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France/USA: Louis Leterrier, 2005; IMDB

TRANSPORTER 2 is basically summed up by a scene in which Jason Statham's Frank Martin, having realised that there is a ticking bomb strapped to the underside of his car, accelerates towards a giant magnet hanging from a crane. As the timer his zero, the car flies into the air, skimming past the magnet. The magnet detaches the bomb from the car the the crane goes up in a massive, subwoofer-rattling explosion while Frank and his trusty car sail on by without taking so much as a scratch.

Yes, TRANSPORTER 2 is very, very stupid. It's also very, very fun, knowing exactly what sort of film it is and not trying to pretend it's anything other than a big silly crowd-pleaser. It effectively strips the well-known Luc Besson-penned action formula down to the bare minimum, dispensing with any notion of character development or extraneous plotting (barring a bizarre comedic subplot involving the French police inspector from the first film) in favour of simply getting to the next ridiculous set-piece as quickly as possible. There's effectively no downtime whatsoever between one action sequence and the next - Jason Statham simply barrels his way from one location to the next, barely stopping to catch his breath, dispensing with a seemingly endless army of foes using a variety of absurd techniques. No, it ain't art, but so what? It's riotously entertaining from its first frame to the last and a welcome improvement over the original TRANSPORTER.

USA: Steven Spielberg, 2002; IMDB

There's a good film buried somewhere in MINORITY REPORT, but it gets lost amid a cacophony of muddled action and information, tasting suspiciously like the cooking of a few too many chefs. It also ends about half an hour after it should, thanks to the emotional and philosophical high point of the film occurring at the end of the second act, meaning that everything which follows feels both irrelevant and anticlimactic. It's impeccably photographed, the production design is exquisite, the performances of everyone involved are faultless (even when trudging through page after page of po-faced expository dialogue) and the CGI visual effects haven't dated unduly, all of which give the film a certain degree of leeway that it wouldn't otherwise have had, but you're left with what my brother described as a "glass ceiling" effect, where it's difficult to shake the feeling that something is holding the film back from being as good as it might have been. What should be the high points feel decidedly muted, resulting in a film that ambles along for two and a half hours without ever providing a single true "wow" moment. MINORITY REPORT is characterised by dull thuds rather than loud explosions, and I found myself reflecting on how strikingly unSpielbergian it all felt. I don't just mean that the plot doesn't revolve around a Very Special Child - it's lacking the sense of adventure and wonder that characterises so many of his best films (whether it's the INDIANA JONES movies or E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL). For a director so renowned for tugging at the heartstrings (sometimes to cloying effect), MINORITY REPORT is strangely heartless.

Argentophile alert: in addition to the presence of Max von Sydow, SUSPIRIA's Jessica Harper also has a small but pivotal role in the film.

USA: Ti West, 2009; IMDB

Even if you don't like THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, you've got to give writer/director Ti West one thing: he pulled off the 80s look more or less perfectly, getting not just the fashion, hairstyles and vehicles right but also the colour palette, film stock and lighting. Better still, it's not simply a nostalgia piece. West and his crew were clearly big fans of 80s horror movies and they do everything they can evoke their mood and feel, but it's not done in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, "we're sooooo 80s" way. Instead, the film takes itself seriously, which goes a long way towards the audience extending it the same courtesy.

There's not actually a whole lot on paper, and to be honest I think West does at times overestimate his audience's stomach for watching his heroine wandering around an empty old house opening doors and peeking into crannies. THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL takes a very long time indeed to actually get anywhere, and while I wouldn't say I was bored - West's highly attuned sense for style and atmosphere, and Jessica Harper dead ringer Jocelin Donahue's engaging and natural screen presence, put paid to that - I did find myself thinking "I hope this is worth it" on quite a few occasions. And is it? Well, sort of. In the final act, the pace and tone of the film change drastically, with more actually happening in the final 15 minutes than in the first 75 combined. It feels a tad anticlimactic, though. There's no big reveal, and in essence exactly what you thought was going on WAS going on.

I liked THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL rather more than this review probably suggests. There's not a whole lot to it, but what there IS is consistently well-made and laced with the sort of atmosphere that most twenty-first century horror films would kill for. If you have any affection for the slasher movie output of the period it sets out to ape, you definitely owe it to yourself to give it a look.

