Review - No

Much blood was spilled in Chile during the reign of General Augusto Pinochet, but in his new film No, Pablo Larraín focuses on a group of men who attempted to defeat a dictator with happiness. This is a turn of events that is as welcome as it is surprising, as the previous two films in Larraín's loose trilogy of Chilean dictatorship have given us little to smile about. Tony Manero and Post Morten were grim affairs, and whatever humour they possessed was of the gallows kind, but No is the most accessible and immediately enjoyable film that the director has yet made, as well as being his most satisfying and accomplished work.

No takes place in 1988, the year in which Pinochet, under increasing international pressure, was forced to hold a referendum to decide the country's future. The nation was asked a simple question, to decide whether they wanted the current regime to stay in power, and they had to answer YES or NO. In a gesture towards democracy, the state-controlled television networks allowed 15 minutes of airtime per day in the month leading up to the vote for the NO campaign to put forward its argument. In an unexpected move, the NO campaign largely eschewed the traditional tactics of opposition parties by painting an upbeat vision of what life could be like after Pinochet instead of focusing on the abuses committed by his dictatorship. They sold freedom from Pinochet as if it was the latest must-have product.

That approach makes more sense when we see that the NO campaign is being orchestrated by advertising creative René Saavedra (Gael García Bernal), a fictional creation who represents the large advertising team behind the commercials. We first see him pitching his campaign for a new soft drink, with a fast-paced advert and aspirational language, and he uses these same techniques when he is hired to work on the NO campaign. He creates a jingle, a colourful logo (with a rainbow indicating the disparate opposition parties working together) and a series of TV commercials that are filled with optimistic imagery and good humour. The images used in these adverts had little to do with the everyday lives of ordinary Chileans – a family eating baguettes at a picnic, a very tall Scandinavian-looking man are two of many incongruities – but after initially being dismissed as trivial escapades, the NO campaign gradually began to win the hearts and minds of voters, and unsettle the establishment.

Larraín's previous two films had protagonists who existed outside the political system, but No focuses on a character who finds himself at the heart of it. René Saavedra initially appears to be an apolitical character who takes on this project as a job like any other, and his ex-wife Verónica (Antonia Zegers) appears to be the real political firebrand in the family, but he later reveals that he was an exile. No's screenplay (by Pedro Peirano, who pulled off a similar balancing act with The Maid) is a marvel in the way it folds exposition and political details into a compelling and funny narrative. Larraín neatly flits between high-spirited sequences of creation and political subversion to tense scenes of intimidation, with Saavedra and his cohorts being menaced and followed by shady government operatives. The one aspect of the film that doesn't quite fit is the domestic story, with Saavedra's ex-wife and young son being awkwardly inserted into the story without making much impact.

No is a film set in the 80s and in every respect it is a brilliant evocation of that era. The integration of real news footage and commercials into the picture is particularly impressive, and it is facilitated through No's most daring aesthetic decision. The whole film has been shot on U-matic video, with the flat, square and ugly images making it look like a cheap soap opera. It does take some getting used to (as does Larraín's habit of cutting conversations across different locations) but it allows for a seamless blending of reality and fiction, paying particular dividends at the end of the film when Saavedra goes out on the day of the vote and finds himself caught in the midst of violence. No achieves the trick of gripping us as it moves towards a result we are already familiar with, and the climactic scenes of joy are exhilarating to witness, even as the director tempers them with a more ambiguous final scene. From the evidence of his previous work, I would never have guessed that I could have enjoyed a Pablo Larraín film as much as this. It seems the director has taken the advice of his protagonist – sometimes changing the tone and having a little fun is the most effective way to get your message across.

Once Upon a Time in Japan

The Japan Foundation's annual film season brings recent Japanese cinema to the UK, and gives many films screenings in this country that they otherwise would never have. The 2013 season has been entitled Once Upon a Time in Japan, and it consists of a number of films set in the country's past, from 20^th century stories to tales from centuries ago. The programme is eclectic enough to provide films for every taste, and here's my brief take on a few highlights.

