Duncan Jones' debut feature is somewhat of a throwback, recalling various sci-fi films from the 60s and 70s. Set in the future and starring Sam Rockwell, it introduces us to Sam Bell who is the sole member of a crew of one manning a mining station on the moon, which provides 70% of the Earth's power. Being only a fortnight away from completing his three year contract, Bell looks forward to returning to his wife and child, but begins to start seeing things. One day he is involved in an accident on a routine checkup, but upon awakening things are not as they seem.

This all makes it sound far more interesting than the film actually is, while the specifics aren't necessarily predictable, the manipulation of the storytelling is and once a "reveal" happens rather early on, the film limps along before an abrupt conclusion. Probably the most disappointing thing about this film is the aesthetics, usually in science fiction films about space (be they big or smaller budget ones) they're a treat for the senses, but here there's model work about on par with the average episode of Red Dwarf, the whole outside moon landscape just looks fake.

Rockwell is his usual Sam Rockwell self giving a very mannered, self aware performance, but eventually it does settle down and at least becomes watchable. The characterisation is interesting up to a point, it makes some good points about how isolation can change a person, but sadly fails to fully focus on the centre of the man's character. A film like Dark City could have the specifics of his past unknown, but still get that man's character across despite that (and that's one of the points that film tries to make), here we never really know the man as while being equally 2-dimensionally drawn, the performance of the actor and the arc of the story cannot transcend it.

The score, by Clint Mansell, is one of those that probably sounds better on an ipod than it actually does in complementing the images, which are competently shot but never arrest or spark the imagination. When all of this blends together, what is there is a decent film with an okay performance and a serviceable story, but doesn't have the incisiveness in conception or artfulness in execution to produce something special. A film like Sunshine had a killer set up for 70 minutes, then ruined it with a tacked-on, ill-conceived third act. This film has neither the highs nor lows of that film and as a result is a very average, uninspired entry in the genre.

Okay, so something of an addition, but I figured seeing as I've bought a few dvds recently, plus there's some I'll undoubtedly get for my birthday soon and then probably some more between that and Christmas, then Christmas itself, I'll do reviews of the dvds I buy/get. Won't include online rental stuff in this, but we'll see how it goes, they won't be that frequent but at the very least will keep the blog ticking over more frequently.

THE FILM :

TITLE - No End
RELEASE - 1985
COUNTRY - Poland
DIRECTOR - Krzysztof Kieslowski
DISTRIBUTOR - Artificial Eye

With the classic status of the Three Colours Trilogy and the Dekalog having being confirmed over the last decade, Kieslowski's other films are obscure in comparison. Even in the realm outside of those 2 heralded achievements No End occupies the most unseen and unspoken about place of his films from the 80s onwards, taking a back seat to the overt stylisation of The Double Life of Veronique and the oft-imitated Blind Chance (both Run Lola Run and Sliding Doors rip it off in terms of stucture and concept, respectively).

This film marks Kieslowski's first collaberation with co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz and composer Zbigniew Preisner (who would define his work from then on) and the mood is immediately set with the music swirling and the imagery beguiling from the outset. We are introduced to a lawyer who has died 4 days before and we follow his wife, who has to deal with various people involved with the "political" case her husband was working on, whilst herself coming to terms with the grief.

Grazyna Szapolowska gives a wonderful central performance (she recalls Greer Garson in the way she is so photogenic cinematically) and her turn, coupled with Kieslowski's style and approach create some moving and unforgettable moments. It is a film very much of its time and setting, culturally this is very "important" subject matter and was probably more provocative when it was released. Time has been very kind to this film though and what remains is a fascinating, artful look at a very dark period in a country's history, and is possibly Kieslowski's most rewarding individual film in the process.

BONUS BITS :

This DVD gives a filmography of Kieslowski which is the bog-standard DVD add-on, but does have some genuine extras of interest. There's a 5 minute interview with Szapolowska which is interesting as far as it goes, but it's a little bit short. There's a much longer interview with cinematographer Jacek Petrycki, but that is him discussing all of his work with Kieslowski, from documentaries through to features and without knowledge of what he's talking about it's of limited value. They do include one of Kieslowski's documentary shorts, The Office, but horrendously the sound is 2 or 3 seconds behind the pictures and it's a shockingly unprofessional oversight. So a bit of a trick missed with the extras, some ideas that were good in theory, but didn't work out that way in the execution.

This is a film which, due to the vagaries of the distribution of foreign language films, only recently got a release in the UK despite being almost 2 years old now. In a way it's not difficult to understand why as the director Claude Chabrol (whilst certainly being a name to cineastes) does not have any kind of appeal to a foreign audience, which equally applies to its young stars Ludivine Sagnier and Benoit Magimel.

It follows a renowned local author Charles Saint-Denis (played by François Berléand) who whilst promoting his new book takes a shine to tv weathergirl Gabrielle Snow (Sagnier). As their affair plays out she is being pursued by playboy Paul Gaudens (Magimel) who wants her but is not what she wants. The acting is very strange, at the beginning Berléand and Sagnier are fine but Magimel seems horribly out of place, yet by the end he's rather like Rachel Weisz in My Blueberry Nights in that he's acting in a completely different style/tone to everyone else but becomes increasingly fun and enjoyable because of it, and in this case making the others seem bland in comparison. Also he benefits from some of the most comedy uses of costume design since Johnny Depp in Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

Chabrol famously started the French New Wave with his debut film Le beau Serge, then by the end of the 60s/early 70s he was the premiere man in world cinema for thrillers, consistently creating striking, interesting work. Since that period he's become decidedly more hit and miss and sadly this film lacks the tension and atmosphere reminiscent of his most successful work. This is not to say the film isn't good, Chabrols are seldom bad and even more rarely uninteresting, but it does lose steam and vitality the longer it goes.

