We need to talk about Kevin

A-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Warrior

B

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

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

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

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

Carnage

B

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

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

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

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

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

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

Devil's double

B

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

West is west

A-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crazy, stupid, love

A-

Tangy bitter chocolate becomes saccharine mush.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Win win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hop

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

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

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

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

Incendies

Although Oscar voters are less predictably schmaltzy than they used to be, they still spurn ugly reality when choosing Best Foreign Language Films. In 2011, they chose tediously well-intentioned In a Better World (set in Africa, from Denmark) rather than the French-Canadian entry, Incendies (Scorched).

Denis Villeneuve's direction and adaptation of the play by Lebanese-Canadian Wajdi Mouawad opens out what must have been an histrionic tale of a Middle Eastern woman immigrant in Quebec. Her notarised last wishes ask her grown-up twin children to visit the land of their birth, where they will meet a brother they didn't know about and learn about their unknown father.

The notary, whom the mother had worked for as a secretary, has promised to aid their searches and delivery of the mother's letters. The three travel to an unnamed Middle East country, the daughter first, learning about their mother's life and their homeland's bitter history. Flashbacks illustrate the ordeals that challenged the woman's belief in love, religion and humanity.

An audience doesn't need to know that the mother was a Maronite Christian, her lover a Muslim, and their country (Lebanon) had been devastated by decades of religious conflict, civil war and invasions. The succession of tragedies and horrors are made to feel universal by well-paced direction and editing, with quiet spells showcasing fine cinematography of harsh scrub-land and bombed urban environments (on location in Jordan). Throughout, no musical soundtrack detracts from the attention focused on the excellent cast's faces.

The melodramatic sting in the tale leaves loose psychological strands waving wildly in the viewer's imagination. They may have been topics not enough Oscar voters wanted to contemplate or honour with a top award.

Beaver

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

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

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

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

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

Bran nue dae

The origin of a movie title that looks oddly Welsh is easily guessed if it's pronounced with an Aussie accent: Bran Nue Dae (2009), a musical comedy first staged in 2000.

"There is nothing I would rather be than an Aborigine, and watch you take my land away!", is the ironic refrain of the curtain-closing final song. A cast of scores of black Aussies sing and prance, Broadway-meets-Bollywood style, led by Geoffrey Rush in priestly robes. Occasionally, elsewhere in the red-dirt outback of north-west Australia, a line of Aborigine youths in war-paint leap and smile to the same song. Then a heart shape frames the faces of the black teenagers who have finally found true love. Cliches? No surprise: they'd been endless for almost 90 minutes.

This painfully patronising love story with unmemorable songs was obviously an entertainment devised for white audiences in Oz, akin to B&W minstrel shows and a universe away from Porgy and Bess or the South African black version of Carmen.

Geoffrey Rush rises way above his material, eyeball-rolling and hamming wonderfully as a deeply-accented German mission school headmaster trying to guide one likely good lad (relatively handsome plump newcomer Rocky McKenzie) in the late 1960s on the path to goodness, a good girl and doing good for his people.

The rest of the cast support them with weak character props: a German hippie (who's actually the priest's son) with a van for the ensemble's road trip, a comic bearded black sage (who's going to turn out to be the hero's dad), a "Roadhouse Betty" with wobbly breasts (a cameo for Magda Babe Szubanski), a loving mum, black football team and temperance march, which is the excuse to get to a beach for the final singalong.

Director Rachel Perkins co-tweaked the stage show as a movie, and may have done the best anyone could with a concept that was cringe-worthily corny. Her first feature (Radiance, 1998) was a well-received Outback drama; her second film was a one-hour TV Outback drama (One Night The Moon, 2001) that also earned critical favour. This film's RT rating of 53% is too kind.

Archipelago

Think Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman; imagine them having lobotomies and going for R&R in the Scilly Islands with a upper-middle-class-Brit family which is, stereotypically, a non-communicative set of repressed and bruised psyches. Does anyone need to see writer-director Joanna Hogg's 2010 soph movie Archipelago?

Its improvised scenes self-consciously filmed in chronological order (a la Ken Roach's reality-seeking school of auteurs), the movie wends through wind-swept insular scenery and solitary souls in little gusts of conversational non-action. They are punctuated purposelessly by little-varied vistas of clouds.

