A Film Canon

At one level, The Adventures Of Tintin works better than most rotoscoped films,  since the uncanny valley opened up by rotoscoping, the tendency to both encourage and thwart identification, is also that of the comic book experience itself. As a result, Herge's tendency to subsume dialogue into monologue, and mannerism into meme, works quite well cinematically, especially in the case of Tintin's (Jamie Bell) own particular combination of speaking and thinking, which tends to drive the narrative. Unfortunately, Herge's visual style makes for a peculiarly profound mismatch with rotoscoping technology, since not only is his elegance and sublimity decidedly two-dimensional in nature, but it actually feels modelled on the classical animation of the 1930s and 1940s - less a series of nascent film frames than a series of carefully selected and organised animation cells (and the only other feature-length Tintin film, 1972's Tintin And The Lake Of Sharks, took this into account by creating an entirely new Tintin narrative, under Herge's supervision, and then releasing the book subsequently, as an adaptation of the film). From that perspective, the challenge - and sacrilege - at play is somewhat akin to that of transforming Snow White And The Seven Dwarves, Pinocchio, or any other canonical instance of classical animation into a rotoscoped film - and, while that doesn't invalidate the project, it does turn it into something which has to be understood entirely on its own terms. Yet this is difficult to do, since the film's aesthetic signature is little more than a sheepish attempt to rein it back in to the two dimensions it really deserves (or to make it approximate the wonderful television series, referenced in the opening credits.) Throughout, Spielberg revels in reflective and refractive surfaces, sublime, glassy curvatures that subsume three dimensions back into two dimensions, as if our 3-D glasses were actually 2-D glasses, allowing us to pretend that we're simply reading the comic book through the bubble of light that segues the 2-D credits into the 3-D film in the first place. What few overtly 3-D gestures remain tend to centre around a ground-level incredulity at 360-degree vistas, often from Snowy's perspective - and while this is occasionally awe-inspiring, it does feel like the aesthetic of a sandbox game without the autonomy, somewhat like an installment in youtube's sandbox tour subgenre. In the end, it feels as if Spielberg should have made a live action film, a 2-D animated film, or simply affixed his name to the video game released subsequently - even if it looks like a draft for Uncharted 3, it's still the most unified and sophisticated aesthetic experience, and the movie plays more as extended advertisement for it than anything else.

With the exception of Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison, Adam Sandler's solo films have tended to play as ninety-minute extrapolations of his Saturday Night Live creations - or, worse, as extrapolations of characters that never even made SNL, creations left on the cutting-room floor. At one level, Jack And Jill is the degree zero of this approach to film-making - not even up to the standard of a feature-length SNL sketch, it doesn't feel that different from the trailer, as if the latter were actually shot first, and then everything else filled in later. Worse, it's bookended by two extended pieces of product placement, for Dunkin' Donuts and Royal Carribean Cruises - although to describe them as product placement understates how much they actually drive and structure the film, which itself comes to feel like a product placed awkwardly, incongruously and incidentally within a ninety-minute advertisement. As a combination of trailer and advertisement, then, the film doesn't differ all that much from the pre-film entertainment, for which it registers a certain hokey nostalgia - and, while this nostalgia is certainly part and parcel of the film's studied anachronism, its affection for sound-stages, it unfortunately doesn't translate into any particular charm on Sandler's part. Fueled by a staunch commitment to cross-dressing over drag, and a quaint, family-friendly oblivion to the possibilities of sexual confusion, Sandler is immediately upstaged by David Spade's brief cameo, which is in keeping with the stronger, camper Chris Farley school of SNL drag. What makes Jack And Jill such a compelling experience, then, is the way it positions Al Pacino, who plays himself, but without any of the narcissistic self-deprecation typical of 00s celebrity self-performance (the contrast with Johnny Depp, with whom he makes his entrance, is instructive). If anything, after a decade of self-referential genre roles, and increasingly heightened theatrical roles, Pacino finally dovetails filmic and theatrical self-awareness, achieving a powerful fusion of theatre and cinema that not only beautifully and bathetically presents him as a kind of journeyman-actor, but places him, in some sense, outside the ambit of the film itself. If Sandler's films always rely on a bloated paratext, a commitment to Sandler as a concept that anchors and grounds the film, then Pacino in some sense takes on that burden in Jack And Jill, making the film feel like a paean to his acting career, and especially the way he's tried to creatively reimagine it over the last ten years - allowing for a Sandler film that, oddly, can be enjoyed without really enjoying, or even watching, Sandler himself.

Based on Michael Lewis' biography of the same name, Moneyball describes how general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and assistant general manager Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) transformed the Oakland Athletics' 2002 season by rejecting their talent scouts' wholistic, intuitive assessments in favor of a sabermetric analysis of prospective players' base percentages. Beane goes from being the most acute victim to the cutting edge of sporting deregulation, responding to the player-trading that's crippling his team by identifying more as a trader than a manager, and so the drama's driven more by statistics and shareholders than by the sport itself - most actual depictions of baseball take the form of real flashbacks, footage of Beane's own aborted career - while there's none of the charisma or attitude generally associated with sporting films. Individual players are little more than the occasional disaggregation of point clusters, while even the main characters remain slightly underdrawn (it's rare to see Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays disgruntled coach Art Howe, in a supporting role that's genuinely diminutive, that doesn't become the charismatic kernel of the film despite itself). As nothing less than the attempt to create an unflinchingly materialist, post-Fordist sports film, it runs the risk of actually leaving the realm of cinematic or aesthetic representation entirely - the baseball field is quickly abstracted from a visual to an audible to a textual to a purely conceptual plane, the cryptic text messages that Beane gets during critical games - but Bennett Miller artfully turns this to his advantage by making the very incommensurability between his conceptual and cinematic visions the aesthetic basis of the film. Translating Beane's rejection of "all intangibles" into a tangible silence, or a silence that refuses to be intangible, Bennett ensures that virtually everything feels like it takes place on a sound-stage, even if it doesn't look like it, locking his drama in an airtight compartment so deep in the stadium structure that it's always silent, no matter how tempestuous the surface of the crowd. This refines the white noise of information processing, the pixellated hush on the end of the line, until the viewer's sixth, statistical sense is heightened by the lack of other stimuli, and statistical analysis starts to truly "open up things we can't see". From that perspective, the screenwriting collaboration of Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zallian is inspired, resulting in a flaccid rhetorical flourish that tries to break this silence but is just absorbed back into it, just as any potential for comedy is quickly looped back into a milder, distributed absurdity, screwball dispersed into moneyball. At its strongest, it feels as if there's no real protagonist, that Beane is just another conduit - Pitt's opacity has never worked better - and that even Miller himself is more ghost director than director, another member of a team-as-process that's both more inextricably connected and profoundly alienated - inextricably alienated - than ever before.

