Thor what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office
for the weekend of April 29-May 1, 2011:

1 (new) Thor (12A) **
2 (1) Fast Five (12A) ***
3 (new) Insidious (15) ***
4 (2) Rio (U)
5 (3) Arthur (12A) *
6 (4) Scream 4 (15)
7 (6) Hop (U)
8 (5) Beastly (12A)
9 (8) Source Code (12A) ***
10 (7) Red Riding Hood (12A)

(source: UK Film Council)

My top five:
1. The Last Picture Show
2. Battleship Potemkin
3. How I Ended This Summer
4. Winnie the Pooh
5. My Dog Tulip


Top Ten DVD rentals:

1 (1) Meet the Parents: Little Fockers (12)
2 (7) Tron Legacy (PG) *
3 (new) The Tourist (12) **
4 (4) The Social Network (12) ****
5 (5) Due Date (15)
6 (2) The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest (15) **
7 (6) RED (12) **
8 (8) Megamind (PG) ***
9 (9) The Town (15) ****
10 (10) Made in Dagenham (15) ***

(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five:
1. Monsters
2. The King's Speech
3. Of Gods and Men
4. Blue Valentine
5. The Green Hornet


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. The Shawshank Redemption (Monday, ITV1, 10.35pm)
2. Mars Attacks! [above] (Tuesday, ITV1, 10.35pm)
3. Ben-Hur (Saturday, five, 11.40am)
4. Swimming with Sharks (Saturday, BBC2, 12.45am)
5. Ae Fond Kiss (Sunday, BBC2, 12.10am)

The girl who played with firearms: "Hanna"

The tonally weird, mostly resistible Hanna is the story of two individuals on the run, the one ducking for cover, desperate to stay off the radar, the other waving their arms around and generally making like a madman to draw attention to themselves. The first would be the eponymous heroine, a teenage assassin trained by her sometime spy father (Eric Bana) to evade the Government agents, led by Cate Blanchett, who've come after the pair of them. Central to the film is the irony that, though a dab hand with a Walther PPK, Hanna is still a little girl who yearns for, if not family, then at least friends, and spends much of this two-hour fugue attempting to figure out who she really is. She could have saved some time calling in at a video shop on her travels: she's a conflation of the main characters - the killer and the latter-day Lolita - from Luc Besson's Leon, now played by Saoirse Ronan, a glassy-glacial screen presence who has herself been left casting around for work in strange places (cf. her unlikely gypsy woman in Peter Weir's The Way Back), and whose very otherness continues to get in the way of audience emotion or empathy.

The second figure on the lam is the director Joe Wright, turning his hand to another genre after the failure of his prestige effort The Soloist to take the box-office or Academy by storm two years ago. I liked Wright's Pride & Prejudice, which brought a breezy freshness to much chewed-over material, but ever since, Wright has become grown increasingly insincere and unmoored in his methods, his wildly inflated rep resting on the preposterous Atonement, a literary adaptation full of emptily grandiose gestures attempting to distract us from the trivial and risible crises at that story's heart; The Soloist, meanwhile, brought lavish, sweeping, lookie-here helicopter shots to what should have been a small, personal, street-level study of urban alienation.

Time and experience have made Wright no more reticent behind the camera. Hanna, from the off, goes for a conspicuous High Style: gratuitous close-ups of Blanchett brushing her gums into a bloody mess are Wright's way of telling us the character may be at least a little controlling and uptight, while Hanna's discovery of her own rogue DNA (via a Google search!) sparks a showy and wholly patronising duh-enn-eh montage that resembles a primer in genetic code for hyperactive remedial classes. The whole thing unfolds to an electronic (and in places, distinctly sub-Kraftwerk-y) score by The Chemical Brothers, so readers of Mixmag magazine can have themselves a little sex wee in the dark. The Teutonic aspects - it's definitely Hanna without die zweite H - suggest Wright fancies himself as another Tom Tykwer, but the film is at best Tykwer-lite, devoid of heart or soul, and badly struggling for unity or credibility.

