown

A+

Scruffy world of an irredeemable underclass which finds release in drugs, booze, prayer meetings, and rabble-rousing kitchen gatherings.

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Australian directors continue to excel at suspenseful timing, as Justin Kurzel proves with Snowtown, his debut 2010 feature that's a terrifying movie based on two books about Australia's worst serial killer, John Bunting.

He and his pals' ten victims lived in the suburban slums of Adelaide in the 1990s, in a squalor populated by fundamentalist and homophobic white trash. The docudrama, written by another newbie, Shaun Grant, focuses on Bunting's domineering relationships with a divorced woman and her three under-educated maladjusted teenage sons. He grooms the oldest (16) to become another of his murderous accomplices, pursuing the boy's soul with mesmerising empathetic stares.

Bunting is played brilliantly by the movie's sole professional actor, Daniel Henshall, who'd previously only made a few TV series episodes. Short, stocky, bearded and amiable, he smiles intensively, eyes glinting hypnotically, and it's only on the rare occasions when Bunting loses his cool that his menacing and amoral character is revealed. The rest of the time, he's exercising a quietly effective, controlling personality.

The family he moves into, and its neighbours, are easily-controlled social misfits, some mentally disturbed, some on drugs, mostly surviving on welfare benefits and petty crime. They are depressingly nasty bigots or weak-minded fools, and it becomes clear that Bunting tolerates a local cross-dressing middle-aged homosexual mainly as a source of potential victims.

Bunting's new teenage disciple (played movingly well as a tearful, passive schizophrenic by first-time actor Lucas Pittaway) is the lead to a step-brother who'd raped the boy when he was younger. There's also a palpable tension in the teenager's relationship with Bunting, in which the boy seeks a family role model while Bunting's eyes suggest the killer may be failing to acknowledge his own desires.

The opening urban scenes set the mood and style frighteningly well, as the boys' mother leaves a male neighbour to house-sit with them and he orders the blank-faced kids to strip naked for photographs. Bunting's arrival on the scene soon after begins with him showing the teenager how to cut heads, limbs and tails off newly-shot kangaroos in the back yard. The blood-stained scraps are thrown at the paedophile's bungalow.

Theirs is the muddy, scruffy world of an irredeemable underclass which finds release in drugs, booze, prayer meetings, and rabble-rousing kitchen gatherings reviewing the grisliest ways to punish perverts. This isn't the admirably brave-faced and amusingly-confused working class characters who populate the sets of Mike Leigh and sentimental neo-realists. This is the ugly reality of human failures, characters which a Bunting can feel superior to, manipulate and kill.

Most of the killings take place off-screen, between scenes, and their details and sequence will only be clear if a viewer reads about them in Wikipedia. The one motive for them - fraudulent use of victims' credit cards and benefits - is only hinted at once; Bunting and his three older associates are never shown with jobs, and Bunting guides the boy's enrolment for the dole.

The pace of the editing (and a nerve-jangling musical soundtrack of metallic banging and electronic sounds) amplify the tension, because a viewer's never sure what type of scene will appear next and how draining it will be. The only elongated murder scene, in a bath, is presented with hand-held objectivity, augmenting its almost unbearably vivid impact.

Less positively, several scenes are mysteriously non-linear non-sequitors. Bunting and the teenager shave each other's heads, but are not seen bald-headed again, except once when only Bunting is. Another time, Bunting bullies the boy into shooting Bunting's own dog, but plays with the dog in a subsequent scene. The scenes jut out of the movie, looking like a cluster of deleted scenes that got spliced in arbitrarily to create a two-hour feature.

At the end too, there's a collage of finely photographed images of urban ugliness that appears gratuitous. The ending itself is an abrupt halt, a door firmly shut, suggesting that the teenager has become a cold-hearted tear-less killer too.

End credits then note the prison terms being served by the killers, giving the audience no fairy-tale closure to a human horror show. As a debut movie, though, this is a winner for Kurzel.

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).