Original title: Les femmes de l'ombre
France: Jean-Paul Salomé, 2008; IMDB

Within about five minutes of starting to watch FEMALE AGENTS, I found myself experiencing pronounced feelings of déjà vu. I recently read a novel by Ken Follett called JACKDAWS - an espionage thriller about an all-woman team of agents who parachute into France shortly before D-Day in order to carry out a vital mission which could decide the success or the failure of the Allied operation. JACKDAWS was published in 2001; FEMALE AGENTS was released in 2008. Neither claims any connection to the other. And yet, as I continued to watch I found myself mentally checking off the instances of events and details that were virtually identical to those of Follett's novel. Both begin with a botched attack in which the heroine's resistance fighter husband is shot (killed in one, seriously injured in the other), both involve the recruiting of a flighty bunch of ladies completely unqualified for the task at hand and deceived as to the true nature of their mission... one of these ladies is even a murderer on death row, for chrissakes!

What is the explanation for these similarities? The generous one would be to suggest that both stories were inspired by the same events and/or people. The protagonist of FEMALE AGENTS, Louise Desfontaines (Sophie Marceau), is loosely based on a real SOE agent, Lisé de Baissac... although, judging by her Wikipedia entry, she was not involved in any mission bearing any resemblance to the one depicted in the film. JACKDAWS makes no direct claim to be based on real individuals or events, but the postscript does imply that its heroine, Felicity Clairet, may on some level have been inspired by Pearl Witherington, a British courier who took command of a 2,000-strong guerilla group in Berry. So, seemingly no common heritage, then. I'm wary of accusing FEMALE AGENTS' writer/director, Jean-Paul Salomé of outright plagiarism, but the evidence is highly suspect.

JACKDAWS is not great literature. The prose is often plain to the point of monosyllabic and the characters are too exaggerated and underdeveloped to be taken seriously. It's entertaining, though - a sort of female DIRTY (half-)DOZEN able to turn on a dime from being a bombastic Boy's (Girl's, rather) Own romp to something darker and considerably nastier. It's ultimately an undemanding and engaging page-turner - a sort of DA VINCI CODE with longer chapters, a more engaging protagonist and a (marginally) less ridiculous plot. In other words, an airport novel - appropriately enough, I read most of it during my various journeys back and forth to Bristol. FEMALE AGENTS is considerably more serious in its intentions, with a sombre tone and sense of dignified gravity. That's not to say that it isn't tense and exciting in all the right places, and it certainly manages to avoid the almost pious depiction of SOE agents that characterised most of the films of this sort made when the war was a more recent memory. Still, it's hard to shake the feeling that a more gung-ho, fanciful romp is just itching to get out - and on a few brief occasions it does, such as the improbably elaborate stunt the women pull off as they rescue a captured British agent from a Nazi-controlled hospital.

It's perhaps because it isn't being entirely honest in its intentions that FEMALE AGENTS isn't quite as satisfying as it could have been. In terms of recent big screen depictions of World War 2-era espionage, I still think Paul Verhoeven's BLACK BOOK, ridiculous though it is, is the most engaging. Others, like Ole Christian Madsen's FLAME & CITRON and Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg's MAX MANUS are more serious but somehow less gripping. FEMALE AGENTS is far closer in tone (if not in spirit) to the latter two than to Verhoeven's lavish pot-boiler, but at the same time, BLACK BOOK, with its moral ambiguity and characters whose motivations are more nuanced than mere po-faced patriotism, is actually the more complex film and, for all its B-movie qualities, the more intellectually satisfying.

USA/New Zealand, Neill Blomkamp, 2009; IMDB

Once again, I'm somewhat late to the party. Virtually everyone I know has seen DISTRICT 9, and given what a major talking point it has proven to be, having to patiently explain to people that I hadn't actually seen it (followed by the inevitable "Well, when WILL you?") did get a bit old. In the end, though, the wait was worth it: DISTRICT 9 does have its problems, and I don't think it's quite the revelation that many saw it as, but on the whole it's an excellent piece of work and, for my money, a vastly superior sci-fi/human issues parable than AVATAR, released just four months later.

As some have pointed out, this is very much a film of two halves, with the less than subtle apartheid parallels giving way a more straightforward gun-toting action movie at around the half-way point. I've read some reviews that were critical of this shift, but personally I didn't have a problem with it. Indeed, given that writer/director Neill Blomkamp's rather heavy-handed approach to the allegorical material, the shift to a more direct, straightforwardly entertaining mode of storytelling actually results in a welcome change of pace.

I can't say I was entirely convinced by the alien CGI, which at times has a rather stilted quality, but for the most part it integrates reasonably well with the live action footage, and the use of interview footage and amateur camerawork to creates a mockumentary aesthetic is impressively convincing. The digital photography, meanwhile, may not be exactly pretty, but is certainly appropriate given the aesthetic Blomkamp was going for. A solid piece of work on the whole, if not an out-and-out genre-defining masterpiece.

