Amour - Michael Haneke (2012)

1. Amour is a really miserable way to spend a couple of hours, brought to you by Viennese dungeon-master Michael Haneke.
2. Peter Bradshaw loves Haneke. Philip French loves Haneke. Dave Calhoun loves Haneke. But it's ok for you not to love Michael Haneke. In fact, it's quite reasonable to regard Michael Haneke as a kind of large-scale sadist who gets his kicks from making his audiences uncomfortable.
3. Of course, there's nothing wrong with sadism, or indeed masochism, if that's what makes your clock tick. But you do sort of have to be in the mood. And if you happen not to be it's totally not your fault.
4. It's a commonplace mistake to assume an association between the bleak and the meaningful. Some true things are bleak: for instance, we are all going to die, and a lot of us are going to have to get old first. But not all bleak things are true. In fact some things are made bleak deliberately and artificially - like films about old people getting on and off the toilet and refusing to be spoonfed apple sauce in the hope that their partner will just let them die.
5. Haneke achieves his stated aim of discomfiting the audience in at least three ways.  The first is visual. He's always shooting down corridors or through doorways. Characters negotiate spaces awkwardly, or silently contest the spaces between each other, or between us and them. Apart from the very first (rather pretentious) shot of the auditorium, all the action of Amour takes place within the confines of the couple's flat. We, the viewers, are the intruders. Haneke never lets you forget that you're nothing but a filthy little voyeur who likes to watch an old lady being given a rough sponge bath, and would really prefer it if her nurse would only get out of the way so you could see everything.
6. The second technique he uses is to deny either his characters or their stories the coherence that Hollywood has taught us to expect. So, for instance, a daughter might suddenly start to sexually molest her mother. Or an old man caring for his terminally ill wife might suddenly slap her. 'We are all capable of anything under the right circumstances' says Haneke, and being Austrian, well he might. In this film, as in Cache or The White Ribbon, the ending is ambiguous. You are denied satisfaction. And that's all you deserve, because you're a nasty little bourgeois shit, who wants things to turn out nice every time.
7. The third method he uses to make all those awful perverts in the audience writhe in agony is showing them pictures of people doing horrible things to each other. Haneke's films are punctuated by violence, but the violence is always shot in such a way as to seem commonplace. The camera doesn't move. The violent event is always sudden, bland and narratively dysfunctional. Haneke claims this is a means of denying violence its status as pop confection. The absence of dynamism produces impassivity, it makes you feel as though you're just sitting there watching - which of course you are. His fixed shot is a finger pointed at the viewer's own appetite for the pain of others. Because, don't forget, you're nothing but a filthy, voyeursitic, bourgeois sadist pervert. SAY IT!
8. So why this need to punish the audience, who, after all, were only looking for a good time? What have we done to deserve this? Well apparently it was all our fault for watching Top Gun.  Haneke claims that his films are a reaction to mainstream cinema, with its attempt to manipulate the view into trite sentiments and moral conclusions. He has memorably said he wants to 'rape the viewer into independence' which is a totally weird thing to think you could do. You don't have to make people miserable to make them think. You certainly don't have to rape them. David Lynch manages to confound his audiences expectations, whilst also introducing some light and shade into his films. Kubrick's worldview was bleak, but he knew how to make you feel more than one thing.
9. So Haneke sets out to trap us, but ironically he thinks he's doing it in order to set us free.* Maybe he's not unaware of this paradox. Consider how, in this film, an act of smothering might also be a release.
10. Of course, the real paradox here is that the people who watch Haneke's films aren't the same people who watch Top Gun and swallow it whole. He's actually offering a peculiar product for a very rarified form of cinema-goer. The kind that feels bad about all the times they willingly consented to the charms of Hollywood. In a way, the film's title is a nasty joke at the expense of our expectations of film - we reach for the lolly, and instead we get the lash. Watching this movie is a kind of a punishment, but it's the kind of punishment you pay for. And there is nothing  more wholesome about that than any other kind of cinema.

*In fact Haneke is only half Austrian. But still.

Dredd 3D - Pete Travis (2012)

1. Dredd 3D is the second feature to be based on Judge Dredd, a comic book character from the British sci-fi weekly 2000AD.
2. Don't worry, it's much better than the Sylvester Stallone turkey, which, ok, didn't set the bar terribly high.
3. This film was put together with a budget of around $50 million. That sounds like a lot of money, but compare it with Prometheus's budget of $130 million or Avatar's of $237 million and you can see that, although not quite made on a shoe-string, this is toward the lower end of the scale for a sci-fi action movie on general release. Incidentally, the absolute winner of bang-for-buck sci-fi has to be Moon, which meets the highest standards of excellence and cost a mere $5 million to make. 
4. A lot of this film was shot live, rather than created with CGI and this occasionally gives the set-pieces a  lazer-quest-with-live-ammo feel. It's probably occurred to you that CGI is actually the enemy of sci-fi  - because it prevents either the director, or the audience, from having to use their imagination - practically the whole reason anyone is in the cinema in the first place.*
5. What the Grudd? Dredd never wields his daystick, there also aren't enough robots in Megacity One and Dredd's Lawmaster bike doesn't have either foot-wide tires or the long Harley-type handle bars and forks which are its identifying features.  A lot of 2000AD readers (or Squaxx dek Thargo as they like to be known) won't like this. But then they're not a hugely influential demographic, from a cultural POV.
6. Hmm that actress playing the brutal matriarch Ma-Ma looks familiar, and it's not just because she bears a passing resemblance to Kiera Knightley if only Kiera Knightley were somehow able to act. She is of course Lena Headey who plays the brutal matriarch Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones. And who's that playing the ruthless, intelligent thug, Kay, but Wood Harris who plays the ruthless, intelligent thug Avon Barksdale in The Wire. You may also recognise the plot, which is a combination of the films Training Day and The Raid. None of this really matters during the action sequences which seem to have come fully-formed from the mind of a delirious psychopath having just the best day ever.
7. The idea for Slo-Mo, a drug which slows one's experience of time to 1/60 speed, was allegedly inspired by watching nature documentaries in HD. Isn't it a cool thought that, in a world where people have run out of space, a hallucinogen that could slow down time would become massively popular? If you'd like to reproduce the effects of Slo-Mo in real life your best bet is probably yage or just some good old lysergic acid diethylamide.
8. The film was written by Alex Garland who wrote The Beach. I know, you haven't been this excited since All Saints reformed. But Garland hasn't just been taking shamanistic drugs and watching box sets for the last 15 years: he also wrote 28 Days Later, and Sunshine. And somehow managed to get himself paid one million pounds sterling to write a script for a Halo film that has so far never been made. Nice work if you can get it.
9. Some people think that since Dredd was conceived in Britain during the late 70s at a time of civil unrest and widespread police brutality the character must be a satirical commentary on those two things. But the writers of Dredd bring too much naked relish to his behaviour for that. Is it possible that the kind of bearded, real-ale drinking Hawkwind fans who write 2000AD are also exactly the kind of people who'd happily kick to death kids who listen to grime out loud on their mobiles? Why do you think shy sci-fi people love sci-fi? That's right, it's because they find the present intolerable.
10. Olivia Thirlby puts in a great and sensitive performance as Judge Cassandra Anderson. This is no mean feat. In the comics she always seemed like she'd been designed by a 15 year old pervert. A female authority figure whose working clothes consist of a roll of black cling film and a zip and who, at any given moment, knows exactly what you're thinking.

*see also the difference between Star Wars and Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith. Prometheus and Alien. Or in fact Prometheus and virtually any other film that didn't go straight to DVD.