Punished

A-

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drive

A+

Artful use of lighting and shadows, high-decibel retro electronic pop and slow-paced silent pauses, warm close-ups and chilling long shots, created a cinematic experience that's exciting and disturbing.

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Many movies get made by outsiders (from Europe or Sundance) who've attracted attention with their debut efforts and gain bigger productions that seek stylish direction at small cost. In the case of Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn was already a young Danish veteran when he got the director's chair for his fourth English-language feature.

His first was Fear X, a 2003 psychological thriller adapted from a Hubert Selby story by Refn. Its lead actor was an unwise choice: John Turturro's name didn't help at the box office and the film's failure bankrupted Refn's production company. Forced back into Danish-language work, Refn made two sequels to his successful 1996 debut, Pusher, and its successor, Bleeder. Their glossy shock value gained him British production funds for two screenplays: Bronson (2008) and the virtually wordless and visually thrilling Valhalla Rising (2009).

Drive, based on a 2005 crime thriller by James Sallis, is the crisp story of a taciturn garage mechanic and part-time stunt driver who moonlights for robbery gangs. Initially a Universal project for Hugh Jackman, it ended up as a low-budget (US$13 million) indie production headlined by rising Canadian star Ryan Gosling. He reportedly chose Refn to direct the book's screen adaptation (by Iranian Hossein The Wings of the Dove Amini). English Carey Mulligan, got the key female role as a single mother who needs saving from vicious gangsters.

The film is Gosling's latest "breakthrough", like almost every other film he's ever made: The Believer (2001), Murder by Numbers (2002), The Notebook (2004), Half Nelson (2006), Lars and the Real Girl (2007), Oscar-nominated Blue Valentine (2010). With two years' work as a child performer on TV (Mickey Mouse Club), and solid supporting roles recently (Crazy, Stupid, Love and The Ides of March) Gosling has a track record ready for recognition by Oscar voters.

Refn has got the recognition he's deserved for Drive, winning Best Director award at Cannes 2011. It's easy to see and sense why. His artful use of lighting and shadows, high-decibel retro electronic pop and slow-paced silent pauses, warm close-ups and chilling long shots, created a cinematic experience that's exciting and disturbing. There are moments when the facial studies of the actors is just too long for the retention of dramatic pace, and there are gruesome gory blood-letting head-butting scenes whose sense of reality is too real for comfort.

Overall, though, this is a movie that grabs the eyes, ears - and brain - from its sharply-paced car-chase opening action sequence. It's a cleverly constructed screenplay whose key elements could have been B-movie cliches: conflicted criminal (Oscar Isaac), adorable Latino boy, limping older colleague (Bryan Cranshaw), foul-mouthed racially-stereotypical gangsters (Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks), slutty moll (Christina Hendricks).

Such standard characters needed above-average actors, and the whole supporting cast is a galaxy of movie acting talent; they support Gosling well. His toothpick-chewing shyly-smiling quietly-spoken man of vengeance is a very modern anti-hero with the stylishness of a repressed 1980s action hero. His survival at the end of the saga, and his parting drive, into the LA nightscape, left an open option for his reappearance. It would be unwise: a very good film is unlikely to be bettered and the attempt would be commercially and artistically unwise. For now, very wisely, Gosling has stepped into lead role for Refn's next screenplay. It sounds an extra-ordinary concept, set in Bangkok, co-produced with French funds and Kristin Scott-Thomas: something to really look forward 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.

Despair

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chocolate

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brighton rock

To re-make a classic movie is likely to be a lose-lose proposition for a novice feature film director, yet BBC Films gave the go-ahead to Rowan Joffe for a 2009 adaptation of Brighton Rock. He'd won awards for his TV feature, The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall (2008) and co-writing of 28 Weeks Later, was working on the adaptation of Martin Booth's The American (an Anton Corbijn project starring George Clooney), and had good genes (mother, actress Jane Laportaire; Oscar-nominated father, director Roland Joffe).

