The Descendants

This year’s Oscars are boiling down to a two-horse race between the rather lovely but unfortunately French film The Artist and this slow moving navel gazer from Alexander Payne. It would be a real travesty of some jingoistic American pride deprived the genuinely innovative and lovely (but French) film of Best Picture in favour of Payne’s decent but slightly tedious film.

Yet another film about a rich American re-evaluating their life, The Descendant’s sees George Clooney plays Matt King, a Hawaiian lawyer and executor of his family’s enormous trust. When Matt’s wife Elizabeth is left in a deep coma by a powerboating accident , he is forced to reconnect with his daughters, teenage tearaway Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and prepubescent bully Scottie (Amara Miller). As he tries to figure out how to shepherd them through life without their mother, Matt discovers some uncomfortable revelations about his wife which make him reassess their life together and how his aloofness has impacted on the rest of the family. All this plays out while Matt is also faced with a massive decision that will enrich his wider family but put one of Hawaii’s smaller islands at risk of ruination.

The Descendants reaches these shores propelled by a wave of Stateside adulation with the film picking up award a-plenty in the last month or so. I have to admit, I can’t fathom why. This is nothing new from Payne. He specialises in movies that feature middle aged (or, indeed, old aged in the case of About Schmidt) characters who find themselves forced to go on a journey (often literal as well as metaphorical) where they re-evaluate their life and reconnect with their past. It all feels a bit been here, done that. Same movie, different stars, diminishing returns.

In fairness to Payne, there’s a surprising lightness of touch which belies the serious subject matter. This is, after all, a film about a man dealing with the aftermath of a terrible accident and his wife’s expressed wish not to be kept alive in a vegetative state. That’s pretty heavy stuff and, yet, The Descendants never feels bogged down in misery. Sure, there are some very down moments but Payne adds just the right amount of levity to ensure that he steers well clear of “Lifetime: Television for Women” territory.

He has also drawn some fine performances from his cast. Clooney is certainly very good here. They’ve gone to considerable effort to make him look less like the suave charmer that you usually expect but the performance has much more depth than that. It is in the moments when Clooney’s breaks down the reserve to give you a glimpse of Matt’s pain at the loss of his wife – however flawed she was – that The Descendants stops feeling terribly arch and clever and starts to feel real. Those moments are few and far between, however. Woodley takes an ostensibly irritating character – a super-petulant teen – and turns her into something more three-dimensional and almost endearing.

Nevertheless, there was something missing from The Descendants for me. There’s no-one to root for or empathise with. Matt seems decent enough but his reaction to his wife’s coma veers wildly from near-indifference to the occasional tear – he’s hard to catch hold of. The absence of any input whatsoever from Elizabeth means that we are left to draw our own conclusions on what kind of person she was and, frankly, I wasn’t too sorry to see her shuffle off to the next life (don’t worry, I’m giving nothing away there). Indeed, by the time the final reel kicked in I was almost wishing she’d hurry up and get on with it. That can't be right, can it?

Stars: ***

Weekend

Andrew Haigh’s simple love story may be based around a gay couple but it will resonate with a much wider audience. Two people hole up together for a weekend pick over live and love and both emerge better for it. It’s a beautifully drawn, insightful and deeply moving film.

Painfully shy, lonely Russell (Tom Cullen) leaves his mate’s house and heads into town to a gay club looking for company. He ends up being rescued from an unsuitable match by the confident and ballsy Glen (Chris New). What starts off as a simple one-night stand grows into something much more as they start to get to know each other properly and they spend the next two days in and out of bed, drinking and taking drugs and sharing their stories with each other. They are from entirely different ends of the spectrum – Russell is out but uncomfortable with the realities of his sexuality, Glen is unashamed of who he is and won’t be cowed by anyone – but they have a deep connection. Their relationship, however brief, will

Haigh does a wonderful job building the relationship in a realistic way – he hasn’t fashioned the kind of Hollywood love story where it’s all walks in the park and montages set to songs about female empowerment. This is a love story played out in the bleak concrete wilderness of one of England’s less glamourous cities and Haigh doesn’t try to gussy up that harsh environment, just as he doesn’t try to dress up the relationship with soft lighting and shots of the two of them staring romantically at each other. It’s messy and imperfect, they don’t always agree and it’s their differences that propel them forward more than anything else.

Cullen delivers one of the performances of the year in Weekend. Russell is the romantic heart of the film, shy and bumbling and utterly endearing despite the reserve. It is absolutely criminal that he hasn’t, at the very least, been recognised with a BAFTA nomination (possibly the frank approach to sex scenes were off-putting for the stuffier end of the Academy). New has the showier role but does a great job of stripping back Glen’s bravado to reveal someone far more vulnerable than the façade he projects.

Weekend is so well done that you’d want to be the kind of person who pinches babies not to be moved by it. A fine achievement, it deserves a wide audience. If you are the kind of person who appreciates the likes of Before Sunrise and Brief Encounter, this is the film for you.

Stars: ****

Like Crazy

At first glance Like Crazy is a story about the all-consuming power of love but delve a bit deeper and you have something far more interesting and complex. It’s just a pity that the whole story hinges on a ridiculous decision early on that haunts the rest of it.

