The films I watched in 2009

In reverse order:

• Ice Age. D: Carlos Saldhana. Good fun animated creature caper. Production above average in all areas. **
• Sea of Love. D: Harold Becker. Pacino is great in an otherwise conventional murder mystery. Nice atmosphere. [DVD] *
• Cheri. D: Stephen Frears. Banal costume drama that eschews the groteque humour that might have saved it. [Cinema] No stars
• Tyson. D: James Toback. Superficial account of the boxer's rise and fall, about as incisive as a sofa. [Cinema] No stars
• Infernal Affairs. D: Wai Keung Lau, Alan Mak. Moderately impressive drama about moles in the police and triad. [Cinema] **
• Wild Side. D: Don Cammel. Camp caper about crime and lesbianism. Director's cut - Cammel killed himself after studio re-cut. [DVD] *
• The Big Easy. D: Jim McBride. New Orleans set police sex and slaying romp. What seemed sexy and cool when I was younger now just seems like camp fun. But still fun. [DVD] *
• We, The Living. D: Roy Anderssen. Bleak tablaeu of isolation and despair in Sweden. A feature from the genius behind Songs From The Second Story can not be uninteresting, but this effort contains about an equal number of hits and misses. [Cinema] *
  
• La Chinoise. D: Jean luc Godard. Godard renounces radical leftism in charactertistically off beat tale of student terrorists. Characteristically baffling and defiantly unhelpful, but contains many moments of Godardian genius. [DVD] ***
• Navigators. D: Ken Loach. Kitchen sinker about the effects of rail privaisation improves as it becomes less topical and the agitprop less grating. Still not exactly subtle and trapped in its reductive workers-bosses dialectic. [Cinema] *
  
• Inglourious Basterds. D: Quentin Tarantino. Grisly, messy botch of a war fantasy. Frequently spectacular, but incoherent and the two halves of the film never gel. Concscientiously nasty. [Cinema] *
  
• Paris. D: Agnes Varda. A selection Varda's short films from different decades. Ranges from irritating to embarrassing. [Cinema] No stars
  
• Russian Ark. D:Alexander Sokurov. Technically audacious single take film. In part, its main achievement is to remind us why we have editing. Visually spectacular, and the final sequence is very impressive, though the point of the whole exercise is elusive. [DVD] **
  
• Suburban Mayhem. D: Paul Goldman. Teen mega bitch terrorises her neighbourhood. A cigarette paper seperates this from reality. Very well done, brilliant performance from Emily Barclay as the monstrous Katrina. Like an Elizabethan comedy, it is essentially tragedy played for laughs. [DVD] **
  
• The In Crowd. D: Mary Lambert. Exploitative tosh about beautiful, heartless, underclad rich kids. A decent cast, competent direction and reasonable production can't redeem a witless, predictable script, where the twists are so obvious they look like red herrings. They aren't. [DVD] No stars
  
• Eternity. D: Wilhelm Leibenberg, Frederico Sanchez. Erotic horror about Elizabeth Bathory. Neither sexy or scary. Two credited directors fail to do the job of one mediocre one. [DVD] No stars
  
• To Kill A Mockingbird. D: Rober Mulligan. Mild adaptation. Good, but dated No excuse for not reading the book. Peck's Oscar winning performance seems mannered today, but Mary Badham as Scout and Philip Alford as Jem are good. [DVD] **
• Thirst. D:Park Chan-wook. The insane Korean auteur geleefully combines Therese Raquin, Zola's sleazy tale of adultrery and nemesis, with Kathryn Bigelow's modern vampire film, Near Dark. Inevitably weird, but more conventional than the majestically mad Oldboy. [Cinema] **
  
• Red Cliff. D: John Woo. Massive Chinese battle epic, but for seasoned Woo watchers, basically a remake of Hardboiled with swords. [Cinema] **
  
• Architekten. D: Peter Kahane. East German architects run up against institutional inertia. More interesting than it sounds. [Cinema] ***
  
