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Kick-Ass (7/10)

UK/USA: Matthew Vaughn, 2010; IMDB

(*) Basic Instinct (7/10)

USA/France: Paul Verhoeven, 1992; IMDB

(*) Hot Fuzz (8/10)

UK/France: Edgar Wright, 2007; IMDB

(*) Psycho (9/10)

USA: Alfred Hitchcock, 1960; IMDB

Centurion (7/10)

UK: Neil Marshall, 2010; IMDB

I was pleasantly surprised by CENTURION. After the disappointment of Neil Marshall's previous film, DOOMSDAY - a sloppy and ill-disciplined hodge-podge of homages to various genres which started off amusingly stupid but quickly succumbed to being just plain stupid - my hopes weren't exactly through the roof for his take on the fate of the infamous Ninth Legion which, so legend says, disappeared in Britain in the early second century AD. (Incidentally, it was also the subject of a book I read as a child, Rosemary's Sutcliff's THE EAGLE OF THE NINTH - itself being adapted for the screen by Jeremy Brock and Kevin Macdonald.)

To my surprise, it's actually very good, and far from the low-grade knock-off of GLADIATOR that the subject matter and promotion would seem to suggest. ("Britain's answer to GLADIATOR!" screams that exalted tome, NUTS, on the back cover - conveniently forgetting that GLADIATOR's director and most of its crew WERE British.) CENTURION is actually a chase movie that actually has quite a bit more in common with those POW escape movies than any historical epic I've ever seen. It's brief, bloody and not particularly subtle, but it knows exactly what it is and gives the audience what it wants to see: lots of tension, lots of battle scenes, and a fair amount of the old tomato ketchup. You've got a decent (some might say over-qualified) cast giving it their all, savvy use of the limited budget, and a director who absolutely knows the meaning of crowd-pleasing. You honestly couldn't ask for much more.

THE DESCENT remains Marshall's best film by a considerable margin, but he has regained a lot of the ground that he lost for me with DOOMSDAY, and I'm definitely looking forward to whatever he cooks up next.

(*) Gladiator (9/10)

UK/USA: Ridley Scott, 2000; IMDB

The Ghost Writer (8/10)

France/Germany/UK: Roman Polanski, 2010; IMDB

Roman Polanski's latest offering, THE GHOST WRITER (THE GHOST in the UK), has been somewhat overshadowed by its director's temporary stint under house arrest (which prevented him from being present in the editing room during the final stages of post-production)... which is a shame, because I believe every film deserves to stand on its own two feet irrespective of what its filmmakers may have got up to, and THE GHOST WRITER is a very fine thriller indeed.

Somewhat reminiscent of Polanski's own THE NINTH GATE, albeit with a less tongue-in-cheek approach to its subject matter (although it's shot through with Polanski's unmistakable brand of wry humour and fascination with the slightly off-kilter), with Ewan McGregor stepping into the shoes occupied by Johnny Depp in that earlier film - the dogged, slightly naive everyman who finds himself stumbling upon an elaborate conspiracy and putting his own neck on the chopping block in his relentless search for the truth. That the subject of the conspiracy, former British Prime Minister Adam Lang, is so clearly inspired by Tony Blair, gives the material a palpable sense of veracity that the rather silly supernatural frolics of THE NINTH GATE lacked.

Excellent performances all round, with Olivia Williams stealing the show as Lang's spurned wife, and some nice use of the perpetually overcast locales (with various locations in Germany and Denmark standing in for Massachusetts)... although the rather obvious use of green-screen does become a bit distracting at times. Definitely one to watch: there are many layers at work here, and the result is a complex and satisfying thriller that I suspect will stand up to repeat viewings.

(*) Toy Story 2 (9/10)

USA: John Lasseter, 1999; IMDB

After.Life (6/10)

USA: Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, 2009; IMDB

No, I don't know why there's a full stop in the title either.

AFTER.LIFE attracted me with its interesting premise: a young woman, supposedly killed in a car accident, wakes up on mortuary slab and is informed by the funeral director that she is dead. She denies it - how can she be dead when she's here talking to him? - but he is insistent and tells her she must stop denying to herself what has happened. So what's going on? Is she actually dead and in some sort of afterlife/state of limbo, or is she the victim of an extremely twisted psychotic?

