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USA/UK: Sam Mendes, 2007

Much like the suburban lifestyle it critiques, Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road is slick, polished and very, very conventional. It takes few risks, succeeding largely thanks to fine performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and especially Kate Winslet, who make up for what is ultimately a rather plodding, obvious script by Justin Haythe (whose only previous credit is the 2004 Robert Redford vehicle The Clearing). It trots out the obvious criticisms of suburbia, hammering home the usual "life ain't as pleasant as it looks" clichés with all the subtlety of a blunt trowel, and tossing in that old stalwart, the madman who sees everything more clearly than those who are supposedly sane. The latter, it must be pointed out, leads to some of the best scenes in the film, thanks to Michael Shannon's excellent performance as the aforementioned mental patient. For all that he's a walking, talking stereotype, he's actually the most interesting character in the whole piece, and at times I found myself wishing I was watching a film about him rather than the self-centred couple played by DiCaprio and Winslet, who dream of jetting off "to Europe" to "discover themselves" but never actually do anything about it. Mendes is a fine craftsman, but he did the whole "stifling suburbia" thing a lot better in American Beauty. It's worth seeing for the performances alone, and for the potent recreation of 50s Americana, but it ultimately feels a bit empty.

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France: Alexandre Aja, 2003

Oh dear. The second of our Monday night horror movie BD double bill, Haute Tension (I refuse to call this film by its UK title) may be considerably better than Hush in every aspect of its execution, but ironically leaves a far more sour taste in the mouth because it falls so far from grace in its final 15 minutes, turning what could have been one of the best examples of the recent wave of French horror into one that assumes its audience consists of gullible idiots and propogates a nasty stereotype that reveals just how ignorant the director is.

Spoilers below (mouse over to view):

Yep, it's our old friend the mad homicidal lesbian, a cliché that turns up without fail in just avoid every genre of every artform. In a twist that I'm sure writer/director Alexandre Aja thought was highly original, it's revealed that the protagonist of the story, a young woman who goes to stay with her best friend's family in a secluded farmhouse and witnesses them being butchered by a maniac, is in fact the killer. That's right, forget everything you saw - that overweight, overall-clad, middle-aged man is in fact supposed to represent our heroine, a barely repressed lesbian who has a thing for her best friend and, when said friend doesn't respond to her advances, decides butcher her whole family in revenge. (She conjures up this doppelganger while having a wank after spying on her friend in the shower, in case you're wondering. This is one classy motion picture!) Never mind that none of this makes a lick of sense, given that the grand reveal completely contradicts everything that came before it - Aja clearly saw Fight Club and thought "What an absolutely wonderful twist! No-one will see it coming!" In a sense, he was probably right, because he doesn't play fair, not even for a second. At least you can rewatch Fight Club and just about see how Edward Norton and Brad Pitt could be different manifestations of the same person. Rewatching Haunte Tension and knowing in advance how it would turn out, I found myself mentally cataloguing every instance where Aja doesn't play fair.

More or less problematic, depending on how you feel about it, is what the film appears to be saying. Now, as my brother said to me last night (after we both calmed down and stopped shouting at the projector), I doubt any deliberate malice was intended, but appearances are everything. Reading between the lines, the film seems to convey that lesbians are in fact men trapped in women's bodies, a moronic notion that was supposed to have been laid to rest a century ago. Bloodthirsty, homicidal men who delight in killing men, women, children and dogs, at that. Luckily, of course (insert eye-roll here), order is restored and that crazy dyke is banished to an insane asylum. Whew! Thank God for that, eh?