A middle-aged mother (Kate Fahy) has rented an island house as a two-week holiday home for her family: a reserved angst-filled son going on voluntary service in Africa for a year (Tom Hiddleston), a shrewish daughter (UK TV actress Lydia Leonard), and her husband, who never joins them, indicating family relationship problems via phone calls. The mother employed a young housekeeper to cook their meals and a painter (Christopher Baker) to give her art lessons. The latter can eat with them; the cook can't.

Static framing of stilted group conversations emphasises the gathering's frigidity, false niceties and basic pointlessness. The three family members are such self-obsessed neurotics that one tends to understand the absent father's unwillingness to join the mournful charade.

Hogg may need a change of inspiration: her first movie feature Unrelated (2007) also portrayed a family on holiday in Tuscany and was critically acclaimed in the UK. Hiddleston and his sister Emma had supporting parts. She has no other screen credit, but Tom (a double-first in Classics at Cambridge and RADA-trained) had already leapt from Brit TV to Hollywood, as close-to-camp Loki, the jealous brother of Thor (and Marvel's forthcoming New Avengers product).

He's worth watching, but not as much as the two lead women: both Irish-born Fahy, the wife of Jonathan Pryce, and Leonard convey inner rage and despair tellingly. They'd have been even better with a real script. So might wooden Baker, a movie first-timer muttering moodily about art and self-confidence; the equally nicely-accented cook chats with Hiddleston about food and self-confidence.

The film's scorecard in Rotten Tomatoes logs 16 favourable reviews from 16 Brit critics, some of whom may be undeclared chauvinists, feminists or upper-middle-class snobs. One non-logged top US critic is rightly scathing. The film is unforgivably boring, to look at and listen to.

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.

Departures

Any tendency to over-laud other countries' movies arises from the commercial reality that foreigners only get to see, rent or buy a nation's exportable best products. Even Japan produces trash movies, surely. Its movies cannot all be as critically successful as Departures (Okuribito).

Its 2009 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar win gave director Yojira Takita unexpected international acclaim to offset its initially cool treatment in Japan. The subject matter - death - is a taboo topic, obliging the production team to tread tightropes. Adapting an autobiographical volume (Aoki Shinmon's Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician) Kundo Kojama crafted a screenplay both ironic and sensitive, comic and sad, manipulative and touching.

An unemployed orchestral cellist mistakenly applies for work at "Departures", a company he thought was a travel agency. Instead, he learns to care for the departed as an "encoffineer", providing a corpse with a symbolic public choreography of respectful washing, dressing and facial make-up, enabling the departed to go to heaven looking good and peaceful.

Lead actor Masahiro Motoki was a member of a top boy-band in the 1980s, and still sports a deliberately cute social awkwardness which didn't match my image of an over-ambitious cellist with a young wife (Ryoko Hirosue, simpering sweetly and silently sobbing in mildly irritating traditional housewifely style).

However, Motoki was totally convincing as a sensitive naif finding an outlet for a natural talent and artistic feelings in ritual ceremonies. His facial concentration and bodily grace rightly won him five Best Actor awards, his best haul since Masayuki Suo's comedy Sumo Do, Sumo Don't (1992). He'd also rated well for Takashi Miike's The Bird People in China (1998). Inevitably, there are a couple of gratuitous scenes allowing Motoki's fans to see him in non-frontal nudity, reminding me of a well-preserved younger version of Hong Kong's Alan Tam.

Director Takita got his start in the 1980s working on the "Molester" series of comic softcore pornographic movies (Japan's defunct "pink film" industry), and was previously best known for the satirical The Yen Family. He steps neatly along the cinematic tightropes, slipping gently from comic interludes to tear-jerking moments, relying on the excellent cast of extras (grieving families, corpses and the standard bath-house old-timers) to push the audience past the screenplay's incredibly long sequence of dramatically convenient coincidences. Notably, veteran Tsutomu (Tampopo) Yamazaki is a central pillar of the production as the self-taught master of funeral rites, personifying traditional Japanese surface taciturnity and deep emotions.

At the end, though, discretion is abandoned. When the encoffineer's socially-embarrassed wife returns to him (happily pregnant), his aged bath-house friend dies, and his long-lost destitute father's body turns up in a nearby port, the production releases all floodgates on its tear ducts. Tears stream, hover at nose ends, and the movie ends with a symbolic smooth rock linking three generations.

