Almost Monday Movie: Aces High

A year after leaving Eton for the Royal Flying Corps, Major Gresham (Malcolm McDowell) finds that his squadron's much-needed reinforcements consist of a single young man: Croft, an old school-friend and the younger brother of his girlfriend. Although wide-eyed and enthusiastic at first, Croft quickly finds himself rudely introduced to a life where his life expectancy is measured in days.

Aces High is a gritty historical film of the kind you might expect from the late 70s, showing a relatively high degree of accuracy on its subject (especially compared to certain recent movies), perhaps no surprise given that it cites Cecil Lewis' Sagittarius Rising as a source. All in all, a pretty solid depiction of a broad spectrum of aspects of the era - from partying with a downed German pilot, to landing to ask for directions.

Monday Movie: Monsters

Six years after a NASA probe broke up on re-entry, seeding Mexico with giant tentacled monsters, photojournalist Andrew Kaulder is called upon to babysit his boss' daughter as she heads back to North America through the "infected" zone. Although local corruption, US militarism and extraterrestrial migration stand between them and home, their journey proves to be both eerie, illuminating and the start of a deeper bond.

Filmed on a shoe-string budget, featuring local non-actors improvising their lines and emphasising ambience over plot or genre trappings, Gareth Edwards' first feature film, Monsters, is, despite what trailers and blurbs may try to tell you, an alternate world travelogue. It may have its moments of action and tension, but predominantly I found this film to carry a mesmerising atmosphere of strange beauty. It's also, like all smart science fiction films, thematically intriguing - with obvious allegories to issues around immigration, environmental destruction, terrorism and military intervention.

Monday Movie: My Neighbour Totoro

Satsuki and Mei have just moved to the countryside and a decrepit new house beside a towering camphor tree. While their dad tries to cheer them in the absence of their hospitalised mother, they soon begin to realise that the forest is home to strange and magical creatures.

One of the most famous and beloved offerings from director Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, My Neighbour Totoro mixes imaginative creatures, beautiful landscapes and everyday childhood to sublime effect.

Almost Monday Movie: The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec

When the legendary journalist and travel writer Adèle Blanc-Sec returns from her adventure to secure the mummified physician of Ramesses II she finds Paris besieged by a pterodactyl. And if she wants to cure her seriously ill sister, it turns out she'll have to tame this prehistoric beast...

Les aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec is a film likely to please fans of director Luc Besson, carrying all his trademark touches. It's brash, colourful, imaginative, stylish, always perfectly framed and bears that strange mixture of soppy centre and callous edge that he does so well.

It has all Besson's flaws too, of course - the plot is woolly, the characters are barely developed and it lacks focus. But in addition to its Besson-ness, the film has one more saving grace: an engrossingly fun performance from Louise Bourgoin in the title role.

Monday Movie: Ashes of Time Redux

In the middle of a harsh desert, the equally dry Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung) makes a living as a middleman between assassins and their clients. As the seasons come and go, all sorts of odd characters come to see him: a cross-dressing princess (Brigitte Lin), a warrior about to lose his sight (Tony Leung), and a woman who hopes to buy vengeance with a basket of eggs and a mule... But as killers and customers come and go, Ouyang Feng's mind is forever on the woman who broke his heart (Maggie Cheung, no relation).

As you should expect from a Wong Kar Wai film, Ashes of Time has no plot or structure to speak of, its draw stemming entirely from its lush visuals and understated emotions. When it comes to the former, WKW and cinematographer Christopher Doyle are at the top of their game. I struggle to think of a more sumptuous and vividly realised film, full of fantastic uses of light, shadow, colour, reflections and, of course, that incredible desert. The emotions, though, while they may simmer quite nicely throughout the film, rarely survive emergence into the harsh sunlight, seeming, to me, somewhat forced.

Whether or not any of the multiple story threads grab you, this film is absolutely 100% high grade beautiful throughout. The fact that it was almost lost to history, leading to this "redux" edit of the surviving footage, is rather scary to consider.

Monday Movie: Inside Man

When two detectives (Denzel Washington, Chiwetel Ejiofor) attend a bank robbery turned hostage situation, it quickly becomes clear that the cocksure mastermind behind it (Clive Owen) has put a complex plan into motion. As the bank's owner (Christopher Plummer) and his fixer (Jodie Foster) get involved, it even starts to seem that these criminals may not be in it for the money.

Possibly presented as evidence that if director Spike Lee doesn't usually make slick blockbusters, it's because he chooses not to, Inside Man doesn't quite have the 100% airtight plot required by this kind of twisty thriller. It doesn't matter though: it's clever enough, and Lee's confident direction, subversive political themes and strong cast lend it a kind of unassuming brilliance.

