Moonrise Kingdom

Why did she do it? Was she scared? Was she bored?

(Belle and Sebastian)

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I love Wes Anderson: the neo-Nouvelle Vague swagger, the precocious children, the middle-age ennui, the arch dialogue, the symmetrical compositions, the literary conceits (diaries, letters, books, chapter headings, narrators...). His debut Bottle Rocket (1996), now a cult classic, is a Salingerian tour-de-force, an off-kilter caper film with lovely breakthrough performances from the Wilson brothers and a superb, self-effacing cameo from James Caan. Rushmore (1998) is sadder, spikier and more ambitious, and one of the great American films about adolescence. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) is Anderson's most complete work, a peculiar, ink-black ensemble tragicomedy of exceptional depth and verve. I wasn't sure about the following two, The Life Aquatic (2004) and The Darjeeling Limited (2007), but he returned to form with Fantastic Mr Fox (2009), a retro, sophisticated, anarchic delight.

His latest offering Moonrise Kingdom, which opened this year's Cannes Film Festival, is an artful, delicate, subtly poignant piece and visually his most impressive film so far. The year is 1965 and we are on a small island where scouting, self-pity and Benjamin Britten seem to be all the rage: it also rains very hard. During a (remarkably elaborate) local production of Britten's opera Noye’s Fludde, young scout Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) leaves the church auditorium and finds himself in a girls-only dressing room. 'What type of bird are you?', he asks the one in the middle. 'A raven', quoths the troubled Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward). Immediate Andersonian Kindred Spirits, they correspond and hatch a plan to run away, Sam from his scout platoon at Camp Ivanhoe, Suzy from the family that don't understand her. Local police officer Bruce Willis leads the hunt, supported by Ed Norton's sensitive scout master, all the little scout cubs (or whatever they're called) and Suzy's weary lawyer parents, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand.

At times, it seems a bit weird to have two twelve-year-old lovers as main characters for a film, behaving as though they're in their own mini-version of Badlands; the scene where Sam paints Suzy in just her bra and knickers is particularly borderline. But Anderson just about gets away with it, as Eric Rohmer got away with the little girl's holiday romance in Pauline at the Beach, because of the summery innocence and genuine empathy that underpin the snogs and fumbles. It's also less an affair than an adventure, in which Sam's diurnal boy-scout pragmatism and Suzy's bedtime reading dovetail rather well.

Indeed, as ever, Anderson celebrates the eccentrically imaginative, and the film itself has the hand-crafted charm of the community performance of the Britten opera. As Ed Norton observes in a rather fun interview on the Guardian website, characters put on plays throughout Wes Anderson's work and they often go unappreciated, like Max's brilliantly over-the-top productions in Rushmore and Margot Tenenbaum's play that her father Royal claims 'didn't seem believable to me'. The sympathy for the outsider is allied to a wariness of conformity and the cocksure, evidenced in the Teddy Boys at Sam's foster home and the ‘Lord of the Flies’-aggression of the cubs in the woods when they find the fugitives (led by an Aryan, Ralph-like figure on a motorbike who, to his great credit, has an epiphany later in the film and persuades the other boys that Sam needs their help). Harvey Keitel's bullying old-boy scout patriarch, who humiliates Ed Norton in front of a huge crowd, is the adult extrapolation of this easy, unthinking, macho bastardry, so it is rather a satisfying, graceful riposte, immediately afterwards, when Norton rescues Keitel from his burning cabin by carrying him on his back, like an ironic Anchises.

The film is full of lovely performances and Anderson's direction of the child actors is commendably understated, but the two stand-outs are Bruce Willis and Ed Norton, both sweet, solitary, beta-heroes who buck the trend. There is a particularly touching scene where Ed Norton stops halfway through a recording of his dictaphone-diary, is hit by a sort of existential crisis, and stays silent for about five seconds. Anderson has a real knack for these miniature moments of overwhelming pathos. There's a scene in Fantastic Mr Fox where the young fox Kristofferson, whose father is very ill, is made to sleep on the floor by his resentful cousin Ash. It's the last straw, and he starts to cry. Again, it's only for about five seconds, then we're onto the next scene (see also pretty much any scene with Bill Murray in Rushmore). Some dismiss Anderson as mannered and superficial, but I can't think of a director who can produce pearls of sadness in the everyday as purely and effectively as he can.

The film also has a visual brio that surpasses even Anderson's best work, and two scenes are especially impressive. A midnight canoe expedition uses natural light in a way I haven't seen since the likes of Barry Lyndon and early Terrence Malick. Then, for the film's climax, a rescue sequence on top of a church is a maelstrom of moonlit rain, shadow and indigo, the cinematic equivalent of the astonishing storm-in-the-forest chapter of Nabokov's Pale Fire ('A flash of lightning, a handshake...'). It also provides an ingenious, cockle-warming solution to Sam's predicament (which I won’t spoil).

Moonshine Kingdom has its flaws. There is a lull about halfway through, a little too long is spent on Sam and Suzie's meanderings, and some of the cameos work better than others (regular Anderson collaborator Jason Schwartzman is a joy; Keitel and Swinton slightly less so). But the third act of the film is glorious and, for a stylised 'auteur' like Anderson, transposes unusually complicated, naturalistic exchanges within credible relationships (the scene when Bill Murray and Frances McDormand are in their adjacent single beds, for instance).

I sometimes think of Wes Anderson as the Belle and Sebastian of cinema, inasmuch as the quirky, cosy, crisp conveyance often covers up something a bit darker: the loneliness of the playground, the melodrama of puberty, the wry hyper-maturity of the outcast. Moonrise Kingdom, perhaps better than any of Anderson's work so far, captures the difficulty of family, the importance of companionship, and the cathartic moment children realise adults aren't perfect. A strange, tender, hopeful triumph.

