The first trailer for The Grey made it seem like someone had gotten over-excited about The Tree Of Life. It suggested the film was going to be some sort of weird, ethereal, existentialist drama. Thankfully though, that’s not what it is at all (well, it is a bit, but not too much).

Liam Neeson plays a guy whose job is to sort out the predators that occasionally menace the workers at a remote gas refinery operation in Alaska. On a plane ride with a number of other motley oil workers, things take a rather drastic turn when they fall out of the sky. Normally a plane crash would be the worst part of your day, but the men are now in the middle of nowhere and in the territory of a particularly vicious pack of wolves.

The animals don’t want the men around, and so it’s up to the survivors to try and take them out. With everything around them covered in bleak snow and ice, and with blizzards constantly threatening, it’s a pretty hairy predicament for the half a dozen men, where big-toothed animals are only one of a dozen things that could kill them at any moment.

After the hideous mess that was The A-Team, you could be forgiven for thinking that director Joe Carnahan literally doesn’t know how to make a movie. However here he pays off on some of the promise he showed a decade ago with the excellent Narc (and to a smaller extent with Smokin’ Aces).

Although the opening scenes that show the men’s lives at the oil operation are perhaps a little too slow, after that he ramps up the tension, keeps things on the edge and never lets go. I’d imagine animal charities already have press releases ready to send out saying wolves are much nicer than The Grey suggests they are, as the film does rather do a Jaws on them, taking an animal that isn’t really that much danger to humans and turning it into a ravenous killer that wants nothing more than to snack of people flesh.

As always in this sort of film, the wolves are as much metaphor as actual animals (man vs. nature, the internal struggle of life), but there will be plenty of people looking askance at anything canine-looking when they leave the cinema following The Grey.

Neeson continues what appears to be his ever-growing career bringing emotion and gravitas to movies that would otherwise lack them. As he did with Taken and Unknown, Liam manages to turn what would otherwise seem fairly portentous yet inconsequential into something you end up actually caring about. He doesn’t manage to make it a masterpiece, but he does a bloody good job of ensuring the film is exceedingly watchable.

The elements that made the first trailer seem rather Tree Of Life are present, with a slightly heavy-handed narration and a lot of musings about nature and God. The men’s internal struggles over their families and past sometimes make it seem like they might as well have a caption at the bottom of the screen saying ‘BTW, the icy wilderness is a metaphor’. While these could have undermined the survivalist tension of the rest of the movie – and it’s apparent this is what Carnahan really cares about – they actually work rather well to underpin what is otherwise a pretty straightforward narrative. It certainly delivers on the visceral front and contains a few standout sequences – one with wolves’ eyes appearing out of the darkness is particularly effective.

It’s not a stunningly memorable movie, but it’s entertaining, keeps you hooked and has a great turn from Liam Neeson. Plus, you get to see a man punch a wolf in the face, which may be the best animal combat moment since horse vs. gorilla in last year’s Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes.

Overall Verdict: While its attempts at metaphor are a tad heavy-handed, it’s a well put together thrill ride with plenty to keep you hooked and Liam Neeson on top form.

Reviewer: Jake Davis

The Descendants was no doubt Oscar bound at its inception – directed and written by Alexander Payne (of Election, Sideways and About Schmidt fame) and starring one of The Oscars current favourites, George Clooney. With five nominations, the only question now is whether it’ll win.

Matthew King’s (Clooney) wife has been involved in a major accident and is on a life support machine. He is a lawyer as well as the executor of his extended family’s massive estate, even though he’s completely out of touch with his immediate family. The plot centres around Clooney coming to terms with, taking control of and understanding more about his fractured family, whilst also learning about his wife’s infidelity.

Clooney’s character is initially completely unaware of her affair due to the fact he’s so focussed on his work rather than living life to the full – unlike his wife. The rest of the film sees King dealing with the decisions he has to make over whether to switch his wife’s life support machine off, as well as dealing with his conscience over signing over the family inheritance to make a huge profit. If that weren’t enough he has to learn about his growing children and find the man his wife had an affair with. In other words King has a lot on his plate!