I thought the early shot of the fragile Ronan holding onto the underside of a speeding truck might take the prize for stuff and nonsense, but that was before the interlude in which our plucky heroine veers off into a holiday romance, grafted in seemingly wholesale from Die Sisterhood von der Travelling Pantsen. The accents are all over the place - Blanchett's is particularly heinous, veering from Missouri to Munich between scenes - but then we may not be supposed to mind, for Hanna is one of those postmodern bricolages where a girl can be chased out of the German wilderness into a desert that suddenly turns into an African village with a Middle Eastern marketplace and Internet cafe adjacent. It's like a Bourne movie (or Tykwer's own, Bourne-inspired The International) with every other establishing scene cut out of it: a flashy assertion of technique that might have been described as experimental or cutting-edge, were the results not such utter bobbins.

Over-extended bobbins, too: sure, no-one was ever likely to beat Run Lola Run - which set some kind of cinematic land speed record - but there's an eternity between that film's 81 minutes and Hanna's 111. How does Wright fill this extra time? By venturing substantial proof that, after a brief flurry of cherishable activity (Funny People, The Time Traveler's Wife, Love the Beast), Bana has reverted to his default boring mode (and with a bad accent, to boot). By offering Tom Hollander (with a lazy, cliched bad Eurovillain accent) in leisurewear leering at hermaphrodites. By allowing Olivia Williams (in her own accent, but a nothing part) a non-sequitur about lipstick and the labia majora, which may end up as the title of the next PJ Harvey album. And by staging all his fight scenes in protracted slo-mo, because he evidently didn't know how to make them work at full speed - and, besides, it's another eye-catching effect.

Wright maybe took this material on because he was cooling his heels between more serious projects, or because the nerds won the culture wars and everybody's making comic-book movies these days, or possibly just to win himself a few more admirers in the 16-34 demographic. In this latter goal, he may be successful: for some reason, the powers-that-be have seen fit to bestow Hanna with a 12A rating, and again - after Kick-Ass, with its similarly glib attitude to screen violence - I feel compelled to wonder what kinds of compromising photos Universal's top brass have of BBFC officials that would facilitate one of their releases obtaining the more commercially friendly certificate. For strip away Hanna's Grimm fairytale trappings - a layer no more deep or meaningful than any other of Wright's artifices - and what you're left with is a work that needed not The Chemical Brothers, but the input (and ironic distance) of a particular Gorillaz track: a film jacking itself up on (and off to) the dubious pleasures of watching kids with guns.

Hanna is on nationwide release.

Pedigree: "My Dog Tulip"

Paul and Sandra Fierlinger's idiosyncratic animation My Dog Tulip is a mass of straggly lines that somehow knit together into the thinking person's Marley and Me. As narrated by Christopher Plummer, this is a very different tale of one man and his dog: sometime BBC journalist J. R. Ackerley (who wrote the titular memoir) and the Alsatian bitch who - for much of the middle part of the last century - was Ackerley's companion, housemate and, in a strange, touching way, his muse. Where Marley brushed everything under a broad, life-changing canvas - its every scene a major event, charged with triumph or despair - Tulip's quiet charm lies in Ackerley's ability to evoke very specific aspects of the dog-owning experience, from tiny triumphs (wooing Tulip back from the influence of a bossyboots sister) to recurring problems (Tulip's reluctance to - in every sense - go outside, once domesticated). Those without canines in their lives will learn more than they ever needed to know about the dog's anal glands.

Content, in this instance, is matched by the hand-drawn form. My Dog Tulip often manifests itself as basic pencil sketches on unevenly lined paper, with none of the conventional in-between or clean-up work to smooth these characters' way: it takes them as it finds them, often pulsing and shimmering with the deranged energy of those old Bob Godfrey cartoons. Far from evidence of sloppiness on the filmmakers' part, the technique becomes instead essential to Tulip's unvarnished appeal: while often scrappy and dishevelled in appearance, there's a humanity to these figures that the clean lines and curves of computer-generated 3D animation more often than not fail to get near, and the Fierlingers observe Tulip's movements - such as her head or ears pricking up at the mention of a particular name - with the close affection of seasoned dog-lovers.