Unfortunately, we don't really get a whole lot of answers, and the few that we do get tend to contradict each other. In this, her feature debut, director/writer Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo conjures up some unsettling imagery and clearly has an eye for an interesting composition, but does little to exploit the coolness of the premise, and leaves you feeling that the numerous scenes featuring that yuppie from the "I'm a PC/I'm a Mac" commercials trying to get to the bottom of what happened to his girlfriend are basically just there to pad the running time. Liam Neeson is suitably creepy as the funeral director, but you can tell he's just cashing a cheque, while Christina Ricci seems to have been cast primarily due to her willingness to do copious (and I mean copious) amounts of nudity rather than because she can bring anything profound to the character. It's not a bad film as much as one that is more interesting on paper than it is in execution.

Toy Story 3 (9/10)

USA: Lee Unkrich, 2010; IMDB

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (7/10)

Original title: Luftslottet som sprängdes
Sweden/Denmark/Germany: Daniel Alfredson, 2009; IMDB

I don't envy those faced with adapting the third and final instalment in Stieg Larsson's posthumously published Millennium trilogy, THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE NORTNETS' NEST. The novel is extremely discursive, the dramatic tension is often lacking, and the heroine, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), spends a good three-quarters of the narrative confined to a hospital bed under police guard. It works to an extent on the page but has the potential to be death on the screen. It's therefore something of a relief to be able to report that writers Jonas Frykberg and Ulf Ryberg have succeeded in sidestepping many of the issues that plagued Larsson's novel and have delivered a screenplay that is both more streamlined and considerably more tense than the source material.

As with the novel, the film picks up from the moment where its predecessor, THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, left off, and teases out the final chapters in the Lisbeth Salander story that began when, at the age of twelve, she was committed to a psychiatric facility under false pretences in order to protect a valuable asset - her father, Soviet defector Alexander Zalachenko - from exposure. Although no longer suspected of the three murders that framed the previous film, Salander now faces a raft of new charges, including the attempted murder of Zalachenko. Initially, the primary concern is with the bullet lodged in her skull, but once it is clear that her recovery is not in any doubt, it falls to unlikely accomplice Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyquist) to uncover the suppressed truth behind the Zalachenko affair, dodge the bullets aimed his way by an increasingly desperate rogue offshoot of the security service, and provide the marginalised Salander with the chance to finally attain the justice that has been denied to her for her entire life.

Like the previous film, THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST is low budget and obviously made with television in mind. The conspiracy narrative, however, serves the pared-down visual style better than the somewhat more action-oriented nature of THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, and gives less of a sense that the movie is trying to be something that it's not. Like the book, the film is largely static, with a small handful of action scenes punctuating a lot of very dialogue-driven material. However, by abridging, eliminating and re-ordering the narrative, the writers succeed in giving the film the sense of uncertainty that the novel sorely lacked. As written by Larsson, the outcome was in little doubt, and the stakes seemed strangely low thanks to the fact that all the cards were effectively laid on the table at the beginning, with all the evidence Blomkvist and co. needed to annihilate their opponents readily available long before Salander's trial got underway. For fear of giving too much away I won't go into precisely what changes are made, but suffice it to say that if the book had played out in a manner closer to the film - or if I'd watched the film before reading the book - I wouldn't have gone through the whole thing with a feeling that I knew exactly how everything was going to turn out.

With Rapace confined to a hospital bed for the bulk of the running time, Nyquist ends up having to carry the film to a far greater extent than the previous instalments, and he does rise to the challenge, although he remains a rather wooden and expressionless lead. In a way, it's hard not to feel sorry for him, because despite his character doing most of the legwork in all three films, it's Rapace who has received the bulk of the attention - particularly in the English-speaking world, where all three instalments bear the prefix "The Girl..." (in the original Swedish, only the second part uses this naming convention). Blomkvist's associates, Erika Berger (Lena Endre) and Christer Malm (Jacob Ericksson), also play far more significant roles than in the previous two films, with the latter benefiting from an exploration of his and co-worker Malin Erikson (Sofia Ledarp)'s reservations about the course of action pursued by Blomkvist (in the novel, everyone is more or less accepting and in admiration of everything Blomkvist does, a manifestation of the character's role as an idealised representation of the author himself). Speaking of Berger, the film's writers have wisely dropped the novel's seemingly irrelevant subplot involving her giving up her position at Millennium to work for a rival publication, integrating its strongest thematic element (the attempts to blackmail and terrorise her) into the main narrative. As a whole, the film feels far more cohesive than the book.