Sagnier's performance is emblematic of this, to begin with she invites intrigue with her natural charm, but as the film progresses the role sadly highlights her shortcomings as an actress. What should be a very precise character arc isn't executed very well and she seems to be quite limited in what she can actually do in front of a camera. The writing and direction don't help this because themes such as the characters' love for each other are spoken out of nowhere without any build up, there's no real sense of time and structurally it seems like the film is continually trying to connect the dots from an outline rather than fashioning a story or development of characters and their relationships.

In the end, a film which is rather substantially flawed and a distance away from Chabrol's best work even in the last 20 years, but one which retains a sufficient amount of interest for enough of its runtime to make checking it out worthwhile.

Right, I was holding off on doing these because I thought I was going to the cinema yesterday (which ended up not happening) and given the theme I was waiting until I saw something good to break the pattern (which did end up happening). So three films, all notoriously "bad" films, which shows what boredom and mild intrigue can do.

First up I continued my Giovanna Mezzogiornoquattroformaggiowithcheese journey into her filmography and went for Love in the Time of Cholera, assuming it would be something like Evening: a superb cast, excellent writer, yet a complete shambles. I didn't quite get what I was expecting as this was just the trashiest film I've seen in a very long time. Ostensibly a romance, it shows how a couple are separated when young and then how the guy stays "in love" with her for over 50 years, whilst shagging a different woman a month for the entirity of that half-century. There are continuously funny porn-lines, the sheer volume of "titillation" gets eye rolling and even including the leads (Quattro and Javier Bardem) the entire cast are uniformly underwhelming. So some poor performances (John Leguizamo, Benjamin Bratt, etc.), a questionable story, dodgy makeup, mishandling of tone from director Mike Newell and frequently it can only be taken as a comedy. That said though, it remains watchable, just about, but it's so, so trashy.

After that I watched Wild Wild West, which was on tv. I'm sure I've seen 20-30 minutes of this before, whilst intoxicated, so as such I was basically coming to it fresh and dear me it was atrocious. An even worse example from Barry Sonnenfeld than Newell in the previous film how to completely misjudge the balance of tone required, while it wasn't a shock to see Will Smith sleepwalking and Kevin Kline be poor, the real shocker was the ridiculously OTT turn Sonnenfeld extracted from Kenneth Branagh, making the best actor in the cast give the worst performance. The screenplay is the bedrock of most of the film's problems, but the way it's executed absolutely cuts everything off at the knees. Easy to see why it did so "well" at the Razzies that year.

Finally (mercifully), being a fan (usually) of vampire stories I decided to watch Twlight online because I figured it couldn't be any worse than Let the Right One In. This is one of those films that occasionally goes for a laugh or two (having a girl introduce her bloke to her dad whilst Daddy's cleaning his gun), but hits far more consistently with the laughs when they're actually trying to be serious. Kristen Stewart obviously tries but lacks the edge of her turn in Into the Wild and Robert Pattinson is so wooden that when they set scenes in the forest he simply disappears into the background. The relationship (which is the whole point of the film) between new schoolgirl Bella and brooding, moody Edward is drawn in such a hackneyed manner ("I'm bad news, stay away from me" *cue she wants him more*, he repeatedly saves her from death/gang rape *cue she wants him more*) it's very difficult to take seriously, also the longer it goes the more evidently lightweight the "story" is, it takes 45 mins for her to twig he's a vampire and then it's very inconsequential. It ends as flat as a pancake and the arc of the storytelling is basically that of blowing up a balloon then slowly letting it deflate. That said, it really is very funny and as such quite watchable, but it's such a hack job from director (Catherine Hardwicke) and writer that it can't even get into the "so bad it's good" range.

Better stuff next time, I promise (shouldn't be hard )

Well this is apparantly my 250th post here and I briefly considered doing something in this post to do with 250, but any kind of list or what have you would be way too long so I thought I'd just mention it. I have my loyal "tens" of readers and it seems quite random when I get suddenly twice as many more visitors, there doesn't seem to be any consistency (rather like my taste, apparantly ) but I quite like that. I'm very glad I started doing these little reviews and round ups and I wish I'd started it years before, you forget so many things and even brief comments can spark a memory. I got online-rental in ... 2006 I think and thinking back to all those Bergman films I raped them of and other stuff like finding my first little festivals, I wish I had my thoughts from the time. Oh well, memories will have to suffice. It seems random that the blog basically coincided with the closure of my favourite cinema (the Midlands Arts Centre, the whole complex of which is being renovated) and when I think about all the films I've seen there ... I now can't believe I don't have anything like this chronicling my thoughts on them. Anyway, on with what I've been seeing.

I know I said the other week I'd wait until the end of the run to talk about the Swedish Wallanders on BBC at the moment, but Krister Henriksson was so good the other night I thought I'd mention it here. The tone of these Swedish ones are more melancholic in general but so far I do prefer the Ken Branagh ones (although they're based on Mankell novels rather than outlines so that's probably the reason). One scene in particular had Kristensson going into overdrive (getting the coroner's report on the murder of his first kiss) and it recalled Charlotte Rampling in Under the Sand or Song Kang-Ho in Sympathy for Mr Vengeance - it's just the kind of scene for a good actor to really get their teeth into and Krister subtlely nailed it.

Rather annoyingly, The Street is on at the same time and so I've been watching those on the iplayer for the last couple of weeks. Never seen it before but Bob Hoskins got me to watch it last week for his modern day High Noon with Liam Cunningham (who was excellent). This week was Anna Friel and since Pushing Daisies she's really coming on as an actress. I did have massive problems with the actual drama, it was completely dependent on coincidence, not only in setting up the drama (Friel's hooker starts a relationship with her plumber and it turns out his dad is one of her clients), but even more lazily in the conclusion as well. The acting makes it work though, even if I did find some of the nudity completely unneccessary (did I just complain about Anna Friel getting her tits out?  maybe I'm coming down with Swine Flu or something ).