Felicity Jones plays Anna, an English student nearing the end of her visa in America. She bravely makes a play for Jacob (Anton Yelchin), the teaching assistant at one of her classes, and they fall head over heels for each other. However, this relationship comes with a deadline with her departure for England imminent. Despite dire warnings from her parents, Anna makes the impulsive decision to stay on a couple of months past her visa expiration date. Inevitably, because Eamonn Holmes is more likely to score a date with Kate Middleton than you are to get an easy ride from US immigration, Anna has difficulty getting back into the country and finds herself banned from visiting for three years. Anna and Jacob try desperately to keep their relationship alive despite thousands of miles between them. But with all their efforts focussed on the physical distance that parts them, they pay scant attention to the emotional gulf that’s opening up as the years pass.

This all starts off with rather frustrating decision by Anna to ignore her visa requirements and linger on in America well past her departure date. Fair enough, she’s caught up in the heady rush of new love but it’s totally illogical and for a little bit you just can’t forgive them their stupidity or sympathise with their plight. Equally, it’s never totally clear why he won’t move to England. He makes furniture and it’s hardly downtown Baghdad but it’s never seriously considered. Nevertheless, director and co-writer Drake Doremus ploughs ahead and does his best despite the poor foundations laid by the script.

It’s really down to Jones’ utterly compelling performance that you choose to gloss over the absolutely enormous holes in the storyline. It is beautifully restrained – no histrionics here - but quite heartbreaking at times. She and Yelchin have good chemistry even if he is a little bland and looks slightly like a bug lab rat.

Although he is dealing with a problematic script Doremus deserves praise for creating a naturalistic look that elevates this above your standard romance into something that feels much more authentic. The exquisitely sad conclusion, which is nowhere near as straightforward as they normally are, is very nicely pitched.

As pleasantly surprising as it is frustrating, Like Crazy is a decent little movie boosted by a lovely central performance from Jones.

Stars: *** and a half

W.E.

About two thirds of the way through W.E., Madonna’s take on the romance between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VII, it finally clicks. This is not a film about an infamous love story, it’s a film about how annoyed Madonna is that Guy Ritchie made her live in London for so long.

W.E. tells the story of two women who find themselves in difficult situations but who take wildly different paths. In the late 90s, Wallie Winthrop (Abbie Cornish) is suffering through a bad marriage to her abusive, cheating husband (Richard Coyle). She seeks refuge at her old workplace, an auction house where the estate of exiled royals the Duke and Duchess of Windsor is being held. As Wallie struggles to come to terms with the breakdown of her marriage with the help of a pushy Russian security guard (Oscar Issacs), she immerses herself in Wallis and Edward’s story. As she delves deeper into the Empire-shattering romance between a King (James D’Arcy) and a twice-divorced American (Andrea Riseborough), Wallie begins to find the strength she needs to free herself from her marriage. But is she barking up the wrong tree? Was the love story that some considered the romance of the century really something else entirely?

Predictably, W.E. got a bit of a pasting from critics when it premiered at Venice last year. They were being unnecessarily cruel. It is nowhere near as bad as people have made out. Madonna’s script doesn’t contain any major howlers (though her decision to have Wallis dance to Pretty Vacant is both jarring and the kind of painfully obvious juxtaposition that Dawson Leery might consider profound) and she does a good job recreating the 30s (she would though, she was probably there). Her direction is competent enough though she is incredibly frenetic with the camera – it rarely, if ever, settles for more than five seconds. She also draws a fine performance from Riseborough as the beguiling Wallis but Cornish could have been a tiny bit less insipid.

The film’s major problem is that Madonna fails to adequately marry her two stories until the very final reel. They feel like they are running entirely on separate paths (except for the odd, slightly ridiculous intervention from an imaginary Wallis into Wallie’s life) and the parallels in their lives shoehorned in to ensure they relate to each other feel clunky.

Frustratingly, she hits on something really interesting at the end which changes the thrust of the movie entirely – introduce it earlier and she could have really had something special on her hands.

W.E. is no disaster but it will find it difficult to rid itself of the spectre of Madonna.

Stars: ***

Haywire

Director Stephen Soderbergh seems to have gotten a little bit of his mojo back.

After a couple of patchy years where he delivered some of the most boring (the interminably long Che biopics) and offensively lazy (anything with Ocean’s in the title) films imaginable, he’s managed to make two relatively decent, watchable films back to back with last year’s Contagion and now Haywire.

An unashamedly dumb action-thriller, Haywire sees Soderbergh have a bit of fun for once with a script where the story is just a vehicle for lots of gloriously over the top fight scenes. And while it is certainly not perfect, it is definitely entertaining.
Former American Gladiator (I kid you not), Gina Carano, plays Mallory Kane, a freelance spy who is hired by corporations and governments to head up the kind of missions that they don’t want tracing back to them. When we first meet Mallory, she is sitting in an anonymous diner looking a bit shifty. She is soon joined by fellow operative Aaron (Channing Tatum) whose attempts to manhandle her result in a severe arse-kicking. Mallory is not a woman to be messed with as we learn in the course of a series of flashbacks. She is on the run having found herself on the receiving end of a double-cross from someone close to her and, unfortunately for everyone else, Mallory knows her martial arts and isn’t afraid to use them. Carnage ensues. Total, utter carnage.