The Descendants

Alexander Payne (along with Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson and Todd Haynes) is one of the few American filmmakers still able to make sophisticated, distinctive, independent-minded films. Payne harks back to a more intelligent, artistically rigorous Hollywood, the New Hollywood of Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show. He is the F. Scott Fitzgerald of middle-aged stasis in middle-class Americana, a classy, wise, endlessly sympathetic chronicler of modern agonies. His breakthrough film, Election (1999), is a stylish, searingly funny school-as-politics allegory, with all sorts of symbolic currents of male sexual longing. About Schmidt (2002) is a patient, melancholy deconstruction of old age, led by an intriguingly reserved Jack Nicholson. Sideways (2004) is a sparkling wine of a film, an existential meander amongst the vineyards of friendship, marriage, casual sex and the tensions between the three. Payne’s short ‘14e arrondissement’, the final vignette in the variable anthology film Paris, je t’aime (2006), is possibly his most impressive achievement so far, a genuinely beautiful seven-minute hymn to happiness, narrated in halting French by an American postwoman on her first European holiday. Please watch it immediately if you haven’t already (here on YouTube).

The Descendants, then, is Payne’s first feature film in seven years, and it is ever so slightly disappointing. George Clooney plays Matt King, an affable Hawaii-based lawyer whose wife is sent into a coma after a speedboat accident. Matt is then burdened with family responsibility from all sides: he must look after his two livewire daughters (aged seventeen and ten) and deliver the news about his wife to all and sundry, but he must also oversee the potential sale of his ancestors’ vast plot of land, acting as sole trustee amongst his various cousins. The waters are muddied when Matt finds out his wife had been having an affair, so Matt and his daughters embark on a Broken Flowers-style hunt to find the culprit, bumping into friends and family along the way.

George Clooney is excellent, as ever, in what might be his saddest, most nuanced role so far, even lonelier than his one in Up In The Air. The secondary performances are universally strong, particularly Clooney’s two daughters and Beau Bridges as a hippy relative, and Payne’s characterisation is always admirably complicated. But there’s something rather staid and detached about the whole film. It is characteristically subtle, funny and dark, but it never seems to get going and certainly never reaches the heights of Payne's previous work. The philosophy of family and one’s place in history could also be explored more acutely than with photos of great-great-grandparents and hugs with cousins.

The Descendants is comfortably better than most American comedy dramas, very comfortably, and Alexander Payne remains one of the sharpest, most respectable figures in American cinema. However, the presence of Robert Forster, so good in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, made me wonder if this is Alexander Payne’s Jackie Brown, an intelligent, familiar, slightly restrained follow-up to an acknowledged masterpiece. Payne was always going to struggle to follow Sideways (for whose screenplay he won an Oscar, as Tarantino did for Pulp Fiction), but he’s had seven years since then and I worry that, in this instance, he’s mellowed at the expense of his socio-satirical bite. The short from Paris, je t’aime shows that Payne has not only still got it, but can scale even greater heights than Sideways. Ultimately, this film is rather like its central character: rational, very likeable, bold in places, funny in a sad sort of way, but ultimately both hold too much back, trapped between the past and the future, and are capable of so much more.

The Artist

What a magnificent film this is. The savviest, most elegant celebration of old-school cinema since Singin' In The Rain, it is also an impeccable fable about the transience of fame and fashion, harking back to the darker likes of All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard. Most impressively, the film is in dazzling black-and-white and (until the final scene) wordless.

Jean Dujardin is quite exceptional as George Valentin, the silent cinema star whose popularity wanes as sound arrives. A far cry from the histrionic "mugging" typical of silent films, Dujardin's performance is a masterclass in restraint, subtlety and fragile charm. Look at his face when he overhears starlet Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), in an interview, call for the silent stars to make way for newer, fresher faces: it begins with a sort of dazed dignity, then he hunches into his food, and then he can't help but confront her; look again as he loiters at the back of the room, head bowed, during the auction of all his possessions, perhaps the most poignant scene in the film. There is another wonderful moment where he bumps into Peppy on a studio stairwell: his smile, that matinée idol smile under the Clark Gable moustache, becomes a frail, parodic, half-rictus mask. Dujardin is compelling throughout the film (he can even dance), but he is particularly brilliant in the early, more inhibited stages of his internal collapse.

Bejo is perky and endearing, if slightly idealised, as George's protegée-cum-guardian angel. There's a fun early scene, a bit like the one in Singin' In The Rain when the microphones don't work, where the chemistry between George and Peppy ruins take after take. But she remains unwaveringly grateful to George, even once he has become a Miss Havisham-esque recluse surrounded by his former glories and nearly sets fire to himself. As much as anything else, this is a film about loyalty, which George commands not just from Peppy, but also from his driver Clifton (James Cromwell) and his lovely dog. The moment George tries to kill himself, with his dog howling at him not to, is heartbreaking, and a powerful throwback to the end of neorealist classic Umberto D., where Flike stops his master from standing in front of a train.

Before The Artist, Dujardin and director Michel Hazanavicius were best known for spy spoof series OSS 117, the French, even less funny equivalent of Johnny English. But they are now responsible for one of the most delightful, stylish and brave films in recent memory, and the best, warmest film about the cinema since Truffaut's La nuit américaine. It is not perfect: there are too many scenes with the dog (as sweet as he is), the gun joke is overflogged, the very early scenes are too hammy, and I know it was a cameo, but Malcolm McDowell could have been used more (the presence of McDowell, a sort of seventies George Valentin who went from Kubrickian iconoclast to B-movie trundler, is one of the film's many ironies). However, it is such an astonishing achievement, a modern-day cultural Fitzcarraldo, to make a black-and-white, silent film in 2011 as contemporary, funny and entrancing as this.

The Deep Blue Sea

Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea is a gouache of a film, with a watery visual pallette more powerful than its performances, which often bloat and sag. An adapatation of Terence Rattigan's 1952 play, it follows Rachel Weisz' Hester, a melancholy judge's wife whose suicide attempt frames the film (Mr Clarkson will be pleased to hear she does it in the privacy of her own flat, well away from the Circle Line). Her attempt is unsuccessful, almost pathetically so, and the film goes on to colour in the act's motives and its immediate aftermath.