Okay, what else, oh yes! Now this came as a complete shock to me, but it turns out the Poles have gone and made the final film in Krzysztof Kieslowski's planned trilogy of films. Tom Tykwer butchered the first, Heaven, but Cate Blanchett may have been the best I've seen her and Danis Tanovic did the second, Hell (L'Enfer) which was one of my favourite films of 2005 (and was the kind of film regularly on at the MAC). So not only has the final one, Purgatory (well, it's called Hope, or Nadzieja) been made but it has been and gone last year in the UK. I don't remember hearing anything about this so I assume it was a 3 cinemas in London-type job.

The film is rather like a lot of the Italian ones I've been watching recently, it's very smooth visually and technically well put together. I did find the score rather uneven and didn't think that was a strong point. The story is that a young lad films an art theft from a church and blackmails the perpetrator into returning the painting. There are some interesting ideas and themes but I don't think they're satisfactorily explored. This is the kind of film where a great performance could really elevate it out of the ordinary but the lead actor, Rafal Fudalej I found limp in a very enigmatic role and as such he prevented it being as good as it could have been. Still a decent watch, better than Heaven as a film (but without the performance), all it really made me want to do though was get my copy of L'Enfer and watch it done properly. Shows what can be done when you get a proper filmmaker to do the job.

Lastly, I caught The Happening on Sky tonight, even though I'd heard bad things about it. Dear me, it was poor. It was the first time I've seen Mark Wahlberg (usually a very solid, capable actor) be wooden, Zooey Deschanel was completely unconvincing, bland and unable to portray any emotion satisfactorily and nobody else did themselves any favours by being in it. M. Night Shyamalan's script doesn't even make sense using its own internal logic, his direction ensures it's just about watchable, but on occasion the only way to take the film is as a comedy. Easy to see why it got so many Razzie noms.

Okay, another batch to get through, firstly I'll just briefly mention a couple of things I tried to watch on tv but didn't see all of. Speed Racer is doing the rounds on Sky at the moment and I love Christina Ricci enough to at least give it a look but sadly couldn't find anything of value. Garish, very fake film, stupid beyond measure with an unbearable tone, sorry to see such talented people as Ricci and Susan Sarandon waste themselves in this dreck. Also caught a bit of All the Real Girls, had missed the beginning but wanted to check it out because Paul Schneider is an interesting actor and to see what all the fuss is about Zooey Deschanel. As with the other David Gordon Green film I've seen the script is the cause of all the problems, and it features characters spouting inanities at each other ("I just want to make sure that a million years from now I can still see you up close and we'll still have amazing things to say" - still? ) as well as performances which are nothing special and can't elevate the material.

So on to better things, on Saturday night there were a couple of films on tv at the same time (11pm) which looked interesting for a variety of reasons - Clue (which I've had pimped to me as kind of a cult classic) was on ITV3 and Facing Window was on Sky Arts. I videoed the former and watched the latter, which is an Italian film about an unhappily married couple who take in an elderly gentleman who can't remember his name. It's one of those films, and a lot of modern Italian ones are like this, which are almost depressingly competent. The cinematography is filtered and sheened, the direction as smooth as possible, but it all masks a lack of depth and insight both in character and story. I found the (sub?)plot about the man's past to be simply using the subject matter (oooh Holocaust, oooh homosexuality) to provide an interest in and of itself rather than creating something dramatic and the main story about the wife (the lovely Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and the neighbour who spy on each other via their "facing window"s rather limp. What remains is an inherently watchable film (although that score is far too overdone) but at-best perfunctory and at-worst pretentious as it takes these touchy issues to give the film a weight of importance and intrigue which just isn't there, as it's all about as deep as a puddle.

After seeing that, Giovanna (her name is so long, it's ridiculous ) was good enough to prompt me to see what else she'd been in (I knew she'd been in the flop that was Love in the Time of Cholera, which I was actually considering watching purely because Ron Harwood adapted it) and it turns out she was in a film I'd wanted to see for a while, the oscar nominated (but completely unavailable here) La bestia nel cuore (Don't Tell). So having waited for years and never found it I downloaded it and watched it the next day. This is heavy, heavy stuff, in the first 20 minutes everything is introduced (death of parents, subplot of lesbian desires, history of sexual abuse) but despite having broadly similar stylistic tendencies to Facing Window, here director Christina Comencini has the heft as a dramatist to provide the depth beneath the sheened surface.

The cinematography is very nice and the camera movement gliding, the score is also beautiful, it adds to the mood and atmosphere greatly. Mezzogiornoquattroformaggiowithcheese (hell, if it's that long I'm going to have some fun with it ) is absolutely first rate here, she has a very difficult role as a woman dicovering her abuse-ridden past and they surround her with uninspired casting choices (let's get both guys from The Best of Youth ) who do solid but uninteresting work. For the most part this is a very fine film, the dream sequence revealing the abuse (less than 20 mins in, it's not a spoiler) is one of the most cinematic depictions of such a thing since that insanely artful "rape" in Talk to Her. It's the character study after that that provides the interest though and the central performance coupled with the direction takes everyone along for the extraordinarily depressing ride. The subplots are acted well enough, but do seem a bit tacked on and superfluous and lack the arresting nature and vitality of the main arc. I can see why enough people at the oscars who saw this were moved enough to nominate it, but equally it's even more clear such a downer of a film wouldn't beat a crowd pleaser like Tsotsi. Well worth seeing, if only they'd release the damn thing here .

