Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office 
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (U) 90 mins ****The paintings are a remarkable spectacle in themselves, notable not just for being the first of their kind, but for their relative sophistication. Much of the fascination stems from the relation they bear to their surrounds, with their trompe l’oeil effects suggesting movement: that of individual frames of celluloid, or – with equines especially prominent – Muybridge’s experiments in recording motion. “Proto-cinema,” Herzog describes it, and the paintings display an evident fluidity of form. The female body is spliced with that of the wide-hipped bison, a link to such Stone Age carvings as the Venus of Hohle Fels – herself an obvious inspiration for the dancing chickens in Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” video.
As ever, Werner strays as much as he wanders. The second half ventures in search of varyingly engaging eccentrics (mock Inuits, albino crocodiles, a master perfumer perpetually sniffing at holes), while ear-splitting choral music occasionally inhibits the images from speaking for themselves. Yet what Cave loses in focus, it gains in dimensionality. Herzog’s cinema – the upriver sequences in Aguirre, Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo’s boat-vs.-mountain business – has long strived for a strong, atmospheric you-are-here sensation. 3D allows him to better define the contours and cascades of the rockface under scrutiny – to allow us a heightened feel for the canvas involved.
For this director, 3D specs aren’t blinkers fostering an escape from the world, but goggles, eyepieces – vital kit with which to peer in the direction of our dim and distant ancestors, and contemplate the mysteries that loom out at us. Within the cave, an eight-year-old’s footprints are found next to those of a wolf. Was the latter a tribal pet, or tailing the child as prey? In framing such questions, Herzog invites us to visualise what our planet was like 28,000 years ago, to hang flesh and detail on the bare bones and markings of the Chauvet floor and walls. The result may be the most overtly philosophical application of 3D yet – which is to say, you just don’t get this with Gnomeo and Juliet.
Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle adapts Rosemary Sutcliff’s revered novel The Eagle of the Ninth with the same dour whiff of Sealed Knottiness that sank Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood. It’s fine if you need to know what Romans ate for supper or the approximate consistency of mud in second-century Scotland, but as an action piece, it doesn’t move so much as retreat to a dusty library corner with a scholar in Celtic tongues.
As Marcus Aquila, the young centurion trying to restore the honour taken from his family when his pa disappeared – along with the titular standard – behind Hadrian’s Wall, Channing Tatum boasts impressively Roman physiognomy countered by Victor Mature-like thespian limitations. Poor Jamie Bell, as sidekick Esca, has only to huddle morosely around a series of campfires before a limp homoerotic squabble over his co-star’s sword that constitutes the film’s one shot at the camp of TV’s Spartacus.
Indeed, The Eagle is all men, no women, and one longs for a lissom dancing girl or conniving empress to break up the visual monotony of earnestly furrowed brows and overly scissored battle scenes. One advantage even the dreariest old Roman epic had over Macdonald’s film is that nobody gets to die properly in the movies any more: instead of the lingering throes of a Caesar, the warriors so drably memorialised here have their limbs severed and throats slit with indiscriminate stabs at edit-suite buttons.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams opens in selected cinemas from today; The Eagle opens nationwide.
Faster (15) 98 mins **
A peculiar vehicle for ex-wrestler Dwayne Johnson – reduced to taking what look suspiciously like Jason Statham’s leftovers – this revenge thriller sports a few workable, albeit second-hand, ideas that might have sustained a taut, grungy B-movie, but end up rattling around inside a medium-budget studio production aimed at the Saturday night crowd. The opening, at least, has punch: Johnson’s jailbird Driver emerging from prison gates like a rodeo steer and jogging full-pelt into the nearest town to blow a gaping hole in a telemarketeer’s forehead. Thereafter, it’s the theoretically fun, actually rather yawnsome business of The Rock charging into stripclub toilets and operating theatres to do away with the men who offed his brother. On his tail: Billy Bob Thornton’s drug-addled detective.
