Your best films of 2006
Posted: Sat Dec 30, 2006 8:00 am
Not a great year as far as cinemagoing is concerned - indeed, I can't even manage a top ten the quality was generally so mediocre. So, in reverse order, my top 6 of the year with wildly overlong reviews for 5 out of 6...
6. Borat
The free-running sequence in Casino Royale may be breathtaking, but it doesn’t quite manage to provide the best fight scene of the year – that honor goes to the notorious one in Borat which, like Casino, also involves testicles in an example of dedication by an actor that makes Christian Bale’s weight loss in The Machinist look like phoning it in. You have to admire Cohen’s cajones (which are on view in more ways than one) as he goes above and beyond the call of duty in his determination to stay in character no matter how hostile the environment he’s helped to create. It’s pretty easy to spot the faked sequences – the driving instructor, the friendly Jewish couple who rent them a room, the children at the ice cream truck, the Pamela Anderson finale – and most of the victims that aren’t faked are more than deserving of their fate (the racist rodeo impresario, the frat boys) or handle themselves well (the feminists). Even the villagers currently suing can’t really have much of a case: the moment an extra agrees to put a dildo on as a prosthetic arm, it’s pretty obvious they're not participating in a documentary. (Hell, they’re not even real Kazaks, so it’s not as if they’re playing themselves!) And yes, it is very funny even if, like most comedies, it does run out of steam in the ‘serious’ last act.
5. V For Vendetta
4. Election 2: Harmony is a Virtue
Johnnie To's crime drama is in many ways more impressive and definitely more ambitious than its predecessor even though it lacks its relentless forward momentum. Where the first film was a literal relay race, this is more of a distance event, but it’s a much more engrossing look at the nature and politics of corruption. It does amp up the violence from the first film, particularly in one literally grinding sequence, but it never deteriorates into a gore show, focussing less on Simon Yam’s Triad chairman after a second term than reluctant contender Louis Koo, contrasting the one’s troubled relationship with his son (who qualified for a lifetime in therapy at the end of the first film) with the other’s hopes for his future offspring. It ends with the possibility of hope for one son but the certainty of damnation for another that hasn’t even been born, the film bookended by scenes at the same location, the first full of sunlight and promise and confidence, the second dark and cloudy as one character finds that the price of respectability is the very violent life he wants to turn his back on. It’s also surprisingly critical of the corruption in the Chinese government, implying that its collusion with Triad gangsters goes way beyond mere backhanders but is actually a deliberate part of government policy as a means of exerting social control in Hong Kong through close ties with organised crime – a particularly perverse irony considering the Triads’ origins as political rebels exiled from the mainland who became corrupted by crime. Unsurprisingly, it seems to have been banned in Mainland China. Incidentally, although there is talk of a longer version existing because of three striking scenes in the film’s trailers (including a Chinese execution, the open grave of the first film’s last victim and a funeral), an interview on the 2-disc Panorama DVD reveals that these scenes were cut by To prior to release.
3. Casino Royale
As one of the only 12 people who were genuinely delighted at Daniel Craig’s casting a year ago, I must admit I was more than a little worried about Casino Royale. Not the kind of paranoia that those newcomers who’d never experience the changing of the guard the series goes through every decade or the staggeringly venomous hatemongering of the more fanatical Brosnan fans who felt compelled to start libellous hate-sites, though. After all those months of arguing that he was the perfect choice for the role (especially after some of the more moronic suggestions), was I setting myself up for a fall if he turned in a disappointing performance? Similarly there was the film itself. While the producers were making all the right noises about going back to basics, they’d done exactly the same with Licence To Kill and chickened out to deliver a sub-Roger Moore effort with Wayne Newton as a comedy relief villain, inept ninjas, pointless gadgets, laughable violence and monster truck stunts. Too often in the past the franchise had been over-reliant on the goodwill generated by the earlier films, rehashing earlier vehicles to decreasing returns secure in the knowledge that the audience would turn up anyway. Take away the Bond brand, and too many post-OHMSS entries simply wouldn’t have stood up to scrutiny in the marketplace on their own merits: Bond had become a tradition, a ritual like going home for the holidays that you knew was never going to be as good as it was when you were a kid but which you still went through out of a mixture of hope and obligation.
