Crime Drama

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn was responsible for the offbeat, often surreal and grimy madness that was Bronson, starring an unrecognisable Tom Hardy as the eponymous hard case with a penchant for the savagery of solitary. The film gained well deserved widespread acclaim, and was regularly touted as a modern Clockwork Orange due to its inventive style, harsh violence and über-dry humour.

His follow-up was the abysmal Valhalla Rising; a slog of a mess of a movie, barely glued together by its only positive which was the cinematography. A few guys wander slowly through some scenery, stopping for the occasional grunt or bout of violence. It’s horrible, dull and pointless.

So, not sure what to expect next then, but his adaptation of 2005 James Sallis novel Drive has already developed cult status, earned numerous plaudits and nabbed the Best Director gong at Cannes.

Drive stars Ryan Gosling as a stunt driver and mechanic who earns extra cash by offering his services as a freelance getaway driver. He has strict rules; his clients have a five minute window beginning from the moment they leave his car for the heist, and during that time he accepts total involvement and shared responsibility, but anything outside of that time frame simply isn’t his problem. He will not carry a gun, and he will not be involved with any clients for a second time.

From the viewer’s perspective, he is known only as The Driver, and comes across as a shy but focused recluse with very little interest in socialising. His world takes a peculiar twist when he meets new neighbour Irene (Carey Mulligan), and her son Benicio. They quickly bond, whilst The Driver is also offered the opportunity to race pro, courtesy of local financier Bernie Rose.

As Drive coasts along with glorious fluidity, punctuated by a pounding, wonderfully intense 80s-style synth soundtrack, we all know that things must take a turn. Once we realise that Bernie and his partner Nino are more than a little dangerous, just as Irene’s husband makes a reappearance, the film kicks into top gear and we get an action-packed thrill ride all the way to the end.

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British director Christopher Nolan has been a revelation; he seems to craft innovative, compelling cinema, whilst handling his own side of the publicity with extraordinary skill. He releases tantalising teasers of information, sowing the seeds of intrigue and controlling the world’s awareness of his next movie’s premise and plotline.

His first real success was Memento, a cerebral and original movie that showed the scenes in reverse order, creating a fascinating story and a thrilling ride backwards through the complex mind of Guy Pearce’s Leonard Shelby.

This would be a sign of things to come, and we are all very well aware of Nolan’s pivotal role in relaunching and reshaping the Batman franchise to become an accessible story, grounded in gritty realism. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are astounding, with the latter showing clear signs of influence from big city crime dramas such as Heat; arguably not the kind of movie one would usually associate with a comic book superhero film adaptation.

Once he gained the necessary big budget flick experience, combined with the offer of huge financial backing for anything he fancied doing, Nolan knew it was time to tackle his long-term goal of creating a film about dream thieves; a heist movie set in the mind, where there are no limits, except those imposed by one’s individual creativity. This movie would become Inception, a monster smash-hit that garnered mass critical and public acclaim, technical praise, Oscar wins and a box office return that likely left the film financiers pinching themselves…

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Despite appearing in a collection of incredible stinkers, with Daredevil, Gigli, The Sum of all Fears and Surviving Christmas heading the list, it should be remembered that Ben Affleck was one half of the writing team behind the excellent Good Will Hunting screenplay, and turned in a great performance too.

He was given the opportunity to direct, as well as write and star in, an adaptation of Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan (a story that has very little to do with Robin Hood), which was retitled as The Town and provided a showcase of Affleck’s raw movie-making talent.

The Town begins by highlighting the severity of bank robberies in the area of Charlestown, located in Boston. This is followed by a heist on a local bank, orchestrated by Affleck’s career criminal Doug MacRay, along with his lifelong friends Jem Coughlin, Gloansy Magloan, and Dez Elden.

The masked thieves encounter a minor hitch, which results in the kidnapping of bank manager Claire Kessey, who gets blindfolded and dropped off at a nearby beach. After the robbery, MacRay decides to follow Kessey, which leads to a relationship between the two, whilst she is blissfully unaware of his involvement in the robbery and her kidnapping.