Fusing the narcotic sweep of Traffic with the digital immanence of The Girlfriend Experience, Contagion follows the rapid progress of an airborne virus that appears out of nowhere, and kills about a third of the earth's population within several months. Like A Journal Of The Plague Year, there's two basic, interrelated narrative strands - one human, one viral. As far as the human narrative goes, an impressive ensemble cast provides a series of miniature narratives and vignettes relating to the plague. At the same time, the human dimension is prevented from ever becoming too pronounced by the fact that the majority of these vignettes relate to bureaucratic, scientific and epidemiological investigation, just as the majority of the screenplay is technical, procedural and concrete in nature. It's at this point that the viral narrative comes into play, not so much as a competitor to the human narrative, but as something the human narrative is continually trying to reconstruct - and it's this balance between narrative and narrative excavation that gives the film its elegance, its warm detachment. Specifically, reconstructing the viral narrative involves pinpointing the first person infected and the most recent person infected, the two thrusts of the epidemiological investigation, and the two poles, mathematical and dynamic respectively, of the film's epidemiological sublime. To that end, Soderbergh does an extraordinary job of making sheer information cinematic, dramatising the disease's terror primarily in terms of its ability to move more rapidly than both social media and the market, opening up a sublime disparity between information and information processing; the moment at which you're told that someone has suddenly and inexplicably died, or, in the case of one of the epidemiologists, at which you realise that you've become the very infective front you've been mapping. At its strongest, the film offers something like a virus-eye view, in which every character is merely an infectable surface - or, rather, a concatenation of infectable surfaces, a multiplication of interfaces beyond anything technology can immediately envisage in response (and the viral structure is proven to be particularly complex, the result of a freak viral mutation between pig, monkey and human DNA). Not only is it a supremely timely film, made for a time at which we're no longer able to foresee the future simply because we're already in it - at moments, it's impossible to think even moments ahead - but the peculiar nervous-respiratory conditions of the virus make it a film that has to be seen in a cinema, ideally amid a sea of coughs, although not necessarily, since every excitation of the optic nerve is tantamount to the screen coughing.

By the third installment, the Paranormal Activity films are starting to feel like a franchise as much as a cycle - and, like all good filmic franchises, the pleasure lies in repetition with a difference. To that end, Paranormal Activity 3 repeats the same basic narrative set-up as the first two films: a homeowner filming himself and his family sleeping, in order to isolate or identify an elusive demonic-domestic presence. The difference is that this film is set in the 80s, rather than the 00s, functioning as a prequel to the events of the previous two films. As a result, all the night sequences are shot on VHS, rather than digital, with the result that 00s digital uncanniness, and its preoccupation with the grain and glitch of the image, is replaced with 80s VHS uncanniness, and its preoccupation with the astonishing portability and mobility of the recording device itself. On the one hand, this deflects glitch into a sonic register - it's easily the most nuanced soundscape in the series, with the house rumbling, shuddering and breathing fairly consistently all the way through, as if internalizing the aftershocks of the earthquake that sets the narrative in motion. At the same time, the soundscape takes on the burden of disembodiment, meaning that the demonic presence tends to be embodied more than ever before in the visual plane. Almost from the very beginning, the demon manifests itself through one of the couple's children - and most of the night sequences involve her movement around the house, drawing heavily on the corpus of suburban horror, especially Poltergeist and Halloween. As a result, it's the most classically cinematic of the three films - unlike the first two, it's best seen in a cavernous, haunted multiplex, rather than illegally streamed - and this feeds back into the second consequence of the movement from digital to VHS: the increased attention to the camera as a mobile protagonist. Not only is this the first Paranormal Activity film in which we see the eye of the camera, but it quickly moves from static to mobile claustrophobia, as the main nocturnal camera is finally positioned on a slowly and spectacularly panning fan base. Moreover, the day footage, which, in the previous two films, played a fairly straightforward documentary role, is now understood more as a series of elaborate tracking shots. As a midpoint between the opening scene of Halloween and The Blair Witch Project - the film actually begins, in the 00s, with the original Paranormal household discovering the VHS cassettes in their basement - it tantalisingly opens up the Paranormal prospect as a haunted archive of cinema, a narrative that progresses technologically (single, multiple, mobile camera; shallow, deep focus) but regresses historically (00s, 80s).

