I Saw The Devil (악마를 보았다) (Ang-ma-reul bo-at'da) (2010)

I don't mind ultra violence in movies when revenge is being meted out to those especially deserving of it, like in Harry Brown or Bedevilled, The Brave One or a zillion other bloody revenge fests, and for the first hour or so, that's what's on offer here when a secret service agent goes beserk, seeking revenge on a Korean Max Cady serial killer who has horribly killed rhe agent's pregnant girlfriend, but by film's end, when the secret service agent's very short-sighted plan for revenge has resulted in pain, suffering and death for myriad extraneous others and when so much depravity is on show - so much that the serial killer becomes just one part of a greater universal serial killer problem - the thrill of revenge becomes more than absurd: From Dusk Til Dawn presents a more reasonable, grounded world.

★★★☆☆

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The Next Three Days (2010)

In this American remake of Pour Elle (Anything for Her), Russell Crowe plays a college professor who decides to break his wife, convicted of murder, out of jail and luckily for him, he has what feels like an eternity - the film's two hours and thirty-three minute runtime - to do it and it turns out to be a rather simple matter of cutting a phone line and doing a letter switcheroo, so turn off your brains and content yourself with the college professor's reality free of inconvenient details.

★★★☆☆

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Heartbreaker (L'Arnacœur) (2010)

In this French romcom, most amusing when it is being sensible but most of the time trying to be an unbridled screwball comedy, Romain Duris' heartbreaker-for-hire, who worms his way into his quarries' hearts by crying on demand and spouting the sort of sappy lines typically reserved for daytime soaps, ends up falling for a client's daughter days out from her marriage to Mr Wrong.

★★★☆☆

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Everything Must Go (2010)

This hardly sounds appealing - an alcoholic loses his job, wife, home and car all in the space of a day and his solution is to hang out and drink excessively on his suburban front lawn where his wife has left all his belongings - but Will Ferrell turns in an understated, heartbreakingly funny performance in the lead, loaning this Raymond Carver's short story adaptation about crisis-ridden working-class America many moments both deeply emotional and laugh-out-loud funny, and even if his journey nears a resolution a touch too quickly to properly address addiction and even if there is a dismaying victim-blaming plot development, this is a surprising bittersweet, funny, sad pleasure.

★★★★☆

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Blame (2010)

A home invasion that leaves a piano teacher gagged and bound while a group of youths in balaclavas arrange his fake suicide appears to be a crime motivated by the death of one of the culprits' friends, but background information about this death is scarce - the focus remains on the criminals as they immediately, irreparably bungle their crime, and you'll have to sit through their mess and the group's long series of shouty, sweary bouts to see the revelation at the end that is treated like a bombshell but doesn't exactly change or mean anything.

★★☆☆☆

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Get Him To The Greek (2010)

The plot of this follow-up to the 2008 Forgetting Sarah Marshall (a music industry intern escorts an irreverent, drug-addled rockstar across America to revive his career in a big-deal comeback concert) calls for real chaos but chaos never really comes - instead we get an unfunny half hour in Las Vegas that is more farcical than chaotic and needs simply to be cut out of the overlong movie - but Russell Brand's Aldous Snow, the rockstar - essentially Brand playing himself - is a fun creation worthy of this second (and even a future third) movie and the comedy for the most part (minus that woeful Las Vegas sequence) is really funny.

★★★☆☆

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The King's Speech (2010)

Forget the DCEU and MCU: grandly staged historical dramas like this one about King George VI, the father of Queen Elizabeth II and stammering deliverer of rousing wartime speeches, form a rich and sprawling KGVIU - King George VI Universe - with Dunkirk and Darkest Hour and other recent big budget historical releases helping to turn boring WWII high school history classes into a rich cinematic tapestry that you feel you could watch stop-start, one movie in conjunction with the others and learn m9re than you ever did from your school books.

★★★★☆

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Piranha 3D (2010)

This is one of those 3D-enhanced creature features that pretends to pay tongue-in-cheek homage to its trashy roots when it fact it simply perpetuates the genre's crimes, stripping unrealistic women of their bikinis, having their naked forms ogled by frat boys and a Weinstein filmmaker type played by Jerry O'Connell, and then for their trouble they are referred to as "bitches" and eaten alive by person-eating fish.

★☆☆☆☆

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You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

Woody Allen movies, and perhaps especially his romantic comedies with their thrown-together ensemble casts, ad-libbed dialogue, seemingly made-up-on-the-spot characters, and voiceover narrations of questionnable value, can give the impression the director isn't even trying, and so it is here in this romantic comedy which in its first half rambles breezily on about the love lives of seven or eight Londoners, appears to jump the shark in the middle with a sudden 'plagiarist writer' development, but finally ties everything together with lots of belly laughs and the idea that the tall, dark stranger of the title is ourselves trying things on in desperate moments, and of course there is the renewed conviction that even though it can sometimes appear he is just churning them out, Woody Allen's movies are always worth a look.

