No one to talk to when I'm feelin' low, no one to stand me when I go too far.

The Rocket
Kim Mordaunt 2013 Laos/Thailand/Australia
Starring: Sitthiphon Disamoe, Loungnam Kaosainam, Suthep Po-ngam, Bunsri Yindi, Alice Keohavong, Sumrit Warin


Kim Mordaunt's story of childhood, poverty and hope in modern Laos, The Rocket, has been compared in many reviews to 2012's Beasts Of The Southern Wild but, while both feature children navigating flood-hit nature, that's about as far as the comparisons go and such attempts at association are pretty uncomplimentary to this film. The key here is magical realism and a focus on tradition with 10 year old Ahlo labelled as a cursed being by his foul-mouthed, doomsayer grandmother because of his status as a surviving twin (his sibling was stillborn) and forcibly relocated from his village to a government-sponsored shanty town by officials who want to flood the region and build a new dam. While there he meets orphaned child Kia and her hilarious, permanently soused, deathly Uncle Purple, so called because of his obsession with James Brown and his propensity to dress up (and dance) like him. But, much like many of the other characters, there's a darkness to this apparent clown as it turns out his beloved suit was given to him by the American Embassy, possibly as a gift for collaborating with them. Later Ahlo sees a photo showing Purple as a child soldier and seeks his expert tuition to help make a rocket for the central competition and we understand that his patent mixture of senility and whiskey may actually be the coping mechanism of a traumatised old man. Thankfully this isn't dwelled on too heavily and the meat of the film concentrates on the sweet friendship between the two children and their attempts to better their lot. Both are really outstanding in the roles punctuating the film with energy, heart, a complete lack of fear and, in Kia's case, a sense of eternal optimism that only threatens to disappear when Ahlo does. The direction falters on occasion and threatens to dip into sentimentality but things are kept strong by the charm of the leads, the dramatic and funny fable-like story and a picturesque setting that should delight arthouse and mainstream audiences alike.

Don't look at me like that or I'll have to get up.

Minnie And Moskowitz
John Cassavetes 1971 USA
Starring: Gena Rowlands, Seymour Cassel, Val Avery, Timothy Carey, Katherine Cassavetes, Lady Rowlands

Gena Rowlands really is something special, makes your heart go rat-a-tat-tat. Even in a below-par film like this she's just exceptional and the same goes for Seymour Cassel, here playing a shaggy, troublesome barfly in a role that's a million miles away from the smooth gangster he'd play in Cassavetes' The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie just fives years later. In fact until he shaves his massive moustache off late in the film it's hard to believe it's even the same actor. That both confounded my expectations is perhaps fitting because anyone who looked at the title and had the film pegged as a romantic drama will be disappointed, largely because the relationship between the two main characters really isn't a happy one or even one with a particularly happy ending. When they first meet he's parking cars and, in trying to protect her from her distraught, aggressive date, flies off the handle completely and jumps the guy before hopping into his truck with Minnie and speeding away. While this in itself may be enough to label him as a bad bet the most unusual thing about the fight is that he takes quite a beating before getting in a lucky shot then running, and later in the film it happens again when he jealously attacks an associate who has given Minnie a lift. Moreover when she, desperate to escape, walks away from him when they've stopped for a hot dog he mounts the pavement chasing her and attempts to run her down. It's strange but in the opening scenes he appears to be the sane one, faced with waitresses that ignore him and sitting opposite crazy, perspiring drifter Morgan (a frenzied cameo from Timothy Carey) by chance, but within minutes he's grabbing strangers at a bar and claiming he knows them. Maybe that's the point: that, in such a city, everybody will go mad given a little time. Loneliness is the key theme here and it's certainly what drives Minnie into pursuing a series of unsuitable men, eternally in search of "a real Charles Boyer". Her first is violent to her and, far from being her boyfriend, turns out to be married with several children. The second, who Moskowitz 'saves' her from, is a borderline psychotic who she only goes out with because she can't find an excuse (their meeting is an incredible scene where Rowlands says very little but still dominates, even the line "Let's go to lunch" makes her look as though she's about to crumble completely). The third is Moskowitz himself and the only point in his favour is that he says he loves her. It's something that his mother, played with brassy fire by Cassavetes' own mother Katherine, points out directly when the families meet. The problem with the film is that, as well-acted and intense as these scenes are, they often feel like little more than a series of vignettes and are often cut suddenly and even in the middle of sentences, as if we've interrupted the conversation and been caught and removed from the area. Similarly the script, while often brilliant, is also at turns poor, frustrating and just plain odd. It's a shame because the actors are on such cracking form that, had Cassavetes been up to his usual standard, this would have been a masterpiece.