It's all about Rapace, though, and she proves that it's possible to be incredibly compelling even when lying in a hospital bed and staring into space. Her greatest asset is undoubtedly her ability to convey pages' worth of material with a single subtle change to her facial expression, and she repeatedly puts this skill to good use. Salander doesn't say a lot and this, coupled with her largely stationary role, means that she runs the risk of being submerged by the events around her, but because Rapace is so good, and because Salander remains such an iconic character, this doesn't happen. That said, even if Rapace wasn't such a good actor, it would still be pretty hard to forget anyone who turns up to her own murder trial in full goth regalia (would all those sharp spikes even be allowed in a courtroom?).

I came away from THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST thinking it the weakest of the three novels. Conversely, I felt that THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE was the strongest on the page and the least impressive on the screen. Thanks to its slick production values and clarity of purpose, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO remains, by a considerable margin, the best of the three adaptations, but director Daniel Alfredson has done a decent job of translating books two and three to the screen in spite of the limited resources at his disposal. I have a feeling that David Fincher, if he chooses to adapt the entire trilogy for the US market, will wipe the floor with Alfredson's take on the second and third instalments - at least in terms of visual panache - but at the same time there's something quirky, honest and altogether European about all three films that I doubt even a filmmaker of Fincher's calibre will be able to match. And, at the risk of flogging a dead horse, let me state, for the record, that no-one can replace Noomi Rapace.

Burn After Reading (9/10)

USA/UK/France: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 2008; IMDB

36 (6/10)

France: Olivier Marchal, 2004; IMDB

Olivier Marchal's cop thriller 36 is downbeat, grim and melancholic in a rather browbeating way. The characters rarely crack a smile, the sky is always bleak and overcast, and barring the odd woman or child there are no good people, only degrees of badness. All of which, I assume, was Marchal's intention, but the modern-day French noir doesn't quite have the pizazz of the real thing. The plot is satisfyingly convoluted and there are a lot of interesting themes at play, particularly the ongoing strife between bureaucracy and actually policing the streets of Paris, and the extent to which petty rivalries can spiral out of control in a charged situation, but because it's all told with the same unwavering straight face, and because the mood is so downright monotonous, it eventually becomes wearying. Men scowl and avoid eye contact while speaking to each other in low, gruff voices, and it ultimately devolves into a long and plodding trawl through the staples of the macho cop thriller with no light at the end of the tunnel. Worth a look, but fairly unremarkable.

The Number 23 (6/10)

USA: Joel Schumacher, 2007; IMDB

For Your Eyes Only (6/10)

UK/USA: John Glen, 1981; IMDB

As the James Bond series limps into the 1980s, it's beginning to look as crusty and worn-out as its incumbent star, Roger Moore. The clichés are now so firmly established that all those involved seem simply to be going through the motions, and it's hard to care about the plot, which has nothing to offer that we haven't seen a dozen times before or more. Even the Maurice Binder opening titles are beginning to look like he just doesn't give a damn any more. Which is a shame, because FOR YOUR EYES ONLY is on the whole a step up from the last Bond film I watched, LIVE AND LET DIE (Moore's first outing as 007). The plot may have nothing to offer, but during the various set-pieces, the film does come to life for some impressively staged stunts, the most striking of which is an extended ski chase. My interest in the movie peaked and dipped throughout its two-hours-plus running time, and whenever I was engaged, you can bet your bottom dollar it was because of an action set-piece rather than anything to do with the narrative.

On the other hand, the pre-credits sequence, involving an obvious Blofeld stand-in, some really bad puns and the sort of jokey slapstick comedy that always comes to mind whenever I think of the Moore Bonds, is pretty dreadful, ranking as one of the worst openings in the series' history and very nearly derailing the film before it gets off the ground. It contains one of the series' few callbacks to a previous Bond film and, in the process, somehow manages to piss all over the memory of ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE's melancholy ending. Worse still, it seems to have been included solely as a means of giving Kevin McClory the middle finger. Bad move, Bond producers, bad move.

