Glock holiday

Spring Breakers, the new sensation from Harmony Korine of Kids, Gummo and Trash Humpers infamy, reminds us once again how different American youth culture is from our own, no matter how hegemonic and irresistible its occupation feels, as our defences fall like pathetic dominoes before exported concepts like prom night, seasons, sweet sixteens, EDM, “Can I get …?” and local elections for police chiefs. Lord, save us from Spring Break. Were this film to be set in this country – or in Ayia Napa, Ibiza or whatever latest fleshpot British sixth-formers and gap-yearers flock to for sun, sex and sexually transmitted disease – it would be called The Easter Holidays. Not quite as alluring, is it?

The very phrase, “Spring Break … Spring Break,” is uttered again and again through Spring Breakers like a mantra, as if it’s Mecca or Oz calling, as opposed to Florida. The film, whose sense of occasion is never in doubt, even if its motives are, depicts a beach babe bingo Bacchanalia, the kind seen in rap videos, or, these days, cameraphone footage, where arse-cellulite vibrates to booming bass, liquid refreshment is siphoned through rubber tubes or simply applied to the skin, and flesh is fancifully fried like a human barbecue. It’s Club 18-30 without a rep in sight.

I have never been on a holiday like this. But you have to hand it to Korine, who’s 40 now: he “gets” what goes on away from prying parental eyes between the second and third semester, and it looks for all the world like the one captured in The Inbetweeners Movie, except without the bidet jokes and the failure to score drugs or have sex.

The music – “Electronic Dance Music” or EDM, the umbrella term over there for house, techno and/or dubstep, so it seems – is key, as it doesn’t just soundtrack these adventures in the skin trade, it provides the pounding, pulsing rhythm of their all-out, non-stop, heads-down hedonism. During their Easter hols, pleasure is their guiding principle and nothing else. If that pleasure might require danger to spice it – cocaine, armed robbery, drive-bys, premeditated murder – so be it. A quick call home to Mom and Dad will cover the cracks. (The wilder this vacation gets, the more demure, innocent and spiritual the calls home become.)

The girls whose story is told in Spring Breakers are played by previously wholesome Mouseketeer types – inspired casting, if you know their CVs, which I’m afraid I didn’t – Candy is Vanessa Hudgens, previously known for High School Musical, Brit is Ashley Benson from Days Of Our Lives, Cotty is the director’s wife Rachel, whose background is less apple-pie, and Faith is Selina Gomez, as famous for being the ex of “the famous pop singer who likes Anne Frank” as being in Disney’s Wizards Of Waverly Place. They are spring broke at the end of term and are forced to rob a Chicken Shack to afford the trip to Tampa, where the action is.

I’m no student of Korine’s work, but I understand that this is being marketed as his most accessible film. It certainly may appeal on a base level to – presumably – the spring breakers whose hedonism it surely seeks to satirise and critique. I certainly felt, at the outset – and the film is a compelling riot of colour, music and movement – that we were in for a debunking of the moral and intellectual vacuum occupied by moneyed American teens. When the film takes its inevitable darker turn – when the Miami PD turn up, basically – and this particularly thin American dream morphs into a nightmare, I thought I knew what was going on.

But, without giving away the plot (such as it is; Spring Breakers feels like a dream sequence unmoored from hard reality come the final reel), Korine winds up complicit in MTV-gangsta-rap fantasies.There may be a price to pay for earlier pleasure-seeking, but there is little redemption or comeuppance.

Although full of flesh, and dictated by a rhythm of grinding hips and bottoms, it’s not as sexually explicit as you might expect, and Selina Gomez, in particular, does not do as much to shock or scorch her own image, as, say, Benson or Hudgens, but as far as you can tell, very little actual sex takes places. Maybe this is a comment? That the lifestyle is all bump and grind and no sexual congress?

If the film is a comment upon “Spring Break” itself, I would argue that, in the end, it’s not much of one. In its favour, it is visually splendid, however, all bright pinks and pastel oranges (and that’s just the skin tones etc.), and runs on a pretty persuasive energy. And James Franco is, as well as unrecognisable, thrilling in the main male role of silver-toothed charmer Alien, a drug dealer who manages to be appealing as well as repellent. His “Look at my shit!” speech, surely improvised by Franco, is a highlight of the film.

Pi-eyed

I know. We’ve been here before, but I think the point still needs making, and I know I’m not the first, or only, cinephile to make it: but can we just stop with the 3D now, please?

It being the awards season, I’m doing my usual January mop-up of “awards movies” that slipped through my net, or else have not yet been released. (People are always asking me to comment on awards nominations and make predictions; this is easier if I have seen the films! If I hadn’t lost my voice, you would have seen me on BBC News possibly twice last week, but I’ve not been terribly well since making the foolhardy decision to stop working for a week over Christmas.) This week, valiantly, I’ve seen previews of Lincoln, Django Unchained and Flight, caught up with The Impossible and Argo, and I have Zero Dark Thirty booked in for Monday. Yesterday I finally saw Life Of Pi.

Why didn’t I see Life Of Pi when it came out in December? Apart from the demoralising Coldplay song all over the trailer? Because Life Of Pi is presented in, and was designed to be seen in, 3D. This, I understand, is because it’s based on a Booker Prize-winning book which is mainly about a boy trapped in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, and was thus considered a tricky sell, and might explain why it took a decade to get to the screen. So, for all its “arthouse” credentials – directed by Ang Lee, and accordingly taken very seriously by Sight & Sound, who put it on the cover of their December issue – it’s been cooked up and marketed as a magical holiday “event” movie. By presenting it in 3D, instead of a film about a boy on a boat based on a book, it becomes a spectacle you cannot afford to miss this Christmas/New Year; an “OMG” moment. (Incidentally, the print I saw yesterday came with a teaser imploring us to “share our feelings” about the film on Facebook and Twitter, which irked me to my boots.) Result: it’s been garlanded with nominations: three Golden Globes, 9 Baftas, 11 Oscars.