I needn’t have worried. Not only is it the best Bond film in 37 years, it’s as if the Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan years never happened. After Brosnan’s surprisingly lazy and slightly seedy turn in DAD, Craig delivers the most physical Bond since Lazenby, but this time matched by the acting chops to make the most of the best script the series has had in decades – at once plot and character led - as the rookie blunt instrument bulldozes his way through his mission until emotional awakening and betrayal starts to finesse him into the Bond we knew from the Connery days. Brosnan never could have delivered this kind of performance, either physically or emotionally, and, truth be told, neither could Connery in his prime: Craig is the first one to convince you that he’s not a movie star or an actor but that he really is James Bond.
The updating of the plot from the Cold War era to a post 9/11 world works surprisingly well, with the first act managing to provide a convincing motive for the high stakes poker game centrepiece while also providing a couple of superb action scenes that don’t become too absurd and serve the plot in a series where in the past the plot was too often an excuse for the action. The much-criticised change from baccarat to poker is a smart one too. Where Baccarat is purely a game of luck (as Fleming himself found out when he went bust in three hands trying out the novel’s premise on a Nazi spy), poker actually involves both strategy and psychology, making for more satisfying drama and tension.
There is, sadly, one concession to gadgetry that veers into the absurd – c’mon, who keeps a defibrillator in their glove compartment? – and is an unwelcome reminder of the days when old Roge would get out of a scrape with his buzz saw wristwatch or his projectile dart cufflinks thanks to lazy writing, but elsewhere it settles for using existing technology (most of it manufactured by Sony for some reason that escapes me) rather than veering into total fantasy. And it’s good to see a Bond who needs hospitalisation after the villain goes Quasimodo on his nuts with a bellrope. The film’s final sequence promises one helluva follow-up, and one can only hope the producers don’t lose their nerve and throw it all away the way they did with Diamonds Are Forever. The real James Bond is indeed back.
2. Cache / Hidden
Even though I was immensely impressed with Code Unknown, the only other Michael Haneke film I’ve seen, I wasn’t prepared for how powerful Caché turned out to be. Denied an Oscar nomination as Best Foreign Film because no-one could agree whether it was a French film or not, certainly on the surface it’s a fairly typical French film, but it’s what’s under the surface that really counts.
The central premise is simple enough, as Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche’s comfortable bourgeois life is put under increasing strain by a series of videotapes of the their house accompanied by childish drawings of faces with bleeding mouths or throats. With one exception, the tapes show nothing: their menace comes not from their contents but the fact that they exist. Since the drawings have to come from someone who knows the character’s past, is it Auteuil’s Georges’ own conscience that is sending them? Or is it the filmmaker who is sending them to provoke a reaction from his characters? Significantly the tapes are all shot on a fixed camera mounted on a raised tripod in what must be a clearly visible position. Indeed, the appearance of the second tape blocking a doorway that was clear earlier in the shot offers little else in the way of a possible natural explanation.
But the tapes are really just a Maguffin, a narrative device to push the characters and plot forward, not for some cross-country chase but for a more internal guilt trip. This particular lost highway leads into the past, mirroring France’s inability to apologize for it’s colonial past (in particular it’s treatment of Algerians), something it absolves itself of all guilt from by repeating the mantra that it was all in the past when they were much younger and knew no better, as if that wipes out thousands of futures denied or stolen. It’s no accident that the film revolves around a failed adoption that mirrors France’s own failed colonisations.
While the characters are believable rather than Godardian or arthouse archetypes, it’s easy to ascribe a wider allegorical purpose to them. In many respects, Georges is a reflection of France itself, outwardly respectable but denying his past and not acknowledging guilt over Algeria (it’s probably not altogether insignificant that Auteuil himself was born in Algeria). He simply doesn’t want to talk about it. He doesn’t even connect emotionally with his present, let alone his past, mother, son and wife all a part of his life he really has nothing much to say about. Nothing is ever Georges’ fault, not even a near accident crossing the street. He blames a cyclist for his careless mistake, showing that he has learned nothing from his past but is still repeating it. As with the opening of Haneke’s epic of non-communication, Code Unknown, he is oblivious to the wider implications of what is to him a trivial moment or of the possible consequences of his moment of self-righteous anger.
More than that, just as he edits out anything ‘too theoretical’ in his TV show, he tries to re-edit his own past (just as the French government did last year when it passed a law that “the benefits of French colonization in foreign countries should be recognized and integrated into school programs.”) but can’t do it quite so easily. Not that he doesn’t try. Both of Georges' initial flashbacks are dishonest reinventions of memory: Georges turns his childish conspiracy against one character into his victim terrorizing him, reinventing his memory and history to reflect his current interpretation of events and reality. It’s this reinvention that allows him to honestly claim without any real evidence that he is being terrorized – “a campaign of terror” are his exact words – by the person he has wronged. To France, the atrocities inflicted on the Algerians don’t matter – it’s the threat to Georges that, in his childlike ignorance, is all that matters and must be dealt with radically.