Haywire is good fun but it surely does not bode well that your abiding thought on leaving the cinema after watching Haywire, Stephen Soderbergh’s star-studded action-thriller, is: “why the hell didn’t they just get Angelina Jolie to do it?”. If ever a film was written for Jennifer Aniston’s arch-nemesis it was this one. It doesn’t help their cause that they seem to have gone out of their way to find an actress to play the lead role that looks extraordinarily like Jolie but has none of her undeniable charisma.

Carano is very much the weak link here. She’s definitely good at beating the living daylights out of men twice her size but she seems entirely vacant throughout. This is the second film in which Soderbergh has cast an unknown female lead (he pulled the same trick when he used porn star Sasha Grey for The Girlfriend Experience) and, once again, the result is similarly uninspiring. Carano delivers her lines with grim determination – there is no sparkle in her eye, no sense of joy. In fact, she’s pretty dead behind the eyes throughout.

Luckily, her rather flat performance is overshadowed by strong supporting cast headed up by Ewan McGregor, playing the villain for once. It is Michael Fassbender though who pulls the rug from under his co-stars delivering the film’s most successful sequence as an operative working with Mallory on a job in Dublin who isn’t all he’s cracked up to be. It’s at this point that Haywire, which feels a little blah for the first 15 minutes, really comes to life when the Dublin section kicks into gear and it manages to successfully maintain that energy for the remainder of the film. The fight scene between Fassbender and Kane, in which they wreak havoc on one of the Shelbourne’s rather lovely looking rooms, is one of the standout moments.

It is after Dublin, when Mallory travels back to the US to try to clear her name (really, they didn’t make much of an effort avoiding tired cinema staples), that Haywire begins to lose its way a bit. The action is still excellent but the story becomes insanely convoluted and by the end you really aren’t entirely sure what’s happened. Soderbergh has also assembled a great supporting cast and given some of them – namely Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas – feck all to do. Seems a bit of a waste.

Nevertheless, and as long as you don’t think too hard about it, Haywire is good craic. It would have been better craic with Jolie in it but you can’t win ‘em all.

Stars: ***

The Sitter

In one hundred years from now when sociologists look back on the significant cultural phenomena of the early 21st century, they will surely find the popularity of the “comic” actor Jonah Hill truly baffling.

Certainly I do. Hill, who looks like he will inexplicably land himself an Oscar nomination this year for a rather bland performance in the vastly over-rated Moneyball, has always given me the heebie-jeebies. There is, as Ann Widdecombe would have it, something of the night about him.

Perhaps Hill recognises this himself because here is starring in a film where he plays a slightly creepy, definitely pathetic waster who has no business being left in charge of kids but finds himself looking after three of them anyway. Hill plays college drop-out Noah who spends his time watching television and chasing after his supposed girlfriend Marisa (Ari Gaynor), a woman so ridiculously far out of his league that their one-sided relationship could only ever exist in a film created by the frustrated men who churn out these lame Hollywood comedies. When his mother gets a shot at bagging herself a surgeon, Noah is drafted in to mind her friend’s three kids – sexually confused Slater (Max Records), over-sexualised tweenager Blithe (Landry Bender) and pyromaniac Mexican adoptee Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez). When Marisa calls Noah from a party demanding that he bring her some cocaine, he rather ridiculously takes his three charges on a journey into the night. As you might have guessed, things go awry.

There isn’t a single original thought behind this film. The story will be familiar to anyone who has ever seen Adventures in Babysitting or any of the many other babysitting-gone-wrong films that Hollywood has produced over the years. Perhaps director David Gordon Green and his scriptwriters thought they were onto a winner by marrying a tried and tested plot with the crude humour that has served them well enough in the past few years. It doesn’t work. And that’s the case from the very start with an opening scene that will surely rank as one of the most repulsive moments on screen this year. There’s nothing funny about The Sitter.

You can get away with mildly amusing when you’re aiming for a bland, inoffensive rom-com but you can’t do that when you go down the ribald route. It has to be funny and The Sitter barely raises a smile, let alone a laugh.

For Hill, the role is something of a departure – as well as being hideously crude, his character is supposed to have something of a heart – but it’s certainly not the star-maker that he needs at this stage in his career. Best to stick to playing creepy sidekicks for now.

Give it a miss.

Stars: *

Shame

My, what a road we have travelled. It wasn’t that long ago that a film like Shame would have had Catholic Ireland up in arms prompting the censor to go and make a show of us all by banning it. This is nowhere near the most explicit film that has graced an Irish cinema screen (that honour must surely go to the super-graphic but woeful 9 Songs) but it is probably the most provocative.

Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, a sex addict who hurtles from one risky encounter to another and who resorts to sexual release (whether brought about by the one he loves or another person) when he finds himself in a stressful situation. Through chance encounters, the use of prostitutes and a healthy grasp of where to go on the internet, Brandon maintains rigid control over his life. Then his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) comes to stay and his tightly wound world begins to unravel bit by bit. She can see that her brother is in trouble and tries to pull him back from the brink but Sissy has her own demons to confront.

