Switch (2011)

A fashion designer in Montreal is encouraged to do a homeswap with someone in Paris, and for the first day this seems like it was a really good idea - she flirts with a man in a park, enjoys the city, sees the Eiffel Tower - but then on day two the fashion designer wakes up to the Parisian police knocking down her door accusing her of grisly murder and suddenly she's alone in a foreign country, accused of murder and even worse, on the case are only the most bungling of detectives believing her to be a Parisian psycho while unwilling or unable to make a simple phone call to Canada to verify the facts of her life - it is an intriguing set-up that has nowhere to go but stupid.

★★☆☆☆

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Larry Crowne (2011)

Had the title been Late to Class, this movie would clearly have been a romantic comedy about a newly-unemployed boomer who heads back to school in order to give his life new direction, but with the austere title Larry Crowne and a screenplay written by director Tom Hanks that keeps the romantic leads at a remove, held apart by educator-student propriety, the movie, drily funny, not hilarious, remains an oddity, not a Sleepless In Seattle or You've Got Mail romcom great.

★★★☆☆

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Beauty (Skoonheid) (2011)

What starts as a clinical, no-holds-barred look at a forty-something family man who has sex with men but doesn't identify as homosexual shifts, as soon as this detail is established, into a psychosexual thriller about his obsession with a young law student, Christian, but it isn't really clear how the sexuality presented first relates to the obsession presented later, and nor is the fixation clearly with Christian's Beauty (I mean, probably) or his youth, openness, freedom, sex - is it something borne of jealous? - and this ambiguity - and the likely reason for it - not that Christian is into it or that wives and families condone it, but just that, well, homosexual sex is aberrant) is more troubling than the thriller is thrilling.

★★★☆☆

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New Year's Eve (2011)

On a New Year's Eve, the Times Square Ball gets stuck, neither up nor down, and this same inert state befalls a veritable Love, Actually ensemble of New Yorkers whose lives grind to a stop in deeply uninteresting, go-nowhere situations like the nurse (Halle Berry) who tends bedside to a dying man in hospital (Robert De Niro) - that's everything - or the man in pyjamas (Ashton Kutcher) who gets stuck in an elevator with a singer (that woman from Glee) - the end - or the pregnant couple who are, well, pregnant - and still pregnant each time the movie unnecessarily returns to them - or, in the most peculiar of the go-nowhere vignettes, a delivery guy (Zac Efron) escorts a woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) around NYC on a scooter skimping on her bucket list that she has no reason to rush through before midnight when, spoiler alert, the Times Square Ball drops and this dull romcom ends and life starts moving again.

★★☆☆☆

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Jane Eyre (2011)

Comparison is more than fair: this 2011 adaptation is filmed in the same location (and often in the very same rooms), is based on the same screenplay, and is frequently a scene-by-scene copy of the BBC four-episode TV series of 2009, so the question is why this Cary Joji Fukunaga-directed adaptation, which gives painstaking attention to realising the look and feel of Charlotte Bronte's novel, chops the story to pieces, starting in the middle, unnecessarily, and lurching unevenly through the events of Eyre's life, either glossing over or entirely deleting key moments from the book AND the BBC TV series with the end result a visually-, aurally-pleasing video clip zapped of most of the story's romance and emotion.

★★★☆☆

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Johnny English Reborn (2011)

My attention strayed and then irritation set in as this British spy spoof, the second in a series of three Johnny English movies but the first I've tried to watch, went on and on and on in such cookie-cutter fashion that it doesn't really ask to be watched at all - a glance at the poster tells you everything you already knew about the James Bond-style opening sequence, the ho-hum scene at the hi-tech spy tools development facility, the repetitive car and boat chases, and the unpsychedelic Austin Powers, a rubbery-faced Pink Panther, at the centre of all the, er, action.

★★☆☆☆

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The Raid (2011)

This Indonesian action flick with a minimal plot, about police on the sixth floor of a tenement building surrounded on all sides and up and down by ruthless drug criminals, is one of the most violent movies you'll ever see but you'll be unable to tear your eyes from the gore (the fluorescent tubes to the neck and the bodies smashed into concrete and the bullets through heads, and so on and so on) because you'll be completely transfixed by the lightning-speed balletic action, perhaps the best martial arts action - or best action, period - ever filmed.

★★★★★

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Final Destination 5 (2011)

Again, we are introduced to a group of school kids, one of whom has premonitions that help them all escape violent death, only for these survivors to then be stalked one-by-one by Death because "Death doesn't like to be cheated", in this reasonably entertaining fifth instalment of the inventive horror series that sticks to the formula but returns the quality of the acting and the special effects back to standard after some woeful earlier sequels.

★★★☆☆

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Contagion (2011)

In Deep Impact, another global panic disaster movie with an all-star cast, it is a meteor hurtling towards Earth that, threatening human extinction, leads the world's population to act in extraordinary ways (including holding a lottery for a limited number of life-preserving prizes), but here in Contagion, it is a new strain of virus - something like the coronavirus - that wipes out millions, starts a global panic, and launches the scientific race to find a vaccine, and even though we've seen it all before in Deep Impact and Outbreak and others, it is gripping stuff ripped from today's newspaper headlines.

★★★★☆

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Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

James Franco is a bit self-consciously James Franco in this 2011 first of the rebooted Planet of the Apes series of movies but his inwardness doesn't stop this being a terrifically entertaining blockbuster about Caesar, an intelligent ape, who ends up leading as rousing an uprising as any you've seen before in cinema, with the movie playing a little like what it would have been like if Alfred Hitchcock had included a first act explaining the terrible battery farm treatment that first made the birds mad.

