THE LOBSTER

(Yorgios Lanthimos, 2015)

There are some brilliant ideas and moments here. The central conceit is the kind of thing that shows how imaginatively conservative so much cinema is: it imagines a world where single people are sent to a hotel in order to pair off within 45 days. If they do not, they are transformed into the animal of their choosing. Some evenings, they head off to a local forest to hunt "loners", rogue singles who have forsworn relationships and live off the land. David (Colin Farrell), recently abandoned by his wife for another man, arrives at the hotel with his brother in the form of a dog, and befriends a man with a limp (Ben Wishaw) and a man with a lisp (John C Reilly), while eluding the affections of a desperate woman (Ashley Jensen). Halfway through the action shifts to the forest as David joins the loners. Here, and against the rules, he falls for a woman who is short-sighted, like him (Rachel Weisz), but if the leader (Leá Seydoux) finds out, they will be in danger.
This is all told in a series of deadpan scenes with flat, affectless delivery of dialogue, Lanthimos' coldly controlled style, and a severe score of several pieces for string quartet sawing away in the background.
While there are some moments of brilliant comedy, much of the success of the material is down to the cast. Farrell and Wishaw do extremely well at halting and awkward loneliness, while Olivia Coleman is another standout as the matter-of-fact hotel manager. Weisz's voiceover is played for some big laughs too, but the story takes a strange turn towards the climax and becomes surprisingly moving.
The allegory at the heart of the story is a little too broad and vague to sustain an entire narrative, even if sometimes it becomes more precise and pleasingly cynical. There are shots here at online dating logarithms, tinder and our cultural acceptance of couples over singles which are often provocative, but much of it is too scattershot to have much of an effect, for all that it is still witty and accessible.It occasionally hints at making more profound statements about human attraction and repulsion - why we need other people and what it does to us - but never quite commits to that.

SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS

(Martin McDonagh, 2012)

All self-indulgence should be as entertaining as McDonagh's follow up to In Bruges. And make no mistake, this is thoroughly self-indulgent, with its tale of a screenwriter hero named Martin (Colin Farrell) who is sick of typical Hollywood portrayals of violence and gets himself tangled up in a dog-kidnapping scheme gone wrong once it targets the pet of psychopathic mobster Charlie (Woody Harrelson). The dog-kidnappers are Charlie's friend Billy (Sam Rockwell) and Billy's friend Hans (Christopher Walken) and they end up in the desert, giving Martin advice on how his screenplay - also named Seven Psychopaths - should end, while hiding from Charlie and his gang. Along the way McDonagh gives us a series of fantasy sequences illustrating portions of Martin's screenplay and the stories people contribute in an effort to assist him while the main storyline continues along well-trodden Tarantino-esque lines.
That this is all so entertaining is purely down to a fine cast and to McDonagh's talent as a writer. He writes blistering dialogue, instantly shown in the opening scene as two mob gunmen wait around before a hit, discussing the minutiae of love and murder in what seems a deliberate thumbing of the nose at post-Tarantino cliches. McDonagh repeatedly criticises his own work, and this self-reflexism works better at some points than others; the criticism of Martin's female characters as "terrible" cyphers who only exist to be shot doesn't really excuse the lack of interesting women here, while Martin's wish that his film could just end with everybody off in the desert, talking, is borne out until it isn't.
He can do tension too, and specialises at finding the comedy in these moments, the instant when
nervousness and fear become a queasy sort of amusement.
The cast make so much of it work. Rockwell is tremendous, hilarious throughout - it is funnier than the majority of this years outright comedies - but also suggesting the power of Billy's friendship with Martin, while Farrell carries off the difficult straight-man role well. Walken, Harrelson, Linda Bright Clay and the likes of Tom Waits and Željko Ivanek in smaller roles all do great work with the character parts that McDonagh writes so well.
But really, this is a very slight entertainment, wicked and dazzling at times but also empty and strangely unsatisfying. McDonagh and his talented cast can do so much better.