Rebirth (Yôkame no semi)

Izuru Narushima's Rebirth opens in a courtroom, with two women making statements directly to the camera. One is Etsuko (Yôko Moriguchi), a woman whose newborn baby Erina was abducted for the first four years of her life, and who now demands that the culprit receive the death sentence. The second woman to speak is Kiwako (Hiromi Nagasaku), the kidnapper awaiting her fate, but she expresses no remorse for her crime. Instead, she tells the court of her sadness at the loss of a child she has come to think of as her own. This is the starting point for a complicated and absorbing examination of the maternal instinct, with Narushima and his screenwriter Satoko Okudera muddying the moral waters by shifting our sympathies in unexpected ways. Kiwako's relationship with the child – whom she renames Kaoru – is depicted as a loving one, with Kiwako being the kind of caring and attentive parent to Erina that her natural mother seems incapable of being. As well as exploring the question of nature vs. nurture through this storyline, Narushima depicts the psychological impact of this experience with a parallel narrative, in which the adult Erina (Mao Inoue) slowly comes to terms with her past. Rebirth consistently develops in surprising ways and the compelling performances from the female cast keeps the audience riveted when the pace occasionally lags, which happens rarely, as Narushima skilfully juggles between his two tales. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Narushima's direction is the way he tells this potentially melodramatic story while keeping sentimentality mostly at bay, and the film's key moments are all the more affecting for being handled in an understated manner.

Zero Focus (Zero no shôten)

Seicho Matsumoto's mystery novel Zero Focus has already been filmed once, by Yoshitaro Nomura in 1961, and the first difference that stands out with this 2009 version is the addition of 35 minutes to the running time. Those extra minutes really start to make their presence felt as Isshin Inudô's film gets bogged down in plot details and forgets to provide the thrills that this story should really possess. The film has an intriguing premise to work with: new bride Teiko (Ryôko Hirosue) is prompted to investigate her husband's clandestine past when he disappears a week into their marriage. As she digs deeper, Teiko comes into contact with two other women who each have their own connection with her missing spouse, Sachiko (Miki Nakatani) and Hisako (Tae Kimura), and learns of a serial killer on the loose. Regrettably, none of this is as exciting as it sounds. The film plods along at a lugubrious pace, and the impact of its most important revelations are lost underneath thick layers of talky exposition and red herrings. Even as the bodies start to pile up, Zero Focus never grips as it should, and one starts to suspect that more attention has been paid to the admittedly handsome recreation of post-war Japan than to the mechanics of the storytelling. Zero Focus does have one big asset however – Miki Nakatani. She has a commanding screen presence that none of the actors around her can live with, and when she isn't on screen, she is sorely missed.

Castle Under Fiery Skies (Katen no shiro)

A terrific performance from Toshiyuki Nishida is at the centre of Mitsutoshi Tanaka's Castle Under Fiery Skies. He plays the humble architect and carpenter Motaemon, who is summoned by Lord Nobunaga when the ambitious lord wishes to build an enormous mountaintop castle that will stand as the focal point of the whole country. The logistics of building this gigantic structure within Nobunaga's specified deadline of three years forms the dramatic thrust of the film, which is at its best when it focuses on the process involved in overcoming the various challenges that Motaemon faces. These include finding the perfect cypress tree with which to create the castle's central column and – in the movie's best scene – successfully lifting the whole structure in order to make some minor adjustments. At other times, Castle Under Fiery Skies struggles to imbue its supporting characters with any depth, which makes the time spent with them feel like time wasted, and some of the film's more spectacular set-pieces feel as if they have been arbitrarily inserted because the filmmakers fear their story isn't exciting enough. They needn't worry; even if it may lack much in the way of conventional excitement, Castle Under Fiery Skies is an interesting and unusual tale, impressively mounted and engrossingly told.

Ninja Kids!!! (Nintama Rantarô)

Ninja Kids!!! was released in Japan in 2011, which makes it old news as far as Takashi Miike is concerned. The ultra-prolific director has made four films since this one, but Ninja Kids!!! is worth a look as it's something of a rarity among Miike's work, being very much a film aimed at children. An adaptation of a popular Japanese cartoon, the film doesn't really have much of a story, instead settling for an endless barrage of broad gags. Most of the jokes surround explosions of snot, people stepping in dog shit, and adults getting hit on the head with a variety of objects (sometimes resulting in a cartoonish purple bruise right in the middle of their forehead). I guess I shouldn't gripe about such an approach when the three exclamation points in the title don't exactly suggest a restrained piece of filmmaking, but it all does grow rather relentless and repetitive, with Miike even reusing the same shots a number of times in certain comic moments. It's hard to deny that it is pretty funny at times, though. Miike's creative energy occasionally throws up some brilliantly imaginative and hilarious shots, and while throwing everything at a movie to see what sticks usually suggests a work of desperation, this director's imagination is so fertile it simply comes off as an excess of wild ideas dumped onscreen for our enjoyment. Ninja Kids!!! is a chaotic mess, but its target audience will probably love it.