The two men in her life are diametric opposites. Hester's husband Sir William (Simon Russell Beale) is well-meaning and dull, a titan of his profession but an emotional titmouse, although, like Chekhov's Dr Dymov, his solidity is an increasingly reassuring lighthouse in a sea of troubles. The third in the triangle is Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), a roistering young Battle of Britain-survivor whose ale-swilling, golfclub-swirling insouciance doesn't hide the boyish temper and war-addled self-caricaturing.

This is Terence Davies' first fictional film since The House of Mirth (2000) and, regrettably, it already feels dated. Obviously it's a period piece and Tom Hiddleston's affected terms of endearment ('old fruit' etc) are excusable as a society-prescribed mask for a deeper void (just as the way the Made in Chelsea lot talk to each other will feel horribly of-its-time in fifty years). But the scenes between Hiddleston and Weisz, two eminently subtle actors, feel too stagey, even for a relationship which is self-consciously melodramatic, and there's far too much shouting, to the point that it often becomes comical (on one occasion in a gallery, this is intentional - "Where are you going?" "TO THE IMPRESSIONISTS!")

Simon Russell Beale, on the other hand, is a marvel. The boring cuckold is never an easy part to play, and even less easy to make sympathetic (my own portrayal of The Husband in the Trinity Players' 2007 production of Lorca's Blood Wedding is a particular nadir), but Russell Beale is somehow simultaneously sweet, tragic, irritating, emasculated, dignified and overly mothered. Ironically, the only scene with all three actors is a mismatch between Hiddleston's shouty faux-menace and Russell Beale's heartbreaking stoicism. This is such a shame, as I love Tom Hiddleston and he is so good in Joanna Hogg's two films, and he's not even bad in this. But there's neither the dangerous swagger nor the tortured vulnerability he displays in Unrelated and Archipelago respectively, and he could have done considerably more here by doing less. Rachel Weisz, who I think is in every scene, is fine, but it is difficult to pity her character (apart from a superb showdown with her mother-in-law) when she has such confused notions of love and tries to kill herself because her birthday was forgotten (compared to heroic landlady Mrs Elton, for whom love is "wiping someone's arse and changing the sheets when they wet the bed").

The film looks beautiful, like all Davies' work. It is sometimes a little too stately for its own good and the pacing is slow, often to the point of stagnation (Hester and Freddie feeling sorry for themselves; all that bloody singing in the pub). But at other points, it is mesmerising (the first time we see Freddie, for instance). The finest scene in the whole film, a long-take flashback sequence to Aldwych tube station during an air raid, is vintage Davies, the Davies of Distant Voices, Still Lives, and a two-minute sonata to the spirit of the Blitz: it made me cry, but it also made me sad that it was like a scene from the film The Deep Blue Sea could have been, one with a present tense. Instead, it is, to borrow Hemingway's critique of the Waterloo sequence in Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, a wonderful, accidental piece in a film that has much dullness.

This is a fickle, frustrating film, one that has pools of greatness but ultimately drowns in its own plodding earnestness. It is surprising that the marriage of these two Terence's, both poets of the repressed, isn't more harmonious.

Midnight in Paris

My love affair with Woody Allen started in France. I was working and living in a school in Lyon, and happened across a whole shelf of his films in a municipal library (in France, slightly confusingly, films are ordered by director rather than title). The "early, funny" likes of Sleeper and Bananas are a bit zany for me, but there are eight works that have dated particularly well: Love and Death (1975) is a glorious, visually ravishing double-parody of Russian literature and stark Scandinavian cinema; Annie Hall (1977) is the Ulysses of romantic comedy; Manhattan (1979) is a strange, artful, fraught poem about New York with one of the most moving break-up scenes of all time; Stardust Memories (1980) is a Fellini-esque disquisition on the beauty and hypocrisy of cinema; Hannah and her Sisters (1984) is a terrific ensemble dramedy lifted by a Richard Yatesian understanding of womanhood; Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) is an operatic, Schubert-infused anti-parable in which the purest comedy and the purest tragedy seep into each other, and is probably the best film he's made; Husbands and Wives (1992), which he made during his much-publicised split from Mia Farrow, is a harsh, Cassavetesian, emotionally dense study of middle-aged stasis and the temptations that surround it; and Sweet and Lowdown (1999) is a masterful ballad about male solitude, featuring a peach of a performance from Sean Penn, and remains Allen's last great film.

Some would say Allen lost his magic touch before then, some would say he re-discovered it with Match Point or Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Both are perfectly decent films, neither as dire nor as triumphant as most critics claimed. Some of the English characters' dialogue in Match Point is woefully, laughably off-the-mark, and much of Vicky Cristina Barcelona is left in the oven a little too long (it still baffles me that Penelope Cruz' performance was more acclaimed than Rebecca Hall's). But as critical doyen Peter Bradshaw once observed, Woody Allen's recent films only disappoint if you compare them to other Woody Allen films: compared to contemporary romantic thrillers or dramas, they actually stand up rather well.

And so to Midnight in Paris. Owen Wilson plays a very successful Hollywood scriptwriter who visits Paris with his fiancée, Rachel McAdams, in the hope the city will enrich the novel he is attempting to write. While she flirts with bearded Francophile know-it-all Michael Sheen, Wilson wanders the rain-washed streets and, on the stroke of midnight one evening, catches a chance lift with a group of dapper revellers. All of a sudden, he is transported to the literary jetset of the Twenties and is soon swilling champagne with F. Scott Fitzgerald, receiving life advice from Hemingway, and hobnobbing with Picasso, Dali, Bunuel, Gertrude Stein and a rather sexy muse, played by Marion Cotillard. She and Wilson are kindred nostalgic spirits, and she more than anyone tempts him away from his life in the present day.

It is a sweet, optimistic, surprisingly sensible film. The present-day scenes, perhaps deliberately, are a tad stale: McAdams has a damp squib of a part, her parents are awful, and Michael Sheen's smart alec isn't as funny as he should be (Wilson's intellectual victory over Sheen in front of the Picasso is disappointingly predictable). However, as soon as we go back in time, the film finds its rhythm. In the same way the film begins with an overlong postcard slideshow of Paris (a simpler, less ironic companion to the start of Manhattan), the checklist of obligatory big names does start to irk after a while ('Oh look, there's Luis'; 'We're going to Gertrude's house'). But who cares? They're great company, especially Tom Hiddleston's classy, gregarious Scott Fitzgerald and Kathy Bates' spikily supportive Gertrude Stein, although Corey Stoll's Hemingway steals the show. He is a revelation, a bruisingly charismatic purveyor of crystalline wisdom, addled with booze and political ideals. He speaks as he writes: terse, forceful, more affected than he lets on.