This is an audacious piece of film-making from director Steve McQueen, working off a script by flavour-of-the-month Abi Morgan. I am not quite sure if it rings entirely true, however. There is an ambiguity to the story that is both admirable and clever but also incredibly frustrating. Brandon’s troubles feel authentic but the vagueness of Sissy’s torments makes it difficult to empathise even though she is by far the more likeable of the two. There is an inappropriateness to their relationship that goes unexplained (this is evident right from the start) but which hints heavily at incest and asks a little too much of the audience.

It is the central performances that really make Shame. There’s no doubting the courageousness of Fassbender and Mulligan, both of whom quite literally lay themselves bare. Fassbender in particular goes to places that not many actors on the cusp of hovering around the bottom of the A-List would dare to tread. (For those of you who are affronted by the idea of an Irish man being involved in a film as frank as Shame it may help you to remember that he’s part German too.) It is an extraordinarily intense, committed performance that is almost excruciating to watch at times. Mulligan also brings a lot to the table by perfectly complementing Fassbender – his pent up aggression matches her weariness – and her version of New York, New York is very moving.

Not one for the first date, or even the tenth, Shame is a brutally uncompromising film that, admittedly, won’t be to everyone’s liking but will certainly challenge your perceptions.

Stars: ***

War Horse

This is a story about the love between a man and his horse. Or rather, the sometimes slightly creepy love between a man and his horse. But mainly the totally incredulous story of a man and his horse who are parted by war but who are destined to be together regardless. Utterly ludicrous and grossly manipulative War Horse certainly is, yet somehow it just about works.

Based on a children’s novel, the film stars newcomer Jeremy Irvine as Albert Narracott, the son of a drunken farmer (Peter Mullan) whose pride forces him to challenge the local landlord (David Thewlis) during an auction for a thoroughbred horse. The end result is that the family’s annual rent is spent on a horse that won’t work the land. It is left to Albert to break in this horse, which, through lack of imagination, he christens Joey. Albert turns out to be a bit of a horse whisperer - either that or there’s something far more sinister going on between him and Joey - and they achieve a great feat which looks likely to save the farm.

And then it rains something shocking so Joey finds himself up for sale to the highest bidder. Unfortunately for him, he is sold to a rather pompous officer (Benedict Cumberbatch) just as war breaks out and Joey finds himself among the poppy fields in Flanders. It will prove to be an eventful war for Joey with taking on several owners including an incredibly irritating French girl and two German brothers with a rather unnerving fondness for each other. Meanwhile, in an effort to find Joey again, Albert is signing up for the war effort. These things never go well, do they?

War Horse is shamelessly sentimental. How could it not be when it is directed by Stephen Spielberg and written by Lee Hall (Billy Elliott) and Richard Curtis (Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral), three men who have made careers out of eliciting tears from stony men? And if you allow yourself to be swept up in the epic love story of one man and his horse, you will no doubt find yourself a bit misty eyed as you leave the theatre.
Whether it is a film of any real substance is another matter entirely. It seems rather odd that Spielberg and his collaborators are intent on making us care for a horse when the action is set against the background of one of the most extraordinarily bloody wars the world has known. When it all goes a bit Saving Private Ryan, people are dying left, right and centre and, frankly, a horse is a horse, no matter how pretty he is. Perhaps, that is being a bit too cynical - War Horse is certainly best watched with that kind of attitude left at the door.

Still, it is a rather odd script. Sprawling doesn’t even cover it. During the excessive two and a half hour running time, Joey goes through owners like Elizabeth Taylor went through husbands. The film is at its most interesting, and original, when he switches sides – the Germans are given a fair go of it for once and though they are cruel to Joey and his mates, they are no crueler than the British who race them into a massacre. They could easily have slashed about 20 minutes by leaving out the annoying French girl, however. There’s also an unexpected homoerotic subtext going as well not only with the two German brothers who look far too fondly on each other for siblings but with Joey who seems falls very hard for another thoroughbred stallion while at war. What happens in Flanders, stays in Flanders, I suppose.

Where it truly excels is in the cinematography which deliberately echoes the classics (the final shot could have been lifted from Gon with the Wind) and in John Williams’ fantastic score. The acting is, for the most part, very good though Irvine occasionally looks a little bit out of his depth.

So saccharine at times that it will bypass your teeth and start rotting your brain, War Horse won’t please the beret wearing hipsters but it is a fine family film that will age well. Just prepare to blink back a few tears no matter how tough you think you are.

Stars: ***

Margin Call

A fascinating take on how the big boys on Wall Street reacted when the sky began to fall in three years ago, Margin Call is that rarest of things – a financial thriller that holds your attention to the very end.

