Four lions

Chris Morris has co-written, acted in and produced some of British TV's most biting satire: The Day Today (1994) and Brass Eye (1997) are classic spoofs of TV news programmes. In 2010, his first full-length feature appeared: Four Lions. The tale of a quartet of bumbling British jihadist wannabe bombers wanted to be a fiercely funny farce, a slapstick comedy that stings.

It's not as black as it could be, mainly because its characters invite comic scorn. Two of the quartet of English-dialect young men are certifiably stupid a la Marx Brothers or Stooges, as shown in their dialogue (but regrettably not in the actors' faces). A third plotter is a mentally disturbed weak bully, a nihilist Caucasian convert to Islam who cannot understand Arabic or Urdu. The fourth is a short natural leader who is portrayed as such a rational, self-aware and admirable Western-style father and husband that he's unbelievable as an eager self-sacrificial martyr-in-chief.

A fifth young rebel joins the group and would add dramatic interest if he were an undercover agent, or anything except a bad-rapping fourth thumb for the handful of amateur revolutionaries. There's great initial promise when the leader and his simpleton pal travel to a Pakistani training camp, with hilarious slapsticky results. The promise is not maintained.

Back on the home front, in Sheffield, the clever leader's smart wife and bright young son are shown to be culturally assimilated and yet, inexplicably, cheerfully supportive of his bombing ambitions, so they're not very credible characters either. Nor are any of the scenario's nicely dim token whites. The movie's comedy depends largely on silly capers, slapstick deaths and occasional black comedy moments involving incompetent policemen.

The gang's accidental assassination of bin Laden, and an expose of UK interrogation techniques (including make-believe Egyptian territory in a container truck), are among various deleted scenes that would have lent an air of contradictory mockumentary seriousness to the movie. It's clear that Morris (and/or his many producers) chickened out of making a snarling spoof, or even a smirky Airplane!, about jihadism.

During the first hour, the plot develops as an amusing inter-cultural comedy of errors and manners featuring a quartet of fools. Then Morris and his three other writers try to transform their offbeat comedy into a more traditional madcap movie pantomime with black moments. That was a comic mission impossible.

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.]

Winter's bone

Why do so distributors fail to convince movie-makers that the title of a successful book will not ensure its success as a movie. The opposite, for otherwise good films such as Winter's Bone.

What a miserable title that is. It didn't deter Sundance Festival audiences from making it an award-winner, but potential cineplex movie-goers are a very different kettle of easily discouraged fish. They will only flock to see it, and only then in small schools, if the indie thriller wins an award or two. Which it should do at the 2011 Golden Globes or Oscars.

Daniel (Ride with the Devil) Woodrell's 2006 novel about Missouri backwoods folk was adapted for the screen by director Debra Granik and co-writer Anne Rossellini. They also worked together on Granik's only other feature film, another multi-award-winner entitled, by ironic coincidence, Down to the Bone (2004). Their screenplay for Winter's Bone earned them the 2010 Sundance screenwriting award, and it is a remarkably mesmerising family drama, thriller, horror movie and female coming-of-age story set in Missouri's Ozarks hills. This is the sort of territory of vicious poor-white inbreeding that movies such as Deliverance made notorious.

The central character is a 17-year-old girl, Ree Dolly, taking care of her speechless crazy mother's woodland farm and two younger siblings. Her father, a crystal meths maker, has vanished and the farm will be lost to bondsmen if he isn't found. Ree's search for him among hills populated by criminal cousins is the only storyline and its credibility and grip depend on the lead actress.

Jennifer Lawrence portrays a young woman forced to be deadly serious in an environment where men verge on madness and their women must look and act ugly outside and inside. Even her uncle (John Deadwood Hawkes) cannot help her in the paranoid, almost incestuous clan. It is all in young Ree's fearful hands and Lawrence was a fine casting choice: she'd won acting awards in 2008 (Los Angeles, for Lori Petty's The Poker House, and Venice for Guillermo Arriaga's The Burning Plain) and turned in another memorable performance for Granik.

The indie film is also well served by cinematographer Michael McDonough, who's worked with Granik since her New York student days and is also one of the film's co-producers. Much of the time, in a movie that avoids mood-setting music and employs natural rural sound effects, the calm camera work conveys the harshness, akin to daylight spookiness, of Missouri. Local-born Woodrell's writings have been called "country noir", and Granik captures that spirit. The movie's heroine wins in the end, but we fear her life is unlikely to amount to a hill of beans.

[Missouri state's film commission helped the production; it apparently bought an idea of promoting the caves in its hills as a tourist attraction. A DVD extra comprises the producers' apologetic note for their movie's only deleted scene, showing the heroine overnighting in uninteresting cave settings.]