Strange this should be an American production, as the eccentricity of the storytelling is unmistakably English. (Or maybe we're no longer as distinct in our eccentricities as we like to think we are; that'll be globalisation for you, driving us all mad in the exact same ways.) Ackerley pays a visit to an ex-army friend who's installed a sofa in even the smallest room in his farmhouse, so as to better facilitate napping; the author writes of the sincere joy he feels when Tulip, after a lifetime of rolling in other creatures' muck, takes a shine to his own urine while peeing in the park.

The middle section is effectively a pooch romcom with traces of farce, detailing the misadventures Ackerley endured, pot of Vaseline in hand, while trying to find his girl an appropriate mate. The worldview here is so English that even dog sex becomes awkward and comical - the pay-off's an X-rated version of Lady and the Tramp, or something truly deserving of the title Dogging: a Love Story - yet the gentle humour Ackerley evokes never obscures the very real poignancy of an old man hoping to see the creature he loves fulfilled before either he or his companion passes on. Compared to what's on at the multiplex, this isn't a starry voice cast, but the film benefits hugely from the gravity and genial, worldly befuddlement Plummer lends to Ackerley's observations: rarely can the phrase "plop, plop, plop" have sounded so, well, Shakespearian.

My Dog Tulip opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.

Army in the shadows: "Outside the Law"

After the global success of Days of Glory, their film about those North Africans who fought for France in WWII and were roundly ignored upon their return to civilian life, the team of writer-director Rachid Bouchareb and his powerhouse trio of French-Algerian actors (Sami Bouajila, Roschdy Zem and Jamel Debbouze) scoot forward one decade in history with Outside the Law, concerning the birth of the FLN and the Algerian resistance movement. It is, to say the least, a riskier project: whereas their first collaboration highlighted an injustice la toute France felt compelled to make amends for (as it did, in the form of new legislation), the history of Outside the Law feels more raw, alive, debatable. On its Cannes premiere last year, the film prompted howls of outrage from the French right; viewed from the distance across the Channel, we might see it as France's very own Malcolm X - and spot precisely why the response has been so incendiary and divisive.

Bouchareb frames the independence movement in terms of a literal band of brothers, first observed being kicked off their forefathers' land at the behest of the colonialists. When the film jumps ahead to the post-War years, we find the central trio reunited at the site of a shantytown in a chilly Nanterre, sheltering in the shadow of the neighboring Renault plant that employs these migrants as cheap labour - the kind of dead-end ghetto, in other words, that has historically tended to foment resistence of one form or another. (When one's back is pressed against filthy, piss-stained, graffitoed walls, men have few choices but to stand and fight back.) The three brothers come to pool their military, ideological and organisation skills, picked up from, variously, spells fighting in Indochina (Zem's Messaoud), reading behind bars (Bouajila's Abdelkader, a very X-y figure), and pimping on the streets (Debbouze's Said, and this assimilation of bad-ass characteristics again feels very Spike Lee).

The movement's context and growth are dramatised in pointed, deliberately provocative ways; it's a film inclined to make heroes from assassins, and determined at all points to stick it to whitey. At an independence march in Algiers on the day Paris is liberated from the Germans, French agents are shown shooting first at the assembled protesters - and, more specifically, at a young Algerian carrying nothing more threatening than his national flag. When Abdelkader watches his countrymen being put to the guillotine from the window of his cell, Bouchareb ensures the basket and soon-to-be-severed heads are facing him - and, by extension, us, even if we're spared the bloody results. And as in countless films about the East End gangsters of the 1950s and 60s, the violent acts committed by the heroes are mitigated against by the fact the brothers are, to a man, thoroughly nice to their mum.