It's all too much, but it works splendidly. Just like the elaborate funeral beautification rite it honours, the movie is a visually enchanting display of graceful technique and professional TLC.

Mildred Pierce

Joan Crawford won her Oscar as Mildred Pierce, the title role in the 1945 Warner Bros adaptation of James M.Cain's novel about a single mother's personal struggles, class-awareness and business success during the Depression. The classic noir film, which added murder to the tale of a disastrous mother-daughter relationship, was part-written by William Faulkner, directed by Michael Curtiz and co-starred young Oscar nominee Ann Blyth as the restaurateur's scheming daughter.

The 2011 remake of Mildred Pierce, directed by co-writer/producer Todd Haynes, was given a great cast including Guy Pearce, Melissa Leo, Hope Davis, Evan Rachel Wood as the daughter and Kate Winslet in the title role. Faithful to the novel, to an extreme possible only in a mini-series, the HBO TV saga ran for more than five hours. Is it too much of a good thing?

It's almost impossible to get too much of Winslet, a charismatic actress who's maturing gracefully. Unfortunately, she cannot do evil intent convincingly: her Mildred is incredibly naive, and ludicrously doting on her vile elder daughter. There are moments when Winslet's Mildred is angry, upset and imperious, but never enough to hint at genetic traits that might have produced spitefully egocentric, snobbish and vicious Veda. She can only be viewed as a devil's spawn, because her father is a sweet-natured weak-willed unfaithful building contractor (self-effacing Irish actor Brian F.O'Byrne, probably the miniseries' most likely Emmy winner).

For the first three of the miniseries' five episodes, 14-year-old Veda is played by 11-year-old Morgan Turner, with a hi-falutin accent and prissy airs tolerated to an unbelievable extent by her parents. Only her two music tutors recognise and slap down her conceit.

When her father moves out, at Mildred's insistence, and her young sister dies of flu while their mother is meeting a caddish new beau from the right side of town (Guy Pearce), Veda can dominate Mildred even more, but the script doesn't focus clearly on their generation gap. Instead, Haynes' focal point is Mildred's expanding restaurant and pie-making businesses.

In the 1945 version, Cain's 1930s melodrama was transformed into a murder mystery. It may have been done to satisfy Hollywood codes about evil earning justice, but it also added a strong narrative punch to an otherwise maudlin family tale. Haynes drops the murder (which I really wanted for several lead characters) and finds his visual punches in gratuitously nude love-making scenes. He also indulges in too many long pans and slow tracking shots, flaunting the production's extensive period settings, indoors and out and about in Glendale and Pasadena, crowded scenes of costumed extras, and a frequent parade of chugging vintage cars.

Haynes' Far From Heaven, starring a memorable Julianne Moore as another independent-minded woman of period character, was reportedly an homage to Douglas Kirk's lush directorial style. Mildred Pierce follows suit, apparently, and it is a beauty to behold, but it's a beauty stretched beyond its natural length. To points where the narrative framework is over-exposed and the characters' incredibility is glaring. This Mildred is just a silly mother, not a tragic figure.

Still walking

Family, death and memories are dominant themes in the work of Japanese writer-director Kore-eda Hirokazu, multi-award-winningly-so for After Life (1998) and Nobody Knows (2004). He's gained international acclaim too for Distance (2001) and Hana (2006); his Still Walking (2008) prompted critic Roger Ebert to dub him the new Ozu of Japanese cinema, as a similar master of immaculately-observed family relationships and human behaviour.

Hirokazu dismisses such a comparison in his very informative to-camera interview for the Criterion DVD; instead he relates himself to the veteran director who also influenced Ozu (best known outside Japan for The Tokyo Story) - Mikio Ukigumo Naruse.

The Ozu comparison was inevitable. Still Walking reveals a prickly proud old local doctor and his bitter-sweet wife hosting their two surviving children's families for an annual gathering marking the accidental death of their oldest son. They bicker, cook (in brilliantly-detailed close-ups), exchange niceties, suppress emotional outbursts and grudgingly cope with the universal problems of belonging to an unlovable family.