Set in Hawaii, Payne makes full use of panoramic and sweeping vistas to capture the natural beauty of the region. The film is bittersweet, comical and serious in equal measure, and extremely well scripted, as you’d expect from Alenander Payne. Clooney delivers again and gives us a very polished performance as a father who is completely out of touch with his family. The supporting cast are all exceptional in their roles, but for me the standout is King’s troubled daughter Alexandra, played by Shailene Woodley. Her performance is extremely emotional and believable (it reminded me of when we first saw Juliette Lewis in Cape Fear) and I expect we will be seeing a lot more of her! The other obstreperous daughter, Scottie (played by Amara Miller), reminded me of when we first saw Christina Ricci in Mermaids.

Trailer

The only problem I had with the film was the switching from serious issues to comic scenes, which was often confusing. One minute we are dealing with a sensitive issue and the next Clooney is running around like Norman Wisdom – although humorous I found it to be a little inconsistent and sometime undermined the power of the scene being built up.

However that is a minor gripe as the rest of the film is well crafted. The final ten minutes of the film are very touching and charming, with a soundtrack Jack Johnson would be proud of. The message of the film is clear – life is the same no matter where you are, so make time for your family and friends.

Overall Verdict: The film has Oscars written all over it – excellent cast, script, quality actors and bereavement (a true Oscar favourite)! This is George Clooney’s film and yes he is a screen icon, but for me there is only one matinee idol this year and that is Jean Dujardin in The Artist.

Reviewer: Stephen Sclater

There’s an old adage on the standup comedy circuit that the only thing worse than complete silence to greet your routine is a couple of stifled chuckles. This, they say, indicates that not only has your material failed, it has done so in such a way that the audience’s only response is to laugh at its failure.

Had Clint Eastwood, the director of J.Edgar attended the screening of his film that I did, he might have had a similar feeling. The last thing one would expect from a serious political biopic is moments of unintentional hilarity, but from the minute Leonardo DiCaprio appears on screen in an unconvincing elderly prosthetic, that’s exactly what you get.

J. Edgar Hoover is not an individual who provokes much contemplation in the UK, but to our American cousins he is as divisive a figure as Margaret Thatcher – herself getting the biopic treatment this awards season – is to us. Some admire his hardline stance in thwarting Bolshevik terrorism in America in the immediate aftermath of World War I and for pursuing corruption wherever he found it. Others condemn him for delusional paranoia that led both he and the institution that he founded, the FBI, to perceive threats where there were none and to wield his powerful knowledge to serve his own deranged agenda. If you can say one good thing about Eastwood’s film, it’s that it panders to neither of these views. Unfortunately, it fails to do anything else of any significance either.

Similar to Eastwood’s previous effort, the disastrous Hereafter, J. Edgar starts promisingly. Despite the unconvincing makeup, DiCaprio, as usual, is an engaging lead and his cutting delivery and haughty demeanour suit the burgeoning megalomania that is later revealed. The first act is filled with potential, as we watch a young J. Edgar scupper the left-wing radicals in effective but ethically dubious fashion.

After this things start to go awry. The introduction of Armie Hammer as Hoover’s second in command and alleged love interest Clyde Tolson is a necessary addition but one that inexplicably causes the entire film to fall flat on its face. The latent homosexual element to the relationship is handled in such a ham-fisted, sub-soap opera tone that it caused the unintentional giggling and guffawing mentioned earlier. There is one scene in particular, a confrontation featured heavily in the trailer, which is so laughably inept that it very nearly ruins the film on its own.

The narrative style, with the elderly Hoover dictating his memoirs to a young agent, is a staple of genre (see Alexander, Chaplin etc), but here it lacks cohesion, with the action jumping unevenly from one time to another. Perhaps the worst example is midway through the film when, in one scene, Hoover’s mother (Judi Dench) is seen gravely ill and apparently close to death. We then cut back to elderly Hoover, who talks about something unrelated, after which we are unceremoniously dumped back in the past, where young Hoover is attending a soirée with his now healthy mother in tow. It’s at best an oversight and at worst lazy storytelling and irresponsible direction and, frankly, Eastwood has enough statuettes on his mantle to know better.

