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].

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.

Cold fish

Black comedy, softcore porno, serial killers and gory horror are favoured elements in mainstream Japanese movies. Writer-director Shion Sono gave his audience their money's worth of all such macabre big-screen entertainment with 144 minutes of Cold Fish. Of its kind, its many genres, it's excellent.

An avant-garde poet and actor, Sino's first feature as a writer-director (in 1990) was Bicycle Sighs. His 2002 gory cult hit Suicide Club (aka Circle), and its 2006 sequel, Noroko's Dinner Table, brought him commercial and critical success, as well as global film festival attention.

Cold Fish is loosely based on a pair of serial killers who owned a pet shop. The film's alpha-male middle-aged extrovert madman owns a grand tropical fish store, and he matter-of-factly tells his chosen new business assistant that he's made 58 people "invisible". The younger man, a weak-willed nerdish pet fish shop-keeper, is easily trapped when the happy maniac rescues his bolshie teenage daughter from shoplifting charges.

Both men have sexy young wives with enhanced breasts and lesbian tendencies. The madman was sexually abused as a boy by his father. The daughter is a bad-mannered bitch who detests her young step-mother. Carnivorous fish are also featured, and a madly menacing hoodlum working for the aquarium boss. Various corpses are butchered methodically, by candlelight, their flesh and bones anointed with soy sauce before burning.

For two hours, the nerd is drawn further into the murderer's mayhem and mindset, and then, inevitably, the worm turns with horrific results. And any viewer who doesn't giggle and gasp, sitting spellbound by the blackly comic audacity, cannot be human.

The actors all present remarkably credible characters (even the voluptuous breast-bared wives) as psychotic misfits living in a loveless world of pain. The editing is well-paced, the camera-work exciting without being too flashy, and sound (especially rain) and music (pop and classic) effects underscore the moods tellingly. This is black comedy at its best, streaked with lots of red blood and wild-eyed scenery-chewing. Yet the only award it's collected was for best screenplay at a fantasy festival. It deserved better recognition.

Cars that ate Paris

Peter Weir's first feature film, as for other young Australasian directors of his generation, was a comedy horror. The Cars That Ate Paris, severely cut and given a narrative, was eventually screened in the US as The Cars That Eat People.

Weir co-wrote the screenplay about an isolated rural Australian town, Paris, whose inhabitants survive on the loot of automobile wrecks they engineer. Any crash survivors are lobotomised into "veggies" of specified degrees of incapacity, and hospitalised or adopted by the community. It was divided into two factions: the town's pious elders, led by their autocratic pipe-smoking Mayor (John Crocodile Dundee Meillon), versus anarchic youths who re-jig wrecked cars as hot-rod stunt cars adorned with snarling shark features or porcupine quills.

When a simple-minded visitor, the surviving brother in an auto accident, stays in town, his recollection of flashing lights on the lane approaching the town worries the Mayor. Rather than have the young man lobotomised by the local hospital's eager experimental surgeon, he adopts the lad and appoints him as the town's Parking Officer. This would be credible if the anti-heroic character were played by a young actor, but the production chose an old-faced balding Maltese-Australian newcomer. He detracts from Meillon's finely-balanced portrayal of well-intentioned menace and paternalism.

Meanwhile, the town's semi-zombie scavengers are looking forward to their fancy-dress Pioneers Ball. The auto-racers plan their Car Gymkhana, but the ritual burning of one of their leader's car provokes an assault on the Ball-goers. In the resulting fracas, the simpleton regains his ability to drive, slams a car repeatedly into the young hooligan leader, and drives off into the night sky. The mayor stands alone, his townsfolk fleeing on foot.

In history as in mythology, coastal communities did lure passing ships to destruction or desert bands and village inns pillaged travellers: Weir's storyline adapted the idea as a light satire of contemporary Australian mores. It was the first Aussie movie invited to the Cannes film festival, and Weir's career later blossomed in more admirable directions.

The movie was a debut too for twin producers Hal and Jim McElroy (Hal working alone since 1992, creating, writing and producing many long-running Australian TV series). They also produced Weir's next three features (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, The Year of Living Dangerously). Weir's occasional artfully framed shots, wry humour, concentration on actors' features and teasingly slow editing were signs of cinematic talents that developed well; the movie itself is a slight period piece.

Confessions

Shortlisted for the 2011 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Japan's entry is a well-crafted tale of horror-tinged revenge. More cerebral and slower-paced, and less violent, than similar Japanese films in the revenge genre, Confessions presents a dazzling package of movie bravado.

The acting, screenplay, editing, music and cinematography frequently alienate, surprise and shock their audience. Do all the devices make it a better film than the actual Oscar-winner (a sentimentalised racial allegory from Denmark)? Yes. Could it have won? Never. Would Oscar voters applaud megalomaniac children who are cold-blooded murderers with vicious or neglectful mothers?

A widowed junior school teacher's infant daughter is killed on purpose twice by two of her pupils, on whom she will wreak horrible vengeance. She won't kill them, but eventually ensure that they kill their mothers. The stories ("confessions") of almost everyone involved are told, via flashbacks and off-screen commentaries, starting with the teacher's 30-minute detailed account of her child's death.

After their milk break, and initially unruly, the school class is told how two boys, A and B, waylaid the child and drowned her. Slowly, through finely-timed cuts, the children are seen to pay closer attention, finally panicking when told by the teacher that she's laced the two boys' drinks with HIV-infected blood (from her dead husband). A noir tale that's barely credible, it's told with gripping calmness by the lead actress, Takako Matsu.