There's a studied banality, blankness and even ugliness to a great deal of Australian cinema that makes it a peculiarly appropriate vehicle for true crime narratives - and, in Snowtown, that aesthetic isn't so much taken to its logical conclusion as examined as the very reason for crime in the first place. At first glance, Shaun Grant's script might play like a pedophile-exploitation film, in which John Bunting (Daniel Henshall) and Jamie Vlassakis (Lucas Pittaway) compensate for the pedophile that got away by embarking upon a mission of extermination that gradually expands from local suspected pedophiles and homosexuals to Chinese, Aboriginals, the intellectually disabled and, finally, anybody who - supposedly - won't be missed too much. While pedexploitation is certainly preferable, as a genre, to more bleeding-heart attempts to 'understand' the pedophile - at least by this point in its cinematic treatment - Justin Kurzel's direction hollows out the visceral kernel that might be expected of an exploitation-film, replacing it with a series of blank gazes and horizons that all stem from Vlassakis' pedophile encounter itself, reduced to a series of elliptical, deadpan photographic poses. As a result, Bunting and Vlassakis' spree becomes a kind of attempt to restore the visceral engagement with the world that the exploitation-film affords - or, alternatively, to restore Vlassakis with the affect that his pedophile encounter seems to have denuded - and, in doing so, clarifies the exploitation-film as a reminder that moral panic and outrage is deeply enjoyable. In fact, positioned in a late 90s media ecology, between two exploitative entertainment modes, both of which are referenced and rehearsed in the killings themselves - the waning exploitative action film and the incipient exploitative torture film - Bunting and Vlassakis are simultaneously positioned on the verge of a new kind of moral panic, or at least of an intersection between intensifying moral panic and decreasing cinematic centrality that has finally allowed moral panic to break away from generic, cinematic constrictions to become a kind of autonomous, quasi-cinematic source of entertainment in itself. In this way, the discussions of what Bunting and his friends would do to suspected pedophiles, as well as Bunting's injunctions to Vlassakis to examine his tortured victims, become a kind of surrogate for going to the movies, watching television or playing video games. Nevertheless, Kurzel's refusal to come down on the side of either pedophile or moral panic - instead focusing on their intertwining, and how that intertwining comes to constitute entertainment - means that the film never feels like a straightforward or hysterical attribution of violence to violent media, nor provides the characters with too much psychological depth, distinguishing psychological from mediatised explanation. It's this nuanced attention to the extravagant logic of exploitation that might make the film seem more exploitative than it really is - but what's extraordinary is that Kurzel's willingness to implicate his very blankness in the atrocities it describes means that he's not completely enslaved to that blankness either, producing moments of extraordinary lyrical beauty, most notably in the astonishing final sequence, as well as an an extremely nuanced, largely indirect depiction of the relationship between the killers. It also informs the exquisite tact with which the killings are described - only one is shown, the rest condensed to the phone messages that Bunting and Vlassakis forced their victims to leave - as well as the complete lack of any voyeuristic-logistic interest in the barrels in which the bodies were stored, and which preoccupied so much true crime, forensic and journalistic representation. In the end, it's not so much a critique of how moral panic breeds serial killing, but of how it constricts people with a spectatorship that's as titillating as it is deadening, numbing and exhausting, poised somewhere between Bunting's laconic, reassuring immediacy, and the evil incarnation of Priscilla who helps organise the murders.

Like Take Shelter, Super 8 plays like a belated, idiosyncratic attempt to complete Spielberg's shelved Watch The Skies project, here positioned somewhere between Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and The War Of The Worlds. However, whereas Take Shelter eschews or at least pathologises nostalgia, Super 8 performs a kind of second-order nostalgia, a nostalgia for Spielberg's own nostalgia mode, that nevertheless also reflects a cinematic universe in which regular nostalgia has been overexposed and exhausted. As a result, the central fantasy of the film is that digital cinematography existed in the the late 70s, in the guise of the Super 8 filming equipment that a group of young children use to make a zombie film - set, appropriately in the 50s - and that inadvertently captures an alien invasion, in a kind of attenuation of Paranormal Activity over the three days it takes for the film to be developed. Raised on ultra-violence and suburban horror, these children are on the cusp of a Spielbergian universe, and the question the film poses is whether a more accidental, contingent recording might have captured the same lush, nostalgic world. By the same token, it's a world that hasn't quite formulated the 50s as its nostalgic object, and so it's appropriate that the alien's invasion dates from the 50s, and that its narrative is redolent of the basic 50s science fiction narrative, in which an ostensible monster is demonstrated to actually be an empathic surface, under the right conditions. It's a premise that doesn't require exquisite direction so much as exquisite quotation and production - and the studied pastiche and cliche that Abrams employed in Star Trek is not only less grating but completely appropriate here since, unlike that film, Super 8 has no pretension to auteurist, bombastic reinvention, but rather to a kind of amauteur appreciation. If it's a myth of origins, it's not of a particular character or narrative, but of a whole mindscape - and, as a result, the entire film feels stagy, not so much in the sense of being filmed on a set, but of taking place in a world that's composed of celluloid. Hence Abrams' only real aesthetic signature - the overexposure of light to produce blue lines and halos analogous to those produced by looking into the Super 8 apparatus itself, and the accompanying intensification of darkness, until each pocket of midwestern life feels like an island, or frame, in the vastness of celluloid space. In other words, it's a producer's film - or, alternatively, a film that Spielberg could only have produced  - with the possible exception of the final film-within-the-film, which feels like a throwback to his late 60s and 70s output, dovetailing the emergence of Super 8 with the frame in which Spielberg became Spielberg.