The original B&W 1947 Ealing film, directed by the Boulting brothers, starred Richard Attenborough, reprising his breakthrough West End theatre role as Pinkie, a murderous young gangster who seduces a key witness. The plot was adapted by Graham Greene and playwright Terence Rattigan from Greene's 1938 novel about Roman Catholic consciences at work in a sordid gang-infested southern English resort town. Joffe shifted Greene's story to the end-1960s, incorporating the period's real street violence between Mods and rockers (and PC-ly changed a hoodlum into a role for a black actor).

Joffe's production included a stellar Brit cast. Pinkie was played by Sam Riley, a young TV actor who'd gained big-screen acclaim in the lead role for Control in 2007 (directed by Corbijn). Fast-rising Andrea Riseborough (Margaret Thatcher and The Devil's Whore on TV) self-effaced herself as Rose, the naive waitress who needs to be kept quiet. Backing them up with muted star cameos were Helen Mirren (teashop manager and Pinkie's nemesis), John Hurt (bookie client) and Andy Serkis (flashy rival gang-leader).

Greene's novella is a brief and brutal morality tale, and its success hinged on readers' images of the doomed youngsters and their rancid home town. In B&W, with Attenborough's little-boy-lost evil look, the movie was noir cinema at its Brit best. Joffe's richly-coloured TV film does capture a period feeling, but can't recreate the true look and mood of the 60s. Riley may have been mis-cast: he seems too mature to be a teenager, too suave, his features too chiselled, his face suggesting a heartless sneer provoked by an unpleasant smell.

Largely due to that unappealing focal anti-hero, Joffe's version looks to be a glossy charade, a re-make that serves best to prompt a re-viewing of the original. Did it sport a sly "miracle" to create the semi-happy ending Joffe presents? Did it dare to clarify, as Greene did, Catholic-raised Pinkie's psychopathic anti-sex anti-woman personality? Did the old-timers end up in cliched contentment? Was it less of a choir-ridden melodrama filled with picture-postcard shots of Brighton landmarks?

Dead man's shoes

The stock in trade of many British mainstream movies is gore, gangs and revenge. They sell seats and DVD rentals, and provide incomes even for above-average talents such as director Shane Meadows (Twenty Four Seven) and his drama-schoolmate actor Paddy Considine (In America), who co-wrote Dead Man's Shoes (2004). Costing less than a million US dollars and filmed in only three weeks, it also proved that commercial cinema can earn awards.

Their story was simple. An English soldier returns home to the town (beside the scenic Peak District) where his mentally-handicapped younger brother had been drugged and abused by a gang of local dealers eight years before, and methodically sets out to teach them terminal lessons. Clive Owen had recently starred in a similar tale (I'll Sleep When I'm Dead), and everyone in the Brit film industry remembered Get Carter (the 1971 original, starring Michael Caine).

Even with a gang of six odd characters to dispose of one by one, it's a stretch to fill even 80-odd minutes of screen-time. Meadows does so with many handsomely composed shots and close-ups of bearded Considine's usings and the simple brother's twitchy toothy smiles. Too many gratuitously pretty shots overall. There's also at least one over-long usage of a mournful cathedral choir filling the soundtrack, which also employs the customary mix of pop music and spooky sound effects.

Meadows maintains a teasing pace, despite frequent jump-cuts into scratchy B&W or tinted flashbacks showing the then-younger gangsters horsing around with the young brother. Tension is not heightened, as it should be, by the gang members. Well acted but mostly non-threatening, they are presented as provincial bumpkins with only one shotgun, one bullet, a comic Dolly car and a mini-shortbow. The co-writers and their credited extra screen-playwright failed to provide Considine's professional killer (a commando) with fearful foes.

The director alone can be blamed for the disastrous vocal soundtrack. In his attempt to create an air of reality, with hand-held camera-work and odd angles, Meadows seemed to have forgotten to put microphones in places that would record conversations clearly. The actors, stuck in cine-verite, mumble as normal blokes would in their living rooms, whose furnishings further muffle their poorly-enunciated conversations. With their dialogue conducted in a medley of regional working-class accents, the action can often only be surmised. The lack of English-language subtitles on the DVD is consequently unforgivable.

