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USA: Edward Zwick, 2008

In some respects I'm almost tempted to look on Defiance as a more po-faced Inglourious Basterds, as least in so far as it belongs to the underpopulated "Jews who fight back" sub-genre of World War 2 films. I'm led to believe that this "true story" plays hard and fast with the facts about a group of Jewish partisans who survived in the woods in Belarus for the bulk of the war's duration, effectively building a community for themselves to replace the one that had been taken from them. It does at times stumble into mawkishness (Daniel Craig on horseback giving rousing Braveheart-esque pep talks to his followers, not to mention a rather saccharine subplot involving a romance between two young partisans), and I get the impression that things weren't as cut and dried as the film would have us believe (the Bielski brothers are said to have been considerably less egalitarian than they are portrayed as being here), but as a straightforward dramatisation and a piece about refusing to surrender your humanity despite your enemies' attempts to dehumanise you, I found this to be a riveting and for the most part well-told movie. It's also stylishly shot by Edward Zwick and cinematographer Eduardo Serra (with Lithuania standing in for Belarus) and features compelling performances by Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber.

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UK/Canada/USA: David Cronenberg, 2007

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France: Guillaume Canet, 2006

Ne le dis à personne is an adaptation of Harlan Coben's novel Tell No One, which I haven't read. I'm not entirely clear as to why an American novel ended up being made in French first of all, but I can imagine the US version that is slated for release in 2011 through Miramax being considerably altered to simplify the rather tortuous, multi-stranded narrative and make things a bit clearer.

Is that a complaint about the film? Are you kidding? I thought it was a top notch thriller, populated by an array of plausible and intriguing characters, and with sufficient twists and turns to keep me guessing right until the end. Focusing on a paediatrician whose wife was seemingly murdered, only for CCTV footage of her, seemingly very much alive, to materialise eight years ago, it toys with classic Hitchcockian "wrong man" tropes but in fact seems to be more interested in the psychology of the bereaved protagonist. François Cluzet is excellent in that role, evoking a fortysomething Dustin Hoffman and providing just the right combination of vulnerability and dogged determination, while the supporting cast, which includes Kristin Scott Thomas as his sister's wife and the director himself as a decidedly less than savoury individual, is uniformly excellent. Certain elements of the plot do require a considerable suspension of disbelief (particularly those regarding a substituted body), but go with the flow and I suspect Ne le dis à personne will go down a treat.

(Incidentally, how refreshing to see a same sex couple being portrayed as just that - a couple - without a massive issue being made of it. That's not to say that I have anything against such "issue movies", but there's something rather gratifying about the fact that the filmmakers don't feel the need to constantly point and cry "Look! Look! Homosexuals!")

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UK/USA: Matthew Vaughn, 2007

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USA: Robert De Niro, 2006

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