★★★☆☆

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In A Better World (Hævnen) (2010)

When a father in the company of his young sons and their friend is assaulted by another father in a playground, a chain of events is sparked that for most of this Danish thriller's runtime is a compelling look at bullying and the vicious cycle of revenge, but a really bad decision made by two of the boys at the two-thirds mark rings untrue - especially after they have both heard parental confessions which should heal not exascerbate their delinquence - and from that moment on, the tension is replaced by a melodramatic soap opera that abandons two major plot points.

★★☆☆☆

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Burlesque (2010)

An appreciation of burlesque will help you enjoy this backstage musical that is pretty much Coyote Ugly but instead of a squeaky voiced talent dancing on a NY bar, this has divas Cher and Christina Aguilera treading the boards of a struggling burlesque theatre in LA, and if you don't like burlesque, the movie features some pretty good humour that will help sustain you through the umpteen musical numbers.

★★☆☆☆

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Red Hill (2010)

In this predictable but entertaining 2010 Australian thriller, a prison escapee looking like a cross between Machete and Freddie Krueger hunts down and kills the inordinate number of male police officers and locals residing in the rural Red Hill township, and caught up in the middle of the bloodshed is Constable Shane Cooper who has recently moved to the town with his pregnant wife and is experiencing a tough first day on the job.

★★★☆☆

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Bedevilled (김복남 살인사건의 전말) (Kim Bok-nam Salinsageonui Jeonmal) (2010)

Great revenge thrillers have you feeling so strongly for wronged heroes that no amount of brutal retribution is too much - there is perverse pleasure in indulging in a revenge fantasy and seeing justice doled out in a violent way not allowed in real-life - but in this 2010 South Korean revenge thriller, the woman with the sickle (pictured) has thirty years of good reasons to hate her enemies (the villagers of Moo-do Island) but the reasons for her insane rage at all of the people on the island isn't made completely clear until after the bloodbath and so the violence is  joy-free and horrific; you can't shake the idea, too, that some of the enemies are women who share in the heroine's plight, and several clumsy plot advancements also detract from what really could have been, with a few slight changes, a perfectly grisly pleasure.

★★★☆☆

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010)

It is a bit hard to review the first half of a ninth instalment of a movie series when you've only ever seen number one 15 years earlier but that said, this made zero sense to me despite my nephew's constant, slightly impatient commentary (That's a mudblood! Beeecause he's a muggle! He's the real leader of Griffindor, durbrain! He just is!) and really for about an hour and a half, Harry, Hermoine and Ron walk around in circles in a woods doing nothing much at all, only occasionally encountering mumbling characters, all incoherent lest they are completely silent as in one case, some adding to the confused boredom by suddenly changing into other characters or snakes or forms I also didn't understand the significance of.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Reef (2010)

There are two or three tense moments in this low-budget Australian 'natural horror' movie about a group of friends terrorised by a shark after their boat capsizes off the Queensland coast but otherwise it all quickly becomes a repetitive cycle of underwater goggle shots and the frantic treading of water.

★★☆☆☆

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The Other Guys (2010)

Early on, hot-shot buddy cops, the sort of beefcakes that traditionally tear up the silver screen in action movies, die being stupidly heroic and into their macho places step desk cops Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell, a pair of Prius-driving, Little River Band-appreciating, wooden gun-bearing, bickering man-children, so the not very funny running gag here is that as a buddy cop movie, this drags its feet and is no The Nice Guys, no Central Intelligence, no Jump Street.

★☆☆☆☆

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Troll Hunter (Trolljegeren) (2010)

Stick this out through its tired first 20 minutes while the Blairwitch found-footage premise is cornily set-up and be rewarded - to some extent - with inventive creature footage, Norwegian scenery, amusing moments (Ned Kelly suits and fake bear tracks, for example) and plotting that though uneven adheres to traditional Norwegian troll folklore.

★★☆☆☆

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Salt (2010)

It's every bit as exciting and fun as The Fugitive except that in the place of suspected wife-killer Dr Richard Kimble is Angelina Jolie's Evelyn Salt, a likeable woman married to an arachnologist, on the run from Government agents who believe her to be a Russian spy; under pressure she certainly appears to be as resourceful and as acrobatic as a Bourne operative - but an American or a Russian one?

★★★★☆

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Point Blank (A Bout Portant) (2010)

A medical intern becomes embroiled in a police chase when criminals abduct his wife as a means of coercing him into helping a wounded colleague escape from hospital, in this action thriller with a very unlikely plot but held together with a lead performance by a short French Liam Neeson.

★★★☆☆

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Love Crime (Crime d'amour) (2010)

It is hastily acted as though there wasn't time or concern for anything other than a first take, and it is as sparse as a Simenon novel without a frame or word of dialogue wasted, making this French thriller about corporate rivals and murder an uninvolving but nonetheless intriguing slip of a story.

★★★☆☆

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