The Once Upon a Time in Japan season is currently running at the ICA. It will be visiting cinemas around the UK throughout February and March.

Review - Lincoln

When one of cinema's greatest directors unites with its greatest living actor to make a film about the most iconic figure in American history, it's fair to say that expectations are high. Steven Spielberg's Lincoln exceeds these expectations by subverting them; instead of making a fawning biopic of Abraham Lincoln, Spielberg has delivered a dense, dialogue-driven exploration of political process. The sentimentality and heavy-handedness that has sometimes marred the director's previous historical films is pleasingly absent here, with his restrained directorial approach largely allowing Tony Kushner's script and his impeccable cast to drive the film. Even the score from John Williams feels unusually reined in.

Perhaps this pared-down and focused approach was simply necessitated by the story Kushner and Spielberg have chosen to tell. Although it opens on the battlefield, Lincoln is a film that largely takes place indoors, in the buildings of government, where the conflict is verbal rather than physical. Lincoln takes us through the last few months of the 16^th American President's life and details his fight to force the 13^th Amendment through Congress, therefore ending slavery. The imminent end of the Civil War gives this action a sense of urgency that imbues the film with its drama and momentum, but even so, many audience members may be sceptical about the film's potential for entertainment. With scene after scene of bearded men sitting in stuffy rooms and discussing the fine details of the American Constitution, Lincoln sounds unbearably dry, but there's a strange alchemy at work here that elevates it into a grand, rousing drama. It is history brought to vivid life.

Of course, the manner in which Daniel Day-Lewis has brought Lincoln to life is a marvel in itself. His embodiment of the man feels utterly authentic, from his slightly stooped posture to a high-toned accent that seems a little off at first but ultimately feels like a perfect fit for the character. This Lincoln has a fondness for folksy anecdotes as a means of taking a circuitous route to his ultimate point (there's a delicious moment when he embarks upon such a tale, to the chagrin of Bruce McGill's Stanton) but behind the calm and humorous manner lies a sharp strategic mind and a fierce determination. He needs those qualities to procure the two-thirds majority needed in Congress in order to pass the 13^th Amendment, and Lincoln turns this quest for votes into a riveting caper. A rambunctious trio of lobbyists (led by an unrecognisable but brilliant James Spader) is enlisted to persuade wavering Democrats to support the bill, while Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) trades angry speeches with Fernando Wood (Lee Pace) on the floor of the House.

Lincoln aside, Thaddeus Stevens is perhaps the most fascinating character in the film. Played with just the right measure of cranky gruffness by Jones, the radical abolitionist begins the film by demanding complete racial equality but is forced by Lincoln to soften his stance in order to ease this amendment through. Through this character, Lincoln shows the compromises and manipulations that are required in politics, and the way ideals must sometimes be yielded in order to find common ground and serve the greater good. In Lincoln we see Democrats being cajoled, pressured and even bribed into switching their allegiance in time for the vote. Politics is a dirty business but Lincoln, Stevens and their cohorts were driven by the knowledge that this was their moment ("We've stepped out upon the world stage, with the fate of human dignity in our hands. Blood's been spilled to afford us this moment now! Now! Now! Now!" Lincoln exclaims), and they had to win this battle by any means necessary.

The political aspect of Lincoln is more compelling than the personal one. Scenes between the president and his family are sensitively played, but these characters don't appear quite as convincingly realised and there's always the nagging sensation that there is more pressing business to attend to. Sally Field perhaps needed one more scene to make her performance as Mary Todd Lincoln feel fully rounded, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is inserted awkwardly into the narrative as Lincoln's older son, whose desire to join the army contradicts his father's wishes. In fact, the most affecting glimpse into the private lives of these characters comes at the end of Thaddeus Stevens' story; a touching scene that gives his narrative arc a satisfying climax, and serves to remind us what was at stake for these men.

Although it is bookended by its weakest scenes (typically, the director bypasses a perfect note to end on), Lincoln is a considerable triumph for Steven Spielberg, whose direction may be uncharacteristically free of the sweeping spectacle and grand flourishes we expect, but whose composition and judgement of emotion and character remains as sharp as ever. We tend to think of him primarily as an entertainer, but he has also made his mark as one of American cinema's foremost historical filmmakers, and the fact that he has managed to make a serious, verbose, ideas-driven political film on a grand scale in the current climate is something to be thankful for. This is a great film about a great man; a film driven by noble ideals and determined to show what the best of us can achieve in troubled times. Politically, personally and artistically, Lincoln gives us something to strive for.

