Zulu

1964, UK, directed by Cy Endfield

Although it's tempting to lump Zulu together with other epics of the empire in its various guises - most obviously David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia - Cy Endfield's film attempts something both more limited, an account of a single military action, and perhaps trickier, that is, presenting that action in a manner that avoids caricature of either side. Of course, the British viewpoint is privileged throughout since the camera, for the most part, remains within the British army post at Rorke's Drift, but the film is a rare account that emphasizes not African savagery or naïveté but rather the tactical and strategic intelligence of the Zulus, who implement a coherent battlefield plan - sketched out for us by an Afrikaner - and who then make a rational calculation about the virtues of continued engagement. The film does, nonetheless, play loose with certain aspects of the historical records, inserting several sequences - most notably a singing "battle" - for dramatic purposes and underplaying some particularly brutal British acts, such as the killing of wounded Zulu.

Endfield provides us with virtually no context for Rorke's Drift beyond an indication that it is a continuation of a battle fought earlier in the day at Isandlwana - a decision which robs the film of any sense of the African motivation for the battle - and focuses immediately on the reactive efforts of the small British garrison to improvise a defense. Endfield shot parts of the film on location, and the outdoor sequences are terrifically impressive, with the tiny outpost dwarfed by the Drakensberg mountains, made more ominous still by the presence of Zulu fighters appearing from on high in several shots. There is, though, an occasional sense of disconnect from the interior sequences, many of which were shot back in England, and which sometimes have a more jocular tone that feels remote from the fighting outside (those inside the buildings, either prisoners or invalids, don't take up weapons until quite late in the film, which seems extraordinary given the numerical disparity between the Zulu regiments and British defenders).

Although Rorke's Drift is remembered as one of the great imperial rearguard actions, a disaster in the making that turned into an improbable victory - the more notable, in both military and propaganda terms, for coming immediately after the comprehensive defeat at Isandlwana - Endfield's presentation, even while enumerating the honors won in the course of the fighting, implies that there's little heroic about any such battle. The camera pans away from the guns and bayonets on the stockade to a carpet of Zulu bodies that must surely have recalled, for anyone watching in 1964, the horrific images of body upon body that emerged when the concentration camps were liberated (the sequence in Zulu is almost in black and white, unlike the vivid colours elsewhere in the film, making the analogy even clearer). It's a fascinating reappraisal of the realities of imperial conquest, a film that undermines conventional propaganda even as it reinforces the standing of Rorke's Drift in British historical memory.

L'Assassinat du Père Noël

1941, France, directed by Christian-Jaque

As with so much of French cinema during the occupation era, L'Assassinat du Père Noël is set in an enclosed community - a snowbound Alpine village in this case - that it's tempting to interpret as a sort of metaphor for occupied France, and particularly for the threat of corruption from within in the form of collaboration. Accusations of collaboration no doubt rang in the ears of director Christian-Jaque (and others, like Henri-Georges Clouzot, then also in the employ of the German-controlled Continental Films), and obviously obliged them to be rather indirect in their critique. As Susan Hayward has written, though, it's almost equally easy to interpret the film, and others of the period, as a paean to a France of the past, in other words to find in it a rather conservative, even vaguely Pétainist viewpoint.* It's perhaps that ability to be all things to all people - and, crucially, to appear innocuous to the German censors - that accounts for the film's substantial success when first released.

Although the film announces itself as a whodunit, the promised plotline is ultimately rather unimportant, with the question of Father Christmas's killer not even raised until well past the halfway point in the film. Instead, Christian-Jaque spends his time serving up a detailed portrait of the village, populated - indeed over-populated - with a variety of eccentrics, not the least of whom is the baron, just returned from many years abroad to cast his sinister shadow over the village. Harry Baur, one of the great stars of the era, and shortly to die in the custody of the Gestapo, plays a local craftsman, a globe manufacturer, who dresses up as Santa Claus each year, and he's especially amusing in the sequences in which Santa comes under the increasing influence of the alcohol with which each and every family rather liberally plies him.

As David Cairns has noted, Christian-Jaque employs a highly mobile, eye-catching camera, moving around within both the village and the interior spaces - a cosy inn, a rather bleak castle, a workshop - to explore both the nooks and crannies and their inhabitants, and he makes good use of the unusual, snowy location, perhaps most obviously in the atmospheric nighttime scenes when two rambunctious boys go exploring. Given the shadows in these sequences, I'm guessing that they may have been shot "day for night," but they're still filled with mystery and a sense of danger - much more than the main intrigue. That plot is the film's weakest element, thankfully balanced by an intriguing group of character actors and the prowling, curious camera.