Set over the two days before the world went into economic freefall in 2008, Margin Call is set in a Lehman Brothers-like investment bank which finds itself at the heart of the problem. With trouble already brewing, a round of redundancies sees risk management boss Eric (Stanley Tucci) given his marching orders at the behest of short sighted financial officer Sarah (Demi Moore). Before he leaves, he gives smart, young analyst Peter (Zachary Quinto) the heads up on a project he has been working on and warning him to be careful.
When Peter looks into it, he realises that the firm he works in is a ticking time bomb with losses running into the billions on the cards as the complicated financial instruments that they have been selling are rendered worthless by market turmoil. He brings it to the attention of his bosses Will (Paul Bettany) and Sam (Kevin Spacey). What follows is a lesson in how rich people stay rich by screwing over the little man as the firm goes into survival mode and contemplates the unthinkable.

Director JC Chandor has assembled a cast to die for here and it is easy to see why. There’s plenty of meat on the bones of these characters and seasoned veterans like Spacey, Tucci and Irons seem to relish the chance to take a bite. Irons is majestic as the Machiavellian bossman who ruthlessly sacrifices the world economy to save his own skin but it is Spacey who really steals the show with a compelling turn as the jaded Sam. This is by far his best performance since American Beauty. The younger cast, lead by Bettany, do a fine job of essaying the arrogance and stupidity of the people who brought about this crisis. The only weak link in the cast is Moore, who is okay at first but ends up seeming a little dead behind the eyes.

Chandor also deserves praise for delivering a sharp script that takes a complex issue and puts it in layman’s terms so you can really appreciate the full horror of what these people are up to. He takes it ever so slightly too far by repeatedly driving home the point that the investment bankers were taking home pots of money for doing a job that they didn’t understand. We get it the first time it’s mentioned, we tire of it by the fifth.

Nevertheless, this is a great little thriller – the film that Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps desperately wanted to be – and worth the effort for Spacey’s performance alone.

Stars: ****

Reclaiming Joyce - Interview with Dreams of a Life director Carol Morley

When documentary maker Carol Morley picked up a copy of The Sun while on the Tube one day, she probably wasn’t expecting to find a story that would pre-occupy her for the next five years. However, the extraordinary story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a woman who was found in her council bedsit three years after her death surrounded by half wrapped Christmas presents and with the television still on, was too compelling to ignore.
“Over the next couple of days I was trying to see if anything else came out about the story and there was very little. The press never got a photograph of her. Then some people in chat rooms and blogs began writing that she must have been one miserable bitch that no one noticed that she was missing and that she probably deserved the domestic abuse that had been mentioned in the article. At that point I felt that that cannot be somebody’s legacy really, that someone should make a tribute or elegiac piece to Joyce,” said Morley.
With so little information available, Morley set about tracking down Joyce’s family and friends to find out what happened to her. What emerges is the story of someone who was much loved by her friends but whose transitory lifestyle meant that the often lost touch with her for long periods of time. And when she died, nobody noticed.
“I felt that I had got to the bottom of it in some ways when I realised that the reason that she was there for so long without anyone realising was precisely because everybody thought she was off having a better life than they were… In a way it has become more a film about friendship. It is ignored in society, how powerful friendship is, and there aren’t many films about it. What I love about the film is that instead of being a film about blame or accusation, it actually becomes a film about people celebrating Joyce’s life but also feeling guilt and regret,” she said.
Morely uses a mix of interviews with friends and interested parties and reconstructions, with Zawe Ashton playing Joyce, to tell her story. Music plays a major role in the film, just as it did in Joyce’s life, with the film’s most powerful and pivotal scene a shot of Ashton singing “My Smile is Just a Frown Turned Upside Down” in front of the bedroom mirror.
“Joyce wanted to be a singer and loved music. It was an important part of her life and in a way I wanted to give Joyce her voice back away from this headline in the Sun and this dreary stuff written on chatroom sites. I wanted to give her a sense of having once lived by bringing an actor into it who could touch on the emotional and inner life of Joyce rather than merely stating the facts or other people’s opinions or ideas about her,” said Morley.
For those who see the film, it serves as a profound reminder that despite all our connections through social media and so on, what happened to Joyce could very easily happen to any of us.
“A lot of people are leaving the cinema and phoning somebody up, a friend or a relative, and some people are inviting people around to their home because they feel they don’t know them enough. It is making people think of not only themselves and their circumstances but also of other people and that is really a powerful thing. It is not like I started out to make a film that would make people connect or think about modern life but that has been the response,” she said.

My Top Ten of the Year

1) The Guard
Brendan Gleeson was in blistering form as the foul-mouthed Sergeant Gerry Boyle in John Michael McDonagh’s wickedly funny film about a racist, drug taking guard with a penchant for hookers who finds himself unexpectedly busting a drug ring with the help of Don Cheadle’s uptight FBI agent. About as Irish as you can imagine, this was a massive box office hit and travelled well in the US earning a much deserved Golden Globe nomination for Gleeson.

2) The King’s Speech
The story of how a stammering accidental-king turned to an Australian to find his voice should have been unmercifully boring but thanks to a great script, and more importantly, a career defining turn by Colin Firth, The King’s Speech was the must-see film of the year. Firth deservedly won an Oscar for his work on the film (having been robbed the previous year) but all three leads were superb. A simple story, well told.

