Review - Abel

Diego Luna has elected to make his directorial debut with a slight and modest drama that nevertheless allows him to display his filmmaking aptitude and his ability to juggle a variety of tones. Set in Aguascalientes, Mexico, Abel concerns a troubled young boy (Christopher Ruíz-Esparza) who has just been released from a psychiatric ward after a long and fruitless stay. His doctors, having failed to cure his odd mood swings and distant demeanour, recommend that he is moved to a hospital in Mexico City for further treatment, but his mother (Karina Gidi) is desperate for Abel to come home. The doctors reluctantly acquiesce, on the condition that he is kept under close observation, and in the film's opening section, Diego Luna keeps his young leading man under close observation too, using close-ups to create an intimacy with Ruíz-Esparza, isolating him from his family and focusing us on Abel's particular view of his surroundings.

Abel is an inscrutable figure, silent for many of the film's early scenes, but when he finally does open his mouth, the film shifts gears in an interesting way. The eldest son, noting that his father is absent, suddenly assumes the role of the man of the house, treating his siblings like his son and his daughter and talking to his mother as if she's his wife. There are some neat comedic moments as Abel makes disapproving comments about his older sister's choice of boyfriend, or demands silence at the breakfast table while he reads his paper, and Luna handles these exchanges effectively. However, the success of these scenes is primarily down to Christopher Ruíz-Esparza, who is note-perfect in his depiction of a 9 year-old child not just playing at being a grown-up, but actually believing he is a grown-up, and by the excellent Gidi as his anxious mother. She cautiously persuades her other children to play along with Abel's fantasy and see where it leads – she's just so relieved to see her child talking again.

It's a credulity-testing premise and I often wondered how far Luna could take it. Fortunately, within the tight confines of Abel's 82 minutes, he and co-screenwriter Augusto Mendoza have positioned their plot developments intelligently, shifting the tone or moving the film forward whenever it looks like it might be running thin. The arrival of Abel's father (José María Yazpik) after a two-year absence (he claims he was working in the US) further destabilises the family dynamic, and this stern patriarch is in no mood to be lenient with his young son's odd behaviour. Luna works the conflict between them well and finds emotional complexities in both their relationship and in the marriage between the two parents.

Luna only stumbles a few times, although considering the risky territory he ventures into (Abel attempts to fulfill a husband's duties in the bedroom, without really knowing what they are), such missteps are relatively scarce and minor. He tells his story at a confident, unhurried pace, and he builds towards a climax that brings a tangible sense of danger into Abel's fantasy. Only after the film did I appreciate how well Luna had developed the film's emotional register, balancing light and shade. Abel works as a comedy and a drama, as a touching portrait of a damaged family, and as a parable about the dangers of growing up too fast, but mostly it's notable as a fine calling card for a man who may as adept behind the camera as he is in front of it.

Read my interview with Diego Luna here

The Best and Worst of 2010

Best Film

1 – Mother
I can't think of another filmmaker who handles drastic tonal shifts with such adroitness and confidence.
2 – Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
I've seen it twice now and on both occasions I have been moved in different ways by the picture
3 – Still Walking
Still Walking is a film filled with a sense of loss, but Kore-Eda finds a pitch-perfect balance between sadness, humour and joy
4 – Dogtooth
A shockingly brilliant and completely original piece of work that confounds every expectation
5 – Toy Story 3
Made with incredible love, care and attention, Toy Story 3 is the climax this series deserves
6 – The Father of My Children
So many scenes here are handled with a delicacy and insight that moved me to tears
7 – The Social Network
The Social Network is one of the most purely entertaining and stimulating movies of the year
8 – Carlos
A ceaselessly invigorating cinematic spectacle
9 – Mary & Max
A beautiful, imaginative and deeply moving achievement
10 – Enter the Void
Enter the Void is the most staggering display of filmmaking technique I have seen for a long time

Honourable Mentions
Alamar
Another Year
Catfish
Certified Copy
Lourdes
The Maid
Please Give
Shutter Island
Tetro
Winter's Bone