A fiery police raid on the shantytown is even filmed in such a way as to make parallels with the shock-and-awe tactics employed on certain contemporary Muslim groups (timing indeed, that it should reach UK cinemas in this of all weeks), yet it's at moments like these that Outside the Law risks the simplification that made Bouchareb's previous film, 2009's London River, so hard to swallow whole. Certainly, it's a little dramatically tidy that these brothers should count among their number a warrior, a prophet-intellectual, and a light-relief hustler; and yes, it's altogether on the nose that "See You Later, Alligator" should be playing on a jukebox in the background as Messaoud and Abdelkader garotte their first target, or that the action should come to a head during a boxing match between a French pugilist and a plucky Algerian challenger.

That said, the screenplay hardly glamorises the FLN, either, in the way countless leftists through history have: we watch them murdering their own to protect themselves, even as we're offered a sense of the sacrifices individual freedom fighters had to make for their cause. (As Abdelkader pronounces upon hearing Said's dreams of becoming a bigshot: "This is no time for personal passions.") Generally, the film remains muted and unsensational in its look, preferring (aptly enough) noirish tones as its characters duck in and out of gyms, alleyways and other retreats; even the assassination sequences - which would surely be the big action highlights of any other feature on this particular subject - prove commendably downbeat, finishing with a grim flourish as the surviving brothers are literally pursued underground and the authorities concede their impotence in the matter.

For all its provocation and attendant controversy, it is, then, an admirable work, not least for what it promises to younger viewers who may not have previously been aware of these struggles; for everyone else, Outside the Law should be a reminder of what a confident widescreen filmmaker Bouchareb can be when operating in his own language, with material close to his own heart - and a demonstration of what immense screen presences Bouajila and Zem in particular have become in collaboration with this director.

Outside the Law opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

No heavy petting: "Deep End"

Hot on the heels of Essential Killing, widely regarded as a return to form for Jerzy Skolimowski, the BFI issue a new print of the director's cult 1970 item Deep End. Four decades on, the film reveals itself as an especially kooky and unpredictable coming-of-age movie, shot through with the weird impulses and reflexes that that other exiled Pole Roman Polanski would demonstrate in his own black comedies of the period (Rosemary's Baby, The Tenant), and working its way, slowly yet inexorably, towards a final mise en abyme.

Slightly dozy, virginal 15-year-old Mike (John Moulder-Brown, an early exponent of the Bieber fringe) takes a job attending to the needs of the clientele at his local swimming baths. When not being pestered by Diana Dors and her outrageous football metaphors ("Did you see George Best's six goals against Northampton? You can't keep Georgie out"), Mike becomes enchanted by the cruel beauty of his older colleague Susan (Jane Asher, at her peachiest); she, however, already has her hands full with the attentions of the pool's married yet lecherous swimming coach. Watching an old man plunging off the high board one lunchtime, Mike wistfully bemoans "I can't do that." Susan replies "There's always a first time." You get the picture.

Looked at today, Deep End is uneven in pitch and pace, on the one hand luxuriating in the baths' hothouse atmosphere, the peeling paint and tantalising proximity to exposed flesh. On the other, in everything from the title on down, the film is a sniggering double entendre. Mike is taught to drive by an experienced older gent ("Release the clutch slowly..."); the baths' cashier accidentally unleashes a spurting fire extinguisher ("It's a monster... it goes on for ever"); Asher has a whole scene [see above] devoted to Susan's devouring of the whipped cream atop her hot chocolate ("You'd like some of this, wouldn't you?").

As hinted by Dors' presence, we're not far removed from the tatty British sex comedies of the same period - but then this was exactly the era when Robin Askwith could turn up in a Pasolini movie without anybody batting an eyelid, and "educational" films like Dr. Lotte Fielder's The Science of Sex Part 2 (which the leads troop off to see at one point) were actually playing in semi-respectable picturehouses; among other things, it's a relic of a time when the waters of high and low culture were being muddied in intriguing ways. What's crucial is that this is an outsider's film, one that doesn't for a moment present any of its fumbling as normalised or heartwarming behaviour - because it knows what's coming.

