• Director: James McTeigue
• US/UK, 2005
• 

By the third instalment, ordinary audiences had just about enough of The Matrix and its red pills, digital rain and ringing telephones. Certainly there were strong themes underpinning that trilogy, but old Neo did a bit too much dodging of slo-mo bullets and not enough exploring metaphors. However, in V For Vendetta, the Wachowski Brothers set aside the sullen monotone of Keanu Reeves – hardly a masterly mouthpiece – and put forth V, a literate, Fawkesian loner who propounds polemic while swishing shortswords.

Credit for the originality of the story goes to graphic novelists Alan Moore and David Lloyd. In a dystopian, near-future Britain, a fascistic government rules the nation by fear and surveillance. Sounds more than a little familiar, doesn’t it? The key to it all is a young woman called Evey Hammond. Natalie Portman infuses her protagonist with humanity but little sympathy. Indeed, whilst she portrays the agony of Evey’s imprisonment and interrogation with extraordinary directness, many of the scenes she shares with the enigmatic V are rather flat. It’s a curiously uneven performance. The Stephens Fry and Rea do good turns in supporting roles and Sinead Cusack manages to turn a few lines of script into a exercise in dignity and understatement. As the eponymous antihero, Hugo Weaving has a tough brief, delivering a range of emotions from behind a mask.

High-concept movies can be a hard sell and this stops well short of Orwell (even when John Hurt reprises his 1984 Big Brother role), lacking the tension and claustrophobia of the graphic novel. Like so many of these “comicbook movies”, the filmmakers were looking for a broad audience instead of the truth. It’s a shame that V For Vendetta is about the extent of Hollywood’s bravery.

• Director: Martin McDonagh
• United Kingdom, 2008
• 

In Bruges tells the story of two hitmen who lie low after a contract in the picturesque Belgian city. This is McDonagh’s first feature-length effort, having started out writing award-winning plays and then winning an Oscar for his short Six Shooter in 2006. Unsurprisingly then, the film is full of superb dialogue, with McDonagh’s script firing off the page like a sort of cocky, Anglo-Irish David Mamet.

The film’s characters are beautifully drawn, without recourse to too much background or showy tics. Each of the three protagonists – the two hitmen and their “sponsor” – has their own pace, their own unique style. Brendan Gleeson’s Ken manages to stay wise whilst being neither patronising nor paternal. Colin Farrell as his young colleague Ray is impatient and clumsy, yet he remains sympathetic throughout. Meanwhile, Ralph Fiennes occupies his role as their master Harry with absolute authority, despite spending the first and second acts on the other end of a phone.

There’s violence here and there’s great beauty. There are cold-blooded killers and passionate lovers. This could turn out to be the precocious debut of a master filmmaker.

• Director: Guy Ritchie
• United Kingdom, 2000
• 

After Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels sold so well and Snatch showed that the grotty London gangster motif had mileage, Ritchie’s career seemed to go downhill fast. Perhaps it was because his limitations were exposed by unfamiliar material. Or maybe his vampire wife had taken too many creativity transfusions from him. Whatever the reasons for Guy Ritchie’s perceived decline, that perception may yet prove unfounded.

And lest we forget, before the hideous Swept Away and the dismissed Revolver all was grimy gold. Ritchie freely admits that much of the screenplay for Snatch comes from the leftovers of Lock, Stock and the two movies have been twinned ever since. So, having attracted Brad Pitt, Benicio Del Toro and Dennis Farina from across the pond, Ritchie gathered together most of his usual suspects and reinvented the wheel.

Among the many highlights of Snatch include Pitt’s beautifully rendered “pikey” accent, pop-eyed psycho cum East End thug Brick Top (Alan Ford), the late Mike Reid’s faux-Jewish family and yet another terrific soundtrack. There are nods here to Scorsese, De Palma and even John Woo. Time will tell if Guy Ritchie can return to take his place as an equal among them.

• Director: Mike Leigh
• United Kingdom, 2008
• 

Mike Leigh is probably the last artist working today who still thinks suburban England has something to say. In his latest film, we’re presented with just under two hours’ worth of the usual struggling folk, weekends down the pub and indifferent weather. It’s all as sickeningly familiar as starter homes and roadworks.

From the midst of this banal landscape steps forth Poppy (Sally Hawkins), a bonny, blithe and gay (as in happy) primary schoolteacher who at first glance has been force-fed too much Red Bull. Nothing sticks to Poppy: people around her can stumble and suffer, but she’s kept her inner-child alive. Nowhere is this clearer than her driving lessons with Scott (Eddie Marsan), a man lost in the grave darkness of himself.

Hawkins brings a pleasant, consistently light touch to her character, but she’s the proverbial Milky Way: she won’t ruin your appetite before dinner. And those scenes with Scott are filling – you find yourself expectant for every driving lesson, to the absolute detriment of the film’s main thread. Marsan’s brooding, powerful presence has made for interesting cinéma everywhere he’s popped up, including The Illusionist, 21 Grams and Gangs Of New York.

• Director: Sergio Leone
• Italy/US, 1968
• 

A single set on Once Upon A Time cost as much as the entire production on one of Sergio Leone’s previous films. Certainly the director made full use of big studio backing to deliver his vision, one of cinema’s most bewitching and monumental works and the death of the western genre (which has had nothing useful to add since).