Whilst MacRay tries to hide his guilt, and keep his friends from knowing his actions, FBI Special Agent Adam Frawley is behind a concentrated effort to get MacRay and his crew behind bars.

For a heist movie, there is very little in terms of bank theft, but this is a conscious decision by Affleck, and allows time for the impressive characterisation and performances to develop fully. This film really is a clever mixture of action and drama, with startling efforts from all the leads.

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We have decided to start putting together regular reviews of some of cinema’s most unforgettable gems; movies that raise the bar, leaving us stunned and in awe of a true masterpiece. Today, we look back at 1998’s American History X, a disturbing, harrowing but ultimately brilliant non-linear portrayal of a neo-Nazi and his difficult journey through the complications of his misguided ideology.

Edward Norton is Derek Vinyard, a young man who excelled at school and was part of a contented suburban family until his fire fighting father dies whilst putting out a blaze in a predominantly black neighbourhood. The subtle seeds of racism had already been planted in young Derek’s mind by his late father, and the man’s untimely death served as a catalyst to his son’s simmering radical beliefs.

Derek moves on to become a leader for lost and troubled youths, going so far as to have a swastika tattooed on his chest, inciting race-related violence and vandalism and even making a bet with a group of young rival black youths that results in their `banishment’ from the basketball courts. Vinyard’s antagonistic behaviour results in the attempted armed theft of his car, which is noticed by Derek’s younger brother Danny (Edward Furlong, Terminator 2). Derek flips, kills the men, and receives a three year jail term for voluntary manslaughter.

Upon Derek’s release he is a changed man, having spent hard time in a prison where his racial prejudices and questionable moral values were truly put to the test. His time, though unpleasant, has had the necessary effect, but he comes out to find that Danny has grown older and is being lined up as a fitting replacement for Derek by twisted kingpin Cameron Alexander.

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Gorgeous rising starlet Gemma Arterton continues to take the movie-world by storm with her excellent performance in devilishly devious and delightful British thriller The Disappearance of Alice Creed. She has appeared in recent blockbusters Clash of the Titans and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, but is still making time for homeland cinema and we should all be very grateful.

She plays the eponymous Alice Creed, who is taken, stripped, bound, gagged and left in the darkness by twisted thugs Vic and Danny. The two rotters have painstakingly fortified a small flat in an unknown location, and this serves as the set for almost the entire movie. Their grand plan is to force Alice Creed’s rich father to pay up £2million, through the use of some unpleasant photographs and video that effectively display Alice’s harrowing, brutal and potentially fatal situation. Vic is particularly bonkers; he poses a very genuine threat to Alice, as opposed to the younger Danny, who seems a little more confused and reluctant about the plan once he sees the physicality of the torment and stress placed upon the helpless girl.

Perhaps this sounds a little familiar, and the ‘kidnap a rich man’s daughter’ motif is not an original concept. However, this is a film packed with twists, turns and a couple of very genuine shocks. The film takes about 5 seconds to get going, and then bounds forward in a perfectly paced and gripping manner, demonstrating some real potential from writer and director J Blakeson. The script is excellent, with the beats coming at just the right time, and effortlessly executed with aplomb. The film is certainly not without its kinky side, and there is no holding back regarding nudity and violence.

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This maddening mess sees three violent and disturbed teenagers break into the home of an unhappily married and extraordinarily unlikeable couple. The pair are beaten and tied up within seconds, and the assailants then proceed to sit on the couch waiting for the couple’s son to come home so they can kill him for being a grass.

This lasts for almost 80 minutes, and it is excruciating; a mind-bendingly dull and lazy waste of time; time that could be spent doing something infinitely better, such as attempting to clean your teeth with a pneumatic drill whilst swallowing a rusty cheese-grater.

The painfully clichéd unhappy couple argue over dinner in a monotonous and badly scripted fashion about an affair that she may have had a while ago (it’s hard to keep track of the conversation due to its poor delivery). They answer the door and are attacked. They are subjected to occasional abuse of a severe nature, whilst the clock ticks down (somewhat erratically) to their son’s arrival, which is due to be met with a fatal response. That is literally it.