My favourite scene, and one on which the film unexpectedly twists, is when Owen and Marion go back to the Belle Epoque and meet Degas et al. It is a subtle, beautifully observed defence of the contemporary, ignored by Cotillard but heeded by Wilson. Perhaps we Woody Allen nostalgists should stop pining for the old days and appreciate this late European phase for what it is (given the film's made over $115 million worldwide, perhaps people already do). Midnight in Paris is not a masterpiece, it is not hilarious, and it doesn't break a great deal of ground. But it is very easy viewing, brings to life a fascinating artistic milieu, and offers a cosy, escapist reflection on escapism.

The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick is the epic poet of American cinema. His first film, Badlands (1973), is a work of senseless beauty, a rich, aloof parable of crime, youth and solipsism. His second, Days of Heaven (1978), is a pastoral, crop-crackling, dusk-buttered ode to landscape, toil in the fields and family, as if painted by Jules Breton and written by Steinbeck. His third, released a casual twenty-one years after his second, is The Thin Red Line (1999), a strange, philosophical, Homeric, aesthetically radical requiem to masculinity, memory, loss and friendship. It is, after Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, perhaps the finest war film ever made (though it suffered for being released the same month as Saving Private Ryan). His fourth, The New World (2005), is a handsome, marvellously understated colonial allegory, which meshes the tentative palliative femininity of Days of Heaven with The Thin Red Line’s battle-hardened, soulful men without women.

The Tree of Life, for which Malick won (but, rather satisfyingly, refused to collect) this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, is his fifth film and combines elements of the previous four – the lyricism; the spiritual self-interrogation; the tensions between man and nature – yet it stands out, already, within the director’s canon. Sean Penn is a wealthy architect called Jack who, between meetings, remembers his childhood and, in particular, his relationship with his father (Brad Pitt) and the death of his brother R.L. His early life parallels the evolution of the universe, of which we get fleeting, heady glimpses throughout, before an ambiguous, Tarkovskian finale where people paddle about on the beach and you can’t be sure of anything.

It is Malick’s most ambitious film so far, and also his riskiest. It can seem, at times, like two very different films spliced together, an elegant, emotionally desiccated fifties family drama, with the occasional celestial interlude courtesy of Sir Patrick Moore. But it works rather well. Indeed, the cosmic landscapes are amongst the most extraordinary images I’ve seen in a cinema (though the scene with the dinosaurs is less convincing).

Brad Pitt is wonderful as the overbearing, Brahms-loving, Old Testament God of a father figure. At one stage, he asks his middle son at the dinner table to promise to do something for him without asking what it is, expecting the sort of unquestioning obedience God demands of Abraham in Genesis 22. It is an exemplary study in confused masculinity (teaching his boys how to throw a punch one minute; reminding them to give him a goodnight kiss the next) and a fascinating companion performance to his Jesse James: the harsh allure, the weary superstition, the warped paternal instincts, the temper. He is our Paul Newman. The other performances are nicely sketched, with Hunter McCracken particularly impressive as the bruised, callow young Jack.

The film is constellated with Biblical overtones. The prologue comes from The Book of Job, that proto-absurdist masterpiece of cruelty and patience. Pitt orders his sons to look after the garden; Jack is jealous of his younger brother R.L.; even Sean Penn’s skyscraper has echoes of the Tower of Babel. Throughout the film, this synthesis of the Christian and the scientific is a surprisingly harmonious one. Is the film as lovely to look at his others? Apart from the bits in space, I’m not sure. Emmanuel Y Tu Mamá También Lubezki (yes, he did The New World too, well done) is a fine cinematographer, but those jittery, hyper-Robert Bresson close-ups are slightly wearying.

To conclude, this film is a nebula, a dust cloud of contemplation, fear, love, anger, nature, humanity, time and space that is simultaneously troubling and full of hope. It is a long, treacherous piece and it’s very difficult to navigate, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in an Emperor’s New Clothes, Last Year in Marienbad, oh-for-fuck’s-sake sort of way (two couples walked out during our screening, but then we were in the Kingston Rotunda). Nevertheless, its unapologetic grandeur, its infinite poetry and its detached, difficult characters, amongst much else, restore one’s faith in American cinema.

Submarine

Submarine is a mesmerising, cineliterate debut from Richard Ayoade, one of our most original comedy actors and a music video director of some repute. Based on Joe Dunthorne’s 2008 novel and set in the 1980’s, it tells the tale of Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), an earnest Welsh schoolboy in the gauche, solipsistic, pseudo-intellectual tradition of Adrian Mole, Holden Caulfield and Rushmore’s Max Fischer. Oliver has two primary concerns: to sleep with girl-of-his-dreams Jordana (Yasmin Paige) and to save his parents’ marriage. This is typical coming-of-age territory, but Ayoade invests it with peppery dialogue, smart characterisation, genuine visual artistry and a lovely, Richard Hawley-tinted soundtrack from Alex Turner.

Submarine is positively awash with cinematic references (the red coat of Don’t Look Now; the adolescence-by-the-sea imagery of Les Quatre Cents Coups; Godardian chapter headings and stirring strings; the Interiors-esque tableau when the Tate family watch Mum’s ex-boyfriend Graham from the window) and, judging by his recent interview with Sight and Sound, Ayoade is something of a film buff; the film is shot, narrated and stylised like a seventies French film, and Oliver even sleeps under a painting of a still from Rohmer’s Ma nuit chez Maud. But the film wears its intellectualism rather more lightly than Oliver himself: on a Woody Allen-esque date to see Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Jordana dismisses Oliver’s cultural funpack of King Lear, The Catcher in the Rye and Nietzsche and walks out of the film halfway through, just as his mother (Sally Hawkins) wants to see Crocodile Dundee to the disappointment of his Rohmer-loving father (Noah Taylor).