• Wall-E. D: Andrew Stanton. Excellent film, brilliantly executed, lovely characters and a thankful lack of rubbish jokes aimed at adults. [DVD] ***
  
• Noi the Albino. D: Dagur Kari. Dull, wilfully offbeat tale of misfit youth. Iceland is presented as a sort of Scaninavian Lake Woebegon, without the humour. [Cinema] No stars
  
• Pierrepoint. D: Adrian Shergold. The life of Britain's premier hangman. A great idea, a great lead, but let down by the Coronation Street production values and a lack of visual, philisophical or narrative insight. [DVD] *
  
• Nackt Unter Wolfen. D: Frank Beyer. Concentration camp cat and mouse as prisoners conceal a Jewsih child. A distant ancestor of the slushier Life is Beautiful, this film is stark, brilliant drama. [Cinema] ****
  
• 2046. D: Wong Kar-Wai. Beautifully filmed meditation on love confounded, lacking only purpose and urgency. Which is, unfortunately, two things it really needs. A s with much of this director's work, it is like watching beautiful paint dry. [DVD] *
  
• Charade. D: Stanley Donnen. Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in a comedy thriller with too much of the former and not enough of the latter. Directed with a bit of style, but nowhere near as charming as it thinks it is. [DVD] *
  
• Made in USA. D: Jean Luc Godard. A big, pretenious mess of a film by the master, stumbling badly between the brilliance been (Les Mepris) and to come (Weekend). Still, nothing by Godard is entirely worthless. Striking use of colour, visual audacity, and a the sheer gall of the project provokes something mid way between admiration and condemnation. [DVD] *
• Ich War Neunzehn. D: Konrad Wolf. The final days of WW2, from the point of view of Red Armyy soldiers always just behind or to one side of the main action. The Spandau sequence and the final scenes pack considerable wallop. [Cinema] **
  
• The Fast and the Furious (1955). D: John Ireland, Edward Sampson. Corman quickie with nothing to recommend it. The remake looks like Potemkin in comparison. [DVD] No stars
  
• Oldboy. D: Park Chan-wook. Sick, brutal, nasty film about long delayed revenge. Redeemed only by the fact that it is brilliant in almost every way. [DVD] ****
  
• Last Tango in Paris. D: Bernardo Berolucci. What is the worst aspect of this film? The script? Brando's performance? The turgid sex? The embarassing 'lets make a movie' sub-plot? The insufferable self importance of Bertolucci's direction? [DVD] No stars
  
• Elephant. D: Gus van Sant. A shooting at a school very like Columbine. The too clever, sleek cinematic technique ends up being exploitative, which, I assume, was not van Sant's intention. [DVD] *
  
• Days of being Wild. D: Wong Kar-Wai. An arrogant playboy takes his women for granted. His life falls apart as he seeks his birth mother. Beautifully done, but uneven. [DVD] **
• Moolade. D: Ousmane Sembene. In a traditional African vilalge, a woman gives four girls, facing female circumsion, sanctuary. This provokes a confrontation between her and the vilalge, progress and tradition, locals and outsiders, men and women. Simple, predictable but well done. [DVD] *
• Gaslight. D: George Cukor. Charles Boyer tries to drive Ingrid Bergman insane in this creaky, overwrought but still fun melodrama. Very quaint, it is strange to think that in the USA, Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon were already history. Joe Cotten made the not-dissimilar Shadow of a Doubt with Hithcock the year before, and must have found the change jarring. [Cinema] *
  
• They Drive by Night. D: Raoul Welsh. First half is great, blue collar drama, blessed with terrific dialogue as Bogey and Raft truck on. Second half is absurd melodrama, though Ida Lupino is obviously haveing fun. [DVD] *
• Mala Noche. D: Gus van Sant. Highly likeable tale of gay hustlers at the social fringes. Beautifully acted, wonderful freewheeling syle and densely composed sound track. Very good, though small scale means it feels slightly inessential. ***
  