Ending on two-generational notes of pseudo-Graecoid tragic significance, the movie is finally a disappointment because a viewer senses that both Meadows and Considine could have produced a superior product. Since 2004, they have done so in further award-winning ways: Meadows for his film and TV versions of This Is England, Considine as a short-film director at the Sundance and Venice film festivals.

Kinatay

Roger Ebert gave Kinatay (Butchered) his damning judgment as the "worst film ever" screened in the annual film festival at Cannes. Yet the Philippine entry won its 2009 Best Director prize for Brillante Mendoza. The Palme D'Or that year was awarded to The White Ribbon, the jury having the usual mission impossible of deliberately honouring two different films for the top prizes (and a third for its screenplay, etc). Mendoza was lucky.

For the first third of his movie, the focus of the excellent hand-held cinematography is on daylit Manila's happy-go-lucky environment. Twenty-year-old police cadet Peping (Coco Martin) is getting married to the mother of their child, in a registrar's office followed by a small family meal in a fast-food cafe.

A wealthy friend pays for the meal, and Peping filches the tip left on the table to give it to another guest who'd asked for a loan. That sudden note of amorality is intensified when night falls and Peping is seen as a small link in a long chain of small pay-offs made by street hawkers to a local gang. Promised further financial gain, the cash-strapped rookie joins another petty gangster in a van of enforcers with police connections. After a lengthy, mostly non-speaking, ride through the ugly urban nightscapes, the anxious rookie ends up realising their target is a drug-addicted go-go bar girl.

It's true cinema noir for the next hour, in naturally-lit semi-darkness in the van, beside a dirt road for the five men's group urination, and in a rural house with a basement. The woman is known to the gang leaders, who rape, abuse and chop her to pieces, which they wrap in plastic bags and throw away bit by bit on their drive back to the city. All the time, the weepy-eyed rookie looks aghast and does nothing.

Back in daylight, in a noodle cafe, he vomits, asks permission to leave, gets his cash, keeps the gun the gang boss gave him and hails a taxi. It bursts a tyre, and the rookie cannot get a bus or another cab in the rush hour. The movie waits a long time beside the highway with him, while the tax-driver changes the tyre. Very symbolically, he hesitates before re-boarding the taxi, but he does. In the final symbolic shot, his wife is in the kitchen with their baby, cooking. Clearly, the audience is told, the rookie's fate is cooked too. He's going to be another corrupt cop.

There are perhaps a few too many such symbols, on the soundtrack (dotted with chicken cries and spooky music), in the scenery (fighting cockerel, butcheries, an abattoir sign and Catholic images) as well as the storyboard and dialogue. The very anti-heroic and almost incredibly naive youngster does not provide a character the audience can identify with or pity. Instead, it is expected to observe the inhumanity of a society without adequate morals, rules or decency.

Presented not as a horror show but a docudrama, this depressing film is a damning depiction of Manila, more so than any of Lino Brocka's anti-capitalist exposes. It is a striking movie, in the mode of the deliberately repulsive extreme reality of French and other quasi-intellectual slasher movies. Its direction, especially the editing and pacing, warranted the Cannes award, and Ebert's outburst is not contradictory - if he meant the "nastiest" film ever invited to Cannes.

The writer, Armando Lao, has more than a score of movie credits since the mid-1980s, most recently making many with Jeffrey Jeturian. He worked with Mendoza the previous year, on Serbis (Service), and is helping to ensure the overseas reputation of the Philippine cinema industry as a source of excellent negative PR for its sorry capital city.

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.

Police, adjective

A cop movie from Romania = promising. A dual Certain Regard award-winner at Cannes 2009 = warning signals.

Police, Adjective, writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu's second feature, follows his sadly comic multi-award-winning 12:08 East of Bucharest. That film looked at provincial citizens' pre-Revolutionary ideas (16 years after the toppling of the country's dictator); this one focuses on one confused man.