Now, my local cinema has been showing it in 3D and 2D, so the option was there, and I was grateful for that. (They were equally accommodating with The Hobbit, although my reasons for not having seen that yet are because I don’t have the energy.) However, with Pi, because I left it too late, there are far fewer convenient 2D screenings left, and I was forced to see it in 3D yesterday afternoon. Also, and I’ll be perfectly honest here, it was clearly going to be such a spectacle, maybe I ought to see it as Ang Lee intended. Maybe I ought to get over myself?

Well, it was a bad decision. This is a visually sumptuous film, its first act shot in the actual region of India where Yann Martel’s novel is set. So, even before we get to the middle of the ocean after the shipwreck, there is much to feast the eyes upon. Except, the eyes are locked out of the film behind a perimeter fence; the 3D glasses. Now, I’m not going to blame “smears” this time. My 3D glasses were clean and clear. But the very act of putting them on, in order to unlock the illusion of three dimensionality, places a barrier between you and the light. The sun in Pondicherry is blazing and bright. I lifted my glasses to have a sneaky, blurred look at it: it was pure white in the sky above Pi as he went about his business. As soon as you lower the glasses, it is dulled. It is slushy grey. It’s no wonder 3D films work so badly when the action occurs at night.

The shipwreck scene, spectacularly done in CGI, with swelling waves and crashing water to make The Perfect Storm and Poseidon seem like cartoons (computer technology moves so fast), occurs at night. For all the wizardry at play, and the “depth” of the 3D, it’s so dark, you can barely make out what’s happening. The second half is where we get the meat of the matter: teenage boy and crouching tiger in single lifeboat on an often millpond-calm sea. Many amazing sights are laid on for us: flying fish, luminous plankton, a leaping humpback whale. These might be enhanced by the 3D, if the colours weren’t muddied by the 3D. I tire of wearing those specs, and I tire of watching films through them, even when the illusion has the desired effect of … well, making something look closer than it is, or making something look like it’s in front of another thing.

The benefits are far outweighed by the defects, for me. I look forward to seeing Life Of Pi on DVD, or TV, in 2D. I’m sure it will still be a visual feast. All the work that went into creating that tiger out of pixels will still be there to marvel at, and be moved by. The relationship between Pi and the tiger will still exist. The story will still be told. Ang Lee’s direction and vision will still be intact. But I won’t be wearing heavy glasses, and the colours will be glorious, instead of muted, and gloomy. It’s a price I’m prepared to pay. (Or not pay, as I understand some cinemas charge extra for 3D, which is a bloody cheek.)

I’ve seen 3D used cleverly, in Pina, for instance. And it’s used sympathetically in some of the sequences in Pi. (The effect of making swimmers look as if they are swimming in the sky is definitely enhanced by the trick.) But it’s not just muddying the colours, it’s muddying the artistic decisions being made by directors and studios.

Oh, and that tagline? I am always prepared to believe the unbelievable. It’s what I go to the cinema for. I don’t need assistance.

Beasts; burden

Here’s a thing. Beasts Of The Southern Wild opens in cinemas today. I saw an advance London preview of this film in August, which is unusual for me, as I’m happier waiting for a film’s release, but my interest was piqued by a rave review in the New Yorker back in June by the reliable David Denby, in which he hailed it as “the first classic of the Long Recession” and “a joyous movie”, praising its “exciting palpability”, its “oxygen-sharp sense of the present tense” and describing it as “raucous and alive.” That it has no star names, was shot on location on the Louisiana coast using many locals and non-actors, and is the feature debut of 29-year-old director Benh Zeitlin and co-screenwriter Lucy Alibar pushed it right to the front of the queue for me. What was this film Beasts of the Southern Wild?

Well, I, like many other critics who’ve been fortunate enough to see it in advance (it showed at Cannes and Sundance, and, this week, the London Film Festival), was totally bowled over by it. I have reviewed it for Radio Times and given it five stars. Now, I am very careful when handing out five-star reviews. I’m not a film critic who has to see every film that’s released every week, and I like to think this makes me less jaded and broken by the sheer weight of chaff, and gives me a level head. It’s dangerous to rate a film when you walk out of the cinema or screening room, and since August I have reconsidered and regrouped, and I still think it’s worth five stars.

However, there’s a problem with five-star reviews: they can be “quoted” on a film’s publicity without any supporting language. My five stars have indeed been included on print ads for Beasts, alongside many others. The ads are lit up by a veritable constellation of stars. This is a film that seems to stand apart from the herd – magical and heartfelt, yet dark and foreboding; naturalistic due to the involvement of untrained actors and the tactile bayou setting, but hyperreal at the same time, with fantasy and overstatement thrown in – which means it won’t delight everybody. That’s usually the yardstick question you must ask yourself as a critic before handing out five stars: will anybody be able to enjoy it? Is it the equal of Casablanca?

Who can know for sure? Not everybody would like Casablanca! (It’s in black and white!) Wanting to see a film again, soon after seeing it for the first time, is a good gauge for me. And I can’t wait to see Beasts of the Southern Wild again.

So what is it? It’s a fable set on the wrong side of the flood defences in New Orleans, where the dirt-poor subsist, literally, off the fruits of the sea, and barter not just crayfish and crab, but stories and mythology and camaraderie. This is an ecosystem, and it’s viewed through the eyes of the six-year-old Hushpuppy, played by newcomer Quvenzhané Wallis, who also narrates. I thought she was a boy at first, but she’s a girl. Her lone parent Wink, a functioning drunk with a good heart that’s also a bad heart, is played with dignity and depth by another non-thesp, baker Dwight Henry. And there’s a storm – another storm, as this seems to be post-Katrina – brewing.