*Susan Hayward, French National Cinema, revised edition 2005.

Red Riding

2009, UK, directed by Julian Jarrold (1974), James Marsh (1980) and Anand Tucker (1983)

The shot that introduces us to Yorkshire in Red Riding is almost identical to that in The Damned United, also based on a book by David Peace, with a car driving up a rain-soaked road, carrying a man leaving behind experiences in the south for an unpredictable future. Other than the original author, however, the two projects have little in common: where The Damned United focused on one individual's odyssey, Red Riding takes on the police and broader social culture of Northern England in the 1970s.

Peace, and his cinematic adapters, interweave real events – the Yorkshire Ripper murders, and vaguer references to the murder of Lesley Molseed, which led to a miscarriage of justice, among other notorious cases – with fictional characters and plotlines, creating a dark, despairing portrait of Northern culture. There’s nothing celebratory about the North here, except between an inner circle of corrupt policemen who believe they can make their own rules, and even the potential heroes are almost all terribly flawed, with justice compromised at best.

There's an almost complete lack of humour in the first two episodes, which does occasionally make for a rather dour four initial hours. Anand Tucker seems to recognize that there's only so far he can push the audience, leavening his final segment with the occasional flash of mordant wit and also creating some sense of limited redemption, albeit of a very circumscribed kind given what's taken place over the course of the trilogy. Tucker also finds quiet moments that reveal a real humanity between one of his lead characters, a rumpled, sad-sack lawyer, and a young woman with whom he crosses paths, nicely balancing what we slowly realize were much less innocent interactions in the earlier episodes between a priestly character (played by Peter Mullan) and those to whom he ministers.

The three directors shot their episodes on different film stocks (Tucker uses HD video), and each segment consequently has a rather different feel. The opening section, set in 1974, was shot on 16mm and positively reeks with the cigarette smoke and alcohol in which the story is thoroughly embedded, and which are key elements of the retrograde social structure that Peace described in his books, but Jarrold also finds something beguiling and warm in sequences shot both in down-at-heel bars and luxurious homes.

By contrast, the middle section, on 35mm, more of a classic police procedural involving the assignment of a new officer (Paddy Considine, excellent as always) to an apparently stagnant case, has a harsher tone, exemplified in the settings that James Marsh chooses - a grim bunker-like document room, or the toilets in a police station - and he comprehensively undermines virtually every hint of heroism among the police characters who are at the core of the story; it becomes, in the end, a situation in which we're invited to choose we least dislike. That, ultimately, is an idea that is woven through all three films. That the result is compelling - I watched the three films back-to-back in the theatre - rather than repellent is testament to the skill of the three filmmakers in creating an absorbing through-line within a tremendous mass of diverting detail, character, and subplot.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

2009, US/UK, directed by Wes Anderson

Having grown up on Roald Dahl's original book, I was somewhat skeptical of this transatlantic adaptation, which hybridizes the material by inserting American accents into a very English country setting, but after about five minutes of Wes Anderson's beguiling film it occurred to me that linguistic accuracy is perhaps beside the point in a story that features an urbane talking fox.

Anderson has a great sense of the particular charms of stop-motion animation, as though he'd climbed into the mind of Nick Park without losing sight of his own preoccupations, most obviously the fraught dynamics of family. As in The Royal Tenenbaums in particular, the members of this particular extended family (and wider community) have their share of failings - most notably Mr. Fox's rather puffed-up self-regard - but they're chronicled gently, in ways that never lose sight of the characters' ultimate (and paradoxical) humanity, while there are some brilliant moments of visual and verbal humour.

Notwithstanding my initial misgivings about the American above-the-title talent, the voice work is sublime, particularly George Clooney as the slightly world-weary Mr. Fox and Meryl Streep as his oft-taxed partner Mrs. Fox; despite having the physical form of a pair of animated foxes, they conjure up a wonderfully convincing portrait of a marriage with its occasional tensions and intermittent triumphs.

