Revanche (Götz Spielmann, 2008)

****
Austria



A credible, consummately crafted Euro art-thriller. Carefully premeditated - and perhaps a little too precisely, since you always know exactly where it's headed. But the scenes retain a charge all the same, largely thanks to writer-director Götz Spielmann's sure and subtle feeling for sound and composition and what they can reveal about things we can't necessarily see or hear.

Little Man, What Now? (Frank Borzage, 1934)

****
USA



Frank Borzage is saddled with a portentous, awkward mediocrity of a screenplay - about the state of [un]employment in Weimar Germany, no less - and he renders it into something tender and radiant. It's still preachy, to be sure, but rather than delusions of grandeur, there is conviction behind the humanity.

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)

***½
USA



Christopher Nolan delivers another solemn, bloated Batman spectacle in a trendy haze of profundity. Thanks to Heath Ledger's hypnotic, maniacal Joker however, the sense of perpetually lurking evil is stronger than at any point in the franchise since Tim Burton bailed. So the film maintains its pull even though: Christian Bale looks constipated throughout (and when the mask comes on, he also sounds it); the fights are not visceral, or impressionistic, or anything other than a mess; and the epic, convoluted climax is beyond silly.

Frost/Nixon (Ron Howard, 2008)

**
USA



Peter Morgan continues his pattern of taking a well-documented historical conflict, padding it with exposition and convincing a frightening number of people that he has contributed something. Ron Howard may as well have been directing over the phone and Frank Langella’s Nixon feels like one of those moderately funny party tricks that won’t go away (or go down in volume) even after you’ve chuckled politely, turned around and tried to start up a more productive conversation.

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On a side note, even by AMPASS standards, what a miserable Best Picture selection 2008 was...

The Raven (Lew Landers, 1935)

***½
USA



At the peak of his powers of enunciation and sinister knuckle formation, Bela Lugosi plays a Poe fanatic with a secret chamber's worth of Poe-inspired torture devices. He controls Boris Karloff by paralysing half his face with hilarious google-eye make-up. This is by no means one of the essential Universal horrors, but it's wonderfully cheesy and wonderfully eerie.

The Class (Laurent Cantet, 2008)

*****
France



High school was like this. Exactly like this. Seemingly it still is: barely ever pleasant, or productive, or un-mind-numbing, or unexhausting.

Laurent Cantet doesn’t present you with any people or places that you don’t already know or that you care to revisit. And yet, the children are hypnotic, the tensions are vital, and the dynamics electrifying.

No one in the cast of mostly underage non-actors exhibits a glimmer of awareness of there being a camera in the room and the situations seem to develop day by day, spontaneously, so you don’t notice a plot until one’s just about wrapped. Purely as an achievement in logistics, it’s staggering; and as a piece of cinema – vibrant, exhilarating.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2008)

***
USA



No one will argue that this sentimental-whimsical behemoth was designed and produced with a concrete purpose in mind beyond bagging a bundle of Ampass gold (and maybe dollars). David Fincher apes Robert Zemeckis, Brad Pitt ages backwards (the CGI gives much better face than he does) and the first two hours are soul-crushing. And yet, in the closing hour, as the odd tragedy at the core of F. Scott Fitzgerald's original short story breaks through, neither the pandering nor the staggering silliness that is the Hurricane Katrina framing device manage to fully mute its resonance.

The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)

*½
USA



The Tudors get sexed up for the Gossip Girl set. And when Anne Boleyn exchanges serene looks with her sister to imply the courts have set her free, director Justin Chadwick craftily cuts to a wide shot to reveal - gasp! - Anne has been sent to the scaffold instead!!

Eric Bana and his juiced up pecs play Henry VIII, Natalie Portman is a superbitch Anne, with Scarlett Johansson as her docile sister whose love for Luke Perry is bland and true. As ever Bana is stiff in all the wrong parts, Johansson is her usual blank self and while Portman grapples valiantly with a British accent and stolid period-speak, it's to little avail.

Duplicity (Tony Gilroy, 2009)

***
USA



Two warring corporations (each with an irrepressible scenery-chewer at the helm) send Julia Roberts and Clive Owen in smug pursuit of a priceless formula and erotic charge across places like Dubai, Zurich, Rome and New York. Sex never looked so difficult. Someone had the rich idea to surname Roberts' high tech conwoman something that sounds like 'Stanwyck'. Ah, if only...

Elegy (Isabel Coixet, 2008)

***
USA



Ben Kingsley, Penelope Cruz, Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard and Dennis Hopper portray several basic facets of Philip Roth's neurosis. Isabel Coixet oppresses you with good taste in the sincere hope that you'll overlook the white middle-aged male over-privileged egomaniac's festival of self-pity which she is facilitating. It isn't subtle, or incisive, or in any sense productive, but while it's on, it's sufficiently engaging. This is in part due to the shock of experiencing marketable faces in unapologetically adult-oriented fare, as well as partly to the sensitivity and questions with which said faces imbue the rather harried material.