On to Clue then, which I enjoyed much more than I thought I would. Based on the board came, it's a film about a group of people who are assembled at a mansion by a mystery person and after discovering all of them are being blackmailed by the same person the blackmailer is killed. How, where and by who is then the basis of the film. This is a very silly, entertaining film, there are the occasion eye-rollingly cheesy lines but in the main it hits far more than it misses. The cast are clearly having a lot of fun and Tim Curry and Lesley Ann Warren in particular make the most of what they're given. There are three endings and while conceptually that works as it's like the game, on the other hand dramatically it does weaken it a touch as for the final half hour or so you're watching stuff that is obviously smoke and mirrors. This is on tv quite often, but after being so depressed following Tom Watson not winning the Open and England conspiring to make life as difficult for themselves as possible in the ashes, coupled with the joy that was Don't Tell, this was the perfect pick-me-up.

Given that Katyn is currently in and around cinemas in the UK and that Ashes and Diamonds was on Sky Arts the other night, Polish director Andrzej Wajda has been on my brain. Known primarily for his "lost generation" war trilogy from the late 50s (which Ashes and Diamonds concluded, following A Generation and Kanal), Wajda famously was given an honourary award by the oscars (following the suggestion from, amongst others, Steven Spielberg - http://www.wajda.pl/en/list.html) and his last film, Katyn, got oscar nominated last year in the foreign language category (and I reviewed it here last year). Wajda is one of those people like Satyajit Ray in that they are primarily known for a trilogy of films and the rest of their catalogue is rather daunting as it is not entirely clear where to go next. Given that only the trilogy and Danton are available here I decided to see if there was anything I could download and I looked at his acclaimed films from the late 70s/early 80s as a place to go.

The first I saw was Land of Promise (which was oscar nominated) and the version was Wajda's re-release cut, 40 minutes shorter than the original three hour runtime, with an infamous orgy scene cut out as he'd decided it was now redundant. This was a very unexpected film stylistically from Wajda, despite being a period piece (it's about industrialists around the turn of the century) it's rather inelegant as the cinematography is notably kinetic. There's also a moment where he has one of the characters break the fourth wall and it's completely out of the blue stylistically and incredibly ill-advised. The biggest problem the film has (and this could either be due to the novel it's based on, the fact it's 40 minutes shorter than it used to be, or just something that was always present) is that given the type of story they're telling, characterisation is kept to a minimum. This means when moral questions are asked and answered, there isn't enough backdrop of the characters to provide the necessary context to give the important moments their meaning. It's a decent film and it remains watchable, it's just a strange one all things considered.

Unsure as to whether that was emblematic of Wajda's filmmaking in the period or not, I moved on to Man of Marble. This was the first modern-set Wajda film I've seen and it was back to his usual smooth style of storytelling so it seems the previous one was somewhat of an abomination in that regard. It is the story of a woman (Krystyna Janda) who is making a documentary on the rather taboo subject of a formerly heralded bricklaying labour leader. The narrative is set up to include flashbacks and newsreel/film footage as she discovers about her subject as she goes along, using shady methods to get people to talk (on camera or just on tape). It's a bit unusual but eventually the style of storytelling does all pull together and when you hear them say how interesting the subject is, it's difficult to disagree with them. Nothing too special in the performances but this is definitely one of those films which is more than the sum of its parts.

Literally following on from Man of Marble is Man of Iron, which won the Palme d'Or a the cannes film festival as well as being oscar nominated (I'd watched Man of Marble to get the context for this film, which was the one I actually wanted to see). It follows an alcoholic journalist who has been ordered to provide a piece destroying a local shipyard foreman (and one of the characters in Man of Marble) and his increasing sympathy for the striking workers. It's similar in style to the previous film as he is uncovering what has gone on and when he interviews people we see flashbacks, as before. The problem though is that the great thing about Man of Marble was that the woman making the film and her subject were both intriguing characters whereas here the characterisation isn't a strong point.

What gives the film a real boost is when they finally get back to the characters from the first film. When Krystyna Janda turns up she is such a breath of fresh air and the film receives a shot in the arm in the process. In the first film she was rather mannered and as such her performance was competent but nothing more. Here she is refreshingly natural and really delivers, it's everything a cracking supporting turn should be. So the final 30-40 mins of the film really elevate what was otherwise a fairly mediocre film, the old characters draw you in and there is an interesting point being made. In the end it becomes a good film, just about, but not as good as the original.

So after my successful discovery of Story of Women (well, being successful in literally finding it, not that I thought the film was successful for me ) I decided to go back to the root of why I had a mooch around for that and dug around for a Catherine Deneuve film from the 80s as they are so scarce. As with Huppert, I was successful in finding one and as with Huppert, it wasn't a very good film.

I found Hôtel des Amériques (Hotel America) and watched it online as the prospect of Deneuve being directed by André Téchiné is always intriguing. Sadly, this is probably the least interesting film I've seen Deneuve in. The basic story is that Deneuve is a pill popping anaesthetist who almost runs over Patrick Dewaere. He stays with her all night in a cafe and then pursues her because she's, as his friend puts it, the most beautiful woman in the world. The whole drama fails to convince because of the way the relationship is drawn, it's unbelievable his simple persistance would wear down a stand-offish Deneuve so easily and it then beggars belief that she becomes the one fighting for the relationship. Very nicely shot as Téchiné's usually are, but it drags a fair bit and it becomes impossible to care about what's happening to either character. It's the sort of character a more intuitive actress, like an Emmanuelle Béart would have more joy with as she's the type who plays emotions/situations rather than getting into specific character work, but she wasn't around back then. Deneuve tries her best, but while she's good, she can't really save the film and her efforts are in vain.

