Frozen Ground (2013)

The action is heightened and some of the events clearly can't have happened in real life exactly as they play out here, but this based-on-a-true-story movie is gripping viewing with Nicolas Cage playing a cop who needs to first convince dismissive colleagues and officials that there is a serial killer active in Anchorage, Alaska before he can bring to justice Robert Hansen, a man whose real-life existence and crimes you"ll probably wish you'd stayed unaware of.

★★★☆☆

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Piercing (2013)

Based on a Ryu Murakami book, this unedifying nonsense, inexplicably well-received by critics on Rotten Tomatoes, has a repulsive, low-affect man book himself into a hotel with a plan to stab a prostitute with an ice-pick, but things don't go as he plans as the plot unfolds in the manner of a Pulp Fiction vignette, but drearily, without the humour and flair).

★★☆☆☆

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Mindscape (aka "Anna") (2013)

The high-concept sci-fi is really just a contrivance, the only thing separating this movie from a more run-of-the-mill whodunit with Mark Strong's "memory investigator", a man able to piggybank along in people's memories, really just a Hercule Poirot who might otherwise have to simply interview those involved in a mystery involving a housebound and hunger-striking teenager (another eye-roll-inducing contrivance), a family secret, a murder, schoolyard bullying and mistaken identity.

★★☆☆☆

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Tom At The Farm (Tom à la ferme)

The tyranny Tom finds himself subject to at the farmhouse of Guilliame, the friend whose funeral he is attending, is the sort of tyranny of classic romantic literature - I thought of the terror Joss held over the 'Jamaica Inn' - and the Quebecois farm is wintery and isolated like the Jamaica Inn or like Manderley, and like 'Rebecca', Tom represents the new, a liberal young alternative urbanite who doesn't belong, and he little realises how completely his world will have to change - and how quickly - to maintain Guilliame's family's rigid, secretive, retentive rural conservatism.

★★★★☆

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Coherence (2013)

The kooky premise - those gathered at a dinner party start to experience mindbending things as a comet passes overhead - will certainly keep you watching but as the high concepts snowball and near, well, incoherence, this ambitious low-budget film stays indoors and stays focused on the more easily, more cheaply captured domestic goings-on among the party guests (one of them Nicholas Brendan of Buffy fame) - so glowsticks, boxes, rings, numbers on photos, and bottles of wine become the preoccupation while the more interesting space- and time-warping things happening outside are, well, left in the dark. 

★★★☆☆

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The Purge (2013)

The funny thing about The Purge, this original movie that gave rise to a series of sequels and a two-season tv series, is that the elaborate concept - that the US Government holds an annual event called "The Purge" in which a twelve-hour moratorium is placed upon all crimes (including the crime of hacking your neighbours to pieces) - has no great bearing on what is essentially a messy, repetitive b-grade home invasion thriller - like being told that in the world beyond the brownstone in David Fincher's Panic Room or outside the house in Haneke's Funny Games there is a politics.

★★☆☆☆

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Dead Man Down (2013)

Intriguing enough given its roundabout way of revealing its fairly basic plot, this revenge flick about a man double-crossing a gang lord wants to be an Infernal Affairs/The Departed action thriller with the epic-ness of Heat but the writing, which tries to squeeze romance out of a situation between a blackmailer and the man she wants to coerce into committing murder for her - writing which also has Noomi Rapace's character driven to murder because three red lines on her forehead destroyed her career as a beautician - is just too dopey too often for the action to be able to soar to Infernal Affairs/Heat heights.

★★☆☆☆

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The 100 Year-Old Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared (2013)

Forrest Gump spouted his mother's life lessons and walked innocently, gormlessly through some of the 20th Century's most momentous historical occasions and so does Allan Karlsson, the 100 year-old birthday boy and 'Swedish Forrest Gump' of Jonas Jonasson's 2009 book adapted here into this movie which starts with good humour as Allan wanders out of his retirement home and embarks on an adventure involving a suitcase full of cash, a growing body count, and explosions, but quickly runs out of energy as the reenacted moments in history and the encounters with thugs become repetitive and the investigation into Allan's disappearance stalls and the absurd developments become more and more predictable.

★★☆☆☆

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Curse of Chucky (2013)

Satisfying elements of mystery keep you watching this umpteenth episode of the serial killer doll franchise which, taking place in a gothic mansion where a wheelchair-bound woman mourns her mother's death, recalls the classic "lunatic on the loose outside a disabled woman's stronghold" movies of the The Cat And The Canary and The Spiral Staircase variety, at least until the is-this-really-happening, laughable Tommy Wisseau "The Room" reveal-all in flashback.

★★★☆☆

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G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013)

By the time some fun stuff arrives - cliffside martial acrobatics, Mission: Impossible-style infiltrations of black tie events and the fast and furious flashbacks that made G.I. Joe: the Rise of the Cobra such unexpected fun - you'll have been burned by a dull boysy first hour where men chortle about their "girl" conquests, snigger about "girls and their guns", leer at legs and you will have already decided Hasbro's action doll franchise needs to stay in 2013.