Worst

1 - Alice in Wonderland
The only curious aspect of this misfire is how the filmmakers have managed to get everything so fundamentally wrong
2 - TRON: Legacy
There's nothing inventive or imaginative under the surface of this unspeakably boring update
3 - The Wolfman
A mongrel of a film
4 - Gulliver's Travels
An all-too-familiar slapdash assemblage of tired gags, haphazard plotting and phoned-in performances
5 - The A-Team
A crushingly boring cinematic experience
6 - Death at a Funeral
A tiresome retread of a movie that wasn't any good in the first place
7 - Dinner for Schmucks
The dinner may be for schmucks, but does the movie have to be made for idiots?
8 - The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
I found it impossible to maintain any interest in the film as it crawled towards its meaningless conclusion
9 - The Lovely Bones
The film gets worse with every passing minute
10 - Legion
A baffling action film with biblical pretensions that ultimately works best as an unintentional comedy

Dishonourable Mentions
Cemetery Junction
Chloe
Despicable Me
Edge of Darkness
Knight and Day
Love and Other Drugs
Machete
Miral
Takers
Whatever Works

Best Director

1 - Apichatpong Weerasethakul – Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
2 - Bong Joon-ho – Mother
3 - Giorgos Lanthimos – Dogtooth
4 - Olivier Assayas – Carlos
5 - Gaspar Noé – Enter the Void

Best Actor

1 - Édgar Ramírez - Carlos
2 - Jesse Eisenberg - The Social Network
3 - Eric Elmosnino - Gainsbourg
4 - Louis-Do de Lencquesaing - The Father of My Children
5 - Jim Carrey - I Love You Phillip Morris
6 - Philip Seymour Hoffman - Mary & Max
7 - Nicolas Cage - Bad Lieutenant
8 - Tahar Rahim - A Prophet
9 - Casey Affleck - The Killer Inside Me
10 - Colin Farrell - Ondine

Best Actress

1 - Kim Hye-ja - Mother
2 - Sylvie Testud - Lourdes
3 - Juliette Binoche - Certified Copy
4 - Aggeliki Papoulia - Dogtooth
5 - Tilda Swinton - I Am Love
6 - Catalina Saavedra - The Maid
7 - María Onetto - The Headless Woman
8 - Noomi Rapace - The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
9 - Jennifer Lawrence - Winter's Bone
10 - Lesley Manville - Another Year

Best Supporting Actor

1 - Niels Arestrup - A Prophet
2 - Christos Stergioglou - Dogtooth
3 - John Hawkes - Winter's Bone
4 - Andrew Garfield - The Social Network
5 - Oliver Platt - Please Give
6 - Doug Jones - Gainsbourg
7 - Colin Farrell - The Way Back
8 - Ned Beatty - Toy Story 3
9 - Yoshio Harada - Still Walking
10 - Alexander Scheer - Carlos

Best Supporting Actress


1 - Dale Dickey - Winter's Bone
2 - Tamsin Greig - Tamara Drewe
3 - Alice de Lencquesaing - The Father of My Children
4 - Nora von Waldstätten - Carlos
5 - Marcia Gay Harden - Whip It
6 - Olivia Williams - The Ghost Writer
7 - Delphine Chanéac - Splice
8 - Amanda Peet - Please Give
9 - Laetitia Casta - Gainsbourg
10 - Julia Hummer - Carlos

Best Original Screenplay


1 - Mother
2 - Still Walking
3 - Toy Story 3
4 - Please Give
5 - Mary & Max

Best Adapted Screenplay


1 - The Social Network
2 - Winter's Bone
3 - Shutter Island
4 - The Illusionist
5 - Whip It

Best Cinematography


1 - Enter the Void
2 - Tetro
3 - Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
4 - Dogtooth
5 - Another Year

Best Editing


1 - Mother
2 - The Social Network
3 - Toy Story 3
4 - Enter the Void
5 - Carlos

Best Score

1 - Mother
2 - The Social Network
3 - I Am Love
4 - Mary & Max
5 - Still Walking

Best Costume Design

1 - Carlos
2 - Gainsbourg
3 - Black Dynamite
4 - The Social Network
5 - Agora

Best Production Design

1 - Enter the Void
2 - Shutter Island
3 - Monsters
4 - Inception
5 - Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Cinema Experience of the Year


1 - Peeping Tom at the Curzon Soho
A screening of a beautiful new print followed by an onstage discussion with Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker, Anna Massey and Columba Powell