Continuing my recent Swedish tilt (including a pretty good Wallander on Monday which I'll hold off on talking about here until the series is over) and specifically after Everlasting Moments, I went back over Jan Troell. His films simply aren't available here so I decided that seeing as the subtitles are now online for his legendary The Emigrants and The New Land (Utvandrarna and Nybyggarna) that I'd download them and watch them properly (I took a look without the subs over a year ago and watched them with detailed plot outlines in hand to get a feel for them). I also tried to get The Flight of the Eagle (Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd) but incredibly annoyingly that torrent ended at 85% . Oh well, at least I got the big ones.

The Emigrants is a film with rare accolades, not only is it one of the few films that got nominated at the Oscars in two different years (first in the foreign language category, then in all the other categories the following year - AMPAS has since closed that loophole, thus denying people like Bruno Ganz in Downfall even a *chance* at an acting nomination) but also it is one of only 8 foreign language films to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. The most immediately striking thing about this film is that while it's almost three hours long, there is such an economy of storytelling, getting across great time periods very quickly with the minimum of length, but maximising the imagery to ensure nothing is missed.

It's the story of a farmer in Sweden, his wife and his brother, who all endure various miseries before deciding to become the first people from their area to emigrate to America. Ullmann is magnificent, the absolute highlight of which being her scenes with Von Sydow on the boat. Monica Zetterlund is also very impressive as the born again whore, as is Allan Edwall as the excommunicated unordained priest, who are part of the party of emigrating Swedes. Troell's work as a cinematographer is a standout on the technical side, whereas the score is a tad uneven, sometimes it adds greatly to the story but at other times it's just there for the sake of it. Only a minor flaw though, the setting is perfectly captured and the end is a very satisfactory stopping point before the next film takes over.

That next film came a year later to complete the story and it's one of the cases of the sequel edging out the original film. The difference in the acting is that while Liv is almost as good as before, Max ups his performance as he's given a lot more to do and Eddie Axberg as the brother Robert completely nails the third of the film he's in. The Robert flashbacks are as close to pure cinema as I've found in the 1970s, virtually silent, yet showing both what happened whilst conveying how it was for the characters. What this has that the other film doesn't is moments of heart-stopping tension, horror and emotion as the film lyrically ebbs its way towards its achingly melancholic conclusion. It's just marvellous stuff, were it not for Everlasting Moments, one might be forgiven for thinking that they don't make them like these any more, but with a talent as rare as Troell's, the old football maxim that "form is temporary, class is permanent" more than holds up to scrutiny here.

Okay, three to blast through but before I do I just found out that the BBC is showing the remaining 11 episodes of the first series of the Swedish Wallanders I was talking about the other day. They showed two to accompany the Kenneth Branagh ones last year but they're showing all the others on Monday nights on BBCFour. Cracking stuff, especially having just had my interest raised with seeing the first couple from the second series online.

Anyway, on with it, a rather curious aspect of this blog is that I can see the most popular "keywords", and aside from some very funny ones like "movies with threesomes" getting a lot of hits (thank you Truffaut ), for some reason there are always a ridiculous amount on Mary-Louise Parker. I must be being linked somehow, I guess I do talk about her a lot as I watch a fair bit of stuff with her in. One such thing I saw recently was Vinegar Hill, which is a US TV movie I stumbled across last week. The basic set up is that Mary-Louise and her family move in with her husband's parents following the husband losing his job. So what's there is the coming apart of their relationship coupled with the unearthing of "secrets" surrounding Parker's overbearing father in law Tom Skerritt. Parker's the reason to see it, she's her usual ridiculously natural self, where they take the story isn't particularly moving or revelatory, but it's a decent watch.

A few months ago I was bemoaning the fact that aside from The Last Metro, none of Catherine Deneuve's films from the 80s are available here. Having stumbled across a site with a new Isabelle Huppert film available I decided to have a root around for some of her 80s stuff online and was able to download Story of Women, which won her best actress at the Venice Film Festival. It's basically the same as Vera Drake, but if Vera Drake were a heinously unrepentant cow who whored out women as well as being the local abortionist .

The biggest problem with this film (which I cannot believe is directed by Claude Chabrol, having none of his patented mood or atmosphere) is the characterisation. While it is fine to have a completely unsympathetic character (think Raging Bull), in order to make it work dramatically that character has even more of a burden to be fascinating to compensate for the dislikability and here aside from what she actually does, they don't delve into Huppert's character at all. They make her a moral bankrupt, and as while that isn't a problem as Capote showed us, if that moral bankruptcy is just matter of fact and doesn't reflect back on the character then it's shallow. Here Huppert is unrepentant and merely whines about the situation she finds herself in, which offers no insight or pathos. While based on a true story, it's hard to grasp the point they're making, if it's that nobody should suffer this fate regardless of whether they're "nice" (like Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake) or not, it also seems to say she should be given a pass because she's a woman. The rights and wrongs of the real life situation are not satisfactorily examined, and a game turn from Huppert can't fill in the blanks that aren't there on paper and make this film (or even her character) vital.

So from one acclaimed performance to an even more acclaimed one, namely William Hurt's Oscar/BAFTA/Cannes-winning effort in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Hurt has the showier role than Raul Julia, playing the effeminate homosexual sharing a jail cell with Julia's rugged political prisoner, but if anything I preferred Raul. Hurt is overtly camp, necessarily so, but never really disappears behind his mannerisms and delivers the character (the way, say Philip Seymour Hoffman did in Flawless). It's always William Hurt giving a performance, and that performance is good but it's very superficial. Julia on the other hand is far more natural and broods nicely. It's just a shame that two fine turns create very little chemistry and as such, coupled with the writing, I found the development of their relationship as presented rather unconvincing.