The Dark Knight Rises - Christopher Nolan (2012)

1. The Dark Knight Rises is the latest in the DC Comics franchise from Hollywood’s most successful idiot, Christopher Nolan. 
2. Christopher Nolan really wants to make intelligent films, but he keeps making complicated films. It’s hard to know whether Nolan himself loses any sleep over the shortfall. He’s keen to associate himself with noir, a genre which he’s called maze-like. And this is very telling. Apart from things like low lighting, a preponderance of flashbacks, femme fatales and bruised male protagonists the defining feature of noir is an air of unresolved mystery. A maze isn’t really a mystery. There is only one entrance and one exit and Nolan’s films are prosaic in just the same way. Now you are lost in the maze. Here is the exit to the maze. 
3. If the prison from which the child Bane emerged was so awful, how come they’ve got a TV? How are they getting reception down there? Do they have cable? Ok, it’s quite a small TV but it’s just that, from the description Alfred gave, it sounded like a kind of living hell, rather than slightly better than a Spanish youth hostel. 
4. Films like Memento, The Prestige or Inception substitute the explanation of an idea for plot. In fact, it sometimes seems like Nolan’s goal as a filmmaker is to explain any idea that’s put in front of him as earnestly and humourlessly as possible, like he’s got a vendetta against ideas, like they make him feel bad in way he can’t express. And it’s weird because often the ideas he’s got it in for aren’t that well thought out, or really the kind of ideas that you'd think it was worth spending millions of dollars to get a scowling Christian Bale to stamp the life out of.
5. Nolan’s big action sequences are shot for real. He’ll really blow the wings off a plane, or lob a crane over the edge of a motorway, or build a bat bike that can leap three double decker buses. If you watch this interview you’ll notice that he regards the fact that studios give him money to enact his stunts with the reverence of a man in the presence of a mystery he really cannot understand. 
6. The Keysi Fighting Method, the martial art used by Bale’s Batman, was made up by two blokes in Spain. You’re probably wondering if men who make up their own martial arts are cool guys who hang around by their motorbikes with their muscly arms crossed. You are in for a treat. 
7. Oh no! Michael Caine is trapped a dream in which he’s playing Michael Caine doing an impression of Michael Caine doing an impression of Michael Caine!
8. Most of the mysteries in Nolan’s films are binary, the equivalent of asking a child which hand the sweetie is in. Is the top spinning, or is not spinning? Is the magician in the box, or not in the box? Is the bomb in this truck or the other truck? But why is the bomb in either? If Bane is so fiendishly clever, why didn’t he keep the bomb somewhere else? This never occurs to Bane, because it never ever occurs to Christopher Nolan.
9. The Gotham Stock Exchange is actually the frontage of the Masonic Temple in Covent Garden. Kind of wondering if they let him use it because he's a mason. Or maybe Nolan secretly believes that the masons are giving him the money to keep making films. 
10. After sitting through three hours of that, you probably felt like watching Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. It’s way better than this. Jack Nicholson is fantastic, and you get to watch Kim Basinger defining the phrase ‘in her prime’.

Prometheus - Ridley Scott (2012)

1. Prometheus is a complexly bad film by Ridley Scott.
2. If you only saw it once you might have had the sense that it was good for the first hour, and collapsed later on. In fact, this was an illusion produced by your own excitement taking about an hour to wear off. A second viewing reveals that it’s pretty bad the whole way through.
3. One of the problems with Prometheus is that it’s an Alien prequel. Alien is just the best horror film ever made that happens to be set on an alien planet. It knows what it’s about, it’s about scaring you and it uses every jaded, dirty trick it can lay its hands on to do so. Prometheus wants to be a sci-fi film in the spirit of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. You can tell from the use of Chopin, the early exterior shot ofthe spaceship moving silently across the vastness of space, the hugely overwrought mythological overtones and the fact it’s called Prometheus.
4. You’ve probably spent the time since you realised a what a bad film it was hoping that Ridley Scott was drunk when he made it, because he’s about to revisit Blade Runner, and wouldn’t it be awful if he fucked that up too?
5. For instance why would anyone who wasn’t totally bladdered at the time cast Guy Pearce to play the world’s oldest man. Why not cast Anthony Hopkins, Peter O’Toole, or just anyone slightly old? Why not cast my Dad? He would have been way more believable.
6. Why do the prehistoric star maps show the Engineers co-existing with humans? And if, as the ship’s captain suggests, the planet is a military facility, why have the Engineers been encouraging prehistoric humans to draw helpful maps of how to get there? There’s no point thinking deeply about it, or going onto an internet forum to discuss it, it’s not a mystery, it just makes no sense.
7. There are two good ideas which were squandered in the film. One is the thought ‘what if we were the aliens?’, uninvited, unwelcome guests on a planet that we were never meant to find. The other is, what if life itself were a biological weapon?
8. Because that’s what the contents of the vases seems to be, a formula for a selfish gene, equipped with a complete horrorshow of a survival instinct, that on contact with air  begins spontaneously to assume the most aggressive form possible to ensure its survival.
9. F-boner continues a good run, as the retentive, tight-buttocked android, David. His best scene is another Kubrick rip-off, playing basketball indoors, while the humans are in hypersleep – like Jack Nicholson throwing his baseball in the abandoned hotel. But he also has some shockers – grinning into the star map for instance. And even though dismembered androids who keep talking while vomiting a weird milky fluid are the mascots of the Alien films, the short exchange about mankind's insatiable curiosity that ends with Dr. Shaw apologising for zipping his decapitated head into a bowling-ball bag is pure turkey. It's a good thing that in space no-one can hear you snort with with derision.
10. So given that David indirectly impregnated Dr. Shaw out of envy, or spite, with the proto-squid. And the proto-squid then impregnated the surviving Engineer with the Alien, that would make Dr. Shaw, who we are told earlier on is barren, the progenitor of the Alien. A kind of Leda and the Swan-type scenario. Or maybe David is the holy ghost and she’s the Virgin Mary. Or maybe since the proto-squid is ripped from her she's a female Adam, giving birth to an Alien Eve. Or maybe Weyland is the father, David is the son and oh look I suddenly don't care any more.

Moonrise Kingdom - Wes Anderson (2012)

1. Moonrise Kingdom is a film by Wes Anderson that you may want not to like, but will probably find impossible not to like.
2. Anderson is turning into a obsessional stylist along the lines of Pedro Almodovar. His conventions are thematic, as well as visual, but his visual tics include the tracking shot through a model-like building, or actual model of a building. The inventory-taking diagrammatic layout shot. The artfully colour-coordinated codacrome fashion shoot shot. The symmetrical portrait with matching background shot (often in pairs). The slow-mo walking shot. The super long mise-en-scene in a single take. They are all here. In fact, if you like Wes Anderson as much as Wes Anderson does, you'll love this.
3. There's something utterly mad and childish about wanting to get all of your favourite things into every film you make. It's like a boyscout who's proud of his badges. Or a little sensitive girl who wants to show you her careful selection of books and records.
4. In this very entertaining video Bill Murray notes that Anderson tends to wear his trousers short, so everyone in this film also wears their trousers short and ends up looking like 'the kind of person you might want to mug'. You probably also noticed that the film is dedicated to Anderson's girlfriend, the writer Juman Malouf. And the film, in its earnestness, awkward showiness and nested detail, is exactly the kind of gift that a character in a Wes Anderson film would give their girlfriend.
5. David Lynch wants to show you what's inside his head. But he's the kind of unapologetic weirdo that doesn't really care what you think:  he's blown his nose and wants you to look at the handkerchief. Anderson wants to show you what's in his head, but he also wants you to like it and appreciate that it's cool. And there's something annoying about this. Neediness of this kind is the opposite of cool - it's awkward. But oh, awkwardness is very Wes Anderson.
6. If you'd like to experience the feeling of being in a Wes Anderson film in your own life, find a colleague or family member. Begin a conversation, but hold his or her gaze for way longer than is necessary or comfortable. Now look away. Now look back and thoughtfully offer them an ashtray, a carrot stick or a sandwich with the crusts cut off.
7. Look at Bruce Willis, he thinks he's acting like an intelligent person acting like a stupid person. Ha ha ha.
8. If you were a paedophile, wouldn't it be funny to get two 12 year olds to grope each other, film it and then show the film to millions of people? 
9. Of course, the 10 Point Review is not suggesting that Wes Anderson is a paedophile, but only that, if he were, he'd be the paedophile all other paedophiles wanted to be. In fact one of the things that makes Wes Anderson's films so fundamentally Wes Anderson is their shyness around all matters sexual. (Apart from that bit in The Darjeeling Limited where Adrien Brodie fingers Amara Karan on a train which feels massively overdone and compensatory). Adult relationships in his films are always complex and sad, and there is a huge yearning to be actually pre-sexual. A non-sexual sexual impulse. Maybe what you're realising is that Wes Anderson is a strange guy. Perhaps you're even starting to think it's sort of wonderful that he's allowed to make films with big stars in them, that loads of people go to see.
10. Bill Murray isn't an actor, he's the man with the world's most sympathetic face. Bill realised years ago that he didn't have to do anything to make people warm to him, in fact they warmed to him especially when he didn't do anything. His face reaches new levels of immobility in this film, like a hugely loveable sofa cushion, from a childhood rec room, with the stuffing removed.

