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USA: Chris Columbus, 1992

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Original title: Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain
France/Germany: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001

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UK: Shane Meadows, 2004

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UK: Duncan Jones, 2009

There's a big danger in making films about what is essentially something that, in real life, would be very boring, for the obvious reason that you run a high risk of the film itself becoming boring. This is a trap that Duncan Jones can't quite avoid with his 2009 sci-fi piece Moon, about a man who has spent the last three years aboard a mining base on the moon with only GERTY, a computer voiced by the ever-laconic Kevin Spacey, for company. To an extent, it drags because it has to: if it zipped along at a breakneck pace it woulf be disingenuous.

Ironically, though, I found it more engaging than J.J. Abrams' much faster Star Trek reboot, the reason being that, rather than being about explosions and effects, Moon is about an individual and his plight. Unsurprisingly, after three years in complete isolation, Sam Bell is beginning to go mad... or thinks he is. This is compounded by the sudden appearance of another man called Sam Bell who looks identical to him and appears fairly unfazed by all this, and it's here that Jones achieves his masterstroke, effortlessly switching viewpoints between the two Sam Bells to the extent that you don't realise the film has suddenly switched to a different character's perspective until after the fact. Although there are appearances from a variety of bit players, including Dominique McElligott as Sam's wife and Kaya Scodelario (of Skins fame) as his daughter, the whole thing is essentially a one-hander (or should that be two-hander?) delivered by Sam Rockwell, who does an impressive job of portraying two very different incarnations of the same person, one or both of whom may or may not be losing his mind.

In some respects, Moon's elliptical nature can be a tad frustrating, and it's tempting to suggest that many of the arresting images we see are included not because they mean something but simply because they are intriguing and unsettling. Why, for example, does Sam have hallucinations about seeing his daughter as a teenager, despite having seemingly only seen her as a toddler via video link? Why is the second Sam Bell so seemingly unsurprised to encounter his double? (This part actually makes even less sense once we learn what's actually going on.) Why is a human employee even needed on the moon, given that all the real power seems to lie with GERTY? But at the same time I suspect much of the film's power lies in this proliferation of unexplained oddities. It's eerie rather than outright scary, but a feeling of loneliness is palpable throughout, and the understated visual effects (a combination of green screen and miniatures) are largely effective to the extent that you don't notice them. Numerous shots feature two Sams on screen at once, often interacting with one another, but when watching the film I never, even for a moment, found myself pondering how the effect was achieved.

Plus, simply put, there's no way I can dislike a film that includes both Matt Berry (Dr. Lucien Sanchez himself) as a sinister businessman and the voice of Kevin Spacey as a talking computer.

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USA: J.J. Abrams, 2009

Anyone remember the infuriating trend in the 1980s of resurrecting classic cartoon characters and creating baby versions of them? This creativity-deprived craze gave rise to The Tom & Jerry Kids Show, Flintstone Kids, Tiny Toon Adventures and other such dreck. Watching J.J. Abrams' 2009 reboot of Star Trek, I felt that something very similar was being done to the Gene Roddenberry's venerable sci-fi saga, albeit with the scenes featuring Kirk and Spock as actual children mercifully kept to a minimum. I'm probably the only person on the planet who has never seen a Star Trek movie or a single episode from any of the various TV series, but given that the new movie was widely publicised as a complete reset I assumed this wouldn't be an issue.

Unfortunately, I found precious little to enjoy in this loud, over-long reel of explosions and lens flares penned by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, Abrams' go-to script guys and the people responsible for giving us Michael Bay's Transformers movies. I definitely got something of a Transformers vibe from this film since, while thankfully not infested with that film's peurile humour (which I suspect comes from Bay anyway rather than his writers), it felt similarly empty and devoid of any real substance. Kirk comes across as a smug, irritating little attention-seeker and Spock a pompous boob, while no-one else actually has a personality to speak of, and Simon Pegg is squandered as a gurning ninny with a dreadful Scottish accent. Instead, Abrams and his writers rely on having the characters spout nudge-nudge wink-wink catchphrases and gestures that are obvious to even a Star Trek neophyte such as myself. Really, though, it feels somewhat pointless to be even mentioning the characters, since they're really just there to fill in the gaps between one computer-generated explosion and the next.

Okay, so it's a summer blockbuster and people generally go to these things because they want to see a whole lot of explosions and chase sequences, not because they want to ponder the meaning of life, but Star Trek's reputation led me to hope for a little more than just another wall-to-wall CGI effects show with a plot held together by sticking plaster. Serenity this ain't.

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Original title: Linkeroever
Belgium: Pieter Van Hees, 2008

The blurb on the front cover of the US DVD release of Belgian shocker Left Bank (original title Linkeroever) calls it "as important as Let the Right One In." I'm still not sure I quite follow how the reviewer is quantifying importance, and I do feel that invoking the name of Tomas Alfredson's excellent fim is slightly misleading, given that they have little in common, beyond both being European horror films with a rather melancholic atmosphere. You have to sell your product to the masses somehow, however, and I'm not sure how else I would have marketed Left Bank to an audience that had never heard of it. Then again, the film does wear its influences on its sleeve, combining the sort of apartment block dread that Roman Polanski used to excellent effect in Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant with the otherworldliness of pagan rituals from the likes of The Wicker Man. All of this is nothing new, of course, but Left Bank is well enough executed to be worth a watch in spite of its somewhat derivative nature.