Monday Movie: The Station Agent

When Fin inherits a train depot from his only friend, he moves in, hoping to live in solitude. But between the loquacious hot dog vendor who plies his trade nearby, and a clumsy artist keen to apologise for almost running him over (twice), it looks like he's got his work cut out for him.

The Station Agent is a film about a short guy trying not to make friends and failing. It's also, to me, the perfect representation of what I expect from American non-Hollywood movies - slick and good looking, but leisurely paced, with an everyday veracity to its scenes, and overflowing with humanity.

Monday Movie: The King's Speech

"Bertie" is a shy man with a speech impediment. As the younger brother to the heir to the throne, he does have the odd public speaking engagement, but at least he's not going to be king or anything. Actually, having said that... Oh dear. Perhaps an unorthodox, antipodean speech therapist can help?

The King's Speech is an impeccable historical drama charting the unlikely friendship between two men from wildly different backgrounds. Colin Firth's portrayal of an introverted man propelled into overwhelming duty is deservedly Oscar-winning, but the film's also a fantastic ensemble piece, with Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham-Carter, Guy Pearce and Michael Gambon all giving engrossing performances, working from a script that breathes life into historical figures without being weighed down by grandeur.

Monday Movie: Ip Man

Living a quiet life in Foshan with his wife and son, Ip Man (Donnie Yen) is nevertheless still frequently called on to exercise his incredible prowess at Wing Chun kung fu to sort out petty feuds and public disorder. But the stakes become life and death when China is invaded by Japan, with starving Chinese bandits threatening his friends, and the occupying army trying to draw him into a brutal martial arts tournament.

Yip Wai-Shun's Ip Man combines beautiful cinematography, a lean and efficient script, sublime action direction from Sammo Hung and a rousing score by Kenji Kawai to create one of the best martial arts films of the past few years. The only niggling dissatisfaction is the fact that this slick, nationalistic action film is supposedly based on the life of a real, flesh and blood man.

Monday Movie: Evil Dead 2

An isolated rural cabin seems like the perfect romantic getaway for Ash (Bruce Campbell) and his girlfriend Linda - but little do they know that the absent occupants had been dabbling in the occult. When Linda is possessed by a Kandarian demon, Ash (perhaps a bit too readily) decapitates her with a shovel and buries the body. And this is only the start of his ordeal. By the time relatives of the cabin's owners arrive to discover the blood-soaked, unhinged man barricaded inside, it may not be easy for them to accept where the real danger lies...

The first thing that's apparent about Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn is the bold and dynamic direction from Sam Raimi, readily lifting this otherwise shaky and low budget film above its B-movie roots. The next thing you'll notice is just how damn funny and scary the film manages to be, often at the same time. The scares come from meticulously crafted shocks and a relentlessly sinister atmosphere. The comedy comes from the slapstick violence, and the absurd situations that develop - both probably exemplified by the sequence in which Ash fights his own possessed hand, before severing it with a chainsaw... at which point he's then forced into a game of cat and mouse with the now independent appendage.

And for all that the film could be claimed to boil down to making you jump out of your seat and split your sides laughing, it does still continue to maintain its atmosphere throughout, constructing a Lovecraft-style mythology of its own, and brutally but steadily fashioning Ash into an iconic horror hero. Add to all that one of my all-time favourite endings to a film, and you've got one heck of a cinematic experience - if you can stomach it.

Monday Movie: 5 Centimetres Per Second

As a thick snowstorm closes in, the young Takaki embarks on an unexpectedly difficult journey to reach his erstwhile schoolmate, long-time pen pal and potential soul mate Akari. When he does eventually reach her, it's a moment of profound romance and intimacy that will overshadow every subsequent relationship he has.

Makoto Shinkai's 5 Centimetres per Second is a sixty minute character study told in three parts, charting Takaki's single perfect moment with Akari, and his inability to recapture the electricity of a love that arguably never really happened outside his head in the first place. The monologue voice-overs that accompany the story are over-earnest, but everything else about the film shows surprising restraint for a portrait of adolescent love. The spoken dialogue is natural, and the ambient sounds blend perfectly with visuals that are simply exquisitely gorgeous. The colours, lighting effects and level of background detail are almost overwhelmingly sumptuous.

My favourite of the three chapters is definitely the second one, in which the monologues are pushed to the back seat and we're introduced to Kanae, an adorably shy and indecisive girl with a terminal crush on Takaki. Compared to the barefaced angst on display in Takaki's two chapters, Kanae's story presents the heartbreak of unrequited love as something almost brave and honourable.

Although 5 Centimetres per Second may stumble, it does so on the road to being a perfect little movie. I definitely understand why Shinkai is seen by many as the next big thing in Japanese animation.