Review - Django Unchained

Django Unchained is Tarantino Unrestrained, a film that simultaneously displays the very best and worst of this filmmaker. After rewriting the history books with the audacious climax of Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino has now turned his attention to slavery, using American cinema's most iconic and durable genre to explore the most shameful period in the country's history. Having allowed the Jews to turn the tables on Hitler, this second historical fantasia follows a freed slave who turns bounty hunter and wreaks bloody vengeance against plantation owners in the Antebellum South. It's a volatile premise, and there's certainly something bracing in the idea of one of the most singular auteurs in American film engaging with the subject of slavery in his typically forthright manner.

The problem is that Tarantino isn't really engaging with America's slavery past because Django Unchained doesn't really take place in America. Every film Quentin Tarantino has made from Kill Bill onwards has existed in Tarantinoland; a place slightly removed from the real world and governed by the rules of film genre. Django Unchained follows the pattern of the films that have preceded it by acting as a showcase for Tarantino's stylistic verve and indulgent monologues before climaxing in carnage, but rarely digging beneath the surface to find some human emotion. It's no coincidence that Tarantino's last recognisable 'real world' film (Jackie Brown, the only film he has adapted from someone else's material) is still, I think, his best work.

Django Unchained is far from Tarantino's best, but in its opening hour it looks like it might get there. In its favour, the first half of the movie gives the spotlight to Dr King Schultz (Christopher Waltz), a dentist-turned-bounty hunter who frees Django (Jamie Foxx) from his chains and hires him to help locate the Brittle Brothers, a gang of outlaws he has been fruitlessly tracking. Waltz is the perfect actor for Tarantino, so at ease with the director's verbose dialogue and such a pleasure to watch as he uses his superior intellect and verbal skills to manipulate every negotiation to his advantage. His loquacious civility is a perfect foil for the silent steeliness of Foxx's performance, whose Django often seems as bemused by the white man riding alongside him as everyone else. Tarantino gets plenty of comic mileage out of the incongruity of this partnership, and the opening hour contains some of the director's best visual work, with potent images such as a Klan raid at night or blood splattering onto cotton being skilfully photographed by Robert Richardson.

Unsurprisingly, Tarantino doesn't soft-pedal the racism in any way. Many of the southerners Django rides past simply gape open-mouthed at the mere sight of a "nigger on a horse" while others respond more aggressively, but Tarantino makes them all buffoons, playing up their ignorance and incompetence for comic effect. These characters are habitually dumbstruck by Schultz's verbal dexterity (even a word such as "ascertain" prompts the response "Speak English!") and the Klan raid is halted by the riders complaints about the eyeholes in their hoods, with the man whose wife made the hoods leaving in a huff. In fact, Django and Schultz don't encounter any racists who carry a genuine threat until they reach Candieland. Regrettably, this is also where the film stalls and never recovers.

Candieland is the plantation run by Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose favourite pastime is watching two black slaves fighting to the death. He currently has in his possession Django's wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), and in order to get her back Schultz comes up with a plan that involves them posing as Mandingo experts and offering to purchase one of Candie's fighters. It's a needlessly convoluted approach that adds nothing to the film but a lot of repetitive talk. DiCaprio is miscast in the role – he can't express the character's sadism and menace when it counts – but he appears to be having a lot of fun as the moustache-twirling villain of the piece. What struck me about halfway through the long Candieland sequence was the realisation that I wasn't having fun, and hadn't been for some time. Django Unchained is 165 minutes long, but what matters is not how long a film is but how long it feels, and the film feels bloated and sluggish, like a rough cut in need of another pass in the editing room. Scenes are allowed to drag, cuts disrupt the film's rhythm, and even some of the musical choices feel like temp tracks awaiting further tinkering from the director.

It's a shame Tarantino couldn't have cut off some of the film's fat (his own risible cameo would be a good place to start) and instead exploited the rich potential in some of his supporting characters. As Candie's wizened and toadying manservant Stephen, Samuel L. Jackson gives the film's most startling performance; a fascinating portrait of subservience and malevolence that eventually marks him out as the film's most interesting antagonist. I was hoping Tarantino would give the talented but perennially underused Kerry Washington a meaty role, but she's nothing more than a damsel in distress here, and even after Django rescues her she takes no part in the final revenge, waiting patiently outside for her man. Broomhilda strikes me as the first totally nondescript female character Tarantino has ever written, and in a film about the uprising of the downtrodden black man, it seems like a missed opportunity to not give her at least one strong moment.