France/USA: Corey Yuen, Louis Leterrier, 2002; IMDB

Q: What's funnier than Jason Statham trying to act?

A: Jason Statham trying to do an American accent.

At least he makes up for his lack of skill as a thesp with his physicality and apparent willingness to try pretty much anything. As a writer/producer, Luc Besson has hit on an action movie formula that actually works extremely well, and THE TRANSPORTER adheres pretty strongly to it, but it's not his finest hour. While it's loud, fast and silly in the ways that you would expect, it lacks the the gung-ho violence of TAKEN, the ludicrous excess of DISTRICT 13 or the martial arts razzle-dazzle of DANNY THE DOG (although it's worth pointing out that Pierre Morel and Louis Leterrier, who between them are responsible for these three films, worked on THE TRANSPORTER as cinematographer and art director respectively). Still, though, it's silly fun and I don't think it's trying to be anything more. I've rented the other two TRANSPORTER films as well and will be getting around to them in due course.

USA/UK: Chris Weitz, 2007; IMDB

UK/Canada/France: Terry Gilliam, 2009; IMDB

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS is typical Terry Gilliam: imaginative, unconventional and downright frustrating. I've only seen a handful of the man's films, but I can't recall ever liking a single one of them unconditionally. For me, they all contain moments of audacity and greatness, but before too long they invariably fall apart, collapsing under the weight of their own aspirations.

Of course, DOCTOR PARNASSUS will probably be remembered first and foremost as the film that very nearly wasn't to be, given Heath Ledger's untimely death mid-production. Interestingly, however, for all its problems, Ledger's death, and Gilliam's solution to the problem of losing his mid-actor before the shoot wrapped, isn't one of them. In fact, the use of Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell to complete the film is actually rather an inspired choice. (Although I must confess that I didn't realise the man I was watching was Depp rather than Ledger until about half-way through his sequence. Law and Farrell, on the other hand, are far more instantly recognisable.) Still, the biggest revelation in terms of the cast comes in the form of Lily Cole, a most unconventional-looking model, as Dr. Parnassus' daughter Valentina. As I understand it, she had no prior acting experience, but she comes across as a complete natural, and I predict that she has big things ahead of her.

On the whole, though, I feel inclined to suggest that DOCTOR PARNASSUS might be most charitably described as "interesting". It doesn't really work as a whole, and the over-abundance of CGI gives the film a fakeness that it could have done without. Gilliam badly needed to sell the film's fantasy worlds as tangible, believable places, but instead they simply come across as synthetic and oddly weightless. Say what you like about AVATAR (and believe me, I did), but at least James Cameron was able to create a convincing alternate world. Then again, he had eight times the budget to work with...

USA: Joss Whedon, 2005

IMDB reference

USA/UK: James Cameron, 2009; IMDB

I see no point in making all the predictable "DANCES WITH SMURFS" and "POCAHONTAS II" jokes that I'm sure you've all heard a hundred times before. Yes, AVATAR's script is incredibly derivative. Let's move on.

Unlike just about everyone else on the planet, I didn't see AVATAR in the cinema. The BD was my first introduction to it, and as such, I've "only" seen it in 2D. Opinions vary wildly on whether or not this actually makes any difference. Some people claim it's a completely different experience in 3D; others say it's not that big a deal. The latter point of view was summed up quite succinctly by a work colleague who, when I asked if she'd seen it in 3D, replied "Well, supposedly."

So yeah, that's my proviso: I haven't seen AVATAR in 3D. You may (or may not) wish to bear that in mind when I say I wasn't exactly overwhelmed bit it. It's technically impressive for sure (even if the Na'avi designs are spectacularly goofy), and has some well-choreographed action scenes. I can't say the narrative resonated with me one bit, however, and quelle surprise, it's a good hour longer than it needed to be. I always say that films need a damn good reason for continuing past the two-hour marker and this one, with its flat, uninteresting characters, clichéd "technology vs. nature" narrative and general lack of anything of interest except for its technical advancements and a few genuinely stunning images, didn't seem to have one. I actually felt myself getting droopy eyelid syndrome on a few occasions during the final hour, as action sequence after action sequence unfolds, serving no apparent purpose except to pad out the running time.

Can I understand why many people were enthralled by AVATAR? Absolutely. Am I one of them? Absolutely not. I actually went in with a sneaking suspicion that I might end up hating it - none of the trailers or EPKs I'd seen had done anything to convince me it was a film I would enjoy - and was rather relieved that this wasn't the case, but for me the pleasures it offered were rather limited and I can't see myself watching it again any time soon... in 2D OR 3D.