Would an undercover policeman have qualms about arresting, and inevitably destroying the life of, a non-criminal youngster who smokes and shares hashish? Would his superiors in the police and judiciary force him to ignore other options? Would a sardonic police captain spend a long time, in one static scene, getting the detective to read dictionary definitions of conscience, police and moral as nouns, verbs and adjectives?

Would he trail the grass smoker for days, and should a movie director trail him for minutes on end? Would a recently-married policeman have a non-communicatory relationship with his wife, and a movie director screen many minutes of him eating gruel alone in the kitchen while his wife plays banal pop music on a laptop?

Would many movie-goers want to watch very long long-shots of nothing dramatic? No, not when an anecdotal fable worth filming in a half-hour short film is spun out for more than 100 minutes. As an intellectual exercise, the movie is intriguing, and its bitter conclusion made inevitable by the cleverly-assembled detective work in the dictionary. A minor diversion for the eyes and brain, nothing more.

Poetry

Only a well-subsidised movie industry such as South Korea's could fund a constant stream of sad feature films. They are cinematic joys for their pensive auteurs and angstful actors, and there must be healthy (numerically speaking) national audiences that also derive pleasure from them.

Poetry tells the tearful tale of a suburban-rural village where an ageing woman learns that she has Alzheimer's, and that the selfish grandson in her care is one of the local schoolboys whose regular rape sessions drove a schoolgirl to drown herself. Painfully aware of life's cruelties and its natural beauties, the woman joins a community class to learn about poetry. Its attendees promise to complete one poem by the end of the course. Only she does so, musing wistfully on the girl's death, having turned her grandson over to the local police and decided to kill herself.

Writer-director-producer Lee Chang-dong's mesmerising 2010 study hinges vitally on the lead role played by retired actress Yoon Jeong-hee, making her first movie for 16 years. She's won deserved Asian festival awards, as has Lee (and two at Cannes 2010).

Mr Nice

The land that produced Lloyd George, Anthony Hopkins and a lot of good singers has used its local film promotion budget to present PR-savvy drug-dealing ex-con Howard Marks as an awfully nice chap. Not even Welshman Rhys Ifan in the title role can achieve such a mission impossible. There is no way that such an anti-hero can have lived up to his stolen identity as Mr Nice.

Writer-director Bernard Rose, best known for his multi-awarded 1992 Candyman, adapted Marks' best-selling autobiography and did his own (unexceptional) cinematography. As the man is still alive, Rose obviously couldn't employ any writer's licence to make Marks' stories ring truer. He was apparently a gifted Welsh lad who won an Oxford scholarship, was a typical grass-smoking student, and became an overnight marijuana kingpin with an ill-defined second wife (Chloe Sevigny), smuggling pals in Pakistan and Afghanistan and a simple-minded link (Crispin Glover) in the USA.

Eventually trapped and convicted there, Marks was given an astonishing early release maybe because he was in secret partnership with an IRA gun-and-drug-running madman. David Thewlis emotes wildly as Jim McCann, whose end fate is not made clear in the film or reality, and will eventually inspire a biopic no Sinn Fein politician would want any Irish movie promotion outfit to fund. He's 72 and last heard of, according to Wikipedia, as an official 2002 Republic of Belarus delegate to a climate change convention.

Marks ended up back in the UK as a touring one-man chat show, apparently revered by toking students. It is never indicated why Marks, self-confessedly at the top of his world for almost a decade, failed to attract the thieving attention of real murderous gangsters in London, South Asia or the States. Did fear of the Provisional IRA extend that far? An outsider can only suspect that there's a lot more to Marks' life story than he chose to divulge semi-comically: his screen character's shallow facade is therefore ideally personified by Ifans, always a slouchy actor without depth. Likable but louche.

Inside job

Director Charles (No End in Sight Oscar nominee) Ferguson uttered a bitter "Firstly" head-note before accepting his 2011 Best Documentary Oscar for Inside Job. Three years after the worst financial crisis in 70 years and the biggest set of frauds in its history, he stated, the US finance industry has not seen a single member go to jail.