Skolimowski is compelled - in his detached, askance way - by the strangeness of the British attitude to sex: the strict delineation of male and female changing areas (and the fluster that results whenever these lines are crossed), the recourse to allegations of "importuning" (an offence that nowadays sounds resolutely Victorian), the members' clubs (pun surely intended) where you have to know the right people or passwords to achieve entry. It's the film that points the way to not just the Confessions... series, but to the murderous sexual frustrations of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut: consider, in this light, the mid-film nightmare that sends our hero scuttling around Soho to one of Can's finest musical wigouts, learning along the way that his angel may very well be a centrefold, and encountering a hooker who keeps the signatures of her most noted clients as mocking notches on the cast of her broken leg. (Ah, the days before super-injunctions.)

This version of the paradise-lost story is ragged, certainly - it needed Kubrick to finesse it (and, some might argue, stifle all its unruly life) - but the bare bones, if you like, are already in place: the hero driven to distraction by the movements of a redhead, like a moth being consumed by the naked flame that compels him so. At all points, Moulder-Brown's gangly gaucheness is exactly right, and Skolimowski is canny enough to, in this instance, make the film's one recurring dirty mac - Asher's very swinging yellow number - an object of fascination, rather than revulsion. When Susan finally removes this life preserver, bad things come to pass.

Deep End is re-released in selected cinemas from Friday.

Walk with me: "Forget Me Not"

Alexander Holt and Lance Roehrig's low-budget Brit indie Forget Me Not follows in much the same footsteps as Before Sunrise, Once and (in particular) the glossier Last Chance Harvey, which sent Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman on a matchmaking walk across London. Here, it's depressed musician Tobias Menzies, walking barmaid Genevieve O'Reilly home after rescuing her from an aggressive drunk - she, in turn, rescuing him from the overdose waiting for him back at his place.

Familiarity is never far away, yet the writers change the game and raise the stakes a little by having the Grim Reaper stalk the leads. Thirtysomething Menzies - acutely aware he's now halfway through his life, with only a battered guitar case to show for it - breaks off from his pillpopping to recount the sad history of a father who was killed in the first Gulf conflict (a wrinkle destined to make every last viewer feel ten years older than they are). Meanwhile, O'Reilly's attempts to get through to a mother descending into Alzheimer's offer up a role more deserving of Gemma Jones's participation than Woody Allen could come up with in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.

Certainly, Forget Me Not skews more adult than its predecessors (Harvey excluded), and the leads do a good job of suggesting grown-ups either weighing up or burdened by their position in the grand scheme of things. Menzies gives us flashes of charm, more often obscured by a hazy somnolence that chimes with later narrative revelations; and while O'Reilly makes an unlikely barmaid - even if she is Antipodean - she's not short on the vivacity that might pull someone out of a funk.

Londoners may find the precise nature of the couple's meanderings a little vague - these two appear to stroll from Farringdon to Covent Garden without breaking a sweat - and roll their eyes when the film arrives at the South Bank, which ever since Four Weddings... in 1994 has become a rather familiar destination for lovers. (Thompson and Hoffman ended up there, too.) Yet Forget Me Not has at least one hero on board in director of photography Shane Daly, who paints an appealing, romantic picture of a capital where everybody looks glowing at six in the morning, even after a night on the tiles.

There are niggles. We're not supposed to care that Menzies is clearly miming to the song his character trills while riding the London Eye, nor that the lavish orchestration we hear on the track could only be coming from the Philharmonic in the next pod down; and it's hard to buy Jones's care home, with its resemblance to the foyer of Le Meridien. (A film like this needs a certain airiness to succeed, but here we find Holt, Roehrig and Daly giving a location too much light and space.) Yet the wrong notes and false steps in the central relationship are few and far between: the final scenes even succeed in subverting the Four Weddings saw of lovers caught in the rain, plotting a surprisingly deft, even touching course through what could so easily have become soggy terrain.