2 - The Great White Silence at the Odeon West End
Herbert Ponting's record of Captain Scott's ill-fated Antarctic expedition, presented at the London Film Festival with a live score

3 - Metropolis at the NFT
The astonishing new reconstruction, finally allowing us to see the film in something like Lang's original vision

4 - The Leopard at the NFT
Luchino Visconti's masterpiece seen on the big screen for the first time

5 - Ugetsu Monogotari at the NFT
My first viewing of Kenji Mizoguchi's ghost story, which instantly became one of my favourite films

2010 In Review

Each December, as we look back at the 12 months that have passed us by, the same question arises: has this been a good or bad year for cinema? Well, that depends entirely on what you consider a 2010 film. After all, when I look at my own top ten list for the year, half of them were films I first saw in 2009, and one first appeared at the London Film Festival in 2008. The complex nature of film distribution means it's often hard to know what festival hits will receive a proper cinema run, and as I wait patiently for two favourites from LFF 2009 (Balibo and About Elly) to get the release they deserve, I have just heard that Lance Hammer's Ballast (for many, one of the films of 2008) will finally reach UK cinemas in February. So when I talk about the year in cinema it seems wise to restrict it to films that have been released in the UK between January 1st and December 31st, and on that basis, this has been a very good year indeed.

Of course, your perspective on the quality of a year's cinema depends entirely on how much you saw of it, and if you restricted your viewing to mainstream fare then you would have every reason to gripe about falling standards. It comes as little surprise that most of the films I hated this year were major studio releases, with so many of the year's biggest films feeling thrown together, with no thought given to plot, coherence or character, and driven by the belief that spectacle (often with shoddy 3D) will compensate for all sins. Alice in Wonderland, TRON: Legacy and Gulliver's Travels were guilty of this approach and all three ended up on my worst of the year list. It's not impossible for a 3D family entertainment to balance visual splendour with great storytelling – Toy Story 3, How to Train Your Dragon and Tangled (a 2011 release in the UK) all managed it this year – but why do animated films so routinely succeed where live-action blockbusters frequently fail?


The only live-action big summer movie worth talking about was Christopher Nolan's Inception, and while I have problems with Nolan as a director, I'm pleased he's out there trying to make serious, ambitious films on a major scale, and that he's resisting 3D and pushing IMAX technology in the process. I enjoyed Inception as I watched it but the film doesn't linger in the memory, unlike the year's other film to feature a traumatised Leonardo Di Caprio, Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. One of the real delights of the year for me was seeing three of the great directors of the 70's – Scorsese, Polanski and Coppola – making films that showed they had lost none of their enthusiasm, skill or perceptiveness. In particular, it was a thrill to see Francis Ford Coppola producing the gorgeous, operatic and idiosyncratic Tetro, which is one of the year's most sadly overlooked pictures.

Aside from those pictures (and a few other gems, like Please Give and Winter's Bone), there's no doubt that the most exciting cinema in the world is being made outside America. My top three films of the year all originated from Asia, with Hirokazu Kore-Eda's Still Walking and Bong Joon-ho's Mother both managing to breathe fresh life into genre conventions, while Apichatpong Weerasethakul continues to ignore genre altogether and forge his own path. His Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives deservedly collected the Palme d'Or at Cannes and offered viewers a truly singular film experience. Such experiences are all too rare these days, but we were fortunate enough to have a few extraordinarily daring filmmakers pushing against the boundaries of convention in 2010. Giorgos Lanthimos presented us with the ultimate dysfunctional family in the dark and surreal fable Dogtooth, while Gaspar Noé gave us a mind-bending vision of life after death in Enter the Void, and Olivier Assayas kept us gripped for five and a half hours with his decades-spanning, multilingual epic Carlos.


The other key experiment that developed into a common cinematic theme this year was that of blurring the lines between documentary truth and narrative fiction. There was much debate surrounding the reality of I'm Still Here, the record of Joaquin Phoenix's year of living strangely, before Casey Affleck finally confessed that it was all a performance, but other filmmakers have been less easy to pin down. Is Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop a genuine street art documentary, or another one of the enigmatic artist's pranks? The makers of Catfish still maintain that everything we see in their film is occurring as it happened, but do you believe them? Other filmmakers have been much more open about the artificial techniques they have used, like Pedro González-Rubio, who built a fictional narrative around a real father and son in Alamar, or Clio Barnard, who hired actors to lip sync to real life testimonies in The Arbor.