Monday Movie: The Illusionist

As the music hall gives way to the music concert, a French magician winds up doing a small gig on a remote Scottish island. There he meets a young woman who doesn't seem to realise that he's not the worldly star she takes him for. When she follows him back to London, the conjurer struggles to make ends meet, and keep a smile on her face.

While Sylvain Chomet's earlier Belleville Rendez-vous was a raucous adventure with an undercurrent of bitter realism, The Illusionist takes the opposite tack, telling a melancholy, ordinary story tinged with cartoonish magic. The focus is on emotion over plot, effectively aided by the beautifully detailed animation, but the film perhaps feels a little undernourished as a result.

Monday Movie: Little Big Soldier

In the aftermath of a brutal battle, only two survivors crawl out of the heaped bodies: a reluctant conscript (Jackie Chan) and a wounded general (Leehom Wang). Seeing the opportunity to collect a reward, the conscript ties up the general and begins dragging him back to his homeland. But he soon finds he has to deal with not just his ruthless and highly trained captive, but also the back-stabbing relatives who want the general dead.

A labour of love that Jackie Chan has been trying to get into production for two decades, Little Big Soldier is a historical odd-couple comedy that manages to branch tentatively into action, tragedy and character drama. It's not perfect by any means, and to say that it's Chan's best film for years probably tells us more about his recent track record than anything else, but this is clearly a story that its creators believed in and wanted to tell, and that kind of enthusiasm is always infectious.

Monday Movie: Winter's Bone

In the harsh and impoverished Ozark mountains, 17-year old Ree has put her life on hold to look after her younger siblings and mentally ill mother. But when it looks like her drug-dealing father may have skipped bail, risking their home and land in the process, Ree resolves to hunt him down herself.

Like its setting, Winter's Bone is harsh but beautiful - a film that coolly nurtures your emotional engagement even while maintaining a tense air of menace and distrust.

Monday Movie: Ong-Bak

When thugs make off with the head of Ong-Bak - the cherished Buddha statue of a simple rural village - naive local Ting (Tony Jaa) is dispatched to track it down. Following the trail to bustling Bangkok, Ting quickly gets mixed up in drugs, gangs and an illegal fight club. It's a good thing he's a consummate practitioner of Muay Thai...

Although the weak characterisation and plot are on a par with plenty of other martial arts films, director Prachya Pinkaew's Ong-Bak is beautifully shot, often surprisingly atmospheric, and Jaa's physical prowess is a sight to see in itself.

Monday Movie: District 13

In the not-too-distant future (well, actually, 2010) the French government walls off the most crime-ridden banlieues and withdraws all public services from those within - including law enforcement. But when the crime lord who rules over Banlieue 13 gets his hands on the worst possible loot, maverick cop Damien (stunt man and martial artist Cyril Raffaelli) is forced to team up with local vigilante Leïto (David Belle, founder of parkour) in a race against the clock to get into the district and prevent catastrophe.

Although Luc Besson has directed an extremely diverse array of films, from surreal love stories to science fiction epics, the films that he writes and produces tend to fit a certain mould. Okay, Taxi, The Transporter and Kiss of the Dragon may be rather different shades of action movie, but they're all cut-down thrill rides with slightly woolly plots and a surprisingly strong emotional core. District 13 definitely ticks all the boxes, but if you haven't been sold on the style before, perhaps the world's first freerunning action movie can tempt you into the fold.

As with many cinematographers who take the director's chair, Pierre Morel shoots a good looking film, depicting the urban decay of his setting, and the tattooed, shaven-headed machismo of his actors with perfect framing and loving attention to detail, while the adrenalin-pumping action sequences are finely edited into quick-fire roller coasters where it's nevertheless still easy to make out what's happening. And thanks to that little pinch of Besson magic, the cast is strong, and the characters memorable - whether you're cheering them on, or booing and hissing. My only complaints are that the sole female character is stuffed pretty deep into the refrigerator, and the two stonking great action scenes that introduce David and Cyril respectively easily outshine much of what follows.

Monday Movie: Metropolis

Inspired by the words of the mysterious and beautiful Maria, spoiled Freder Fredersen descends into the depths of his father's metropolis and sees for himself how terrible conditions are for the toiling workers that built it. Little does he know that his father plans to use a robot clone of Maria as an agent provocateur, inciting the under-classes into sowing the seeds of their own demise.

I have to admit that, as much as I pride myself on enjoying movies of all stripes, types and forms, I struggled to appreciate Metropolis in its previous best restoration, in which all of the sequences believed forever lost when Fritz Lang's original version was re-cut for American audiences are marked by mere place-holders. But the discovery of a complete (if badly damaged) copy in a small museum in Buenos Aires finally allows the film to be seen in a much more watchable form. Two short sequences are still missing (and after this miraculous find its too much to hope that they'll ever turn up), and the Buenos Aires footage is of a markedly lower quality than the rest of the film, but this only serves to underscore the fact that a lot of the most awesome parts of Metropolis were butchered.