This film has had a seemingly strange fate, in that despite having lots of awards to "sell" it, it is only available here on import dvd, and was even unavailable in America for years. I don't think that lack of distribution was much of a loss, the direction from Hector Babenco is unfocused, the story uneven and the motivation of the characters unbalances the drama and weakens it. Just about worth seeing for the individual performances, but certainly a film which fails to blend them together and is rather poor in quality and turgid.

At the Academy Awards, the most "problematic" category is the one that rewards the best foreign language film. This is because they only see one film per country, and more tellingly, they often see dozens of films that haven't been released in America. The result of which is that every single year there are multiple French, German, Spanish, etc. films critics respond to that they aren't allowed to vote for, and also that every single year "big" foreign films get "snubbed" for films most people have never heard of, let alone seen. This year, the likes of The Baader-Meinhof Complex, The Class and Waltz With Bashir had all got excellent distribution, but it was the unseen Japanese film Departures which used the vagaries of the oscars' voting system to walk away with the prize.

The set up of the plot is that Kobayashi is a cellist in a local orchestra, which is disbanded due to poor concert attendance. To save money he sells his cello and relocates with his wife to live in the house his mother left him after she died. He needs a job and responds to an advert in the paper for help with "departures" - he assumed it would be a travel agent, but in fact it is for a company that specialises in the preparation of bodies for burial. He takes the job as they need the money but doesn't tell his wife exactly what he does for a living.

Takita Yôjirô directs the film with an extremely fluid visual style, and this ensures that Departures is nothing if not watchable. Problems arise though from the over-use of a very syrupy score. This alone would be testing enough, but that added to the areas the script takes the story, the longer the film goes the further the balance is pushed into the realm of almost unbearably cloying sentiment. As the filmmakers attempt to make the film as moving as possible, the attempt by them to make it moving is obvious as both plot devices and cinematic techniques are very transparent.

The acting is fine for the most part, although on occasion Motoki Masahiro (Kobayashi) in particular is not very natural. That's nothing against him as he's doing exactly what Takita wants and it is just the style they're going for. What doesn't help matters is that the characterisation in general is subpar and to call the relationship between the Kobayashis sketchy is an insult to sketch artists on streetcorners across the globe. It's extremely patchy and when the bulk of the drama in the first half of the film is the question "What's going to happen when she finds out what he does?" it makes it difficult to generate any dramatic heft or interest.

What remains is a smoothly put together film that is fine for long stretches, but lacks restraint in pretty much every area in getting to the emotional finish they want to. At times that lack of restraint is in doing too much and at others it is in doing too little, but for the most part it does exactly what it says on the tin. Does it deserve the oscar? That question is probably moot given the set-up of the category and the way it is voted for, but the one certainty is that due to the oscar this film is now getting decent worldwide distribution, and it's definitely good enough to merit that.

In 2008 the BBC did what the Swedes have been doing for years, and commissioned adaptations of Henning Mankell's Wallander novels. They got Kenneth Branagh to play the leading role and the resulting television won Best Series at the BAFTAs. Such has been the demand for Wallander in Sweden that by the time the BBC wised up the Swedes had adapted all of Mankell's novels (starring the quite superb Rolf Lassgård, from After the Wedding) and even spawned a TV series of original stories from Mankell outlines. The first of those was Before the Frost, which was released theatrically and starred Krister Henriksson (from Faithless and Reconstruction), and that along with another of the initially commissioned 13 new stories was shown on BBCFour to accompany the Branagh Wallanders.

Hämnden is the first of the new batch of 13 Wallanders being made in Sweden, still starring Henriksson, and it was released theatrically with the rest to follow on dvd then tv. The set up is that local top brass policeman Kurt Wallander has moved into a house by the sea and during a get-together the lights across the whole city of Ystad go out following the bombing of a local station where the power is routed. During the blackout a prominent local citizen who has organised a controversial art showing is murdered and the following day when parked cars start exploding the military is brought in as the blame is increasingly placed on potential Islamic terrorism.

So an extremely political and topical backdrop for this entry in the pantheon of Wallanders, it's the usual nuts and bolts police procedural. Johanna Sällström used to play Wallander's daughter, but a couple of years ago she committed suicide, there's a moment when the new public prosecutor (the utterly divine Lena Endre, who played Henriksson's lover in Faithless, giving one of the finest performances in decades in the process) casually asks Kurt if he has children and there's a brooding moment as he says yes. Henriksson is quite excellent here, whereas in the past he's either had the show stolen by Sällström or too hackneyed a plot to work with, he really gets his teeth into the role here and absolutely delivers. Extremely soulful turn, believable when rattled and very genuine throughout.

Unfortunately, despite Henriksson's game efforts and some nice touches from the supporting cast, the unfolding story is very formulaic and not really deep or incisive enough to work in this medium. It requires a lot of close cutting to synchronise the "reveal" and from then on out the film goes downhill, culminating in a rather limp finale. That said though the cinematography is especially fine and the film certainly looks the part. Ultimately a solid, but unispired piece of work, which is a good kick-start for the new series of films. As a stand-alone film it's not as good as Before the Frost, but as a series-opener it's fine.

Wallander: Skulden (Debt)

I also managed to see the next film in the series, Skulden, and it was a better piece of work all round. The plot of this was the disappearance of a boy from school, with a recently released paedophile the prime suspect and the teacher in charge behaving strangely and lying to the police (i.e. Wallander) about her actions during the disappearance.

Henriksson isn't as good as he was in the previous film, but Endre has more to do here and their developing on screen relationship is very nice (and hardly surprising given their chemistry together in Faithless). The way the plot unfolds is interesting, but it's more than Mankell's outline is interesting, whereas the details of how it's fleshed out lack a little and seem too simplistic to be fully satisfactory.