The two boys note their formative influences and innermost wishes, while the class's quiet self-willed leading girl recounts the new young male teacher's efforts to reach out to one of the boys, who's turned into an unwashed mentally-disturbed reclusive. That boy's wimpering, doting mother blames the woman teacher for his state, but his partner in crime is sure that the teacher's HIV claim was only a scare tactic. He befriends the schoolgirl, killing time with her while he plans how to be re-united with the mother who'd abandoned him.

Loose ends in the story dangle threateningly around much of the time, most noticeably in the foolish replacement teacher's lack of knowledge of the school's involvement in a child's death. Coincidences are hard to accept, but only on reflection. During the film, visually dazzled by darkening cloud formations interspersed between artfully-composed sound, light and blood effects and aerial or hand-held shots of malicious children, an audience can only sit transfixed, waiting for explanations.

With an ending that's close to grand guignol, and a final line of dialogue that's a dramatic slap in the audience's face, the movie leaves one shattered emotionally. Disbelieving, but aware that that the original, horrific sinfulness of children has been conveyed so well, a la Lord of the Flies.

This seventh feature film from writer-director by Tetsuya Nakashima, based on a novel, prompts searches for his previous award-winners: Memories of Matsuko, Paco and the Magical Book and Kamikaze Girls. It's pleasing that the Japanese film industry sent Hollywood a film it must have known could never win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Sentimentality.

Hills have eyes, the

Wes Craven made a hit horror movie in the 1970s, The Hills Have Eyes. Three decades later, after watching a bandwagon of horror remakes making fortunes for other people, he jumped on it too, taking on board a duo of proven French horror-movie talents. Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur had established their European reputation for writing-directing bloodthirstiness with Haute Tension in 2003, and no one doubted their ability to deliver a technically adroit remake and update.

Morocco provided the vast stark "New Mexico" desert in which a white family of four adults, two teens, a baby and a pair of Alsatians get lost, deliberately misdirected into the feeding grounds of a subterranean gang of genetically deformed nuclear test victims.

The cinematography is excellent, and the whole cast (even the manufactured freaks) are unusually acceptable actors for what is nothing more than a souped-up B-grade horror movie. Editing, music, and the striking special effects are also well above average, but the movie has been fairly damned as porno horror.

The deaths and ordeals of the characters, especially the women, do verge on the pornographic, but they lose the essential frisson of a true horror movie. Consequently I lost any interest in seeing what further creatively gory setpieces might have been devised by the movie-makers. By the time I switched off physically as well as mentally, the only mildly engaging aspect was wondering which character would be slaughtered next.

The Frenchmen may have found their niche with their more recent Piranha remake: incredibly corny and self-mocking humour allied with sensational SFX.

Monsters

Does anybody now make a movie that isn't in two parts or primed for a sequel? It is very irritating for a movie-goer to be left in mid-air, feeling defrauded of the price of the second part's ticket. Especially, as with Monsters, when the first part has too clearly been spun out, a half-hour or more longer than its material justifies, in order to run a minimally acceptable hour and a half.

It's more than irritating when a way-above-average B feature is a one-man showpiece of excellence from its British writer, director, SFX director and cinematographer, Gareth Edwards. It may be only half a calling card, but his debut movie was his open sesame to Hollywood fortune and has already gained him the director's chair for the Godzilla remake.

A previous award co-winner and nominee for TV programmes' SFX (Hiroshima, Perfect Disaster), Edwards attracted a budget of less than of half a million dollars for his concept of extra-terrestrial octopoid monsters confined to an infected zone in northern Mexico, with a new great wall guarding the USA. Although Peter Jackson-backed District 9 had triumphed at the box-office despite placing its caged ETs in South Africa, Edwards wisely set his scifi thriller in the American hemisphere.

After a battle between US aircraft and the creatures on the southern border of the zone, a photojournalist is ordered to bring his boss's affianced daughter back home. They encounter all the usual transportation problems, corruption and jungle settings, and Edwards' producers knew the pair of lead actors, on-screen throughout the movie, would make or break its credibility. Experienced TV actor Scoot McNairy was a shrewd casting choice: he'd recently (2007) won an Indie acting award for the baby-budget (US$15,000) In Search of a Midnight Kiss.

He is a credibly egocentric photojournalist, although his relaxed facial image projects gormlessness rather than sensitivity. Almost too good to be true is the production note claiming that his then girlfriend, current wife, was offered the co-lead to better ensure an on-screen rapport: TV actress and movie bit-parter Whitney Able. A gamin lookalike for Cameron Diaz, she is both charismatic and very credible as a young woman finding her own life.

Edwards' location cinematography is excellent too, and his SFX of rampaging gleaming octopi, forest trees' trunks of their translucent eggs, and bomb-scarred Central American settlements are top-quality. His piece de resistance is the coupling of a pair of multi-limbed octopi over an abandoned gas station, where the two humans watch them, transfixed a la Strange Encounters, prompted uncontrollably to have their first passionate kiss - just before the screen fades to black and this audience's irritation point. The irritation is knowing that one wants to know what happens to the sensuous octopi. Which reminds me: there must be a second part for District 9. Please.

Piranha

Every now and then, as rarely as sensitivities can allow, every movie lover must see an incredibly bad, disgustingly commercial, cliche-bespattered load of derivative cinematic offal. They don't make Showgirls every year, and its ilk are therefore treasured movie experiences.

Such an abomination is the sort of cineplex fodder one would expect from the Mr Hyde side of the Weinstein brothers, who delivered its first part in 2010 as Piranha 3D. Its special effects, of packs of blood-thirsty prehistoric piranha fish hunting nubile young bodies on their Spring Break, are so credibly good that the movie ends up being so gory it's wonderfully comic.