The Cabin in the Woods - Drew Goddard (2011)

1. The Cabin in the Woods is a brilliantly entertaining movie about horror directed by Drew Goddard, one of the writers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and produced by Joss Whedon.
2. The film opens in a government facility: two weary bureaucrats (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) bellyache about their home life as they prepare for a mysterious event. At this point you probably felt like you were watching a high-quality HBO comedy-drama. That's because Whitford and Jenkins have been in every TV show you've ever liked, from Six Feet Under to Ally McBeal. There is something immensely reassuring about their presence. Remember that word 'reassuring'.
3. The poster shows the cabin as a Rubik's cube. It's a puzzle for genre fans and spotting the references is part of the fun. So, the teenagers from A Nightmare on Elm Street get in the RV from The Hills Have Eyes and drive to the house from Night of the Living Dead through the forest from The Shining and encounter the zombies from Dawn of the Dead. And hey, where have I seen that merman before?
4. The horror genre depends on fear of the unknown. Now, you're going to say, 'no, it depends on the fear of death.' But then look you're caught in this entertaining loop, do we fear death because it's unknown, or do we fear the unknown because it reminds us of death? Have fun with that one.
5. You may have noticed that what you learnt about the nature of events at the cabin short-circuited your capacity for the fear of the unknown. You knew exactly what was controlling those events, from the beginning of the film. But by then you'd also probably understood that it wasn't really a horror film. Unless you write for the Guardian film blog, in which case you somehow managed to hopelessly miss the point.  None of this is a secret, after all the film's title is a parody of a horror title. 
6. There's something nerdy going on here. The geeky idea from Douglas Adams via Terry Pratchett (and, yes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) is what if the magical required administration? And what if its administration was handled with a level of competence comparable to all other forms of human affairs? Wouldn't that be weird?
7. Conspiracy theories are paradoxically reassuring. The thought of powerful forces at work behind the scenes, is way more comforting, more patrician and more American, than the idea of no powerful forces at work behind the scenes. 
8. Most horror films take a kind of fear and make it manifest. So you might say that The Shining is 'about' the murderous impulses contained within every family, Drag Me To Hell could be 'about' bulimia, Black Swan the psychic collapse of a neurotic type-A personality. This film has a vending machine filled with fear of every flavour. That's because it's a film 'about' fear itself.
9. Jenkins and Whitford's characters establish a betting floor in the facility. The thing that, according to all the computer models never happens, happens. Those reassuring people that you thought had it under control turned out not to have it so under control. Sound familiar at all?
10. Fear is a product of culture, so were that culture to collapse, all of those familiar things you were afraid of simply would not exist any more. Well might we look at the ghosts and buzz-saw wielding zombies with something approaching wistfulness. They are the known unknowns, and they are so much more appetising than the unknown unknowns which lie just down the road. It might even be that they were cultural artefacts designed to distract us from the genuinely terrifying spectres of environmental disaster and global economic collapse that would freak the entire population the hell out, if only we stopped eating the pizza of pop culture for long enough to think about them.

Rampart - Oren Moverman (2012)

1. Rampart is an astonishingly good film starring Woody Harrelson, directed by Oren Moverman. The screenplay is by Moverman and James Ellroy, but much of the dialogue is ad-libbed and Harrelson is so totally on-point he should probably get a credit too.
2. Los Angeles, 1998. The city has recovered from the riots only to be gripped by a massive police corruption scandal involving the anti-gang CRASH unit (Community Resource Against Street Hoodlums. Yep, really) based on Rampart Boulevard. Some 70 members of the unit are implicated in crimes ranging from armed robbery to the theft of huge amounts of cocaine from police storage. Beating suspects is SOP. Basically the group has turned into the city’s baddest gang, eg: its officers wear tattoos of a skull in a cowboy hat surrounded by poker cards showing aces and eights, ‘the dead man’s hand.’ They award trophies to each other for shooting suspects, in a bar in Echo Park.
3. It’s all relevant because the story centres on Dave ‘Date Rape’ Brown, a deeply corrupt LAPD cop. Brown is a Vietnam vet who regards the police presence in LA as a military occupation. He’s also the most dangerous sort of psychopath, the kind that believes that he’s the last good guy standing. There’s a sense in which he is the rampart of the title, betrayed, attacked from all angles, using every ounce of his ingenuity to hang on.
4. And this is just one of the reasons that we sort of admire him. You probably noticed that one of the film's dedicatees is C. G. Jung, and perhaps the satisifaction we get from watching Brown taking care of business comes from mainlining some very shadowy archetype behaviour.
5. Harrelson is in every scene and he’s insanely good. Sinewy as hell, chain-smoking, charming and bent on survival. He even manages to show us Brown’s vanity – his consciousness, when he’s being likeable of his own likeability. Also his terrible loneliness, which is the loneliness of anyone who tries to live life their own way.
6. There are some dangerous ideas in this film. One of the hardest to swallow is that women love a murderer. Dave Brown earned his moniker for the killing of a serial date rapist, and of all the women who he sleeps with in this film there isn’t one that doesn’t know it.
7. There are so many great lines: ‘I’m not a racist, I hate all people equally’, ‘you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in this bar’ and not forgetting ‘I like to suck cock! So sue me!’
8. Brown has a polygamous relationship with two sisters and a daughter with each of them. It’s a testament to the strength of his will that he can hold a situation like this in place, and a bellwether sign that his will is giving out that he can’t keep it together. He is the creator of his own morality, a father figure. But the film's final scene offers us the hope (and by then it is a hope) that although he may be losing his grip, he won't let go.
9. Even Ice Cube turns in an excellent performance. There’s a rightness in his appearing here, for fans of his album, The Predator, he represents the spirit of that particular place and time.
10. It's hard to know how Time Out expect people to take their film reviews seriously when they reference Kill List, a great film, but one that resembles this film not at all, and not Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant. Or Aguirre Wrath of God. Or really any Werner Herzog at all. Also has anyone noticed the way that Time Out's reviews so often contain a 'really too many to mention here'-type phrase? Why not sit there with your pencil and try a bit harder yeah?

