For Eyes Only

If clothes maketh the man, then curators maketh the film festival. And this was truly the case in the extraordinary Celluloid Curtain – Europe’s Cold War in Film exhibition held at the Riverside Studios in May. The majority of the films had never been screened in the West before and had never had any release after their theatrical runs. They lay in archives in the former Eastern Europe and the intrepid researchers and co-curators, Oliver Baumgarten and Nikolaj Nikitin, diligently tracked them down and persuaded the various national archives to loan prints – yes genuine 35mm reels! – for a one-off showing at this spectacularly themed film bonanza. Some of these films are not referenced in film encyclopaedias or movie databases – not even in the excellent Eurospy Guide by Matt Blake and David Deal. So, rare treats indeed. Rarer still, the point of view: these were mainly films shot (and funded) by communist states and are a kind of obverse side of the espionage coin we are familiar with, in that they are presented from a viewpoint originating from behind the Iron Curtain. It is ‘us’, not ‘them’, who are the political problem.

Films screened included Nyama nishto po-hubavo ot loshoto vreme (There’s Nothing Finer than Bad Weather), a 1971 Bulgarian film, Skvorets i Lira (Skvorets and Lira, 1974) from the Soviet Union, Smyk (Skid, 1960) from Czechoslovakia, Streng geheim (For Eyes Only, 1961/2) from the GDR, Spotkanie ze szpiegiem (Rendezvous with a Spy, 1964) from Poland, Fotó Háber (Haber’s Photo Shop, 1963) from Hungary, and the 1961 Romanian film S-a furat o bomba (A Bomb Was Stolen). There were no traces of James Bond, Derek Flint or Matt Helm in these films. Soviet realism put paid to that, and the films had more in common with the downbeat British spy film The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), which was one of four Western spy films screened alongside the Eastern European productions.

Of course, in aesthetic terms few of these films are five-star works, but in terms of socio-political and visual culture history they certainly are. They each in their separate ways contain rich veins of sub- and inter-textual propaganda narratives and ideologies. One of the most superficial of these veins being the immense contrast between the sparse, low-budget, no-nonsense visual stories of the East and the extravagant, superfluous gadget-driven spy films from the West – Hollywood and Europe. For these were also the heydays of the so-called Euro-pudding film industry, which were exemplified in the Celluloid Curtain season by the French-Italian production Les barbouzes (The Great Spy Chase, 1964), the Spanish-Portuguese film Comando de asesinos (High Season for Spies, 1966) and the Franco-Italian Fritz Lang film, Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse (The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, 1960). In tandem with the festival was an enlightening exhibition, Kiss Kiss Kill Kill, of 60s and 70s spy film posters that have been lovingly collected and collated by Richard Rhys Davies – and which go on tour in the UK after their Riverside showing.

Sponsored by the Goethe Institute, EUNIC, the Polish, Czech, Romanian, Hungarian and other cultural institutes, this small but perfectly formed festival was a unique and special treat for the few who attended, and Project Head Claudia Amthor-Croft and Project Coordinator Maren Hobein deserve to be highly commended for their archival and presentational work here. Only a churlish mind could carp at the ingenious subtitling of these rare gems. In a couple of cases, it was the respective embassy staffers who – after making translations on a word processor – heroically and painstakingly sat at the back of the cinema with their laptops and superimposed the texts, line by line, as the film ran. Full marks!

The Celluloid Curtain festival of films will follow on to Berlin where a similar weekend of screenings and events will be presented. The curators also hope to take the show on the road to former East European countries.

James B. Evans

A Good Man, A Good Day

For me, film festivals are all about new films, so I normally shun retrospectives honouring classic films or deceased directors. The Berlinale’s presentation of eight Shibuya Minoru films was a special case: while all of the films were from the 1950s and 60s, they will have been a new discovery for most audience members, since Shibuya’s work has never been available on DVD outside Japan. A retrospective of Shibuya Minoru was screened at last November’s Tokyo FILMeX and picked up by Ulrich Gregor for the Berlinale’s Forum section. At the Berlinale, it seemed that audiences shared my prejudice against old films: the three Shibuya screenings I went to attracted a respectable showing, but the cinema was far from packed. It was a testament to the quality of Shibuya’s work that the screening ended with applause, even though the director had passed away some 30 years ago.

Shibuya’s 1960s films share some features with the work of Ozu Yasujiro, a more familiar name from this period. The characteristically low camera height would have felt normal to domestic audiences who sit, eat and sleep close to the floor; for Western viewers, this lower-level perspective on the action is unusual. Similar to Ozu, too, is Shibuya’s recurring theme of family relationships in a changed, and still changing, post-war Japan. The similarities end here, though: while Ozu tended to focus on quietly pleasing aesthetics, and tenderly moving portrayals of parent-child and husband-wife dynamics, Shibuya’s films are a livelier affair. They are marked by their humour, from light comic banter to satire. Yet because Shibuya’s films treat relevant topics, they are more than just entertainment: they complete the portrait of 1950s and 60s Japan, rounding out Ozu’s lyricism with silliness, sexuality, and even despair.