Credit must go where it's deserved, to Alexandre The Hills Have Eyes Aja, a "Splat Pack" horror movie director and son of French producer Alexandre Arcady, who funded his son's first two directing efforts, Furia (1999) and Haute Tension (2003).

Although Piranha is a re-make of Joe Dante's 1978 classic horror, Jaws was clearly the prime inspiration for the two credited "writers", Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, a pair of TV talents whose prior movie was also a remake-cum-spoof, Sorority Row. This time, just in case no one sees the connection, the spoof's opening pre-credits scene shows Richard Dreyfuss fishing in a lake when an underwater earthquake unleashes a swarm of piranha and the conclusion of Dreyfuss's bit part.

It is hoped he collected a small fortune for such prostitution of his name and cinematic heritage. Ditto for Christopher Lloyd, who trundles his bug eyes into an aquarium set where he is the mildly mad boffin reincarnated from Back to the Future. Also resurrected from that classic is Elizabeth Shue, now the right age to play the sheriff who's the mother of three children, assisted by Ving Rhames as her deputy, who gets a Tarantino moment to wield a frantic piranha-killing machine (an outboard motor).

That's the oldie, feminist and black markets catered for: what's left? TV regular Jerry O'Connell continues to show that he never lived up to his promising start in movies (Stand By Me, 1986). His role as a camp straight porn film director is a highlight of ham in a film in which the acting is deliberately super-porcine (one assumes the acting technique didn't arise naturally, being kind to some of the actors).

Horror movie buffs would have been tickled gorily pink by the guest appearance of another "Splat Pack" director, Eli Hostel Roth, as a short-lived wet-shirt show host. Those shirts, and languid subaqua lesbian dance routines, were designed for hordes of pubescent porno fans, as was well-boobed English actress Kelly Brook.

Various young actors get the chance to flex muscles, grins and puppy fat: Cody Longo and Steven R McQueen have screen names to die for and acting abilities to unleash herds of cringes. There may have been some Latino extras in the blood-soaked white-fleshed waters of the Arizonan lake setting, but there seemed to be no blacks, possibly because their skin tones would have clashed with the set designers' red-hued colour scheme.

There were moments in that watery blood-fest when I laughed in manic disbelief. Have you ever seen a girl's bloody body suddenly break in two? Or watched two piranhas scrapping over a very distended circumcised penis, which the winner disgustedly expels undigested? Or a headful of female hair trapped in a speedboat's engine, causing its owner to be scalped?

There are more tributes and bows to horror and comedy movies than any movie buff can catch the first time, all gleefully packed into 80 minutes (and a budget of only $24 million). The remake ends with a slap-in-the-face promo that will have all lobotomised movie buffs salivating at the thought of 2011's release of Piranha 3DD.

The baby fish in this first instalment were excellent teeth-gnashing tail-whipping hi-speed tricks of the CGI trade, but the next school of fish will obviously be really big whoppers for one woman, her three kids and a single girl to battle. It's hard to know whether to sigh or cheer at the news that this first Piranha "only" grossed $80 million globally.

Let me in

Re-makes of successful films rarely recreate the originals' freshness, distinctive mood and cinematic quality - three key factors accounting for its original success. One recent attempt was Let Me In, the 2010 English-language version of the acclaimed 2008 Swedish vampire movie, Let the Right One In.

The haste with which it was re-made by Matt Cloverfield Reeves suggests that Swedish film industry insiders knew that the original story could play well in the USA if it wasn't screened with subtitles. Fortunately, they decided not to tout a dubbed version.

The Swedish movie was based on a novel and screenplay by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who worked with Reeves on the American adaptation (to which two other Americans contributed). The original movie was directed by Tomas Alfredson, who won several awards for it; he was not involved with or happy about the US re-make. It was co-produced by long-established British horror production company, Hammer Films (now Dutch-owned and back in business after a two-decade hiatus).

The new version kept the basic story, set in the 1980s in a snowy environment: a bullied 12-year-old boy forms a close friendship with a new neighbour of the same age. She feels no cold, lives with an older guardian, turns out to be a truly bloodthirsty killing machine, helps the boy annihilate his school tormentors, and rides off with him in a train into a vampire's world of essential sunsets.

In America, a completely new character is introduced, a detective (Elias Koteas) investigating a supposed Satanic cult. Possibly seeking to add another known face to the US film's marketing strength, the role of the girl's "guardian" is expanded to show more of Richard Jenkins. To accommodate them, details of the original film's neighbouring victims were trimmed, while a scary scene with cats was completely cut out.

Other differences in the US version are matters of style: the Swedish movie had a slower pace, an eerie quality, and its young actors seemed more spectral, their snow-clad setting more sombre and alarming. The English-speaking pre-teens are presented less ominously, most effectively by Kodi Smit-McPhee, an Australian boy who'd shone in The Road.

The evil side of the girl's character is depicted by some strikingly horrific special effects, but Chloe (a tomboy delight in Kick-Ass) Moretz has a tougher acting challenge. She is possibly too pretty to be seen as a credible Lolita and lifetime physical partner for an older man, even when the screenplay shows us that she had never aged.

This above-average (for the USA) vampire/horror movie doesn't match the cinematic qualities of the Swedish original.

Serbian film, a

If a movie is totally banned in Australia, and needed 49 cuts and more than 4 minutes excised before it could even get an "18" certificate in the UK, one knows it's going to contain an above-average level of simulated sex and/or violence. Deliberately given a bland title by its makers, A Serbian Film is a deliberately black-souled challenge to its audiences, especially to former Yugoslavs.