Hirokazu once again shows his winning ways with child actors, and this film's trio are everything that Hollywood brats so often fail to be: natural, moody, coolly observant, clearly sensing their elders' social inadequacies and weaknesses. Their parents are distinctive characters; the in-laws are the nicer people to meet. As a self-confessed semi-autobiographical set of anecdotes, this film clearly sublimates the writer-director's dislike of his parents' personalities and the young man they made him become.

Each cast member, several of whom have worked for Hirokazu on other movies, present characters as nuanced as the writer's storyboard, and as finely-detailed as the director's focuses on production details. Most notably, veteran actress Kirin Kiki, as the pseudo-deferential venomous grandmother, rightly won various awards.

The director's interview includes his comment that he should have deleted the end scene, an unnecessarily poignant and happy conclusion whose pat voice-over words and symbol-packed scenes look like pretty plastic bows of platitude and pretence added to the whole movie's sincere package of home truths.

Hirokazu's next film really shunted aside the petrifying burden of being seen as Ozu reincarnate: Air Doll (2009) is a quirky delight about a blow-up model who gains a human spirit and falls in love.

America, America

America, America lasts almost three hours and gained Elia Kazan three Oscar nominations in 1963 for Best Picture, Direction and Original Screenplay. Its only win, though, was for Best Art Direction (in the Black & White category, separate from colour until 1966) for Gene Callahan, who worked on five of Kazan's movies. The B&W artistry glows throughout the auteur's portrait of his uncle's life in early 20th-Century Turkey and Greece.

The movie, in effect a docudrama, is an accepted classic, and an historical document depicting a typical immigrant's experience in his homeland and the USA. Kazan himself was an Istanbul-born Greek, and the 1963 movie saga earned him the last of his four Golden Globes for direction; in the year's Oscar race, however, Tony Richardson's Tom Jones triumphed.

Kazan's central character, on screen almost all the time, is Stavros, the eldest son of a Greek businessman keeping a servile profile in Anatolia during the Turkish Empire. Sent to what was then Constantinople to establish a new base for the family, he is cheated out of his family possessions and learns to suppress his "Anatolian Smile" (the film's secondary title) while maintaining his childhood dream of escaping to the land of opportunity.

After long searches throughout Europe, Kazan picked Stathis Giallelis, an unknown Athens film industry wannabe, for the lead role. Although he made no other significant screen appearance afterwards (a total of only eight), he's been immortalised by this film, having been expertly coached by the experienced stage and movie director who'd already honed the skills of Marlon Brando, James Dean and Montgomery Clift.

Surprisingly, for a movie that's only 57 years old, it unreels creakily, marred by old-fashioned sentimentality, the supporting cast's ham acting for cliche-ridden characters, its over-frequent bursts of melodramatic mood music and focused glances, and its mostly poor and non-sync dubbing by very ham and very American voices. In the end, the movie feels much older, decades older, than other, earlier, award-winning Kazan films. It looks wonderful, with richly-detailed settings and costumes, and Oscar-nominated B&W cinematography (by Haskell Wexler, working on his first big-budget feature).

Maybe the material was too close to his family's heart for Kazan to have the necessary perspective and self-critical awareness. He ended up making a self-aggrandising spectacle with an earnestness that was Soviet-style and a misanthropy provoked by the class- and race-conscious people who destroyed a young man's smile. Ironically, Kazan personally had a much easier migration to American fame and fortune (and eventual repudiation by many in Hollywood and Broadway for his self-preserving betrayal of former Communist colleagues).

It's possible to guess why Martin Scorsese, a New Yorker of Italian origin, admired this film from his inspirational idol, a New Yorker of Greek origin. They are atypical Hollywood success stories, akin to but very distinct from the movie industry's Eastern European emigres.

Tree of life

The "fragmented and non-linear narrative" (so called by Wikipedia) that is Terrence Malick's 2011 Cannes award-winner The Tree of Life, isn't necessarily off-putting per se. All depends on the movie's overall dramatic impact and the individual elements that create the mental images left with a viewer.

Are the actors portraying credible characters or token figures, does the cinematography advance meanings more than just the director's aesthetic desires, do fragments blend excitingly on-screen and in the viewer's mind?