The Artist - Michel Hazanavicius (2011)

1. The Artist is a curious film by Michel Hazanavicius about how awful it is being French.
2. Hazanavicius' other major films, OSS 117: Le Caire, Nid d'Espions (Cairo Nest of Spies) and OSS 117: Rio Ne Repond Plus (Lost In Rio) are slapstick comedies about a clueless Gallic secret service agent, also played by Dujardin. Given meticulous 70s art direction, and a technicolour wash, these, too, are period pieces that use style to generate substance, comedies of nationality where being French is funny, rather than tragic.
3. Critics like Peter Bradshaw keep writing about how it's a 'homage to the age of silent cinema'. This simply isn't so. Hazanavicius says that the majority of silent films are 'boring'. His influences are directors like John Ford, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock and the film's references are all distinctly post-sound, like Vertigo. Hazanavicius was interested, first and foremost, in making a film without sound, rather than a silent film, setting it 1920s Hollywood merely provided him with a pretext for doing so.
4. A French person will tell you that the word for cool in French is 'cool'. And if you say, 'no, what is it in French' they will look at you and shrug like a Pierrot.
5. If you're a director who makes francophone cinema you will inevitably spend your career trapped in the ghetto. The Foreign Language category at the Oscars is just one example of the patronising apartheid that will be the closest you'll get to recognition in the US. By making a silent film Hazanavicius has entered through a side door. Most of the academy were probably delighted when they discovered they'd just watched a French film that didn't make them feel stupid. At the time of writing Labrokes are 1/6 on him to win Best Director.
6. Just imagine if your language had no word for fun, and that every time you wanted to say something was fun the word that came out was charming. Obviously, the French don't make things easier for themselves by taking mime seriously, or dressing their children up in creepy little sailor outfits, but perhaps they only do that kind of thing because, tragically, they don't understand the meaning of the word charming either.
7. As you no doubt noticed the film as shown at a 1:1.37 aspect ratio. And there is something genuinely transporting about the way it feels to be in a cinema, looking at this oddly square frame, listening to an audience laughing over the instrumental score, bathed in the flickering white light from the screen. 
8. It is not true that John Goodman has never been in a bad film, in 2009 he had a major role in Confessions of a Shopaholic.
9. You probably realised that there was a sense in which Valentin was the artist rather than just an artist that was about more than the scattergun deployment of the definite article in French. His story is an anatomy of talent. Because, nothing is more likely to make you averse to trying new things than being good at one thing in particular. Valentin is only prepared to change once the pain of not-changing begins to outweigh the pain of changing. That he does so without dignity, sustained only by the faith of the people who love him, is relatively unimportant. All an artist has to do is survive his own process, by whatever means necessary.
10. The beautiful Berenice Bejo is Hazanavicius's wife. If you're a romantic you'll probably imagine that her off-screen role mirrored that of her character's, and that she sustained Hazanavicius through the, undoubtedly traumatic, process of making this strange film.

Shame - Steve McQueen (2011)

1. Shame is a film about a man with an interesting and varied sex-life, starring Michael Fassbender, directed by Steve McQueen. 
2. Seriously though, what red-blooded man doesn't have this much sex with strangers and prostitutes and webcam girls and female colleagues and porn and men all the time? What?
3. If you're interested in Michael Fassbender's penis you'll love this. You don't even have to wait long, it's right there in your face in the first scene, waggling around a spare, soulless New York apartment. Apparently Steve McQueen insisted on Fassbender's being naked all the time on-set and, whenever he asked, 'what's my motivation here?' would simply point at the tip of his penis with a conductor's baton.
4. This is the worst porno ever right? But, of course, this is a film about sex in a world where sex isn't fun any more. Fassbender's character, Brandon, is an addict. As is made abundantly clear, he uses sex compulsively because of a terror of intimacy. This not-very-subtle idea is stated in about 10 different ways. A female caller leaving an answerphone message for him over and over (it's almost like she can't get through to him), his inability to get stiff in the presence of woman who wants to know him (but it's fine with a prostitute later) and the 7-inch record of Chic's I Want Your Love, that's playing in his apartment when comes home (ironic!) and the fact he keeps asking his sister 'what do you want from me?' (she wants love, did you get that? Love).
5. But there is a cruel irony at work here, where the addict's substance of choice ends up delivering the precise opposite of the thing it once promised. So the alcoholic who drank for conviviality ends up pissed and alone. And the sex addict who once fucked to feel loved finds himself unable to love. The look on Brandon's face during coitus is that of a mating dog, a creature compelled to do something, without having the first idea why it's doing it.
6. It's pretty heavy stuff, so you can divert yourself by considering that Willem De Foe's penis was actually so large that Lars Von Trier had to use a body double for all the weird sex in Antichrist. And, according to model Janice Dickinson, Liam Neeson's cock is the size of an Evian bottle. So, those are the guys to beat.
7. Brandon jogs listening to Bach's piano cantatas. Of course, these are variations on repeated theme, so, a clever touch in a film about repetitive compulsive behaviour, but who, really, listens to disco in their flat and classical music when they go jogging? If you had to think of a word for the film's symbolism it would probably be heavy-handed, which is two words.
8. There are at least two meanings of the word shame. One is 'a feeling of humiliation brought on by the consciousness of wrongdoing'. The feeling we feel when our actions run counter to societal norms, according to Freud, a manifestation of the internalised society we each carry within us. Brandon, however, is living in a post-shame world. His boss discovering his browsing history is the worst possible thing that could happen - and yet there are no consequences, and he feels nothing. After all, how can the condemnation of authority mean anything when even that authority is literally shameless, cheating on his wife with Brandon's sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan)?
9. Turns out the price of liberation from our own shame is the freedom to live out our desires, which are delusions of the kind that, ceaselessly pursued, will eat you alive. As Sissy says: 'We're not bad people, we just come from a bad place'. The other meaning of the word shame is 'a regrettable or unfortunate thing'.
10. Carey Mulligan just looks so English and she has neither the face nor the voice to pull of a pretentious scatted version of New York, New York. The 10-Point Review literally fell asleep, twice, during the song, but that could just be that terrible post-coital exhaustion that usually kicks in after lunch don't you just hate that etc.?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - David Fincher (2011)

1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a superior best-seller to blockbuster adaptation by David Fincher.
2. Like Fight Club, this is way better than the book it's based on. Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian, have stripped out most of the dross about industrial espionage and the Venger family history. Lisbeth's backstory is reduced to one intense vignette plus a menacing hint about her Dad. And there's none of the stuff to do with Venger having employed Blonquist's father in the 60s. All this makes it a leaner and tighter thriller altogether.
3. Speaking of which, Fincher cast Rooney Mara from the Social Network, instead of Scarlett Johansson, whom he rejected for being too sexy (which you have to like him for doing on behalf of all men, just once). At first the camera approaches her with caution, giving us the hard angles of her jaw and hair. But as the film progresses Mara's body is photographed pornographically. Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with her body, but it is an unconventional sight in a blockbuster. Small-breasted and lithe as an eel, she's boyish, and never more so than when she's being handcuffed and sodomised (yeah, spoiler, if that's the word).
4. Fincher seems to be intent on provoking several million hetero viewers to an experience of the 'queer' element of their own sexuality. For instance, during the rape did you walk out? Why not, were you enjoying it? And if that seems like an uncomfortable question, consider that this film is all about the terrible things that people won't admit to.
5. If Fincher made the call not to move the action to the US it's not because he likes Sweden. Blonquist asks Harald, who sits surrounded by photographs of Scandinavian supporters of the Third Reich, why he doesn't redecorate. The exchange goes something like this:
   
   H:I'm the most honest
   B:In your family?
   H:In Sweden. My relatives want everything to have a shiny surface, like an Ikea table.
   
   Needless to say, this isn't in the book. Nor is this the first of Fincher's films to feature Ikea. As in Fight Club, the veneer hides something something far more savage.
6. Martin Wenger's chamber of horrors is an upgrade from the cellar in the book, which is merely a basement, rather than a centre spread from Lairs Magazine. What else would be hidden beneath his sterile Scandi-house? Like interior design, like mind. It isn't quite fair, since Fritzl was Austrian, but the precedent does prevent you wondering too much about how he got the sofas down there without anyone noticing.
7. Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor have put together a really intelligent score. You probably noticed the white noise as Lisbeth enters (she's a hacker, one who interferes), and the use of disjointed rhythms while they piece together disparate clues. Also that their cover of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant features a scream very like the one that Lisbeth lets out in the lift after her first meeting with Bjurman.
8. Lisbeth's primal scream is important, it tells us that, fucked up as she may be, she offers the dark currents of her personality a clear channel into the world outside. The really evil people in this film are the hypocrites, the kind that live in a world of wheat-toned scatter cushions with a soundtrack by Enya. By breaking Martin Wenger's jaw she reveals his true face, as it would be if evil could be seen, and when she rides out into the forest after him they do so as the purest versions of themselves: a demon chasing a monster.
9. The intro sequence is by Tim Miller at Blur Studio - not Kyle Cooper who did Se7en. As everyone keeps saying, it is like a James Bond intro, but there's a larger repertoire of fetish objects: guns, women, men, USB cables, rubber ball-gags and carnivorous plants, can you spot them all? And did it give you an erection? Just asking.
10. You can buy Lisbeth's 'FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCK' nightshirt here. But to distress it properly you'll need to really put the hours in spooning heavily-pierced bisexuals.