TOTAL RECALL

(Len Wiseman, 2012) This remake of Paul Verhoeven's 1990 adaptation of Philip K Dick's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" takes little from either piece of source material. The barest bones of the plot are used, as are a few character names, and director Wiseman throws in a couple of sly references to Verhoeven's film - there is a three-breasted prostitute, and a limb is lost in an elevator. But this is a very different film; darker, grittier and tighter. It is perhaps the closest thing to a genuine b-movie among this summers crop of blockbusters; at its heart a man-on-the-run thriller, driven along by a relentless succession of huge cgi action sequences of varying inventiveness and interest. Its world-building is adept enough; the story takes place in a future where War has rendered all of Earth uninhabitable except for Great Britain and Australia, and workers travel from the latter to the former via an immense tunnel through the earths core known as "The Fall". The two different territories steal from different dystopian visions; Britain is a towering, gleaming megacity, all flying cars and synthetic policemen, while "the colony" is an Aisan-inspired floating shantytown, filled with food karts, neon and rain-slick street markets. That reflects another big difference between this and the 1990 version; here is a film influenced by the current economic situation, where the world depicted is defined by the conflict between the rich and the poor, rather than Verhoeven's use of mutants on Mars. Onto this there is laid an espionage plot; Doug Quaid (Colin Farrell) is a construction worker plagued by a recurring dream of another life. He visits Rekall, a company who implant memories of a more glamorous, exciting life into your mind, but his visit is interrupted by the arrival of a team of policemen. Displaying combat acumen he didnt know existed, Quaid kills them, discovers that his wife (Kate Beckinsale) is not really his wife, and now wants to kill him, and finds himself on the run with Malena (Jessica Biel), a beautiful Resistance "terrorist" who knows him as Hauser, a former Government spy turned terrorist leader. After all this, one notable scene aside, the film barely flirts with the idea of whether or not these events are real or implanted. But then it has little time for any ideas; Wiseman is too busy driving from one video game-influenced pursuit to another. A parkour-esque chase over Colony rooftops, balconies and through alleyways, a high-rise car chase over and under freeways above what was once London, a game of cat-and-mouse through elevators that go sideways as well as up and down through tunnels and vertiginous shafts, and a zero-gravity gunfight. There are scenes and beats shamelessly stolen from The Bourne Identity and Minority Report, but the world is sumptuously mounted and convincing, Farrell is a winning lead, Biel and Beckinsale are as good at the action as they are at the little drama required of them, and Bill Nighy and Bryan Cranston provide classy if underused support. It is always watchable, occasionally thrilling, and ultimately forgettable.

PRIDE AND GLORY

(Gavin O'Connor, 2008) Gavin O'Connor doesn't really do original. His films - from drama Tumbleweeds to sports films Miracle and Warrior, to this police corruption drama - hit all the usual, expected beats, feature predictable, familiar characters and plot-points, and generally offer solid storytelling and entertainment. What he does well is emotion. Pride and Glory is a derivative, cliched police procedural, familiar in it's every particular, but, while it never approaches the power and intensity of Warrior, O'Connors best film, it still truly sings at certain points. That is partly down to O'Connor's style; he works in a gritty, you-are-there register, atmospheric, tonally downbeat and generally realistic, eschewing any flourishes but the occasional touch of visual poetry. There is a definite and pleasing '70s vibe to the material and the approach. He also casts extremely well. Here he has assembled an impressive array of macho character actors (the likes of Frank Grillo, Shea Wigham and John Ortiz) to back up his leads. Those leads are Edward Norton as Ray, a New York police detective who has been working a desk job following an unspecified trauma from some past raid gone wrong, but finds himself - at the behest of his father (Jon Voight), an alcoholic veteran - working on an investigation into the shooting of three cops during a drug raid. His discovery of serious corruption inside the Precinct run by his brother (Noah Emmerich) leads him into conflict with his brother-in-law Jimmy (Colin Farrell), a rogue dirty cop who does deals with drug lords, arranges hits and tortures innocent people for information. The leads all relish their big confrontations, but those scenes are part of O'Connor's problem as a dramatist; he seems to think in terms of operatic confrontation, actors screaming as they eyeball one another. It works when the actors are as good as the ones on show here, though the best moments belong to the ever-impressive Jennifer Ehle as the terminally ill wife of Ray's brother. Her silent despair as she watches her sleeping children one night is perhaps the films most piercing moment. Aside from that, it's very much a collection of scenes reminiscent of other scenes in better movies. Cops bust down doors, cops refuse to be intimidated, cops have regretful conversations with estranged wives. Nocturnal meets occur in deserted industrial areas. The Irish-American mileau of dingy bars, drunken sentimentality and suffocating family is nothng new, but is nicely evoked. The violence is vivid but not especially memorably-staged. The cast are all fine; Farrell and Norton give their all to characters who are limited by generic necessity, Emmerich is as good as he ever is, bowed beneath the weight of his sadness and regret, while Voight powerfully plays another in a long succession of old lions. At over two hours, it's far too long, with pretensions of saying something about the law and justice, when really it's merely a powerful little family drama with some pulp in its DNA.