The slippery nature of truth was also a key theme in one of the year's best pictures, David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network, which was 2010's most satisfying anomaly: a popular hit that is both entertaining and smart, and a film that deserves all of the prizes it will surely claim. Perhaps in years to come The Social Network will be seen as the film that defines 2010, but when I look back at the year, most of my memorable cinematic visits were to see older films on the big screen. I saw a brand new print of Peeping Tom and the reconstructed Metropolis; I experienced Visconti's The Leopard on the big screen and was thrilled by a nitrate print of Brighton Rock; I saw Mizoguchi's remarkable Ugetsu Monogotari for the first time and enjoyed The Red Shoes for the umpteenth time. When contemporary cinema disappointed me I could always take refuge in the great cinema of the past, often finding those films to be as impressive and relevant as anything being produced today. In the first weeks of 2011 I will be seeing Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century and DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, and I'm looking forward to those cinematic visits more than any of January's new releases. So maybe the lesson here is that talk of 'good years' and 'bad years' is ultimately pointless as there are always bold, interesting films being made and there is always a vast wealth of cinema history to become reacquainted with or to experience for the first time. Depending on how adventurous you are in your film viewing, and how determined you are to seek out these special pieces of work, every year can be an exceptional year.

Review - The Way Back

Peter Weir is a great director, but The Way Back is not quite a great film. In his first film since 2003's magnificent Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Weir has taken it upon himself to tell a fantastic story, but while The Way Back has the bearing of an epic adventure, it sometimes struggles to bring its narrative to life. Nevertheless, this is a handsome piece of filmmaking, with Weir once again displaying his consummate craftsmanship, and the story it tells is astonishing, whether it's true or not. The film has been adapted in large part from Sławomir Rawicz's memoir The Long Walk, in which he claimed that he and a group of fellow prisoners escaped a Siberian gulag in 1941 and trekked 4,500 miles to freedom in India, but historical records show that Rawicz wasn't released until 1942. Did he invent the whole story, or did he steal a possibly apocryphal tale and make it his own?

Whatever the facts of the matter, this is an extraordinary yarn and one that merits the big screen treatment. The opening section of the picture skilfully immerses us into life in the gulag and introduces us to the key characters. Jim Sturgess plays Janusz, a Pole convicted by spying after his wife, under torture, testified against him. He is sent to Siberia, where the guards warn the inmates that it's not the fences and the dogs keeping them imprisoned, but the unforgiving wilderness that surrounds them. The gulag is captured by Weir with a sharp eye for details, with the prisoners utilising whatever skills they possess to survive; an artist trades pornographic sketches, a storyteller recounts Treasure Island to fellow prisoners, while some – like thief Valka (Colin Farrell) – simply steal and kill to get what they need.

Although Janusz is the film's lead character, Valka is the most compelling protagonist, with Farrell delivering a lively and very engaging performance as the violent and staunchly loyal Stalinist who is allowed to join the escape party by virtue of possessing the only knife. The escape party Janusz eventually puts together is seven-strong, but my eye kept being drawn back to Farrell as he snarled away on the sidelines, and when the actor isn't on screen, the film really suffers for for his absence. Few of the other escapees really come to life as interesting, multi-dimensional characters, and so it's hard to be fully invested in their fates as they eventually succumb to the hardships of their journey. The film also has a real issue with pacing, which is perhaps understandable when you consider the challenge of compressing a year-long, 4,000 mile odyssey into a feature film. Some sections drag while other appear bafflingly curtailed, such as the group's trek across the Himalayas, which some viewers are in danger of missing completely if they pick that point to go to the toilet.

Having said all of that, The Way Back still holds the attention impressively well and Weir doesn't stint on showing us the pain and misery that these men endured as they slowly moved towards salvation. From sub-zero temperatures in Siberia to mirages in the desert, the film constantly reminds us of their hunger, their desperation, their swelling feet and blistered skin, as the increasingly ragged characters soldier on. When they find a source of food or water or a moment to rest their weary limbs, the sense of relief is palpable, and the arrival of Saoirse Ronan as a Polish refugee halfway through the picture is crucial, adding a fresh dimension to the group dynamic. This remarkably composed and confident young actress adds a sense of vulnerability to their band, and she shares some good scenes with Ed Harris, who is strong and understated as a grizzled American soldier.