Take Shelter plays like a revisionist midwestern nostalgia piece, or Field Of Dreams with bad dreams, in which landowner Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) experiences a series of apocalyptic visions that induce him to pour all his time and money into building an underground shelter for his family. These visions, which occur periodically throughout the first third of the film, represent an intensification and exhaustion of Spielberg's proclivity for the upward gaze of a child, here intensified to the upwards gaze of a deaf child, Curtis' daughter, whose imminent surgery is put into jeopardy by his actions, and whose cochlea gradually becomes continuous with the spiraling tornado that dominates his visions. As a result, those visions tend to be primarily visions of sound, or of images raised to such a pitch that they can effectively be heard, strangling and stifling Curtis with their sublimity. Not only does this produce an unusually and spectacularly variegated topography of cloud and light, as if Nichols were belatedly and idiosyncratically completing Spielberg's shelved Watch The Skies project, but the claustrophobic expansiveness peculiar to a deafened image, as if the sheer fact of living beneath something as immense and crushing as the sky constituted live burial. In this way, they pre-empt the claustrophobic conclusion, and its gas-masked fusion of sight and sound -  part of an unusual movement away from the visionary register of the first act in favor of a revisionary, indie flatness, in which Curtis' experiences are more or less decisively diagnosed as the onset of paranoid schizophrenia, and our wonder simply presented as something requiring medication. From that perspective, the final movement back towards a visionary register, and the way it's presented as a twist, is a little disingenuous - but it's also understandable why Nichols resorts to it, just because there's ultimately something a bit unsatisfying, and even facile, about a revisionary destylising of a genre, or mode, that's almost entirely driven by style. Field Of Dreams and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind - the two biggest touchstones here - are both extremely slow films, but they're so gorgeously and contemplatively style-driven that their slowness isn't noticeable, whereas Nichols frequently seems to retain their slowness and discard their style, making his own film feel a bit cosmetically, or ponderously slow. It also doesn't do any credit to his own tactile proclivity for style, again clearest in the first section, which seems poised at the same level of sign language as Curtis' daughter, who can speak the general sign for "storm", but not the individual letters.

Sometimes a film syncs so beautifully with an actor's personal life that it's impossible to believe it could have been any other way - and yet Mel Gibson wasn't the first choice for the role of Walter Black, a chronically depressed toy manufacturer who brings himself back from the brink of suicide with the aid of a talking beaver puppet. Nevertheless, only Gibson's back story could have prevented the film feeling gimmicky, let alone transformed it into something so beautiful. By the same token, only a friend could have directed Gibson by this point in his career - so there's something poignant about the fact of the film itself, about the slippage between Jodie Foster and Gibson's friendship, and their performance of a romance, that encapsulates their dual existence on the peripheries of Hollywood sexual orthodoxy, in a similar manner to Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester in Bride Of Frankenstein. It's a diegetic cusp, a position between two types of utterance, that cries out for exactly the acting-directing that Foster provides, so it's appropriate that the film should understand what could have been a fairly straightforward narrative of paternal failure and redemption as a failure of utterance, an inability to completely inhabit language. Given that Gibson's last incursion into the popular consciousness was as a psychotic voice - or, rather, as a psychotic presence so monstrous that it had distilled itself into a disembodied voice - it's even more appropriate that Walter is presented as a burnt-out voice, a place where some unnamed crisis that precedes and looms over the narrative has prevented language. It's a symptom that extends, in turn, to his entire family - his wife (Foster) uses the dinner table as a desperate attempt to restore conversation, his older son eschews his own voice, writing speeches and exams for other students, and his younger son has difficulties talking to people at all. From this perspective, the beaver's ability to restore paternal authority is synonymous with its ability to restore language - first and foremost to Walter, and then only indirectly to his family. Just as Gibson's beliefs can be traced back to his even more extremist father, so the beaver intervenes at the precise moment at which Walter is about to follow in his father's footsteps, producing the film's central meta-narrative of Gibson fathering Walter, or Walter's final apotheosis as the destination of Gibson's rants and rambles. As a result, Gibson's most tangible presence in the film is as the beaver - the distant, commonwealth fringes of his American accent - while the rest of Walter's body is strangely unfamiliar, Gibson without Gibson. It's probably Foster's best direction, treading the fine line between horror and comedy that culminates with Walter's self-castration, and opening up a roller-coaster sentimentality that's strangely moving, if only because it encapsulates the epic, roller-coasting linguistic ambitions that each member of the family secretly harbors. In the end, these find their most evocative image outside the family, in the older son's girlfriend, whose graffiti auteurism provokes melancholy dreams of "tagging big and fast...on freeways, billboards, buildings... as if I'm running a million miles an hour."

Like most of Wiseman's explorations of quotidian American spaces, Boxing Gym is more interested in procedure than narrative. However, whereas his procedural approach has often tended towards a slow, pessimistic pace - procedure as a kind of failure, or foreclosure - Boxing Gym tends to be more kinetic and positive, elaborating the daily rhythm of a small boxing gym, run by Richard Lord, in Austin, Texas. In doing so, it draws out boxing's paradoxical relationship with individualism, or perhaps just the paradoxical nature of individualism, as the various patrons of the gym collaborate to move beyond the collaborative, communitarian texture of the gym itself, into a world that's never shown - virtually the entire film takes place in the gym - but only intrudes, at least contemporaneously, in the form of an incongruous Microsoft employee who prompts a chain of discussions about mass shootings. As a result, the gym feels like a retreat from the contemporary world, a kind of analog backwater, free from "contracts, initiation fees and plastic", as evinced in its extraordinary display of posters, photographs, paintings and other paraphernalia. None of these seem to date much beyond the 80s, while each one feels like a nascent or elliptical narrative, as Wiseman uses them to frame the gym patrons; or, rather, uses the gym patrons to frame them, in a kind of apotheosis of the vernacular poetry that forms his closest approximation of a self-consciously aesthetic signature. This poetry carries over to the interviews, which beautifully manage to draw out idiosyncrasy without ever devolving into the contrived, whimsical eccentricity that's so often the province of documentaries about 'ordinary' people. In part, it's because Wiseman doesn't even provide fully-fleshed interviews, preferring to relegate speech to just another iteration of the soundscape, making each utterance feel as incidental and intriguing as anything anybody might catch while training - and just as implicitly inclusive, as some of the more extended conversations demonstrate. In the same way, the majority of the gym can be seen from most vantage points, thanks to a couple of well-positioned mirrors, with the result that none of the patrons ever feel particularly abstracted from it. It's this inclusive, communitarian texture that ultimately transforms the gym into something like a classical gymnasium, and boxing into a mere extension of the dignity of manual labour. Not only does Richard Lord dissuade anyone joining who wants to fight, rather than box, but he teaches boxing itself as a kind of lesson in etiquette, a physical politeness that finds its logical conclusion in the astonishing penultimate scene, in which a man and a woman dance beautifully and obliquely in the ring, but never parry or aim blows at each other. By abstracting boxing from any combative or aggressive imperative, Lord simultaneously abstracts training from any narcissistic imperative; or, alternatively, makes the gym less about streamlining and regulating musculature than an exercise in demotic dexterity, with the result that there's less self-consciousness and, ultimately, paranoia about people - especially men - communicating and communing with their bodies. It's this laconic, generous openness to communication that ultimately constitutes the film's own caressing dexterity, its eschewal of any self-consciously privileged, documentary distance, as if Wiseman had just signed up his grainy, televisual eye as a gym member, or Lord were merely another hard-working, multitasking director, producer, editor and sound technician. 