Yopparai tengoku (Drunkard’s Paradise, 1962)

This was the first Shibuya film I saw, and the one with the most sobering conclusion. At first, Drunkard’s Paradise portrays drinking as a minor (and entertaining) vice: its worst effects are embarrassing behaviour, a diminished bank account and an overnight stay in a prison cell. But the film also explores more serious potential consequences of drinking, through a believable scenario involving four central characters: a father and son, the son’s fiancée and a famous baseball player. When one of these characters becomes violent after drinking, it brings about a dramatic change in the lives of all four. One of the problems explicitly addressed is that at that time in Japan, drunk people were not held responsible for their actions.

Drunkard’s Paradise can become oppressive at times, as its characters are crushed by needless tragedy. The audience is rewarded, though, first by the film’s opening comic scenes, and later by complex character development. Although the film’s premise seems designed to show that alcoholics bring unhappiness on themselves, the film is not so simple or moralising as this. All four characters are sympathetic, inviting the audience’s compassion: their justifications can always be understood, if not accepted.

Kojin kojitsu (A Good Man, A Good Day, 1961)

After the bleak black and white images of Drunkard’s Paradise, the saturated colour of A Good Man, A Good Day was a welcome surprise. This was a film more uniformly comic in tone, although it too addressed important social issues, this time of class. The good man in question is an eccentric mathematics professor who wears his shoes on the wrong feet and ignores people who don’t interest him. This doesn’t help his daughter’s marriage prospects: her fiancé’s family is none too sure about hers.

The film’s even tone is more reminiscent of Ozu than Drunkard’s Paradise, but with Shibuya’s characteristic dash of comedy: the professor is unimpressed by his daughter’s fiancé until the young man has the nerve to call him an ‘old fart’. This points to the film’s satire on status: although the professor is venerated at the university, he only gains wider respect when he wins a prize from the Ministry of Culture. In a nod to contemporary reality, the professor’s daughter is adopted, having been orphaned by WWII bombings: this too is a source of prejudice against the family. Unlike Drunkard’s Paradise, though, A Good Man, A Good Day ends happily.

Daikon to ninjin (The Radish and the Carrot, 1964)

All three films that I saw happened to include the prolific actor Ryu Chishu in the role of the father. His acting capabilities were showcased beautifully, as the fathers are quite different in each film: a drunk, a scholar, and an ordinary man with a secret. Ryu also appeared in almost every one of Ozu’s films, but The Radish and the Carrot has an even stronger link to this director: it is based on an unfinished script that Ozu was working on just before he died. It is the story of a family man who disappears, leaving his wife and four daughters wondering whether he has run away or been kidnapped. Only in his absence does the man’s family really start to think about him, considering their relationship to him, and what secrets he might have. The film’s title stems from his daughter’s comment after he leaves: they think of him as ‘a radish or a carrot on the kitchen floor’ – necessary, then, but unremarkable. The film teaches us not to take our family for granted, certainly, but it also recognises that family can be a burden on us as individuals.

Alison Frank

Mother

Electric Sheep writers review best and worst films of 2010.

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

Mother (Madeo)

A powerful and complex portrait of maternal love, Mother mixes tragedy and goofiness to tell the story of Do-joon, a mentally challenged young man who is arbitrarily accused of the horrific murder of a school girl, and of his mother, an eccentric peddler of medicinal herbs and illegal acupuncture, who will do anything to prove her son’s innocence. Although Mother is constructed like a murder mystery, structured around escalating tension and gradual revelations, it is not a conventional police procedural but a psychological thriller. As the secrets mother and son share come to light, an intricate, inescapable web of overwhelming love and guilt is revealed. Superbly crafted both visually and narratively, Mother builds up extraordinarily intense and complicated emotions that culminate in a morally ambiguous dénouement, making it one of 2010’s definite must-sees. Virginie Sélavy

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Loong Boonmee raleuk chat)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is powered by an animist magic that is genuinely mysterious, the more so for being woven into a narrative of everyday life and death. Boonmee, played with quiet melancholy by non-professional Thanapat Saisaymar, is dying of kidney failure, and haunted by the lives he thinks he might have lived in the past. As the film begins, he is visited by a sister-in-law, Jen, and young nephew, Tong, at his remote farm in north-eastern Thailand. But Uncle Boonmee is more than an elegiac rural drama. It is also a ghost story, a fable and a meditation on memory and place. Tone and style vary, mirroring the shifts between real and supernatural that come to feel logical. As in his Tropical Malady (2004), director Apichatpong Weerasethakul brings plants and animals to vivid life, his skilful observation of nature an important counterpart to Uncle Boonmee‘s more esoteric elements. The military history of the region – occupied for two decades by the Thai army, who carried out frequent attacks against suspected communists – is part of the unquiet, haunted backdrop, too. The final reincarnatory twist only reinforces the surety of Weerasethakul’s vision and the magic of what has gone before. Frances Morgan

Dogtooth (Kynodontas)

The well-deserved recipient of the Un Certain Regard award at last year’s Cannes festival, Dogtooth is the second feature from Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos. Taking place almost entirely within a single location, the film centres on a married couple and their three grown-up children, who have never set foot outside the house and are confined to the ludicrous universe created by their tyrannical parents. The only outsider allowed to penetrate this insane domesticity is Christina, a female security guard at the father’s factory who is employed to have sex with the son. But Christina’s intrusion sets off a chain of events that has increasingly nasty and tragic consequences.