Moneyball - Bennett Miller (2011)

1.  Moneyball is a surprisingly engaging film about using statistical analysis, or sabermetrics, to assemble a successful baseball team.
2. But it’s ok, it was written by Aaron Sorkin who also did The Social Network, the best film about a court case about a website that you are ever likely to see, and it was directed by Bennett Miller, whose last film was Capote.
3. You have to wonder whether Miller even likes baseball. His depiction of it is bleak – the players are exploited, the scouts are liver-spotted charlatans, the owners are shark-eyed capitalists. Pitt’s character, Billy Beane, is unable to even watch his team play, because he’s terrified he’ll jinx their game, so the game itself features hardly at all. Ok, there are a few graphs and some montages, but that’s more or less it. In fact, Miller seems to have ended up making a sort of anti-sports movie, which is probably good thing, given that the baseball is up there with cricket and kabbadi in the wilful tedium stakes.
4. Miller took over from Steven Soderberg, who wanted to turn it into one his of his multiple storyline films, following the car journeys of 20,000 individual Oakland As fans on their way to the stadium.
5. You suspect Brad Pitt is the man who made this film happen, since he’s been allowed to play his favourite version of Brad Pitt. In this sense the film is of a piece with The Ides of March, and The Rum Diary. A major star shooting an eccentric, otherwise virtually un-financeable script. You might see this as A-list males bankrolling their own B-movies. But even if these films aren’t as good as they’re making out, at least they’re way more interesting than studio pictures cobbled together from green paper, CGI and market research.
6. Aaron Sorkin is a huge Freudian. His stories are all about characters processing trauma. So Zuckerberg becomes the geek who can't relate who creates the ultimate system for mapping social relationships. Lt. Kaffee (Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, which, yes Sorkin also wrote when he was about 15) is the lawyer who can't stand up in court because he’s so intimidated by his memory of his father, the star court lawyer, and ends up having to face down the ultimate father figure: a bristling Jack Nicholson. And here Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the baseball player who was overrated by scouts as a young man, brings down the temple of subjective baseball analysis with sabermetrics.
7. It's a great way of writing satisfying films, but it’s sort of misleading, because it makes it look like a situation has arisen in order that the character can process their stuff. This is an illusion, brought about by the fact that Sorkin has worked backward from the event to the trauma, when in real life the trauma happens first, and there probably isn't any kind of causal relationship anyway. 
8. Sorkin used to like to freebase cocaine. He said ‘I had found a drug I absolutely love and that gave me a real break from a certain nervous tension that I kind of carry with me moment to moment.’ In a Sorkin film Sorkin would be a writer who learns to process his dissatisfaction with real life by writing screenplays where the dialogue is always perfectly polished and everyone has a sharp comeback ready. Miller allows his actors to hesitate, talk over one another and repeat lines which gives all the smart stuff the patina of realism. It works surprisingly well, even if you can't quite believe that people who work in baseball are anything like this entertaining.
9. You’ll notice that Beane has a load of pictures of The Clash on the wall in his office. These are from the single date the Clash played at the Oakland  in 1982, supporting the Who - you can tell because Strummer has his 80s wide Mohican going – like in the Rock the Casbah video.
10. Aaron Sorkin could probably write a script about eastern mysticism, field theory and kabbadi and it might even be interesting, so long as they didn't let Steven Soderberg direct it.

Margaret - Kenneth Lonergan (2011)

1. Margaret is a flawed, overloaded, but moving film by Kenneth Lonergan.
2. Who's Kenneth Lonergan? Well, he wrote Analyze This and, yeah, ok, The Gangs of New York. But wait, Margaret is really good, and at no point do gangs of men march on set, armed with a range of cutlery, and introduce themselves. If you're wondering what Lonergan looks like, he plays Anna Paquin's screenwriter dad here.
3. Don’t Matt Damon and Anna Paquin look terrific? It’s not CGI, it’s just that this movie has been trapped in post-production since 2006. Lonergan shot hundreds of hours of footage but couldn’t arrive at a cut he could live with. Fox Searchlight, to their credit, wouldn’t release the film without his approval – but they did sue him, hard, for not getting his shit together. This explains why, despite having some major stars in it, there was zero publicity, and you can only see it in about two London cinemas.
4. What you’re watching is a cut by Martin Scorsese, signed off by Lonergan. Things have to get pretty bad before people start saying ‘let’s get Scorsese to do this, at least he’s not such a perfectionist.’
5. It’s a film about sympathy, and how much we can really be expected to feel for other people.
6. All modern life depends on apathy. For instance, it’s only possible to inhabit a city like New York or London because, beyond your family and closest acquaintance, you don’t really care what happens to the human beings around you. Imagine the emotional ‘load’ of a single London tube carriage: all the hopes, dreams and fears of all those people sitting in close proximity to you. Compare that with your own deafening sense of isolation when sitting on the tube. The city has turned you into a psychopath. Why, you could probably watch someone being horribly maimed in a traffic accident and have forgotten about it by lunchtime.
7. Or could you? Are there certain kinds of tragedy that would force you into deep sympathetic contact with the strangers around you. And how would that be? Isn't there something greedy-seeming and, ironically, unsympathetic, about trying to participate in someone else’s emotional life without their permission? And how do we choose who we feel for and who we don’t? These are just a few of the pleasantly un-worked-out questions that the film raises.
8. There is no one in this film called Margaret – the title comes from a poem, Spring and Fall, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It’s about a little girl crying for the dead leaves in Autumn. Hopkins basically explains to her that she’s crying for her future self who’s bound to end up so weighed down with human misery that things like dead leaves just won’t even touch the sides. Just one good reason for never leaving your child alone with a Jesuit.
9. You probably noticed that, in the scene in which Joan and Lisa sit down in the New York Opera House, the shot is an extension of your own view of the cinema’s seating. It’s a paradox that if you want to care about people you have to go to the opera. Or the cinema. Another paradox is that the people invested with responsibility for the public expression of emotion are actors, the most narcissistic, emotionally self-involved people there are.
10. The experience which Lisa is having at the end of the film is catharsis, as described by Aristotle. The drawing out of emotion elicited by drama. The spooky thing is that what she’s watching is Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, which has nothing to do with her situation whatever. Which is, realistically speaking, true of any work of art you've ever loved.