Terrence Malick has always been interested in the moral certainty of 50s suburban melodrama - but, with The Tree Of Life, he pairs it with suburban melodrama for the first time, taking that genre's oscillation between the domestic and the cosmic to its unimaginable conclusion. In the process, he not only provides a kind of genesis, or myth of origins, for his own directorial style, positioning it as the end product of creation and evolution, but creates his most abstract, stylized film, the film towards which all his previous efforts yearn, and his most effective nexus between film, philosophy and Christianity. As such, the most dramatically stylized moments occur in the first half, which frames an extended montage sequence, depicting the history of the universe, with the reaction of a suburban couple to the news of their youngest son's death in World War II. One of the most extraordinary pieces of film-making ever composed, this attempts nothing less than to visualize the breath of God, the small voice or silence in the storm - or, alternatively, to discover the golden ratio, the rapturous, upwards spiral that connects and consummates the harmonious complexity of all things; the galaxy in the jellyfish, the surface of Jupiter in the sea anemone. With the aid of a highly mobile camera, frequent jump cuts and an echoed, chambered alternation between diegetic and non-diegetic sound, Malick creates a membrane-image, a bubbled surface without depth, a single, prehensile translucence that makes each shot a jewel, the equivalent of being born, or at least of touching the surface of some embryonic threshold. At its strongest, it's like holding a shell to your ear and hearing the ocean in its whorl, and would seem to invite an IMAX projection were it not for the fact that Malick seems equally as interested in elegance as expansiveness, in beauty as sublimity - a turn that distinguishes him from such abstract forbears as Baraka and Godfrey Reggio's qatsi trilogy, and is especially clear in the galactic imagery, which is surprisingly painterly, delicate and humble. By the same token, the depictions of suburbia in this opening section are strikingly deanthropocentric, as people become just another iteration of the biblical quotations, most of them drawn or extrapolated from Job, that whisperingly texture Malick's visual glissandos. In the second part of the film, which tells the story of the deceased soldier's childhood, and relationship with his older brother, the style is more reined in, and more recognisably continuous with Malick's earlier output. While it's still spectacular and moving, the sheer astonishment and relief of a Malick film in which humans are finally and sublimely elided - of seeing him achieve a Christian inhumanism, admit that he's directing for God - makes the return to an Oedipal family drama somewhat anticlimactic, while the last sequence is unfortunate, an attempt to search for an appropriately epic image on which to conclude, after the entire universe has been exhausted. Nevertheless, it's the most ambitious and spectacular science fiction film since 2001, making the 50s as strange as the most distant reaches of the galaxy - strange enough to dissociate them from any straightforward nostalgia, just as Malick's alternation between biblical and biological wonder resists any straightforward appropriation, as if David Attenborough were to propose an argument for intelligent design.

The Australian New Wave of the late 70s and early 80s exhibited a tension between languorous stylistic experimentation and a kind of stylistic pragmatism, a reproachfully 'sincere' disregard for style - and the victory of the latter is the only way to explain the middling critical response to Julia Leigh's extraordinary debut feature. Even the most idiosyncratic contemporary Australian films tend to anchor their stylistic signature in an insistent, vernacular drawl, whereas Leigh not only eschews this, but imbues every utterance with a ceremonial quality that's palpably insincere, or at least artificial. The narrative is elliptical and oblique, telling the story of Lucy (Emily Browning), a troubled university student who drifts into lingerie waitressing, and from there to a fetishistic business, in which men pay her to take a sleeping pill for five hours, during which they're allowed to do anything to her that's not harmful or penetrative. It'd be too crude to reduce such an elusive film to an allegory for the Sydney property crisis, but Lucy's movement from student-house to boutique apartment could only be mapped out in this way in a mileu in which private property had become uncanny, gothic and even aristocratic - relegated, with the help of a spectrum of Australian-English accents, to an almost colonial distance, in a neo-noir tour of Sydney's heritage houses, where most of the sex acts take place. That said, Sydney is largely abstracted, as Leigh's taste for tight, medium-shots, and the virtual absence of music, or even diegetic sound, makes every space feel like an interior, and imbues every composition with the immaculate interior design of the houses themselves. This tends to be drawn from Oriental sources, creating a hushed floating world, or a digital painting, that places it alongside the greatest films about prostitution, most notably American Gigolo. At the same time, Lucy is transformed into a porcelain edifice, in which, as her madam (Rachael Blake) reminds her, her vagina is her "temple"; or, rather, in which the temporal space within her vagina simply becomes continuous with the private spaces within which she and her vagina are paraded. With the help of an analogy between the labia and mouth, between temple and temple, these private spaces become the real erotic object, the endoscopic trajectory from dinner table to double bed, or the whole etiquette of bourgeois, private speech that's endlessly rehearsed and denatured. At the same time, Leigh's fade-outs between scenes, and minimal cutting within them, opens up a hallucinatory, private time - or even a privatized time, as the pervasive connection between drugs and money might suggest, fused into a tipsy "kind of grace". From this perspective, and as a house-bound, suicidal friend of Lucy's suggests, the ultimate erotic fantasy of the film is not merely sleeping or waking up in your own bed, but having the luxury to die in your own bed; or, more radically, the luxury of a private space from which to construct fantasy at all, a dream of the dreamless space required for dreaming to occur.