Yes and no, of course, because Malick is incapable of creating a movie that isn't encrusted with glistening, provocative and unforgettable images. At times during this 140-minute display, one wants the movie to freeze, to let one savour the beauty of a composition, its lighting, its disturbing angle. On various occasions, Malick obliges by reducing the camera movement or action to almost nothing, creating a slide-show effect that's both beguiling and alienating.

The sparse plot only comes to narrative life during the film's middle hour. In a tree-lined middle-class district of Waco, Texas in the 1950s, a frustrated power plant executive (Brad Pitt) runs a God-fearing dog-loving old-fashioned household with a dutiful wife (Jessica Chastain, an excellent US TV actress in a breakthrough film performance). His three young sons include Jack (first-time actor Hunter McCracken, a teenage Sean Penn look-alike), who has become an angst-filled architect (Sean Penn, in a constantly wandering-around and wondering-aloud role as a man with unhappy childhood memories).

One of his brothers had died (we aren't told how or why) at the age of 19, as we were told dramatically early on, evoking enormous sorrow from his parents, as we saw extensively. Was it the brother whose hair started falling out in later scenes, with no narrative explanation or off-screen information? Was it the youngest brother, whose musical talent and looks carried the father's genes? Was Jack jealous of either of them, or merely a miserable soul?

During the very refined soap operatics of that central hour, Malick's cameras focus fairly and squarely on the family, at dinner, in its grassy yards, amid Jack's playful games with his brothers or adolescent viciousness with schoolmates. His father says and shows he loves all his sons (and expects their respectful kisses) in his rough, tough, Navy-trained ways, but his oppressive persona earns Jack's hatred. The father represents Nature, the off-screen mother's voice told us; she stands for Grace, the other half of humanity. Many other recollections, mostly from Jack, contain unrelated memories, pensive asides and mumbled thoughts.

Moment by moment, the interactions of the boy and his parents are revealed like a quilt pulled from the shadows with slow gestures and sudden yanks. Not fully revealed, frustratingly for those who seek narrative clarity. We also never learn whether Jack really had an Oedipal obsession for an ethereal mother who seemed to float, whether the father was embittered because he couldn't be a serious musician, when and how Jack left home, why he's shown apologising on the telephone to his presumably still-living father, what happened to the family when the father lost his job, whether the tree Jack and his father planted in the yard grew ... and those are just some of the unconnected loose ends, seen as dramatically inconsequential as various dogs that run around the family garden.

However, it looks as if Malick realised this finely-photographed family portrait presented an inadequate overview of humanity. The audience needed to be made aware, be in awe, of the writer-director's philosophical thoughts about love, God, Christianity, losing a job and failing to be a successful parent. The film starts with quotations from Job and detours for self-indulgently exquisite long works of cinema art depicting the creation and history of the universe and Earth, including the day when a dinosaur discovers the concept of mercy for smaller creatures.

The cinematography is astonishing: Mexican Emmanuel Lubezki has been Oscar-nominated four times and deserves to win this time. The sound effects are also subtle and striking, as is some of the original music (Frenchman Alexandre Desplat, another four-time Oscar nominee). But much of the music, especially the classical extracts (presumably reflecting the father's love of music), is over-emphatic, flabby with wailing choirs and ringing requiems.

The worst conceit of all is Malick's 20-minute closing section: it's an increasingly irritating succession of closing scenes, suggesting either that the director couldn't bear to eject any one of his magniloquent images or that he delights in tantalising his audience. At the really final fade to black, the audience sighs rather than gasps: Malick has proved he's a major cinematic talent, but he's done so with such self-conscious spiritual primness and visual pomposity that his messages are drowned in his media magic. Is his story an anti-Christian morality tale dressed up as a church-goer's cinematic sermon? How can we care when Malick doesn't care to show us why.

Accidental tourist

The Accidental Tourist was a critical and popular success in 1988 for William Hurt and Geena Davis (who won the year's Oscar for Best Supporting Actress). It also gained many award nominations for its original score (John Williams) and direction and co-writing by Lawrence Kasdan, whose screenplay was based on an Anne Tyler novel. The nominal lead actress was Kathleen Turner.

