The Counterfeiters review

 Number 606 on the top 1000 films of all time is the German historical war drama 'The Counterfeiters.'

This film is based on the true-story of Operation Bernhard. During the Second World War, the Nazi's had a plan to destabilise the British economy by flooding it with fake currency. To achieve this goal, they coerced Jews into helping them - the chief among these is renowned counterfeiter Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics.)

The Counterfeiters won the 2007 Best Foreign Language film Oscar. I can see why. It is a quiet, but powerful story about the lengths that people will do to stay alive. Sally is just one of a group of Jews exploiting their skills to save their own lives.

Plenty of questions are raised about the morality of what the counterfeiters are doing, least of all from former Nazi dissident Adolf Burger (August Diehl) who is the first to point out the relative luxury that they are living in - in comparison to the Jews not lucky enough to be in their positions.

Sally's office is at the back of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. We often get chilly reminders of how he and the other Jews are in a special type of bubble - far enough away to be protected by the Nazis, but close enough to hear how the rest of their people are being massacred. It was a clever juxtaposition which reminded us that horror was never far away.

The different prisoners all have their own reasons to submitting to the Nazi demands yet they all felt human and believable. This is especially true of Sally who very much eschewed your standard hero archetype. Despite Burger's many attempts to spur him into rebelling, he stubbornly refuses. He's more interested in his own self-preservation. Considering his circumstances, who can blame him?

I do think that the film could have used an extra ten or fifteen minutes to wrap up the ending, as everything was rushed. Otherwise, this was a quietly powerful about a little-known part of the Second World War.

Sympathy for Mr Vengeance review

 Number 549 on the top 1000 films of all time is the Korean neo-noir crime thriller 'Sympathy for Mr Vengeance.'

Spoilers ahead

The deaf/mute Ryu (Shin Ho-Kyun) is a factory worker with a sister who desperately needs a kidney transplant. After he is fired from his job and is robbed by organ traffickers who run off with his kidney, he concocts a hair-brained scheme to kidnap the daughter of a rich man and hold her to ransom to pay for another kidney. But then things start to go wrong.

Sympathy for Mr Vengeance is Park Chan-Wook's first film in his Vengeance trilogy, later followed by Old Boy and Lady Vengeance. While I would consider Old Boy one of the best films of all time ever made, I cannot speak so highly of Sympathy for Mr Vengeance.

This film was confused and unfocussed. It straddled multiple genres without ever really engaging in one. Although it is labelled as a neo-noir, crime-thriller, it strayed into black/gross-out comedy like when it showed the organ traffickers engaging in casual necrophilia. Yet this humour was so off-beat that it wasn't funny at all.

At other times it tried being a romance with Ryu and his girlfriend Yong-Mi Cha ( Bae Boona) plotting to kidnap the little girl - Yu-Sun, but for reasons I'll explain later, this didn't work either. The film also strayed into horror with its gratuitous use of gore, plus the ghostly apparition of Yu-Sun.

But Sympathy for Mr Vengeance also didn't have a central protagonist. You think it would be Ryu and to a lesser extent Yeong-Mi, but after Ryu's sister and Yu-sun die, Yeong-Mi is promptly forgotten about, as is her relationship with Ryu, and the film shifts focus to Yu-Sun's father Park Dong-Jin (Song Kang-ho.) He swears revenge on those who killed Yu-Sun, which sees the film remembering about Ryu and Yeong-Mi, but this shift in protagonist was confusing and disjointed.

Speaking of disjointed, the film was poorly edited. It had a bad habit of cross-cutting in an incohesive way - we crosscut from Ryu's sister's body being discovered to her having an autopsy. But also in key scenes, the camera cut away to a completely unrelated scene which left certain plot threads dangling. For example, Ryu and Yeong-Mi discuss kidnapping Yu-Sun one minute, the next she's in their flat not worse for wear.

In one scene, Dong is tied up to a lamp post, the next he's walking about without a scratch. Finally, when Ryu goes to take revenge on the three organ traffickers who stole his kidney, he kills tow of them, but then the third one comes at him with a knife. What happens next? I don't know, because the camera cuts away. Later on, we are told that he has killed her too and has eaten her kidney.

I get that the film was going for a whole "if you set off on a quest for vengeance you must first dig two graves," which is true," as mostly everybody ends up dead, but this was lost in disjointed storytelling and confusing editing.

The Talented Mr Ripley review

Number 985 on the top 1000 films of all time is the 1999 psychological thriller 'The Talented Mr Ripley.'

Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) is sent from New York to Italy to bring the spoiled playboy Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) back home. However, this seemingly simple task proves to be much more difficult than originally foretold, and soon takes a dark turn. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Greenleaf's girlfriend Marge Sherwood and Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Greenleaf's best friend Freddie Miles.

This was a very convincing thriller. It was tense, gripping and had high suspense throughout. But it was also marked by such a great subtext. Although it wasn't directly addressed, I wonder, in Ripley's attempts to convince Greenleaf to return home, he starts to fall in love with him. Greenleaf is your run-of-the-mill playboy - charismatic, playful, but incredibly spoiled. Jude Law brought a brilliant chaotic energy to the role. 

Matt Damon was equally good as Ripley. This film came out in '99, so this was before Damon had really made a name for himself. But you could see his potential. This subtext gave the film a completely different layer. Maybe I'm reading too much into it - I don't know whether this was intentional or not, but it really worked.