The Trip is a redacted version of a BBC television series that screened in late 2010, and describes a week-long road trip taken by Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. However, not only does it feel like a completely independent film, but the cinematic presentation - or at least the awareness of a transition from television to cinema - works better for the panoramic north English landscapes, and textures Coogan's melancholy musings on the relative merits of television and cinema, and his inability to completely break into the latter. For the most part, Winterbottom draws on Coogan and Brydon's background in celebrity crypsis to present them as two charismatic voices, gradually abstracted and elasticised beyond any of their astonishing impersonations, into a startling, prosopopoeic fluidity: "Two-thirds of the way through that, you were thinking of doing Anthony Hopkins, weren't you? I heard it in your voice." It's as if the credit sequence in Tristram Shandy were expanded into an entire film, in which Coogan and Brydon's voices gradually fuse into a third, more abstracted voice, as evinced in Coogan's impersonation of Coogan, and the movement towards impersonating inanimate objects, most memorably a submarine sonar. Not only does this absorption of character into voice prevent the frequent invocations of Coleridge and Wordsworth ever feeling contrived or pretentious - they're just another pair of voices, like Kate Bush and Heathcliff - but it restores their poetry as a spoken medium, producing the lyrical sublimity of the latter part of the film, and a delightful take on the Romantic project of abstracting the voice of the common man, the babbling of nature. It also prevents Coogan's search for an original voice ever feeling particularly indulgent, as well as making Winterbottom's ekphrastic, photographic montage sequences feel more spoken than directed, as Coogan trudges through them in search of mobile phone reception. Even the pretext for the trip - a tour of the best restaurants of north England - never feels precious, just because of how exquisitely Coogan and Brydon adopt and manipulate the whole theatrics and gravitas of the restaurant experience, in a culinary comedy of manners that's less about talking at cross-purposes than across a breathful of food, or mouthful of words, as their shared love of Al Pacino turns screwball into chewball; a quizzical sampling of chocolate quotation-marks.

At once Tarr's simplest and most extravagant film - and longer, in its way, than Satantango - The Turin Horse has all the unbearable, apocalyptic heaviness of an auteur condensing, exhausting and annihilating his signature in the name of whatever it was it stood for; still life attenuated one syllable at a time. Detailing six days in the life of an impoverished man and woman living alone in a windswept valley, there's no narrative, hardly any dialogue, and - with the exception of two very brief interludes - only two characters, although the complete absence of any introspection, development or charisma hardly qualifies them as characters, nor the performers as actors, as performance and characterisation are subsumed into the two labourers whose repetitive, physically taxing routines constitute the bulk of the film. Unlike Tarr's previous films, the mere possibility of a crowd, or a collective, is completely absent, dispersed into the gale-force winds that whip around the house and into Vihaly Mig's hypnotic organ soundscape, producing some extraordinarily lyrical possibilities which Tarr, characteristically, refuses to indulge too extensively. This refusal to engage, a distrust of both discursion and depth, has always been part of Tarr's style, but it's pared back here to the disparity between the film and the opening monologue, which describes the story of Nietzsche's encounter with a whipped horse in Turin, and how it precipitated his breakdown. Although Tarr's project could be explained both in terms of Nietzsche's subsequent withdrawal and his anti-discursive philosophy, it seems too discursive to even say that, and makes more sense to understand the horse - which, despite being the subject of the film, is only seen in a few scenes - as the apotheosis of Tarr's career-long use of animals as a surrogate for human suffering; or, as the woman's replacement of the ailing horse at the front of the cart suggests, not even a surrogate so much as a surface upon which common labour leaves a more tangible trace. As a result, the deadening bathos of the film gathers around the almost unbearable beauty and pathos of the horse's face - a pathos that extends to its whole body and propels Tarr's characteristic tracking shots with a more rhythmic gait, as if it were longing to ride the wind. But those tracking-shots are, ultimately, more restrained and invisible than they've ever been, to the extent that the film frequently approaches straightforwardly classical editing. It's an extraordinary, surreal cinematic experience, exponentially more numbing than any of Tarr's previous films, in which it's almost impossible for the viewer to see, rather than dumbly look. As the elusive trailer - a candle burning out - might suggest, it feels as if Tarr simply wants to detail everything that's required to survive - or alternatively, to film a flame or fire until it simply, quietly expires. It's cinema slow enough for pupils to expand and dilate, to become completely accustomed to the blackness of the house, creating an extraordinary, vortical shock whenever the front door is opened and the trip to the well is made, or even whenever a window intrudes on the mise-en-scene, as convulsive and dismaying as the brightness buried beneath potato skins.