Kasdan had already written and directed Body Heat (his 1981 debut, also starring Hurt and Turner), The Big Chill and Silverado, and co-written the second and third Star Wars instalments (1980/83) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). He made another six movies up to 2003, when he co-produced and directed his re-working of William Goldman's adaptation of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher. It lost him big money; since then he's reportedly been attached to Tobey McGuire's aborted live-action Robotech and is now completing a delayed project co-written with his wife (and co-writer of his Grand Canyon) about a woman who loves her dog more than her husband (Darling Companion, starring old hands Kevin Kline, Diane Keaton and Dianne West).

Anne Tyler's novel told of an uptight weak-willed travel writer (Hurt), separated from his bossy uptight wife (Turner) a year after the shooting death of their 12-year-old son, hiring a self-determinedly odd trainer (Davis) for the boy's biting Corgi. Dogs never hurt a film's audience appeal and are photogenic dei ex machina for its plotting; this one is a star turn.

An admirable supporting cast flesh out Hurt's three eccentric siblings and his bachelor publisher (Bill Pullman), and the richly comic details of their lives build a firm frame for Hurt's character's melancholy indecisiveness. Their dialogue is wry and charming, like much of the movie. Overall, though, at two hours it's an over-long reflection on love and marriage, insecure men and purposeful women. There are longueurs and the trio of key characters are self-centred folks with whom one wouldn't want to share one's life.

Masahista

Brillante Mendoza has amassed dozens of awards, including many from festivals outside his native Philippines. An experienced production designer (using the name Dante Mendoza), he worked on ten features in 1985-9, and on three more of his own directions in that function since 2006. His debut as a director came in 2005 at the age of 45, with Masahista (The Masseur), after a long spell working as an art director on TV commercials. Since then he's won Best Director at Cannes for (Kinatay, 2009), which also earned him a second Palme D'Or nomination, following Serbis (Service) the previous year.

Masahista's emotionally powerful story (credited to frequent Mendoza collaborator Ferdinand Lapuz) and naturalistic screenplay (Mendoza and another frequent associate, Boots Agbayani Pastor) have a pronounced gay element. So do several of the Mendoza team's movies, but their homosexual action and characters are a secondary, albeit seemingly integral, aspect of working-class Filipino existence as seen by Mendoza.

Family love and/or duties is his dominant motif. The movie's central character, a young masseur in a seedy back-street Manila house of male prostitution, is summoned back to his reprobate father's death-bed in his scruffy home city (Pampanga). Calming helping an embalmer dress his father in formal clothes for the funeral rites, the masseur's actions are counterpointed with scenes from his previous day's work, undressing and oiling a new customer.

At little more than 70 minutes, the movie is a shocking slice of poor Philippine life. Shocks abound not so much in the full nudity (mostly non-frontal), simulated homosexual intercourse, street language or intimate details of gigolos' techniques and services. What's overwhelmingly shocking is the depiction of desperate poverty in a society where amorality and cheating is masked by facades of politeness and friendliness.

The writing team avoid many of the usual soap-operatics that can blight such docudramas. The masseur's younger brother is not shown following his sibling's lead, his girlfriend is a foul-mouthed sluttish customer, and his mother is as hard to love as his aunts and adulterous drunkard absentee father. The masseur's co-workers are portrayed credibly too, reserving only their oral kisses for their girlfriends, and the screenplay employs telling overhead shots to pan across the row of tiny curtained massage cubicles. If only all such operations in Manila (or the nation's movie versions of them) weren't managed by unctuous queens twittering camp Filipino-English.

Eventually, the masseur breaks down in regretful tears over the loss of his father, but he's not allowed to walk off into any sunrise of hope or happiness, or a loyal woman's arms. A challenging focal figure, a street-wise cherub, Iliac the masseur was the first major role for Coco Martin, who subsequently starred in other Mendoza movies and is now a TV star. He's credibly faux-naif, his emotions little explored, firmly repressed.

Alan Paule is credible too as the kindly massage customer, whose stilted chat-chat conversation and price negotiations with Iliac advance the movie's docudrama, providing details that explain the two men's outside lives and commercial relationship. Paule, also a frequent actor in Mendoza films, made his first movie back in 1988: it was a similar socio-political saga, Macho Dancer, directed by Lino Brocka, one of the country's leading anti-capitalist neo-realists.

Neo-realism is a small world in a small film industry: Mendoza's main female character this time (the masseur's matriarchal aunt) is played, sharply, by Jaclyn Jose; she also starred in Macho Dancer and several other Mendoza movies.