Seeing it in its almost complete glory, I finally find myself able to get into the film and lend it the admiration I wasn't sure it deserved. It's not just the visionary depiction of a timeless city where gothic architecture survives in the shadows of massive art deco superstructures, but Gottfried Huppertz's incredible score (which is a pleasure to listen to in itself); Brigitte Helm's fantastic performance as both the humble, saintly Maria and her skittish, sexually-charged doppelgänger; the dense and simplistic cocktail of 1920s hopes and fears about everything from Communism to technological advancement; and, more than anything, the singular combination of pulp sensibilities, epic themes and masterful imagery that's as breathtaking now as it was over eighty years ago.

Monday Movie: A Town Called Panic

Somewhere in the serene papier mache countryside, a toy cowboy and Indian live with a horse, forever getting up to mischief. When their latest hijinks see horse's house completely obliterated, the trio knuckle down to rebuild it, only for each set of walls they build to be stolen by unseen criminals.

Chasing after the thieves, Cowboy, Indian and Horse blunder to the centre of the Earth, the bottom of the sea and the bowels of a terrible, terrible war machine. Will they recover their home, clear the name of their impossibly macho neighbour and get horse to his piano lessons on time? Well, if anyone can do it... it's probably not these three idiots.

A Town Called Panic (a.k.a. Panique au Village) blends rock-bottom crude animation with an epic, child-sized imagination to create an infectious, anarchic and bizarrely charming film where pretty much anything can happen.

Monday Movie: Speedy

"Speedy" (Harold Lloyd) has considerable trouble holding down a job, whether he's goofing off in an ice cream parlour or terrorizing passenger Babe Ruth by driving a taxi without looking where he's going. Fortunately, he has a devoted girlfriend with an amiable old father. This old-fashioned geezer also happens to be the man who drives the last horse-drawn trolley in New York - or at least, he does as long as he's able to maintain a service at least once every twenty-four hours. And some unscrupulous businessmen have a few ideas about that...

As Lloyd's last silent film, this saw his brand now carefully honed into exactly, well, you know, that kind of film that it was. Where the two other great "silent comedians" of the era were dedicated filmmakers with an interest in cinematic experimentation (in the case of Buster Keaton) or heartwarming storytelling (in the case of Charlie Chaplin), Harold Lloyd films were mostly just intended as vehicles for his comedic talent, happy to drop everything and run off in pursuit of any good gag. Speedy perhaps stands out in that it finds a structure where it all fits together quite nicely. Speedy's different jobs enable Lloyd to get involved in all manner of hijinks, a trip to Coney Island fair ground cements his chemistry with leading lady Ann Christy (in what was apparently both her big break and her last major picture), and the battle for the old trolley runs through a glorious slapstick street brawl before the inevitable madcap chase to the climax.

Monday Movie: Exit Through the Gift Shop

Meet Thierry Guetta, a man who films every moment of his life. When he discovers that his cousin is the French graffiti artist Space Invader, it's his induction into the world of street art. Soon he's accompanying all manner of guerilla artists on their sojourns around the cities of the globe, as they fight signposts and billboards for control of our visual space. His access extends as far as Shephard Fairey (whose iconic image of Barack Obama is known worldwide) and even the impossibly elusive Banksy. When anyone asks him just why he's filming everything, he responds with the obvious answer: he's making a documentary on street art. Eventually though, Banksy realises that Thierry is just "a guy with a camera and mental problems".

Exit Through the Gift Shop is a really interesting film, in a lot more ways than you might expect. At first it covers a broad perspective on street art, arguing that this is a way to put meaningful images in the public eye while side-stepping or corrupting corporate advertising and the art-gallery establishment. And then, in Thierry, or "Mr Brainwash" as he starts to call himself, it goes on to show this very process going spectacularly awry, projecting someone into the public eye who has no talent or originality beyond his unwavering self-belief and an innate knack for generating hype.

But, hang on a moment, I can't fail to mention that there's also the nagging suspicion that Mr Brainwash may himself just be the latest Banksy piece, a bizarre self-parody, or a parody of people's perceptions of Banksy and his career - and in some way, despite what Banksy may say at the start of the film, this actually is a film about him. Isn't that just the kind of stunt he'd pull?

(I also have to mention that the UK DVD comes in a really cool cardboard box, with a kaleidoscopic pair of "unique 2D glasses". It does not, regrettably, come with subtitles.)