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UK: Mark Tonderai, 2009

Were it not for the fact that My Bloody Valentine 3D and The Unborn both came out this year, I'd be calling Hush the worst horror movie of 2009. Bankrolled by the usual hodge-podge of lottery funds and music-labels-cum-film-distributors, it takes a reasonably interesting premise and proceeds to utterly destroy it thanks to an idiotic script and cack-handed direction. The setup is interesting: a young couple, whose relationship is on the rocks, are heading along the M1 late at night in the middle of a rainstorm. There's a hold-up, and they find themselves stuck behind a lorry. As the vehicle comes to a halt, its back door jolts open momentarily, revealing a naked woman chained up in the back, screaming for help. Interesting, you might think, but first-time director Mark Tonderai seems more interested in the tedious bickering between the annoying couple, whose character motivation, dialogue and performances range from implausible to downright embarrassing. When he finally does remember the actual point of the movie, he lurches from one unbelievable setup to another, throwing in twist after idiotic twist, leaving way too much unexplained and mistaking running around in the dark with the camera flailing around for actual tension.

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USA: Henry Selick, 2009

I almost didn't see Coraline. The 'tude-infested poster made me expect a smug, self-satisfied movie brimming with pop culture references and centred around a wise-ass, sassy heroine. It just goes to show that appearances can be deceptive, for the poster does a very poor job of selling what is arguably the best film of 2009 that I've seen so far. Based on the novel by Neil Gaiman, this stop motion delight was written and directed by Henry Selick, who back in 1993 directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, possibly the greatest feature length stop motion animated feature ever made (not that there have been many).

Many people erroneously believe that film to have been directed by Tim Burton, who in actual fact merely produced and provided the original story for it. Selick and Burton also collaborated on the rather disappointing live action/stop motion hybrid James and the Giant Peach, before parting ways. A few years back, Burton returned to the world of stop motion animation with the shockingly disappointing Corpse Bride, a bland, stiff and unappealing movie that wasted the considerable talents of both its animation crew and its voice cast. Watching Selick's Coraline last night, it became blatantly obvious to me who deserves the lion's share of the credit for The Nightmare Before Christmas, and it ain't Tim Burton. Coraline has everything that Corpse Bride didn't, namely a vivid imagination, appealing designs, a sense of whimsy and that wonderfully crooked aesthetic that made The Nightmare Before Christmas so interesting to watch. (About half way through the opening credits, my brother commented "Well, this is already ten times better than Corpse Bride," and that feeling stayed with both of us throughout the film's duration.)

If I had any criticism to make, it would be the brattiness of the titular character. Mr. Gallows says that, in the novel, Coraline was a refined British girl, which sounds to me to be more in keeping with Neil Gaiman's style than the character presented in the film. Mr. Gallows also suspects that the character of Wybie, not present in the novel, was added purely to give the boys in the audience someone to root for. There may be some truth in this, but I suspect his main purpose was to give Coraline someone to talk to, externalising what I presume were internal thoughts in the book. Either way, he's considerably less annoying than I thought he would be, although I must confess to preferring his mute doppelganger (watch the film and you'll understand).

Seriously, see Coraline as soon as you can. I don't often get this worked up about an animated film that isn't by Pixar. I gather Henry Selick had a pretty rough time with 2001's Monkeybone, by all accounts a considerable disappointment due to a combination of studio interference and budget cuts, but he has come back fighting with Coraline, and I hope we don't have to wait another eight years to see another feature from him.

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UK: Roman Polanski, 1965

I don't doubt that the precise "meaning" of Roman Polanski's Repulsion has been debated ad nauseam. What is the purpose of the nuns playing ball in the courtyard overlooked by Catherine Deneuve's flat, or the street musicians? Who does the man who Deneuve imagines raping her represent? What is the purpose of the rotting food? I'm sure there are plenty of very interesting answers to these questions (I can come up with a few theories myself), but I suspect the short answer is that there is no answer. As a director, Polanski is very blunt, tending to deliberately eschew metaphor and symbolism in favour of just going with images that serve no purpose other than to convey the sort of mood he's looking for, and in Repulsion, that mood is very much one of creeping unease, with bursts of outright terror. These bursts are never, in my mind, as sustained as I would have liked, and, as the film progresses, Polanski runs the risk of becoming slightly redundant: there are only so many times you can show Catherine Deneuve acting skittish before the audience says "Enough already, let's move on." To some degree, I suspect that this may have stemmed from Polanski's slightly snooty desire to make something that was "not just a cheap horror film": it's essentially a film that toys with a repressed desire to delve into all-out terror, but restrains itself for fear of seeming uncouth.

