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You can tell this film came off the back of Midnight in Paris: it’s another New World love letter to an Old World centre of culture, with half the dialogue stemming from the characters walking around talking about how wonderful it all is. This is by far the most irritating thing about the film – living in London I hear enough cultural criticism regurgitated by tourists from a book, and when I go to see a film I don’t want the dialogue to be outshone by what you hear hanging around the National Gallery. Allen always includes one figure meant to satirise middle-class intellectual pretensions (in this case Ellen Page’s attention-deficit actress), but the problem is that to me they never sound that distinguishable from all the other characters. That’s unless they say something especially grotesque, in which case instead of laughing I just curl up inside. Allen’s claim that he just makes films for himself in order to keep busy is very easy to believe here.

Writer-directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano show that clichés can still be worked into something effective, and I think the main reason for this is simply that they don’t make a big deal out of them. They have managed to make a film where the plot is secondary to the relationship of the two main characters (which I suppose is the definition of a buddy comedy), and so the details of how they come to meet and the various trials they go through are unimportant compared to just watching the friendship develop. The whole relationship is fairly uncomplicated and amiable, a mutual respect present from the start and both men becoming fond of each other quite quickly. As that’s what makes the film as enjoyable as it is it means no pressure is put on the enjoyment, and the rest of the story drifts past charmingly. Extremely likeable rather than brilliant, but outstanding in terms of storytelling.

Tom

In a series of events vaguely reminiscent of Antonioni's L'Avventura, Iranian drama About Elly sees a group of three families going on holiday north of Tehran with their children. One of the women, Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani), has brought along her friend Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti) in the hope of sparking a romance between her and Sepideh's brother, Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini), a divorcee visiting his home country from Germany. As the families settle into a rundown beach house, a holiday spirit coalesces, and between the potential lovebirds things seem to be going awkwardly but well. Then, after a near-disaster involving one of the children, Elly has mysteriously disappeared. Has she drowned, or left for Tehran as she was threatening to do? Realising how little they knew about her, and starting to panic over how to deal with the situation, the happy group soon begins to break down amid scenes of guilt and recrimination.

This is in fact Farhadi's previous film to 2011's A Separation, only released here this year in the wake of that film's Oscar-winning establishment of him as an international star. Going on About Elly, hopefully we'll see a comprehensive recognition of his body of work in the next couple of years, as this is an incredibly well sustained ensemble drama. A story set almost exclusively within one location, it revolves around a single, ambiguous event, and otherwise relies entirely upon dialogue. It's testament to both the script and the performances that it's gripping right the way through; the joyful holiday spirit of the first half genuinely pleasing to watch, convincingly sliding into distress and tension after the accident.

Given that this is an excellent film based on any criteria, it would be reductive to analyse it too much as a cultural artefact to be contrasted with Western values, but I'm going to a little bit because it's cross-cultural power stems from it's quality as a drama. Certainly, the seriousness of one of the main exacerbating factors of Elly's disappearance and initial presence on the holiday is only appreciable to us in a morally relativist sort of way. When Sepideh is warned that she could be killed for enticing Elly the way that she had (I can't go into any more detail without spoiling a major revelation), you uneasily realise that, gross injustice though this would be, it might not be an exaggeration. This is by far the most pointed example, but the entire scenario is steeped in traditional attitudes to courtship, family and married life. Yet despite existing within this particular environment, the script is so nuanced and the performances so convincing that the characters are never eclipsed by these social strictures, and culture-specific customs never get in the way of emotional truth. The desperately unhappy ending, revolving as it does around notions of shame and honour, might be more clearly focused to an audience with similar religious and social convictions to the characters, but on a fundamental level it can be appreciated by any person with a basic sense of decency and justice. Transcending local concerns in this way is the definition of good drama.
Tom

Lawless is at its core an old-fashioned genre piece, albeit a hybrid of the heroic anti-establishmentism of the gangster film and the encroaching civilisation frequently dealt with in revisionist westerns. Based on Matt Bondurant's book, The Wettest County in the World, about the exploits of his grandfather and great-uncles in Prohibition-era Virginia, it reunites John Hillcoat and Nick Cave, the team behind The Proposition, in another violent and morally challenging tale about life on the fringes of the world.

The Bondurant brothers, Forrest (Tom Hardy), Howard (Jason Clarke) and Jack (Shia LaBeouf), are part of a rural Virginian community cashing in on Prohibition by keeping the surrounding area in moonshine. While at a local level the distilling network is a generally accepted and relatively benevolent practice, it is feeding a catastrophic crime wave in the cities; it's clear that it's only a matter of time before the chaos rebounds upon the quiet rural community at its source. One day the Commonwealth Attorney turns up with his vicious enforcer, Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce), in tow. He wants to bring the illicit business under his control by coercing the bootleggers into working for him. The Bondurants, led by Forrest, refuse on principle; the Attorney departs, but leaves Rakes to begin a long war of attrition with the brothers and other local distillers.

