Birth (2004)

Jonathan Glazer's beautifully acted and beautiful-to-look-at Birth, about an affluent Upper East Side New York family intruded upon by a boy who claims to be a reincarnated dead husband, wants to be taken seriously - and some people oblige, calling it a mystery and treatise on profound things like belief and loss, but it plays out more like a deadly earnest fairytale - that is to say, it plays out ridiculously - and while the final scene does a good job, finally, of grounding the first-world problems of these toffs in some real emotion, getting there is far too long a road - an absurd and monotonous one - with an especially icky bath scene and kiss scene along the way.

★★★☆☆

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Melinda and Melinda (2004)

Like a failed first draft of Blue Jasmine, this middling Woody Allen movie (one also helmed by an Australian actress) splices together the same story told twice, once as a comedy and once as a tragedy, except the comedy is almost entirely laugh-free, the tragedy just a dreary tale of woe, and really, it is just a Sliding Doors movie about wishes made on magic lamps, not a movie about the cruel theatre of life and so it can be hard to remember at times which of the two versions of Melinda's life you are watching they are both so similar.

★★★☆☆

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Saw (2004)

Given the fact there is a serial killer, Jigsaw, playing philosophically-motivated torture games, that comic actor Carly Elwes plays a rubber-faced Ash-like doctor whom it is sometimes hard to take seriously, and that Ken Leung's Steven Singh is a David Mills replica, it is entirely possible this original movie of director James Wan's Saw series was intended as a parody of Se7en, but whether that is true or not, the story of two men waking up in a puzzle box was taken seriously enough to spawn a long-running series of gruesome horror thrillers, and this original movie is possibly even responsible for the birth of the Escape Room craze that took over the world in the year of Saw's release, 2004.

★★★☆☆

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Alien vs. Predator (2004)

A security guard at work assures me that the bringing together of the Predator from the Predator movies and the Alien from the Alien movies into an Alien Vs Predator (AVP) series of movies isn't silly, that the two series and two monsters complement each other nicely, but this first movie of the series has a research team investigating an underground pyramid in the Antartic, unleashing from a prison the beginnings of a long Predator/Alien mythology that is pretty bloody silly. 

★★☆☆☆

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The Grudge (2004)

Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on horror series, until now wholly Japanese productions, continues with this third movie, high on spooky atmosphere but low on sense, that casts Americans Sarah Michelle Gellar and Bill Paxton in the lead roles of a story - something about a curse that makes children blue and wide-eyed, that makes dead bodies appear and/or disappear, and sees the dead spiritually tethered to the places of their death but then also free to visit people at work or at home - don't ask too many questions.

★★☆☆☆

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Keane (2004)

As the title character, Damian Lewis gives a wholehearted performance but his situation never quite rings true: after the abduction of his daughter from the New York Port Authority bus terminal, Keane teeters on the edge of insanity (but then doesn't), struggles to scrounge cash to continue his hotel limbo (but then doesn't) and for the benefit of the viewer (but not for the believability of the story), he also helpfully provides an out-loud commentary of his mad thoughts.

★★☆☆☆

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Arsène Lupin (2004)

As a kid, I was riveted by Maurice LeBlanc's stories of Arsène Lupin, the gentleman thief who always wins, part The Scarlet Pimpernel, part Sherlock Holmes, and this movie adaptation - not of one book but a mash-up of many - gets everything right: the look of the debonair hero played by Romain Duris, the glamour of La Belle Époque, the enormously fun exploits, the derring-do, the twists and turns of inexplicable mystery, and although I don't remember his family life being quite so complex, that worked for me as well.

★★★★☆

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Vanity Fair (2004)

To give you an idea of the pace, war breaks out in one scene and Reese Witherspoon's all-too-American Becky Sharp, the social-climbing female-Barry Lyndon central to William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847 novel, helps her fellow pregnant friend into a shelter where they talk momentarily about their impending motherhood and in the next scene when they emerge onto the street, the Napoleonic Wars are over and they are mothers of 15-year-olds, and so it goes - a breezy line about a funeral is dropped to inform us of the death of a major character we saw cough just a moment earlier; a first kiss immediately precedes a scene of extended family bliss - and while it may be an impressive feat of screenwriting to capture most things that happen in Thackeray's 650-odd pages of sweeping, multigenerational period drama, as a movie this feels too often like a mere highlight reel.

★★☆☆☆

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Taking Lives (2004)

Featuring Angelina Jolie as pillow-lipped FBI profiler Illeana Lara Croft Clarice Starling Scott, Taking Lives is such a formulaic serial killer thriller a more fitting title would have been Checking Boxes, because it feels like every item on a serial killer thriller checklist has been thrown in: a Tom Ripley chameleon killer, an unnecessary Dead Ringers twins backstory, male cops antagonised by a female agency interloper with unusual methods, a motorway chase, jump scares as bodies spring out of dark recesses, a cool killer who suddenly cracks and goes goo-goo-ga-ga to reveal just how deeply-rooted his mother complex is, bad police work of the enter-the-dark-room-alone variety (and the leave-the-protected-witness-alone-for-a-quick-mo-to-go-have-a-ciggy-by-the-cop-car variety), blurred professional boundaries as Illeana beds (no, desks) a person of interest in the case, and a protracted denouement where the killer's m.o. - painstakingly compiled by the acutely perceptive profiler - is abandoned for an out-of-character stand-off between cop and culprit in which the identity thief and killer of only male victims for over twenty years suddenly becomes an obsessive stalker, domestic abuser and holder-on of Life's details.