Still, in spite of its flaws, I can't deny that Repulsion lingered with me. I actually dreamed about it when I went to bed after watching it, which is unusual for me (I don't normally remember my dreams, more's the pity). So yes, it certainly got under my skin. I prefer Rosemary's Baby overall in terms of Polanski's "crazy woman in apartment" tales, but there's much to be said in favour of this one, from Gil Taylor (Star Wars, The Omen)'s striking lighting and use of lens distortion to Deneuve's brilliant performance as the flaky, unhinged Carole.

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Original title: Das Leben der Anderen
Germany: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006

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USA: Mark Dindal, 2005

Chicken Little came about at a time when the Disney studio was convinced that the path to success lay in imitating its arch-rival DreamWorks, which for some bizarre reason raked in a massive amount of cash with Shrek and its sequel. As a result this, Disney's first in-house CG feature, feels irritatingly smug and constantly undercuts itself by never taking itself seriously, even when the material calls for it to do so. The result is that even an "end of the world" scenario is treated as nothing more than an extended joke and an excuse for a string of pop culture references, with the cloyingly cutesy characters serving as mouthpieces for whatever the writers happen to think is funny, regardless of whether it fits contextually. In doing so, the whole exercise feels incredibly insignificant, an 80-minute vacuum that doesn't outstay its welcome but leaves you wondering what the point of it was. Director Mark Dindal previously helmed the The Emperor's New Groove, which suffered from precisely the same flaws, so in a sense we probably shouldn't be entirely surprised. However, I think some people assumed that, because many of Disney's recent 2D movies had been so lacklustre, a move to 3D would instantly turn the studio's fortunes around.

Oh, and whoever thought Zach Braff could convincingly voice a cartoon chicken boy needs their head examined. That said, the two biggest laughs in the film come from his delivery of certain lines.

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Original title: Flammen & Citronen
Denmark/Czech Republic/Germany: Ole Christian Madsen, 2008

Flame and Citron is an interesting film: an attempt to tell a film noir-style thriller in Nazi-occupied Denmark, focusing on a pair of real-life assassins working for the resistance movement, from whose code names the film's title is derived. With a budget of around 45 million krone (over $10 million US), this is the mos expensive Danish film ever made, and it certainly looks the part, with Jørgen Johansson's slick cinematography, replete with immaculate compositions and clouds of billowing smoke. The plot is a little on the muddled side, however, with the continual double- and triple-crossing twists never quite ringing true, while a handful of narrow escapes are a little far-fetched (the least convincing involves one character creating a clumsy diversion to allow another to simply walk out of a heavily guarded Nazi compound). Still, it's nicely paced with some decent set-pieces, and it calls attention to an aspect of World War 2 history that tends to receive little attention. I don't doubt that other films have been made about the Danish resistance movement (which by all accounts emerged as one of the most organised and effective in Europe, their successes including managing to evacuate almost the entire Jewish population to neutral Sweden), but I'm not personally familiar with any of them.

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USA/Canada/France: Steven Spielberg, 2005

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USA/Germany/UK: Tom Tykwer, 2009

The International, the latest film from Run Lola Run director Tom Tykwer, is a plodding, muddled and not very interesting affair that is so infuriatingly po-faced that it collapses under its own weight. A terrifically staged shoot-out at the Güggenheim Museum in New York notwithstanding, this film is a waste of its director's talents. Clive Owen, an actor I've always found to be rather bland and unconvincing, is completely out of his depth here, and Naomi Watts is criminally underused as his sidekick of sorts. At least it looks like a million bucks: Tykwer has that slick, cold, ultra-modern, ultra-calculated visual sensibility that many of his fellow German filmmakers possess (Robert Schwentke is another), and it serves as a perfect antidote against the hyper-kinetic, unplanned shakycam fiascos favoured by many of today's action filmmakers (*cough* Paul Greengrass *cough*).

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