While the plot isn't particularly strong or forceful, and the characters' motivations can occasionally get lost among the mumbling and drinking, Lawless is a beautifully designed and acted film. The moonshine war is interweaved with the Bondurants' personal tribulations in a way that damages the drive of the plot but succeeds in bringing the characters to life: an important achievement when even the good guys indulge in the odd bit of vengeful castration. Jack's endless quest to prove himself to his older brothers is well portrayed by LaBeouf, who does a nice line in cocky insecurity, and his and Forrest's romantic subplots are successfully worked into events so that they don't feel like distractions. Guy Pearce sneers and twitches like an aloof rodent as Rakes; whenever he's on screen he seems an inch away from committing some horrific sexual abuse.

Lawless doesn't come close to The Proposition, I think simply because it's an adaptation and Cave has trouble working someone else's material into something as coherent. Lawless is sprawling where The Proposition is sparse, and as such doesn't have the it's consistency in tone or theme, even if there are similarities in their dealing with moral corruption on both sides of the law. Fans of Cave might miss the baroque, intensely literate dialogue of the earlier film (equally, non-fans might thank Christ it's gone), but there are still flashes of his preoccupations throughout: a scene where Jack, in pursuit of Bertha (Mia Wasikowska), goes drunk to the church where her father is preaching, with it's swooning and chanting, and conflation of religious and erotic imagery, is quite easy to imagine in the form of one of his songs. Overall, Lawless is artistically flawed, but solid entertainment nontheless.
Tom

Margot (Michelle Williams) and Lou (Seth Rogen) are a married couple in their late twenties: happy, loving, and sedate. They live in a nice house in a bourgeois-bohemian neighbourhood in Toronto and have nice semi-literary jobs; he's writing a chicken cookbook and she's a freelance travel writer. While visiting a tourist attraction for research, Margot becomes acquainted with Daniel (Luke Kirby), a painter and rickshaw driver who turns out to live across the street from her and Lou. A spark between the two spreads into a chaste love affair, as meeting Daniel causes Margot to evaluate her relationship with Lou, and question whether she is ready to settle down into staid but reliable married life.

The first segment of Take This Waltz, establishing the characters and their connections, doesn't bode well for the rest of the film. It's a typically indie mix of contrived imagery and quirky conversations that openly function as heavy-handed character development; for example Margot feels uncomfortable during airport connections, because she hates the stress of moving between things. You don't say... The theme of marital ennui and the temptation to try something exciting and fresh is neither exciting or fresh itself, so Sarah Polley has her work cut out in bringing something new to the table. After the uninspiring start, though, the film settles into itself, and while never breaking any new ground is considered and self-aware enough to trade on the performances and in details rather than attempt to thrill with the plotline. There are a few genuinely funny moments, as well as some very touching ones, and all the relationship commentary is open and honest and often rings uncomfortably true.

Michelle Williams gives the believable and nuanced performance you'd expect from her - I found her a little too adorable at times, but that's a problem with the character rather than the acting - but Rogen is the real surprise: I hadn't seen him in a "serious" role before this film (although I guess no-one's really sure whether Funny People counts as comedic or not), but he's really well suited to this kind of quirky, downbeat story. Kirby is charismatic and a convincing mysterious loner-type, but I found the character of Daniel a little hard to warm to, and hence the relationship between him and Margot mainly works as a function of her character's dissatisfaction rather than inspiring any audience investment for its own sake. The script has a tendency to over-use him as representative of all the things Margot feels she is missing, so he never develops into a full character, at least compared to the other main roles.

For all its dealing with love and relationships, Take This Waltz is defiantly un-romantic. And for all its cuteness, it's deeply serious and unsentimental. The ending definitely feels too much like a lesson, but as movie-lessons go it's an unusually sensible and honest one. It's deliberately uninspiring, but in spite of that still feels hopeful: there's change you can control, and change that you can't, and considering this you might be luckier than you realise.
Tom

Cults seem to be in right now. At the beginning of the year, Martha Marcy May Marlene brought us a tale of the residual effect of such a break from normality, once a person escapes. Working backwards, Sound of My Voice depicts the bewitching process by which a person becomes ensnared.

Opening on the induction of two couples into a mysterious cult somewhere in the LA valley, the film wastes no time in hinting at the darker aspects of these groups. The strict requirements of washing the body and handing over personal possessions are reminiscent of arriving at a prison, an image underlined when they are handcuffed, blindfolded, and driven to a new, protected location. Once there, and once they have performed an elaborate and childish secret handshake, they are introduced to the cult's leader and focal point, Maggie (Brit Marling). She praises their faith in coming so far, and 'rewards' them by revealing her secret, and the cult's raison d'etre: she is from the future, and has come back to help people prepare for a coming disaster. After the session, one couple, Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius), turn out to be posing as believers in order to expose the cult before it becomes dangerous.