The drip-feeding of information is handled better and while it's not unpredictable, they don't reveal their hand too soon. The young new cops introduced in Hämnden aren't given much to do and it seems that the only way they can shift the plot along is by making the one older cop especially incompetent (he fails to protect a charge in the first one and allows a prisoner escape in this one). So a distilling down of the station as a whole, but when that means more Endre then that is only a good thing. Settling in to the series, looking forward to more as and when they come out.

Not been many round ups or posts in general, because this period of the year (The French Open up to Wimbledon) takes up so much of my time with non-film interests, and the summer is usually a down point for cinema. So having watched Daniela Hantuchova have her best result in a year and half, the best French Open in recent memory and the worst Wimbledon, I'll get a few things out of the way to wipe the slate clean before I start seeing more stuff now the bulk of the tennis is over (and I love that I have a window open with a livestream from a first round match of a clay tournament in Hungary as I'm typing this ).

Right, the filler paragraph is done, on with the films. For some inexplicable reason one of my art cinemas showed a couple of episodes of Kieslowski's legendary Dekalog, and one of them was one of my favourites, Honour Thy Father and Mother (Episode 4). It was accompanied by an atrocious short called Till It Hurts, which is based on the same principle but is just a bloke arguing with his mother for 20 minutes. I actually can't believe the cinema got away with showing the episode though because 1 minute in the projection stopped, then after it had been fixed the sound was absolutely atrocious, distorting when the score/voices got over a certain volume. That such an appalling presentation could almost derail one of the most perfect hours of television is almost impressive. Powerful, emotional, strange, beautiful, it shines through in any environment.

Moving on from that I caught An Unfinished Life when it was on tv. Initially this was a film that people thought might have a chance at oscars, being a Lasse Hallström film. However, its released got pushed back a year and that is never a good sign (The Other Boleyn Girl suffered the same fate last year, as has The Road this year). It's all very watchable, Robert Redford will never lose his effortlessly natural screen presence and he, Morgan Freeman and a young Becca Gardner all do very well. Jennifer Lopez is just there and doesn't do badly but equally she's not very convincing. Not a surprise this got very mixed reviews at the time and also not a surprise it bombed at the box office. It's a decent watch, I enjoyed it as far as it went but it's very inconsequential.

I also tried to watch A Fine Madness, because I thought the idea of any Joanne Woodward film sounded like a good idea, let alone one with Sean Connery. I ended up switching it off, horrendously dated, not funny and just going for the kookiness and falling flat on its face, would never have believed Mrs. Newman could ever be so fundamentally uninteresting. Lastly I saw Mad City because its being doing the rounds a lot but once I found out Costa Gavras directed it I finally checked it out. Interesting for long stretches, kind of Dog Day Afternoon meets Network, but it gets a bit too obvious in its message the longer it goes. Dustin Hoffman's very fine, Travolta is just John Travolta "acting", this could have been excellent, but instead it's just pretty good.

Jan Troell is one of the most legendary directors in Swedish cinema and more than a little of that reputation internationally stems from his oscar-nominated epics in the early 70s, The Emigrants and The New Land. Part of his unique appeal is that he creates period detail superbly and captures it himself as he is the cinematographer on his films. His latest offering, Everlasting Moments, has received a fair amount of acclaim but sadly atrocious distribution (its widest release in America was 30 screens and in the UK it opened in a grand total of seven cinemas), denying those interested from even getting a chance to see it.

The story follows the poor, growing, Finnish Larsson family in early 20th century Sweden. Sigfrid, the father, is an ox of a man and picks up work down the docks and the mother, Maria, takes odd jobs cleaning and sewing, whilst trying to raise the children. That is made more difficult when Sigfrid repeatedly becomes intoxicated and gets them thrown out of their housing. In order to raise some money Maria decides to sell a camera she won in a lottery before she got married, but the local proprietor of the photography shop, Sebastian Pedersen, encourages her to use the camera rather than sell it.

Elements of the story are a tad overdone as the feckless Dad routine does occasionally get a bit tiresome and the hypocrisy of Sigfrid openly having affairs, then being jealous of his wife is a touch trite. That may well be the only flaw in this exceptional film though. The way Maria both expresses herself and at times supports the family with her hobby/passion/talent is extremely satisfactory dramatically, and the depiction of the relationship between her and the timid Pedersen is an absolute delight.

Mr. Troell photographs this film so lovingly and skillfully, it's one for the senses aesthetically. Sometimes in period pieces the sets and costumes are first rate but it can feel set up for a film, or the actors don't seem right in them. Here, his cinematography melds everything together sublimely, meshing the actors with their characters and surroundings, creating a simple, genuine ambience. At the centre of this world he has created is Maria Heiskanen playing Maria and her performance is note-perfect. She has a wide range of emotions to show, always highlighting the dignity of her character's situation and the complexities of multiple relationships. Her turn is so unendingly natural it is seemingly effortless, it's a beautiful portrayal of a very real character.

The rest of the cast all turn in fine performances and Mikael Persbrandt in particular does the most he can with a brutally unforgiving role opposite Heiskanen. That said though, it is Jesper Christensen, usually such an arctic, unsympathetic screen presence, who brings all of the heart to the film as Pedersen. In his moments with Maria he radiates warmth and brings out the most touching moments of Heiskanen's wonderful characterisation; he encourages her, he respects and esteems her and she is at ease with him. He is both a fountain of kindness and the key to unlocking her creativity, and by extension herself. Their platonic relationship is powerfully moving, when Christensen looks at her he smiles with his eyes and in return Heiskanen reveals her character's soul, it's an achingly gorgeous meeting of two people on screen.