What is already a ramshackle shanty town looks all the more precarious with a hurricane looming, but these people have nothing, and thus have nothing to lose. If you’re worried that this is “class tourism”, a gap-year view of poverty, don’t be. I never felt that Zeitlin or Alimar were patronising these resilient people; rather, offering them up as a lifeline out of the apparently “civilised” mess the rest of us on the other side of the wall are in.

The image that dominates the trailer and the posters is the one where Hushpuppy runs through exploding fireworks. This is not typical of the film, certainly not the bulk of it. The stampeding prehistoric aurochs – giant boar – are another image that should not be overplayed. They’re key, but do not dominate. It’s more about survival, and family, and hope, those unfashionable kinds of things. I love the way Hushpuppy holds animals and birds up to her ear, so she can hear their breathing – just to reassure herself that they are alive. It could have been hokey, but for me, it’s not. It feels warm and vital and real.

I’m just concerned that a film which actually deserves to be discovered is now being rammed down people’s throats. It may not be able to live up to the hype. It has big ideas, but it’s a small film. It’s not The Help. It’s not Driving Miss Daisy. It’s not The Color Purple. It’s not really about “color” at all. Neither, closer to home, is it HBO’s syncopated New Orleans-set Treme, whose defining local/political point of view feels conventional by comparison. It’s a bit like George Washington and The Wizard Of Oz, if either helps, but it’s mainly not like much else.

Nick Pinkerton, reviewing in Sight & Sound, pulled it to bits; more importantly, he called out all the critics who had given it five stars, and accused us all of being hoodwinked. (Somebody on Twitter called me “conceited” for suggesting that the rave reviews for Killing Them Softly were a bit over the top, but I never accused my fellow critics of being duped, which is, you might say, a bit conceited. I simply thought a five-star film by some consensus was more of a three.)

I would love to know what people think of this unlikely film. I’ve been living with my five stars since the first week of August, and now they’ve been pressed into service to promote the film, I’m feeling responsible. It’s my Beasts burden.

2011: skill list

Now, I was asked to compile my Top 10 films for the Radio Times website a couple of weeks. I found I couldn’t reduce the year in film down to ten choices, so I did 12. Well, I’ve had a couple of weeks to adjust, and I’ve seen two more films that deserve recognition, so I’ve decided to go nuts and expand it to a Top 20. This has, it turns out, been a good year for films.

1. Drive

Ryan Gosling had an amazing year – especially in terms of being fancied by heterosexual men – but although The Ides of March, Crazy, Stupid Love and Blue Valentine (in which we see him as a balding, paunchy, older version of himself) showed him off, this was the film that surely anointed him as one of the most exciting, sexy, subtle actors of our time: as a driver-for-hire in Nicolas Winding-Refn’s superstylised LA-set thriller, Quentin Tarantino-like in its sheer arrogance. Although horribly violent in places, it’s the shock of these scenes that holds the power, and subsequent viewings – which Drive merits – cauterise their repulsion factor, and you can watch with your eyes wide open. (Interestingly, I have never seen a Winding-Refn film before, despite having his Pusher films on DVD in my cupboard.)

2. The Artist

Didn’t see this one coming, but I’m glad I waited until the actual end of the year before carving this list into stone tablets. It exists in a category all of its own, and stands apart from the rest of the list (while there is a lot of crossover between other pictures, whether in terms of casting or theme).

3. A Separation

An Iranian film that pushed back the boundaries of what could be portrayed in a kitchen-sink drama in a still-oppressive country, this was a tantalising glimpse into the world of day-to-day middle-class life in Tehran, in which a couple simply seek a divorce in the face of a patriarchal society. If a film can be a window on another culture, then Asghar Fahardi’s domestic drama is it. An education in the most enlightening sense of the word.

4. Tyrannosaur

It still feels odd to recommend a film that’s violent, harrowing and depressing but Paddy Considine’s feature-length directorial debut is not a film you’ll forget easily. It’s always on my mind. Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman and Eddie Marsan are superb as a triangle of damaged souls, whose individual calamities seem insoluble. In the best tradition of British film-making. Makes This Is England ’88 seem like a sitcom. Avoid if you find implied violence towards dogs difficult to stomach.

5. Melancholia

Arguably Lars von Trier’s best work, certainly his most visually sumptuous; an end-of-the-world disaster movie combined with a Mike Leigh-style wedding reception from hell. I found it profound and moving, and actually very scary. Best thing Kirsten Dunst has done, too.

6. Animal Kingdom

As if we needed any more proof that the Australian film industry was in tip-top shape, this brooding, tense but thoroughly believable suburban crime drama was a smash hit in Oz in 2010 (released here in February this year) and earned Jacki Weaver, as the Melbourne family matriarch, an Oscar nomination.

7. The Deep Blue Sea

Terence Davies, a unique British talent who stays away for too long at a time, provided the year’s most torridly romantic film in his liberty-taking adaptation of the 1952 Terrence Rattigan play set in bombed-out, postwar London. Rachel Weisz is impeccable, rising star Tom Hiddleston (also seen in Archipelago, Midnight in Paris and, less probably, Thor) even looks like a 1950s matinee idol.

8. The Guard

An Irish film in all but funding – and its talented writer-director John Michael McDonagh (brother of Martin) is actually London Irish by birth – this low-budget, Connemara-set police buddy movie is all heart. Witty and scurrilous by turns, it gives Brendan Gleeson a homegrown role that only he could properly play as a Galway Garda visited by Don Cheadle’s FBI man to help bust a drug ring. This is where I like to go on holiday, so it gave me real pangs in a year when I couldn’t afford to go on holiday.