Indeed, even though Majid and his son are French-born, both are regarded as foreigners, intruders. Yet neither conforms to the stereotyped ‘Arab’ image: polite, sad, very pointedly not aggressive, yet still regarded purely as a threat for being goaded into an action for which they were punished.
Haneke makes no secret that he isn’t interested in providing answers but rather is forcing questions on the viewer to make them more of a participant. As he said in an interview in The Observer, “I’m not going to give anyone the answer. If you think it’s Majid, Pierrot, Georges, the malevolent director, God himself, the human conscience – all these answers are correct. But if you come out wanting to know who sent the tapes, you didn’t understand the film. To ask this question is to avoid asking the real question the film raises, which is more: how do we treat our conscience and our guilt and reconcile ourselves to living with our actions.
“People are only asking “whodunit?” because I chose to use the genre, the structure of a thriller, to address the issues of blame and conscience, and these methods of narrative usually demand an answer. But my film isn’t a thriller and who am I to presume to give anyone an answer on how they should deal with their own guilty conscience?
“I look at it as productive frustration. Films that are entertainments give simple answers but I think that’s ultimately more cynical, as it denies the viewer room to think.”
If all that sounds hopelessly ‘arty,’ it’s not: this is a film that can be enjoyed on many levels, and it certainly engaged the varied crowd in the packed house I finally saw it - it’s been a long time since I’ve heard an entire cinema gap in genuine shock at one sequence. And, though I usually avoid anything shot on video like the plague that they are in theatres, at least there’s a valid reason for this to be shot on tape (there needs to be a textural similarity between the covert tapes that drive the narrative and the ‘real’ scenes), although there are moments where the limitations of the HD cameras are all too awkwardly apparent and briefly drew me out of the film. But the film was powerful and thought-provoking enough to draw me back in and lodge itself in my head long after seeing it.
1. Pan's Labyrinth
This is one of those films that starts so well that you hope it will stay that good but which actually surprises you and constantly improves. It’s a remarkably layered work about the importance of choice even in an emotional and political dictatorship and about the fictions and fantasies that sustain people through the worst circumstances. On the surface this appears to be little more than a more fantastic spin on The Spirit of the Beehive, sharing its post-Spanish Civil War setting as well as the broken family setting, but this is a far superior film in every way. Although marketed largely as a fantasy, its real power lies in the scenes set in the real world where Sergi Lopez’s all too believable Fascist monster is mopping up the few remaining communist guerrillas in the hills while waiting for his sick wife to give birth to his son while her daughter from her first marriage tries to reassert her own identity rather than submit to the Captain’s idea of family.
The challenges of the mythical world are far less disturbing – or violent - than the real one, and it’s all too easy to see why she wants to escape into the darkness of the labyrinth where at least the hope of something better exists. But then she’s not the only one escaping into the imagination, as her mother sustains herself with a romanticised view of her meeting the captain that he has no interest in whatsoever. To him stories – even a part of his family history that has passed into local legend – exist only to be denied. Lopez’s greatest sin isn’t the pride that he admits to, or even that he is so pitiless, it’s that he chooses to obey without question: the girl’s small triumph is that she does not. And the triumphs in the film are generally small, quiet ones, where courage and fear go hand in hand, making the few acts of decency all the more important when they occur. There is one “saved by the cavalry” moment that at first doesn’t convince but does prove to be there for a definite purpose that makes the ending all the more powerful.
But while there’s a lot going on underneath the surface of the film, it doesn’t crush it with the weight of its ideas. It’s directed with a visual assurance and, at times, playfulness that sweeps you along, sometimes with delight, sometimes with apprehension, but never simply for the sake of a nice shot or a neat special effect (most of which are incredibly well integrated for such a low budget feature). The performances are superb, with Lopez somehow managing to avoid turning his irredeemable character into a caricature: this is an evil without conscience that is all too recognisable. Javier Navarette’s beautiful score is also adept at walking the fine line between magic and emotion without crossing the line into schmaltz.
It’s a remarkable film, the only new one that I’ve seen this year that I’d genuinely say is one of the greatest of all time. It’s been years since I was so affected by I movie that I had to see the very next show. Practically perfect and definitely one to catch on the big screen.
