"Machete Kills" (The Guardian 11/10/13)

Machete Kills (15) 107 mins **

2010’s Machete stretched a joke trailer in Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse collaboration into spottily amusing mock-schlock; it’s here stretched further still – dispatching Danny Trejo’s Latino avenger first to Washington, then into space – with fewer laughs. The original’s savvy social subtexts are gone, obscured by nudging cameos that at their most desperate (hitwoman Lady GaGa, Charlie Sheen as the President) plunge the franchise in the Scary Movies’ guttural direction. The odd vivid shot reminds you of Rodriguez’s dynamic visual imagination, but also what it’s wasted on here: a project every bit as indifferent as some of the trash that inspired it.

Machete Kills is in cinemas nationwide.

"Not Another Happy Ending" (The Guardian 11/10/13)

Not Another Happy Ending (12A) 102 mins *

That convention-flouting title misleads: this winsome affair lags in lamentably close to the modern romcom average. The Glaswegian backdrop projects more dignity than the actors caught blundering around before it: Karen Gillan’s klutzy author is conceived as Bridget Jones in Annie Hall clothing, at least until the sub-Austin Powers scene that deploys a perky pair of meringues to obscure her nudity from her hunky publisher (Stanley Weber). You could dismiss it as another film made by men who’ve never encountered a flesh-and-blood woman, were it not that the male characters are equally alien, half-heartedly beamed in from Planet Romcomnia.

Not Another Happy Ending is now playing in selected cinemas.

"Baggage Claim" (Metro 11/10/13)

Baggage Claim (12A) **

So, while Robin Thicke was away cavorting with semi-clad supermodels on the “Blurred Lines” set, this is what wife Paula Patton was stuck doing: a honkingly silly romcom about a flight attendant forced to get back on the dating carousel after her ideal man is exposed as a bounder. Could The Actual One be dependable neighbour Derek Luke, helpfully named Mr. Wright for slower viewers? Surprises will come to be outnumbered by cringes, as the not unappealing Patton finds herself shortsold by a director (the overreaching David E. Talbert, adapting his own book) content to peddle soft-focus images and sappy music cues ahead of – yes! – a last-reel dash to the airport. Paula: your other half got the better deal.

Baggage Claim is in cinemas nationwide.

Heartland: "Nothing But A Man"

Before blaxploitation, before Killer of Sheep, there was 1964's lost indie classic Nothing But a Man, which stuck around and staked out the kind of Deep South community Sidney Poitier could only hightail through in The Defiant Ones, and took a long hard look at what was going down there: the flies, scars, cracked windshields and broken homes that collectively suggested the U.S. was still some distance short of full integration. In the middle of all this dilapidation, the ethnographically minded German-Jewish director Michael Roemer would place what looks likely to be a doomed romance, that between Duff (Ivan Dixon), a divorced or separated railroad worker, and Josie (Abbey Lincoln), the schoolmarm he takes a shine to.

This might be seen as an attempt to marry up, but the film shows us Duff has a dependability and charm of his own, and his dreams, though fragile, are not so uncommon: unlike some of his drinking buddies, he actively wants to get by, fit in, to do the right thing - from the very first minutes, he's building something. Yet he's held back, both by the job description of any black man in 1960s America, and by an immediate environment that is suspicious and humiliating at best, violently racist at worst. What follows is a quiet crisis at the heart of America, one apt to be overlooked - as, indeed, the film was after its initial release. 

Roemer shoots simply but effectively, trapping a repository of underfilmed faces within the Academy frame, a choice that fosters first intimacy - bringing even 2013 audiences closer to these lives - then a sense of stifling constraint, and as Duff's predicament becomes apparent, that tight 4:3 ratio comes to look like the type of prison to which a fellow might very well want to take an axe. In the lead roles, Roemer draws out affecting displays of naturalism from pro performers who must still have known something of these struggles, these constraints, yet who appear better placed to process them than might an untested amateur: the stoic Dixon, clenching his jaw and trying not to reel too hard from every punch life has to throw his way, is finally only outpointed when Lincoln pours forth some of the most honest and affecting tears the movies have ever asked an actress to shed.