Despite DiCaprio’s solid performance (although it’s been a while since an Academy Award has been so obviously angled for), the cast is largely under-used. Naomi Watts, a very capable actress by anyone’s standards, can do nothing with the under-written Helen Gandy, Hoover’s loyal-to-the-end personal secretary, and drifts anonymously through the piece. Likewise, Judi Dench, deprived of precious screen-time and robbed of any opportunity to establish any meaningful relationships or motives is wasted.

And so, sadly, the question must be asked, has Clint lost his touch? Prior to this, his last two contributions have been Invictus (unremarkable) and Hereafter (awful). Not only that, J. Edgar suffers in an almost identical way to Hereafter, a plodding and confused narrative and wholly unsympathetic characters. Indeed, it only raises itself above those depths by being fairly informative about its subject matter and partially redeeming itself near the end with a neat twist. The fact remains though that this is Eastwood’s second out-and-out dud in a row and one wonders when, if ever, he might get the old magic back.

Overall Verdict: DiCaprio’s fine performance is ruined by poor structure, unconvincing make-up and a laughable attempt to tackle unrequited and forbidden homosexuality. Avoid.

Reviewer: Alex Hall

After two pairs of friends meet in a Moscow nightclub, their evening is interrupted by the swift arrival of invisible entities who waste no time in massacring everyone in sight. Hiding for as long as they can, the friend eventually venture out in search of anyone else who may have survived.

Thanks largely to the influence of Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch), Moscow is fast becoming an in-demand filmmaking location. Its juxtaposition of lingering Cold War gloom and the new generation of neon vibrancy evokes a city of instant and fascinating contrast. Given the loving manner in which The Darkest Hour shoots the Russian capital, it’s unsurprising to learn that the demented Kazakh is one of The Darkest Hour’s producers.

The seemingly unstoppable nature of the aliens makes for more of a survival film rather than an action one, and also reduces the likelihood of any gung-ho heroics. How can you possibly hope to fight beings of pure energy that can disintegrate at will any matter they touch? The lack of an established character hierarchy, as well as the principal actors’ relative obscurity, mean that nobody is truly safe from the atomising lash of the unseen foes.

The electrical nature of the aliens is thought through well enough that you don’t stop to question the practical plausibility of such physiology. The static fields they generate cause lights to flicker when they are close, which, while helping to indentify their locations, also serves to mark their Inexorable progress towards anyone unlucky enough to be stranded in their path. Their invisibility, as well as cranking up the tension from the possibility of them being quite literally anywhere, harks back to old-school horror when the monstrous antagonists were largely unseen presences skulking in the shadows. When the big reveal occurs – though really more like a series of glimpses – their appearance is so utterly alien that you truly have little to visually compare them to. From a practical sense, the aliens being concealed for most of the film also craftily saves on CGI expenditure.

Full-on outer space invasion blockbusters have been light in recent years – the distinctly average Cowboys & Aliens aside – in favour of stories with more localised threats such as Attack the Block or Super 8. Although the Darkest Hour’s threat is soon learned to be global, established trends are still defied by the interlopers not being here to conquer, enslave, harvest or otherwise dominate humanity. As one character points out after an educated deduction regarding the aliens’ purpose is made: “We were just in the way.”

Some neat touches add flavour to proceedings, like the silent wind blowing small clouds of ash that used to be people and a few attempts at wry humour such comparing the Cyrillic alphabet to Klingon.

As you would expect, the film focuses on tense encounters and frantic chases in place of any attempts at proper characterisation. The characters are sympathetic enough that you genuinely wish they make it out of danger, but neither are they drawn with enough dimensions to convince as rounded people.

Overall Verdict: The Darkest Hour is not really a film worthy of the spectacle of cinema – the 3D adds vey little – but more of a Friday night DVD rental with beer, pizza and friends. It’s engaging and intelligent enough for what it is, so view it on those terms and you’ll be fine.

Reviewer: Andrew Marshall

Michael Morpurgo’s wonderful children’s novel, War Horse, has been around since 1982. It was one of my favourite books when I was a kid, partly because it’s a wonderful story and partly because like the tale’s human hero, Albert, I was a boy growing up on a farm in Devon. Admittedly times had changed since the 1910s, but it still felt rather familiar, helped by the fact that Morpurgo only lived a few miles away from me and so he was intimately familiar with the area.