3) The Adjustment Bureau
Pitched as a science fiction film, this was really a cross between Inception and Love Actually. Big themes like free will and the existence of a higher power make way for an achingly romantic story about a man willing to give up everything for love. The amazing chemistry between Matt Damon and Emily Blunt only elevates it further.

4) The Help
Viola Davis gives the performance of her life in this story about a group of maids in the Deep South who stage their own silent protest against the injustice of their situation by revealing their employer’s secrets in an anonymous book. Hugely entertaining with a cast working at the top of their game, The Help had a serious message too but it was wrapped up in the feel good film of the year.

5) Bridesmaids
It was a good year for women on film and Bridesmaids led the charge. Giving lie to the nonsense that women can’t be funny, Kristen Wiig wrote and starred in the funniest film of the year, storming the box office and, hopefully, changing the way that Hollywood looks on projects written by or for females. Improbably turned Chris O’Dowd (or as I prefer to call him Brendan from The Clinic) into a genuine star in the US.

6) Melancholia
Contrarian director Lars von Triers challenges the audience again with this morose story about the end of the world. A film of two halves, this initially looks like business as usual for Von Triers with another cast of detestable characters doing vile things to each other but it turns on its head half way through and becomes something quite moving. The final scene is literally breath-taking. Happily, no genitalia suffer grievous injury this time around.

7) Drive
Ryan Gosling is the definition of cool in this super stylish film from Nicholas Winding Refn. Nothing happens for ages but you are just being lulled into a false sense of security because things get very hairy when Driver’s rage is unleashed. The slow build is well worth it. This felt like the freshest film of the year and that soundtrack was worth the admission price alone.

8) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II
They saved the best for last with the final installment of the Harry Potter series. Eight films later, we finally waved goodbye to Harry, Ron and Hermione after a frantic battle at Hogwarts that saw them defeat Ralph Fiennes who was deliciously evil as the doomed Lord Voldemort. It wasn’t perfect – no Potter film ever is – but it was the best of the series and an emotional experience for cast and audience alike.

9) True Grit
The Coen Brothers took on a classic western with True Grit and breathed new life into the weary bones of the genre. The script zings with one-liners and is very funny but without being irritatingly quirky (see Burn After Reading) while the cast are all pitch perfect. Hailee Steinfeld, in particular, is a revelation as the feisty teenage girl who hires Jeff Bridges’ drunk US Marshall to track her father’s killer.

10) Snap
A deeply unnerving performance from Aisling O’Sullivan (Raw) is at the heart of this small but well-formed film from Cork director Carmel Winters. As a mother coping with the aftermath of her son’s terrible crime, O’Sullivan absolutely dominates the screen with a turn that burns itself into your brain. It also features the late Mick Lally delivering a brave performance in his final screen role. A film that haunts you long after.

Close but no cigar: The Runway, The Ides of March, Puss in Boots, Sensation, 50/50, Arthur Christmas, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Parked, Crazy Stupid Love, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Beaver, Senna, X-Men: First Class, One Hundred Mornings, Thor, Submarine, Never Let Me Go, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Most hated:
The Tree of Life – if there is a hell, it has The Tree of Life running on an endless loop. Lost in its own profundity, this is without doubt, the most boring film of the year.

Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part I – the vampire saga turns grotesque. Proof that Twilight author Stephanie Meyer hates her own gender.

Just Go With It – actually, no, I won’t thanks Adam Sandler. Because you’re really taking the mickey now with this muck.

The Zookeeper – another ill-conceived misogynistic piece of trash from Sandler and his cohorts. Somebody stop this madness now.

Honey 2 – this year’s obligatory appearance from a film that features ne’er-do-wells finding redemption in urban dance.

Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides – a tedious attempt to squeeze more money from a franchise that lost its edge about five minutes after the first film ended.

Fast Five – bunch of Muscle Marys revving their penis extensions and giving each other the eye.

No Strings Attached – Yay, another film about a borderline autistic girl who acts really weird and bags the man anyway. Did these people learn nothing from All About Steve?

Conan the Barbarian – Just the kind of meat-headed dated 80s action flick that should be consigned to straight-to-dvd bargain bin. Unfortunately one of many similarly themed films released this year but by far the worst.

The Hangover Part II – this year’s Sex and the City 2. A lazy retread of the first film - barely bothered to piece together a plot. Worse, however, was the fact that it was desperately unfunny.

The Iron Lady

The conservative press in Britain – you know, the ones that hate women, asylum seekers and anyone who isn’t a white, male businessman with fond memories of being rogered in public school - are up in arms about The Iron Lady because it has the temerity to portray their spiritual leader, Margaret Thatcher, as a doddery old woman.

The rest of us should be more offended by the fact that this is a film that seeks to humanise a political monster and does its damnedest to empathise with a British leader whose dogmatic pursuit of a conservative agenda ruined the lives of thousands, if not millions, of people.

We start at the end with Thatcher (played by Meryl Streep – who else could it possibly have been?) succumbing to dementia, talking to her dead husband Denis (Jim Broadbent) and virtually being held prisoner in her own home by her well-meaning staff and daughter Carol (Olivia Colman). While this Thatcher struggles to come to terms with her husband’s passing, a series of flashbacks tell her life story from growing up as the daughter of a politically minded green grocer through her attempts to gain election to parliament (which she ultimately manages by getting married, striking another blow for women’s liberation there Margaret) and her rise to power while the public schoolboys around her floundered. These flashbacks then spend a considerable amount of time casting a sympathetic eye over her performance as prime minister.