These little details are fun winks for a sad anorak like me, but (far more importantly) this is a highly original, deeply satisfying work in its own right. Our American friends churn out these sorts of offbeat adolescent tragicomedies like there’s no tomorrow (The Squid and the Whale; Adventureland; the overrated 500 Days of Summer), but Submarine has more bite, more invention and a subtler sense of melancholy than all of them: if this film were French and made in the seventies, it would be worshipped in bedrooms like mine and Oliver’s all over the country. It is full of symbols and expressionistic quirks, but it never feels gimmicky. I particularly liked the use of fire and water imagery. Fire is exciting, dangerous and ephemeral (Graham’s light show; the firework display; the ‘light arson’ Oliver commits with Jordana; Oliver’s fire riddle) whilst water is associated with depression and routine (the bullied Zoe falling into the pond; the father’s depression as an extension of his work as a marine biologist; the fish tank during awkward family meals; Oliver’s solitary trips to the beach; Oliver’s nightmare on the bridge). Those who know their Truffaut will be able to guess which of the two elements provides the backdrop to the film’s denouement.

The acting is strong and off-kilter, with Noah Taylor’s gentle Antipodean dad and Paddy Considine’s New Age mystic rocker Graham a delightfully sketched yin and yang of fading middle-aged masculinity. I remember reading an article in Empire Magazine a while ago that said Paddy Considine could be the next Robert de Niro. That may sound ridiculous, but not many actors can do terrifying and sweet as seamlessly as Considine and I think he could turn out to be one of our great character actors (he’d be brilliant in a Paul Thomas Anderson ensemble piece); he also has impeccable comic timing (please watch the criminally underappreciated Shane Meadows mockumentary Le Donk and Scor-Zay-Zee as soon as possible if you have not already). Craig Robert’s studied, ever-startled Oliver is sweet and more endearing than most of cinema’s precocious oddballs (Bud Cort in Harold and Maude, for instance), but I found Yasmin Paige’s Jordana very annoying: I’m sure this is the point and of course one should sympathise as her mum isn’t well, but part of me thought Oliver would be better off with Zoe.

But what an exciting director Richard Ayoade looks to be, a genuine auteur with shades of Wes Anderson, Woody Allen and François Truffaut, translated into his own distinctive cinematic vocabulary. Submarine is a poetic, self-effacing, very funny exploration of growing up, a dazzling first feature and the finest film about adolescence since Rushmore. Ayoade could fizzle out, of course, but (like his Warp Films stablemate Chris Morris) I have a feeling that he is only going to get better as he matures: if Submarine is his Bottle Rocket, I cannot wait to see his Royal Tenenbaums.

Archipelago

Archipelago is an elusive, elegiac second feature from Joanna Hogg, one of the most exciting new directors in British cinema. Like her startling 2008 debut Unrelated, Archipelago refracts the solitude and ennui of human existence through the prism of an upper-middle class English family holiday: Noel Coward meets Michael Haneke. Before heading off to Africa, Edward (a maturer, more subdued Tom Hiddleston than the one we saw in Unrelated) joins his mother Patricia (Kate Fahy) and sister Cynthia (Lydia Lloyd) in a remote house they have rented on the Scilly Isles for a holiday of long walks, painting lessons and sitting around while meals are cooked for them. Bliss, you might think, but far from it! It becomes a genteel nightmare, in which Hogg tempers the lyricism of the Tresco landscape with naturalistic, Rohmerian dialogue and a darker feel for stasis, claustrophobia and silence.

A former photographer and apprentice to Derek Jarman, Joanna Hogg composes the architecture of each frame like a European master, such as Theo Angelopoulos or Victor Erice. The camera doesn't move, but she packs each shot with nuance and painterly juxtapositions (look out for the background reactions of Rose the cook). The narrative focus of the film is rather more obscure, and richer for it: like the superb scene in Unrelated where the row between Oakley and his father is shown from the perspective of the reluctant listeners, the mother's worst argument with her husband (whom we never see) occurs off-screen. Indeed, the film consists of the very scenes less brave directors would omit (group silences, filler conversations, awkward meals), the feathers and innards of the plot rather than the meat, but Hogg arranges them so intuitively and so precisely that the film becomes as much about what we don't see or hear as what we do. Why is the sister so unhappy? What did Rose's letter say? Is there more to art teacher Christopher than meets the eye?

The cast, a mix of professionals and non-actors, is excellent. One scene, a conversation between Edward (RADA-educated, Olivier Award-winning Hiddleston) and Christopher (played by Hogg’s former art teacher Christopher Banks) about the “intensity of conviction” needed to succeed as an artist, is a particularly effective mix of technique and unstudied spontaneity. Hiddleston will be a household name before too long (Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris and Kenneth Branagh’s Thor are all on the horizon), but I do hope he keeps working with Hogg: they could be the Scorsese and De Niro of British arthouse.

Archipelago is a beguiling piece from a genuine auteur. It presents human nature as nature: beautiful, indifferent, solitary and fickle. The film is bleak, elliptical and exquisitely shot, but also very sweet and very funny (there is a lovely moment with a toy badger). It is less potent, raw and immediately moving than Unrelated, but is subtler, more ambitious and visually even richer. Of this current Golden Age of female British directors (Andrea Arnold, Clio Barnard, Lucy Walker and Sophie Fiennes amongst many others), Joanna Hogg is the Terrence Malick, the understated maverick and perhaps the most intriguing of the lot.

Exit Through The Gift Shop

Exit Through The Gift Shop is a sly, thrilling and thoughtful documentary directed by Banksy, the Picasso of street art. The film depicts the transformation of a chubby, camera-obsessive French shop owner called Thierry Guetta into ‘Mr Brainwash’, the most talked-about artist on the West Coast and the man Madonna asks to design the artwork for her Greatest Hits album. At first glance, the trajectory of the film is fairly traditional, an All About Eve for graffiti artists, a cinematic Bildungsroman in which hype corrupts and hollows a genial family man into a scooter-bound tyrant more interested in giving interviews than arranging works for his first exhibition, ‘Life is Beautiful’.