"It's like a cartoon for grown-ups", the multi-lingual graduate wife of a semi-retired porn star explains to their cherubic four-year-old son when he accidentally watches one of his father's old movies. That one incident captures the mixed tone of the debut feature from director Srdjan Spasojevic: outrageousness with a sense of black humour.

None of the hard-to-pronounce/spell Serbian names of his excellent actors or talented technical crew (lighting, editing, soundtrack and cinematography) will be noted. However, they are part of the rationale the director employs for the making of a very controversial psycho-sexual horror film: his film would help foreign producers appreciate the potential value of working with the Serbian film industry. His main justification for his own exploitative film, expressed in the DVD extra of a post-screening Q&A in London, is that his study of porn film-making reflects the exploitation that the war-weary people of "Serbia and the region" endured for decades, and still experienced.

The story line is brutally realistic fantasy. The happily-married stud (a short flabby actor with presumably fake equine apparatus) is offered big money to star in "artistic pornography" for the export market; his wife agrees and a former female co-star is his trusted go-between. He will not be given a screenplay, being told to follow ear-phoned guidance from the megalomaniac director (a messianic psychologist, former orphanage operator and State Security officer rolled into one epitome of pseudo-benign evil).

The stud's elder brother, a corrupt cop, is jealous of his sibling's life and covets his sister-in-law, as the drugged and hallucinatory stud is forced to realise during the porn film's final day of shooting. By then, the stud has unwittingly buggered his own drugged wife and boy. He'd already seen that his co-star friend had all her teeth ripped out and got choked to death by a goon's cock. Revenge is delivered when the stud fucks the goon to death through an eye socket.

The stud slaughters the director and his goon cameramen, while his wife bludgeons his brother to death, after which he drives her and his child home, where he shoots the three of them, embraced in a bed, with one suicidal bullet. At which point, a new director and crew appear in the bedroom, a goon is instructed to be necrophiliac first with the child, thus leaving the audience with a final reminder of a previous incident in which a large goon had fucked (off-screen) a new-born baby moments after he helped to deliver it (on-screen).

Can a film that's technically superb and more than competently scripted and acted be acceptable if it's fundamentally amoral? Does exquisite use of available light and expressionist sets entitle a horror pseudo-snuff movie to serious consideration? It certainly has validity as a provocative devil's argument for the freedom of creative art, and warrants seeing once. Only once.

[The cuts ordered in the UK are described in detail on movie-censorship.com; they indicate that the British film censors were most concerned that audiences should not think child actors had actually watched simulated sex scenes. A few grisly moments were also trimmed, but the movie's plot developments were not emasculated.]

Black swan

One plus factor for the Golden Globes charade is its distinction between "drama" and "comedy/musical" categories. To the delight of directors, producers and lead actors, the distinction means that two sets of talents earn "best" recognitions. A Golden Globe isn't an Oscar but it's certainly the next best thing for actresses such as Annette Bening and Natalie Portman. They both can't win the 2011 female acting Oscar, but they did win the year's two Globes, Portman for psychosexual thriller Black Swan. She should win the year's Best Actress Oscar too.

Director Darren Aronofsky developed the idea of dramatising the Black Swan/White Swan conflict immortalised in Tchaikovsky's ballet music, adapting an original story (The Understudy) by film-maker Andres Heinz, who re-worked his own screenplay for Aronofsky. He'd discussed the project with Natalie Portman for a decade. She clearly sensed that this could be the role of a lifetime, as a psychologically disturbed dancer who was a natural White Swan but lacked the passion to convince her ballet company director that she could also perform the twin role of the Black Swan.

In the ballet, the black swan seduces the lover of the white swan, who commits suicide. It's a romantic melodrama, with appropriately sensuous music and traditional choreography. By the time Aronofsky got the relatively low-budget (US$13 million) movie funded in 2009, by Fox Searchlight, Portman was barely young enough (28) to undergo months of arduous ballet training. She did, and she's convincing to a non-balletomane.

She also had to be convincing as an overly-mothered self-wounding sexually-repressed obsessive dancer for whom professional and personal strains lead to evil hallucinations. In this movie version, the white swan learns to hate her mother, imagine a passionate lesbian adventure with her dancing rival, take drugs, commit murder, grow webbed feet and stab herself in the stomach with a shard of glass. Although lethally wounded, she triumphs at the end of the ballet's first night, dying happily, having achieved "perfection". One minute after the film's end, an audience knows that most of the action never really happened, but Portman makes it all feel credible enough at the time.

Aronofsky makes it look believable too, even when the moments of blood-tainted horror are far-fetched. Naturally, the cinematography (Filipino-American Matthew Libatique working with his favourite director for the fourth time) focuses sharply on shades of black and white, offset by touches of pink. Aptly, too, the excellent musical soundtrack contains variations on Tchaikovsky themes when it isn't playing the real thing in rehearsal and performance scenes from the ballet.

It is an under-stated grand guignol movie which totally depends on Portman for validity. She's on-screen almost all the time, and a small supporting cast really support her, avoiding scenery-chewing exaggerations of their cliched characters: Vincent Cassel (manipulative ballet director), Barbara Hershey (smothering ex-dancer mother), Mila Kunis (rival and ideal black swan) and Winona Ryder (forced-out ballerina and suicide).