The Goonies

1985, US, directed by Richard Donner

The Goonies seemed to be on television every other week for a while when I was growing up, and my brothers and I watched it more times than is entirely healthy through our teenage years. The rest of the Friday night audience at the Brattle Theatre had clearly done much the same thing as the screening had very much the feeling of a reunion with an old, perhaps slightly timeworn, friend. Of course, by 2010 standards The Goonies is positively quaint, with no CGI effects and camerawork that actually allows the viewer's eye to focus for a few seconds on each shot.

The ending is even more saccharine than I recalled, and a betrayal, in a sense, of all that has come before, as a group of youngsters navigate the world in the absence of their harried parents, but the young actors are generally charming (for a couple of them, this was a career highpoint), and the film is nicely paced, quickly establishing the coastal setting and getting down to business (the credits efficiently introduce us to the villains of the piece). It's interesting to note in passing that the film is exceptionally cynical about the kind of boosterish development associated with the Reagan years: the youngsters spring into action to prevent their blue collar hometown from being overrun by that worst of business insults, a golf course, and one of their (inadvertent) triumphs involves the creation of chaos at the tennis club.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2009, Sweden/Denmark/Germany/Norway, directed by Niels Arden Oplev

I haven't read the phenomenally popular books which prompted this film and its sequels so I've no sense of their faithfulness to the original material, but the movie version is a classic example of attempting to have it both ways, ripping open the seamy underbelly of Swedish life and condemning the misogyny that lurks in these chilly landscapes while also showing us, in often stomach-churning detail, what bad men do to women.

There's certainly no instinct to tell rather than show on the part of director Niels Arden Oplev, which is a shame because the parts of his film that deal in microfilmed chases are often more compelling than those that reveal artfully created depictions of death, while he also benefits from two excellent lead actors, most obviously Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander, a brittle, punky cyber-detective.

Despite the references to broader political machinations, the intrigue is essentially a closed mystery, with a limited cast of characters and a Poirot/Marple duo to unmask the criminal mastermind. Almost inevitably, the film reveals a long-gestating series of crimes and while there's some satisfaction in seeing the tentacles of justice emerge, I wouldn't have minded if the explanation had turned out to be as mundane and yet inexplicable as the film initially suggests, more Homicide: Life on the Streets than P.D. James; what, after all, is more terrifying than the idea of a truly random, unpremeditated attack that emerges from nothing and disappears again?

Meet Me In St Louis

1944, US, directed by Vincente Minnelli

Vincente Minnelli's films are one of my biggest (American) cinematic blindspots: I'm fairly certain I'd only seen two of his pictures before my encounter with this stunningly beautiful print of Meet Me in St Louis at the Brattle Theatre, and neither of them prepared me for this extraordinary film, a deeply moving evocation of family and place on the verge of transformation by the coming of adulthood and economic boom respectively.

Set over the course of a year, with intertitles designating the passage of time, the film dramatizes the idea of a path not taken, as the family patriarch makes a decision on whether or not to move his family from St Louis; indeed, the film reminded me very much of the 1946 It's a Wonderful Life, which makes the forked road proposition more explicit, with the life that has already been led ultimately proving the richer, more meaningful option.

Of course, Minnelli camouflages many of the more adult themes very effectively, using a riot of colour and music - and Judy Garland at the absolute peak of her powers - to conjure up St Louis as a beguiling place to grow up (privileged). Still, it's hard to not to imagine that contemporary audiences must have found other resonances in the film - as Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests, the bonfire sequence, one of the film's most atmospheric and alarming scenes, surely evoked the contemporary spectacle of book-burnings.

Minnelli's recreation of family life is wonderfully appealing too - a crowded dinner table crammed with opinionated and humorous family members, reminiscent of mealtimes in Hitchcock's Young and Innocent - except that mother/wife is firmly in place here in St Louis, where such an absence would cast an unsustainably dark shadow over the flirtatious goings-on.

House

1977, Japan, directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi (Original title: ハウス, Hausu)

House defies my rating system - mainly instituted at the request of family members who can't tell whether my musings are positive or negative on occasion - since I wavered between rating it as a deranged masterpiece and a complete mockery of the idea of a feature film. The extraordinary 90 minutes certainly seem to be the product of a coherent, if very singular, imagination, and yet there are moments when the shifts of tone and filming style are so outrageously strange you wonder whether the whole thing was planned or concocted in a giant cinematic blender.