Set on the borderline between the real and the incredible, Dogtooth plays on everyone’s perception of the family while offering a glimpse of the distorted dynamics that are set in motion by over-controlling parents. Yet the film has a lot more to offer than a psychological survey into the wreckage of family dysfunction. Contributing to the parents’ outrageous stories about the dangers that lie beyond the garden fence, the isolated country home gives the film a claustrophobic feel and a consistently troubling atmosphere of otherworldliness and lurking evil. But the film’s truly brilliant achievement, and what makes this odd fable all the more effective and original, is the deftly balanced mixture of raw and uncompromising realism with a dark and absurd sense of humour and occasional, unpredictable moments of cruelty. Marking Lanthimos out as a great talent to watch, Dogtooth is a bold and unsettling mini-marvel that first sneaks up on you before biting you to the bone. Pamela Jahn

Winter’s Bone

Winter in the Ozark Mountains. In this incestuous community, where the families are all linked by blood ties and a terrifying patriarch is king, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) goes looking for her father who is missing ahead of a court appearance. If he skips the hearing, the family’s home, posted as bond, will be seized. But when Ree tries to find him, she’s taught the hard way not to interfere in other people’s business. Directed by Debra Granik and based on a novel by Daniel Woodrall, Winter’s Bone paints a portrait of a remote community mired in poverty and drug addiction. Chillingly authentic, this is a place that few outsiders will ever see. The film is well served by two terrific performances. Jennifer Lawrence, in her mud-stained, ill-fitting clothes, her hair knotted, exudes grace and a rough, unvarnished beauty. John Hawkes plays Teardrop, her father’s brother and a violent, unpredictable addict given one last shot at redemption, his craggy features and thin, worn-out frame blending perfectly into the landscape. Granik’s film is part social realism, part mystery and part tragedy. But as bleak as it sounds, Winter’s Bone has a special quality that makes it an unmissable film, and deserving of the Grand Jury Prize that it received at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Sarah Cronin

Breathless (Ddongpari)

In Yang Ik-joon’s stupefying Breathless, gangsters are only marginally more violent than wife-beaters, and equally as contemptible. The main character, the psychotic Sang-hoon, and the boys under his command work in parasitic packs, intimidating and beating up unfortunate people, because violence is the only thing they know. These low-level thugs are an exaggerated version of the men of South Korea, the casual brutality required in their line of work a heightened form of generalised patriarchal abuse. Although sons may sometimes rebel against the fathers’ rule, they inevitably end up perpetuating the cycle of violence as adults. And yet, when Sang-hoon meets tough schoolgirl Yeon-hue, it seems that there might be hope of breaking out of this pattern. Their encounter is shockingly unsentimental, disturbing and funny in equal measures. Both isolated misfits in their own way, they take tentative steps towards each other, always modulated by diffidence and wariness, their spiky verbal duelling hiding their vulnerabilities and traumas. Despite its subject matter and harrowing scenes, Breathless is never depressing, partly because it is infused with the fervent energy of a deeply felt anger, partly because the encounter of Yeon-hue and Sang-hoon offers a glimpse of hope. Breathless is no issue movie, but a profoundly singular, devastatingly powerful, intensely personal vision of both the explicit and hidden violence underlying social and familial relationships. Tina Park

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

How Werner Herzog ended up helming a kind of remake of Abel Ferarra’s 1992 film, starring Nicolas Cage, I don’t know, and don’t really want to. I prefer to think of it as a product from an alternate universe where Herzog does this kind of thing all the time. What you need to know: it’s a blast, and funny as hell, with Ferrrara’s gritty, tortured Catholicism tossed in favour of wilful absurdity and a plethora of lizards. Cage is terrific, with a lopsided gait and a crack-pipe laugh, torturing grannies and shaking down football stars, screaming one quotable line after another. It’s every cop show cliché reflected in a hall of mirrors – wholly indecent fun. Mark Stafford

White Material

An unnamed African country immersed in civil war. A charismatic rebel leader, The Boxer, is in hiding. Child soldiers run wild. The government ruthlessly murders members of the opposition. Both sides stir up anger against white settlers. And a woman fights for her coffee plantation, desperate to salvage the harvest despite the whirlwind of violence that is building around her. Her workers are angry and frightened; her son lazy, mentally disturbed; her husband desperate to sell the farm at any price.

Claire Denis’s White Material is a riveting, dark portrayal of personal and political breakdown. Isabelle Huppert is perfect as Marie, a passionate, deeply misguided woman who still believes in some kind of post-colonial fantasy; Huppert and Denis worked on the project together from the start, and the result is a charismatic, yet often unlikeable heroine. The film, beautifully shot and scripted, has some winning moments: Huppert, riding a beat-up 125cc bike, floats her hand in the air, riding the warm breeze; young, invading soldiers tiptoe around her home, holding onto their guns and knives, but childlike in their delight at the trinkets they find inside. That scene makes their tragic fate all the more poignant. Sarah Cronin

A Prophet

THE GOOD

A Prophet (Un prophète)

