Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone

2001, US, directed by Chris Columbus

Last Ride

2009, Australia, directed by Glendyn Ivin

Hugo Weaving as a criminal on the run, trying to bond with his son. Though the film makes liberal use of well-worn tropes, the bond between Weaving and the young boy (Tom Russell) has a sincerity and a realism that's quite affecting at times -- it's not hard to believe in the idea of them as father and son, however dysfunctional -- while the photography/use of the Australian landscape is excellent, without descending too far into clichés about the outback as a malevolent character in its own right. Indeed, right at the moment I assumed the film was going to proceed in that direction it creates a little victory for the characters and restores the focus on father/son. 

Mother

2009, South Korea, directed by Bong Joon-ho

White Material

2009, France, directed by Claire Denis

Isabelle Huppert in is top form here, while Claire Denis's work is typically strong, and less elliptical than in some of her 2000s work -- which is perhaps the more effective for this particular film. The sense of societal collapse is cogently and succinctly sketched in, and if I still have some vague sense of discomfort about the depiction of the African continent, Denis is trying to tease out something very challenging, including in her critique of the role of white settlers, about both her own relationship with Africa and cinematic depictions thereof.

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days

2003, US, directed by Donald Petrie

Lost in La Mancha

2002, UK/USA, directed by Keith Fulton & Louis Pepe

One of those films where you wonder at the sheer volume of self-incriminating material committed to tape/film at the time -- the filmmaking process here has a kind of dual aspect, with the actual film accompanied by a filmed reflection on that film as it evolves or, in this case, fails to evolve. The sense of an unraveling dream is quite unnerving, though it's never entirely clear exactly how the plug gets pulled -- it just all somehow falls apart, just as it all somehow seemed to come together at the beginning with a variety of financiers and other players. Gilliam, for his part, is remarkably sanguine most of the time -- deeply committed to his vision, and infectiously enthused by the few moments they do manage to commit to celluloid, but perhaps naive that the whole thing could have worked at all.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

2005, US, directed by Shane Black

Perhaps it was my mood, but this didn't work for me although I'd long wanted to catch up with it. There's nothing wrong with a good neo-noir, even one that thumbs its nose at genre conventions (see, for instance, Goodbye Paradise), but this comes across as entirely too self-satisfied, and I didn't warm to Robert Downey Jr's lead character.

Mea culpa

2014, France, directed by Fred Cavayé

The latest in Cavayé's series of action movies is roughly on the same level as his previous film, A bout portant, promising much more grit than it ultimately delivers. I only gave it a shot because of Vincent Lindon, and the actor does what he can with the conventional material. I do like a well-made action film and while Cavayé has the occasional moment of skill in chase sequences he has no idea of how to communicate space and proximity so the sense of peril is fatally undermined. That derailed two big set pieces, and the shame is all the greater since there aren't many French directors seriously committed to this kind of lean genre material. 

La France

2007, France, directed by Serge Bozon

Serge Bozon appeared poised to break out, at least on the critical front, with this film but he hasn't been all that active in the interim despite the strengths on display in this  tale of a young woman who goes in search of her husband after she receives a cryptic letter from the front in 1917, disguising herself as a man in order to begin her odyssey and quickly linking up with a small group of soldiers who have been separated from their regiment. The war, obviously, is a constant presence whether it's through the men's accounts of their experiences, their fear of running across spies or enemy soldiers and, from time to time, the rumble of heavy artillery in the distance, but we never see the front lines -- this is a different kind of war story, and one where Bozon quite consciously wants to evoke our imagination of the trenches without depicting them. 

To my mind, the strongest French-language analogy is with Maurice Pialat's La Maison des bois, particularly the episode in which a battalion of troops passes through town -- a visible sign of the war but without any direct depiction of the fight. Bozon, like Pialat, is also strong on the bone-weariness of these men, but unlike Pialat he doesn't hew to a strictly realist template, interspersing the film with unusual and anachronistic musical interludes that nonetheless do an effective job of channeling and enhancing the humanity of the men we gradually get to know. I was very impressed by the film, and by the performances -- Testud is excellent as the coltish "boy" while many of the actors playing the soldiers have striking moments in the sun, gifted some fine lines by Bozon.