Obayashi certainly throws every possible idea up there on the screen to see what sticks, with flashes of animation, slow-motion, freeze-frames, unexpected singing sequences, girl-eating pianos, buttock-biting heads, and a dreamy teacher with a coterie of admiring schoolgirls. There is a plot of kinds - the schoolgirls plan to spend part of the summer with one girl's aunt at the titular house - but the film is only marginally interested in storyline, playing instead with tone, atmosphere and crafting eye-catching effects (although near the end the fevered atmosphere makes it very hard to distinguish what's actually occurring on screen). While I suspect that a few of the laugh moments weren't in the original script, the film has a unique verve and momentum, as well as some brilliant non sequitur moments where everyone acts as though the bizarreness is really nothing to get worked up about even though the audience is attempting to collectively close its gaping jaw.

(It's hard to really capture a film like this in words: imagine the trailer extended to 90 minutes and you're on the right track).

Un Revenant

1946, France, directed by Christian-Jaque

It's unfortunate that the New Wave critic-directors' dismissal of some of their predecessors - the cinéma de papa directors - has been so influential, for its surely one of the reasons that filmmakers like Christian-Jaque, who might well have been celebrated in the Hollywood system, remain under-appreciated today. There is certainly an unevenness to the director's career - as was also true of a director like Julien Duvivier - but there's great skill and assurance to his best works.

The film opens with a back and forth dialogue between brothers-in-law which is constructed like a tennis match, and to which the observers in the room react like spectators in the stands at Roland Garros, revealing from the beginning both the artifice and subtle humour that will underpin much of the film. There's similar, if slightly showy, skill in shots that illustrate the objects in a young man's bedroom, each held to embody one of his qualities or defects, or the sequence, late in the film, where a character takes her leave of Lyon with the camera moving from one bourgeois face to the next while she delivers imaginary farewells.

Of course, the film isn't all, or even principally, about visual style: the dialogue by Henri Jeanson, who worked with Carné and Duvivier among others, bursts at the seams, and Louis Jouvet and his co-stars clearly relish many of the lines with which they're provided. There's a neat counterpoint between two of Jouvet's scenes, with an early sequence where he barely allows a young woman to answer a series of strange questions complemented by a scene late on when Jouvet meets with Marguerite Moreno, in one of her final film roles, who refuses to allow him to intervene for even a syllable.

As with much French cinema of the wartime era, it's tempting to read Un Revenant in terms of its real-world resonances. The film was Louis Jouvet's return to French cinema after an extended absence - he spent most of the war touring South America, having objected to German efforts to censor the works his theatre group wished to present - but the plotline, in which Jouvet, a successful theatre director, returns to Lyon, location of his youthful dreams but also of a profound betrayal, might also be read in terms of the journey from occupied Paris to Vichy France, a revisiting of France's now-sullied past. Certainly, it's hard not to imagine that contemporary audiences did not experience the film that way, and the brief background glimpses of Lyon are a fascinating, unspoken window into the city as it was then.

--

Thanks to David Cairns for providing a copy of Un Revenant; I think the film could benefit from one of his patented blogosphere revivals!

In the Loop

2009, UK, directed by Armando Iannucci

An extension of the BBC political satire series The Thick of It, broadcast between 2005 and 2009, In the Loop is a fine, pointed addition to the faux-documentary genre, presenting the behind-the-scenes events as policy doves and hawks duke it out in Washington and New York with a junior British minister called into play as a key tool (we realize this, but the hapless fellow hasn't a clue what he's gotten himself into).

Although the film never presents itself as an actual documentary, with the usual interviews to camera and so forth, the camerawork and cutting techniques, with brief insert shots of overlapping action, owe much to the documentary style, even if the camera ends up in unexpected locations (the aftermath of a drunken transatlantic fumble, for instance).

Even the poor on-camera behaviour might not seem like a credibility stretch to anyone who has seen the terrific Australian documentary Rats in the Ranks, from 1996, in which the participants in a small-town mayoral race display their cutthroat sides for all to savour. In the Loop, though, has the market sewn up on creative, sustained profanity in the form of a succession of Scottish press handlers, played by Peter Capaldi and, in an especially psychotic turn, Paul Higgins.

The unvarnished cynicism here takes its cue from the process which led up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, although Iannucci and his writers also imply that there's a degree of sheer incompetence that acts in concert with the Machiavellian strategizing of various people in government on both sides of the Atlantic. They also have considerable fun dragging their minister back to earth with a constituency dispute involving a dodgy wall - the constituent, perfectly played by Steve Coogan, intervenes at the most inopportunely amusing of moments.