But there is more to the film than meets the eye. It has an almost Cervantine formation of tricksy authorial layers: Banksy, face shadowed and voice altered, tells us early on that the film is about Thierry’s attempt to make a film about him; Banksy has, supposedly, cobbled it together by combining Thierry’s thousands of hours of footage with his own footage and interviews. The neat whole is then presented to the audience with a third narrative voice – mellifluous Welsh actor Rhys Ifans. Thierry, we are told, first breaks into the street art underworld through his cousin, the artist Invader, whom he casually starts to film on his nocturnal escapades. Soon, he is filming all the big names – Shephard Fairey, Borf, Ron English, Swoon, Buffmonster – until a chance encounter with the king himself. Soon after, Banksy and Thierry switch roles of observer and subject, and Thierry’s artistic output, in the guise of Mr Brainwash, becomes the film’s focus.

If Thierry is a fabrication, he is a remarkably thorough one, and the attention to detail sets the film apart even from the likes of I’m Still Here and Catfish. Reams of stock footage and universally deadpan interviews are enriched by Banksy’s own wry eloquence: for instance, he suggests that the first time he met Thierry, he looked like something out of the 1860s (the decade, for what it’s worth, that gave us the unreliable narrator figures of Great Expectations and Sentimental Education). There are clues along the way that suggest Thierry is perhaps not the genius-in-waiting we might have expected. Thierry’s first solo artistic attempt is ‘Life Remote Control’, a nightmarish mess of a film that Banksy deems ‘unwatchable’. The hype around Thierry grows thanks mainly to an enigmatic endorsement from Banksy (‘Mr Brainwash is a phenomenon… and I don’t mean that in a good way’), which Thierry milks with all the vigour of a Swiss farmhand. In fact, we never really see Thierry so much as pick up a paintbrush: his is a cinematic approach to art, where he is the director delegating the production of the work to hired hands. Banksy later describes Thierry as the natural heir to Andy Warhol, one who has rendered icons even more meaningless than his predecessor: is this a compliment, criticism, or deliberately both?

Is Exit Through The Gift Shop a real documentary? When it's this funny and insightful, who cares? Either way, as artist Shephard Fairey suggests, the idea of voyeur turned successful mimic is anthropologically fascinating: the film is full of marginal, mythopoeic figures that Thierry observes for years before becoming a fame-hungry caricature of them, the living equivalent of one of his neo-Pop Art paintings. Ultimately, the film is a deft, post-ironic, beautifully judged portrait of fame, contemporary art, flock behaviour and the vacuity of hype, but also a portrait (like Velazquez' Las Meninas) into which the artist has secreted a version of himself. Whether the joke is on us, or if there’s a joke at all, is up to you.

Never Let Me Go

Poor old Never Let Me Go. A measured adaptation of one of our finest writer’s finest novels played by the cream of British acting, it should have been, at the very least, this year’s Atonement. But it has been eclipsed, by The King’s Speech (the most universal English heartwarmer since Chariots of Fire) and a remarkably strong crop of other releases (True Grit, 127 Hours, Black Swan, Gnomeo and Juliet), and will probably miss out on the audience it deserves.

Perhaps the film is too subtle for its own good. A suggestive parable that extrapolates the prospect of human cloning with chilling authenticity, it follows Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley), three young innocents who meet at a mysterious boarding school called Hailsham where the pupils wear electronic tags and don’t have surnames. The boarding school itself – cloistered, ordered, bubbling with rumours and envy – has layers of philosophical symbolism. It might represent the cosy idealism of childhood and the potential challenges for the over-protected to survive in the real world (a sweet café scene captures the lighter side of this). It might represent the more ambiguous reassurance the rituals of religion offer: as in The Truman Show and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, the protagonists are fed horror stories from a young age to stop them from stepping outside the boundaries (though, unlike The Truman Show and The Village, nobody tries to escape). Sally Hawkins’ teacher figure, a rare rebel, is spirited away from the school for telling the pupils what will happen to them once they leave Hailsham, prompting an eery defence of conformity from Charlotte Rampling’s formidable headmistress (“The tide is not with forward thinking”, but “with the entrenched mindset”).

Their universe is full of awful, Orwellian euphemisms like ‘possibles’, ‘donations’ and ‘completions’, where art and love are objectified (indeed, one becomes the currency of the other). Mercies are scarce: in the film’s most heartbreaking scene, the pupils of Hailsham are treated to a ‘sale’ of toys children from the real world no longer want. Distant parents recur in Ishiguro’s fiction (the older Mr Stevens treats his son like a fellow member of staff in The Remains Of The Day; Christopher is abandoned by his parents in When We Were Orphans; Ryder’s parents fail to turn up to his concert in The Unconsoled), but here they are completely absent, leaving the youngsters with a distorted, materialistic understanding of love and affection.

The questions the film raises are disarmingly existential. Is it better to be exposed (and resigned) to the grim reality of one’s own shelf life all along, or are unfounded morsels of hope to be treasured, even if they prove to be false? Is it better to die young, or alone? Is it enlightened to have a system where certain people are born to give up their organs to eliminate disease and allow others to live longer, or the opposite? There are no right answers and the film doesn’t presume to provide any.

Mulligan, Garfield and Knightley, three of the crown jewels of British acting, acquit themselves very well. Mulligan is lucid, sweet and reasoned, whilst Garfield’s low-key gauche charm is scorched with a Romantic temper. There is a scene where the two of them go for a walk in the woods where Tommy can’t quite bring himself to say that it is Kathy he loves rather than Ruth. It is, like the scene where Anthony Hopkins refuses to show Emma Thompson the book he is reading in The Remains Of The Day, a fleeting chance to take an emotional risk, but missed. Knightley, whom it seems increasingly fashionable to dislike, is rather good in a weighty secondary role, her selfish, affected precocity yielding to fragile, helpless guilt (there is one particularly convincing scene in a hospital corridor).