Hitch

2005, US, directed by Andy Tennant

A com-rom rather than a rom-com, in the sense that the first half is much more focused on the comic setup with the second half squeezing in the hitherto undernourished romantic plotline. The problem is that despite the romantic partners being absolutely charming, they can't hope to compete with the comic chemistry generated between Will Smith and Kevin James, so everything afterwards seems like a bit of a disappointment. Still, there are enough laughs in the first half to just about sustain the momentum when James goes offscreen for an extended period.

Lucy

2014, France, directed by Luc Besson

Hardly surprising that Besson takes the lessons of the Besson school and applies them with considerable force: fast plotting, breathless/kinetic action, a dash of humour, plus an engaging actress. It's everything you'd expect from a production line of considerable talent.

Cars

2006, US, directed by John Lasseter

I've seen the beginning of this a half dozen times with my older son -- and heard the beginning another half dozen times while driving -- so it was mostly just a relief to find out where the story went. As with most Pixar films, I find the artistry extraordinary but the overall effect so calculated that it leaves me a little cold.

Chrystal

2004, US, directed by Ray McKinnon

A very affecting slice of Southern Gothic that manages to invoke many common images of the American south without ever belittling the setting; indeed, as much as several of the characters are spectacularly unpleasant there's a frankly celebratory aspect to the film, too, particularly with regard to landscape and some of the region's small pleasures (music on a porch, a catfish fry). There's a little too much going on at times -- one subsidiary plotline seems awkwardly shoehorned in and adds little to the main narrative, as though it was pared back late in the day -- but for the most part, Chrystal works as a fine and sometimes blackly funny bit of authentically regional cinema, the kind of thing that is inevitably produced outside the Hollywood circuit these days.

Gespenster

2005, Germany, directed by Christian Petzold

Most of Christian Petzold's work is set in small-town Germany -- even where he uses Wolfsburg as the title for a film, the bulk of the action takes places on the fringes of that town -- but here Berlin has the same depopulated feel as Petzold's provincial locations: there's almost none of the bustle you might associate with the city, and the director prioritizes a sense of sterility, the institutional feel, in almost all of his locations. His characters, too, are often devoid of the range of emotions one might expect -- they struggle to express themselves, or behave unexpectedly, even inappropriately. The title can be taken quite literally in that regard: many of the characters seem to be shadows of normal human beings, seeking connections but failing to establish them in the midst of a plot that would likely descend into melodrama in other hands. Julia Hummer is especially good in the lead role -- a lost waif if ever there was one, spiky and difficult yet still vulnerable.

Mission: Impossible II

2000, US, directed by John Woo

Chosen purely because it was on the hospital television when we needed a distraction, the title was inadvertently appropriate: my wife was making slow progress through her second very long labour (a mere eighteen hours on the official clock, though we thought the hospital was ungenerous in that regard). The high-water mark for John Woo's American career, the camera operators got quite the workout here, what with Woo's penchant for filming destruction from multiple angles and at multiple speeds. Even at the time, the conjunction between aspects of Woo's Hong Kong aesthetic and the slickness of a Hollywood superproduction was incongruous, though one of the successes of the MI franchise is certainly the sense that each film has a distinct visual identity -- unlike, say, the Bond films, at least until the most recent phase of that franchise.

Love Actually

2003, UK, directed by Richard Curtis

I know the film is silly, I know it violates all kinds of rules of cinematic good taste that I should adhere to, but I also know that it happened to be the perfect film while sitting beside my wife as she was in the early hours of labour. I'm still conflicted as to what the film says about love and obligation -- the Laura Linney storyline is by far the worst in that regard, somehow suggesting that because one has significant familial obligations one cannot also have romantic love -- but it still has treasurable moments, none more so than the instant when Emma Thompson, silently grieving the collapse of her world, reaches down and straightens out a crease in a bedspread. I've no idea whether she or Richard Curtis suggested the gesture, but the it adds a terrific sense of the show-must-go-on reality of domestic life, whether the show continues to feature the same players or not.