Jacques Audiard dives into the murky pool of the Gallic underworld once more when youngster Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) is sentenced to a six-year stint in prison. The young Arab is forced to align with a Corsican gang, led by César Luciani (a disquieting performance by the ever-excellent Niels Arestrup), and soon finds himself rising up the ranks through a series of often violent acts. Arestrup reprises the ambiguous fatherly role, part ogre, part mentor, that he fills in Audiard’s earlier The Beat that My Heart Skipped, while Rahim plays Malik with the same sort of nervous intensity Romain Duris brought to the character of Thomas Seyr in the same film. Audiard’s interest in exclusively male environments is here exacerbated by the prison setting. Just like Thomas in The Beat, Malik is caught between two worlds, this time defined by racial and ethnic ties rather than familial ones, and succeeds in negotiating his own, individual path between them. Those who have yet to be captivated by the director’s prodigious talents may find this film a somewhat challenging introduction – there’s certainly more warmth and originality in The Beat that My Heart Skipped and Read My Lips (2001) – and at a bum-numbing 149 minutes, this sprawling gangster saga is not for those with an MTV attention span. However, there’s a reason why it was so acclaimed at both the Cannes and London Film Festivals: its gritty, realistic portrayal of life within the brutal corridors of prison is thoroughly riveting and makes another impressive addition to Audiard’s growing filmography. Toby Weidmann

The Arbor

A fascinating fusion of narrative and documentary cinema from artist filmmaker Clio Barnard, The Arbor tells the powerful true story of Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar (The Arbor, Rita, Sue and Bob Too) and her daughter Lorraine. Dunbar wrote honestly and unflinchingly about her upbringing on the notorious Buttershaw Estate in Bradford and was described as ‘a genius straight from the slums’. When she died tragically at the age of 29 in 1990, Lorraine was just 10 years old. The Arbor catches up with Lorraine in the present day, now also aged 29, ostracised from Buttershaw and in prison, serving a sentence for manslaughter for the death of her son. Through compelling interviews (with the actors seamlessly lip-syncing the words of the real-life subjects) we learn that Lorraine sees her mother as a destructive force throughout her childhood; an alcoholic who let her suffer abuse and whom Lorraine blames for all that is wrong in her life. Also featuring first-hand accounts from other members of the Dunbar family, this essential work presents a contrasting and not always flattering view of Dunbar. Distinctive, compassionate and compelling, Barnard is very clearly an important new voice in British cinema. Jason Wood

The Road

John Hillcoat’s big screen adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road is as faithful in its dramatic bleakness to acclaimed author Cormac McCarthy’s (No Country for Old Men) bestseller as it can be. And yet, despite being set in a world without hope, The Road is far from a forlorn experience, thanks in main to an engrossing narrative, which thankfully disregards the usual spectacular trappings of Hollywood’s post-apocalyptic special effects to concentrate on the characters, supported by captivating performances from the principal cast. Viggo Mortensen and moppet newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee are exceptional as the father and son survivors wandering the desolate landscape of a world devastated by fire and earthquakes.

While many films of this type offer some glimmer of hope, The Road is perhaps more realistic (or should that be nihilistic?) in its harrowing depiction of a cataclysmic future, mirrored by cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe’s gloomy visuals, which are bereft of all but the most minimalist colour. Humanity has been reduced to its basest level: scavenging, looting, raping, killing and, in some cases (as illustrated in the film’s most disturbing scenes), feeding on each other. And yet within the darkness lies an irresistible sliver of light, found in the boy’s innocence, the father’s resolute attitude and their few acts of decency. Perhaps humanity can be saved after all… Toby Weidmann

Lebanon

The one-line pitch for this claustrophobic little war movie runs ‘Das Boot in a tank’, and for once that’s pretty damn accurate. Based on writer-director Samuel Maoz’s experiences the film is set during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, as seen in Ariel Folman’s Waltz with Bashir. Apart from the opening and closing shots of the film, we the audience are trapped with an ill-prepared and uneasy crew of four inside the tank for the tight 92-minute running time. As with the ‘war is hell’ sub-genre in general, the focus is on the experience of combat rather than a cohesive view of the rights and wrongs of the conflict itself. As in Waltz with Bashir, the blame for the true evil is shifted onto the brutal Christian Falangists, with the Israeli forces mostly represented as misled and misguided – although to its credit, Lebanon does show the Israelis firing upon the guilty and the innocent, and the film does not flinch from the traumas inflicted upon the civilian population.

It’s as a sensual experience that Lebanon is at its strongest. As the film progresses, the men’s sweat begins to drip and pool on the tank’s floor, thick with muck, dog-ends and soup croutons (don’t ask). The air fills with smoke, while oil and mystery crud accumulates on the faces of the cast. You can almost feel the heat, and definitely feel glad you can’t smell the action. Lebanon is not earth-shatteringly original – it’s heavy-handed in places, and a little clichéd, but it feels authentic: grimy, stinky, delirious and chaotic. It works. Mark Stafford

Trash Humpers

Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers has to be one of the most extraordinary films of the year, if only because it so gleefully defies everything that is expected of mainstream cinema. The top user review on IMDB (which also finds time to slag off Marguerite Duras) gives the film only one star, calling it a ‘non-movie’. It’s a description that’s curiously hard to argue with. Korine himself has described the film less in terms of a work of art, than as something one might find in a ditch somewhere. The experience of watching it offers the same illicit thrill one might obtain by peaking at the diaries of the mentally disturbed. But for all its VHS fuzziness and hand-held shakiness, there are occasional glimpses of a working aesthetic that belie its auteurist origins, a certain pre-dawn light caught in its still beauty, brief essays becoming a formalist montage of attractions. Scanning a random selection of other reviews on the web, one finds a fairly even split between those praising its genius and scoffing at its impossible awfulness. Whatever else, it’s probably the only film that’s been shown at your local Odeon this year that might lead you to ask the question, is this a movie? And even, what is a movie? Robert Barry

The Sky Crawlers (Sukai kurora)

Mamoru Oshii’s The Sky Crawlers is a languid tale of young fighter pilots in a near future that evokes both real world conflicts, such as the 1940s War in the Pacific, and fictional ones, such as the perpetual warfare in George Orwell’s 1984. Oshii uses the tropes of the war movie as a springboard for meditations on youth, memory, the fetishising of technology and the war against terror. It’s is a dreamy, beautiful film that gently weaves its way around the lives of various pilots as they learn their skills, romance local girls, clash with authority and take part in graceful, exhilarating dogfights with the enemy. The general look of the film is inspired by the 40s and 50s, but with a hard SF twist I won’t reveal here, that adds additional poignancy to the notion of the brief lives of the (handsome) young men pressed into military service. Many of Oshii’s films unwind at a deliberate pace, but the elegiac animation of sky, land, sea and aircraft also seems inspired by younger filmmakers such as Makoto Shinkai, whose melancholy style suits the material and is echoed as Oshii captures memories of long, golden, youthful summers that now seem alien and impossible.

The Sky Crawlers is Oshii’s finest film since 2001’s underrated Avalon and his best animé since the original Ghost in the Shell. The familiar subject matter of wartime romance may even attract new fans to the director’s work, who might not have initially warmed to the cyberpunk thrillers and Gothic siege warfare found elsewhere in his oeuvre. Alex Fitch

Fish Story (Fisshu sutôrî)

Happenstance, predestination, mishaps, mistakes, premonitions, paranormal record collectors, an earthbound comet and a fateful proto-punk record are just a few elements of Yoshihiro Nakamura’s utterly charming Fish Story. Made up of a series of seemingly disparate, but ultimately interconnected stories, the film explains how music can save the world in the most unexpected of ways. It opens on a scene of seemingly apocalyptic desolation as a mysterious comet hovers menacingly in the sky, before going back in time to the tale of a timorous college student, who learns to overcome his fear when it matters. The film jumps forward to 1999, as a doomsday cult awaits the end of the world in accordance with Nostradamus’s prophecies. Things don’t quite go according to plan, and the story moves on to the bit of the puzzle that takes place in 2009, on a ferry that is about to be hijacked. There are hints, clues and red herrings as to what might happen next, but Nakamura changes the scene again and heads back in time to the 1970s, when punk band Gekirin (Wrath), described by their record company as ‘talentless losers’, record ‘Fish Story’, the song that is, somehow, destined to save the world, despite its inauspicious beginnings.

It’s a brilliantly crafted piece of storytelling, and each chapter could survive independently, but Nakamura revels in the idea that seemingly random events are intertwined, resonating down the years, until they culminate in a moment freighted with meaning. Funny, melancholy, hopefully, helplessly optimistic, deliciously absurd, Fish Story is a quirky gem of a movie. Eithne Farry

Monsters

Monsters straddles the divide between several genres: the giant monster genre, alien invasion movies, travelogue and romance. The fact that Monsters weaves all these strands together in a comprehensive and complementary way is an achievement in itself. The fact that director Gareth Edwards accomplished that while location-scouting on the hoof in a country he was unfamiliar with, working with a cast of untrained actors, who improvised many of their lines, and designing terrific special effects, makes this one of the most assured and impressive feature debuts in recent years. Edwards uses the backdrop of a quarantined Mexico, still partially infested with aliens, as the setting for a slightly old-fashioned drama that recalls the films of Frank Capra as a gentle romance unfolds between a mismatched and slightly antagonistic couple. It also draws on the familiar post-20th-century tale of an indentured photo-journalist reporting from a war zone, and the improvised, semi-illegal filming of Michael Winterbottom’s In this World (2002), where refugees from a war zone play fictionalised versions of themselves. Mixing satire, media commentary, excellent direction and sympathetic performances, Edwards creates a science-fiction film that sums up the decade prior to its release in memorable microcosm.

Monsters isn’t a perfect film; the plot, like the characters, meanders a little and the final scene seems a little conventional and forced. However, it is the finest and most thought-provoking alien invasion movie since the excellent District 9, and it uses its small budget in absolutely exemplary fashion, easily outshining movies costing five times its amount, and showing the emergence of a major new British talent. Alex Fitch

24 City (Er shi si cheng ji)

At its peak of productivity, Factory 420 in Chengdu, China, employed 4,000 workers in order to manufacture equipment for the military. Today, the structure is a shadow of its former self, awaiting reinvention as an upscale apartment complex with an adjacent shopping mall. Jia Zhangke’s quietly compelling 24 City chronicles the declining fortunes of Factory 420 – and those of its former employees – as a means of commenting on the consequences of China’s change from communism to capitalism. The director alternates between nine monologues, in which individuals recall their experiences of happiness and hardship, and musical moments, while an amateur opera troupe performs within the soon-to-be-demolished factory; interviews with real workers are combined with scripted scenes performed by established actors (Joan Chen and Jia regular Zhao Tao), thereby blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. However, 24 City maintains a largely static aesthetic that prevents the melancholic mood from ever seeming self-consciously manipulative, even when Jia engages in meta-cinematic references to Chen’s status as an international movie star. Clearly constructed with both care and compassion, 24 City achieves an emotional resonance that is rooted in both the personal regrets of the past and the economic reforms of the present. John Berra

Tetsuo: The Bullet Man

THE BAD

Mammoth

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described Mammoth as ‘a fatuous, self-serving and fantastically dishonest exercise in pseudo-compassion’, and it’s hard to find a more accurate summation of this misfire from a figure once described by Bergman as a ‘young master’. Segueing from the droll and delightfully observed Together into less palatable but formally inventive fare such as A Hole in My Heart and Container, Lukas Moodysson’s attempt to once again capture the hearts and minds of discerning cinema-goers is, however well-intentioned, painfully condescending. The film revolves around a successful New York couple, Leo (Gael García Bernal) and Ellen (Michelle Williams), whose lives are about to unravel. Leo is the creator of a booming website, and has stumbled into a world of money and big decisions. Ellen is a dedicated emergency surgeon who devotes her long shifts to saving lives. Their eight-year-old daughter Jackie spends most of her time with her Filipino nanny Gloria, a situation that is making Ellen start to question her priorities. When Leo travels to Thailand on business, he unwittingly sets off a chain of events that will have dramatic consequences for everyone. A film that feels like a depiction of third-world poverty as fashioned by the Hallmark card company, Mammoth plays like a fifth-rate Alejandro González Iñárritu movie, minus the artistry, insight and empathy. Jason Wood

The Last Seven

Writer Carl Neville recently relayed a story in which a friend of his who works in television actually met Danny Dyer and was shocked to find him ‘performing’ (so this friend assumed) the whole cockney wide-boy act 24/7. How exhausting it must be, the friend concluded, to be Danny Dyer. All the bloody time. Imran Naqvi’s The Last Seven sees Dyer dispense with his usual tirade of plosive ‘Bruv’s’ and ‘Geezer’s’, for a blood-drenched snarl and a black leather greatcoat. Yes, this is the film in which Dyer goes Goth, with predictably cringe-inducing results. Though the premise is a tempting combination of I Am Legend and The Twilight Zone, the result is closer to a GCSE drama piece, shot by the kids’ parents. Then again, perhaps the decision to render Dyer mute is a sign that the former Human Traffic star has transcended the status of actor/TV presenter to become pure signification, a kind of working classness in itself. The Last Seven presents a sort of right-wing utopian fantasy in which the whole of London disappears, leaving just seven slightly bewildered, vaguely middle-class folk, whose lives are incidentally interconnected. The only spectre haunting this dream, currently being made real by the welfare policies of the Tory administration, is the gruesome image of Dyer as the Angel of Death, a kind of return of the proletarian repressed. Robert Barry

Tetsuo: The Bullet Man

Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Bullet Man is another example of a franchise that started off brilliantly, only to beat the original idea into the ground. Sadly, everything we loved about his original Japanese cyberpunk masterpiece Tetsuo: The Iron Man in 1989 – its ferocious nihilism and furious pace, the stunningly inventive visuals and the proto-industrial soundtrack – has been cheaply and brutally gutted in this third, American-produced instalment. The only comfort to be found in this wasted cinematic effort is that with no theatrical release in sight, it will most likely remain one of the worst films of this year that won’t reach an art-house near you anytime soon. Pamela Jahn

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinno)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo makes Electric Sheep’s list not because it’s a bad film, but because it’s just not the ‘utterly compelling’, ‘edge of the seat thrills… cracking rollercoaster of a movie’ that the critical/marketing hype suggests it is. Anyone expecting this film to do for thrillers what Let the Right One In (2008) did for vampire movies will be sadly disappointed… as were we.

The film is a perfectly acceptable made-for-TV thriller, which has some reasonably good performances from the cast, adequate direction and pacing and a plot that sticks near enough to the book to satisfy the millions of fans who have read and enjoyed the late Stieg Larsson’s novel. Michael Nyqvist makes a likable lead as the disgraced journalist Michael Blomkvist, hired to investigate the case of a missing girl, while Noomi Rapace is believable as the socially inept private investigator Lisbeth Salander who helps him. However, neither really make the roles their own and fans of the book might feel both are miscast.

It is impressive how a fantastic film poster, tied with an unstoppable marketing machine and the pedigree of a bestselling novel, can make a ‘must-see’ film out of what is just an average movie. Toby Weidmann

The Killer inside Me

THE UGLY

The Killer inside Me

It is rather frustrating that, with a few exceptions, American noir novelist Jim Thompson’s remarkable body of work should have led to so many disappointing cinematic offerings, and Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of The Killer inside Me is a particularly deplorable entry into the canon. The film stars Casey Affleck as Lou Ford, the outwardly sweet-natured but dim-witted Deputy Sheriff of a small Texas town, who under his Southern good manners hides a frightening intelligence and psychopathic impulses. This story of deceit and death is the occasion for extreme violence, with two particularly grisly murder scenes, in which women are subjected to extended brutality and degradation. There is a tremendous sense of indulgence in these beautifully shot scenes, and the copious amount of gratuitous sex adds to the sensational aspect of the film. The characterisation of the main female characters is spectacularly reductive: always half-naked and in bed, they are both stunningly gorgeous and like rough sex…

Winterbottom has said in interviews that he wanted to be ‘faithful’ to the source novel, and this has served to justify the violent excesses of the film, but his incredibly unsophisticated literal approach is particularly unsuited to capturing a novel as ambiguous as The Killer inside Me: Winterbottom scrupulously follows to the letter a book that actually requires reading between the lines. He channels Thompson’s savage view of humanity through a slick, superficial noir pastiche that completely misses the seediness, mediocrity and complexity of the evil described by Thompson. Virginie Sélavy

Marnie

To coincide with the Blonde Crazy retrospective, which runs from March 1-17 at BFI Southbank as part of the Birds Eye View Festival, Electric Sheep writers pick their favourite Hitchcock blonde. Tell us who your favourite is by leaving a comment below and win a pair of tickets to one of the films in the season! See details of the competition below.

LISA WILLIAMS: TIPPI HEDREN
For all his talent, Alfred Hitchcock was a tyrant and none more so than with Tippi Hedren. Just like the ‘poor little creatures caged up’ at the beginning of The Birds, Hitchcock bound Hedren so tightly to her contract that her career stayed in limbo until it was too late. In Marnie, she captures the haunted innocence of the title character but it is as The Birds’ Melanie that she is at her most iconic. Sometimes aloof, sometimes as overplayed as a B-movie actress, Hedren’s Melanie dominates the viewer’s gaze. Credit must also be given to her blonde bouffant, which, in its varying degrees of tidiness, reveals almost as much emotion as her face. The actress has since revealed that Hitchcock demanded real birds be used in her character’s final showdown, so part of her struggle is in fact genuine. This perhaps explains why she has since devoted her life to rescuing tigers, rather than anything of an avian nature.

TOBY WEIDMANN: EVA MARIE SAINT
My favourite Hitchcock blonde is Cary Grant’s ‘sparring’ partner in North by Northwest (1959), Eva Marie Saint. While Grace Kelly is probably the Master of Suspense’s archetypal woman, having starred in three of his films – Rear Window, Dial M for Murder, To Catch a Thief – I just feel Saint has a devilish quality that, to my mind, makes her more alluring. In many ways, Saint’s character, Eve Kendall, is an unusual Hitchcock blonde; yes, she oozes cool charm and well-mannered sophistication like many of the director’s other platinum-haired beauties, but unlike them, we also know almost immediately that she’s no virginal do-gooder. Her picture of innocence is tarnished from the off: we know she’s up to no good, we know she’s lying to Thornhill and we know she uses sex as a weapon (some kind of flyswatter) – she is, essentially, a ‘bad girl’ (who eventually comes good). And the allure of the dark side is always compelling. I know I would have fallen for Eve’s charms far sooner than Roger O Thornhill – a bewitching cock of the eyebrow, a dry quip, laden with double meaning, and the offer of a quick bunk-up in her cabin after dinner, and I would have been putty in her hands too. There may be better Hitchcock films, but is there a better Hitchcock blonde than Eva Marie Saint? I don’t think so…

MARK STAFFORD: TIPPI HEDREN
Others were fully formed before they reached his hands but Ms Hedren was Hitchcock’s custom-built blonde, designed and sculpted for mounting unease and screaming terror. Witness to the malicious ecological nightmare of The Birds, she looks fabulous darling with that skin, those clothes, that hair, that car, drawing the suspicion of locals as if she must be responsible for the vicious attacks simply because she looks so damn fine. And no wonder, she is like a visitor from some sleek space-age future that never was, here to tell an outpost of the 50s that a swingin’ paradise awaits. Of course, she must be punished for this and spends much of the film’s second half yelping in terror with a variety of feathered fiends screwing up that immaculate coiffure, pecking that perfect skin… As frosty Marnie she displayed a new range of traumas against a fake backdrop of matte paintings and modish psychodrama, in a great film that’s as difficult to love as its heroine. That was it for Hedren and Hitch, and she was never used so well again. But she wears a flapping crow well, and that’s a talent to be reckoned with.

EITHNE FARRY: GRACE KELLY
There is James Stewart sweatily asleep in his dark apartment, with his leg in a plaster cast and his mind on the goings-on in the flat opposite, and here comes Grace Kelly to wake the grumpy sleeping beauty with a kiss and light. Switching on three lamps, she introduces herself with golden insouciance: ‘Reading from top to bottom, Lisa…Carol…Freemont’. Self-contained, confident, beautifully dressed and bringing a catered dinner. She is a princess, with a couture wardrobe and a knack of packing an immensely beautiful negligée and delicate slippers into a very small suitcase. But she’s also the prince, heading into peril on a quest for the freighted-with-meaning wedding ring, and a murderous husband. Crisp of diction and dressed to the nines she’s a girl who’ll take chances, embark on adventures. By the end of Rear Window, she’s wearing the trousers, (and a very becoming) tailored shirt, pretending to read Beyond the High Himalayas. Checking to see that Stewart, now with both legs in cast up to the thighs, is still asleep, Ms Kelly swaps her travel book for a copy of Harper’s Bazaar. Very cool.

PAUL HUCKERBY: TIPPI HEDREN
Appearing in arguably two of Hitchcock’s greatest films – and certainly two of the juiciest female roles in the filmmaker’s oeuvre – The Birds and Marnie, Tippi Hedren was the ultimate and last of Hitchcock’s icy blondes. Strikingly beautiful with the same cool elegance as Grace Kelly, the model was ‘discovered’ by Hitchcock when watching a television commercial. Perhaps it is because she was moulded by the director himself that she became the most perfect example of his female ideal, through which he could play out his favourite fantasy – watching the urban sophisticate whose cool exterior is destroyed by a force of nature. Seeming older (already a mother in her 30s when making her film debut in The Birds) and more worldly than Kelly, she also was willing to suffer indignities more famous actresses would never have allowed – having birds tied to her and even thrown at her. Her terror as seagulls claw her hair can clearly be seen to be real. But perhaps she remains the perfect Hitchcock blonde because she barely made any other films for any other directors. Naturally, she is cool and aloof today when discussing why it was they fell out – why she refused to work for him and why he refused to let her work for anyone else – paying her to sit idly for two years while others clamoured to cast ‘Hitchcock’s new Grace Kelly’ in a multitude of roles. She occasionally hints that it was something to do with Hitchcock’s obsessive nature and that it would probably be classed as sexual harassment nowadays, but whatever it was, it seems it was worse than having live seagulls thrown at your face.

PAMELA JAHN: KIM NOVAK
In Vertigo, Kim Novak gives one of the greatest performances ever in a Hitchcock film, one that is carried by a deep understanding of the curious double-sided nature of her character, and which for me surpasses any other Hitchcock blonde in both its sensuality and vulnerability. It’s hard to imagine how the film would have turned out if Vera Miles (who starred in Hitchcock’s earlier film The Wrong Man and would later appear in Psycho) had played the part of Madeleine/Judy as originally planned, but – fortunately – Miles became pregnant just before the shooting was to start, and Novak took on the part. Dressed up in a wig and that close-fitting grey suit, she not only brilliantly portrays a woman who must impersonate another woman to please a man, but she also strives against Hitchcock’s disappointment at having to work with his second-choice blonde. She succeeds in both tasks and proves that Hitch for once was wrong in his initial choice of cast. A tough job incredibly well done.

VIRGINIE SÉLAVY: TIPPI HEDREN
Tippi Hedren may not be as dangerously pulpous as Kim Novak or as coolly urbane as Grace Kelly, but she is the ultimate Hitchcockian object of desire, and although delicate-looking, she turns out to be more resistant to aggressive male attention than many of her blonde counterparts. In The Birds, she comes under freak avian attack shortly after meeting an attractive man and being taken to his home. In Marnie, she is the pathological kleptomaniac who is given the dubious choice of marriage or prison by the boss (Sean Connery) who catches her. In both films, she is a woman in trouble, but she somehow eludes the obsessive, fetishistic suitors who try to keep her/birds/life under control. In Hitch’s world, blonde sophistication masks the predatory nature of romantic relationships and Hedren embodied this perhaps more strikingly than any other of the director’s muses.

ALEX FITCH: KIM NOVAK
In Scenes of Clerical Life, George Eliot wrote: ‘In every parting there is an image of death’… This could apply to Alfred Hitchcock’s depiction of Kim Novak in Vertigo, her entrances and departures into John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson’s life leading to the death and resurrection of her character. Hitchcock’s obsession with unobtainable blondes on screen is obvious to even the casual observer, but Novak is the most exquisite example in what is his most overt film on the subject. At face value, Scottie falls in love with a woman only to see her die, and then while dealing with post-traumatic stress tries to craft a stranger into her doppelgänger. If every Hitchcock blonde is a reflection of the ultimate woman in the director’s mind’s eye, then this explicit rendering of the theme turns the viewer into both psychoanalyst and voyeur as we see a desperate man try to overcome death through metaphorical necrophilia. If every Hitchcock blonde is a reflection, it is appropriate there was such a large filmic concatenation of afterimages following the film’s release. The fake Madeleine, a reflection of an unseen ‘real’ woman in Vertigo, gives a monologue about her former life in front of a felled redwood, a tree that has seen a hundred generations of deaths precede its own, a speech that was then adapted for the script of Chris Marker’s La Jetée in 1962. Sound and images from Vertigo were later used in Marker’s Sans Soleil, in Terry Gilliam’s remake of La Jetée, Twelve Monkeys, and in video works by artists Douglas Gordon (Feature Film) and Wago Kreider (Between 2 Deaths). Since Novak’s character and her scenes from Vertigo had such a remarkable afterlife, it is appropriate that she and Hitchcock collaborated once again, in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, introduced by the director (in archive footage) suitably from beyond the grave.

COMPETITION:
Leave a comment below to tell us who your favourite Hitchcock blonde is and explain why in no more than 200 words. The best two entries will win a pair of tickets each to a film of their choice in the Blonde Crazy retrospective, (subject to availability), courtesy of the BFI. Closing date for entries: Thursday 25 February.