Hollywood only came knocking after the novel was adapted into an incredibly successful stage show at the National Theatre. And if you’re going to have Hollywood knocking, there’s no one better to have on the other side of the door than Steven Spielberg, who’s turned War Horse into a beautiful, moving and very sentimental movie, set in a somewhat twee Devon (but more about that later), which then goes off to a more real-feeling war.

Teenaged Albert (Jeremy Irvine) gets a surprise when his father (Peter Mullan) comes back from the market with a thoroughbred horse that he’s massively overpaid for. Although the youngster is excited, his mother (Emily Watson) is less so, as the family doesn’t have much money and what they really needed was a proper work horse. However the animal, Joey, proves his mettle and develops a close bond with Albert.

Then World War I erupts and with the farm in jeopardy, Joey is sold to an army officer (Tom Hiddleston). Albert promises Joey that one day he’ll find him again, even though that seems impossible. Soon the horse is shipped off to France, setting in motion an epic journey that sees Joey pressed into service by both sides of the conflicts, getting close to the innocent casualties of war and finding a way to survive what becomes an increasingly hellish place for both man and beast.

There’s a slight air of War Horse being Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan for families. It’s a film that wants to show the horror of war but needs to do so in a way that’s not too gory. Spielberg has always been more interested in the human side of conflict than the politics, and War Horse is the perfect story for that. It is slightly odd, but watching people interacting with animals often brings out a humanity it’s difficult to see when people are mixing with one another. That’s amply demonstrated by a scene where the British and Germans are prepared to call a temporary truce over the fate of a horse.

As Joey goes from Devon into the British cavalry, before being pressed into service by the Germans, he brings out something very human in all sides. As with Morpurgo’s original novel, it’s not about who is good and who is bad – after all, a horse doesn’t have a particularly complex understanding of politics and morality – but about human beings, whatever side they’re on, trying to retaining their humanity and find their way through something terrible. It’s quite a change for Spielberg from the moustache twirling Nazi villains of Indiana Jones to the very human Germans of War Horse.

Admittedly the whole film is slightly sentimentalised, but to be honest, in this context that’s not a bad thing. It’s a moving film, and while there are moments when the movie seems a tad manipulative, that never overwhelms the basic humanity (and horse-anity) at the centre of War Horse. It’s also notable that the film (again like the book), holds back on anthropomorphising the central horse too much. Joey does have a personality, but no more so than horses actually have personalities. It ensures the sentimentality never gets too treacly and yet there’ll be plenty of dewy eyes towards the end of the film.

I have to say though that as a Devonian, it is odd seeing the county portrayed in a Hollywood movie. Well, that’s not quite true as we have a proud film heritage that’s seen Devon appear in everything from Remains Of The Day to Alice In Wonderful, but it rarely appear as itself. When Devon is meant to be on the screen, for whatever reason it often seems to get filmed elsewhere. When a TV series was made of RF Delderfield’s ‘To Serve Them All Their Days’ – which is largely about my old North Devon school – they filmed it in Dorset, because apparently my school didn’t look enough like itself (that was the real reason given). Cameron Crowe was so keen to get Devon off the screen that he transported the upcoming We Bought A Zoo from Dartmoor (where the real life story took place) to America, and turned the distinctly Westcountry twanged zookeepers into more cinema-friendly form of Scarlet Johansson. But as Spielberg shows, Devon is an exceptionally beautiful place that has attracted filmmakers for decades, even if the county is rarely allowed to be itself.

When I first saw the trailers for War Horse, I kept thinking Spielberg was rose-tinting everything and making the Devon scenes way too twee and sentimental (many have criticised War Horse for that). But do you know what? Rural Devon is twee (and the locals ought to embrace that more). At first all the shots looked a little too beautiful, but then I remembered that when I was a kid, I walked out the front door and had a view that stretched across 20 miles of stunning patchwork, hilly greenness. I never appreciated it at the time, but now when I go back home it takes my breath away, so I can’t really blame Spielberg for showing that.