Portman, born in Jerusalem, is an Israeli-American. Cassel (the son and husband of other famous actors) is French, Kunis was born in the Ukraine, Hershey and Ryder are American. The three women are Jewish, as is Aronofsky. Raised in a Conservative Jewish home, he may need a supportive ethnic blanket. His award-winning debut feature. Pi, was a Jewish-centric mathematical thriller. The Goldfarbs, mother and son, were central characters in his second movie, Requiem for a Dream, co-starring half-Jewish Jennifer Connelly. Rachel Weisz married him in 2001 (separating in 2010) and she co-starred in his 2005 resurrected third feature, The Fountain, a three-part essay on love and death that bombed badly.

He bounced back in 2008 with The Wrestler, a good grosser (US$45 million) starring Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei, with no visible Jewish angles. Aronofsky has now delivered an even bigger earner, and may no longer need his blanket: his next projects are the Wolverine sequel (working again with Hugh Jackman, his Fountain co-star) and another comic-book action-adventure, Machine Man.

Buried

Buried had a reported budget of US$2-3 million and grossed more than $18 million globally by the end of 2010, before its DVD release. It's a winning calling card for its Spanish director, Rodrigo Cortes, and lead actor, Ryan Reynolds. And for the concept-creating producers who arranged their association and, thereby gained official Spanish (Catalan) and Canadian credits.

A third key factor was employing Chris Sparling to write the movie, which won him the USA's National Board of Review 2010 award for best original screenplay, unintentionally encouraging other writers to take commercially offbeat scripts abroad to get them made. (But gauche Sparling committed a Hollywood faux pas when he urged Oscar voters to nominate his screenplay.)

One can imagine Hollywood bean-counters' reactions to the concept of a kidnapped 30-year-old married American lorry driver held for ransom in Iraq, buried in a coffin-sized box with few items capable of illuminating him and advancing the story.

It's obvious to an audience and the driver that time and the oxygen in the box will soon run out. The kidnapper, speaking with him via the cellphone, is ruthlessly demanding, and phone contacts with the outside world are frustrated or frustrating. Other movies have exploited claustrophobia and imminent death threats, but this one does so with perverse black humour a la Hitchcock, depicting brutal corporate and political realities unimaginable in feel-good Hollywood entertainment.

Frequent lapses into total blackness, during which audiences only hear Reynold's curses, sobs, snores and coughs, intensify the dramatic intensity of this portrayal of a condemned man's emotions. The movie never leaves the box setting throughout its 90 minutes of life-maintaining air. On a DVD, this can become tedious rather than riveting, and I can imagine the movie is even more effective on the big screen, shared with other spectators "trapped" in their cinema seats, not knowing if the man can be rescued.

Sparling, previously known only for writing and acting in shorts and a home-made comedy, crafted a screenplay with a cunning blend of suspenseful tricks. The super-cynical sting in the story's tale is reason enough for Sparling's award. First-time feature director Cortes also edited the images with mature stylishness, and the cinematography by another relative newcomer, Eduard Grau, shows why Ford chose the young Barcelona man as his directory of photography for A Solitary Man.

There were few slips in the scenario's logical flow. Only one trick was a little too convenient to be credible. The kidnapper had provided the driver with a Zippo lighter and a Blackberry at the start, which made sense from his point of view. After 40 minutes, though when those two spasmodic sources of light stopped providing interesting angles and shadows, the driver discovers a bag containing glow-sticks and a torchlight (red or white light), plus a sharp penknife that enables two further plot developments.

They all work out acceptably, though, in the ever-increasing tempo of fear and despair. Adding mildly horroric tension are low-key mood-setting music, a fanged sand snake slithering into the box, and an overhead bombing that leads to broken timber planks in the box's roof and periodic trickles of sand.

Abjuring flashbacks, and only including one short, relevant phone video from the outside world, the movie stays in the confines of the box the whole time. Voices off - for mechanical phone operators, the vengeful anti-invasion kidnapper, the truck company's legalistic personnel department, and the official hostage-rescue team's professionally friendly liaison officer - are disembodied images of bureaucracy, spin and indifference. Through them, the morals of the story are explained.

Vancouver-born Ryan Reynolds grabbed this chance to prove his acting ability. A teenage Nickleodeon TV series performer who later got a few parts in Hollywood, Reynolds was better known as the fiance (for two years, 2004-6) of fellow-Canadian singer (and Nickleodeon artiste) Alanis Morisette, then as the husband for two years (2008-10) of actress Scarlett Johansson. He (and his movie stand-in) can now sleep better at night, unless he dreams about the time he spent making this breakthrough movie.

House

Who could resist a comic horror fantasy in which schoolgirls are consumed by a haunted House? The 1977 Japanese smash hit was recently reissued in a Criterion DVD set, its informative extras including comments from director Nobuhiko Obayashi (now 72 and working on his 43rd film). House was his first feature-length work, and its wildly experimental style helped win him the Blue Ribbon Best New Director award the following year.

The DVD's 45-minute set of subtitled, well-edited interviews mixes interesting production notes from Obayashi, his screenplay writer Chiho Katsura, and his daughter Chigumi, who provided her father with the movie's original story ideas when she was a 12-year-old.

Her commercial-making father had been asked by the Toho studio to write a Jaws-style film. His daughter told him she'd enjoy seeing a house that consumed schoolgirls, suggesting such lethal weapons as a grandfather clock, piano, well, futons and mirrors. Obayashi chose to create a standard Japanese group of seven (a practice in reality as well as in Disney and The Seven Samurai), while Katsura's development of the idea was inspired by a Walter de La Mare short story. Other influences included the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (Obayashi's home city) and grieving post-Pacific War lovers.