Leone’s masterstrokes are many: mixing together all the great colours of the cinematic West to create something new and powerful; moulding a strong female into the pivotal role (against his own better judgment); painting Hollywood hero Henry Fonda in a new and frightening shade of evil.

It’s also a brave film: the long, excruciatingly tense opening sequence and the slow burning plot will doubtless have turned some off. Yet even if this film didn’t set the US box office on fire, it was still arguably the finest achievement of Leone’s oeuvre, a justly revered classic the world over.

• Director: Alfonso Cuarón
• Mexico, 2001
• 

What’s odd about Y Tu Mamá También is how it can be so many things all at once: a road movie, a coming of age comedy, a sexy love story, a political critique. By way of illustration, this latter motif peppers the movie: there are soldiers and police and beggars and put-upon peasants. Somewhat oddly, however, the three characters who take us on their Mexican odyssey seem never to notice what’s out there.

The business of explanation is left to a kindly narrator whose voiceover comes right out of a Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie. He seems to encourage us not to judge Julio, Tenoch and Luisa too harshly, instead coughing up furballs of pathos that stockpile the humanity in a way two teenage bums and a broken-hearted ague could never do.

Let us make no mistake, this film is a coquettish charmer. We absolutely have to love it, because it loves life and so must we. Here the relentless positivity and positive absurdity of the youthful condition reunite us with that sense of adventure that grows harder to maintain the older we become.

• Director: Joe Wright
• United Kingdom, 2007
• 

When a young girl uses a series of events to doom the romance of the housekeeper’s son and her elder sister, the course of each of their lives is changed beyond foresight. So goes the story of Atonement, an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s manipulative novel by upcoming British director Joe Wright.

Whilst the first act concentrates on the minute tensions of a pre-war country residence, the remaining drama unfolds on a much broader and more popular canvas set among the young nurses of London’s war effort and the British Expeditionary Force’s evacuation of Dunkirk.

Though our three protagonists comfortably succeed in displacing themselves to a new time and place, the film as a whole still feels unbalanced when detailed portraits are swapped for sweeping landscapes. When all is finally explained with a typical McEwan twist in the dénouement, this beautifully shot, seriously acted film rather struggles for credibility like a swan taking flight.

• Director: Joel Coen; Ethan Coen
• United States, 2007
• 

It’s probably fair to say that the Coen brothers had been off their game for a few years. Since 2000′s O Brother Where Art Thou, we’ve had to swallow a lukewarm homage to film noir and a couple of flaccid big studio pictures. With No Country, the brothers are back in town. Yet whilst some Coen trademarks are here in abundance (tight plotting, expansive landscapes) others are noticeably muted (black humour, rich dialogue).

The story is propelled by three characters who never meet until the ends of their respective arcs. When they do meet, there is no interplay. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is the central figure, a ne’er do well who happens on a disastrous drug deal and its cash bag. Tracking him is the sociopathic hitman Anton Chigurh who’s no longer focused on the hit. Trailing both is the bemused veteran Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) who, as our link to the protagonists, finds such ‘modern’ crimes unfathomable. Woody Harrelson also pops up in a small, scene-stealing role as another hitman dispatched to bring down Chigurh.

This latest effort from the Coens is vintage stuff. Rather than relying so heavily on script, the distinctive sharp taste comes from pure acting and Javier Bardem’s masterful, Oscar-worthy turn as Chigurh drives the film with a crackling, frightening energy. Like the ‘cattlegun’ with which he dispenses people and door locks, Chigurh’s violence is drastic, suddenly explosive yet always controlled. As a result, the always-vacant look in his eyes is something to be feared.

• Director: Wes Anderson
• United States, 2007
• 

Anderson’s films are often about families or groups of individuals who form strong bonds. What’s becoming increasingly clear after seeing Darjeeling is that the director’s troupe of actors is imitating his art: almost all of the cast here seem to have appeared in multiple Anderson movies.

And Darjeeling is hardly the black sheep. It’s probably his most accessible effort yet and the humour and human story here are uncomplicated. Yet the audiences have been consistently small and the publicity was probably overshadowed by Owen Wilson’s personal troubles.

More’s the pity, because as three very different characters, Brody, Wilson and Schwartzmann are incredibly convincing siblings, travelling across India on the eponymous train and trying to make sense of each other.

• Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky
• Austria, 2007
• 

A busy master forger, Salomon Sorowitsch is a man with little concern for political ideals. And that’s what keeps him alive when war breaks out and he ends up in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Receiving preferential treatment to other prisoners, Sorowitsch is given the task of forging the currency that will keep the Nazi war effort alive and ruin the Allies’ economies. Put simply, it’s a case of “(y)our money or your life”.

The balance of principles and survival adds massively to the tension of the movie. We are never left in any doubt that Sorowitsch and his colleagues are moments from the same fate as those over the wall. As a result the film feels much weightier than its mere 98 minutes.

Karl Markovics is an agreeably grim Sorowitsch. An opportunist with few redeeming features, but in the circumstances, we still find ourselves rooting for him even though other characters perhaps deserve more regard. Sachsenhausen is certainly no place for lofty words, yet oddly it brings Sorowitsch a sort of redemption.