Labyrinth

1986, US, directed by Jim Henson

Although it's as technically adventurous as The Dark Crystal, Jim Henson's subsequent film doesn't stand up nearly so well to the test of time, partly because it's impossible to take David Bowie's villain seriously - unless being wildly camp is an unfamiliar form of skulduggery - but more fundamentally because the connective tissue featuring a very young Jennifer Connelly is very dated, with Connelly herself not an especially convincing performer at that stage of her career.

The opening scenes feel as though they are lifted from a 1980s teen film, albeit one without the sharp writing and pacing of the genre's most successful entries; indeed, the sequences underline how much more at ease Henson seems when working with puppet/muppet performers rather than actors. Several of the subsequent scenes featuring Connelly in the eponymous labyrinth feel as though they've been drawn from Sesame Street, with the dialogue infused with that air of earnest explanation so familiar from the television series. Although there are several dazzling sequences - especially the scene that channels M.C. Escher's perspective experiments - the singing interludes too often seem unintentionally comical, while there's almost never a real sense of danger that would give the film some edge.

The Dark Crystal

1982, US, directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz

As soon as Avatar colonized screens worldwide, various corners of the Internet sprang to life with speculations and allegations regarding James Cameron's inspirations. From my reading, the main issue seems to have been a lack of appropriate credit, although movies haven't usually been in the business of footnoting their sources and have always, for better or worse, been avid recyclers. Given the amount of Webprint spilled earlier in the year, I'm surprised, then, to find so few comparisons between Avatar and Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal - which, no doubt, has its own lengthy list of inspirations (most obviously The Lord of the Rings books).

Both films feature fairly simple, quasi-mythological narratives set against richly-imagined backdrops, but what continues to make The Dark Crystal dazzling nearly thirty years on is the complexity of the hand-crafted special effects and the extraordinary muppet-style characters. While the central story is quite straightforward, a quest tale in which a young man must prove himself, the backdrops are utterly beguiling, with eye-opening, and often amusing, creative touches. Several of the jungle scenes seem to have reproduced rather faithfully, albeit in digital form, in Avatar, which seemed to only reinforce for me the sense in which each film allows the viewer to become lost in a lush, detailed alternative world for a couple of hours (I know that some people had difficulty moving their gaze around the 3-D Avatar but allowing my eyes to wander throughout the backdrops was one of the film's chief pleasures).

The Square

2008, Australia, directed by Nash Edgerton

Although Nash Edgerton's debut feature feels a little derivative - the debt to the Coen brothers is clear both in his view of humanity and the noirish subject matter - he makes excellent use of his unusual setting, on the southern fringes of Sydney. The location is exploited to atmospheric effect - overhead shots of a burning house, the road bridge that's a feature of local life, the channel across which a dog repeatedly swims - and Edgerton creates a credible local world of work, criminality and evening outings that makes no reference to the nearby big city.

It's unfortunate, then, that the storyline isn't all that compelling: as soon as the main character, Ray (played by David Roberts, primarily an Australian television actor), makes his first unwise decision you sense that the house of cards is about to collapse, and the characters are generally so unappealing and self-serving that it's hard to invest emotionally in their machinations. There are strong moments, like the scene in which Ray tries desperately to call off a plan he's set in motion, or the blackly humorous sequence in which a dog makes yet another channel swim, which show that Edgerton may have a better film in him if he's armed with a more interesting script.

L'Assassin habite... au 21

1942, France, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

David Cairns, who runs the wonderfully eclectic shadowplay, seems to have a knack for drawing my attention to compelling French movies set largely in boarding houses, and I have him to thank again for pointing me to Clouzot's first significant work as a director, which, naturally, takes place in yet another boarding house, the Pension des Mimosas (presumably a pretty direct reference to Jacques Feyder's film of the same name).

Even by the standards of the genre, Clouzot's house is peopled by an eye-catching array of residents - a dollmaker, a failed novelist, an exotic illusionist, a returned colonial doctor - into which a flamboyant detective introduces himself in the hopes of catching a particularly elusive murderer, who leaves a calling card on each of his victims. Although France was under German occupation when the film was made, the capital is transfixed not by the Wehrmacht but by the elusive M. Durand, who seems to be able to attack at will; the opening sequence dramatizes his latest crime, in a tense bit of filmmaking that takes us from a cozy bar to a fearful street.