Ferguson's angry documentary report is a damning brief for America's prosecutors. The chances of them acting on its expose of systemic corruption are as slim as a threadbare dollar bill. So-called victimless crime is part of the American social fabric and a keystone of its economy, which lost US$20 trillion because of it in 2008, losses (in savings, jobs and homes) borne by few in the upper ranks of the financial industry itself.

Matt Damon lent (or rented, at union rates, probably) his liberal voice to the documentary as its narrator, and a pair of young documentary editors, Chad Beck (No End in Sight) and Adam Bolt (The Recruiter), joined Ferguson in the writing of the well-researched script (whose filming locations included Iceland, Paris and China).

Many of the guilty parties can be identified from the many captions noting that they refused to be interviewed. They will be glad they didn't when they see the mess a pair of top US economics professors get into when they try to skate past their well-paid PR work for the finance industry.

As Ferguson illustrates, the Obama administration is as much a Wall Street puppet as any of the preceding administrations since Donald Regan initiated Ronald Reagan's unleashing of the deregulation demons. Ferguson also goads defenders of the status quo by comparing bonus-addicted financiers to coke addicts and users of another service industry, prostitution. He points out that US government lawyers were happy to use personal failings to strip power from fraud-fighting Eliot Spitzer, but not from any criminal merchant banker, hedge fund manager, industry regulator, credit ratings agency or Washington politico.

Iceland's microcosmic case study is an opening blast that reveals the absurd dimensions of post-Reaganomics financial and governance delusions. As the French finance minister comments pithily about the Lehman collapse, "Holy cow". Forcing Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy sparked recognition of the so-called Financial Crisis, and the ritual slaughter of Wall Street's least-loved villain is a detective thriller awaiting another documentary feature. The media's gorging on lobbyists' lies, advertising revenue and bribes is another area not covered by Ferguson in this indictment of a cabal of financial, academic and political fraudsters who've controlled the US for more than three decades for the benefit of only themselves and their clans.

A frightening horror movie, Inside Job reminds its viewers that another crisis is inevitable, but it's preaching to a small choir, even with an Oscar to give it a little extra light.

Stool pigeon

Good car chases and shoot-outs. Swishing machetes and gory wounds. Psychologically damaged characters on either side of the law. Hong Kong action movies have been there and done that many times, and writer-director Dante Lam needed a fresh plot element in 2010. So he constructed a screenplay about police informants as unsung anti-heroes in The Stool Pigeon.

In a previous multi-award-winner, The Beast Stalker, Lam had worked with the same screenplay writer Jack Ng and lead actors Nick Cheung and Nicholas Tse. The plot for their reunion is different enough to interest audiences and not be too surprising.

Cheung is a police inspector and experienced user of paid informants. The script includes many references to the two-sided exploitation, starting with a lengthy opening scene showing how circumstances obliged Cheung to expose an informant to almost certain death. This serves a key marketing purpose of providing a hyper-ham role for one of Hong Kong's hammiest supporting actors, Liu (Kill Zone) Kai-chi. Saved from death by luck, he is later found, a mad beggar, hiding himself from his wife and child, befriended secretly by the policeman.

Cheung's newest spy is a petty criminal newly released from prison, shaven-headed Nicholas Tse, a road-racer Cheung hopes will be recruited by a long-wanted goldshop-robber, providing a dubbed role for the mainland's commanding Lu (Aftershock) Yi . Cheung helps his man gain acceptance, offering him the chance to pay off his father's million-dollar debt, thereby freeing his sister from a life of prostitution.

When Tse joins the gang, he discovers that he'd met the chief's girlfriend before (in a brilliantly-staged flashback using overhead cameras to show two people fleeing cops and robbers on roads that meet, enabling the pair to escape). Taiwanese Kwei (Ocean Heaven) Lun-mai delivers another bravado offbeat performance, and her character's decision to swap loyalties is made credible by her and the script. She'd also worked on The Beast Stalker.