Thankfully, nothing which follows is anything like as bad, and while I don't fully agree with the assertion that FOR YOUR EYES ONLY is a Timothy Dalton Bond film before its time, it does contain a couple of very satisfying moments in which Moore's "nice English gent" mask slips and the ruthless bastard portrayed on occasion by Connery, Dalton and Craig (and, needless to say, the literary Bond of the original novels) emerges. In fact, there's a scene involving a truck, a cliff and a well-placed kick that I'm inclined to feel is considerably nastier than anything Connery's Bond ever did. On the whole, though, it's hard to shake the feeling that he's simply going through the motions, and for whatever reason I still have great trouble ever feeling that he's in any danger - even when being used as shark-bait or being set upon by a team of homicidal ice hockey players. I suspect the problem is that he just seems so detached from the events unfolding around him that it's hard to see him as anything other than an observer.

A few more random thoughts: despite the dull-looking opening titles, I quite liked the Sheena Easton song. I also rather enjoyed Bill Conti's score, but I'm not convinced it fit particularly well with some of the action scenes. There's an earlier sequence, involving Bond and his sidekick du jour, Melina, escaping an armed gang in Melina's mini, that feels a bit too jaunty and jokey. Speaking of Melina, she may not go down in history as one of the greatest Bond girls but she's a good deal more feisty and resourceful than the dimwits in LIVE AND LET DIE... not to mention that the actor playing her, Carole Bouquet, is incredibly easy on the eyes. By the way, it's not true that she never smiles. (The film's other Bond girl, Lynn-Holly Johnson, on the other hand, is just infuriating, and thankfully the filmmakers have the good sense to limit her screen time.) And the closing gag, while completely tone-destroying, did, I must admit, make me laugh.

Well, for the time being, I'm done with Roger Moore, despite only having watched two of his seven films (barring THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN and MOONRAKER, the rest aren't available on BD yet, and I don't feel like paying for either of those two). Next up: Timothy Dalton in LICENCE TO KILL. Hmm... or shall I rent THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS on DVD first?

The Box (7/10)

USA: Richard Kelly, 2009; IMDB

There was a point when everyone in this country seemed to love Richard Kelly's debut film, DONNIE DARKO, but the craze seemed to die out pretty quickly and I honestly can't remember the last time I heard anyone mention it. His follow-up, SOUTHLAND TALES (which I haven't seen), was more or less universally panned, to the extent that there was really nowhere for him to go but up. THE BOX, based on a Richard Matheson short story which was previously adapted as a TWILIGHT ZONE episode, is an intriguing and atmospheric piece, even if the questions it raises in the first half are more interesting than the answers it provides in the second. Beyond the nifty central premise - man offers husband and wife $1 million is they press a button which, so he tells them, will result in the death of someone they don't know - it's probably best if you go in without know anything about how the plot unravels, so I'll leave it at that and simply say that this was a rather pleasant surprise and one of the better films I've seen recently.

(*) Ne le dis à personne (8/10)

France: Guillaume Canet, 2006; IMDB

(*) The Girl Who Played with Fire (7/10)

Original title: Flickan som lekte med elden
Sweden/Denmark/Germany: Daniel Alfredson, 2009; IMDB

Wanted (2/10)

USA/Germany: Timur Bekmambetov, 2008; IMDB

Can I have those two hours of my life back, please?

I really don't feel like writing paragraph after paragraph about WANTED. It started off well, but rapidly disintegrated into a sludge of cod-philosophical mumbo-jumbo, incomprehensible action and a narrative so muddled it can only have been the work of a committee. What ends up playing out feels like a more colourful, sillier and vastly less entertaining rip-off of THE MATRIX - the sort of film that it's hard to believe anyone involved in the production actually cared about. The impressive cast is wasted, with Angelina Jolie doing nothing but pout and James McAvoy thoroughly miscast as a would-be action hero, overdoing the goofy facial expressions and making annoying "Waaaahoooooooeeeeee!" noises during the copious slow motion fight/chase scenes. And does Morgan Freeman not get tired of constantly getting the "Yoda" roles? An awful, awful film - loud, clumsy, confused and utterly forgettable.

The Hurt Locker (7/10)

USA: Kathryn Bigelow, 2008; IMDB

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