9. Kill List

More horrible violence, but narratively justified in Ben Wheatley’s follow-up to the low-budget Down Terrace (which I’ve never seen), in which two hitmen get mixed up in something far nastier than they imagined. Like Melancholia, it goes for the Mike Leigh vibe early on, but mutates into something else. Seems like it was a good year for British, and Irish, cinema, with emergent, original talent everywhere you looked (Joe Cornish, Richard Ayoade). You may need to avert your eyes, at least once. I did.

10. Meek’s Cutoff

I love a modern western, and Kelly Reichardt’s dusty, authentic Oregon Trail fable was the height of visual splendour and languid storytelling. Michelle Williams – also fantastic in Blue Valentine; I’ve not yet seen her in My Week With Marilyn – might be America’s most reliable screen actress.

11. We Need to Talk About Kevin

Our own Lynne Ramsay made her American debut with this stark and inventive telling of Lionel Shriver’s bestselling novel about the gulf between mother and first-born son. It’s actually a UK/US co-production, and it stars Tilda Swinton, but the subject matter is definitively American: high-school shootings. Ramsay finds beauty amid all the hate and violence.

12. Senna

Documentary of the year, in a crowded field, Asif Kapadia’s skillful and compelling montage of Formula One star Ayrton Senna’s firework-like ten-year Grand Prix career, which ended in tragedy, tells its tale without narration, using only existing footage and spoken testimony. I hate motor racing, and I was gripped.

13. The Tree of Life

With Terence Davies and Terrence Malick back in the same year, somebody is spoiling us. Malick also takes his time between films, but really pulled one out of the hat with an apocalyptic tale that takes us back to 1950s America and uses abstract, scientific imagery to suggest the creation of life and its apparent doom. Heavy stuff, but how nice for US cinema to produce something this challenging.

14. Another Earth

I mentioned to Peter Bradshaw that I thought he was too hard on this debut feature from Mike Cahill – he gave it two stars in the Guardian – and he said that maybe he expected too much from its premise. I had lower expectations, although I was intrigued by the trailer, and I felt it hit the spot. A moving and philosophically provocative slice of no-budget sci-fi.

15. True Grit

Easy to take this for granted, but another modern western that – like all the best modern westerns – loves the old westerns. The Coen Brothers on top form.

16. Take Shelter

Of a piece with Melancholia, Contagion and The Tree Of Life – and even Another Earth – for its interest in the end of the world and more cosmic matters than, say, a global recession, this was director Jeff Nichols proving himself a talent to watch, with Michael Shannon perfectly cast as the Ohio engineer plagued by apocalyptic visions that may, or may not, be rooted in a genuine approaching storm.

17. Beginners

It’s been a good – and bad – year from dogs in film. They were being strangled in Wuthering Heights and kicked to death in Tyrannosaur, while Uggie the Jack Russell in The Artist and Cosmo the Jack Russell in Beginners, were having much more meaningful roles, and saving the day. The latter, from writer/director Mike Mills (not that one), is the kind of American indie that gives the economic imperative-cum-genre a good name. Best thing Ewan McGregor’s done for ages, and Christopher Plummer as his gay dad might well find himself Oscar-nominated.

18. Contagion

Timely dramatisation of a global pandemic in which everybody is famous, this was a modern day disaster movie that might have been made especially for me. Stephen Soderbergh will be sadly missed if he really does retire to paint, as he’s threatening.

19. The Skin I Live In

A film whose imagery has stayed with me, Pedro Almodovar’s tribute to 1930s “mad professor” horror movies inevitably manages to work in transgender issues and rape, and although not as obviously ravishing as Volver, packed with audacious ideas.

20. X-Men: First Class

You see? Credit where credit’s due. A comic-book sci-fi blockbuster can find its way into my Top 20.

The next 10: Archipelago; Blue Valentine; 127 Hours; Pina; Sarah’s Key; Dreams Of A Life; 13 Assassins; Salt of Life; George Harrison: Living in the Material World; Black Swan

Worst film of the year: The Tourist

The height of cruelty?

As mentioned previously, I have a problem with Wuthering Heights, Andrea Arnold’s stunningly elemental interpretation of Emily Brontë’s famous novel, and that’s with the implied animal cruelty in it. It’s set on the wild and windy moors, of course, and through Arnold’s radical and beautiful vision, we almost literally have our noses rubbed in the mud of this unforgiving rural landscape. By use of shallow focus and forensically sharp digital stock, she takes us right down into the undergrowth, there to see dewdrops glistening on a single strand of a spider’s web, or a thread of sheep’s wool snagged on a thistle. We can almost smell a horse’s breath, or feel the hairs on its head. It’s thrilling filmmaking, and a piece of cinema I would recommend you see, despite its narrative deficiencies. Unless you have a problem with the implied mistreatment of animals.

Using a largely unknown, and inexperienced, young cast, Arnold imbues what is for many a familiar love story with new life. (I have never read the book, but I’ve seen it on TV and heard the hit single.) She and her screenwriter Olivia Hetreed make Heathcliff black, rather than a gypsy, which brings a new power to his relationship with Cathy. As I note in my much shorter Radio Times review of the film, the detailed sound design, lack of score and action-chasing handheld camera bring the story alive. And Shannon Beer and Solomon Glave are striking as the young Cathy and Heathcliff. It’s such a modernist approach, almost as if this version is a guerilla documentary about a more conventional dramatisation of Wuthering Heights, captured on the hoof for the second disc of the DVD, your suspension of disbelief is occasionally shattered and, ironically, you start to think: it’s some actors on a hill. Indeed, it’s the reality of it that gives me my Big Problem.

The film carries a 15 certificate, which, according to the detailed BBFC report, is mainly to do with the strong language – which is only moderately fruity albeit at one point racist to modern ears – and what it refers to as “animal killings.” This is what the report goes on to state: “There are four scenes involving live animals, with a sheep’s throat being cut, a rabbit’s neck being broken and two dogs seen hanging from their collars from a fence and a branch, implying that they are left to die. Assurances have been provided by the production company explaining in detail how these scenes were filmed, including detail of special effects employed, so as not to harm any of the animals involved.”

I have to take that at face value. I don’t know how they used special effects to make it look like two dogs were being hung on a gatepost and a branch, but it looks just like they are actual dogs being actually hung, for a few seconds, by their collars, and are left, for a few seconds, to wriggle around uncomfortably. It’s easy enough to imagine animal trainers rushing in to unhook them after being on film for a few seconds, but that can’t be the case, surely? To be honest, as I never tire of saying, even implied violence towards animals onscreen bothers me. In a week when one prize fucking idiot was caught on camera actually swinging a cat around by its tail, and another was apparently stolen after being featured in an article in the London Evening Standard, I worry about people. And if animal cruelty is shown, even in an arthouse film, it might subconsciously go in.

I’m going to trust Andrea Arnold and the BBFC and accept that, somehow or other, no dogs were even made uncomfortable for a few seconds in the making of this film. But if you’re as soppy as I am, you might want to be ready to look away, or stay away.

Who art in Kevin

This is one of those films I saw quite a while ago, but it’s released this Friday, so let’s get my feelings down. We Need To Talk About Kevin is a rare beast, in that it’s based on a novel that I have read. Yes, a novel that I have read! (If you don’t know me by now, you’ll never, never, never know that if I’m reading a book, it will be a non-fiction book, as I’m too hungry for knowledge to read things that are made up and with each passing day I become hungrier.) As such, I can be one of those bores who leave the cinema and say, “Well, it’s not as good as the book.”

Of course the film isn’t as good as the book. Whatever film it is, it’s going to be shorter than the book, unless it’s a tiny book, and when you read the book, you imagined what it would be like, in your imagination, and thus any visual interpretation of the book will be other than your own, and intrinsically disappointing. Unless the film’s screenwriter and director happen to have cast, interpreted and shot the film exactly as you imagined it, it’s going to feel weird. Also, if you love the book – and we’ve been down this read recently with One Day – no filmmaker is going to be able to match that love, as they will have had to hack the story back, and details you know will be missing. Sometimes whole characters. Certainly whole scenes. I was once asked to come up with a list of five films that are better than the book for an item on The One Show. Off the top of my head, and up for a fight, I think I chose A Clockwork Orange (because Burgess’s book is, while seminal, for me, difficult to read even on a good day, and the film is easier to follow), The Shining (because Kubrick – again! – extracted the right bits from a fairly dense novel and made Jack Torrance the focus and not his son, Danny) and … three others which I can’t remember. It’s a pretty audacious thing to judge. Better not to compare. As I am about to do …

I came late to Lionel Shriver’s book. It was first published in 2003 and I don’t believe I picked it up until around 2007, after it had won the Orange Prize. I knew roughly what it was about – although to be fair, this is given away on the blurb on the back, which makes it more interesting and not less – and I knew it was widely acclaimed. I’d also had it recommended to me. I’m sure I must have resisted. It sounded like a book about parenting and wondered if I’d be able to connect with it.

Well, I was able, and it actually offered a lucid insight into parenting. In daring to investigate the issues around a mother who hates her child, from birth, Shriver seems to say the unsayable. By making Kevin something of a monster, as a baby, as a toddler, and eventually as the sociopathic high schooler, but telling the story exclusively from the mother Eva’s perspective, the author allows us the cold comfort of possibility that his monstrousness is at least partly in Eva’s imagination. Certainly, Franklin, the doughy old softy of a dad, doesn’t see him this way. Kevin does bad things, for sure. And if you haven’t read or seen it, I won’t even hint at what those things might be.

The book is presented as a series of letters written by Eva to her by-now-estranged husband, through which the story gathers momentum. Lynne Ramsay, who directed We Need To Talk About Kevin and co-wrote it with Rory Stewart Kinnear, might not be your first choice to take on such a huge task. Her previous work had been personal, esoteric and impressionistic. And British. Her astonishing debut Ratcatcher was set in the Glasgow in which she grew up, and at a time, 1973, when she was growing up in it. It was raw, and moving, and boldly mixed social realism with moments of quasi-fantasy, certainly rapture, and marked her out from the word go as a talent. (It picked up awards like a magnet.) Her follow-up, Morvern Callar, based on the Alan Warner novel, showed that she could work with existing material, but make that her own, too. It was, if anything, less linear and more fuzzy, and was quite a trip. How would Ramsay – whom I interviewed for Radio 4 at the time and found her humble, likeable and determined – follow this? Well, she didn’t.

She got caught up in what sounds like a nightmare, down to adapt and direct her first blockbuster novel, The Lovely Bones, and eventually forced off the project, if I understand it correctly. It can’t have been a happy experience, and the only Ramsay credit we’ve seen between 2002 and this coming Friday was her video for Doves’ Black and White Town. This was a tragedy. So all hail We Need To Talk About Kevin; not only does it prove that she’s the equal of any bestselling source novel – and would surely have made a far better job of The Lovely Bones than Peter Jackson did – but it puts her back on the circuit.