It's the film's grand sweep that you'll remember afterwards, though. Russell Boyd, who won an Oscar for his camerawork on Master and Commander, takes advantage of the continent-traversing story to give us an extraordinarily rich variety of vistas, with the characters often being dwarfed by imposing mountain ranges or an endless desert. It's a feast for the eyes, and the rare contemporary film that recalls the work of David Lean, but I just wish it married the human story with the spectacle as successfully as Weir has done in the past. The Way Back is a striking and impressive tale of the human spirit triumphing over seemingly insurmountable odds, but we've come to expect more than this from Weir, and I certainly expected him to be above the kind of coda that gave us a potted history of communism before closing with such a silly, sappy climax.

Review - Gulliver's Travels

In 1726, Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels as a fable that used a tale of fantasy and adventure to satirise the society he lived in. In 2010, 20th Century Fox produced Gulliver's Travels as a multi-million dollar 3D family blockbuster in which Jack Black fights a giant robot for no fucking reason whatsoever. How far we have come in almost 300 years, Swift might have mused, and while it may seem unfair to compare a mainstream family movie to a classic literary work, there's still something thoroughly dispiriting about this dreadful offering. There's no reason why a contemporary take on Gulliver's Travels couldn't have been an exciting, imaginative adventure, but that would have required some thought and effort on the part of the filmmakers. Instead we have an all-too-familiar slapdash assemblage of tired gags, haphazard plotting and phoned-in performances, with the film being irretrievably skewed by its need to fit the dubious talents of its leading man.

The biggest problem with Gulliver's Travels is Jack Black and how you respond to the film may depend largely on how you feel about his shtick, because that's all you're going to get from him here. He plays Lemuel Gulliver, another directionless slacker working a dead-end job in the mailroom of newspaper in New York. He has no aspirations beyond his current position, apart from a vague romantic longing for travel editor Darcy (Amanda Peet). In a misguided attempt to win her affections, Gulliver applies for a vacancy in her department, and having convinced her of his talents by hastily plagiarising some online articles (Darcy, clearly, is pretty stupid), he is despatched to his first assignment: The Bermuda Triangle.

One splashy CGI storm later, Gulliver awakens on a beach to find himself pinned down my hundreds of tiny people. This is Lilliput, home of the miniature hordes who instantly make Gulliver a prisoner, only to later revere him as a hero when he puts out a fire (by pissing on the flames) and inadvertently defeats an invading army (the cannonballs bounce off his stomach and shatter their ships). Aside from a brief detour in Brobdingnag (where the roles are reversed and Gulliver finds himself trapped by a giant child), Lilliput is where the majority of the story takes place, but the paucity of ideas exhibited by the filmmakers as they try to milk some jokes out of his giant presence is pitiful. The tone is set very early on, when Gulliver falls backwards – arse crack exposed – and lands on an unfortunate Lilliputian. Much of the film's subsequent humour revolves around Gulliver using his real world knowledge to amaze the natives (he gets them to restage scenes from Star Wars and Titanic as scenes from his life), or uses the lyrics from Prince's Kiss to help lowly commoner Jason Segal woo princess Emily Blunt. These are not necessarily bad gags in themselves, but by the time the town of Lilliput is covered by billboards featuring Black recreating well-known posters (imaginatively renamed as Gulliver Chronicles and, er, Gavatar) any comical potential has been bludgeoned into the ground.

The film never displays a spark of life. Every actor (barring Chris O'Dowd, who at least tries to give a real performance) appears bored by the lines they are forced to repeat, with Emily Blunt barely attempting to disguise her disinterest. Above all, the increasingly ineffective Black seems completely bereft of inspiration, with his performance amounting to little more than a tired trawl through the expected motions – a few silly voices and some unnecessary bursts into song. The climax consists of Gulliver leading the Lilliputians in a rendition of War because...well, I suppose it's easier than writing a proper ending, and anyway, after the long fight sequence between Gulliver and Iron Man, Gulliver's Travels has already created the impression of a film that has forgotten what it was supposed to be about in the first place. That is, if anyone involved actually gave a shit about it in the first place.