Many factors illustrate the creators' determination to make a new type of movie, one designed to please young audiences and not high-brow critics, one that would look and sound uniquely fresh, be exciting cinema to watch and hear. Most amazing, Toho let Obayashi keep his English-language title, after a two-year media campaign had transformed it into a radio production, musical album, graphic magazine and marketing stunt. When none of the studio's own contract directors would touch the populist project, it was finally given to Obayashi himself, to be made in Toho studios.

The story was simple: young Gorgeous, distressed by her widower father's intention to marry a beautiful woman, invites herself and six schoolfriends to stay at the Western-style country house of an aunt she'd only seen once before. A snow-white blue-eyed Persian cat arrives at her home, at the same time as her aunt's written invitation. The girl, the cat and her friends (epitomising their given names of Fantasy, Kung Fu, Mac (for Stomach), Melody, Prof and Sweet) reach the house, are welcomed by the love-lorn cat-loving wheelchaired aunt, and then disappear one by one in grisly (and bizarrely comic) ways.

Every shot and frame is innovative (Obayashi acknowledging that his team mischievously filmed typically artistic scenes in ways that would most infuriate directors such as Ozu and Kurasawa). Self-conscious alienation effects pop up constantly, with inappropriately raucous pop music, luridly colourful painted backdrops and gaudy set props, a dancing skeleton, delicate compositions to accompany the cannibalistic piano, fast jump cuts, glossy imagery, animation and cartoon effects. The three lead actresses are credibly beautiful and bewitched, while the six novice teenage actresses - models the director had worked with on commercials - sport airs of joyous fun and terror.

Audacious and joyful itself, the movie is memorably entertaining cinematic art.

[One similarly OTT fantasy that now needs re-viewing is the wonderfully exuberant Thai homage of 2000 to cowboy movies and romances, Wisit Sasanatieng's Tears of the Black Tiger. Like Obayashi's movie, it belongs in a genre of its own: pastiches to celebrate the art of cinema.]

Dream home

Edmond Pang Ho-cheung has a good track record as one of Hong Kong's more inventive directors, and his latest movie earned new appreciation for its leading actress and main producer, Josie Ho. She's one of Stanley Ho's daughters, which makes the theme of Dream Home highly ironic: this is a satirical murder story bloodily highlighting the inflationary horror of Hong Kong's property market.

Media reports suggest that Ho forced Pang to make his scenario even gorier, in order to intensify her movie's marketability. What was produced was a slasher movie that deserves to become a classic in its genre.

Utilising an ever-changing time-frame, Pang builds a back history of hardship, family pressures, slum housing, governmental collusion with property developers, economic lawlessness and marital infidelity to account for the calculated bloody-mindedness of a single woman (Ho) with two jobs and an obsession about buying an apartment with a harbour view.

She'd finally raised sufficient deposit cash, by allowing her terminally ill father to die, at a time when the Hang Seng Index reached its 2007 peak; the apartment sellers jacked up its selling price beyond her funding level. In one evening visit to the apartment building, Ho's calmly amoral character kills 10 people and a pregnant woman in a successful effort to decrease the building's property values overnight.

The side stories for some of them are further condemnations of Hong Kong society at varying levels, and their means of death are imaginative black cinema. The shockingly credible SFX (produced by an experienced Thai team) include a disemboweled punk smoking, a fully broken neck, a lesbian prostitute with a bed strut in her mouth, and a severed penis. Murder weapons such as a screwdriver, hammer, golf club and vacuum-packaging are derived from the side stories, adding to an audience's fascination with a movie presenting Hong Kong cityscapes with beautifully arranged lighting effects and subtle music (Italian composer Gabriele Roberto, who'd worked for Pang on Exodus in 2007).

Several well-known Hong Kong actors play cameos, but the only real character is Ho's determined workaholic. In this movie, she wasn't afraid to show her age, fleshy chin and an independent spirit that should have given her property magnate father sleepless nights. Pang's script, opening review of scandalous property prices, and post-production statement (on the DVD) comprise a bloody assault on his home city's major driving force.

There's an unexpected irony for Pang in the manic rebound of property prices in 2010, making the per-foot prices of 2008 now seem like relative bargains. I suspect there's another irony lying behind the artful front credits, when the floor plan of a vast apartment includes Portuguese translations; it would be truly ironic justice if they're the plans of a Ho family palace.

Killer inside me

It's nice when a small mainstream film gets a big break. The Killer Inside Me may, as lead actor Casey Affleck's latest chance to savour a taste of older brother Ben's bigger success in Hollywood. Casey's being touted as an outside chance for a Best Actor Oscar nomination in 2011. He has been an outsider once before, for Best Supporting Actor in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. His other major claim to fame has been three appearances in the ensemble casts for the Oceans franchise.

This time, he's an arch anti-hero in a frighteningly noir Western thriller directed with icy precision by Michael Winterbottom. The Briton's films vary wildly but are rarely easy viewing (e.g. Mighty Heart, Road to Guantanamo, Cock and Bull Story, 9 Songs). This one's far from easy; psychotic multiple killers are tricky characters to portray entertainingly. One of the few to succeed was Mary Harron's American Psycho (Christian Bale's breakthrough movie as an adult actor), and Winterbottom's movie lacks that film's air of fantasy. It helped audiences not to take the coldly brutal character of Bale's killer at face value. Instead Winterbottom and Affleck compel us to look straight into the calm smiling eyes of a baby-faced soft-voiced sadist.