Throwing out the letters and presenting a straightforward narrative, Ramsay and Kinnear nonetheless play with the chronology, and it is this approach that makes the film so intriguing. You really have to pay attention. And even if you see the pivotal event coming, you won’t see what comes after it coming. (Unless you’ve read the book, of course! Luckily, I’d actually forgotten it.) The film grips because of finely tuned performances from Tilda Swinton as the mother who has the joy squeezed right out of her lovely bones, John C Reilly as her soulmate turned antagonist, and Ezra Miller as the teenaged Kevin, all asymmetric fringe and glowering eyes. In chopping the story up into bitesize chunks and throwing them all up the air to see how they land, Ramsay creates a fractured narrative that says so much with glances and glimpses and hints. Usually, when you’ve seen a film’s trailer as many times as regular visitors to the Curzon have done, you look forward to discovering the wider context of the snapshots therein. With this film, you may find that they are merely part of slightly longer snapshots. This also gives the impression of it being a saga remembered. It’s not playing out before your very eyes, but in the memory of its chief protagonist.

I really loved it. It’s dark and foreboding, hot and stuffy, and convincingly American, and through Swinton’s exacting and subtle performance, it provides an X-ray of a mother in distress. It’s as if you can see through her translucent, Scottish skin and watch her soul squirming around within. It’s not a great film to see if you’re thinking of starting a family, especially, I would imagine, if you’re the prospective carrier of this progeny.

Lynne Ramsay, still only 41, has yet to put a foot wrong in her career. But while Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar worked on a relatively small canvas, Kevin is much bigger, much more mainstream, but without ever losing its eye for detail, or its feel for the arthouse.

One wedding and a funeral

As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing like a disaster movie. And Melancholia is nothing like a disaster movie. It is, however, more like a disaster movie than you might expect from a mischievous and iconoclastic filmmaker like Lars Von Trier. After his last film, the unforgettable but problematic Antichrist – which I reviewed here – I was expecting something mercifully less horrific, and the ubiquitous trailer certainly led me to this expectation: Melancholia seemed to be about a group of people at a country-house wedding on the eve of the possibility of the end of the world. Having seen it at the Curzon on Sunday, I can tell you that it is and it isn’t.

A world apart from Von Trier’s earlier, Dogme 95-influenced works – Breaking The Waves, The Idiots, Dancer In The Dark (although as pedants will gleefully tell you, only the middle one of those actually abides by the Dogme 95 manifesto), and their theatrical, anti-style follow-ups Dogville and Manderlay, Antichrist and Melancholia seem to inhabit grander worlds, visually ravishing, artistically precise, proudly cinematic. Antichrist went into the woods to discover primal and disturbing things about the human condition; Melancholia spends the weekend at a magnificent turn-of-the-century country manor house (actually, Tjolöholm Castle in Halland, Sweden), but achieves the same end. And the end is its cosmic vanishing point: a rogue planet, called Melancholia, is set to pass by this one at a specified time, but there seems to be an off-chance that it will hit us, and cause the apocalypse. Despite the gravity of the situation, nobody seems to follow this event on TV or radio, as would be the case in a Hollywood film about the apocalypse, in which the media response would be as vital as the response of the protagonists. This failure, or refusal, to engage, merely increases the sense of isolation for our characters. (One character looks up Melancholia on the internet, but it’s as if the laptop is forbidden contraband.)

For a self-professed depressive – and one who apparently clawed himself out of a dark place by making the terrifying Antichrist – Von Trier has clearly inserted himself into the action, and inaction, of Melancholia by way of Kirsten Dunst’s Justine. That’s her, above, floating in the water of her own premonitory dreams at the very beginning of the film, Ophelia-like. (Oh, by the way, once again, Von Trier writes and directs what is essentially a Danish film, set in Sweden, but in the English language, using predominantly American and British actors, who use their own accent even when, say, the American Dunst and the Anglo-French Charlotte Gainsbourg are supposed to be sisters. In any case, the language in Melancholia seems far more naturalistic than in the more psychoanalytical Antichrist.)

Justine – a full-bodied and magnetic performance by Dunst – is a depressive who’s somehow agreed to marry the seemingly blameless and sympathetic Michael (Alexander Skarsgård), a man she cannot love. Their wedding reception, organised by her straightlaced sister and held at she and her filthy-rich husband Keifer Sutherland’s remote hotel where time seems to stand still, is an unsuitably lavish and formal affair, whose very opulence frames Justine’s inevitable descent into, well, melancholia, which takes disturbing form as the festivities collapse into black farce. (I am not the first the spot the similarities to fellow Dogme 95 man Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen, whose hotel celebration was similarly rent asunder. It’s so obvious it barely needs pointing out.)

In this first section – named after Justine (the second act is named after Gainsbourg’s Claire) – Von Trier has his expected pops at posh people, but allows plenty of humanity to seep through what is a kind of nightmarish social comedy, thanks in part to the warmth of John Hurt’s performance as a rogeuish father, to Skarsgärd’s guileless charm, and to the camp humour of Udo Keir’s wedding planner. Von Trier drinks in the grand, partly studio-created surroundings, and the vast grounds of the castle at night, enjoying the sheer cinema of the sequence in which hot air balloons, inscribed with marker-pen messages of love from the guests, are released into the night sky – the sky that will later be filled with the approaching blue planet that will vaporise ours.

The second half is a chamber piece, after the wedding, when the guests are all gone, and Justine is now lost to her dark side, this bout of depression almost totally debilitating, and which recasts Claire as her carer, much to the inconvenience of the boorish Sutherland, whose main job is now to convince their young son, Leo, and his jittery wife, that Melancholia will pass gloriously by and not bring about the end of the world. Naturally, the depressed Justine’s attitude is: bring it on.