The Good Fairy (William Wyler, 1935)

***
USA



Sweet-faced, faintly tomboyish Margaret Sullavan is released from her orphanage to become an usher in a movie theatre. In due course she inadvertently seduces the Wizard of Oz, while falling in love with an even-smarmier-than-usual Herbert Marshall. The misunderstandings that ensue are naturally zany, and also a tad shrill and monotonous. The action takes place in 'Budapest', so that people can wreak havoc with surnames like Ginglebusher and Sporum and Schlapkohl.

A young Preston Sturges wrote the script, which seems laboured in the same way as his late-period misfires, but in a similar fashion also features some singular highlights: early on, an uncanny overwrought-movie-within-a-movie parody clearly signals the kind of brilliant lunatic that could later come up with a Sullivan's Travels or a Lady Eve.

Ruggles of Red Gap (Leo McCarey, 1935)

***½
USA



This repressed-fish-out-of-water comedy's venerable reputation might lead you to expect something more polished and less dewy-eyed-jingoistic. That said, Ruggles, the Parisian butler won in a poker game by crass mid-Westerners, is perhaps the most understated and beguiling of the three remarkable and remarkably varied characterisations Charles Laughton gave in 1935. And he isn't even the pick of this terrific ensemble: As a drunken loon and Ruggles' original master, Roland Young brings an odd improvisatory deadpan rhythm to each of his scenes that feels decades and decades ahead of its time.

A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935, Max Reinhardt, William Dieterle)

****
USA



Absolutely the final word in Depression era studio excess kitsch: Ancient Greece, as rendered through the merry pranksterism of medieval mythology and Elizabethan backstage shenanigans, is further rendered through a Warner Bros. prestige department intent on out-prestiging the competition with a set that is a mash up of every 'Europe'-set Astaire-Rogers frivolity and Fritz Lang's take on Die Nibelungen. Then you have pint-sized Mickey Rooney - palpably high on something an overworked child actor should never be prescribed - as Puck, and a prima ballerina in a representation of dawn descending upon an enchanted forest, and what looks like a chandelier strewn through every frame. The entire film is heavy-duty 'magical' and all in all: Hypnotic.

In a cast of predictably overripe rascals and over-enunciators, a few manage to muster up some real fire: a radiant Olivia De Havilland in her screen debut, and an unhinged James Cagney at the head of a slew of character comics as the amateur troupe of 'mechanicals' (among whom you'll recognise Joe E. Brown, Jack Lemmon's future suitor, already gaying it up in an early role).

Hands Across the Table (Mitchell Leisen, 1935)

***½
USA



With characteristic pluck Carole Lombard takes on a role that Ginger Rogers would annex for the remainder of the decade: the hardboiled working gal looking to seduce a bankroll only to fall in love against her better judgment. Ralph Bellamy (of course!) is the better judgment and Fred MacMurray, working overtime to pass for quirky and accidentally dashing, is true love. It's second-tier screwball and awkwardly paced, but where future king of women's weepies Mitchell Leisen struggles to deliver on spark, he compensates with a tender, melancholy Depression-era edge. Reportedly he had Ernst Lubitsch mentor him on this one.

Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, 2008)

****½
USA



Jonathan Demme and Jenny Lumet assemble a dysfunctional-family-sized lunatic orgy of profoundly insulated, self-absorbed people and simmer it into a sober, pulsing, humanist slice of Dogme. Effortlessly they secure your patience and compassion even for several flaky personages you wouldn't hesitate to punch in real life.

In fact, it's downright disorienting that nobody seems to be excoriating the Buchmans for their over-privilege and hollow pretences to multi-culti-exoticism. But then the core of this elegant rarity among indie dramedies that set out to wage war on contemporary American upper-financial-bracket living isn't a collection of hipster jabs at the expensive and irrelevant surface. It's about the multitude of often contradictory notes that define a family dynamic. The delicate and the volatile, the cautious and the explosive, the healing and the scarring, the generous and the chilling: Demme, Lumet and their incandescent cast find ways to encompass it all.

The Reader (Stephen Daldry, 2008)

**½
USA/Germany



Bernhard Schlink’s novel was a solid, moderately sophisticated, resolutely commercial exploration of enduring German post-Holocaust guilt, with its primary strength being its sifting of a prestige-packaged-out topic through the repercussions of an illicit erotic attachment between a pubescent wimp and an erratic cipher twice his age.