★★☆☆☆

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I, Robot (2004)

Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics are used as the philosophically interesting starting point of what you might hope is a Kubrikesque meditation on sentience, but Will Smith's Detective Spooner, investigating what might be murder committed by a robot, is a wise-cracking action hero of a distinctly Schwarzenegger type ("Control, Alt, Delete, A.I. mofo," he doesn't say but very well could as he sends a bullet through yet another metallic skull); although the flimsily plotted action garnered an Academy Award nomination for its special effects, it is hard to work out exactly what is happening in many of the cgi-heavy scenes.

★★☆☆☆

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Kung Fu Hustle (2004)

The effete, retiring, tired, slovenly everyday folk of Pig Sty Alley, a Shanghai slum, have some kungfu tricks up their sleeves when the not-so-dastardly Axe Gang muscles in on their territory, in this oddbod hit set in the 30s that combines wuxia thrills with cartoon fantasy, hilarious screwball and slapstick comedy, and a touching romance between Sing, a street crim whose heart isn't in it and Fong, a mute hawker.

★★★★☆

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

Shot in a style that recalls cold war propaganda, graphic novels, and 50s science fiction, this odd movie, both grandly staged and obscure, tells of a pilot, Sky Captain, a kind of Biggles in a steam-punk alternate reality, and a reporter, Polly Perkins, who team up to investigate an intrigue involving miniature elephants, metal war birds, disappearing scientists, giant robots that descend upon the world in The Day The Earth Stood Still style, and an inexplicable The Wizard of Oz tie-in, and it is always visually arresting if not always such an interesting narrative.

★★★☆☆

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The Stepford Wives (2004)

Rich with material for a big screen adaptation, Ira Levin's book is a macabre suspense thriller and a kind of bodysnatching horror with lots of room for black humor and feminist commentary, but at the cost of this potential, Frank Oz's big, glossy and not very remarkable Hollywood adaptation treats the material primarily as a goofball comedy and has Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick and Nicole Kidman hamming it up as the new residents of the all-too-perfect surburban paradise, Stepford, where residents live picture-perfect 1950s lifestyles thanks to an army of worryingly subservient, docile female homekeepers.

★★★☆☆

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Kill Bill Volume 2 (2004)

The superior second half of Quentin Tarantino's four-hour revenge opus continues the Bride's bloody quest to kill those on her Death List 5 and continues the director's trademark devil-may-care enthusiastic film-making.

★★★★☆

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Nobody Knows (Dare Mo Shirenai) (誰も知らない) (2004)

A mother abandons her children for long periods with instructions that all but the eldest boy are to remain unseen and unheard inside her apartment, in Hirokazu Kore-eda's sanitised account of an actual 1988 news story; some of the blame for the tragedy that follows surely rests on the film's disconnected, apathetic Tokyo.

★★★★☆

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The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

You'll yearn for your own adventures watching this account of Che Guevara's formative motorbike ride around South America with his friend, Alberto Granado, but you'll also wonder at the characteristics of the 23-year-old Argentinian medical student that see him so politicised by his adventure that - in events beyond the scope of this travelogue - he goes on to become leader of the Cuban Revolution, then a reviled mass-murdering terrorist killed by a CIA-supported Bolivian military, then a contemporary hipster icon.

★★★★☆

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Christmas With The Kranks (2004)

Not as madcapped, as funny or as focused as National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, and Tim Allen can't match Chevy Chase's ability to accentuate the absurd, but this is a harmless Christmas-themed comedy in which the Kranks decide to skip Christmas, much to the consternation of their neighbours.

★★☆☆☆

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9 Songs (2004)

Scenes of explicit sex are cut with Brixton Hall concert performances in this 65-minute love story that is curious for the first half then boring for the second.

★☆☆☆☆

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Catwoman (2004)

Badly influenced by the Batman movies that came before it, Catwoman is a camp and shallow origin story featuring an unfocused superhero - part apologetic cupcake-baking, coquettish Bree Van de Kamp and part computer-generated and personality-free Frank N Furter dominatrix - fighting a similarly unfocused villain, a barely featured Sharon Stone representing a vague Death Becomes Her evil vanity.

★★☆☆☆

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Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle (2004)

Clark Griswold stopped at nothing to get his family to Walley World; Harold and Kumar with the munchies must reach a White Castle burger joint and despite my hating nothing more than stoner comedies, I find Harold and Kumar's juvenile antics actually very funny - a crude new-generation National Lampoon's Vacation...to White Castle.

★★★☆☆

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