With Source Code, Duncan Jones continues Moon's interest in futuristic, simulacral labour - and, while it lacks the stylistic-musical signature of the earlier film, it's considerably more interesting conceptually. In essence, it details the operation of a single invention, which allows the residual, post-mortem, neural rumblings of Private Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) to be transplanted into the last eight minutes in the life of a terrorist victim, for the sake of identifying the terrorist perpetrator. Not only can Stevens continually relive these eight minutes, which take place on a Chicago-bound train, but he can creatively interact with them, producing an idiosyncratic take on the convergence of cinematic and gaming aesthetics, in which the latter makes itself felt primarily through an ostensibly limitless horizon - the train is continually framed by expansive pans and tracking-shots - that conceals a whole host of invisible, local horizons, as if to evoke that point in a sandbox game at which the limits to autonomous exploration are surprisingly and suddenly reached. Positioned somewhere between Groundhog Day and The Lady Vanishes, Stevens' continual exploration of this space - which could have done with a little more of Ramis' radical repetition - creates a chamber drama that moves from spatial to temporal to neural parameters; a brain chamber drama, centred on an impressive reinvention of science fiction's perennial brainscape, in the form of a dim, flickering illusion of proprioception, an "electromagnetic vibration" somewhere between conscious and neural death that imagines consciousness itself as a kind of false limb. Alternatively, Jones presents a chamber drama, or a repetition-drama, built around a fragment of space-time, translating the frequent discussions and explanations of quantum mechanics into the difficulty of triangulating a criminal from the relative movement of two trains. At its strongest, it approaches the intensive impotence of the classic action film, transferring it from a post-Vietnam to a post-Afghanistan mileu, suggesting that physical recuperation is now not even possible in fantasy, and opting for a cerebral flexing that sits well with Gyllenhaal's muted physical presence, his narcissistic subsumption of physical agency. It's hard to say whether the ending lives up to the promise of the premise, and the temporal twist is a little tired - but this hardly seems important since, as one of the characters reminds us, the film is less preoccupied with time travel than with time management, less fascinated with revelation than with process, as if the spectacle of being present at your own death - the central, titillating paradox of time travel cinema - were exhausted and replaced with the yearning for death as naked singularity: "...any soldier would say that one death is service enough."

The strongest installment in the Scream franchise since Scream 2, and the most original since the original, Scream 4 poses two questions - how to recover classical suspense in an age of digital simultaneity, and how to transform a joke into something horrifying; or, rather, to how recover classical suspense from the comic mode it's been assigned by the rise of digital, three-dimensional and torture porn horror. Although Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson playfully flirt with all three modes, their real innovation is to transform Ghostface so that he's both more of a fully-fledged character than in any of the previous films, and even more identified with his mouthpiece; a charismatic automaton, or bundle of technology, completely continuous with the Ghostface iPhone app that plays such a pivotal role. Correspondingly, Ghostface is, for the first time, a digital cinephile, raised on youtube recreations of Scream, and his spree is a testament to the insatiability of this new mode. In fact, his mission ultimately seems to be to restore the sense of time that makes suspense possible - unlike previous 'shriekquel' or 'screamake' Ghostfaces, he's not interested in reminding Sidney (Neve Campbell, as sassy as if Scream 3 never happened) that the past is still with her, but rather in reiterating it as past. As a result, the first two acts take place in an eerie zone where suspense proper is replaced by a disarming cinephilic frenzy, poised somewhere between techno-comedy and the sublime, fractallated self-referentiality of the opening sequence, while the third act restores classical suspense by way of one of Craven's most exquisite set pieces, bringing forth an astonishing conclusion in which digital fandom is identified as a symptom of 00s wound culture. It's by far the most Gothic film in the series, preoccupied above all with self-wounding, textured by a cool, chiming wind that seems to have travelled all the way from 1996, and opening up the temporal possibility of a Woodsboro years, decades hence;  "you remind me of me".

Wasted On The Young does to mobile social media what Elephant did to gaming, to the extent that the love triangle between high school students Darren (Oliver Ackland), Zack (Alex Russell) and Xadie (Adelaide Clemens) - set into motion by Zack and his friends raping Xadie - feels like an incipient "social film", designed to be seen on multiple technological platforms simultaneously. Not only does it feels as if Ben E. Lucas wants to reduce the space between scenes to the simultaneity of an IM, but the screen is continually and elaborately scrawled with the detritus of instant messages, or overlaid with multiple layers and windows of communicative pixellation. By making the striking decision to refrain, with the exception of the last shot, from casting any adults - parents and teachers are continually mentioned, but never seen - Lucas suggests that social media has finally fulfilled the teen fantasy of creating a completely adultless space, a mobility that's sufficiently fluent and elastic to elude parental or pastoral control. That's also the essential fantasy of the teenage, high school house party - and so Lucas beautifully suggests a fundamental alteration, or perhaps just consummation, of party topography. Parties, in this world, are no longer an event but a medium, as pervasive in the school playground as in their ostensible venue. Dance beats seep seamlessly in and out of the diegesis, while the most stylised cinematography is reserved for the blue-green osmosis that connects dancefloor and school pool. In the process, bullying itself becomes more mobile, elasticised, effeminised, partaking of the subtlety and nuance that's more conventionally typical of female bullying - Chris Lilley's 'Jaime' reimagined as a horror protagonist - while the familial, communal overtones of social media are completely quashed (Zack and Darren are half-brothers, and their absent parents' surveillance system segues quite effortlessly into their mobile party). Nor is the class levelling of social media presented as redemptive in any way - it just means that the bullies can conceivably attend an exclusive private school but still sport Southern Cross tattoos. Apart from being the greatest film about school bullying since The Faculty, it's a chilling and refreshingly unconventional vision of an education system in which laptops have replaced books - the fight that anchors the narrative gradually gathers the school across the library, laptop announcements and iPhone videos - that, like Elephant, can only conceive of a violent response in virtuality, as an attempt to escape being "trapped inside of a bubble", imprisoned in a facebook fortress.