Despite the heinous crimes that set the film in motion, the tone shifts to a lighter register for most of the remainder of the action, with Pierre Fresnay's cocky Inspector Wens a comic foil rather than an embittered noir detective; Fresnay has to adopt the disguise of a minister to infiltrate the boarding house, where he also has to deal with his girlfriend's attempts to use Durand's infamy for her own career ends.

Although it hardly has an edifying view of human nature, the film is far less bitter than Clouzot's subsequent Le Corbeau, which dealt obliquely with the impact of the Occupation on a small French town. The comic/morbid tone may well have inspired Claude Chabrol's films featuring the equally unconventional Inspector Lavardin: the second of the films features a character not unlike the oddball dollmaker here, although in Chabrol's version the eccentricity is dialed up a notch since the character, played by Jean-Claude Brialy, makes models of eyes rather than entire people.

Up in the Air

2009, US, directed by Jason Reitman

Although I can understand why many people find Up in the Air just a little too satisfied with itself - an accusation that can also be leveled at Jason Reitman's previous outing, Juno - I'm more intrigued by the aspects of the film that strike a chord with audiences, perhaps especially because we saw it in a packed local theatre more than three months after it was first released.

As much as George Clooney's character, Ryan Bingham, is an exaggeration, with his extraordinarily peripatetic existence and his strange, apparently pointless quest for ten million airmiles, his life takes place in the kinds of spaces and locations that the rest of us are familiar with. The film is filled with anonymous offices, interchangeable airports, overcrowded planes and generic motels - but also, on the more positive side, with the kinds of family gatherings more familiar to many viewers than those in majority of Hollywood features, with their glittering tablecloths and vastly overdone weddings.

The film's also surprising successful, in certain scenes, at capturing the reality of mundane office employment - employment which may nonetheless be tremendously important, both financially and psychologically, to the employee. The film doesn't really spring any narrative surprises (the characters experience adversity and epiphany on cue) but the fact that it manages to anchor that narrative in a world not unlike the one in which we live the rest of our lives - burnished with better lines and good-looking actors - perhaps explains why an April crowd was on tap for a December movie.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

2008, US, directed by Nicholas Stoller

While there are several very amusing patches in Forgetting Sarah Marshall they're diluted by far too much padding in a two-hour film that sorely needs the attention of a dispassionate editor. Even assuming that the plot isn't a big deal here - it's not - the film is stretched out far beyond what the material allows: like Judd Apatow, from whose stable the film comes, Nicholas Stoller is so generous in ensuring that each performer has a scene or two in which to shine that he fails to keep any overall sense of rhythm to proceedings. That being said, Russell Brand - playing a character, rocker Aldous Snow, not all that dissimilar to the Russell Brand of British tabloid lore - is exceptionally amusing, the one character who might profitably have been given more screen time (and, right on cue, the character is due to re-appear in a 2010 film).

Mr and Mrs Smith

2005, US, directed by Doug Liman

Although the film was conceived before Brangelina infiltrated our supermarket checkout consciousness, it's quick to exploit our offscreen sense of Brad and Angie's charms, with the opening scene asking them uncomfortable questions in the guise of marital therapy - and leaving us with the same image. Given that we are dealing with a couple of professional assassins the film also manages, in it's own extremely strange way, to provide us with a surprisingly clear-eyed portrait of married life and the challenges of keeping a relationship fresh (not unlike the ways in which P.S. I Love You and The Break-Up shed some unexpected light on modern relationships).

Of course, ultimately it's impossible to reconcile those insights with the idea that these people could have any semblance of a normal emotional exchange given the nature of what they do and the callousness with which they do it: as much as the film has fun with the idea that Brad and Angie, or their gun-toting alter egos, might live in the suburbs and drop over for drinks, it can't do much about the fact that in the end we know there's not a whole of overlap between our lives and theirs.

A Serious Man

2009, US, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

Notwithstanding the setting in a close-knit midwestern Jewish community - not unlike, one is tempted to conclude, the community in which the Coen brothers themselves came of age - the concerns of A Serious Man might prompt nods of recognition from many an African filmmaker, or indeed African viewer. The film dramatises a very fraught balancing act between tradition and modernity, a theme that's at the heart of so many films from Africa, with the eponymous serious man, Larry Gopnik (a great performance from the unfamiliar Michael Stuhlbarg) navigating the alarming shoals of social change in 1960s America.