★★★★☆

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Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

As I struggle with furniture companies that outsource (and so disown) unreliable delivery services, and as it feels increasingly like, in Australia, you have to fight to get anyone to do what they are in fact paid and are supposed to do, it is refreshing to watch this Japanese documentary about a man and his sons and their kitchen crews who wholeheartedly devote themselves to their jobs, turning into an art even the most menial aspects of sushi-making, like massaging the octopus (not a euphemism) - this family of sushi chefs are committed to their art, even at the cost of family- and leisure-time and even though it might all go (tuna-) belly-up after the patriarch scales down his involvement.

★★★★☆

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You're Next (2011)

There's a couple of lines at the start that sound like clues suggesting this might be something more than a mere home invasion slasher — perhaps an And Then There Were None-style mystery where family members gathered in a sprawling mansion are picked off one-by-bloody-one by a Mx X  — but the leaden dialogue never lets up, the acting remains wooden, we never feel even remotely interested in the victims, and as the body count increases without there being anything clever whatsoever in the bloodletting, you'll stop wondering which one of the dead might actually still be alive and abandon hopes for a sensible twist — that the heroine is in on it or that it is Muffy or Buffy's April Fool's Day prank — in the knowledge this 2011 movie is in fact just a low-budget and unimaginative home invasion slasher, nothing more.

★★☆☆☆

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Margin Call (2011)

Like the 2007-2008 financial crisis that is this movie's context, the problem that befalls Jeremy Irons' investment banking megacorporation cannot be easily explained (something about a flawed equation and always out-of-frame data and graphs that herald tremendous financial loss) so it is hard to care much about this corporate thriller which has its ensemble cast spout platitudes every time the crux of the problem needs elucidation - plus, the people you might actually feel sympathy for, not smug suits staring out of their skyscrapers or weeping in sleek toilet cubicles but the hardworking public who you know ultimately lose out, are kept out of the picture.

★★☆☆☆

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Our Idiot Brother (2011)

Prince Myshkin is The Idiot, Dostoevsky's model of the ideal Christian whose plain, guileless approach to life riles the people around him and raises questions about how it is possible to be pure and good in a base, self-interested corrupt society, so perhaps this utterly inane, uneven comedy drama starring Paul Rudd as a simpleton with Jesus looks and a plain, unthinking approach to life that causes upheaval in his sisters' lives, is a pointless refashioning of Dostoevsky's novel?

★☆☆☆☆

ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Moneyball (2011)

Brad Pitt continues his best Robert Redford impression since being schooled by him in Spy Games, here playing a distinctly Redfordesque Billy Beane, a real-life sabermetrician whose unconventional drafting process (based on research and analysis, not whether a player's girlfriend is hot or not) led his Oakland Athletics major league baseball team to a record-breaking winning streak in 2002.

★★★★☆

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Horrible Bosses (2011)

Three employees plot to do away with their horrible bosses, a plan that sees them, respectable men leading regular suburban lives, venturing clumsily into an underworld of crime, which is the premise of this shrieky, snide, sneery and unpleasant comedy of minimal laughs featuring Hollywood's most smug performers.

★☆☆☆☆

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A Good Old Fashioned Orgy (2011)

The opening scene establishes we are stuck in the company of an unlikeable group of 40-somethings united by their love of themed parties and - probably - their not having seen Shortbus; they decide to have an orgy but is an orgy really an orgy if its planning is protracted to movielength by way of a laborious recruitment process and untitillating research, and when a tepid and irrelevant romance is injected into the story to fill time, isn't it just as though the movie itself has conceded how uninteresting the orgy and its participants are?

★☆☆☆☆

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Thor (2011)

The Xanadu stylings of the Thor world - glittery rainbow-coloured rollerskating paths leading up to a gold fob watch hanging in space called Asgard - crossed with the horned helmets, Elvin beards, and male bawdiness of Norse mythology, do not appeal but I persisted with this Chris Hemsworth-helmed number one of the Marvel Thor series knowing one day I'd need to have watched it in order to grapple with the other two (read 'three', 'four', 'twelve'...) - 'Thor: The Dark World' and 'Thor: Ragnarok' - and apart from a Lord Of The BoRings taint to the all-male armies that are fighting to control 'the nine realms', this is very familiar in a just-like-all-other-superhero-movies kind of way (a blonde Wonder Woman from an alien Themyscira ends up among humans being aided by a female Steve Trevor who shows the sort of immediate devotion to the potential lunatic that those women do who, a couple of letter-exchanges in, chose to marry their confessed mass-murderer-in-jail penpals), and it is all fine if slightly boring...but at least I am ready now to equally reluctantly watch the endless other Thors (but, full disclosure, I still need to wiki some aspects of the plot I missed along the way like who Idris Elba is, what exactly he is doing just standing there in space, and what on earth the nine realms are.)

★★★☆☆

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Elena (Елена) (2011)

In this unhurried but captivating Russian melodrama with something biting to say about privilege, responsibility and enabling, second wife and carer, Elena, launches into action when her ailing husband announces his intention to leave a bulk of his estate to his wayward daughter, not to Elena and so not to Elena's son's desperate family.

★★★★☆

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The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito) (2011)

The first audacious act - a plastic surgeon involved in unethical transgenic experiments holds captive in his mansion a patient in a body sock who is attacked in her cell one day by a man in a tiger costume - takes some explaining and the latter half of Almodóvar's film goes back six years to reveal how even the minutest details of this wacky situation comes to be, which works well as an analogy: how do our circumstances shape us into the creatures we are, in these body socks, tiger suits, or surgical masks we live in?

★★★★☆

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