Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)

If you'd have told me only a couple of years ago that in 2009 I would be leaving a Guy Ritchie film having thoroughly enjoyed myself I would have had a hard time keeping a straight face. And yet Sherlock Holmes just worked, through a combination of dumb-but-fun plotting, Mark Strong doing his best Hammer Horror villain impression and the undeniable chemistry between Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law. The film was a hit, and two years later we have the inevitable sequel. Strong is out, replaced by Jared Harris as Holmes' nemesis Professor Moriarty, who has an Evil Plan™ that manages to be both fiendishly convoluted and blindingly obvious at the same time; an impressive feat. It had something to do with starting a major world war so that he could profit from the arms trade (Wasn't that also his nefarious plan in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? The crafty bugger).

What follows is a thorough, two hour box ticking of the check list of globe-trotting action adventures: Assassins on a train? Check. A night at the opera? Check. Frenchman named Claude who exists purely for reasons of exposition? Check. Ludicrous and totally impractical mountaintop fortress lifted straight out of a Bond film? Check. But just as with it's predecessor, this is a film in which everyone involved seems have realised just how silly it all is, and decided to run with it anyway. Jared Harris makes a fantastic Blofeld to Mark Strong's Dracula, his scenes with Downey Jr. sparking the kind of chemistry that made the first film so enjoyable. Noomi Rapace too proves that she can successfully make the leap to English language films, it's just a shame that she's given something of a non-role. There's also a brilliantly enjoyable and revealing (in more than one sense of the word) cameo from Stephen Fry as Holmes' older brother Mycroft.

That's not to say that the film isn't without it's flaws. There's an overly long detour to Germany that's made even more grating by it's excessive use of slow motion. This was the moment at which I thought my old dislike of Ritchie's flashy, vacuous earlier films would rear it's head, the camera slowing to a crawl every time a character leaped through the air, loaded a gun or blew their nose. Fortunately it's not a lasting problem, and he does redeem himself slightly by using a surprisingly clever gag to turn Holmes and Moriarty's fist fight into mental one. But despite all these flaws and strengths, the reason that it all hangs together is still the relationship between Holmes and Watson, and the film works best when they are bickering and behaving like old women. In their dysfunctional relationship there is some surprisingly good comedy, and in the case of Watson's framing narration, something approaching genuine drama. It's not big and it's certainly not clever, but just as with the first film, it is extremely entertaining.

Hugo (2011)

Martin Scorsese must have a lot to live up to. He is revered by critics, by his peers and by audiences, and you would be hard pressed to find any respectable 'Greatest Movies Ever' list that did not include at least one of his films. And so it comes as a surprise that not only has he made a family film, but that it seems to be the film that is closest to his own heart. Scorsese is a cinephile, and Hugo is a cinephile's delight. It's a heartfelt love letter to the mechanics and history of cinema, but one that works equally well as a family adventure film. Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) is a young boy who lives in the walls of a Paris train station, where he has maintained the clocks and tried to repair an old automaton ever since his father died. After angering the elderly owner of a toy stall in the station (Ben Kingsley), Hugo and the stall owner's goddaughter Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz) slowly discover that this morose old man is none other than Georges Melies, the great cinematic pioneer. Together they decide to unlock the secret of his past and his connection to Hugo's automaton.

The film is visually stunning, with an almost herculean amount of effort put into the tiniest of details (look out for 'cameos' from Django Reinhardt, Salvador Dali and James Joyce in the station), but it's technical prowess never overshadows it's human elements. Asa Butterfield is disarmingly good as the titular Hugo, considering his young age, but it's Kingsley who really shines. He plays Melies with the tragic grandeur of a toppled ruler; a sad, crippled husk of a man unable to keep up with the changing world around him. It couldn't be further from the unashamedly creepy performance he gave in Shutter Island, Scorsese's last film. Also worthy of note is the pleasure in seeing Christopher Lee in a charmingly nice role as a kindly bookshop owner. Even Sacha Baron Cohen's antagonistic station inspector manages to be more than a two dimensional caricature; the metal leg brace that could have been merely a villainous gimmick becoming a delicate reminder of very real weakness and vulnerability.

It is of course impossible to discuss the film without mentioning it's use of 3D.  Several critics have put forward the most compelling theory as to why the 3D works in this case; that in a film about the mechanics of cinema, the 3D is drawing attention to itself as an alienation device. I have always found that 3D simply looks like lots of 2D images stacked on top of each other, but whereas this reduces the effect of most films, in Hugo it actually gave the film the look of an old Melies film. The film is so brilliantly made that it will work perfectly well in 2D, but even I have to begrudgingly admit that Scorsese has done a pretty good job with the third dimension. Hugo is the type of film that reminds you why you fell in love with cinema in the first place. It's a beautifully crafted valentine to cinema itself, and it's pure self indulgence on Scorsese's part, but his evident delight and wonder is infectious.

Take Shelter (2011)

There is a moment in Take Shelter when the main character's wife finally snaps, screaming at him “Are you out of your mind!?”. It's a question the audience has been asking ever since they sat down. Curtis (Michael Shannon) is an an average, salt of the earth American, with an an average, blue collar job, an average home in an average white picket fence American town, and an average loving wife and an average young daughter. In fact the only decidedly unaverage thing about Curtis are his dreams of an impending storm of apocalyptic proportions. Night after night he is plagued by the belief that something catastrophic is coming, and that he must prepare to protect his family. He begins to obsessively stock pile food and renovate the storm shelter behind his house, using all his family's savings, while his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) becomes ever more concerned that he is succumbing to the paranoid schizophrenia that saw his mother institutionalised when he was just a boy.

At the heart of Take Shelter is the constant question of Curtis' sanity, and it's one to which director Jeff Nichols seems unwilling to give a straight answer. Despite everything we are told about his family's history of mental illness, and his own acceptance that he may be going insane, the entire film is saturated with an overwhelming sense of foreboding. Even in it's most quiet moments there is the sense that something cataclysmic is never far around the corner. In Curtis' obsessive paranoia there are echoes of Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, not least when his cosy family life begins to come apart at the seams. There are also the tiniest glimmers of a post 9/11 political subtext, with Curtis' growing paranoia over the nameless, faceless something coming to small town America, but this is so subtle it's barely there and the film works perfectly well without it.

Jessica Chastain gives a brilliantly restrained performance as his concerned wife, and in any other movie she would be the clear highlight; but this is Shannon's show. His performance veers wildly from understated intensity to out and out mania and it's a testament to his ability as an actor that he manages to bridge the gap so seamlessly. Curtis is a perfect example of the kind of roles that Shannon is now know for: a man circling the very edges of insanity, occasionally dipping his feet in before recoiling in horror, never demonstrated better than the scene in which he wildly berates his work colleagues for their lack of concern over his warnings, to the horror of his wife and confusion of his daughter. It's a heartbreaking moment, as any pretence of normality within his life comes crashing down, and he must endure the half scared, half pitying looks of his friends. The film's great triumph is in the emphasis placed on the fragility of his life over the portentous possibility of the storm, and it's an amazingly understated film, considering it deals with a potential apocalypse. I was so surprised by just how good it was that I spent ages racking my brain for the flaws I was sure I must have missed. If there is a problem, it lies in the running time, and at 121 minutes there is the tiniest sag in the middle of the film. This is a miniscule problem however, and it took me a long while of thinking to even come up with it. Five minutes probably could have been left out of the middle, but even as it is the film is an enigmatic, heartbreaking and compelling affair that I have no qualms about declaring a low key masterpiece.