6. Borat
The free-running sequence in Casino Royale may be breathtaking, but it doesn’t quite manage to provide the best fight scene of the year – that honor goes to the notorious one in Borat which, like Casino, also involves testicles in an example of dedication by an actor that makes Christian Bale’s weight loss in The Machinist look like phoning it in. You have to admire Cohen’s cajones (which are on view in more ways than one) as he goes above and beyond the call of duty in his determination to stay in character no matter how hostile the environment he’s helped to create. It’s pretty easy to spot the faked sequences – the driving instructor, the friendly Jewish couple who rent them a room, the children at the ice cream truck, the Pamela Anderson finale – and most of the victims that aren’t faked are more than deserving of their fate (the racist rodeo impresario, the frat boys) or handle themselves well (the feminists). Even the villagers currently suing can’t really have much of a case: the moment an extra agrees to put a dildo on as a prosthetic arm, it’s pretty obvious they're not participating in a documentary. (Hell, they’re not even real Kazaks, so it’s not as if they’re playing themselves!) And yes, it is very funny even if, like most comedies, it does run out of steam in the ‘serious’ last act.
5. V For Vendetta
4. Election 2: Harmony is a Virtue
Johnnie To's crime drama is in many ways more impressive and definitely more ambitious than its predecessor even though it lacks its relentless forward momentum. Where the first film was a literal relay race, this is more of a distance event, but it’s a much more engrossing look at the nature and politics of corruption. It does amp up the violence from the first film, particularly in one literally grinding sequence, but it never deteriorates into a gore show, focussing less on Simon Yam’s Triad chairman after a second term than reluctant contender Louis Koo, contrasting the one’s troubled relationship with his son (who qualified for a lifetime in therapy at the end of the first film) with the other’s hopes for his future offspring. It ends with the possibility of hope for one son but the certainty of damnation for another that hasn’t even been born, the film bookended by scenes at the same location, the first full of sunlight and promise and confidence, the second dark and cloudy as one character finds that the price of respectability is the very violent life he wants to turn his back on. It’s also surprisingly critical of the corruption in the Chinese government, implying that its collusion with Triad gangsters goes way beyond mere backhanders but is actually a deliberate part of government policy as a means of exerting social control in Hong Kong through close ties with organised crime – a particularly perverse irony considering the Triads’ origins as political rebels exiled from the mainland who became corrupted by crime. Unsurprisingly, it seems to have been banned in Mainland China. Incidentally, although there is talk of a longer version existing because of three striking scenes in the film’s trailers (including a Chinese execution, the open grave of the first film’s last victim and a funeral), an interview on the 2-disc Panorama DVD reveals that these scenes were cut by To prior to release.
3. Casino Royale
As one of the only 12 people who were genuinely delighted at Daniel Craig’s casting a year ago, I must admit I was more than a little worried about Casino Royale. Not the kind of paranoia that those newcomers who’d never experience the changing of the guard the series goes through every decade or the staggeringly venomous hatemongering of the more fanatical Brosnan fans who felt compelled to start libellous hate-sites, though. After all those months of arguing that he was the perfect choice for the role (especially after some of the more moronic suggestions), was I setting myself up for a fall if he turned in a disappointing performance? Similarly there was the film itself. While the producers were making all the right noises about going back to basics, they’d done exactly the same with Licence To Kill and chickened out to deliver a sub-Roger Moore effort with Wayne Newton as a comedy relief villain, inept ninjas, pointless gadgets, laughable violence and monster truck stunts. Too often in the past the franchise had been over-reliant on the goodwill generated by the earlier films, rehashing earlier vehicles to decreasing returns secure in the knowledge that the audience would turn up anyway. Take away the Bond brand, and too many post-OHMSS entries simply wouldn’t have stood up to scrutiny in the marketplace on their own merits: Bond had become a tradition, a ritual like going home for the holidays that you knew was never going to be as good as it was when you were a kid but which you still went through out of a mixture of hope and obligation.
I needn’t have worried. Not only is it the best Bond film in 37 years, it’s as if the Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan years never happened. After Brosnan’s surprisingly lazy and slightly seedy turn in DAD, Craig delivers the most physical Bond since Lazenby, but this time matched by the acting chops to make the most of the best script the series has had in decades – at once plot and character led - as the rookie blunt instrument bulldozes his way through his mission until emotional awakening and betrayal starts to finesse him into the Bond we knew from the Connery days. Brosnan never could have delivered this kind of performance, either physically or emotionally, and, truth be told, neither could Connery in his prime: Craig is the first one to convince you that he’s not a movie star or an actor but that he really is James Bond.