None of the book’s sincere questioning or sense of time and place survives this ossified, atrociously directed adaptation, whose chief reason for existing is several people’s ravenous Oscar-hunger. It’s a relief that the otherwise lovely Kate Winslet finally has hers, so that she can stop selecting parts based on their FYC-campaigns. But the performance itself is all wrong from her first tentative spurts of a flaky Tscherman akcent through to her insistence on emphasising the cuddly, misunderstood simpleton behind the outwardly cold Nazi and all the way through to her uneasy pitching of a youthful timbre against the dazzlingly 1930s-biopic-pasty aging make-up.

Frozen River (Courtney Hunt, 2008)

***
USA



Melissa Leo is so down on her luck that she has to forego hair product, transport illegal aliens across a frozen river connecting the state of New York to Canada and participate in increasingly implausible plot contrivances in order to make sure her movie takes you exactly where you very quickly figure out it is going. In case you aren't entirely sure where that is, writer-director Courtney Hunt's unremittingly dour aesthetic will give you some extra heads-up. That said, Hunt does keep things relatively tight, the principals are all very very good and her protagonists are afforded more dignity than they generally get away with in festival-prize-shovelling liberal-guilt-driven indie crossover-hopefuls.

Boogie (Radu Muntean, 2008)

***½
Romania



Due to the unfussy low-key-ness and principal cast of unlikable slackers at quarter-life-crisis, it's too easy to miss out on the caustic insight and preciseness with which Radu Muntean and his script team capture the mindset of crushing disappointment at having inherited the paralysis that is responsibility towards others, which seems to be defining a generation throughout contemporary Eastern Europe, and probably further.

Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008)

**½
UK



Life in the slums of Mumbai is a video clip, the citizens of Mumbai communicate in expository dialogue and when Dev Patel tenses up his face in an expression that uncannily resembles other, lesser actors struggling to disguise their self-consciousness at being asked to emote before a camera and a 20+ person crew, it’s merely a sign of his time- [and logic-]defying love for an orphan that has blossomed into the face of Estee Lauder.

Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006)

****
USA



David Lynch introduces you to another peppy Hollywood starlet familiarly mixing an illicit romance with a Hollywood project shrouded in intrigue and Eastern European curses. Then he has his characteristically seedy avant-garde conceptual epic do all those phrases people use to describe films they can’t get a grasp on: obliterating conventions, overthrowing narrative, fragmenting, bifurcating, refracting upon itself, embracing dream logic, temporal what-not etc.

So yes, first and foremost, this three-hour cryptic-ominous sensory offensive is an unwieldy thing – exhilaratingly so for at least one full hour, before it starts veering back and forth between visceral absorbing horror and commendable experimentation falling embarrassingly flat (often due to crude miscasting). At all times however, it offers you the singular, enthralling experience of watching Laura Dern hit notes of astonishing force and rawness and clarity in phenomenally dodgy mini-DV resolution.

It’s hard to conclude on Lynch’s ultimate and core point, but it may very well have something to do with how assembling a glamourous identity (the prime Western commodity?) is only half-living, and how you must not only shed (and asphyxiate and disembowel and pulverise) this identity but embrace and transcend the absolute nadir of human experience (Hollywood Boulevard whoredom, some more disembowelling, oblivion) if you are to rise to a state of completeness and really live. So, all in all, proceed with caution, but by all means, proceed.

Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes, 2008)

***
USA



In order to warrant putting your name across one of the great literary works of a given century, you have to bring to it life, something fresh - something more. And Sam Mendes' adaptation is unquestionably something less. The context of the harsh idyll of 1950s Connecticutt and the notion of whether this is the culprit that has oppressed the Wheelers or whether the Wheelers have done their own oppressing but blame only their environment: that is, the crux of Richard Yates' wrenching novel - well, that is gone. The notion of Frank Wheeler being prematurely shoved into marriage and his dad's job, and of April Wheeler's life amounting to the perpetual crushing of a horrific cry of anguish. Fractions of these do translate, and there are glimmers of an authentic-seeming and telling dynamic between the Wheelers that hints at something bigger and shattering, but inevitably they are something of a pale copy. The majority of the film is pale, and also stiff.

Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008)

***
USA



It's difficult to criticise this hagiography of the patron saint of gay rights in times when said rights are taking a fresh trashing. But Harvey Milk's legacy has nothing to do with an ensemble of earnest, nobly-intentioned actors purging hefty chunks of exposition to try reduce an unwieldy man's life into a two-hour running time.

That said, for as long as you're watching Sean Penn, it's as though you're watching a much better movie. Beyond the fact that he sells the exposition and manages a phenomenal bit of mimicry, and beyond the fact that nothing about his posture and cadences and goofy grinning is remotely recognisable from previous Sean Penn joints, it's always gratifying to follow a generous, wonderfully tactile and vibrant character thriving over the my-personality-is-defined-by-a-neat-chronology-of-unceasing-dignity creed of the biopic.

Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster, 2008)

***
UK/USA



Dubious psychoanalysis and fluffed-up topicality have infiltrated the superhero genre, so that now Daniel Craig has to play Jason Bourne playing James Bond. Fortunately no one told Mathieu Amalric about the series' gloomy-sexy revamp. It's a shame he didn't grow a moustache in time so he could twirl it and also that no one passed him a fluffy white cat so he could stroke it. He resurrects a brand of hysterical Eurotrash villain that I at least presumed extinct since the 70s. He's either playing in a different movie to the rest of the cast or he is the only one among them to pinpoint the cheap and shiny and delightfully convoluted bit of trash hiding behind the murky hand-held world-economy-referencing gloss.

Changeling (Clint Eastwood, 2008)

***
USA



If the world were a Clint Eastwood picture, it would run very very smoothly, since any prospective threat to the system would announce itself efficiently, whether by slurring their words, smirking lasciviously, breaking into a loony grin, resembling a lesbian or adopting an irregular, indecipherable yet malevolent accent while sending a bereft mother to the nuthouse for undermining their power.

Despite Eastwood's harried tactics, it's impossible not to get drawn into this tale of true and sensational events surrounding the disappearance of 9-year-old Walter Collins from his mother's home in late-20s California. The two face expressions - half-stifled anger and wrenching cries - which Angelina Jolie selects to represent Christine Collins do win over your sympathy, inextricably linked as they are to the fact that there once truly was a Christine Collins, whose child really was abducted, who - with frightening conviction - was saddled with a dodgy replacement, and who - for habitual reasons of convenience and patriarchy - was committed to a psychiatric ward when crying foul.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, 2008)

****
USA



Even at their most piercing, Woody Allen's nervous fantasias romanticised every chunk of grit and ethnicity out of New York, so it's not unsettling that he sets this breezy cynical jaunt in a Barcelona straight out of a Lonely Planet guide. Even if the settings feel vaguely inauthentic (since you get the sense this isn't by accident, you can still suck in all their touristy splendour without feeling guilty), the same can't be said about the neuroses.

Rebecca Hall, Javier Bardem, an annihilating Penélope Cruz and an out-of-her-league Scarlett Johansson exchange fluids in a heightened rom-com key, but there is a deft, acute seventy-something-year-old orchestrating their shenanigans, with his mind on something real and fascinating. As for those pesky, inevitable cries of misogyny, they seem particularly out of place in this study of a thinking and layered woman with a conscience scrounging to keep afloat in a [unisex] sea of charming idiots.

Burn After Reading (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2008)

****
USA



A bunch of tenacious lunatics with low emotional IQ's and single-minded pursuits run around Washington D.C. with an inflated sense of their own importance in the way the world runs. This leads to many hilarious and convoluted mishaps and a sneaky grand statement about the moral relativism, paranoia and blinding self-interest that have defined the decade.

R.I.P. Paul Newman (1925-2008)

A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008)

*****
France



Raw, unwieldy, rambunctious gorgeousness. Other than Almodovar, no one in the world makes movies as rich and alive as Arnaud Desplechin's. He sends you off on several bubbly tangents at any one time and inundates you with a generosity of spirit and novelistic detail, so that you're caught completely off-guard every time either of these tangents evolves into a complex revelation (and they all do). For two and a half hours (not nearly long enough, I say!) he gives you life at a higher register. You can only leave the cinema in a gratified stupor. You won't want to shake it off.

Autumn Sonata (Ingmar Bergman, 1978)

****½
Sweden



Had Ingmar Bergman delivered this familiarly harrowing mother-daughter confessional in the lead-up to his masterful Cries and Whispers, it would have been held in much higher regard. Instead it was [and is] often greeted as practically an anticlimax, since it doesn't quite match the ferocity and lacerating insight of that other work. This is particularly unfair since: a) what work could?; and b) the layers, the questions, the conflicting and therefore revealing motives with which Ingrid Bergman (in what is unquestionably her greatest performance) and Liv Ullmann invest their roles are worth tears, adulation and multiple viewings, at least.

In a Year with 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978)

***½
Germany



With brutal commitment Volker Spengler plays Elvira Weishaupt, a transsexual with a mauled heart dissecting her past in search of the cause[s] behind her present state of [utter and harrowing] destitution.

To brand this Fassbinder's 'darkest' or 'most personal' would be an exaggeration, not to mention beside the point. But it is infused with a sense of purging and a despairing search for answers, which it is tempting to tie back to the then-recent suicide of Fassbinder's lover (the film was openly mounted as a coping mechanism).

1978 was otherwise no less busy than other years for Fassbinder - he had already delivered two features before this one was conceived and the film does bear the marks of a fast job, both positive and negative. The mad rush of invention and catharsis that comes from direct purging onto celluloid crystallises into sequences of galvanising force. But then there are others, particularly in the film's later sections, that don't really hold together, even if the concepts behind them are touching.