Melancholia is full of arresting, ambiguous, apocalyptic visions. It actually begins with a premonition that the world will indeed end, and gives dream-like glimpses of how it might play out in these opulent surroundings. (There’s a nice gag among the doom and gloom in this prologue where we see Claire clutching Leo in her arms and running across a golf green; the flag tells us that it’s the 19th hole.) There’s no denying that Von Trier is now an accomplished visual artist. He makes explicit references to art – a Breughel painting, The Hunters In Winter, is seen burning at the beginning; the Ophelia link is clear; and various key works are highlighted when Justine manhandles a series of coffee table art books into a display at the hotel – which is to be expected in an “art” film, but he creates art of his own, too: he dwarfs figures against the manicured lawns while the “extra” planet looms down from the night sky. This approach is painterly and can be consumed and admired as such.

I made the connection to the work of Peter Greenaway while watching Antichrist, and it’s even more distinct here. He’s not as playful as Greenaway, whose 80s films often felt like puzzles to be solved by smart alecks, but Von Trier has developed a similarly keen sense of visual rhyme. (Without going into any plot details, there is a small bridge over a stream, and twice we see a horse refuse to cross it, and later, an electric golf cart. This is not an accident; this means something! The horse refuses to cross it out of fear or foreboding, but of its own accord; the car simply runs out of juice before crossing it. Discuss?)

In all, it’s a gorgeous looking film, with a powerful sense of foreboding. Even though it begins with the end, we have no real way of knowing if what we’ve seen is a flashforward, or a paranoid delusion, perhaps from the fevered mind of Justine. You can make your own mind up when you see it. Lars Von Trier can be annoying. He can dress up pretence in emperor’s finery. But he’s also transforming himself into quite a showman. It takes some front to use Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde to soundtrack the impending destruction of the planet, as if to underline the “operatic” nature of the film. It’s not Armageddon, but it is the end of the world as he knows it.

The nasty things in life

Here’s a film I’d like to recommend, but I can only do so with a warning. The low-budget British horror-thriller Kill List, the follow-up to even-lower-budget crime chamber piece Down Terrace from one-to-watch Ben Wheatley, is easily the most exciting film released this week. Nothing else touches it. In fact, the Disney-produced, all-star, 15-certificate, big-budget horror remake, Fright Night 3D, shrivels to nothing next to it. Fright Night has some shocks, and some fancy effects, and some “Boo!” moments (none of which made me jump), but Kill List has a sense of dread that is maintained from one end to the other. And that’s much harder to cook up.

I didn’t catch Down Terrace, but I remember reading a lot about it. If it’s anything like this, stylistically, it won’t be everybody’s cup of tea. Kill List starts out – as every other critic has spotted, but it’s true – like a Mike Leigh drama, with a hellish dinner party going off the rails. This is uncomfortable enough. But when the two male characters, Jay (Neil Maskell) and Gal (Michael Smiley), are revealed to be professional contract killers, their domestic lives become all the more charged. They take on a lucrative job, which involves a list of three people they must kill, and their friendship is sorely tested by what ensues. It’s effectively a thriller that turns into horror, but it’s best you don’t know quite how, as I didn’t, and it makes the third act all the more explosive.

It’s sly and witty, and at the same time, often unbearably tense and brutal. The script, written by Wheatley and his wife Amy Jump, has been enhanced by improvisation from the four main leads, and it helps to underpin the realism. Its strength lies in the believability of Jay and Gal’s relationship, so when the cracks appear, we know what’s at stake: years of mutual support and empathy. They understand each other, and we understand them. They are not the cartoon, superfly hitmen of Tarantino’s hyperreal universe; they are two blokes getting on with their work. When they steal shampoos from a hotel, it’s humorous, but also entirely credible. Of course they would. Who wouldn’t?

Maskell and Smiley (with whom I used to work on Channel 4′s Naked City in the early 90s) are first rate. Though there are conventional thriller elements at play here – the jeopardy that spreads from their professional lives into their private lives – the destination is anything but predictable. Much of it is confusing, although Wheatley insists it fits together if you look at all the clues. I’ll have to watch it again. And you should watch it, too. Except …

You might not enjoy it. It contains “very strong bloody violence” according to the BBFC. They’re not joking. There is one scene, in particular, that almost turned my stomach. It had me trying to look away from the screen – and, naturally, being drawn to turn back and face it. This is not a film with a big special effects budget, but it’s been done brilliantly and resourcefully, such that the violence is horrifically, noisily real. This is not cartoon violence. This is messy. And ugly. I was surrounded by jaded, seasoned film critics at a screening this week, and after the scene in question ended, you could hear a mass exhalation, a mix of relief and exhaustion.

So I can’t recommend it, unless you have a strong stomach. I got through it. You might prefer not to watch a film that you have to get through.

I have seen the nasty bits in all the main nasty films, from the bit where the guy gets his head smashed in on the marble steps at the start of Wild At Heart to the act of self-harm in Antichrist, and in many ways, I wish I could wipe them from my mind. I can’t. I sort of admire filmmakers for having the power to do this. But I have always been forewarned, and ignored the warning, so I’m warning you now, pansies, so you can ignore me.

I wanna do bad things with you

OK, finally reached a point where I was mentally armed to see the controversial art-horror-porn film Antichrist by “the greatest director in the world” Lars Von Trier (his words, not mine). We chose a Sunday afternoon showing, at the splendid-if-premium-priced Curzon Soho, rather than a late night one, thus guaranteeing sunlight for soul-examination and mental-wound-licking afterwards. (Nothing like building yourself up, is there? I do like a tingle of anticipation before a film, and after some of the makeweight Hollywood dross I’ve had to sit through in the name of holiday cover, I was grateful for that.) I’m afraid I had read way too much about Antichrist before seeing it – what it means, what other critics think, a detailed account of its shocking content – but that’s just me. I like exploring new cities, but I always thumb a tour guide beforehand.