Runner Marie (Eline Kuppens) is forced to drop out of a prestigious pan-European competition when she collapses shortly after coming second in the qualifiers (she was desperate to come first). Diagnosed with a serious iron deficiency, she is ordered by her doctor to take things easy for the next few weeks. Sick of having nothing to do except lounge around the house butting antlers with her mother (Sien Eggers), she decides to move in with her new boyfriend Bobby (Matthias Schoenaerts) who lives in an apartment on Antwerp's Left Bank. At first, all is well. She and Bobby introduce one another to their respective mothers, enjoy each other's company, and have lots and lots of sex. Gradually, however, things begin to gow awry for Marie as she meets some of the apartment block's more unsettling tenants, and becomes prone to bouts of nausea and deeply unsettling dreams. Her mother, an ageing hippie type, senses bad vibes in the apartment block and urges her to get out, but it's not until it's too late that Marie realises just what sort of unsavoury goings-on she has walked into.

Left Bank takes its time to get going, but this unquestionably works in its favour as it builds up an atmosphere of impending dread that simply could not have been achieved had director Pieter Van Hees gone down the cheaper route and opted for quick gratification. Last week, in his Radio 5 review of Michael Haneke's latest offering, The White Ribbon, Mark Kermode talked about how the film's great strength was that it preyed on the threat of something bad happening rather than actually showing something bad happening, and the same technique is at play here. A few hyperkinetic, frenetically-shot moments in the final act notwithstanding, the film's style is clinical and understated, utilising the Scope frame and naturally dour locales to impressive effect. The score, while minimalist in the extreme and completely absent for lengthy stretches, kicks in where appropriate and adds to the air of unease.

Acting-wise, Van Hees succeeds in getting a great deal out of Eline Kuppens who, in her debut film, delivers and incredibly assured and naturalistic performance. In terms of the script, there's not a great deal to Marie short of a handful of broadly defined traits, but Kuppens takes the character and runs with her, and somehow makes her seem real. She appears in more or less every scene and, while this is largely a mood piece, the bulk of the film still rests on her shoulders. It's a good thing her performance is so strong, because she is to some extent able to distract you from the problems with the script, namely a tendency to throw a variety of ideas on to the screen that aren't fully realised. Many of these are to do with character: for instance, around halfway through the film Marie tells Bobby that sometimes she wishes she could just start her life over with a clean slate. It doesn't make a great deal of sense because we aren't given any indications prior to suggest that she is overly unhappy with her life. Instead, this aside is introduced merely to set up the film's climax, which ultimately feels a little tacked on and results in a lack of cohesion. Similarly, while Van Hees attempts to keep the specifics of what's going on shrouded in uncertainty, horror veterans should have no trouble working out what Marie has stumbled into when the word "Samhain" appears.

But despite these concerns, and a nagging sensation that it was ten minutes longer than it needed to be, Left Bank made for interesting viewing. So many people have written about the dire state of the majority of current American horror output that it hardly seems worth referring to it here, but films such as this, flawed though they may be, simply serve to remind us how little US horror currently has to offer in comparison with its counterparts from more exotic locales. The closest counterpart Hollywood has put out to Left Bank this year is probably David S. Goyer's The Unborn, and the comparison should leave no doubt as to which side of the Atlantic is currently producing the cream of the crop.

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Original title: Banlieue 13: Ultimaum
France: Patrick Alessandrin, 2009

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Norway/Denmark/Germany: Espen Sandberg, Joachim Rønning, 2008

Until I saw Max Manus (I refuse to use the "Man of War" subtitle that the UK distributors added, and which gives the impression of a very different film) tonight, I don't think I'd ever seen a Norwegian film before. Then again, I can think of innumerable other countries whose cinema I haven't sampled; this is one more I can cross off the list. I'm a bit of a sucker for spy movies, particularly those focusing on the Second World War, which is probably the period in history that I find most interesting and the point at which espionage as we know it today really came into being. Flame & Citron shed some light on the relatively unknown (outside its homeland) Danish resistance movement, and Max Manus does much the same for Norway. The protagonist, the eponymous Maximilian Manus, achieved something approaching folk hero status thanks to a combination of the audacity of the sabotage missions he pulled off, his own deviousness and sheer luck.

That said, when the end credits rolled, I was left with a nagging sensation that I hadn't got to know who Max Manus really was. The film is gripping from its first frame to its last, but it crams an awful lot of material into just under two hours, and as a result leaves you with the impression that important stuff has been glossed over. Given that the events of five years are condensed into the film, this was perhaps inevitable, but there's something a little unfocused about directors Espen Sandberg and Joachim Rønning's handling of the material. A subplot involving the local Nazi head honcho and his romance with a Norwegian woman, for example, is introduced but never fully resolved and has no ultimate effect on the plot, and at least one reviewer astutely observed that the hunter/hunted relationship between he and Max essentially amounts to nothing. There is no meaningful interaction between them, no real impact on the narrative at all. It's slightly frustrating because, when they come face to face towards the end of the film, we get the impression that the directors envisaged this as a momumental event: the moment where two bitter rivals come face to face. Instead, it fizzles out because there is essentially no real conflict between them.

But having said that, I certainly enjoyed Max Manus. It's gripping and technically extremely proficient, with a deeply engaging performance by Aksel Hennie, who looks slightly reminiscent of Steve Buscemi, which in many ways helps him to convince as the awkward everyman turned unlikely hero. And hey, now I know a little about the Norwegian resistance movement, about which I was previously completely ignorant, so I got something of an education out of it too.

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Original title: Banlieue 13
France: Pierre Morel, 2004

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France: Luc Besson, 1997

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