Much of it has been half-inched from superior, decade-old cult films: Oliver Jackson-Cohen’s assassin-with-issues cribs directly from Grosse Pointe Blank, the knowing use of Kenny Rogers’ “Just Dropped In” from The Big Lebowski. Its own ideas are laughable – a supporting character named Hovis Nixon, anyone? – and plain disorganised: over-qualified performers drift in for a scene or two, while preening Hollyoaks graduate Jackson-Cohen, the Londis Jake Gyllenhaal, eats up vast swathes of screen time. The finale’s just preachy, as Driver arrives at a revivalist’s tent down by the river, and everybody lays their demons to rest. With fewer zeroes on the budget, it might have served as a worthwhile straight-to-DVD discovery. As it is, it’s empty and oddly pretentious: not Crank, just cranky.
Your cynicism kicks in early with Country Strong. Some enterprising indie type makes a sincere character drama about the life of a washed-up country singer that hits big with critics, audiences and award committees alike (Crazy Heart), and the studios scurry to semi-remake it as an inflated, Star is Born-ish melodrama in the hope of tapping the same market. Instead of one singer, Shana Feste's film offers a whole stable of 'em, each one conveniently at a different stage in their careers. There's Kelly, a major star struggling with alcohol dependency and a failing marriage, yet still looking as apple-pie wholesome as Gwyneth Paltrow usually does; there's the up-and-coming male contender (Garrett Hedlund, mostly stubble under a stetson), who's something of a flyweight when set against the Colin Farrell role in the earlier movie; and, finally, there's a bright-eyed ingenue (Leighton Meester) working her way up from the very bottom of the ladder.
Pang Ho-Cheung's Marxist home-invasion thriller Dream Home - "based on a true story", the credits inform us, though you take that description with a large pinch of salt - lards a strong central idea with a cleverish structure and a debatable excess of splatter; some will love it, some will most likely be repulsed. What we watch is a young woman (Josie Ho) going on a manic, kill-crazy rampage through the residents of a Hong Kong apartment block, slaughtering adulterers, drug dealers and pregnant women alike.
This skilfully assembled primer in British labour relations history – somewhat undervalued on its theatrical run – unfolds over the landmark summer of 1968. Having seen another request for a pay upgrade rejected, the female employees at Ford’s Dagenham plant – happy housewife Sally Hawkins, stressed Geraldine James, flirty novices Jaime Winstone and Andrea Riseborough – elect to walk out on strike. Coached by sympathetic shop steward Bob Hoskins, Hawkins’ Rita takes up the hammer as a crusader for equal rights. The men don’t know what’s hit ‘em.
Tony Scott's got his train set out once more. Hard to think Scott's bombastic Pelham 123 remake could have been a warm-up for anything, save perhaps nuclear armageddon, but many of the elements exploding out of the screen there recur in the director's latest, Unstoppable: flashing LEDs, yelping bulletins from dispatch, the business with throttles and switches and signals, Denzel Washington's teeth. The deal here is that a train has got out of control in northern Pennsylvania, which'll teach them for having put Randy from My Name is Earl in charge of it. Also out on the tracks this particular morning are a wagonful of young schoolchildren receiving a lesson in rail safety (of course), and a cargo train staffed by old hand Washington and rookie Chris Pine; Scott gets his best effects early on cross-cutting between the latter pair pootling out of various yards as they make their daily pick-ups, and the driverless express - number 777, but lucky for no-one - steaming around the bends under its own propulsion.
Neil Burger's tricksy thriller Limitless opens with professional smirk merchant Bradley Cooper perched on the ledge of his penthouse apartment, looking down at a Manhattan sidewalk some hundred or so floors below him. Once the audience's clamorous cries of "Do it! Jump, man!" have died down, we settle into the tale of a loser scribe (Cooper) and his troubled relationship with the experimental drug that has brought him to this brink. The mind-expander in question - "NZT-48", as pushed by a shady brother-in-law - has the immediate benefit of clearing our hero's writer's block, bestowing money, women and success upon him, even restoring relations with his ex Abbie Cornish. Nobody's told him about the side-effects, though: paranoia, a shortened attention span, and a tendency to find oneself pursued around the city's streets by narky Russian loansharks.
Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office 