The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2010)

Remaining largely faithful to the late Steig Larsson’s source novel, this long and TV-styled thriller brings punk hacker Lisbeth Salander to the screen. Michael Nyqvist’s rather dull journalist Blomkvist is shunted aside by Noomi Rapace’s mesmeric performance as the titular heroine.

This is a movie that divides opinion: smart thriller featuring a feminist action-heroine, or an exploitation flick that savours violence against women?

Campaigning journalist Blomkvist loses a libel case against a wealthy businessman, and is offered a working exile by an equally wealthy industrialist. Determined to solve the forty year old disappearance of his niece, Vanger suspects his bickering family of her murder. Salander cannot resist breaking cover to help in the investigation…

Red Cliff (2008)

Imperial China, AD 208: a big dollop of Chinese history coming up. Liu Bei flees with 100,000 peasants from tyrannical Prime Minister Cao Cao’s million man army, to take refuge with Sun Quan in the Southern state of Wu, joining with the rebel forces of Sichuan. As Cao Cao’s huge navy sails up-river to invade Souther China, the rebels unite their forces at the Fortress of Red Cliff in the hope of defeating their common enemy.

No one is making epic cinema like the Chinese. The modest (by Hollywood standards) $80 million budget feels several times that with the spectacle that is thrown up on screen for the better part of three hours. This is a Chinese war movie that outdoes all the others in the scale of action (Mulan and Confucius included).

Brotherhood of War

“I wish this was all just a dream. I want to wake up in my bed, and over breakfast, I’d tell you that I had a strange dream. Then I would go to school, and you and mom would go to work.”

Archaeologists excavating a Korean War battlefield contact a veteran whose dog-tags identify him as a casualty. Cut to 1950, two brothers are drafted into the South Korean army to fight the Chinese-backed communists. ‘Taegukgi Hwinallimyo’, also known as ‘The Brotherhood of War’ is the Korean war film directed by Kang Je-gyu.

Korean cinema is notoriously uncompromising and this is a tough watch, that makes closest comparisons Saving Private Ryan and Platoon look like The Simpsons. Extreme, extensive battle scenes include excessive violence, blood, gore and suffering, relieved only when the excesses tip over into stylised melodrama.

Mulan (2009)

The legendary story of Mulan, the girl who went to war and saved a nation. No, not the Disney musical, but China’s live-action epic recalls El Cid, The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far and the Sands of Iwo Jima in a sweeping tale of nationalistic pride.

When the Wei nation is threatened by the barbarian raiders of the Rouran tribes, the Wei go to war with a nation-wide draft. Let’s skip over the implausible tale of the enlisted volunteer soldier who is really a girl and keeps her gender concealed throughout the whole campaign and rise to the highest rank.

Nobody does historical epic like the Chinese. Casts of thousands, even before the CGI, sets, costumes, weapons, landscapes; China outdoes the golden age of the Hollywood epic by sheer weight of state resources thrown at the film industry in the world’s most populous country. And in return, the patriotic message of personal sacrifice in the name of Chinese unity and progress weighs down the whole enterprise time after time.

Casshern

More Manga than Manga

In a dystopian, Orwellian, retro-future of Samurai steam-punk, be prepared for an overdose of Japanese comic-book super-heroism replete with Gothic design, violent death, resurrection, giant robots and buckets of CGI.

Adaptations of Japanese Managa can be an acquired taste, as can the source graphic novels. Japanese studios generally carry these off with great verve and ambition, regardless of the budget or the script. Casshern is right at the peak and despite being eight years old, still carries the banner for this genre of film-making.

Genetic science attempts to roll back the damage of fifty years of war between Europa and the victorious Eastern Federation, in the aftermath of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The miraculous “neo cell” creates a group of super-beings at the head of a forgotten robot army; but a powerful warrior emerges to fight for mankind. Like they do…

City of Lost Children (1995)

A surreal French steam-punk fairy-tale from the warped minds of Delicatessen  creators Jeunet and Caro (1995).

In a latter-day Frankenstein castle – an oil platform at the centre of a minefield – a cloned scientist, Krank, prematurely aged and unable to dream, dispatches a cult of rubber-wearing, mechanically-enhanced Cyclops to kidnap innocent children. The genetically enhanced genius Krank would steal their dreams but gets only their nightmares. Their creator long vanished, Krank lives in exile with his makeshift ‘family’ of six younger clones, all played by Dominique Pinon, a dwarf bride, Miss Bismuth (Mireille Mosse) and a migraine-afflicted brain in a tank (Irvin, voiced by Jean-Louis Trintignant).

The Cyclops steal the wrong child when they kidnap Denree (Joseph Lucien), the Little Brother of One (favourite movie ugly bloke Ron Perlman, lately of Hellboy), a sailor and carnival strongman. Aided in his pursuit by a nine-year-old ingenue street thief, Miette (Judith Vittet), One chases them through a city mashed together from Dickensian squallor and the dark alleyways of 1930’s Parisian noir.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec

Paris, 1912; a reanimated Pterodactyl terrorises the city while our heroine Adele does derring-do in Egypt in search of a cure for her comatose twin sister.

Luc Besson takes a sideways step from his big-budget sci-fi and thrillers (Leon, The Fifth Element) into the slightly surreal 1970’s comic-book world of Jacques Tardi; a ripping-yarn that’s mostly the Mummy meets Indiana Jones with some Conan-Doyle Lost World but all with a Gallic twist (in French with sub-titles)

Freewheeling between set-pieces and a string of farcical sub-plots featuring a collection of well-drawn, but nonetheless cartoon caricatures, heavily influenced by Herge and lovingly rendered on screen.

Moliere

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Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, pen-name ‘Molière’ wrote more than 30 plays and is considered in France to be a greater playwright than Shakespeare. This costume tragi-comedy, co-written and directed by Laurent Tirard begs comparison with Shakespeare in Love.

In 1644, Molière was bankrupted and went missing for several months. Tirard fills those months with a fictional account almost entirely based on Molière’s most famous play, Tartouffe, in which a louche con-artist inveigles his way into the household of a nobleman disguised as a priest…

Priceless

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Hors de Prix (Priceless) (2006)

A French ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Jean (Gad Elmaleh), a shy young bartender, is mistaken for a millionaire by beautiful, scheming gold-digger Irene (Audrey Tautou). The love-struck Jean refuses to let her go when she discovers his true identity, even after she leaves him penniless. By blind chance, Jean falls into being a gigolo to an older woman at a luxury hotel, just as Irene continues to search for an eligible older sugar-daddy at the same hotel. ‘Luck’ and co-incidence  string the plot of this movie together, played out in the rarefied atmosphere of upscale Riviera resorts. It is no surprise that Irene mentors, and finally warms to her persistent, persuasive suitor…