Together, this pair are electric, and the misery of their plight will be alleviated by this chemistry, and by some of the greatest pop songs of this age ("Heatwave", "Come on Home", "Mickey's Monkey"), licensed to Roemer by the nascent Motown Records for a pittance in one of the best deals any up-and-coming filmmaker ever had the good sense to make. For its maker, the film effectively led nowhere - Roemer didn't direct again for almost two decades, then briefly resurfaced with 1989's New Independent curio The Plot Against Harry - yet what now seems utterly astonishing about Nothing But a Man is that we can plot a straight line through its atomised families to the rubble of Killer of Sheep, the bullet casings of Menace II Society and the empty vials and discarded needles that littered the five seasons of The Wire. The film, for whatever reason, went away; the issues it documented and dramatised so brilliantly never did.

Nothing But a Man is currently touring selected cinemas.

From the ashes: "The Wicker Man: The Final Cut"

The so-called "Final Cut" of The Wicker Man is an 84-minute placeholder that splices into the commonly circulated shorter version - first slashed down by its producers back in 1973 to fill the lower half of a double-bill with Don't Look Now - stray analogue remnants of director Robin Hardy's original standalone vision; a new 4K digital restoration punches up the blood reds and harvest greens, and hopes we won't notice the joins. The new additions come early, and are upfront about characterisation in ways that can seem clumsy. Christopher Lee's Lord Summerisle, ominously late to the party in the standard version, is here introduced foppishly pimping a young boy to Britt Ekland outside the Green Man pub; a date-stamped prologue ("29th April 1973") serves to establish the beliefs of Edward Woodward's uptight and chaste Sergeant Howie as archaic from the off - we are, as we're now definitively informed, some time on from the Summer of Love.

Such detailing underlines this as as much a counterculture movie as, say, Easy Rider was in the States: though it's narratively no more specific to Vietnam, thematically, at least, The Wicker Man serves as a cautionary tale for any bullheaded conservative thinking of blundering blindly into unfamiliar territory, while its embrace of a "new" pagan sexuality (as incarnated by Britt Ekland, the cream of 1973's pin-up crop, and her body double, striving to bang down the last remaining walls) was very much of its time. (Unlike Dennis Hopper, hellbent on martyrdom, Hardy even lets the longhairs win.)

Four decades on, its sheer unconventionality - as a horror-musical several years before The Rocky Horror Picture Show, full of weirdy-beardy folk songs about men turning into trees and such - positions it as very much a spiritual offshoot of the New American Cinema, yet its various incantations are sung as seriously and as sincerely as the Christian hymns with which The Wicker Man now opens, and might - if we kept our ears open - be heard as clues: in those gay rhymes about men and trees, is there not already a conjunction being made between wood and death? (See also: the film's makeshift coffins, the apple crates piled atop gravestones from which an outraged Howie fashions his rudimentary crucifix.)

It was, then, meant as an education - a broadening of the mind - for both viewers and clueless protagonist alike, and the more one sees The Wicker Man, the more one can't fail to be impressed by the masterclass Woodward gives in actor empathy. We have no business having any sympathy for a character as pompous and stuffy as Howie - a little man, oblivious to the worldly delights and pleasures with which the film surrounds him - and yet Woodward somehow dignifies him, shows us the character's limitations (his blinkered approach, his imprisoning chastity) as a warning to us all, and in doing so, he gives this deeply eccentric film not just its centre, but its own inexorable logic. The final reel - which still impresses in its physicality, even as it turns on the revelation of the biggest faux pas in horror cinema - becomes tragic and horrific for a reason: all that knowledge, all that conviction, and to see it all go up in smoke...