Damon played Ripley very well. I think it would be overly-simplistic to describe Ripley as a psychopathic serial killer. He is a far more nuanced character than that. And Damon brought this nuance to the fore. I don't think Ripley necessarily causes bad situations to happen, but, rather, he positions himself to best take advantage of these situations. And that's what made him such an interesting character.

I also very much enjoyed Philip Seymour Hoffman. He is good in everything he does, and this film was no exception. Freddie Miles absolutely despises Tom Ripley and Hoffman plays this contempt with aplomb. He is sleazy, arrogant and nasty. RIP Hoffman. He was an actor taken from us far too soon.

The Talented Mr Ripley was a great thriller with some convincing performances. Hoffman might have just been playing a supporting character, but he surely stole the show.

Mr Nobody review

 Number 396 on the top 1000 films of all time is the science-fiction film 'Mr Nobody.'

Nemo Nobody (Jared Leto) is a 118-year old man at the end of his life. He is living in a futuristic society where humanity has achieved practical immortality. A journalist (Daniel Mays) interviews Nemo about his life. Nemo gives a sprawling, contradictory story which explores the many different paths that his life could have taken. He focusses on key events that happened when he was nine, fifteen and thirty-four. Some of the events include the break-up of his parents marriage as well as his own relationships with a number of women.

If there is anything that this film taught me it's that I'm not the biggest fan of science-fiction. I'm not maligning a whole genre - there is some sci-fi I like, but a lot of science-fiction seems pretentious and self-indulgent; writers and directors trying to show off their intellectual ability. And, of course, you can argue that I'm being bitter because I'm not clever enough to understand it. Partly that is true, but, for me, cinema should be a form of escape. It should be something where I can turn my brain off and not worry about missing half the film. Sure, that doesn't mean it can't be arty or intellectual, but I want to easily enjoy and understand a film.

Anyway, I'm saying all that, because I think 'Mr Nobody' was pretentious, self-indulgent and overly-long. The concept of it was interesting enough. A multi-verse idea lends itself to lots of narrative potential - every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And every decision you do or don't take can create a whole new universe. And this could have been interesting to watch if the film didn't explore every single way Mr Nobody's life could have gone. We see what life would have been like if he had chosen to live with his mum and with his dad. We see what his life would have been like if he had dated and married Anna (Diane Kruger) or if he had married Elise (Sarah Polley) or Jean (Linh Dan Pham.) All of these different storylines bloated the film and made it far longer than it needed to be.

And because so much of the film is told in flashback, with Thomas Byrne playing a nine-year-old Nemo and Toby Regbo playing Nemo at fifteen, it didn't really give Jared Leto a chance to act. He isn't the film all that much which is weird considering he plays the main character. He's a great actor - he won an Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club so why you won't allow him to do his thing is just a mystery to me. And when we do see him, he is mostly in make-up or against a horrifically, fake-looking green-screen. Seriously? The CGI was awful. Or perhaps that was supposed to be the point. Mr Nobody gives so many contradictory accounts that we're not sure which account to believe. Maybe the flashbacks with the awful CGI are supposed to be the imposters.

Although, one good thing about the film was its soundtrack. It was diverse and varied consisting of artists like Otis Redding, the Police and Buddy Holly. But this great soundtrack didn't make up for what was ultimately a convoluted, overly-confusing and self-indulgent film. And a film that severely under-utilised its lead actor.

Fantastic Mr Fox review

 Number 496 on the top 1000 films of all time is Wes Anderson's animated comedy Fantastic Mr Fox.

Based on Roald Dahl's 1970 story, Fantastic Mr Fox follows Foxy Fox (George Clooney) who regularly thieves from three farmers: Boggis (Robin Hurlstone,) Bunce (Hugo Guiness) and Bean (Michael Gambon.) These farmers swear revenge on Foxy Fox endangering him, his wife Felicity (Meryl Streep) and his family and friends.

This was a stop-motion film and the animation was absolutely gorgeous. I loved the rich Autumnal colour schemes. The colour truly popped. All the different animals looked adorable too from Foxy Fox to his badger lawyer voiced by Bill Murray to the villainous rat voiced by Willem Defoe.

However, this star-studded cast and lovely animation wasn't enough to stop this ultimately being a film made for kids. I was hoping that it would be a family friendly film that would appeal to children and parents alike a la Monsters Inc or Toy Story, but this really was meant for little children. And that did hurt its watchability factor. Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man, but maybe it was seemingly obvious that this film was always meant for kids. Children would love the bright colour scheme and the adorable animal characters.

Nevertheless, the conflicts were very juvenile such as the subplot of Mr Fox's son Ash Fox and his rivalry with his cousin Kristofferson. Ash feels threatened and jealous of his seemingly perfect cousin. This is a subplot that would be obviously appealing to little kids but not grumpy, old curmudgeons like me. All the violence bordered on cartoonish, like Mr Fox and his oppossum sidekick climbing up an electric fence. With every climb, the electric shocks x-ray their entire bodies. 

And a lot of the dialogue was contrived. It didn't seem natural and I think that some of that was down to George Clooney himself. I noticed that in a lot of conversations Mr Fox had with his son there were these strange hesitations at the end of each line. You could argue that, at first, this signifies their strained relationship. But their relationship fixes throughout the film, so why are there still the strange hesitations?

I think if I was twenty years younger I would have loved this film, but, now,  I'm far too much of a grumpy old man. It was good as far as it went, but that wasn't very far at all.