Likewise, when the entire village turns out to see whether a horse will plough a field, it initially seems dumb. Surely people wouldn’t go and watch that? But I’m still amazed at the amount of people you can get to turn up at a village hall just by saying you’ll be selling some second hand clothes and dodgy jam. And if you knew how excited Devonshire villagers can get about a vegetable show, you’d probably worry about them. So getting a full-house to watch a horse do some ploughing isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.

Times have changed since the era War Horse is set in, but if you really knew rural Devon – the proper one and not just the tourist trap version – the film is far closer to the truth than you might imagine. Rural Devon is a bit twee, but you’re bound to get a bit of twee-ness in a world where community still really means something, everyone knows everybody else and which has still never fully signed up to the hectic, impersonal modern world. Morpurgo wrote what he knew, and Lee Hall and Richard Curtis’ script retains that.

The view outside my home when I was growing up on a Devon farm

Well, that’s my tourist board bit out of the way, and onto things War Horse does less well. For a start, the film is wildly inaccurate by making everyone in Devon understandable to a general audience. Proper Devon people, of which there were many more 100 years ago than there are now, are not easily understandable. My father is one of the last of a dying breed of exceptionally broad accented, dialect spouting Devonians. His accent is so broad that when I was a teenager, many of my friends had absolutely no idea what he was saying, even though many of them were Devon born and bred themselves (but from the less out-in-the-sticks bits of the county). As a result, I have no doubt that War Horse’s light-accented people with a sweet Devon burr are nothing like rural villagers would have been at the time. But then, if everyone in the film talked like my dad, nobody would know what the hell was going on, so you can understand why they toned things down.

I’d also like to point out that Albert and his family live on the most stupid farm ever, which seems to have no livestock (barring a horse and a goose) and so has to rely on a single field of turnips for its future. I think it’s fair to say that any farmer who had that as their business plan would have gone out of business a long time ago. It ensures it’s all very dramatic, but turnips must have been worth their weight in gold in 1914 for it to make any sense. That said, there are pictures of my father in the 1930s and 1940s riding bareback on massive cart-horses, so the close relationship farmers used to have with horses is very true (my dad even had to ride a horse to school), something that’s largely been supplanted by modern machinery nowadays.

I have to admit that I am a bit biased when it comes to War Horse. It’s a story I’ve been close to for over 25 years and a county I’ve been part of for even longer – this year my family will have been living on the same farm in the county for a full century. But even if you’ve never been to Devon, the film still has a lot to offer.

As Albert says at one point in the movie, “We’re Devon boys – and we’ve got to stick together.”

Overall Verdict: Young horse lovers may be a bit disturbed by the amount of animal jeopardy but Spielberg uses it to give a genuine sense of the humanity trapped under the machine of war in this wonderful tale of rural life and the horrors of war.

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

Oh my God, Michael Fassbender has a penis! Whoever would have thought it? The fact the actor’s little man makes a more than fleeting appearance in the Shame has received so much attention, you’d have thought everyone has assumed he was a Ken-doll down there before he proved otherwise. It’s a pattern that’s repeated over and over, as if an actress gets naked it’s either barely mentioned or letched over, while male actors gets epithets like ‘brave’ and ‘bold’ thrown around. That’s not Fassbender’s fault, as he’s just doing his job and doing it well (and I’m sure there are some who’ll more than welcome little Fassbender’s appearance in the movie), but it would be nice if we could treat male and female genitals equally!

The actor and his penis play Brandon, a man who’s constantly on the prowl for sex – picking up women in the subway, ordering escorts at his porn-crammed apartment, and slipping off to hotels with willing co-workers. While in many films that would be a recipe for a rollicking sex comedy, Brandon’s world is a relentlessly bleak one, where sex is an absolute compulsion rather than something fun. He is endlessly drawn to the distraction and few moments of release, without ever being able to experience the joy of it – indeed you get the feeling he actively doesn’t want to feel joy.

As a result he lives a life full of endless meaningless connections, as if he’s desperately trying to find something his own actions ensure he’ll never get (and by the nature of addiction he’ll never realise that). The title – Shame – is less about about Brandon’s journey and more about the condition he constantly lives in. And thanks to Michael Fassbender’s intense, rather desolate and angry performance (his orgasm face is almost fury), it feels incredibly real.