The Wicker Man: The Final Cut is in selected cinemas ahead of its DVD release on October 14.

Driftwood: "Blue Jasmine"

Blue Jasmine, this year's Woody Allen Comeback Special, is a Princess-and-the-Pauper variant in which one actress gets to play both roles simultaneously and thereby chew up 99% of the movie, a feat for which she is apparently to be rewarded with all the gold and silver the upcoming award season has to offer. The princess in question is Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), formerly Jeannette, and very evidently a woman with a fragile sense of self. Jasmine was living in gilded luxury in uptown Manhattan until the Ponzi scheme set up by her financial advisor Hal (Alec Baldwin) came crashing down around her. As we join the film, Jasmine is going West, if not to regain her lost fortune, then perhaps to flee her creditors; upon landing, she installs herself in the modest San Francisco home of her adopted sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), a single mom who just happens to be among those Hal and his pals ripped off.

The rash of four- and five-star reviews Blue Jasmine has so far prompted offer a vast collective sigh of relief that Allen - still a critics' darling, even after Hollywood Ending and Cassandra's Dream - has returned to surer ground after his spell in European exile, and it's true the director's feel for toney Upper East Side living here far outclasses, say, Match Point's pie-eyed vision of London's moneyed elite. This is the needling Allen of Crimes and Misdemeanors and Hannah and Her Sisters returning to prominence: after the comforting fantasias of Midnight in Paris, the flashbacks excavating Jasmine's past serve to bring us closer to the rot, hurt and betrayal.

Perhaps, too, there is relief at the fact that, when he turns his mind to it, Allen is still capable of writing a sustained character study. Jasmine is "on", as it were, from the very first scene (chewing the ear off a nice old lady on a plane) to the film's closing moments, giving Blanchett ample time to flaunt her theatrical virtuosity. Yet her triumph comes at the expense of almost everybody else around her. With the honorable exception of Andrew Dice Clay (the faded stand-up whose weariness and desperation fits his role as Ginger's duped and vengeful ex), Woody's San Francisco folk are unforgivably basic, salt-of-the-earth blue-collar caricatures, drawn from more or less the same condescending neighborhood as Mighty Aphrodite's dumb lugs and hookers, who convince as types more than they do as actual people.

Perhaps it's foolish to expect fine-honed naturalism from a director who's long expected nothing more from his actors than to show up and read his lines out, but Allen apparently has next to no idea how to shoot contemporary working-class life. Ginger's spacious walk-up is like a network sitcom production designer's idea of Where Poor People Might Live, while Javier Aguirresarobe's photography lends even San Francisco's supposedly dingier districts the same hazy, orangey glow he previously gave to Vicky Cristina Barcelona. You want to see a filmmaker romanticising penury? Well, here you go.

The narrowness of the supporting characterisation cuts across the classes: set Blue Jasmine against the filigreed depiction of America's social extremes in either Arbitrage or Warrior, and you surely see that everybody's praising Blanchett for making off with a movie only marginally less tissue-thin in its concerns than You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger. The film certainly looks of this particular moment, granted, yet as several recent interviews attest, Allen has no real interest in the widening gap between rich and poor: to him, this great divide is just a peg upon which to hang this year's movie script, and in applauding Blue Jasmine, it strikes me that we're applauding a director in decline for being hopelessly out of touch with reality. 

The Woodyphiles have clung to that creaky old theatrical driftwood A Streetcar Named Desire as a way of explaining why everyone in a film notionally set in present-day America should be acting as though they were on stage in the Eisenhower era, yet even Jasmine's obvious resemblance to Blanche DuBois can't excuse Bobby Cannavale's cartoonishly second-rate Kowalski impersonation, or the way the film tails off into a babbling nothing the moment you emerge from the Odeon to find yourself once more confronted by the rather more vivid surrounds of Poundland and Booze Busters. You have to add Tennessee Williams to Blue Jasmine to make it seem less intrinsically flimsy or phoney - and I'd argue there's a gulf of difference between a performance that deserved a Tony in 1958 and one that merits the Oscar in 2013, between full creative recuperation and feebly piggybacking an overrated master.

