Brilliantlove

"They don't make British soft porn movies like they used to", a great-uncle might utter after watching Brilliantlove. "Nowadays youngsters have to include a real story, good actors with attractive bodies and some jolly nice sets, location work and lighting. Still don't get to see enough action, of course".

Outside the UK, the low-budget second feature from Ashley Horner (R, above) was called The Orgasm Diaries, a truer indicator of the slim plot written by Sean Conway, an even less-experienced short-film writer-director. It's primarily a series of sexual acts and full-frontal exposures performed in north-east England by horny young Manchester, a photographer, and his passionate girlfriend, Noon, who's a taxidermist.

She keeps dead creatures in her father's refrigerator, and welcomes the birds a nomadic cat lays in tribute at the roll-up door of their live-in garage. Randy Manchester tends to get inebriated, which is when he cavorts through a field of flowers and tells a tape recorder to tell Noon that he wants her every sexy thought recorded for his pleasure. He's already recording her sexual motions and gasps on his small camera, and these photos end up in the eager hands of an art dealer who transforms Manchester into a well-paid provider of fancy gallery porno.

The lead actors were called on to perform or simulate masturbation, urination, ejaculation and the usual non-visibly penetratory coitus. To their credit, Liam Browne (L, above, with one previous TV acting role) and complete newcomer Nancy Trotter Landry are believable as lovers. She has a future as a Cherie Blair lookalike. The ending of their breakthrough movie experience is far less convincing, a make-believe melodrama in which Manchester doesn't succeed in accidentally killing himself with a plastic bag during a candlelit masturbation scene.

"My only surprise was the lack of an end-credit warning note about the plastic bag technique", my great-uncle might have mused. "They did note that no animals were injured, so the dead birds must have been simulated too."

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.

Blue valentine

In 2006, Derek Cianfrance won the Chrysler Film Project award of a million US dollars to make his screenplay, Blue Valentine. His critically-acclaimed debut feature, Brother Tied had appeared in 1998; since then he'd only made shorts and pop music documentaries. The new movie was completed in 2009, shown at Sundance in 2010 and purchased by the Weinstein Company. After a stand-off with the censors, it was distributed at the end of 2010, earning several award nominations for its director and two lead actors, Michelle Williams (including Best Actress Oscar) and Ryan Gosling.

Primarily because of their performances, the tale of love and marital breakdown is also a financial success, rewarding the actors for taking on executive-producer roles too. Williams deserved her Oscar nomination, for a character who proves to be an almost pitiful victim of her own mistakes. Gosling's role is possibly too pitiful to be totally credible.

The film juxtaposes scenes from their late teenage romance and during the final days of their marriage less than a decade later. Cindy had been in deep love with a jock at school, Dean was a dropout working for a removal company. He fell in love with her at first sight, she quickly grew to enjoy his zany companionship. When she discovered she was pregnant by the jock, caring Dean proposed, and she accepted a way out that would also release her from her squabbling parents.

He tells a workmate that men marry when they feel they've found the best possible person for their life, whereas women marry the most suitable option. The screenplay illustrates how wives learn to rue their choice while men continue to chase a false dream. Dean is happy just to be married to Cindy, to be a father for her daughter, but that's not enough for Cindy. Her ennui and growing irritation, heightened by a chance meeting with her former college lover, cannot be dispelled by Dean's charm and rebuffed attempt at cunnilingus (the scene, only inferred, that roused the censors).

For almost two hours, there are well-edited close-ups and fly-on-the-wall observation of two actors playing finely off each other, possibly ad-libbing at times, making their characters seem very alive and suffering. That's not enough meat for a filling movie meal, more a depressing appetiser.