But the biggest disappointment of Django Unchained is that the film ends in the only way Tarantino seems to know how, with a bloodbath that suggests the director is trying to one-up his previous efforts. The climactic shootout is long and messy, with blood spurting out of multiple wounds and splashing up against the white walls. Tarantino directs Django's bloody vengeance against the white oppressors with obvious glee, but in doing so he makes the film seem ever more cartoonish and undermines the seriousness of the white-on-black cruelty he attempts to depict in a more sombre tone. The violence in Django Unchained isn't shocking or cathartic, it's just numbing and puerile. Tarantino has made another film that satisfies all of his own urges – referencing his favourite films, including his favourite music, starring his favourite actors – but again I find myself being disappointed in his determination to make a film that fits neatly within the filmography he has become obsessed with rather than daring to engage with something bigger than movies. Django Unchained could have been a bold and shocking examination of American history, but it's just a Spaghetti Western that has been badly overcooked.

Review - Leviathan

The biggest challenge facing a viewer in the opening moments of Leviathan is working out just what in fact they are looking at. The film opens in darkness, presenting us with murky, indecipherable images and a soundtrack of mechanical sounds with a few men's voices being barely audible above the din. As our eyes adjust to the image and the camera begins to reveal more of its surroundings, we realise we are onboard a fishing vessel somewhere in the middle of the ocean at the dead of night. We are watching commercial fishermen hauling in a huge catch, with cameras apparently fixed to the helmet of one of the men giving us as subjective a view of this procedure as cinema can manage. At least we can be thankful that the film has no way of expressing the smell.

Co-directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel haven't kept any kind of objective distance from events on board this trawler, and instead they have plunged straight into the midst of it, using a number of small cameras positioned around the vessel and given to crew members. These cameras have captured the tumultuous nature of the sea, and the violent struggle between man and nature, with a visceral immediacy that is equal parts disorientating and exhilarating. Leviathan is also a powerful argument for the redundancy of 3D, as few film experiences are as immersive as this.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor's last feature film was Sweetgrass, which he co-directed with Ilisa Barbash (but went uncredited), and like that film, Leviathan is an examination of men at work, and a way of life far removed from regular society. But whereas Sweetgrass had a leisurely rhythm entirely appropriate for its portrait of sheep being herded across a mountain range, Leviathan possesses a harder and faster editing style; the film is a maelstrom rather than a ramble. The cutting is sharp throughout and from the vast amount of footage they collected from their multiple viewpoints, the filmmakers have astutely picked out a series of striking images that instantly imprint themselves on viewers' minds. From close-ups of dying fish packed inside the trawler's huge nets to a shot of blood-red water pouring over the side after the catch has been gutted, Leviathan consistently finds seemingly incidental details that feed our sensory experience of this vessel.

Towards the end of Leviathan, the filmmakers include a lovely shot of one fisherman sitting in the break room and slowly nodding off in front of the TV. It's a rare moment of quiet in a film that thrives on chaos, and while the men involved in the expeditions that Leviathan captures are all credited at the end of the film, they don't make any impression in the film itself. They remain on the fringes as they work diligently and efficiently, no more human than the machinery utilised in their process. Perhaps this is why I was slightly less satisfied by Leviathan than Sweetgrass. The shepherds being followed by that earlier film offered a point of engagement for the audience, their journey provided a narrative shape, and the fact that their way of life was coming to an end gave the film an affecting elegiac quality. This film doesn't offer any such hook for the audience, as Castaing-Taylor and Paravel disregard any rules of documentary filmmaking, and this approach can be both thrilling and vexing.

Even if I found it sometimes frustrating to watch, there's no denying the astounding formal achievement that's evident in Leviathan, with the expert editing and sound design being particularly praiseworthy. The filmmakers occasionally emit a whiff of pretension, through decisions such as opening with a quote from the Book of Job ("He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment.") or listing the Latin names of every creature caught in the end credits, but they have created something spectacular here. Leviathan's signature image may be the remarkable upside-down shot of countless seagulls following the trawler, and that's what the film does at its best; it forces us to look at the world from a different angle, seeing commonplace occurrences through fresh eyes. Leviathan is exploring territory that's centuries old – in fact, it was filmed in the same waters that Melville used for The Pequod's epic pursuit of a whale in Moby-Dick – but the manner in which it has been created makes this primal struggle between man and nature feel dramatically new.