Sometimes silence is a scream.

The Missing Picture
Rithy Panh 2013 Cambodia/France
Documentary

There have been several documentaries confronting oppressive, despotic regimes in the last couple of years, among them Dror Moreh's The Gatekeepers (interviewing the former heads of the Shin Bet) and Joshua Oppenheimer's extraordinary, monstrous The Act Of Killing (meeting the still-in-power perpetrators of the Indonesian anti-communist genocide of the 1960's and filming them willingly re-enacting their crimes in the manner of any film genre they want), and most have been quite rightly given high acclaim. Rithy Panh's portrait of the reign of the Khmer Rouge and their leader Pol Pot's attempts to 'socially re-engineer' Cambodia, a period which resulted in the deaths of almost a quarter of the population of the country, is the latest in this line but remains distinctly different from any of the former as well as practically any other film I've ever seen. For one, Panh actually lived through this period and spent most of his teenage years as a forced resident of the regime's many labour camps. It's a subject Panh has visited repeatedly, chiefly in his horrifying 2003 work S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine, and a time he talks about frighteningly openly but the central problem is that, while Panh recalls torturers filming executions being carried out, there is very little footage or photographic evidence of the period, and certainly not of Panh's memories, images that he says he wouldn't be allowed to show anyway. So, instead of going through what would be a herculean task and trying to create a fictional feature based around that time (again, one that may have to suffer massive cuts to even find a release), he decided on a much more innovative, slyly fitting method; carving accurate clay figures of the people and the settings involved and attempted to reconstruct moments from his past. These dramatizations make up at least half of the film and are narrated using Panh's own words and addressing his feelings about the real-life incidents recreated on screen by an actor, presumably because Panh himself would have had trouble keeping his composure. The voice is really the heart of the film, never wavering even as it describes the 'disappearance' of Panh's brother, the fatal hunger-strike of his father ("His suit is white, his tie is dark, I want to hold him close) and the eventual death of his entire family. It's almost as if he can't even feel anger or grief anymore, like any emotion has been crushed from his body by the sheer force of the atrocity he's gone through, and yet you know without doubt that it won't ever leave him and you're positive he'll never get over it, almost as if he's trapped underneath the strangely malevolent waves that open and close the film. Much like the aforementioned works of last year The Missing Picture isn't an easy watch, in fact it's about as far away from that description as you can get, but in its grim, nightmarish, hallucinatory ninety-two minutes it's one of the best and certainly most important films of the year, allowing us a glimpse into a episode of history almost unfathomable to inhabitants of the West. Everybody needs to see this.

The only sin that can't be forgiven is despair.