The updating of the plot from the Cold War era to a post 9/11 world works surprisingly well, with the first act managing to provide a convincing motive for the high stakes poker game centrepiece while also providing a couple of superb action scenes that don’t become too absurd and serve the plot in a series where in the past the plot was too often an excuse for the action. The much-criticised change from baccarat to poker is a smart one too. Where Baccarat is purely a game of luck (as Fleming himself found out when he went bust in three hands trying out the novel’s premise on a Nazi spy), poker actually involves both strategy and psychology, making for more satisfying drama and tension.
There is, sadly, one concession to gadgetry that veers into the absurd – c’mon, who keeps a defibrillator in their glove compartment? – and is an unwelcome reminder of the days when old Roge would get out of a scrape with his buzz saw wristwatch or his projectile dart cufflinks thanks to lazy writing, but elsewhere it settles for using existing technology (most of it manufactured by Sony for some reason that escapes me) rather than veering into total fantasy. And it’s good to see a Bond who needs hospitalisation after the villain goes Quasimodo on his nuts with a bellrope. The film’s final sequence promises one helluva follow-up, and one can only hope the producers don’t lose their nerve and throw it all away the way they did with Diamonds Are Forever. The real James Bond is indeed back.
2. Cache / Hidden
Even though I was immensely impressed with Code Unknown, the only other Michael Haneke film I’ve seen, I wasn’t prepared for how powerful Caché turned out to be. Denied an Oscar nomination as Best Foreign Film because no-one could agree whether it was a French film or not, certainly on the surface it’s a fairly typical French film, but it’s what’s under the surface that really counts.
The central premise is simple enough, as Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche’s comfortable bourgeois life is put under increasing strain by a series of videotapes of the their house accompanied by childish drawings of faces with bleeding mouths or throats. With one exception, the tapes show nothing: their menace comes not from their contents but the fact that they exist. Since the drawings have to come from someone who knows the character’s past, is it Auteuil’s Georges’ own conscience that is sending them? Or is it the filmmaker who is sending them to provoke a reaction from his characters? Significantly the tapes are all shot on a fixed camera mounted on a raised tripod in what must be a clearly visible position. Indeed, the appearance of the second tape blocking a doorway that was clear earlier in the shot offers little else in the way of a possible natural explanation.
But the tapes are really just a Maguffin, a narrative device to push the characters and plot forward, not for some cross-country chase but for a more internal guilt trip. This particular lost highway leads into the past, mirroring France’s inability to apologize for it’s colonial past (in particular it’s treatment of Algerians), something it absolves itself of all guilt from by repeating the mantra that it was all in the past when they were much younger and knew no better, as if that wipes out thousands of futures denied or stolen. It’s no accident that the film revolves around a failed adoption that mirrors France’s own failed colonisations.
While the characters are believable rather than Godardian or arthouse archetypes, it’s easy to ascribe a wider allegorical purpose to them. In many respects, Georges is a reflection of France itself, outwardly respectable but denying his past and not acknowledging guilt over Algeria (it’s probably not altogether insignificant that Auteuil himself was born in Algeria). He simply doesn’t want to talk about it. He doesn’t even connect emotionally with his present, let alone his past, mother, son and wife all a part of his life he really has nothing much to say about. Nothing is ever Georges’ fault, not even a near accident crossing the street. He blames a cyclist for his careless mistake, showing that he has learned nothing from his past but is still repeating it. As with the opening of Haneke’s epic of non-communication, Code Unknown, he is oblivious to the wider implications of what is to him a trivial moment or of the possible consequences of his moment of self-righteous anger.
More than that, just as he edits out anything ‘too theoretical’ in his TV show, he tries to re-edit his own past (just as the French government did last year when it passed a law that “the benefits of French colonization in foreign countries should be recognized and integrated into school programs.”) but can’t do it quite so easily. Not that he doesn’t try. Both of Georges' initial flashbacks are dishonest reinventions of memory: Georges turns his childish conspiracy against one character into his victim terrorizing him, reinventing his memory and history to reflect his current interpretation of events and reality. It’s this reinvention that allows him to honestly claim without any real evidence that he is being terrorized – “a campaign of terror” are his exact words – by the person he has wronged. To France, the atrocities inflicted on the Algerians don’t matter – it’s the threat to Georges that, in his childlike ignorance, is all that matters and must be dealt with radically.