Like Donnie Darko, Daydream Nation imagines the 80s as the moment at which we first began to experience that dissolution of time that signals the approach of end time. It's further enough along that trajectory, though, to ensure that the time travel that drove Donnie Darko doesn't even make sense any more. Instead, Michael Goldbach suffuses his coming-of-age story, which focuses on a love triangle between two students and a teacher in a small Canadian town, with an overwhelming nostalgia for the present. As the title's reference to Sonic Youth might suggest, it's a replacement of flashback with feedback, an indication that past and present are now simply part of the same loop, bleeding into the cinematographic fuzz that covers most of the film's surface, and produces something like a visual Doppler Effect - layer upon layer of pastness that becomes exponentially and unbearably more present, until it's suddenly even more remote than the past itself. Virtually every shot is overlaid with pixellated, magnified and abstracted points of light, which offset the witty, acerbic dialogue, and complete the 80s cinematic project of turning the past into little more than an abstracted texture, an ambience that gathers around local, formal, specificities - or, in terms of the film's narrative, the serial killings that defined "that summer", and suffused the town with a murky, amorphous illbience, even as they produced sharp, local cusps. Less an atonal than a modal film, then, it's not a straightforward recreation of an 80s small town nostalgia piece, nor a straightforward deconstruction - although Goldbach does playfully suggest that nostalgia for small-town life both conceals the fact that small towns still exist, and that they need this very fabricated nostalgia to make their tedium bearable. Instead, by presenting the small town nostalgia piece as the cinematic version of 80s feedback, Goldbach suggests that it's only now that that feedback has circulated enough to become truly inhabitable, just as  Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation comes more into existence retrospectively, with each subsequent playing.

Less a docudrama than the sleazy, lurid, consistently climactic recreation that might be expected to accompany a tabloid news broadcast, The Bank Job is loosely based on the 1971 Baker Street Robbery, in which a group of petty criminals successfully broke into a bank, only to discover that the contents of the safety deposit boxes they confiscated were desperately wanted by a whole bevy of London criminal and administrative figures. The most critical box contained photographs of Princess Margaret engaging in compromising sexual acts, and was being held by Michael X, a radical, anti-imperialist Trinidadian, as blackmail - and so the film quite eloquently captures the peculiar British proclivity for tabloid scandal as a fascination with royal scandal, or a prescience that the very existence of royalty is a kind of ongoing scandal, publically sanctioned pornography. At the same time, the centrifugal energy that generally characterises the opening act of a heist film is relegated to the third, as the criminals, led by car salesman Terry (Jason Statham), devote considerably more logistical and aesthetic ingenuity to retaining the money than to stealing it, in a strikingly literal instance of the heist genre's perennial reminder that possession is nine-tenths of the law, as well as its conflation of heist-logistics with unremunerated labor. Throughout, Roger Donaldson favors oblique angles, which give the entire film the feel of a hastily, covertly snapped photograph - how a paparazzo might shoot the past - as well as a warm, summery palette, which both evokes the slight bleeding of blurred, fetid newsprint, and casts a distant, tropical sheen from the imperial fringes that drive the action. As a classical heist film made for a contemporary action demographic, then, it's a considerable achievement, grafting the verbal energy of 90s Cool Brittania onto the visceral intensity of 60s kitchen-sink realism, for an eccentric, hidden history of hyper-kinetic action aesthetics.

Of all Danny Boyle's films, Slumdog Millionaire is perhaps the most eloquent vehicle for his auteurism, just because it's based on a fairly unpromising book and screenplay, which tells the story of Jamal (Dev Patel), a slumdog who works his way onto the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, for the sake of winning back his childhood sweetheart, Latika (Freida Pinto). The most promising element of this narrative is the fact that Jamal isn't attempting to win back Latika with a display of money, or intelligence, but simply with a display, a dissemination of himself onto so many screens that one is bound to find her - and Boyle takes this as the basis of his directorial signature, which identifies the game-show as a post-Bollywood genre, and attempts to visualise some convergence between the two, just as the narrative converges Jamal's slumdog childhood and his progress on the game. Most explicitly, Boyle reserves the most elaborate, recognisably cinematic movements for the game show's crane cameras, suffusing his depictions of the city slums with the digital, hand-held cinematography that's become his directorial signature. However, there are two new innovations here - firstly, the cinematography is more anarchic than it's ever been, with the screen tilted for the majority of the film, and a hyper-kinetic frenzy that recalls nothing so much as Michael Mann shooting India, Mumbai Vice; and, secondly, there's a preoccupation with a space in front of the action, a kind of interface between the film and the audience that's variously figured as the space where subtitles occur, which tend to be positioned all over the screen, rather than at the bottom, the space where the questions on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? are positioned for the benefit of the home audience and, finally, the whole world of blurred, glassy objects that continually occlude the action, coming between the viewer and whatever they're supposed to be watching. If the radically kinetic, body-hugging cinematography feels like nothing so much as a phone-image, an inadvertent series of shots from the iPhone cameras that were on the cusp of widespread visibility at the time the film was made, then this additional interface feels connected to Jamal's work at a call centre, and the general connections made between call centre and post-Bollywood spectacle. As phone-images, the film's images already feel second-hand, globalised, deterretorialized and recirculated, a vision of India as the centre of a world without a centre, of affect as just another ingredient in its communicative conduit. Not only does this prevent the film ever feeling too exotic, but - astonishingly - it allows Boyle to even adopt a kind of picaresque tone - Jamal's favourite novel is The Three Musketeers - that never feels twee or contrived, and whose heightened sentimentality is simply that of the Bollywood industry itself, here condensed to the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? host's (Ani Kapoor) revelation that he desperately doesn't want Jamal to win. It's a vision of a nation of screens, in which picaresque playfulness consists in knowing how to dodge, elude and exploit your own co-option as spectacle, most memorably in Jamal's post-musical riff on Indian paintings to a credulous American couple.