This is a tender, quietly provocative piece that stays faithful to the understated spirit of the book, but one which unquestionably works as a film in its own right. Kazuo Ishiguro, with his hazy first-person narrators and immaculate sense of English reserve, is not an easy writer to translate to film, but this is an admirable, at times gut-wrenching adaptation that deserves to be seen. I wonder which of his novels will be next. Perhaps The Unconsoled with Daniel Day-Lewis?

Blue Valentine

Blue Valentine is an impressionistic portrait of a young couple, full of mimetic nuance and hazy beauty. The narrative juxtaposes fragments from the lithe early days of the relationship between young lovers Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) with the flabby paunch it becomes. The film's characterisation, particularly the way Dean and Cindy's younger selves feed into their current selves, slightly reminded me of Jonathan Franzen's much-lauded Freedom, a Bayeux tapestry of a novel that provides painstaking, neo-Tolstoyian backgrounds for each of its protagonists and interweaves them: this is more pared-down, of course, but with the same interest in the germination of personalities, the degradation of the American family unit and the potential of even the most virtuous character traits - idealism, playfulness, hard work - to wilt or fester: it is an intensive dual-character study, a cinematic novella, the spare, frustrated authenticity of whose dialogue recalls the short stories of Raymond Carver. Sex throughout the film is, for the most part, brusque, dissonant or apathetic: those grim scenes in the motel, and the shower scene especially, are horribly true to that wonderful description of unreciprocated male lust in The Waste Land:

Exploring hands encounter no defence;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

 

Ryan Gosling belongs (along with Sam Rockwell, Mark Ruffalo, Casey Affleck and, the most promising of them all, James Franco) to that new wave of soulful, sleepy-eyed leading men who steal every film they are in. He is particularly engaging here: witty and optimistic as the young Dean; frayed, receding and irreverent (bordering on immature) years later. He is also very funny, even in the more serious scenes. Michelle Williams is equally impressive, her sweet and spontaneous loyalty to Dean giving way to a sort of jaded, passive-aggressive lethargy: she has got to the stage where she is too tired to be a mother or a wife, and yet an unexpected encounter in a supermarket with Bobby, her baleful high school sweetheart, provides a perverse flutter of excitement.

The potential problem with a film like this is it risks creeping into the territory of self-indulgent ‘actor vehicle’ (Gosling and Williams are both credited as executive producers). But the script manages to resist this: for instance, in a scene where Michelle Williams turns up late to her daughter's school play, Dean, rather than hector her for being late as you might expect, pauses and asks her gently what the matter is. Whilst the early scenes are lit more warmly than the later ones, director Derek Cianfrance's emotional palette within the two canvases is more fickle and ambiguous (the rapture of a comedy taxi driver one minute, the agony of an abortion clinic the next). He tempers the joy of the young lovers, and the vicarious joy the audience feels for them, with ironic glimpses of their future together. Their garbled final row, where what leaves the characters' mouths are less words than raw, escaped snatches of feeling, where there is so much left to say that is left unsaid, is a highly articulate depiction of inarticulacy and the final shot is fittingly enigmatic.

Blue Valentine is, all in all, a fascinating, bleak and literate meditation on marriage, young love and the frictions between the two, with a subtle, potent score from Grizzly Bear that blossoms in the final credits. If Mike Leigh's Another Year extolled the cosy notion of marital bliss, Blue Valentine defiles it. It is a less self-consciously stylised reinvention of the romance genre than last year’s zesty, if superficial 500 Days of Summer (whose zenith was the inspired, split-screen contrast of "Expectations" and "Reality"), but perhaps even more subversive in its maturity, uncertainty, and canny admixture of reality and idealism. An artful, emotional fable that deserves to be seen, but perhaps not on a first date.

The King's Speech

The King's Speech is a superb, refreshingly old-fashioned celebration of reluctant heroism, shot in sombre hues that capture the uncertainty of the age. Colin Firth plays George V’s second son Bertie, who has the throne thrust upon him after the abdication of his brother Edward VIII and must overcome his stutter to comfort his subjects in a live radio broadcast on the brink of World War Two. Having exhausted almost every medical avenue, Bertie's wife Elizabeth (a game Helena Bonham-Carter) enlists the help of Australian Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), unorthodox speech therapist and failed Shakespearean actor. The film’s director, Tom Hooper, is known for his stylish, ambitious television dramas, including Longford, a study of the eccentric peer's attempt to rehabilitate Myra Hindley and a staggeringly assured exploration of faith, evil, remorse, sainthood, prison, the press and, most of all, forgiveness: it is arguably the finest British television drama of the decade. But this is his most impressive achievement yet.

Hooper has an understated command of social suspense and captures rather well the silent agony that precedes speaking in public: rather than flit between the audience and the speaker, the camera remains behind Colin Firth’s shoulder the whole time and follows him. The epiphanous ‘trial by broadcast’ motif seems to be a favourite of Hooper’s (Longford is framed by an interview on a local radio station; Brian Clough is interviewed twice on Yorkshire Television in The Damned United), but it is particularly prevalent here: the film is, amongst much else, a document on the evolution of radio (and an interesting companion piece to The Social Network, in this respect), whilst the need for individuals in the public eye to attune their personality through the use of technology is a more relevant concern today than ever. Hooper is also very good at capturing the ugliness of macho malevolence in sparkling supporting turns (Andy Serkis' terrifying Ian Brady in Longford; Stephen Graham's crafty Billy Bremner in The Damned United) and poor Colin Firth has to contend with two bullies, his hot-headed father George V (Michael Gambon) and his fey brother David (Guy Pearce). This makes his friendship with Lionel all the more moving. The chemistry between Firth and Rush is a joy and, like the Don Quixote-Sancho Panza incongruity of Michael Sheen's Brian Clough and Timothy Spall's Peter Taylor in The Damned United, traces the growing interdependence of two disparate souls.