I'm not suggesting that there's anything conscious in these parallels, simply observing that the film's concerns - exploring ideas about how we conduct ourselves in life, and how we choose to behave when confronted with a concatenation of distressing events - are often those of another form of cinema rather than those of the American mainstream, even though the brothers also manage to have their usual fun with shot choices (looming shots of people in positions of authority), oddball character parts, and elaborately weird dream sequences (at one point Larry asks whether an incident took place the night before, and neither we nor the characters are entirely sure of the answer).

The 1960s is no accident given the way that the decade has come to be seen as a particular moment of change in American society, when a series of long-held values, or at least practices, was called into question. The Coens add to that another, specifically Jewish layer of spiritual questioning, as Larry attempts to reconcile his life experiences with his Judaism, consulting a series of rabbis without ever being entirely convinced of the utility of consulting rabbis. There's a beautiful moment when our expectations are upended as an older rabbi resolves a situation with unexpected grace, revealing his understanding of change more effectively than those who are at least nominally more in touch with youthful concerns.

The Informant!

2009, US, directed by Steven Soderbergh

The source material for The Informant!, Kurt Eichenwald's excellent book on the price fixing conspiracies involving the conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland, plays like a fairly straightforward corporate thriller, structured to reveal information sparingly and chronologically, not unlike Soderbergh's earlier Erin Brockovich and similar tales of corporate malfeasance.

The movie adaptation gives the game away almost immediately, though, using music and a breezy tone to imply that all is not what it seems with Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), the ADM executive who turns whistleblower. From the opening scene, we're privy to Whitacre's rich interior life, revealing both his Mitty-ish view of his role at ADM and his frequent oddball observations on more or less anything in his path (indeed the exclamation mark signals that the approach is likely to be rather different before the film ever begins).

It's a little jarring, then, that the rest of the characters seem to have been shipped in from a different film. The other ADM executives and the FBI agents who work with Whitacre are played entirely straight (Scott Bakula is particularly good as the main agent, Brian Shepard, who seems like a genuinely good guy on both paper and film) in contrast to the comical image of Whitacre, whose moustache is in keeping with the overall presentation. Within the world of the film, though, no-one seems to perceive this dissonance until it's much too late. Still, the film never presents itself as a detective story, and simply turns the tables: Eichenwald revealed a story which seems utterly absurd in retrospect, and Soderbergh simply presents it in straightforward terms to force us to ask questions of everyone who missed what appear to have been alarm bells of the highest order.

As always in Soderbergh's films, the casting is impeccable, with the smaller roles emphasizing, once again, the extraordinarily deep pool of memorable American character actors (it's nice to see Thomas Wilson, Biff in the Back to the Future series, back on screen, for instance). Just like in Erin Brockovich or Out of Sight, Soderbergh is able to craft a moment in which each actor gets a moment to shine - a skill that presumably also came in useful when constructing films with eleven, twelve, and thirteen thieves.

Up

2009, US, directed by Pete Docter & Bob Peterson

Like the previous Pixar film, WALL•E, the opening fifteen minutes or so of Up are so strong that the rest of the film almost seems like a letdown; the filmmakers set the bar so high that you forget the standard for other movies is much lower. The first segment is also the most "adult" portion of the film, a clever and poignant account of a life, and a marriage, that then segues in a late-in-life adventure.

Those opening minutes spring from a lovely homage to the newsreels of old, before the talking stops and the images take over, with wonderfully clever moments like the succession of ties that signifies the passage of time through a working life, or the repeated breaking of a rainy-day jar as dreams cede to domestic obligations. It's extraordinary just how much the filmmakers manage to squeeze into that sequence without distracting us from the emotion of their story.

As with all of Pixar's movies, there's exceptional attention to detail, with the richly textured backgrounds popping with objects that tie in to the story - a pair of tickets to a far-flung destination, for example - but there's also plenty of room for the animators to indulge in flights of fancy, whether it's the steering mechanism for the floating house that's at the center of the film, or the wildlife encountered as the story evolves. Those details, though, are always in the service of a broader story, anchored by two wonderfully engaging characters (voiced by Ed Asner and Jordan Nagai) whose relationship, begun under duress, gradually evolves into a winning partnership.