Far less credible is the secondary female interest, presumably attached to the plot in order to employ a leading mainland actress, Miao Pu. Her thankless role, portrayed very touchingly, is that of the policeman's lame and amnesiac wife, who'd attempted suicide and now works as a receptionist at a dance school where her unrecognised husband visits her. That's bad enough as an irrelevant plot device. It gets worse when her father and brother attack the inspector.

Lam's speedy direction and good editing allow audiences to accelerate past such roadblocks, and admire a lot of strong details in the settings and characterisations. As in all Hong Kong movies co-produced with mainland companies, we know that justice will prevail, good sinners will redeem themselves while their bad kin will die deaths of a hundred cuts, no leading sinners will speak Mandarin, and baddies never use the mainland as their base. Dante Lam's skills ensure that such an obligatory fairy-tale framework stands up well in this above-average action-thriller.

Outrage

Takeshi Kitano is a leading Japanese film and TV industry character and charismatic screen personality (as "Beat" Takeshi). The multi-talented Kitano's early film directions created a distinctive "deadpan" style of glossy, black-comic and violent portraits of yakusa gangsters and corrupt police (Violent Cop, Boiling Point, Sonatine), starring himself as a man of few words and harsh action. In 2010, after a decade of unpopular experimentation with other forms, he returned to his crime metier with Outrage, a stereotypical gangland movie with a few cinematographic flourishes.

They mostly comprise fixed or panning distance shots of lines of sleek limousines, on otherwise empty highways or parked outside gangster mansions. The opening scene is the most memorable: a long tracking shot of black-suited yakusa drivers and henchmen awaiting the emergence of their family bosses from a yakusa council meeting. Kitano's expressionless face is one among many, all silently conveying the extent and menacing power of the gangs, whose carefully structured world is as far from reality as that of fedual royalty or corporate tycoons.

Throughout the film, only one detective is seen questioning the yakusas, and he's immediately established as a paid-off associate, and an old schoolpal of Kitano's character. He has a name, as do all the gangsters, and the four families they belong to, but for a non-Japanese it is difficult to develop a clear understanding of who's who and which of them is a blood brother or son of whom. All be-suited and seriously treacherous, they can only be distinguished by the actors' facial quirks, and it isn't worth trying to know their names: they don't matter.

Kitano, who wrote, edited and directed the movie (in his usual omnipotent fashion), gave himself a central character with a surprising level of gullibility, and loyalties almost as divided as those of his yakusa rivals and henchmen. One by one, the yakusa chief arranges the slaughter of competing families, only to be slayed at the end by his own badly-treated lieutenant. In between, gangsters are stabbed with a dental drill and chopsticks, shot in a train and many limousines, machine-gunned, beheaded by a speeding rope and have many finger ends sliced off. The only outsider involved, apart from slain call girls and waiters, is an African country's ambassador tricked into turning his embassy into a casino. He survives, digging a grave for a family boss.

As that scene illustrates, this is a minimally credible movie Kitano may have made out of financial necessity. It isn't a worthy use of his old multi-talents. He's still a charismatic presence, but the light has faded.

Ice blues

Former US child actor Chad Allen, an out gay, had no worries about taking the lead role in the filmed adaptations made for cable TV of the Donald Strachey mysteries, featuring "America's first gay detective". Two of them appeared in 2008, On the Other Hand, Death and Ice Blues, following in the successful screen-steps of Shock to the System (2006) and Third Man Out (2005).

The novels' originality lay in the matter-of-factual presentation of Strachey as an Albany private detective who happens to be gay, and in a lifetime partnership with an assistant to a female New York senator. They were written by an American, Richard Lipez, using the pen name Richard Stevenson, starting with the not-yet-filmed Death Trick, published in 1981 prior to Lipez coming out (with the father-of-two getting divorced in 1989). Ten other books followed, and Lipez became a gay activist in an open relationship with a sculptor.