Indeed, even though Majid and his son are French-born, both are regarded as foreigners, intruders. Yet neither conforms to the stereotyped ‘Arab’ image: polite, sad, very pointedly not aggressive, yet still regarded purely as a threat for being goaded into an action for which they were punished.
Haneke makes no secret that he isn’t interested in providing answers but rather is forcing questions on the viewer to make them more of a participant. As he said in an interview in The Observer, “I’m not going to give anyone the answer. If you think it’s Majid, Pierrot, Georges, the malevolent director, God himself, the human conscience – all these answers are correct. But if you come out wanting to know who sent the tapes, you didn’t understand the film. To ask this question is to avoid asking the real question the film raises, which is more: how do we treat our conscience and our guilt and reconcile ourselves to living with our actions.
“People are only asking “whodunit?” because I chose to use the genre, the structure of a thriller, to address the issues of blame and conscience, and these methods of narrative usually demand an answer. But my film isn’t a thriller and who am I to presume to give anyone an answer on how they should deal with their own guilty conscience?
“I look at it as productive frustration. Films that are entertainments give simple answers but I think that’s ultimately more cynical, as it denies the viewer room to think.”
If all that sounds hopelessly ‘arty,’ it’s not: this is a film that can be enjoyed on many levels, and it certainly engaged the varied crowd in the packed house I finally saw it - it’s been a long time since I’ve heard an entire cinema gap in genuine shock at one sequence. And, though I usually avoid anything shot on video like the plague that they are in theatres, at least there’s a valid reason for this to be shot on tape (there needs to be a textural similarity between the covert tapes that drive the narrative and the ‘real’ scenes), although there are moments where the limitations of the HD cameras are all too awkwardly apparent and briefly drew me out of the film. But the film was powerful and thought-provoking enough to draw me back in and lodge itself in my head long after seeing it.
1. Pan's Labyrinth
This is one of those films that starts so well that you hope it will stay that good but which actually surprises you and constantly improves. It’s a remarkably layered work about the importance of choice even in an emotional and political dictatorship and about the fictions and fantasies that sustain people through the worst circumstances. On the surface this appears to be little more than a more fantastic spin on The Spirit of the Beehive, sharing its post-Spanish Civil War setting as well as the broken family setting, but this is a far superior film in every way. Although marketed largely as a fantasy, its real power lies in the scenes set in the real world where Sergi Lopez’s all too believable Fascist monster is mopping up the few remaining communist guerrillas in the hills while waiting for his sick wife to give birth to his son while her daughter from her first marriage tries to reassert her own identity rather than submit to the Captain’s idea of family.
The challenges of the mythical world are far less disturbing – or violent - than the real one, and it’s all too easy to see why she wants to escape into the darkness of the labyrinth where at least the hope of something better exists. But then she’s not the only one escaping into the imagination, as her mother sustains herself with a romanticised view of her meeting the captain that he has no interest in whatsoever. To him stories – even a part of his family history that has passed into local legend – exist only to be denied. Lopez’s greatest sin isn’t the pride that he admits to, or even that he is so pitiless, it’s that he chooses to obey without question: the girl’s small triumph is that she does not. And the triumphs in the film are generally small, quiet ones, where courage and fear go hand in hand, making the few acts of decency all the more important when they occur. There is one “saved by the cavalry” moment that at first doesn’t convince but does prove to be there for a definite purpose that makes the ending all the more powerful.
But while there’s a lot going on underneath the surface of the film, it doesn’t crush it with the weight of its ideas. It’s directed with a visual assurance and, at times, playfulness that sweeps you along, sometimes with delight, sometimes with apprehension, but never simply for the sake of a nice shot or a neat special effect (most of which are incredibly well integrated for such a low budget feature). The performances are superb, with Lopez somehow managing to avoid turning his irredeemable character into a caricature: this is an evil without conscience that is all too recognisable. Javier Navarette’s beautiful score is also adept at walking the fine line between magic and emotion without crossing the line into schmaltz.
It’s a remarkable film, the only new one that I’ve seen this year that I’d genuinely say is one of the greatest of all time. It’s been years since I was so affected by I movie that I had to see the very next show. Practically perfect and definitely one to catch on the big screen.
I thought it was better than X2 and enjoyed the "post-credits" teaser. Very entertaining film.
you shouldn't plan to go out after this movie. Still, very moving, emotional film, great design... the score however didn't do anything for me and was the only weak point. Prepare for some intriguing, thought-provoking but hyperviolent movie (as the violence is so realistic... think the torture scene in CR was scary? Think again...)
Only saw seven films last year that stood out. Here they are in ascending order: