Few directors have managed to marry poetry and narrative film in a wholly satisfactory way – the list of noble attempts is a short one. Maybe the truth is that verse, so often to be found arresting time, exists only in stark contrast to film, where the ticking clock is inexorable. There is also a very practical consideration: filming writers in action is rarely dramatically profitable.

But Jane Campion, directing this biopic of John Keats’s last years in Hampstead Village, is unafraid of poetry’s holy moments. The young Romantic’s compositions in this period (1818-21) included ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘Lamia’, the first parts of Hyperion and his six great odes – astonishingly precocious achievements for any writer, never mind a surgeon’s apprentice in his early 20s, racked with tuberculosis and publicly derided in the Quarterly Review. Sensibly, Campion does not try to crush his greatest hits into 120 minutes of epiphanies on the heath and bouts of furious quill-scratching. Bright Star, named after one of Keats’s sonnets, is about as tender a romance as the author of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ deserves. Poetry, discussed throughout, is eventually put into an intractable conflict with love, thanks to the zealous assertions of Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider), Keats’s friend and supporter, who jealously guards his pet genius from the advances of their neighbour, experimental seamstress Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). But poetry is not all of Keats, and Keats is not all of Bright Star. Campion’s film rather takes Brawne as its subject, and it’s through her eyes and ears we contend with Keats’s sensory responsiveness and poetic gift.

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Contrary to popular opinion, it’s easy to addict oneself to gritty realist cinema. There’s something moreish about the feeling of slackening one’s mind into a putty-like receptacle, ready to be loaded full of outrage, shock, pity and righteous indignation. And if that doesn’t hook you, at the end of the movie you’re suffused with the warm fuzzy feeling that you earned by relating to people in worlds entirely alien to your own.

On the face of it, Lion’s Den – with its tagline ‘Mother Behind Bars’– looks set to satiate even the staunchest fan of ‘hard-hitting’ film. Julia – an eye-catching, affluent 20-something – is imprisoned for committing a murder of which she has no memory (legal injustice always gets the juices flowing). Being pregnant with the dead man’s child (abandoned, vulnerable mother) she is incarcerated in an all-female ward where inmates can raise their children (the clincher: innocent, criminalised babies).

Director Pablo Trapero has taken this plot – purpose-made, it would seem, for soliciting empathy – and done the unthinkable. He has refused to disguise the impossibility of relating to his subjects. Read more »

Neo-classical avant-gardist Peter Greenaway returns to indie cinemas near you with Nightwatching, a boisterous and beguiling film straight out of cinema’s academic leftfield. Cut from the same canvas as The Draughtsman Contract, Nightwatching sees Greenaway again throw himself into artsy period restoration, this time in chase of answers to the legend that is Rembrandt. The themes of painter as outsider and of cinema as artifice are never far from the camera’s lens, and while onscreen events fail to reprise the full pomp of Greenaway’s yore, Nightwatching certainly proves an edifying spectacle in the current atmosphere of Avatars and Wolfmen.

The film’s beating heart is Rembrandt himself, a painter as technically brilliant as he is historically elusive. For all the acclaim this famed Dutch Master continues to receive in art schools, little is known about his life. Of the three women he took during his lifetime, for example, where the second two came from is anybody’s guess. And then there’s his finances. Rembrandt famously died destitute having once lived handsomely, though just where all the money went remains a mystery. Read more »

Northwest Vision and Media – which funded Salvage (2009) along with two other micro-budget feature films, both premiered in 2008 – has asked me to keep a secret. As budget film benefactors are the undisputed angels of the industry, I’ve decided to play nice and not broadcast the mystery of the shipping container whose contents rampage their way through Salvage’s 180 blood-spattered minutes.

Jodie (Linzey Cocker) plays the Dad-doting teen sent to spend Christmas with her career-bent mother (Neve McIntosh) who is found – true to form – bonking a stranger with the door open. Thus, when the horrors-of-which-we-may-not-speak break out of a shipping container washed up on a nearby beach to terrorise the streets of the cul-de-sac, Mum and her friendly fuck are left peeping out at the house across the road, where Jodie has fled in sulky rebellion.

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Continuing his perennial exploration of the purposes and causes of terrorism, Austrian director Michael Haneke arrives at a near-identical story to the one he told in his 2005 film Caché, in which middle-class media professionals were haunted by their apparent complicity with France’s colonial past. The return of the repressed in that film was marked first by the sinister postage of videotapes and crayon drawings, later the suicide of an Algerian man orphaned by the Paris massacre of 1961. In The White Ribbon (2009), Haneke’s truths are more oblique: social neuroses manifest as random acts of violence committed in the agricultural community of Eichwald, on the eve of the Great War.

Like Caché, the film’s point of view is held in a position of delicately-balanced uncertainty. “I don’t know if the story I’m about to tell you is entirely true…” begins the narrator, an elderly incarnation of the tender and troutlike schoolteacher who gingerly plays amateur detective in the final stages of the film. But it is far too late for him to collapse The White Ribbon’s superpositions into a single solution. He could not have been privy to the vast majority of the film’s many vignettes, which follow the Baron, the Pastor, the doctor, the village’s unfathomable children and sundry other villagers as they socialise with suspicion and barely-sublimated hostility. The dramatic irony is on a world-historical scale: not only do we know Europe will be imminently plunged into four years of industrial ruination, but the narrator’s audible senescence asks us to view Eichwald’s trauma with the rest of German history in mind: the rise of fascism and 1945’s partition included.

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French documentarist Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s first fiction film, Johnny Mad Dog (2008), is a clear-eyed and ultraviolent examination of child conscription. Set in and around an unnamed coastal city torn apart by civil war, it tells the stories of two teenagers, Johnny (Christophe Minie) and Laokolé (Daisy Victoria Vandy), both robbed of their childhoods. Most of the film is given over to Johnny, whose squad of teenage footsoldiers, costumed in blue balaclavas, angel wings and sport helmets, are a small part of the rebellion closing in on government forces and the reviled ‘Dogos’.

They bully and rape their way through strategic targets, in the vague hope that with victory their parents will be reimbursed for their services. The action scenes are frenetic and sometimes deliberately confused, as if composed in the heat of a real street fight. Dialogue and gunshots interlace amid the chaos of English-French patois, screaming and explosions.

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There’s something unsettling about the idea of an ‘ordinary’ serial killer and unsettling the viewer is something that Tony does very well, primarily because of its ability to convince you of the sheer normalcy of Peter Ferdinando’s methodically studied murderer. This makes the horrible stuff all the more distressing when it comes. A murder committed in the warm light of a late summer’s afternoon in the familiar surroundings of a London suburb really sticks with you, for some reason.

David Lynch wants his curtains back

Luckily, the movie doesn’t take itself too seriously, which prevents it from tipping the balance too far into the realm of the disturbing. There’s a deep vein of black humour throughout, much of it arising from the awkward behaviour of the eponymous Dalston dweller – “What can you do for five pounds?” Tony asks of a supremely nonplussed prostitute. It helps to relieve some of the tension built up during scenes of butchery, but also adds a bit of a sneering quality at times. It’s not nice to laugh at people with mental illnesses. Even (especially?) if they’re going to chop you up in the bath later.

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Astra Taylor, sociologist and director of Žižek! – one of four documentaries about the Slovenian communist Slavoj Žižek – here returns to the field of filmed philosophy with a 90-minute gloss on a Plato quotation: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Examined Life is divided eight ways, with each philosopher on some type of gentle promenade, pursued – rather self-consciously – by Taylor and her camera operator. The occasional emphasis on documentary artifice is out of place in a film already heaving with Sisyphean intellectual cruising. There is an emphasis on ethics and global citizenship, but the film has no central drive beyond finding out what famous living philosophers are thinking (a thoroughly worthwhile pursuit). So unlike Žižek!, none of the contributors here have an opportunity to layer or complicate their basic enquiry. Žižek’s 10 minutes wrap up with his urge to “cut off even more these roots in nature”, which is a good punchline to a lecture on ecology, but you yearn for more from each don. Perhaps this is the point – more is available elsewhere and Examined Life is an energetic primer. It is the cinematic equivalent of a contents page.

Quietly dispensing with Dickens’s interest in the widespread poverty wreaked by the industrial revolution, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past transplants the plot of A Christmas Carol to the scene of a wedding in Newport, where rakish hedonist Connor Mead (Matthew McConaughey) is busy disrupting his younger brother’s nuptials with a misogynist’s philosophy inherited from his late Uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas), “a visionary” who taught the teenage Connor that, “The power in a relationship lies with whoever cares less.” And, “Love leaves you weak, dependent and fat.”

McConaughey is reasonable casting as the Ebenezer of love, and the film’s most impressive feat is making his passage from miser to Cupid vaguely plausible. But there is give and take – his transformation is only plausible because the women in his life are needy and shrewish emotional wrecks.

That’s half of the problem. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is in theory a romantic comedy, but there’s an obtrusive, er, ‘mirth gap’. Early on, Connor dumps three girlfriends by conference call. Later, all the condoms he ever used rain down on his head. It’s a bit of a plodder and chronically unsurprising, a chick flick that hates chicks.

It’s always nice to come across a film that actually delivers on its promises. Kicks sets out to take a look into the dangers of celebrity obsession, focusing particularly on British society’s WAG obsession, and achieves its aims with refreshing intelligence.

Set in Liverpool, the film follows Nicole, a latchkey kid who’s obsessed with the Reds’ star striker, Lee Cassidy. She is befriended by the more affluent Jasmine, who has aspirations of landing a player of her own. A close bond develops between the two, but upon discovering that the object of their affections is to depart for sunnier climes, they enact a drastic bid to prevent his defection. Ultimately, it becomes clear that, far from being worthy of Nicole’s idolisation, Lee isn’t all she thought he was cracked up to be.

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