Everlasting Moments is such an artfully realistic film it's not surprising it's based on a real story, researched by Troell and his wife. The conception of the story mirrors the execution of it, everything about it is so lovingly done, it's clear Troell has lost none of his adoration of cinema despite his increasingly sporadic output. A glorious film that revels in the expression the medium allows, both thematically and in practice. Would be worth it just to get to know Maria Larsson, but as Troell so clearly attempted to create, there are some everlasting moments in doing so that will never leave the audience in this lyrical, ebbing, eye-closingly moving, utterly timeless film.

Some films are so skillfully made and iconic that they almost immediately become templates for how to do a certain aspect of cinema well. If you want to know how to tell a story without dialogue you watch the following scenes in Vertigo, if you want to know how to use sex scenes to explore character development you might watch something like A History of Violence, if you want to see a masterclass in editing then JFK would be a mandatory port of call. Sadly for Public Enemies, Michael Mann's film chronicling the infamous American bank robber John Dillinger, rather than being an example for excellence the only thing it is useful for is pointing out to budding filmmakers how not to do things.

For a start, the most immediately apparant shortcoming is that it boasts some of the worst sound design seen in a major American release this decade. Whenever the oscars come around the sound categories (mixing and editing) are not really understood by a lot of people, but from now on if ever the need arises to point out what sound mixing is, this is it. At times the music overpowers the dialogue making it barely audible, other times the background balance will stay the same then suddenly the voices will become much more loud in the mix, it's so bad it can vary in the space of a sentence where it goes from barely audible to far too loud. It's so bad that it almost seems like there's a problem with the cinema showing the film's speakers, but after the nightmare that was Miami Vice on this front and the fact that this is something that has been complained about in other reviews, it's just what Mann does.

Aside from sounding like it was mixed in Michael Mann's shed, considering this is a film with an alleged $80m budget, when the big shootouts come they look alarmingly cheap. The style is all over the place, on occasion out of the blue it goes in to full blown documentary-style camerawork, at other times rapid movement sweeps in and only makes you aware you're watching a film, it's so shoddy and uneven in the visual storytelling. The actors are constantly groped in close ups which usually brings out more of a performance but that leads onto the next major problem and that is the acting.

Over the last 20 years Johnny Depp has carved out a career for himself which has given him the reputation of being one of the most unusual, inspired, interesting and charismatic leading men in world cinema but Mann has extracted a performance from Depp which actively goes against everything that makes him the actor he is with the appeal that he has. It's bland, it's mannered on occasion and it's only his screen presence which holds it together. Christian Bale gives a sufficiently vapid turn but he, Depp and Marion Cotillard all falter because the bedrock of any film, the script, pulls the rug out from underneath them.

The characterisation in this film is laughably two-dimensional and as such none of the actors have anything to really get their teeth into. Bale's character is a badge with a gun, nothing more, Cotillard's moll is barely even sketched and Dillinger is drawn incredibly superficially and as such it makes it a glorification rather than an exploration. That alone would be enough to impact on all their turns, but Depp and Cotillard have it twice as bad because their romantic relationship is so risibly written. Cotillard on occasion acts like Penelope Cruz did early in her Hollywood career, but here it's not because Marion is having trouble with her English, it's because the dialogue is so wooden and clunky it would be impossible for any actress to deliver the lines well, let alone in a second language. Even Depp is given lines that wouldn't even make the first draft of the average porn film (reaching its nadir in suggesting he and his Prince Albert join a naked Cotillard in the bathtub) and this is the basis of a relationship the filmmakers actively try to take into emotional areas, which is a contradiction they never solve as the attempted powerful scenes fall flat because of everything that has preceeded them.

Mann has created a film that, aside from the prospect of the cast (but not the actual way they're used), has nothing to offer. It's overlong (Collateral is the only one of his last 6 films he's brought in under 130 mins), the action sequences are sub par and drag, the script is poor, which makes the acting suffer, and on top of that aesthetically (both visually and sonically) it's a bust. It's almost impressive the non-performances he gets from a cast that are clearly talented and just how superficial the whole thing is in every single imaginable way. A shining light for future filmmakers on how not to make a big budget commercial film, Mann's career continues to be an insulting shadow of its former self.

This is one of those films that if it didn't star Gael Garcia Bernal then there is absolutely no chance it would ever have made it into British multiplexes. That is not to say that it has got some decent distribution is an inherently bad thing, all too often very commercial foreign language fare (like this) gets overlooked as for some the prospect of watching a film with subtitles necessitates an intellectual subject matter. Not so, and sometimes nice little films like this find their way through.

Rudo y Cursi is a reunion of Bernal and Diego Luna from one of Mexico's most famous exports of the last decade, Alfonso Cuaron's Y tu mama tambien, and this film is directed by the co-writer of that film: Cuaron's brother Carlos. It follows two half-brothers who are spotted by a wandering football talent scout (who narrates the film) and plucked from obscurity and start playing for different professional teams.

There aren't too many surprises along the way, this is very familiar stuff with more than a few cliches, but the charm of both actors carry them through and the film with them. As a piece of filmmaking it is extremely solid, impressively so. Never anything too showy, it doesn't show the actors doing too much on the pitch the way Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas did in last year's Linha de Passe and the family dramas at the centre of this are much more lightweight than in that film but if anything it works much better because of it.

There are some nice supporting turns, Guillermo Francella as the scout-come-agent is very amusing and steals the show and Bernal's music video is utterly hilarious. So a very simple little film which does exactly what it says on the tin, for football fans, fans of the people involved, or just if you fancy seeing Bernal's rear end on multiple occasions, then it's worth checking out.