Director Phyllidia Lloyd must wake up every day and thank her maker that Meryl Streep exists and gives her the time of day. It was Streep – and an extremely healthy dose of goodwill generated by the stage show – that made her debut Mamma Mia such a success and she once again has been called into action to save this poorly conceived biopic from total disaster. The Iron Lady is bogged down by plodding direction and an absolutely horrible narrative structure that jumps from one era to the next like an ADHD child hyped up on chocolate and Coke. To be fair, Lloyd deserves praise for drawing out one of Streep’s best performances since her heyday in the 80s and the blame for the atrocious use of flashbacks lies solely at the door of screenwriter Abi Morgan.

Thatcher will be remembered for four things: ordering the destruction of the Belgrano, the Argentinian ship carrying hundreds of men away from the Falkland Islands, resulting in their needless deaths; letting the hunger strikers starve themselves to death; breaking the miners and introducing the Poll Tax, a tax on mere existence which led to her political demise.

She’s certainly not going to be remembered for struggling to balance home and work but Morgan rather stupidly decides to focus on this wholly uninteresting aspect of Thatcher’s life. As a result we get a very scant look at the moments that defined one of the most controversial political careers in history and we get no real sense of the havoc wreaked on the families of those directly affected by her ideologically driven decisions. The film literally glosses over the hunger strikers - they get a single line throughout – and the miners get relatively short shrift. What is really galling, however, is the use of the sinking of the Belgrano – a decision made in full knowledge that hundreds would die and that ship was not a real threat – as a tool to celebrate Thatcher’s strength as a leader. For anyone who isn’t in awe of the woman, it’s actually offensive how much this film admires her work.

But then there is Streep, who transcends the mediocrity of the film around her with a truly mesmerising performance. She doesn’t just deliver an impression of the woman; she totally embodies everything that Thatcher was about. It feels utterly authentic. She is supported with strong performances by Broadbent and Colman (doing a wicked impression of Carol) and a brilliantly understated turn from Anthony Head as Thatcher’s right hand man and author of her downfall Geoffrey Howe.

Still, good work from the actors aside, this is a pretty poor effort. There’s a serious film to be made about Margaret Thatcher. This is not it. In fact, what we what we really have here is a two star movie elevated to three stars because it features a genuinely stunning turn from Streep. Without her input, it would amount to nothing.

Stars: ***

Dreams of a Life

This a film that plays on our deepest fears about being alone. The story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a woman who had so detached herself from the world that nobody noticed she was missing for three whole years, should be a lesson to us all – Facebook friends are all well and good but if nobody’s calling to your door, you’re in trouble.

It is hard to fathom what happened to Joyce. She was discovered sitting on the floor of her grotty bedsit in a north London borough by housing association workers who were there to repossess the property. She had been sitting there for three years. The body was so badly decomposed that she had to be identified by matching her teeth to a photo. Three years. Let that sink in. Three whole years her corpse sat there with the telly blaring at it and nobody noticed. Nobody checked on her, nobody wondered why they hadn’t seen her for a while, nobody seemed to care. It’s a horrifying story.

Director Carol Morley spent five years researching Joyce’s story having happened across it when she picked up an abandoned newspaper on the Tube. It was very much a labour of love for her and it shows. She could easily have dwelled on the more ghoulish aspects of Joyce’s death – the decomposition of the body meant that it was not possible to establish a cause of death – but, instead, she spends much of the film celebrating her life.

The police investigated Joyce’s death but could find little or no information on her. Through her tenacious search, however, Morley has rounded up a group of Joyce’s former friends and acquaintances to tell her story. Tellingly, Joyce’s family refused to take part. The story they build is of a mysterious woman who drifted through life acquiring no real friends of her own but adopting the friends of boyfriends, flatmates and co-workers. Strangely though they all seemed to love her and enjoyed her company. But she would move house regularly and it wasn’t unusual for her to disappear from people’s lives for six months at a time. So nobody noticed when she disappeared for three years.

Using a combination of talking heads and reconstructions with Zawe Ashton playing Joyce, Morley skilfully builds the story before it takes a darker turn as the reasons for Joyce’s decline are explored. One stand out moment sees Ashton singing “My Smile Is A Frown” hinting at Joyce’s skill at hiding her sorrow. This leads to a heartbreaking final third where her friends finally succumb to the guilt of her lonely death.

Dreadfully sad but powerful stuff.

Stars: ****

Goon

Often hilarious, this Canadian comedy works because it isn’t trying to be terribly arch or clever. The humour is broad and exceptionally crude but strong performances from a cast who are clearly enjoying themselves and a script that delivers on laughs with impressive regularity ensure that this isn’t the mess that rightly should be. And miracle of miracles, it is a sports film that sticks rigidly to the usual formula but isn’t so boring that makes you want to punch your own face.