Firth is outstanding throughout and will win the Oscar for Best Actor this year (what a fruitful harvest the autumn of his career looks to be bringing), but there are two moments in the film that push his performance into the realms of greatness. The first comes when Lionel lets Bertie build the model aeroplane and is the expression on his face when he talks about his dead brother Johnny; the second comes when Bertie first sifts through the mountain of kingly post and is the way his voice breaks when he weeps that the only thing he knows how to be is a naval officer. But Geoffrey Rush is the revelation: it is a gentle, cunning, compassionate performance from one of the finest character actors of his generation. If Firth pounds the heartstrings with his frozen consonants and haunted pauses, Rush plucks at them, pizzicato. His expression at the very end of the film, lost in a sea of admirers for the King, is a mix of pride, sadness, uncertainty, humility, possibly even envy: Rush's contoured, crooked face in that moment has the world-weary mystery of a Velázquez portrait.

The King’s Speech is a lovely film. It may suffer from the same rhapsodic notices that turned Slumdog Millionaire into a ubiquitous awards hoover, but it is a classy, heartwarming, often humorous triumph with two masterful central performances and an impeccable supporting cast (I particularly liked Anthony Andrews’ pained Stanley Baldwin). It considers notions of self-expression, performance, monarchy, modernity and the tensions between them; but most importantly of all, it is a film about the beauty of friendship. Tom Hooper has the scope, savvy and versatility to be the new David Lean. God knows how he’s going to follow this.

Police, Adjective

In vogue and rude health, Romanian cinema continues to flourish and Police, Adjective is a fine addition to its canon. It is a wry, contemplative anti-thriller about a provincial policeman and the moral dilemma he faces with his latest (relatively minor) case, in which a teenage student is suspected of supplying hashish to a couple of his friends. It deconstructs the police thriller with admirable patience, authenticity and wit, and, in the realist tradition of Stendhal, achieves that very difficult balance of conveying provincial boredom without ever boring the audience; we follow Cristi (an ironic anti-Messiah?) as if in real time: every low-key pursuit, every conversation at work, every form he has to fill in is presented to us. There's a lovely Godardian moment in a waiting room where Cristi and his colleague Belu sit in silence for a good three minutes while the matronly secretary types away on her computer. The climax of the film, a masterful subversion of the genre, is an intellectual shootout between Cristi and his chief inspector over the definitions of law and justice, with a dictionary the sole weapon. It is a slow film (the middle-aged couple sitting in front of us left about forty minutes in: I wonder what they were expecting?), but it is also bold, truthful, sweet, unusually compelling and permeated with an absurdist sense of humour so deliciously dry you could bottle it and serve it in El Bulli. A quirky, patient, cerebral delight.

Another Year

Mike Leigh’s Another Year is a subtly intoxicating, beautifully acted tragicomedy in four seasons. It leavens the gentle, humanistic poetry of Rohmer and Ozu with a more Chekhovian, humour-dappled sense of uncertainty and melancholy, the embers of which glower throughout the film. Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen are Tom and Gerry (a fun touch which is nicely underplayed), a middle-aged couple who adore each other, enjoy their jobs and have a lovely relationship with their grown-up son Joe (Oliver Maltman). Their cosy home, however, has become a sanctuary for bruised souls, most notably Mary, a jittery, amiable, superficially cheery but profoundly lonely work colleague of Gerry's. Mary attempts to douse her frustrated self-awareness in fragile laughter, hollow self-assurance, booze and, most poignantly, emotional promiscuity; she flirts inappropriately (with Joe, with Tom, and later with Tom's laconic brother Ronnie, played brilliantly by David Bradley), as though, like Anne-Marie Duff’s sexualised mother figure in Nowhere Boy, it is the only way to talk to men with which she feels comfortable. It is a wonderful, agonisingly convincing performance from Lesley Manville, a textured study of modern frustration and a dappy cousin, of sorts, to the brittle, vinegary female roles Woody Allen used to write so well for the likes of Dianne Wiest and Judy Davis.

Some critics have reproached the latent smugness of Tom and Gerry as characters, suggesting that they surround themselves with the forlorn to feel better about themselves. It is an interesting interpretation, and one of many ambiguities with which the film is strewn, but Tom and Gerry's warmth is perhaps too passive for the charge to hold up: they seem to invite the likes of Mary and Ken out of polite sympathy and genuine compassion rather than any premeditated, self-serving hope that they will appreciate their own happiness more. But it's a measure of Leigh's characterisation and the performances he draws that one cannot be sure either way. Indeed, in an increasingly flighty cinematic age, thank God for Mike Leigh, who has favoured his peerless repertory of character actors (Broadbent, Staunton, Davis, Marsan, Manville) over big-name casting and preserved the humility, wit and perspicacity of his early writing; in many ways, Leigh's characterisation has improved as he has got older (the opposite to Mr Woody Allen, whose Attractive But Troubled leads, not to mention the protean Banquo's ghost of the neurotic Woody Allen persona, have become half-arsed, charmless parodies of themselves). The broader caricaturist brushstrokes of Life Is Sweet and Leigh's early plays (even the masterful Abigail's Party) have been replaced by more nuanced portraits, exceptional illustrations of the unexceptional.

Perhaps the element most worthy of praise in Another Year is the (often simultaneous) blend of the comic and the tragic, a quality that I genuinely think puts the film right up there with Chekhov and Arthur Miller. Like the magnificent funeral scene in Ken Loach's Riff Raff where Robert Carlyle's family struggle with the contraption containing his mother's ashes, there are moments of exquisite humour in the saddest circumstances; for instance, David Bradley's memory of the year his and Tom's mother died is heartbreakingly funny. The scene at the wake, shot with the crisp dark tones and mirror imagery of an Edward Hopper painting, is the closest the film comes to the climactic outpouring on which the rhythm of a Mike Leigh piece often hinges (Timothy Spall's cathartic diatribe in Secrets and Lies; Eddie Marsan's violent outburst in Poppy's last driving lesson in Happy-Go-Lucky). But it never quite comes, even from Martin Savage's bitter leather-clad Carl, and the pathos is all the tenser for the restraint.

If you have never seen a Mike Leigh film before, Another Year would be a very good place to start. Less abrasive than Naked, more measured than Happy-Go-Lucky, less melodramatic than Secrets and Lies, more immediately accessible than Topsy Turvy or Vera Drake, less idiosyncratic than anything he made before 1990, this might just be Leigh's masterpiece.