This remake of a 1950s Jim Thompson pulp fiction reportedly is truer to the novelist's original story. It's a complex one, filled with socially flawed characters. Affleck is Ford, an orphan Texan policeman whose boss (Tom Bower) is an alcoholic. The death of Ford's adopted brother had been set up by the town's property kingpin (Ned Beatty), whose son (Jay Ferguson) is besotted by a local prostitute (Jessica Alba). The policeman has a girlfriend (Kate Hudson), and the scenario also involves an interfering union organiser (Elias Koteas), a suspicious outside detective (Simon Baker), a blackmailer, and a cafe owner and his teenage son. Most of them will need to die once the policeman starts arranging justice and death to suit his moods. Inevitably, amid such complexity there are squeaky plot devices, but the movie gallops past them.

Thompson, briefly a member of the US Communist Party, was a victim of the McCarthy era, and also one of egocentric Stanley Kubrik's credit-deprived co-writers (for Paths of Glory and The Killing). Other Thompson stories adapted later by Hollywood included Stephen Frears' The Grifters and Roger Donaldson's The Getaway, while French directors brought him belated recognition too with Bertrand Tavernier's Coup de torchon and Alain Corneau's Serie noire. Winterbottom has now highlighted the recurrent noir nastiness in Thompson's work, and many US critics fixated on what they saw as the excessive violence Affleck's character inflicts on his female victims.

Are the fast-cut scenes of facial and bodily battering necessary for a fuller understanding of the killer's mind? To me, yes, in the context of the whole killing sequence. They made the killer's fastidious footsteps, calm pause to glance at a newspaper, toying with a coffee maker and other psychotic mannerisms even more horrifyingly disconnected from his twisted sense of reality. At the end, when an audience might be expecting suicidal redemption, there's a Grand Guignol finale that will ensure the movie's fame/notoriety as a classic noir thriller.

[Meanwhile, Casey was notching up a bigger marker in 2010. His creative direction of the Joaquin Phoenix mockumentary I'm Still Here also got him noticed favourably. Phoenix, a brother-in-law and good friend of Affleck, got noticed anew too.]

Wolfman

Andrew Kevin Walker has written above-average horror movies, notably Se7en and Sleepy Hollow, less notably 8MM. David Self is a younger screenplay writer and adaptor, notably for The Road to Perdition. Working together they re-worked Curt Siodmak's screenplay for the 1941 Lon Chaney classic, The Wolf Man.

The tale of a rich 19th-Century English lycanthrope, his two sons and the woman who loved them both is an inevitable downer. The second son, bitten by his father, is fated (by gypsy lore and Scotland Yard police) to die. The supposedly happy ending is that a woman's love will enable him to die as a man and not in the guise of a beast with brutal strength and gory fur.

Naturally, the key ingredient for such a blood-drenched horror movie

is its special effects, and they are good. The CGI of misty, muddy old London are credible too, akin to created so effectively for Sherlock Holmes. The mostly British cast is also commendable, doing what they usually do, emoting calmly: Anthony Hopkins (Wolfman Sr), Art Malik (his loyal Indian servant), Emily Blunt (Wolfman Jr's love interest) and Anthony Sher (the splendidly supercilious mental asylum doctor attempting to cure Wolfman's delusions).

Australian Hugo Weaving is as dependable as always, as the mostly dead-pan Scotland Yard detective leading the hunt for the beastly killer, who's played the even more dead-pan Puerto Rican Benicio Del Toro. Hollywood's SFX doyen, Rick Baker, joined the production team led by director Joe Johnston, whose slow-paced track record (only one movie every few years) began with Honey, I Shrank the Kids and included Jumanji and the third Jurassic Park.

Put all the promising ingredients together and you end up, sadly, with a dead-pan slow-paced movie that looked and felt old and uninspired. Bodies are decapitated brightly, claws flash nicely, Hopkins smirks, Del Toro dies manfully, and one character is left with a bite, of course.

Crazies

If at first you don't succeed, try a remake. That is a lesson Breck Eisner seems to have learned, maybe from Disney's ex-chief, Michael Eisner, his father. With that big career advantage to start with, Breck went to a film school, did well with TV commercials and directed a low-budget movie that went straight to video (Thoughtcrimes, 2003). He then directed Sahara (2005), "one of the biggest financial failures in Hollywood history".

Five years later, he's redeemed himself by directing the remake of The Crazies, a horror movie created in 1973 by George Romero (who co-executive-produced the remake). Having earned a reasonable box-office return (US$38 million), Eisner's now working on remakes of Flash Gordon and Escape from New York.

The Crazies had a standard scenario: chemical disaster afflicts small rural community, ugly zombies wield gory havoc, government sends in the troops, and the local sheriff and his deputy and their female interests must escape before the area is nuked. Much depends on the audience rooting for the sheriff, ably played by Timothy Deadwood Olyphant.

He's got twinkling eyes, and his sidekick's given the cool quizzical style of English actor Joe Copying Beethoven Anderson. A very busy Australian actress, Radha Mitchell, filled the international billing requirements as the sheriff's wife.

There is some attractive cinematography from a young master of the genre, Belgian-born Maxime The Hills Have Eyes Alexandre, and the producers wisely employed multi-Emmy nominee Billy Fox for the film editing. Putting more budget funds where they can really pay off, they added an Oscar nominee and Emmy-winning veteran composer on the team (Mark Isham), a top designer (Anglo-US award-winner Andrew Syriana Menzies) and art director awardee (Greg Memoirs of a Geisha Berry).

For sure there are other talents further down the credits list, and they're probably part of another lesson or three Breck was given by Hollywood pals: hire top technicians and you can make a B picture that looks great, and makes you look pretty good too.