• Infamous. D: Douglas McGrath. Covers same ground as the better known Capote. A more conventional, but perhaps better film with its own strengths and weaknesses. Toby Jones is superb. [DVD] ***
  
• Der Dritte. D: Egon Gunther. A woman seeks love amid the socialist realism. Stylish, very nouvelle vague winner from the GDR. [Cinema] ***
  
• Berlin-Schonhauser Corner. D: Gerhard Klein. It doesn't sound promising: 1950s East German teenage rebellion. The actual film is every bit as unconvincing as that summary sounds. [Cinema] *
• Lone Wolf & Cub 4: Baby Cart in Peril. D: Kenji Misumi. Frantic, preposterously bloody samurai fun. With a topless ninjette. [DVD] *
  
• Sleeping Dogs. D: Roger Donaldson. Feisty little film, chronicling the rise of fascism in 1970s New Zealand. No, really. Features a gaunt, youthful Sam Neill. [DVD] **
  
• Knafayim shvurot. D: Nir Bergman. Generic, but likeable, Israeli family drama. Offbeat setting and believeable cast are assets. [Cinema] *
  
• Capote. D: Bennett Miller. Well made account of the writing of In Cold Blood, though too self-consiously crafted and enigmatic. [DVD] **
  
• Manufactured Landscapes. D: Jennifer Baichwal. Profile of the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky. His photographs are astonishing, clinically objective illustrations of the impact of industrialisation on landscape, but the additional material is less interesting. [Cinema] **
  
• San Pietro. D: John Huston. Another supressed WW2 doco from Huston, detailing the cost of a single battle in the Italian campaign. [DVD] *
• Let There Be Light. D: John Huston. Long supressed WW2 doco, showing rehabilitation of shellshocked GIs. Somewhat dated. [DVD] No Stars
  
• Darwin's Nightmare. D: Hubert Sauper. Jarring documentary about poverty, exploitation and pending ecological collapse around Lake Tanzania, where locals fish for invasive Nile Perch which are freighted to European restaurants while the fishermen subsist on rotting fish remains. [Cinema] ****
  
• Zulu Dawn. D: Douglas Hickox. Prequel to the events described in the better known Zulu, this film is less jingoistic and more sympathetic to the Zulus. Merciless in exposing the blunders that lead up to the disaster at Isandlwana. [DVD] ***
  
• No Country for Old Men. D: Joel & Ethan Coen. Film noir in cowboy hats. Accomplished, polished and well turned out, but spoiled by a cartoon villan. Still, gave Tommy Lee Jones a chance to act, rather than chew the scenery. [DVD] ***
  
• Perfect Strangers. D: Gaylene Preston. He kidnaps her, she kills him, keeps him in the freezer, falls in love with him. So mad it almost works. Good performances and lovely locations. [Cinema] *
  
• March of the Penguins. D: Luc Jaquet. Let down by anthropomorphism, sentimental music and a lack of facts and data. Nice pictures. [DVD] No stars
  
• The Producers. D: Mel Smith. First half is superb, with Mostel and Wilder playing off each other. Opening number of 'Springtime' is brilliant, but the other musical scenes are flat, lacking the comedy or bad taste that made the first half great. [DVD] **
  
• Flandres. D: Bruno Dumont. Wilfully bleak, purposeless film about farms, mud, sex, war, only much less interesting than that sounds. Dumont tells us that life sucks, in every film he makes. He doesn't seem to be capable of saying why it sucks, or what we could do about it. [Cinema] *
  
• The Longest Day. D: Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Bernhard Wicki, Elmo Williams. Still stirring war film. The pre-invasion scenes are often twee, but the staging of D-Day itself is impressive and gritty. Three 'official' directors, plus Elmo Williams is credited for co-ordinating 'battle scenes' and deserves directorial recognition. [DVD] ***
  