Forget Me Not opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

Cold fronts: "How I Ended This Summer"

Alexei Popogrebsky's 2003 debut Koktebel (co-directed with Boris Khlebnikov) was a road movie, inhabited by a drunken father and his increasingly independent young son who felt like avatars of the Old and New Russia. The expansive follow-up How I Ended This Summer - Popogrebsky's third credit, after 2007's Simple Things, unreleased in the UK - plays out a similar tension on a bigger canvas, and a more remote location still: an island somewhere in the Arctic, where two men assigned to a weather station check the dials and dutifully log reports for their superiors back on the mainland every quarter-hour.

The older of the pair, Sergei (Sergei Puskepalis), who we learn grew up in something akin to Arctic conditions, is a stickler for rules and regulations, refusing to cut corners in his work because he knows all too well the risks that follow from living in this environment. By contrast, his young apprentice Pasha (Grigory Dobrygin) sports an earring and headphones, and knows what a smiley represents at the end of a text message. Pasha treats the locale like his own personal playground, swinging on satellite dishes and marching around with an unloaded rifle slung over his shoulder; he's playing at being a man, where his colleague, taciturn and practical, simply is one. Inexperience, however, will out: while Sergei is away on a fishing trip one day, Pasha takes down a grave radio message he can't bring himself to pass on - and at once, a whole new degree of isolation begins to set in. The title is that of a school report Sergei accuses the "tourist" Pasha of writing during his time at the station - but that "ended" is ominous (why not "spent"?), and it's clear the kid sorely needs to grow up, if he's ever going to survive in this harsh terrain.

Koktebel had the benefit of being one of the more approachable Russian films of recent years - emerging around the same time as Andrei Zvyagintsev's entirely opaque The Return could only have helped its cause - and here, too, Popogrebsky folds in those elements (Pasha's pop music and computer games) denied by, to cite two examples, Zyvagintsev's airy allegories and the diffuse, impenetrable nightmares of Sergei Loznitsa's My Joy. How I Ended This Summer deals in graspable concepts, easily picked up. Pasha's first-person, stalk-and-shoot console games are evidently meant to foreshadow the cat-and-mousing of the film's final hour. Sergei sports a blue windcheater, Pasha a red one, and never the twain shall meet; you can imagine a director doing similar with colour-coded hard hats in any American remake set on board an oil rig. This simplicity of approach pays off beautifully in places: with the radio interference Popogrebsky leaves on the soundtrack as Pasha becomes fully attuned to the messy repercussions of his hesitation, or in the later sequence that finds the young man out on the hills, lost in a fog that's both literal and metaphorical.

If Popogrebsky appears better equipped for international success than many of his compatriots, it may be because he forsakes those hard-to-translate spiritual and transcendental characteristics most commonly associated with the Russian cinema for a sort of front-and-centre physicality. This Summer, essentially an action movie that shuns pyrotechnics to better preserve the chill in the air, was shot on a location fraught with pre-existing dangers (extreme weather, polar bears, radioactive remnants of the Soviet era, transmitting Geiger-counter echoes of mutually assured destruction), and the actors deserved their Berlin prize in part because it's clear they're doing so much of the film's heavy lifting themselves: they can't help but convey a sense of the stress of being attacked by gnats, climbing a sheer rockface to retrieve birds' eggs, sleeping out in a makeshift bivouac in freezing conditions, because that's exactly what's going on in that moment, and any additional psychological tension has to be mapped onto this.

I think it perhaps needs a stronger reason for Pasha to withhold the message in the first place, beyond the vague sense of unease he feels in the older man's presence - surely full and immediate disclosure would give him the time off he so dearly craves? Yet the idea is cleverly developed, on both a narrative level - Pasha goes from being unsure how to break the news to a deliberate withholding of same after Sergei is verbally and physically abusive to him - and in the way our sympathies are allowed to see-saw between two men at a near-total remove from the rest of the world. The scenes where Pasha tries to hide from his stampeding colleague (even in the wide-open spaces of the Arctic) will chime with anyone who's ever had a fractious relationship with a flatmate, but this slow-burn thriller reserves its iciest grip for the final reel, as a cold front blows in that further endangers these men's existence, and reveals their remoteness to be not just geographical, but emotional, and potentially lethal with it.

How I Ended This Summer is on selected release.