Meteora
Spiros Stathoulopoulos 2012 Greece
Starring: Theo Alexander, Tamila Koulieva, Giorgos Karakantas, Dimitris Hristidis


Despite the financial crisis Greece has experienced in recent years its cinematic world seems to be going through a renaissance of sorts, much in the same way as the Romanian scene has of late. Of course the great Greek director Theo Angelopoulos made a number of intelligent, masterful films over the space of several decades but much of his work took place in other countries and featured foreign actors. This new renaissance as I see it started in 2009 with Yorgos Lanthimos' disturbing and genuinely bizarre Dogtooth and continued with Athina Rachel Tsangari's complex, brilliant Attenberg and Lanthimos' 2011 effort Alps. Pleasingly Spiros Stathoulopoulos' Meteora is totally different from any of those works and utterly innovative, mixing as it does beautiful landscapes, a sensitive arthouse love story and alarming animated sequences depicting mazes of blood and land cracking open to reveal visions of hell, and juxtaposing modern methods with traditional Orthodox sensibility. The narrative of priests or nuns being tempted by human desire and each other has often been played for titillation in a veritable banquet of soft-porn films but here, much as in last year's wonderful Diderot adaptation The Nun, it never feels exploitative and for the most part remains overtly non-sexual, instead concentrating on the irresistible connection between the lovers and the unavoidable guilt they feel. The repressive nature of religious discipline is a major theme, shown via ambiguous set-pieces such as the ever-present bandage on Urania's hand (is it merely a accidental injury or the aftereffects of an archaic form of penance?) and a net that Urania willingly climbs into before rising up the mountainside in it (a mode of torture or simply a means of getting about in the monolithic terrain? And, if the former, who is pulling its ropes?). It's a incredible, magnetic piece of work that, considering the contrasting styles and that leading man Theo Alexander is best known for playing Talbot in True Blood and Tamila Koulieva is a Russian TV actress, really shouldn't work but somehow it lingers in the mind and is never less than captivating. On the evidence of this and the aforementioned films it seems as if there's a dark undercurrent in modern Greek life that has resulted in a deep strangeness but, as ever, strangeness and undercurrents make for awe-inspiring cinema.

Kissing gourami.

Shiri/Swiri
Kang Je-gyu 1999 South Korea
Starring: Han Suk-kyu, Choi Min-sik, Yunjin Kim, Song Kang-ho, Yoon Joo-sang, Park Yong-woo

In 2014 North Korea is best known for its detachment from the rest of the world, the absolute power of its leader and the totalitarian nature of its society so a film concerning the long-standing civil war between the two Republics of the country produced by one of them could be suspected of being a little one-sided and, at first it seems it is. The opening scenes of Shiri show a frenetic, violent, storm-soaked battle situation with soldiers gleefully bayonetting terrified men tied to trees, the blood splattering across their faces repeatedly. The thing is this isn't war, it's simply a disturbing form of military training led by the great Choi Min-sik, known primarily in the West as the main character in Oldboy. His role here isn't at the level of that film but, despite its enigmatic, slightly underwritten nature, he's still good value. In one scene he spits forth a shockingly raw, vitriolic explanation for his actions and blows every other actor in the film away, and that's not an insult to them. The aforementioned training continues with the soldiers being blindfolded and forced to shoot at the empty space between a line up of fellow learners and even fire at crash test dummies dressed as government officials. If this sounds biased it's pleasing to see that South Korea are subject to the same blurred morality. For example, while the North are shown to be brutal and underhanded, the South are openly developing biological weapons and holding shows to demonstrate how powerful and intelligent they are. Not only that but Min-sik's special forces are shown to be acting on their own initiative rather than following their apparently level-headed president as might be expected. That all of this is contained within a sweat-drenched action film, albeit one less bombastic than the Mission Impossible series, less posturing than the Bourne cycle and more realistic than either, may put some off but the film is well worth your time, not least for the stunning visual sequences involving human bombs and imploding skyscrapers, the clever and eminently possible narrative and the ferocious acting. Perhaps in an attempt to attract audiences more familiar with Hollywood, perhaps purely because of dumb sexism, all the advertising for the film is based around the image of a gun-toting woman in a slit-to-the-thigh dress showing off her sideboob but it should all be ignored. For one the lead female character isn't even seen properly until the last half-hour and is never dressed like that and the majority of the film is spent with Min-sik and Suk-kyu. What's more it's brilliant and much more than just the dumb action movie the publicity may have you believe.