However while we follow Brandon through his rather cold, out-of-time version of New York, we never really get to know much about him. The result is both a strength and weakness. It means the film acts rather like a mirror, holding itself up to the audience’s experience of life. Each person who watches it will bring their own worldview to Brandon, purely because most of what we know of him is the desperation he’s trying to find his way through. It’s the reason why the movie has had responses from absolute adoration to utter contempt.

Those who truly hate it seem to do so from a place of misunderstanding addiction or being unable to see sex as a true addiction. Shame does little to dissect the nature of addiction, or to explain how or why someone can become an addict, especially to something like sex, which unlike heroin, isn’t a chemical you can get hooked on. It means that your reaction to Brandon and the movie is entirely reliant on where you’re coming from – so you may end up seeing the character as rather tedious, self-centred ass or someone who’s an incredibly tragic hero, with the truth probably being somewhere inbetween.

If you’re willing to engage with it, Shame is a fascinating, disturbing film, but you would expect no less from director Steve McQueen. His last film – the even bleaker Hunger, about the Bobby Sands hunger strike – was so spare that it let two characters sit at a table and talk for a single, stunningly long 17-minute take, drawing you in with ideas rather than spectacle.

Shame is undoubtedly stylish, although this becomes a slight issue as while Brandon’s character feels very real and grounded, he doesn’t feel like he quite lives in the real world. While the claustrophobic, bleak, past-meets-present New York is perhaps too idiosyncratic, the shot composition is wonderful, with McQueen framing everything in a way that forces you to look hard at what you’re being shown. Indeed purely from the editing, watching the film becomes a somewhat uncomfortable experience (as it should be).

Although Shame is mainly about Fassbender’s Brandon and the succession of partners he shags and moves on from, the film get a jolt of energy from Carey Mulligan as his damaged sister. If Brandon seems determined to feel nothing beyond a few seconds of release, his sister, Sissy, feels too much. In one striking scene he watches a porn video full of faked passion while trying to ignore his sister’s true, broken-hearted emotions spilling out next door.

The true depth of the movie comes from the interplay between the two characters. Something has gone very wrong in their past and as a result they’re both damaged people. Most films would be obsessed with finding as easy excuse for their behaviour by over-explaining the past, but in Shame that’s left hanging, perhaps because for both of them, it’s not really about how they got to that point, but the life they’re trapped in now.

One problem I did have with the film’s ‘leave it to the audience to decipher’ attitude, where nothing is fully explained, is Brandon ending up having gay sex in a sauna. It’s difficult to know how to take it. It does appear that when we him going to a sauna, it isn’t the first time he’s found release with a man and it does underline how it’s his desperation for sex and not who it’s with that drives him. However it’s placement towards the end of the movie makes it difficult not to feel we’re supposed to see this as some sort of ‘descent’ to a new level of depravity.

On one level that’s fair enough, as it does underline how his sexual compulsion has detached itself from any form of human longing, and connection. After all, if it were the other way round – a gay man who started shagging women purely for sexual release even though he wasn’t at all attracted to them – the point would be the same. However with the film boldly (and admirably) refusing to give pat answers to things, it means the some audience members will inevitably come up with their own dumb reasons for everything. In terms of Brandon having gay sex and where it comes in the movie, many will reach the conclusion he’s sunk to a new, near-rock-bottom low because he’s doing it with a dude, rather than what it means to have a totally straight character who compelled to have sex so much that sexual orientation becomes less important than getting that orgasm.

The only other option would be for McQueen and screenwriter Abi Morgan to come in and heavy-handedly give reasons for what Brandon’s doing at this point, which would undermine one of the film’s great strength, that it trusts the audience to be intelligent and not to assume everything can be shoved into easy boxes. The downside is that there are a lot of idiots out there who will watch Shame and either be angry that it doesn’t do all the work for them, or dislike it because they assume it’s saying something which is actually just them projecting themselves onto the film. Shame is thought-provoking cinema, and while it has its weaknesses, it certainly engages your brain, as long as you’re willing to let it do that.

Overall Verdict: Graphic, stark and rather desolate, Shame is a fascinating film as long as you’re prepared to engage your brain and allow Michael Fassbender’s wonderful performance to draw you into a dark world.

Reviewer: Jake Davis