Hallam Foe

Hallam Foe
STARRING: Jamie Bell, Sophia Myles, Ciaran Hinds, Jamie Sives, Maurice Roeves
DIRECTOR: David Mackenzi
95 mins

A happening indie soundtrack, a nice lead performance – it’s all here, and yet it can’t somehow cancel out my feeling that the story’s tosh-level is considerably in excess of the EU maximum.
Jamie Bell plays young Hallam Foe, a tortured teen who lives in a very grand house somewhere in the Scottish borders.
He has lost the plot since his mother died: murdered, he suspects, by his foxy stepmother, played by Claire Forlani, who has ensnared the heart of his good-natured but ineffectual dad, played by Ciaran Hinds.
So now Hallam spends his time hanging out in his treehouse – a sign of ineffable creepiness in any other film, but here the token of wounded, eccentric sensitivity – and spying on local folk with his binoculars.
When he runs away to Edinburgh, Hallam finds himself scampering roguishly along the rooftops and working a menial job in a hotel, with whose personnel manager (Sophia Myles) he conceives an obsession, because she is the dead spit of his dead mum.
Jamie Bell has grown into a performer with warmth and style, and David Mackenzie’s direction is exuberant, but the story itself is self-regarding, and the ending, with its muddled vengefulness, strains both sympathy and credibility. – PB

Year of the Dog
STARRING: Molly Shannon, Laura Dern, Regina King, Thomas McCarthy
DIRECTOR: Mike White
97 mins

Comedy writer Mike White now makes his directorial debut with a script of his own.
The result is a bit of a dog’s brunch. It’s pitched as a suburban satire with touches of Solondz, Anderson, Payne and Jared Hess’s Napoleon Dynamite.
Dialogue scenes are often set up with direct sightlines into camera: a compositional tic which film buffs associate with Ozu, but here of course de notes emotional sterility and alienation.
The satirical acid is, however, diluted over the course of the movie; we find ourselves being invited to laugh with, not at, the movie’s screwed-up heroine. Molly Shannon plays Peggy, a sad-sack spinster, whose needs are ignored by everyone, including a boorish neighbour (John C Reilly) and an uptight sister-in-law (Laura Dern).
The only person who really cares about her is her dog, Pencil, and when Pencil dies in a freak accident, it triggers a mid-life breakdown in Peggy.
White doesn’t seem sure exactly where to take his script, how to find redemption for Peggy, or how to modify the tone: he winds up shrinking from the icy waters of bleak satire and opting for warm sentimentality.  – PB

The Dam Busters
STARRING: Richard Todd, Michael Redgrave, Ursula Jeans, Derek Farr, Patrick Barr
DIRECTOR: Michael Anderson
124 mins

AT more than half a century’s distance, this unabashedly heroic account of how Britain taught Hitler’s Germany a lesson can still stir patriotic true Brit emotions, trading as it does in the gruffly elemental moralities of the “good war” against the Nazis.
Though somewhat debased in the memory after decades of football chants, this is still a rousing adventure on the big screen, with its double-act of bouncing-bomb boffin Barnes Wallis (Michael Redgrave), and ace flyer Guy Gibson (Richard Todd), from whose memoirs the story is adapted.
The development of an armaments-delivery system to take out the Ruhr dams is described in admirably concise terms, and even if we know exactly how it turns out, director Michael Anderson keeps it all humming along as the low-flying Lancasters dodge the flak.
Only Gibson’s unfortunately named dog distracts from the Boy’s Own heroics. – AP

Reviews by Peter Bradshaw and Andrew Pulver