The Rum Diary - Bruce Robinson (2011)

1. The Rum Diary is a confused film about boozing in Puerto Rico, based on a novel by Hunter S. Thomson with a screenplay and direction from Bruce Robinson.
2. Robinson is famous for Withnail and I, but he also made How to Get Ahead in Advertising, a poorly researched but entertaining morality tale about an ad executive (Do you mean executive or do you mean copywriter? Well how about you make up your fucking mind?) who grows a talking boil. He also wrote an autobiographical novel The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman, which the 10-Point Review can't really recommend.
3. About half-way through this film Johnny Depp's character, Kemp, visits a ghetto where he takes a picturesque photo of a young black girl through the window of an abandoned car. This scene is meant to demonstrate that Kemp is more than a tourist, he's a serious reporter with an axe to grind. Yes, fine, but the majority of the film is about getting drunk and chasing girls on a tropical island, which is more or less the modern definition of tourism. And all the other black people in it are hostile, frightening or sexually threatening. You cannot both have your cake, and also eat your cake.
4. In fact, if you're scared of gays and black people you'll love this. As in Withnail and I male homosexuals are menacing, but in Puerto Rico it's not just Uncle Monty who wants to bugger you, there are a load of sailors who are just dying to get right into your ass. There's also the scene in which a sweating Chenault (Amber Heard) dances with a young black man whose abs look like they've been carved from an illegally logged Amazonian hardwood while her husband (Aaron Ekchart) is forcibly restrained, powerless to intervene. You probably recognised these scenes as the expressions of sexual neurosis they patently are. If you're this worried about being forced to suck cock, no wonder you have to drink so much.
5. Speaking of which, there's a lot of cock fighting in this film, a blood sport that's illegal on the US mainland, but not in Puerto Rico. Its inclusion, in unflinching slow-motion, along with the racism and homophobia mentioned above, as well as the boozing, drug-taking, fast cars and the edible female lead, demonstrates the film's unrepentantly retro aesthetic. This is subtly different from the reconstructed retro of, say, Mad Men, which encourages the viewer to see the 60s in a slightly patronising light ('Nice suits, but if only they'd had therapy'). It's a sort of paean to a time when life was less complicated and/because these things were allowed to pass unexamined.
6. Bruce Robinson is a recovering alcoholic who relapsed to write this screenplay. Maybe that's what gives the movie its holiday feel: an escape from reality and its concomitant moral responsibilities. (Is it ok to have sex with prostitutes if you only do it in Puerto Rico? Just asking.)
7. You might consider this film as a sort of prequel to Terry Gilliam's, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Depp who at 35, played the 34-year-old Thompson in Fear and Loathing, now at 48 plays the 22-year-old Thompson in The Rum Diary. Basically he's twelve years older where he should be twelve years younger. It's confusing, and all you can take from it is that Jonny Depp looks fantastic for his age.
8. Aaron Eckhart is forging a career as what William Burroughs called 'The Ugly American'. Which is not to say that he's ugly, but that's there's something about his too-good-to-be-true jawline that means he's inevitably cast as a representative of everything that's cruel in the American dream. A few decades ago he would just have been a leading man, a la Donald Sutherland, but now he appears in order to demonstrate the vulnerability of old America, brought about by its lack sensitivity. His girlfriend is bound to cheat on him.
9. Hopeless sentimentality is as much a feature of alcoholism as drinking alcohol. And this film has a sentimental streak about a mile wide.
10. 'Empower the fowl', 'Your tongue is an accusatory giblet! Keep it out!', 'Can you smell that? That's the smell of bastards' - these phrases are characteristic of Hunter S. Thomson's idiosyncratic voice. Yes, well, none of them are in the book - they come from Robinson, who, let us not forget, could write a line for Uncle Monty like ' Come on lads, let's get home, the sky's beginning to bruise, night must fall and we shall be forced to camp.'

Wuthering Heights - Andrea Arnold (2011)

1. Wuthering Heights is a dour Andrea Arnold adaptation of Emily Brontë's classic English A'-level text.
2. Arnold has made two excellent films: Red Road and Fish Tank. This is, if not quite a fully-fledged turkey, certainly nowhere near as good as either of them.
3. During the 80s Arnold appeared as the foxy roller-skater, Dawn, on the children's Saturday morning show Number 73. If you've ever wondered why when anyone says 'Maidstone' you mentally append the word 'Kent' you know who to blame. If you were born around 1980 and a have a spare half hour for a disorientating dose of nostalgia click here
4. Arnold's characters inhabit alienating spaces, they stalk across patches of wasteland or industrial estates, argue in car parks or dance in abandoned council flats. If you ever run out of petrol and find yourself trudging down the hard shoulder of a motorway, entertain yourself by imagining you're in an exciting Andrea Arnold adaptation of Rebecca.
5. For the first hour or so of this overlong film the young Heathcliff (Solomon Glave) and Catherine (Shannon Beer) chase one another over the Pennines. No council estates here, just birds, beetles, rocks, mud, grass, rain and sky. And did I mention birds and rain and mud? And rain? After a while you may start wishing someone would introduce an episode of Rentaghost, just to leaven the mix.
6. Unlike most adaptations this one concentrates on the childhood sections of the book, apparently to make Heathcliff's grief more poignant and believable. For Arnold cinema is the closest thing to sharing someone else's experience. Stuff like the uniquely isolating feeling of deafening wind in your ears, which no other medium could reproduce effectively. So during the extra-long first half she's trying generate sensuous memories that will tie us to Heathcliff and Cathy in the second half...
7. ...only it doesn't quite work, and she has to keep introducing flashbacks to remind us of how the first half felt. Plus Kaya Scodelario and James Howson who play the older Heathcliff and Cathy don't either look, or seem, like the same people as their younger counterparts.
8. In forensic science circles necrophilia is known as 'cold-cocking'.
9. No-one in this film seems to care about getting soaked in the rain - despite the fact that keeping warm and dry must have been a life and death-type priority in 19th Century Yorkshire. Perhaps we're being invited to consider true love's elemental qualities. But you will probably spend most of the film thinking 'will someone please just shut that fucking door'.
10. To be fair Wuthering Heights isn't an easy book to adapt, not least because the emotions it describes aren't realistic. In the novel they're smothered under layers of 19th Century story paraphernalia, framing narratives, eavesdropping, discovered texts and so on. Arnold has removed all this, she's also removed the dream sequence, and the gothic qualities of the house itself. She has removed the bathwater, but also the baby. In fact, Kate Bush's interpretation of the novel is far more faithful not just to its melodrama, but also its irony and intelligence. This film closes, not with Kate Bush, but Mumford and Sons, and so reveals its true sensibility. Like them, it proves you can strip back to the essentials and still end up sounding pretentious.

The Ides of March - George Clooney (2011)

1. The Ides of March is an ok political thriller directed by the actor George Clooney.
2. It's a film about ambiguity: no one in it is quite what they seem.
3. For instance, you might consider Clooney to be a likeable, bankable, but ultimately lightweight Hollywood star. But no, no, no, it turns out he's a director of worthy political thrillers starring fidgety actors' actors like Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
4. George Clooney's face can sell anything, from Steven Soderbergh's Ocean franchise films, to proprietary brand coffee machines. This is a pretty weird state of affairs, and there's probably no-one who finds it weirder than George Clooney.
5. Clooney enjoys a reputation for both intelligence and niceness. You can almost imagine him being embarrassed by the power of his face as an instrument of economic gain and this embarrassment registering as a certain wilful perversity in its deployment. It's like he's levying a kind of boredom tax on the use of his face. This, perhaps, explains why he often appears in complex, slow-moving films like Syriana, The American and Good Night, and Good Luck.
6. You see, there was time, just after he left ER, when he might have been an action star: running around in a polo neck, shooting things, etc. Only then he started making films with Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers. Maybe it was then that he realised clever films tend to privilege dialogue and cinematography over action, and perhaps this is why all his films feel like they've had the action systematically sucked out of them. The word that comes up a lot is restrained. The discovery of the body, the final argument between Gosling and Clooney are all studiously under done in this movie. Like a not-very-intelligent person who maintains a reputation for intelligence by not saying much.
7. Ryan Gosling is great in this film. Sadly he doesn't stamp through anyone's face, but he does do some high quality flirting. The flirting is based largely on double bluff, which is one of the film's motifs. It's neat, like the way that when you break off a piece of broccoli it looks like another tinier piece of broccoli. Actually the scenes between Gosling and Wood are the best here, but then they're also the most reminiscent of Julia Roberts' scenes with George Clooney in Ocean's Eleven.
8. Don't worry, Evan Rachel Wood was born in 1987, so she's not actually a teenager. But she is, technically speaking, 'the devil's candy'. The idea of a sexually confident 20 year old woman, raised on a diet of MTV and hardcore porn, is the modern replacement for the sexually submissive female lead of the past hundred years. But she's not a threat, because it turns out that the price of that sexual confidence is emotional instability, an abortion and then death (oops, spoiler, sorry). BTW, are we really expected to believe that she poons Gosling because she needs $7000? And that there is no-one else at all that she could ask? Come on.
9. The screenplay is based on a play by Beau Willimon called Farragut North. The Ides of March is, as you well know, a quotation from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a play that is synonymous with political duplicity and betrayal. But it also refers to a date, March 15th which is not slightly relevant to this film. It's almost as though they've chosen the most famous line in Julius Caesar, because quoting Shakespeare makes you look clever. Restrained? Or just strained?
10. Ryan Gosling appeared in the Mickey Mouse Club for two years alongside Justin Timberlake. All the face-stamping and intern-fucking in the world is not going to turn you into Jack Nicholson after that. But at least he's trying.