• Mauvais Sang. D: Leos Carax. Four things that ruin French films are here in condensed form: no plot, no urgency, stylistic excess, Juliette Binoche. [Cinema] No stars
• All the Kings Men. D: Robert Rossen. Triple Oscar winner from 1950 still works brilliantly, partly because politicians are still corrupt scum bags who lie, but mainly because the cscript, direction and cast - particularly Mercedes MacCambridge - are superb. Ends predictably, just missing out on that coveted fourth star. [DVD] ***
• King Lear. D: Brian Blessed. Blessed, as Lear, looks like a tetchy hobbit. Some good performances among minor players. A poor adaptation which looks like it was filmed on a mobile phone. [DVD] No stars
  
• Gospel According to Harry. D: Lech Majewski. A summary would make this banality seem more interesting than it is. A big disappointment from the director of the fascinating Angelus. [Cinema] No stars
  
• Diva. D: Jean-Jaques Beineix. Homage to Hollywood, Hitchcock (note the shameless MacGuffin driven plot, the lighthouse, and matters "disposed of from a great height"), Blow Up, Godard, Paris. Tres chic, but empty. [Cinema] **
• Toy Story 2. D: John Lasseter. An advantage of parenthood is that you get to watch films like this. Enjoyable, and possessed of an old fashioned, pre-Shrek innocence. [VHS - no, really, it does still exist] **
  
• La Science des Reves. D: Michael Gondry. Watery romantic comedy which tries too hard to be batty but is annoying and superficial. There are some very cute animations. [Cinema] No stars
  
• Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man. D: Lian Lunson. By-the-numbers tribute concert, but does that matter with numbers like these? Some interesting commentary from Cohen. A pity Bono exists. [DVD] *
• Basquait. D: Julian Schnabel. An indulgent biography of the graffitti artist. There are some good performances, but the whole thing feels suspiciously like a highbrow Finding Forrester. [Cinema] *
• Mr Arkadin. D: Orson Welles. Mad, late period attempt to combine Kane, The Trial and The Third Man into one. Less than those mighty works, but like anything Welles did in his late phase, this film has baroque touches of near accidental genius. [DVD] **
• Hamlet. D: Mike Mundell. After a creaky opening segement, this is well done, though its low budget shows in almost every scene. A spirited presentation with a good cast that capturesd the 'feel' of the play more effectively than some mega-star and big budget vehicles. [DVD] **
• Wild Things: Diamonds in the Rough. D: Jay Lowi. Sleazy, exploitative, and delightfully trashy, though pretty much worthless for anything other than lewd amusement. No stars
  
• Melissa P. D: Luca Guadagnino. Glossy, softcore Europorn. Hallmark erotica which pretends to be investigating the fraght topic of teenage sexual misadventure but is really just exploiting it. Avoid, no matter how base your motives. No stars
  
• Angelus. D: Lech Majewski. Weird fable about individuality and spirituality in communist Poland. Beautiful and successful on its own captivatingly strange terms. **
  
• MacBeth. D: Jeremy Freeston. A very poor attempt at the play, with Connery and Baxendale weak in the lead roles. The text has been hacked to pieces and the whole thing is poorly staged. Good Banquo and decent witches. [DVD] No stars
  
• The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. D: Mark Herman. Unsurprisingly bleak film which serves as a good introduction to the Holocaust. Yes, it is contrived and not very realistic, how much does that matter? [Cinema] *
• To Have and Have Not. D: Howard Hawks. Shameless clone of Casablanca. Bogey & Bacall exchange sardonic one liners. Hoagy Carmichael sings. William Faulkner writes. Nil resembleance to the Hemingway novel of the same name, apart from the involvement of boats. Daffy fun. [DVD] **
• The Sweet Smell of Success. D: Alexander MacKendrick. Uber-louse Tony Curtis oils and weasels his way about the screen in a stupendous film about how vile people can be to each other. [DVD] ****