★★☆☆☆

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Nymph()maniac: Volume I (2013)

A man comes across a woman lying in an alley, takes her home and tends to her and while she talks him through every sexual encounter she has ever had in her life, he interjects with fly fishing analogies, in this occasionally very funny, always interesting first volume of director Lars von Trier's epic five-and-a-half hour contemplation on compulsive passionless sex, just one highlight of which is the mortifying but hilarious scene in which Uma Thurman as a spurned wife, the antithesis of Charlotte Gainsborough's Joe, tries to guilt-trip her husband and his new lover.

★★★★☆

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Night Train To Lisbon (2013)

Seeing an out from his existence as a live-alone, play-chess-alone Classics professor, a Swiss man uses the train tickets he finds in the coat of a woman he saved from killing herself to go to Lisbon where he infects even a Boys Own Adventure set in pre-Carnation Revolution Lisbon with his tediousness.

★★☆☆☆

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The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

The adventures of Katniss Everdeen continue in this, for readers of the book, perfectly watchable but for all others, slightly mystifying sequel that sees the heroine propelled to celebrity status, on tour by high-speed train across 'the districts', involved in backstage image management and audience manipulation, becoming the reluctant figurehead of a rebel movement, then thrown into the death arena that now features mandrills, oh, and poison mist, oh, and lightning, oh, and tidal waves, oh, and mockingbirds, oh, and wait, it's a clock...?

★★☆☆☆

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White House Down (2013)

Sometimes romantic lead, sometimes teen heartthrob, sometimes dancing sex symbol, sometimes powerhouse dramatic actor, here the versatile Channing Tatum tries his hand at the John McClane role in a Die Hard clone set in a besieged White House, but he is not exactly the centre of attention - there are too many other characters vying unsuccessfully for that, including Jamie Foxx as the POTUS requiring extraction from the hostage situation - and so with your focus divided across myriad players, and further distracted by ill-timed bursts of humour during the high action, you never care what happens but can at least enjoy the audacious sight of the President in his limousine doing doughnuts on the South Lawn while shooting a missile launcher.

★★☆☆☆

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The Return (Возвращение, Vozvrashcheniye) (2003)

Two young brothers have their mother's word and a 12-year-old photo to assure them that the man who has turned up home is their father, and no sooner has he sat down at the kitchen table and plied them with wine, the threesome head off on a tense car trip to fish, camp, learn how to make bowls from birch, and presumably, they are to bond provided the boys can conform to their new taskmaster's authoritarian approach to parenting...or could this mystery man have other plans and might the group in fact end up killing each other (you won't ever really believe)...but who would know given the trio's frustrating inability to simply communicate and square with each other?

★★★☆☆

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About Time (2013)

Imagine Four Weddings and a Funeral with a time travel twist and you get this, an occasionally touching, occasionally funny but mostly irritating British romantic comedy slash family drama that adds time travel into the mix for no great gain, just to unnecessarily hammer home the life lessons learned by a Hugh Grant moving (backwards and) forwards through life with an Andie McDowell.

★★☆☆☆

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The Wolverine (2013)

The Wolverine slices and dices his way through Japan where it turns out he is best friends since WWII with a Japanese industrialist, in this superhero movie far superior to 2009's X-men Origins: Wolverine, with humorous lines and nicely choreographed action including a spectacular sequence on the roof of a bullet train.

★★★☆☆

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The Stranger Within (2013)

With the look, feel and pace of a daytime soap and populated with actors who appear to think their only job is looking good, this hard-to-watch psychological thriller about a woman dealing with trauma, paranoia, jealousy and fear in a remote mansion is of only momentary interest for featuring William 'How did I end up here?' Baldwin; the rest of the movie reeks of four friends with a camera giving movie-making a go on a 'swingers' weekend away.

☆☆☆☆☆

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Carrie (2013)

The two problems with this 2013 remake of Carrie, the 1976 movie based on the Stephen King book are, one, the wildly inconsistent state of mind of the title character who one minute sobs and screams inconsolably, the next calmly employs expert conflict resolution skills in negotiations with her neurotic bible-bashing mother about how unfairly she is being treated only to immediately revert back to hysterical, incessant screaming; and two, the horror movie wants us to sympathise with Carrie and who really has sympathy for a school massacrist, bullied and telekinetic or not?

★★☆☆☆

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Thor: The Dark World (2013)

Marvel generally cannot sustain the fun and energy of its blockbuster 'firsts' and so it is again with this lifeless number two, a superhero action movie that never gets out of first gear - the humour falls flat, the action fails to interest, the cgi backdrops look cheap, and the Thor mythology is an incessant hammering for two hours ("convergence blah blah blah convergence blah blah blah)" that only the most dedicated of Marvel enthusiasts will care to really listen to.

★☆☆☆☆

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