Blue Jasmine is in cinemas nationwide.

At the LFF: "A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness"

The British artist and filmmaker Ben Rivers has become a posterboy for what's been labelled "slow cinema": that arthouse strand, more prevalent at festivals than on the commercial circuit, in which a quasi-documentary authenticity, an adherence to the rhythms of everyday life, are offered up as a reaction or corrective to frenzied Hollywood posethrowing. In Rivers' cinema, patience - the desire to wait and watch - has been reclaimed as a virtue; inaction - and the contemplation that follows from that - is valued as much as action. These are films specifically intended to calm rather than quicken the pulse, and in today's hyper-accelerated, post-capitalist universe, there is something welcome, and possibly even defiant, about that.

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness - compiled with the American artist Ben Russell and showing in the London Film Festival's Experimenta strand - doesn't feature demarcated scenes so much as extended spells of hanging out, allowing the camera (and the viewer) to poke round, say, a lake by dawn, or a woodland commune, or a mossy forest, and see what might be happening there for two, five or ten minutes at a time. Clearly, Rivers is clinging onto the back-to-nature line of his previous, theatrically released enterprise Two Years at Sea. The commune's tanned, relaxed and nurturing residents tend orchards by day before slipping out of the sauna to sip a cool beer in the last of the day's sun; from their ranks emerges a beardy black fellow (the musician Robert AA Lowe) who pushes on even further into the woods, in a second act that resembles Into the Wild removed of its narrative impulses.

Throughout, there's a commitment to capturing what it is to be living in the moment: to be the toddler taking great pleasure in running through the garden in the rain, or the grown-up taking a parental pride in watching the kid at play. I know, I know: it sounds impossibly hippy-dippy and head in the clouds, yet set against Terrence Malick's airier fantasias, or the thesis-bound juxtapositions of the Baraka/Samsara school, Rivers and Russell make these feel like graspable utopias: the pair's use of sound is particularly vivid and evocative, and while we're never told where we are exactly, we're lent a sense that we, too, could be there, and be this free, if we weren't all sitting in a cinema in the middle of the city surrounded by people trying to shake a cold and worrying, like us, whether they have enough money on their Travelcard to get back to the house on which the rent is about to be hiked.

One could still accuse the filmmakers of a certain naivety: there's something a little questionable - very Westwoodish, very Tarantinoid - in the film's positioning of a black man as the epitome of Zen cool; the film's underlying idea seems to be that this figure is more primal (given he's eventually seen painting his face, more aboriginal) than anybody else on screen, and thus more likely than anyone to be attuned to the call of the wild. Yet this guy's desire for solitude rings true, and serves as a reminder of something we risk losing at a time of constant virtual messaging and social networking: a recognition that our best creative urges come when we shut ourselves off for a while, and strive to forge our own paths through life.

This leads to the last-reel reconciliation with the world at a Finnish rock gig, where the screen becomes a sea of nodding, moshing faces: out of solitude, connection; out of tranquillity, noise. I suspect the beauty of this final act will depend heavily upon your tolerance for earsplitting death metal - though this, too, is a release of sorts, we understand. The action may have been minimal, but the journey has been epic: you really do feel as though you've been transported somewhere, albeit via the scenic route. Like commune life, or the music of Lordi, it won't be for everyone - one already has visions of sceptical viewers checking their texts, and plotting their own, literal-minded escape from the auditorium - but this eminently experimental, experiential venture may be the closest the cinema has come to matching Thoreau's Walden, outlining not just a retreat but a getaway, a manifesto for a whole other way of living.

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness screens at the BFI Southbank on Saturday 12 and Friday 18; further details can be found here.