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn - Steven Spielberg (2011)

1. The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is the gayest movie to appear on general release since Gus Van Sant's Milk.
2. Whether Tintin is gay is a facetious question, like whether or not Lady Macbeth has children. Outside certain obscure hentai Tintin is absolutely sexless. But the informing principle of this film, and of all Tintin stories, is gay.
3. Tintin is a young man with a taste for 'adventure'. These 'adventures' always involve the pursuit of some species of MacGuffin, in this case, model ships. In fact the MacGuffins are functionally interchangeable, masks for a libidinal urge that leads Tintin, with clockwork regularity, to the docks. 
4. Whenever he visits the docks Tintin is inevitably cornered by two or three heavily-built men and either chloroformed or assaulted with a phallic object like a rubber blackjack or cosh. Very often he awakes to find himself bound, and gagged. You'd think, under the circumstances, he might just avoid docks and shipyards. But oh no.
5. When the John Williams score kicks in over the seaplane taking off from the crest of a wave you may well be aware of the sensation of your buttons being firmly pushed. This won't stopped them being pushed.
6. What about that scene where Tintin is thrown violently around a cabin filled with sailors while Captain Haddock watches from the doorway? In fact, by that point you've probably started to think of the film as a really intense gay porno for children. But don't worry, all the sex has been substituted for 'adventure'.
7. Georges Prosper Remi, or Hergé, gets a good deal of stick for being a sinister fascist, not just because he was a keen scout, but because during the occupation of Belgium the Tintin strip appeared in the Nazi-controlled paper, Le Soir. And it's not like the stereotyping of black people, Arabs, South Americans, Russians and Jews was limited to that period of his career either. Spielberg has had the rights to Tintin since the 80s - but he probably had to make Schindler's List first didn't he?
8. Tintin's best friends are his toy terrier, a hairy alcoholic and two moustachioed, co-habiting bachelors. There's nothing to see here.*
9. In modern gay argot the word for a beefy, hirsute gay man is a 'bear', the word for a correspondingly lithe, ectomorphic and hairless gay man is a 'twink' or 'chicken'.
10. The only woman in Tintin is the opera singer Bianca Castafiore. She is a comic character, distinguished by her high-pitched voice, a female secondary sexual characteristic which all the other characters find intolerable.

*Hergé died from an HIV-related infection in 1983, but he caught it from a blood-transfusion. He remains a national hero in Belgium. 

Contagion - Steven Soderbergh (2011)

1. Contagion is a disaster movie by Steven Soderbergh starring every single actor in Hollywood.
2. Jude Law suffers from a terrible illness. Its symptoms include a prosthetic overbite and a risible Australian accent. Soderbergh has a tin ear when it comes to accents. You probably remember Don Cheadle's wince-inducing 'English' accent in Ocean's Eleven and, absurdly, Terence Stamp's English accent in The Limey.
3. Remember when Steven Soderbergh made great films like Sex, Lies and Videotape and ... well that was a pretty great film.
4. Soderbergh directs both serious works and 'entertainments'. When he's doing his serious face  there are hundreds of characters, all given equal emphasis. He's pretty pleased with this technique because it subverts one of Hollywood's central traditions: tight narrative focalisation. It even has certain right-on political implications since most American films have one character who soaks up our time and sympathy and that person is a white American male. He fucked it up in this film though, because the Chin Han/Marion Cotillard ethnic Stockholm Syndrome storyline was just too boring for the final cut and got mulched into a humilating montage with the music dubbed over the dialogue like no one would notice.
5. Is a disappointing disaster movie more disastrous than a good disaster movie? Feel free to entertain yourself with this paradox during the final 40 minutes of this film.
6. There are a few decent scenes, the first occurs immediately after the death of Gwyneth Paltrow - it's the one with Matt Damon and the doctor, and it's in the trailer. There's the moment where the pathologist saws off the top of Gwyneth Paltrow's head and flaps her scalp over her eyes like a haute couture meat fringe. There's also the shot of Kate Winslett's head covered in cellophane like something from the window of a Dalston butchers.
7. You'll notice that the 10-Point Review has not bothered to marry the names of these actors to the names of their characters, not just because the word 'character' doesn't apply here, but because the impact of these scenes depends on outraging our expectation of how long we're going to spend watching Gwyneth Paltrow die. This has a lot to do with economics - we just can't quite believe that an actress who makes $10 million a film will be bumped off in the first 10 minutes and the sense of waste we experience when she is is an attenuated version of sudden bereavement. This disease, which is really a metaphor for the world's most famous disease, Death, falls on the famous and the obscure alike. 
8. Several actors have been miscast and then left to muddle through as best they can. Matt Damon plays a fleshy Liam Neeason. Lawrence Fishburne acquits himself well as Morgan Freeman. And Kate Winslett does a pretty good Julianne Moore.  
9. Judging by all the gurning Jude Law seems to think that he's been cast against type as the world's least likeable man. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
10. The world-through-the-eyes-of-a-dying-man shots are taken from Ivan's XTC, based on Tolstoy's short story, The Death of Ivan Ilych. If you'd like to spend a sobering few hours contemplating your own mortality you could watch that on a double bill with The Death of Mr Lazarescu.

Fight Club - David Fincher (1999)

1. Fight Club is a wonderfully strange film by David Fincher, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. 
2. It’s easy, in a post-Fight Club world, to imagine that the film was a simply a serviceable adaptation of a classic novel by a great American author. This is down to some A+ direction on the part of Fincher, and spot-on performances from Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter. In reality the novel is a flimsy mixture of school-shooter philosophy, wouldn’t-it-be-weird anecdote, plus one great ingredient that fell in by accident. Fincher made it what it is, making Palahniuk what he is in the process. 
3. Palahniuk has described the story of the messianic figure of Tyler Durden, and his effect on the life of the nameless narrator, as ‘apostolic’ fiction. It probably also reminds you of Oscar Wilde’s rule that ‘all first novels are the author as Christ or Faust’, since Durden is both. You needn’t tell anyone that Fight Club was actually Palahniuk’s second novel, as his first Insomnia: If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Already, never found a publisher. 
4. Like many first novels the book is freighted with ideas that Palahniuk obviously felt were important at the time. Some of the ‘ideas’ are just lines that sound cool, and many of them contradict one another, eg: What’s the point of the ‘human sacrifice’ if it just encourages its victims to participate more totally in a system that is worth nothing? What about Tyler Durden’s vision of an agricultural society founded in the ruins of late capitalism where you will ‘wear leather clothes that will last you your whole life’? And the whole narrator-is-really-beating-himself-up thing? I mean, come on. (Oh yeah, spoiler. Soz.)
5. The scattergun tendency of the film’s philosophy can be excused in two ways: nihilism, (ie if your goal is chaos confusion is good) and insanity (the story as the product of one man’s confused imagination).
6. This is one of the wonderful things about cinema: that it can take an insane novel from an outsider figure like Palahniuk and expose it to millions of unsuspecting punters. In this sense the whole film is a subversive act. When Norton’s character goes looking for Durden at the end of the film, he passes two conspicuously labelled files in the Paper Street map room. One is labelled ‘Mischief’, the other ‘Misinformation’. Feel free to imagine the screenplay nestling in either.
7. In a recent introduction to the book Palahniuk admits that the rules of fight club were a filler introduced to help bind the novel together in those places where he didn’t want to develop characters or describe action. As you may have noticed words = time in fiction. The paradox is that if you want to indicate the passage of time you need to keep stacking up the words, without it ever looking like you’re merely passing the time. The rules were what Palahniuk came up with when he ran out of Nietzsche, Buddhist philosophy, and neat one-liners like ‘I want to have your abortion’. 
8. Some of the best lines in the film aren’t in the book. Notably ‘I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school’*. In a really delicious piece of Hollywood chicanery Fincher offered it as a substitute for ‘I want to have your abortion’, which was unacceptable to the film's producers. Needless to say, they weren’t delighted with the new line, but Fincher had forced them to agree that, if he re-shot, the replacement would on no account be cut. What. A. Dude. 
9. You may notice that, during one of the corporate scenes, they’re talking about ‘cybernetting the office’. This is one of the few reminders that the film was made in 1999 when Google still looked like this. The other major reminder is the final scene, with the exploding skyscrapers, which would be virtually impossible to shoot post 9/11. In fact, the film is extremely prescient about the possibility of a violent reaction against western consumerist culture, although in the event it was to come from radical Islam rather than from within western culture itself. Equally, the viral nature of the fight club movement has only become more believable with the passing of time.
10. Palahniuk claims the inspiration for the book came from going into work with a black eye and finding that no one would asked him about it. You’ve probably also wondered whether it had anything to do with the 1991 Atari game Pit Fighter. 