That said, having now seen it, I am surprised by how much of what forms the dramatic climax has been described, catalogued and dissected by critics. Have they not heard of spoilers? (Even in saying that, I have disclosed that at least some of the notorious shock moments come at the end, but you don’t know which ones. I pretty much did. Are the rules different with arthouse movies? Is it OK to discuss them to the point of giving away at least part of the ending? Discuss.)

Here’s what you probably already know: it’s an English-language film shot in Germany predominantly by Danes and funded by six European countries, starring an American and a half-French Englishwoman playing an American couple from Seattle, translated from Von Trier’s native North Germanic tongue and thus giving the dialogue an almost in-built stiffness and poetry. It’s ultimately about a bereavement and the resulting grief: the couple, unnamed, lose a child, and – he being a therapist – they hike out to a cabin in the woods to confront her fears and work out her anxiety. (And here’s the first example of Antichrist‘s deep-seated misogyny: she is emotional, unpredictable and nutty; he remains stoic and calm. Chicks, eh? Probably her time of the month etc.) At the cabin, cut off from civilisation, the powerful effects of nature on the mind and the body take terrifying hold, and the line between reality and fantasy becomes blurred. Are the couple going mad? Or are we?

The story is divided into four chapters, and bookended by a prologue and epilogue. It’s in chapters three and four, entitled Despair (Gynocide) and The Three Beggars, where the film goes off the rails and turns into a graphically gory horror movie, albeit one with a more serious psychological intent than to just show you horrible physical pain. (Either that, or you go along with the view, widely shared, that Von Trier is simply taking the piss out of us all, especially those Guardian-reading arthouse apologist among us, who will swallow any old exploitation if it’s dressed as art. Clearly, as one of those people, I refute this. It can’t be that simple, surely?)

Antichrist is beautiful. It begins in what seems to be knowing parody of advertising, in pristine, slo-mo monochrome, set against Handel, as if selling shower gel or perfume – except the scene, which is far more explicitly sexual than any Calvin Klein ad will ever be, contains, even conceals a horrifying dramatic event. Right from the start, Von Trier is – if not playing with us – playing with form. He dares us to be titillated, again and again, and punishes us for our bad behaviour. So what’s going on? Is this a masterpiece? I don’t think so, as its intentions seem so confused, beyond the definite motive of casting women as the root of all evil. (I won’t give any plot points away, but the mother feels the death is her fault, and, well, the unfolding narrative done not make a very good job of dissuading us otherwise.) Beauty and ugliness have been juxtaposed many, many times in art and in cinema – Peter Greenaway might have made this film, had he an interest in horror, or, as Von Trier claims, had he plunged into a mighty depression and used work to claw his way out of it. This is a pretty dark piece of work, and when it stays this side of exploitation, it’s intriguing and clever and, yes, truly scary: the weird animal presence (you’ve heard all about “the talking fox” – well, if you find yourself laughing when the fox says, “Chaos reigns” then you have an odd sense of humour, like the men in the row behind me); the stunningly shot forest, with its fairytale quality, possessed of a malevolent character even in broad daylight; the sound of the acorns landing on the cabin roof; the creaky doors and rusty tools. Von Trier has not thrown this film together; the sheer craft is there to behold.

And yet, for my money, he undoes much of his good work by seeking to shock. Although I had planned on closing my eyes for the bits that I’d read about but had no wish to see, I lost my nerve at the last second, and saw both of them. Yuck. (There’s a third act of violence which I hadn’t anticipated, so I saw – and felt – that one, too. Ouch.) I had presumed that I would get through my life without ever seeing one of these things – the “money shot”, as it were – and although it was clearly achieved using special effects, it’s pretty unforgettable. It aims for the same impact as the eyeball-slitting shot in Un Chien Andalou, that’s all you need to know. I watched that, too, and have never forgotten it. But the Bunuel/Dali film was made in 1929, when the very grammar of cinema was still being forged (and sought to sidestep the kind of analysis that dogs arthouse cinema today, by claiming to represent and symbolise nothing). Antichrist comes off the back of a wave of post-9/11 “torture porn”, and simply borrows the same techniques, while merely changing the context from functional frightfest for teenage boys to Freudian examination of grief and depression.

And then there’s the frank sexual content. It used to be that an erect penis entering a vagina was the preserve of hardcore pornography. That all changed with a new wave of art movies beginning in the 90s: Lars Von Trier’s The Idiots, Catherine Breillat’s Romance, Julio Bedem’s Sex & Lucia, and Michael Winterbottom’s Nine Songs. (I’m not saying these were the first, clearly – Oshima’s Ai No Corrida, which I started watching at the weekend as it’s being reissued by the BFI, shocked the world in 1976.) Anyway, these are 18-certificate films, perfectly fine for 18 year-olds to watch. We have to get over this. It’s progress, and no floodgates have been opened as yet. The sex in Antichrist is realistic. It is also violent. But it reflects the psychological problems that exist within the relationship. It is part of the story, not decoration, and certainly not titillation. If you want to be turned on by an erect penis entering a vagina, I believe this act has been cleaned up, depilated and relieved of all narrative baggage for you in a specialist type of film. Once again: discuss.

I can’t read Antichrist as the “hoax” other critics have identified. It is what it is: a tale of grief and madness in the woods, which takes a very nasty turn at the end. The nasty bit will dissuade many from seeing it, while attracting others. But you should go and see a Hostel if you want crowd-pleasing gore. Go and see Antichrist if you want to see a film whose misogyny is at least subject for discussion, rather than, say the romantic comedy The Ugly Truth, which takes the shallowness and inferiority of women as a given, and makes jokes out of it.