Moonrise Kingdom
Wes Anderson is one of your more painterly directors. His imagery is as balanced and meticulously framed as a Jeffery Smart canvas, with similarly saturated colour. He makes the sort of movies that effortlessly seduce the eye, but at their fantastical core is a veiled edginess – who would have thought that affable Owen Wilson was going to be eaten by a shark in The Life Aquatic? Here Anderson also employs a gnomish cartographer and local historian (Bob Ballaban) as a narrator. In the manner of a Shakespearean prologue, he informs us that the following events will take place in the days leading up to the area’s worst-ever recorded storm, thus creating an unshakeable sense of doom. Sam (Jared Gilman) is a twelve-year-old orphan in the care of foster parents on a sparsely populated New England island. He runs away from a scout jamboree where, because of his strangeness, he is the least popular boy. He has made an assignation with Suzy (Kara Hayward), a girl whom he’d met and fallen in love with at a church function twelve months earlier. Set in the sixties, the kids have no access to iThingies, so are instead at large as young primitives in an isolated, idyllic landscape. Any sense of cutesiness, however, is banished by a shocking death soon after they take flight, at which point your comfort zone is pricked by dark anxiety. The adults who search for Sam and Suzy are well-meaning but unaware of the soulful bond that has grown between the youngsters. Gilman and Hayward are both convincing in an unnerving way – their first kiss on a pebbly beach is disarmingly erotic – but the deadpan deliveries of Bruce Willis as the sheriff, Edward Norton (the scoutmaster), Bill Murray and Frances McDormand (Suzy’s parents) tend to dilute what emotional impact is brewing. A brilliant soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat, heightening the mood of escapism, is countered by regular insertions of Hank Williams’s earthiness, and the end result is a warm-hearted film of bent and beguiling artifice. ~ John Campbell
 

Taken 2
Liam Neeson’s weathered, world-weary face has evolved over a long career of doing it tough on screen – even when he lands a rare part in a rom-com like Love Actually, the poor bugger finds himself newly widowed with a troubled kid on his hands. So as sure as God made semi-automatic rifles, he reverts to type and is harried and hunted in this state-of-the-art but run-of-the-mill smash-and-bashathon. The movie opens at an Islamic burial in rustic Albania. A murderous patriarch grieves for his son, a kidnapper who was killed by CIA agent Mills (Neeson) in the earlier installment of what looks worryingly like developing into yet another tiresome pseudo 007 franchise (as if Bond isn’t boring enough). He and his cohort of unshaven, swinish thugs vow vengeance, and you know right there and then that by the time the end credits are rolling, good ol’ Liam will have killed them all. There really is nothing more to it than that. A desultory preamble in LA introduces us to Mills’s estranged wife Lenore (Famke Janssen), the pathetic female whose life he’ll need to save later, and his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), girly and in love with a boy of whom her overbearing Dad does not approve. Kim can’t crack it to get her driving licence, a contrivance that allows for the script’s moment of bludgeoning irony when she gets behind the wheel of a heisted cab and fangs it through the narrow streets of Istanbul in the mandatory car chase. What else? There is the now common manic pursuit across rooftops and, for those with a limited capacity for remembering detail, director Olivier Megaton manages to squeeze in about a million shots of the Blue Mosque, just in case the target audience thinks they’re in Butte, Montana. Not that the location would make a scrap of difference to what this is all about – violence as porn, juvenile morality and a none-too-subtle denigration of Muslims as simian wops. ~ John Campbell

Looper
The brain-strain action flick is not ordinarily my cup of tea. My preferred movies are those that speak to me of life as I know it. Because I’m yet to associate with people who blow the guts out of other people with massive blunderbusses at the rate of one every five minutes or so, the appeal of the genre eludes me. This one, however, is not as unendurable as expected (or, as Mark Twain said of Wagner’s music, ‘it’s not as bad as it sounds’.). Writer/director Rian Johnson has set his drama in the near future. By 2072, time travel has been invented (discovered?) but is strictly controlled by the powers that be, who use it to shunt those who need to be liquidated thirty years back where an executioner – the looper – awaits. There is a lot of complex and convoluted logic to get your head around, but one scene clarifies the matter brilliantly (at least in my case it did). A looper is assigned the task of shooting a bloke who turns out to be him from thirty years hence. He can’t do it. The older him escapes but as he flees his body starts to show the injuries that torturers are inflicting on the younger him – it is, as we used to say, trippy. Looper Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is confronted with the same problem when his older self (Bruce Willis) arrives in the killing field. The Bruiser takes it on the toe and the two Joes must get their thinking caps on to ensure that fate happens – or something like that. Complicating matters is older Joe’s personal vendetta. He wants to find and eliminate the three-year-old boy who will grow up to become the megalomaniacal tyrant who is running things in the future. Younger Joe falls for the essential Girl (Emily Blunt), and wouldn’t you know it, she’s got a three-year-old kid! It’s all very polished and cool but you have to keep reminding yourself that the hero is a cold-blooded killer. ~ John Campbell