* (trans. primary school)

We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lynne Ramsey (2011)

1. We Need to Talk About Kevin is an excellent adaptation of Lionel Shriver's unpleasant 2003 novel of the same name.
2. You better like looking at Tilda Swinton's face because that's what you'll be doing, almost uninterruptedly, for 118 minutes. In fact, you probably won't have spent this long scrutinising another human being's facial set-up since There Will Be Blood. Swinton's face is polarising along sex lines, women love it and go on about how striking she is, while men can't really see what all the fuss is about. The facial equivalent of Ugg Boots. If you find Tilda Swinton's face a bit pointy and annoying, that's one more way in which this movie will be something of an ordeal.
3. Speaking of faces, you've probably also noticed that John C. Reilly, who plays Franklin, has the face of dwarf.
4. If you're bulimic, or sitophobic, you're going to love this. All food in this film is absolutely disgusting, tending to the slimy, brightly-coloured and sticky, and anyone eating does so noisily, and with the gristly eating noises turned right up into the red. This is so deliberate and sadistic that it can only suggest a point is being made about the family table being the battleground where animal appetites are domesticated. Kevin's awful table manners are just one symptom of a pathology that refuses civilisation. Wanking vigorously in front of his mother being another. (Spoiler. Whoops, sorry.)
5. Lionel Shriver is a woman, she changed her name by deed poll from Mary Ann Shriver when she was 14. We Need to Talk About Kevin was her seventh novel and she published her first in 1986. She described it as her 'make or break book' and this may go some way to explaining its nihilistic tone and subject matter. And don't try pulling any of that dated death-of-the-author shit. Within the film the question of who made Kevin, and therefore who takes responsibility for him, is a surrogate for the question 'who made evil'? Outside the film we know who made Kevin: it was Lionel Shriver.
6. The screenplay is by Lynne Ramsey and Rory Stewart Kinnear. Kinnear is Ramsey's partner, not the son of Roy Kinnear who last year won the Evening Standard award for best actor.
7. Ezra Miller is superb as the adolescent Kevin. His performance owes just a little to Heath Ledger's quieter moments in The Dark Knight and a lot to Malcolm McDowell's Alex in A Clockwork Orange. The ingredients for just this kind of sociopath are sinister composure, cherry red lips, slim-hipped adolescent sexuality and some great one-liners - then you just have to look like you're having a marvellous time at those times when other characters are at their most uncomfortable.
8. All the interior shots at Eva's house come straight from Nan Goldin. It makes you wonder whether at the pitch they just gave them the book and this Harper's Bazaar shoot and said 'like that, but without the leopards.'
9. If you secretly fear and dislike children and you're trying to dissuade your partner from ever having any so you can devote your moneyed middle age to sex with mid-priced escorts and  golf, try inviting them to watch this film on a triple bill with Rosemary's Baby and Eraserhead.
10. The film takes place entirely in flashback, or at least, it has no primary narrative for the flashbacks to flash-back into. The viewer's sense of where he's at is almost entirely dependent on which wig Tilda Swinton is wearing, and how much paint there is on her house. Freud characterised the subconscious as without temporal extension - so it makes sense for a film that deals acutely with trauma and the formation of subconscious to take place outside time. Neat hey?

Warrior - Gavin O'Connor (2011)

1. Warrior is a 140-minute-long advertisement for the mixed martial arts promotion company UFC and the associated clothing brand TapouT (sic) probably also the Atlantic City Convention & Visitors Authority.
2. As all sensible people agree, when a film is part-funded by a particular concern, in return for featuring a message about that concern, then it is no longer a piece of art, it has become an advertisement. Films like this include The Hangover - an unfunny screwball caper one suspects owed a great deal to the generosity of the kind of businessmen who have an interest in promoting Las Vegas as a city of moral license where the prostitutes look like Heather Graham - and Transformers which should properly be called Selling Cars to Children. If you don't share this view on product placement in films, go ask David Lynch.
3. Warrior is an especially pernicious example of the film-as-ad genre because unlike both The Hangover and Transformers it contains many elements of an actual film - including some brilliant dialogue and excellent performances - especially from Nick Nolte and Tom Hardy. I mention dialogue rather than writing because the construction of the screenplay, the plotting element of the writing, is insane.
4. There is a point where situations get so improbable that they almost become probable again. When the Iraq war hero who went AWOL fights his way to the championships of a international mixed martial arts tournament only to end up in the final against a physics teacher, who's just come out of retirement in order to cover the mortgage repayments on his house (which mortgage he originally took out to pay the bills associated with his second child's rare heart condition) and who has been drafted in to replace a pro fighter who has suffered a horrific jogging injury, turns out to be the Iraq vet's own estranged brother, we must assume this is what the screenwriters were going for. They even have one of the fight commentators say: 'It's unbelievable!' You have to admire their balls.
5. The line 'hard to find a woman who can take a punch these days' is proof of the structuralist dictum that beauty is information. It contains the history of Tommy's childhood, his fighter's voice, his humour, his father's backstory and the character of his mother, all in 11 words.
6. The step in 12-step recovery which Paddy (Nick Nolte) is trying to enact by apologising to his sons is the 9th step ('We made direct amends to such people except when to do so would injure them or others'.) The tradition which Tom Hardy and Nick Nolte routinely break by talking about their real life membership of 12-step fellowships is the 11th Tradition ('We should ever remain anonymous at the level of press, radio and film.') NA also featured largely in The Fighter a film that was both more and less realistic than this one.
7. The extraordinarily overdeveloped muscles which make Hardy look like he's carrying a backpack full of marrows under his sweatshirt are his trapezius and rhombodeus major. It's ok to find them weird and gross.
8. One of the other ways that you can tell this is an advert is that it has no bad guys. All of the characters, even the 'bad' ones like Tommy or Paddy, are victims of circumstance: the economy, their parents, their grief, the Iraq war, alcoholism. This is necessary in order to explain their propensity for violence in such a way that it appears sympathetic. The UFC is not just a place where violent men over-extend one another's elbows in front of a baying mob - it's a therapeutic octagon where families can get together and work through their problems. 
9. The hold with which Brendan dislocates Tommy's shoulder is called a Kimura. The climactic final hold, which precipitates Brendan's primal cathartic cry of 'I LOVE YOU! I'M SORRY!' is called, touchingly, a rear naked choke. Because he is naked. Emotionally.
10. When Tommy continues to fight Brendan, with one arm dangling broken and useless in front of him, it is essential to shout 'it's just a flesh wound!'