Newfoundland-born Sebastian Spence has played Strachey's partner in all four films, and the latest was filmed in his home city of Vancouver. All four have been directed by Canada-born Ron Oliver, whose IMDb entry notes that his gay marriage of 2000 ended in divorce after three years. Plots of the novels have been similarly out. In Third Man Out, a notorious outer of gays received death threats, in Shock to the System Strachey solved the murder of a student while the screenplay examined social attitudes and gay conversion; the third film in the series involved an older lesbian couple.

Ice Blues, less focused on homosexuality, sees Strachey investigating whys and wherefores in the funding of one of his lover's favourite charity organisations for the city's youth. The short (80-minute) screenplay includes a runaway girl, a drug dealer making porn movies, a family's corrupt law firm, a vanished mother and murdered son, millions in bearer bonds, a romantic policeman, an English black thug and height-challenged Strachey's even shorter ethnic-Chinese sidekick.

By the time the plot reaches its denouements, after mediocre fisticuffs, and the detective and his slightly fey and whimsical partner have kissed a few times, it has become a gay-accented version of a B movie. Competently acted, professionally produced, almost totally forgettable.

Down Terrace

From 2006 on, Ben Wheatley co-wrote and directed British TV series each year with Robin Hill, who also acted in them. In 2009, the pair completed their first feature, Down Terrace. Inevitably, it was a crime caper; no other genre seems to get green-lighted for low-budget British film projects.

The long struggling life of a wannabee movie-maker can be guessed from Hill's listed credits. Together with the young Hurst brothers, he'd co-written/produced and acted in a very low-budget (£4,000) Betacam thriller in 1996 about a bunch of druggie squatters in Brighton, Project Assassin. His father, Robert Hill, helped out by playing a menacing government mind controller. Their effort never saw the light of a UK projector, but it was bought, transferred to film and distributed by a German producer in the European market.

With Down Terrace, one senses that Hill and Wheatley initially conceived a new TV six-parter, a noir sitcom about a crime family coping with treachery in a nondescript suburb of Brighton. Clearly inspired by the idea of a working-class British gang a la Sopranos, they created a group of mentally-disturbed criminals with generation gaps and bizarre spouses. It was filmed in the Hill family's own house in Brighton; Mr Hill Sr took the role of the gang's unctuous ex-hippie folk-singing father figure. Mr Hill Jr played his neurotic son, and his team probably realised they had the makings of an above-average crime movie/sitcom/family drama. In any case, the volume of "fucking" in the dialogue and the brutally comic murders in the plot would have confined the series to a late-night slot on a minor British TV channel.

The movie version, if that's what it is, has an episodic style suited to TV, with quick cuts to black between scenes. Each day is announced with captions, and the movie employs hand-held cameras and close-ups to catch the bitter family banter and characters' repressed hatreds and fears. As in Mike Leigh films, the claustrophobic atmosphere of a real, scruffy tenement house's rooms focuses attention dramatically on the actors, whose performances are as convincingly "natural" as those in a Leigh ensemble (and that of the recent Australian crime family saga, Animal Kingdom).

The family house is an integral part of the story, which stays in the living room and front door corridor while it establishes the individual characters: harassed mother, pregnant girlfriend and middle-aged gang mates greeting the father (late 50s) and his son on their return home after a courtroom acquittal. Someone shopped them, they believe, and their London boss is concerned. Half-way through, the film ventures outside the house, into the surrounding Downs countryside, then back in the house to the upstairs toilet and out to the small back garden.

Good editing and camera-work heighten the tension, twisting it with laugh-out-loud murders, providing frequent musical relief through folk songs' fake poignancy. They echo the storyline that this family depends on dreams and lies, and will destroy itself with sadness. That's good material for a finely-designed debut feature that deserves a lot of recognition and awards.

[The historic southern English seaside resort city gained fresh notoriety for its status as a haven for London's criminals (especially Cockneys) in the mid 1940s from the success of Brighton Rock, a novel by Graham Greene, who re-wrote it for the stage and cinema, with young Richard Attenborough in the lead role. (Rowan Jaffe's 2010 remake, starring Sam Riley, was to be released in February 2011.)]