MIAMI VICE

(Michael Mann, 2006)

In many ways, Miami Vice is the ultimate Michael Mann film. Here he perfects the digital photography he experimented with in the earlier Ali and Collateral. Here he remakes some of his earlier work (the plot is based upon a couple of separate episodes of the Original series, but elements of it were also used in his Robbery Homicide Division series from a few years ago). Here he revisits some of his recurring themes - men defined by what they do, the impossibility of true human connection in the modern world, the relativity of good and evil in terms of law and order...Here he also returns to his favourite visual motifs, such as man pensive in a wash of blue by the ocean and the harsh beauty of the modern American city by night.
The film follows two Miami detectives as they head undercover into the twilight world of the international drug trade, posing as drug-runners in order to expose a mole within US Drug War intelligence. That brings them into the deadly orbit of a Colombian organisation and leads Crockett (Colin Farrell) into an affair with Isabella (Gong Li), a sort of financial advisor to Godfather Jesus Montoya (Luis Tosar, chilling in a few short scenes) while his partner Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) struggles to keep them focused and alive.
Mann has dealt with this world so often that now he is merely refining his ideas and sharpening his details. There is the sense in Miami Vice of an artist working almost in shorthand. Dialogue and exposition are minimal, spoken realistically and offhandedly. Cliched situations are elevated by the intensity of the writing, direction and playing - the undercover cop falling in love with one of his targets, a nocturnal shootout in a shipyard. The details are always telling and the soul of the film is in the tiniest moments. In a stylistic choice evoking Terrence Malick, Mann's camera occasionally drifts away from the obvious focus of a scene to dwell on something else entirely - Crockett gazing out a window at the ocean while his squad turn the screw on an underworld contact, or the feet of children racing past a car-wheel on the street outside a Havana Bar.
Mann is possibly the finest stylist working in modern cinema, and he puts sequences together better than just about anybody else. His camera moves elegantly and unostentatiously, and some of his compositions are extremely daring - he will often begin a scene with an abstraction rather than an establishing shot and loves to fill the foreground of a shot with the dark block of a shoulder. He is obsessed with surface - buildings, clothes, cars, weaponry - because he understands that in the modern world, surface often is substance, appearance is all, and that gives Miami Vice a tactile sense of the world too often missing from genre cinema. His action scenes are unparalleled, realistic, coherent and thrillingly visceral and his eye is just superb; there are countless moments of incredible visual beauty in this film, thrillingly captured by Dion Beebe's fluid digital photography.
Aside from the thematic and stylistic aspects, Miami Vice is his first film since The Last of the Mohicans to focus on a love story, and as such, its his most emotional film in some time. His decision to pull away from the procedural elements of his narrative and devote a large chunk of the film to the doomed romance between two characters is a bravura one, and it pays dividends at the climax, which has a hefty and adult sense of tragedy, loss and pain. The chemistry between Farrell and Li, both terrific, is crucial to that, and the rest of a strong cast - great players like Ciaran Hinds, Eddie Marsan and John Hawkes in even the smallest parts - gives it the feeling of an intimate glimpse at one small part of a wider, fully imagined world.
One of the great American films of the '00s.

SHELL SHOCK

A.K.A TRIAGE
(Denis Tanovic, 2009)

War Correspondant dramas were common in the 1980s. Under Fire, The Killing Fields, The Year of Living Dangerously, Salvador; all focused on Western journalists in South East Asia or Central America, as if the only way for audiences in the first world to relate to the experiences of the people actually living and dying in Cambodia or El Salvador was for us to see one of us there, being traumatised by man's inhumanity to man. Well, Denis Tanovic's Shell Shock tells the story of a War Photographer and his suffering. And it's even set in the 1980s - meaning Dublin is dressed up in "The Joshua Tree" posters and buses that haven't been seen on its streets in over a decade and the nightclub scene features New Order as the background music - during the most infamous conflict between Sadaam Hussein's Iraq and the Kurds.
But it lacks the rage or the artistry of any of the films I mention above. Only the first act takes place in Kurdistan, and it is the best material in the film, highlighting the awkwardness inherent in taking photos of people suffering and dying only feet away. But it is also over-familiar, visually and dramatically, the usual grittily-shot desert scrub filled with grimy bodies, the struggle back to life from serious injury, Colin Farrell suffering beautifully with greasy hair and a beard.
The rest of the film, however, is utterly drab by contrast. As an attempt to portray post-traumatic stress disorder, it settles on a curiously confined setting in a depopulated Dublin, shot clinically but without any sense of style or any real visual interest.
Farrell's performance is partly to blame. Always most effective when asked to let his natural charm and charisma shine through - as he does in early scenes here- his interpretation of numbness is to do nothing. His face is immobile, his eyes blank. He can play mournful and has done so successfully in several films, but this is lower wattage and he hasn't got the wit or experience to make such a one note performance interesting. Paz Vega brings little to a nothing "girlfriend" role, leaving a scenery-chewing Chrisopher Lee as easily the best thing in the film, delivering tons of dialogue in a Spanish accent and plainly having a rare old time.
He is not enough to rescue the film, which has already settled into it's stiff, oh-so-serious torpor by the time he arrives. The last act revelations and flashbacks are predictable and banal, and it's all mediocre enough to make me wonder if the film that brought Tanovic to prominence, Yugoslav War black comedy drama No Mans Land, is as good as I remember.