Initially, the approach taken towards the cult phenomenon is one of examining the reasons people feel attracted to them. Both Peter and Lorna are given brief but suggestive backstories: he lost his mother at an early age largely due to her involvement with a cult; she had a wasted adolescence and now spends her time trying to make her life as worthwhile as possible. Both also clearly have personality features that could be seen as susceptible to such manipulation: he the obvious loss of a nourishing parental figure; she, it is claimed outright through the voiceover, is merely exhibiting another facet of an addictive personality otherwise expressed through her health foods and noble causes. Furthermore, whether accurate or not, their unfounded conviction that the group is bound to at some point grab guns and start shooting people comes across excitable and reactionary itself, and those impulses can easily be imagined turned to the use of leaps of faith and twisted reasoning. The script does a good job of presenting the seductive ambiguities of Maggie's story, and there's a nice nod towards the exploitation of existing powerful mythologies in a scene involving apples which embody rationality, logic, and "intellectual bullshit", and which the cult members are expected to reject.

This is not kept up. There's a point when the film shifts gear in order to keep the story moving, and in the final act it becomes more of a thriller, pushing the behaviour of the protagonists to see how far they will go to get what they want. In all fairness, the ambiguity as to whether the two have actually been taken in by Maggie's story does generate a fair bit of tension, and the final twist is undeniably satisfying. However, it's satisfying in the same way as the twist in The Usual Suspects, in that it's not so much a twist as a casting of doubt upon a large chunk of the narrative up to that point: plenty of impact, but a storytelling stunt more than anything else. Sound of My Voice is a great showcase for using uncertainty as narrative drive, but it fails to escape from its own fog. Doubtless it can be argued that that's the point of the film, but sadly it ultimately comes across more as the writers not being able to make up their minds how to end it.
Tom

This family drama paints an elegant portrait of a declining way of life, balancing the sadness of change with hope for progress. The first shot brings us to rural Albania, to a grand old farmhouse with a rough path running between two of its fields. A makeshift horse-drawn carriage approaches from the far end of the path, only to find the way out onto the perpendicular road is blocked by a row of stones. There is a murmur of disgust from inside the carriage, and two figures emerge; they throw the stones into the bushes, get back into their vehicle, and are on their way. Presently, a bar-room slanging match crystallises this ambiguous act of vandalism for us in a pressure chamber of ancestral resentment. The land which the path runs through used to belong to the grandfather and great-grandfather of the men who moved the stones; since then the state awarded the land to a new family, who have revoked the previous owners' tradition of allowing that path as a public thoroughfare. Tradition and family pride do not give way easily to the encroachment of state-enforced legality, and the anger soon erupts into violence. One of the men of the family who now own the land is killed by two brothers of the other, an act which sparks an old-fashioned blood feud between the families, and threatens to leave a lasting scar on the lives of the innocent younger generation.

A modern-day blood feud is an excellent way of depicting the rising gulf between generations in the onset of secular global culture. Apart from the denial of a historic right of way, which comes across as spiteful and mean-minded (though significantly it's technically legitimate), all the points of view in the disagreement are to a greater or lesser degree sympathetic. The feud is senseless, unjust, and on top of that hopelessly patriarchal; but despite this the pain of the older generation is all too recognisable. Whether the murder was self-defense or pre-meditated, it came from an understandable sense of frustration through loss, not merely of land, but of a sense of security in their way of life. However idiotic their actions they are visibly trapped by, rather than exulting in, their spurious duty. It's a credit to the script that the film's moral universe convincingly centres not on the killing but around the original land dispute, and the current inhabitants set themselves out as the aggressors, despite being the ones to suffer a murder, through showing no respect for community tradition when it comes to a statist land reallocation, yet hypocritically pursuing an archaic form of feuding far beyond what little sense of decency it might have. Alongside the newly-consolidated modernising state riding over traditional community values, the children play with mobile phones and games consoles, talk of going to university and escaping to the city. Nik (Tristan Halilaj), whose father delivers bread by horse-drawn cart, dreams of starting an internet cafe in his town. The feuding comes upon them out of nowhere, and draws them in against their will by dint of their blood. Ultimately it becomes clear that a painful break between the generations might be what is necessary, if they want to live in a world of modern-day values.

Sensibly, American writer-director Joshua Marston hasn't tried to get too involved in a cultural practice that one has to presume would be fairly alien to him. He takes an unfussy, straightforward approach, allowing the script and environment to speak for themselves and concentrating on framing the bucolic scenery and the attractively shambolic semi-rural lifestyle of the characters. As such he avoids any sense of cultural tourism, and this has a knock-on effect in the film's success in condemning a barbaric practice without looking down on the participants. He is aided immeasurably in this by his actors, who are powerful: providing naturalistic and detailed performances, and leaving the director to focus on telling the story.
Tom