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Prior to his untimely death in 2004, Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson wrote a trio of novels collectively known as the Millennium Trilogy. Written in his native Swedish tongue, the stories have proved a critical and commercial success, and all three have already been turned into Swedish language movies.

This month sees the DVD rental release of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, originally titled Män Som Hatar Kvinnor or Men Who Hate Women. The film, much like its source material, has enjoyed mass acclaim from pretty much everyone, and deservedly so.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo introduces the trilogy’s two main protagonists; firstly Mikael Blomkvist, a middle-aged investigative journalist writing for the magazine Millennium. His attempts to uncover the corrupt nature of Swedish billionaire and industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström have gone awry and resulted in a libel case against him. He will have to serve three months in prison, but has a few months before he must face his sentence.

The title character and movie heroine is Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-something with prior issues relating to behaviour and mental stability, but a brilliant researcher. She has been hired by ultra-rich Henrik Vanger of the Vanger Group in order to check the legitimacy and authenticity of Mikael Blomkvist’s reputation as a skilled investigator.

Satisfied with Mikael’s credentials, Vanger meets with Blomkvist and requests that he investigate the disappearance of his foster child Harriet, who has been missing for 40 years and presumed dead. The circumstances surrounding the disappearance are more than suspicious, and Henrik suspects foul play from none other than a member of his own twisted, money-hungry family.

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Modern cinematic heavyweights Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio team up for the fourth time in this eerie and brooding mystery thriller, based on a novel by Dennis Lehane.

Set in the fifties, Shutter Island sees Leo’s U.S. Marshall Edward ‘Teddy’ Daniels investigating the apparent disappearance of a mental patient from a totally locked and guarded room. The patient, Rachel Solando, is a resident at the Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane, located on the otherwise desolate Shutter Island.

Daniels is accompanied by his new partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), as they attempt to solve the unusual case. Their hospital ‘guide’ is head psychiatrist Dr. John Cawley, portrayed by Sir Ben Kingsley, who makes no bones about coming across as rather sinister and creepy.

It does not take long to establish that there is a lot more going on that a crazy woman with a talent for matter displacement. Daniels believes from the offset that the island and its inhabitants, including Cawley, have some dark and desperate secrets buried within those not-so-solid hospital walls.

Secrets from Teddy’s own past, a few suspect twitches from various characters, a cameo from Max von Sydow, a visit to the ‘off-limits’ prison/hospital on the hill, a secluded and mysterious lighthouse and some weirdness on a cliff all help to create a bizarre, baffling and intriguing mystery shot by a master of cinema.

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Harry Brown is a cracking British thriller which pits the legendary Sir Michael Caine against a gang of drug dealers on a south-east London estate.

Caine plays the titular Brown, an ex-Royal Marine who is spending his twilight years making regular visits to his dying wife’s hospital bed and playing chess in the pub with his only friend Leonard.

Leonard reveals his constant harassment by local youths, and he is starting to show signs of cracking. A local underpass serves as a gathering point for the dealers. It also acts as a shortcut to the hospital but Harry refuses to take it, fearing for his life.

In one moving scene, after having taken the long way round to the hospital, Harry finds that his wife has already been removed from her bed; succumbing to her illness before he arrived.

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Ron Howard’s adaptation of Dan Brown’s religious thriller The Da Vinci Code was one of the highest-grossing films of the decade, earning over US$230 million worldwide in its opening weekend. Yet you’d be hard pushed to find a critic who gave its contrived storyline and turgid script the thumbs up. Angels and Demons, which comes before The Da Vinci Code in Dan Brown’s canon but has been adapted for the big screen as a sequel, is slicker and pacier than its predecessor. Howard, along with adapters Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp, stick less rigidly to Dan Brown’s clunky prose this time round, resulting in a more confident, dazzling production. Unfortunately, despite the film’s glossy exterior, it tells a story that is both convoluted and, at time, utterly ludicrous.

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