Oldboy

"15 Years of Imprisonment ... 5 Days of Vengeance". That was the movie's sales tag, and it's all anyone needs to know before watching Chanwook Park's Oldboy, the second (2003) feature in his so-called "Vengeance Trilogy".

This movie version of a manga "comic" book is a horror epic and its synopsis is mind-blowingly complex. In typical Park fashion, it's also shot through with scenes of outrageously noir humour. The Korean director's black artistry is as polished as ever, gleaming like evil gems adorning sets that are exquisitely composed, framed and lit.

The two lead actors perform their bizarre roles well, as old boys of the same co-ed Catholic school. One, drunken buffoonish Daesu Oh (Min-sik Choi) is kidnapped when his daughter' three years old. For 15 years, he's held prisoner and then allowed to go free, given five days to find out why he'd been confined and seek his revenge. He's introduced to a young female sushi chef, eats a live octopus at her counter, faints and moves into her apartment and love-life.

The other schoolboy, Woo-jin (Ji-tae Yu), is eventually revealed. The scheming millionaire brother of a girl who died at their school, he too is seeking revenge, in ways even Macchiavelli might spurn.

Now, spoilers are spilt. The brother and sister loved each other, perhaps incestuously, and the ex-prisoner is the father of the girl, whom he'd been accused of killing. Double incest is an unusual basis for a melodrama, horror film and fantasy, and I cannot imagine how - or why - an American version of this movie is in production.

The original plotline could never get a green light in the USA. A dozen key, gruesome and gory plot details will have to vanish. Another dozen red herrings, macabre footnotes and mood enhancers won't survive the film's first American production conference. On second thoughts, one cannot wait to see what happens to this scenario in its American reincarnation.

The multi-award-winning Korean movie earned the Cannes Jury Grand Prize and is admirable. So, some people think, is sado-masochism.

Sympathy for Mr Vengeance

Sympathy for Mr Vengeance [MV] was the first of three films in the "Vengeance Trilogy" from South Korean director Chan-wook Park. His fifth feature, it appeared in 2002. Old Boy [OB] followed the next year, and Lady Vengeance [LV] in 2005.

Park is a unique talent, and it's indicative that the only special feature on the DVD of MV is a sequence of story board sketches outlining the highlights of the ultra-violent movie.

In the movie, even in the goriest most shocking incidents, the aesthetics of the storyboarding are clear, in Park's meticulous composition of each scene's colour balance, lighting effects, off-screen sound effects and actors' ensemble poses. Early in MV, in the steel factory where Ryu (charismatic Ha-kyun Shin) the deaf-and-dumb anti-hero works, splashes and lines of green decorate the set. They were designed to complement Ryu's green hair dye.

The whole film is so artfully self-conscious, one knows that the seemingly chaotic jump cuts in the storyline must also be deliberate. Frequently, the audience is forced - deliberately alienated, I'd guess - into seeing a character or a plot development as both inexplicable and unrealistic.

If Park's quartet of screenwriters, including himself, were creating social melodramas, an audience might sneer at such cinematic conceits. When the scenario bristles with deep black humour and shocking moments of gore and sadism, a viewer is forced to drop his jaw and gape in disbelief. Park is Hitchcock on a much higher, riper level, at times almost sickening, always engrossing.

Can a mass masturbation scene be a comedic triumph? Has anyone ever used bottles of urine to mark the passage of time? Can the ghost of a kidnapped girl be shown to make her grieving father (another bewitching Park regular, Kang-ho Song) laugh? Can we wait ten minutes to guess why the anti-hero has a gash in his stomach?

The basic story is simple. The deaf-dumb man and his revolutionary-anarchist girlfriend kidnap a rich man's daughter to raise money for an organ transplant for the man's sister. A mentally retarded stranger, akin to Lear's Fool, stumbles by and the girl dies accidentally. From then on, revenge is rampant, blood seeps and teems, and the framing of each scene remains mesmerising evidence of a very disturbed cinematic genius.

Genius, yes, because there are few movies that compel a viewer to seek out their sequels, fewer that demand replays in order to see the creative methods in the seeming madness.

Dorian Gray

Ben Barnes (Narnia: Prince Caspian), a handsome British actor a la mode of young Keanu Reeves, was a natural choice for the title role in Dorian Gray. A less obvious casting option was that of Colin Firth as Lord Henry Wotton, the bearded Victorian aristocrat whose cynical bon mots lead Dorian astray in gin shops and worse. There's a third key lead actor, Ben Chaplin as the painter of Dorian's secret portrait. Female interests are minor characters.

Oscar Wilde wrote the classic tale of the picture that aged while its sitter stayed infernally youthful. Toby Finlay adapted it for the screen, and purists were upset by changes to the characters, motivations and ending. Those were all the more surprising because the period drama's director is Oliver Parker, an actor turned screenwriter-director who'd previously created his own versions of Wilde's An Ideal Husband (successfully, with Rupert Everett) and The Importance of Being Earnest (less effectively, with Everett, Firth and Judi Dench).

This time, Parker crafted a typical UK film industry costume melodrama. The cinematography, settings, lighting, CGI and editing sport admirable craftsmanship, but the screenplay doesn't. It adds bodice-ripping, homo-erotica, maggots, orgiastic posturing and gore to a Faustian fable.

Maybe this Parker-Finlay version would have worked better, in the style of Hammer horror movies, if Dorian hadn't always looked as deadpan as Keanu, if Firth's character hadn't been less of a sulky schoolmaster, if the portrait had aged sickeningly rather than putrefied laughably.