Scott plays Doug Glat, slow on the uptake but handy with his fists, who comes to the attention of his local hockey team’s manager when he gives a fellow spectator a good hiding for slagging off his gay brother. The manager is in need of an enforcer – someone whose purpose is not to score goals but to protect his team-mates and intimidate the opposition by beating the crap out of them on a regular basis. Despite the fact that Doug can barely skate, he proves adept at this and quickly moves up the rankings with a transfer to another team. He is expected to protect star player LaFlamme (Marc-Andre Grondin) whose last meeting with a decent enforcer (Liev Schreiber) left him terrified to play hockey.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who sees Goon that it emerges from the same talent pool that created Knocked Up and Superbad. Jay Baruchel (best known for playing the skinny kid in Million Dollar Baby) plays Doug’s crude best mate Pat but also co-wrote the script with Evan Goldberg (Superbad, Pineapple Express). So it’s no shock that the humour here plays to a low common denominator even if it is refreshingly light on toilet jokes. That kind of humour isn’t for everybody but if you buy into it Goon is very funny. It is also almost entirely absent of the sexism that slightly marred the likes of Knocked Up.

The film relies heavily on Scott’s pitch perfect performance. Things never really took off for him despite breaking out from the highly successful American Pie series and making a decent stab at becoming a leading man with The Dukes of Hazzard and Role Models. His star is one that is very much on the wane but in Doug Glat, he has been given his best role since Stifler and he draws on all the things he is best at – playing endearing morons – to really carry the film. Baruchel and Schreiber have a lot of fun in support and Alison Pill gets some laughs playing that rarest of things – a relatively well rounded female in a male dominated comedy.

One of the taglines for Goon is “Punch destiny in the face”. If that doesn’t make you laugh, it may not be for you but enter into the spirit of the thing and you will be richly rewarded.

Stars: ****

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

When thinking of directors to take on the US version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo it is hard settle on anyone more perfect for the job than David Fincher. Having made his name with Se7en, he is no stranger to twisted stories and shows no fear when it comes to subjecting the audience to deeply unpleasant things. This he does with aplomb in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo delivering a film that, unusually for a US adaptation, proves more than a match for the original Swedish take on Stieg Larsson’s book.

Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, a publisher who has just been through and lost a bruising libel battle with a shady businessman. With his reputation at an all-time low, he steps back from his investigative magazine when he is drafted into solve a long standing murder mystery by retired businessman Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer). Nearing the end of his life, Henrik wants to know what happened to a beloved niece who mysteriously disappeared from the family island in the north of Sweden never to be seen again. She is presumed dead and Henrik suspects that one of his own family members did the dastardly deed. Mikael sets about his investigation but it isn’t until he is allowed to bring in Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) as an assistant that he really begins to make headway. Lisbeth is a troubled young woman and ward of the state who is suffering at the hands of her guardian. She is also something of a genius when it comes to hacking and ferreting out information that others don’t want the world to see. What they will uncover is far more sinister than anyone expected.

With Fincher fresh off the success of The Social Network and working from a story that seemed tailor made for his talents, expectations were very high for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Happily, it does not disappoint. Fincher has delivered a film that is every bit as compelling as the Swedish version and that feels no less authentic for its translation into English. It helps that he has retained the cold, unforgiving Swedish countryside as his set and that the film seems to have been made without any compromises to the more sensitive sections of the film-going audience for whom Swedish torture films are not high on the agenda.

The Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was excellent - thanks to Noomi Rapace’s brilliant take on Lisbeth – but it was also a difficult watch. There are a couple of really harsh scenes in there that are hard to stomach. Foolishly, I thought that the Hollywood version might deliver something a little more palatable. Alas, I was wrong. So very wrong. Another director might have chosen to shy away from the grim detail but Fincher revels in it. If anything it is actually more visceral than the original and there are scenes that will linger with you for days afterward. This is particularly true of the pivotal scene involving Lisbeth and her abusive legal guardian Bjurman (Yorick Van Wageningen). It burns itself into your brain and is probably the most uncomfortable scene that you will see on film this or any other year.

The other sticking point was always going to be Mara’s performance versus the career making turn that Rapace put in. I have to say that the Swedish woman just about shades it. While Mara is as determined and courageous in her take on Lisbeth as Rapace was, she just isn’t as compelling. To be fair to her, it is a slightly more subtle performance than Rapace’s aggressively in your face effort but she needs to put a bit more life into it the next time around. Craig is dependably solid as Mikael – it’s a role that really takes a back seat to Lisbeth anyway – and the rest of the cast all do well. It is strange though to hear everyone including the Americans in the cast attempt a Swedish accent except Craig – it’s like he’s beamed in from elsewhere and it is slightly ajar with what’s going on around him.

There’s a real problem at the heart of the script, however, in that it takes ages for Lisbeth and Mikael to start working together. The film springs to life when they do so you end up wishing that they’d come across each other much sooner. And because the book is heavy on detail, we have to endure a slightly pointless and far-fetched epilogue.

Nevertheless, this is really well made and acted and, if you can stomach the more gruesome elements of it, it is a fine thriller that will stay with you for quite a while.

Stars: ****