L'Amico di famiglia

2006, Italy, directed by Paolo Sorrentino (The Family Friend)

I'm starting to sense a theme in Paolo Sorrentino's films -- the first three films I've seen are all portraits of isolated or solitary men, twisted by circumstance and unable to pursue conventional lives and friendships. Women are certainly present in these tales, but almost always on the periphery: even where, as here, they take an active role in shaping the action, it's mostly as seen from the male perspective, with Sorrentino taking a greater interest in the consequences for his central characters (The Consequences of Love...). As stylishly constructed as Sorrentino's other films, L'Amico di famiglia is also somewhat more insistently oddball, from the opening shot (though that is, eventually, explained in fairly logical terms). That may reflect the worldview of the titular friend, Geremia De Geremei, played by Giacomo Rizzo -- a sort of Italian Ron Perlman -- in a performance that's devoid of vanity; Geremia, a moneylender, an unattractive man, both mentally and physically, and Rizzo never looks for the audience's sympathy, with every minor shot at redemption quickly turned around by a man constitutionally unable to avoid the temptation to take
his pound of flesh.

Un Prophète

2009, France, directed by Jacques Audiard

Audiard has never lack ambition -- after getting his directorial feet wet with the retrospectively fairly straightforward character study/thriller Regarde les hommes tomber he quickly took on the Occupation period with Un Héros très discret -- but this still feels more expansive than most of his previous work, partly because of the ample running time and more especially for the attempt to create a comprehensive picture of the criminal underworld, in and outside prison. Indeed, Audiard somehow manages to squeeze a storyline similar to that of an entire season of the French crime drama Engrenages into 150 minutes, compressing time without compromising our understanding of the central character's ambitious progress up the criminal food chain.

As a portrait of the prison world, it's dispiriting at best: no re-education here, except in the intricacies of criminal methods and leadership, and there are fascinating insights into the creative ways to turn guards and other prison personnel in order to effect special privileges or introduce a variety of contraband. The final shot makes abundantly clear just what we've been watching, and perhaps best exemplifies the central character's Godfather-esque self-image as an essentially benevolent family man presiding over an empire of great financial and physical power -- self-deception being a critical component of such a rise through the ranks, not least in order to deal with some of the more extreme choices he has made.

Le Conseguenze dell'amore

2004, Italy, directed by Paolo Sorrentino (aka The Consequences of Love)

Paolo Sorrentino's films, like those of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, make a fine argument for returning to similar themes and styles if there's more to be mined from those ideas -- Il Divo shares a lead actor, a bravura style, and a tone with Sorrentino's earlier feature, for instance, but there's no sense of a director simply spinning his wheels. Sorrentino is even able to reproduce a similar scene without it seeming stale: here, a particularly serious moment is accompanied by a rendition of the Ornella Vanoni pop song Rossetto e cioccolato, just as Il Divo features a wonderful sequence intercutting the lead character with a performance of a soaring Renato opus. Perhaps it's a personal sensitivity, but the rhythms of his scenes, where a great deal of the communication and effect are wordless, seems to work especially well for me -- there's a hypnotic quality to his camera movements, prowling corridors over and over (à la Marienbad, with similar dreamlike effect) or unexpectedly rising over the crown of a character's head, revisiting and insistently reworking the same perspectives to give us a sense of a most unusual, cloistered life.

Il Divo

2008, Italy, directed by Paolo Sorrentino

In the second half of Paolo Sorrentino's enthralling portrait of Giulio Andreotti, there's a scene where the politician sits quietly with his wife and watches a Renato Zero concert on television. Zero sings a soaring version of I Migliori Anni Della Nostra Vita, a choice of title that's of course entirely apposite to the film's portrayal of Andreotti as a man who reaches the political pinnacle while barely ever appearing to enjoy a single moment of his profess life (making him the most un-Italian of his countrymen). It's a bravura sequence, carefully splicing images of Zero on stage with the unspoken understanding between Andreotti and his wife, and cutting with a sudden silence to the next scene -- a fine example of Sorrentino's confident showmanship and also of how that showmanship is always in the service of his story. Not incidentally, it also showcases his instinct for music, whether Italian or English-language pop, classical, or original soundtrack (the intoxicating marriage of music to image reminds me Olivier Assayas's films). Sorrentino doesn't lay claim to definitive truth here -- any account of Andreotti's professional life is filled with silence and shadow -- but the cumulative picture of Italy's rotten political scene is quite devastating.