All of the elements appeared to be in place: the Nowheresville USA setting; the cartoon-like introduction; the overly bright colour palette; Belle and Sebastian, Moldy Peaches, Sonic Youth on the soundtrack. This had all of the hallmarks of one of those overly-kooky indie films which seem to be churned out for the Sundance market, almost like a factory line of production. In recent years this has given us the likes of Garden State, Little Miss Sunshine, Thumbsucker, Rocket Science, Napoleon Dynamite, and Running With Scissors, which have emerged into this post-Wes Anderson sphere filled with overly-stylised characters, needlessly hip soundtracks, and humour so deadpan that sometimes it is easy to forget to laugh.

Not that all of those films above were bad; Garden State was good, but could easily have done without the annoying kook of Natalie ‘don’t call me Hirschlag’ Portman; Little Miss Sunshine was also enjoyable, if a little cloyingly over-characterised at times. It’s just that there is now the idea that whimsy and more-indie-than-thou posturing can be a substitute for a decent script, and properly fleshed out and real characters the audience can care about. Thank heavens then for Juno. First-time screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman have managed to weave together the antidote to all of this mediocrity; a warm, touching picture, with a razor-sharp wit, and a cast of characters not assembled from some Sundance-by-numbers character archetype kit, but ones who seem like real people.

The film starts with the 16 year-old Juno MacGuff and friend Paulie Bleeker about to have sex, sex which ultimately ends up with our young Juno accidentally falling pregnant. The assumption on Paulie’s part is that her having an abortion is the sensible idea, but her trip to the clinic leads her to reconsider. Several columnists and pundits in the US media have pointed to the film being part of a new wave of ‘anti-abortion’ films, citing Knocked Up and Waitress as two other prominent examples. What utter rubbish. Anyone with half a brain could see that Juno is agnostic on the debate – this isn’t 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, folks.

Juno eventually decides to put the baby up for adoption, and locates a suitable couple in a newspaper ad, ‘near the adverts for used gym equipment’ as her friend Leah points out. They are Mark and Vanessa Loring, he a musician with whom Juno strikes up an immediate rapport with, and Vanessa extremely eager to be a mother. Everybody appears to benefit from the deal. But there are hints of things not quite right; Vanessa is maybe a little too eager to have a child, while Mark seems less than enthusiastic; and is there a chance that Juno would reconsider once she completes the full term?

To merely detail the plot points is to miss out a lot of what makes the film such a joy to watch. Ostensibly the situation is a simple one, but it is the individual characters, as well as the dynamic between each of them, that gives the film its depth. At the centre of it all is the title character, fleshed out wonderfully by the ever-blossoming Ellen Page. Her Juno MacGuff is smart, quick-witted and fast-tongued, with a dry, sarcastic sense of humour. But for all her bravado, as the film develops we can begin to see that she is also rather lost; for all her coarse language and haughtiness we get the sense that she is without any form of compass – ‘I don’t really know what kind of girl I am’, she concedes at one stage. Page’s performance is terrific, striding the emotional tightrope with the consumate ease of an actor twice her age.

What is also refreshing about the film is that the secondary characters are not merely there to make up the numbers, and seem to be almost as fully formed as Juno herself is – when she reveals the pregnancy to her father and step-mother, their reaction, after the intial shock, is a pragmatic one, offering practical advice and support; their response is a human one, not a melodramatic one. The dynamic between Juno and her friends of the same age is also a natural one, in particular with her best friend Leah; this dynamic recalls that of the two girls in Ghost World, Terry Zwigoff’s terrific film about growing up, emotional isolation and trying to find meaning in life. This is certainly one of this film’s key reference points, and perhaps aesthetically there is also a touch of American Splendor about the it.

I have said quite a lot already without even mentioning how fantastically funny the film is; cinematic comedy can so often be forced, but Juno is nothing of this sort, the laughs coming surprisingly thick and fast, but never feeling like an inserted afterthought; I particularly enjoyed the critique of the phrase ‘sexually active’ – never again will I hear those words without thinking it utterly absurd. A lot of ‘comedy’ films try too hard to show us overly comedic, or overly ridiculous characters with which to force us into laughing at; Juno has that rare lightness of touch where we just laugh instinctively. And it makes it look so easy.

There is simply too much to say about how great the film is, and most of it is difficult to fully articulate to anyone who hasn’t seen it. My first instinct after watching it was to watch it again immediately, because I wanted to be with those characters again, to go through Juno’s nine months of pregnancy with her all over again, laugh at all of the jokes again, and to watch again how this wonderful film manages to tell its story and evoke its colourful little world so effortlessly brilliantly. I’m not sure I can recommend it any more highly than that.

Critical heralding of a ‘return to form’ of a once-favoured director commonly derives from a sense of relief, as much as it is of the merit of the film itself. So it is no surprise that, after the dismal run of form which included such nadirs as Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, the new film from messrs Coen and Coen has been universally acclaimed as such. But bearing all the hallmarks of their classic work, No Country For Old Men is a thoroughly enjoyable black comedy-cum-thriller which is perfectly pitched, paced and executed, and features one of the most memorably psychotic screen villains in quite some time, and can quite rightly be claimed to put brothers Ethan and Joel back at the top of modern American filmmaking.

Returning to the Texas of Blood Simple, the story is simple enough: Llewelyn Moss, on a hunt, stumbles across a drug deal gone very wrong, locates a satchel filled with money and safely makes off with it. In the meantime, Anton Chigurh, a hitman, is shown violently escaping custody, conducting a series of random killings, before being hired to locate the missing money. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, upon the discovery of the increasing number of casualties, then finds himself in charge of trying to stop the killings and put an end to what is happening.

The bare bones of the plot appear to show a fairly familiar, linear storyline; Moss will run, Chigurgh will follow, with Bell bringing up the rear behind both of them. But knowing this is a Coen brothers film makes us expect for genre conventions to be messed with and overturned somewhat. The wild Texan setting gives us a clue; the film looks like it will play out like a neo-Western, with Good, Bad and most certainly Ugly elements intermingling in a Sergio Leone fashion. There is also hints of the bleak nihilism of Peckinpah at play here.

But much like The Big Lebowski disassembled, at the same time as playing homage to, the noir of Raymond Chandler’s universe, in particular The Big Sleep, here the Coens take our expectations and slant them on their sides. Just as Jeffrey Lebowski bumbled his way around LA never seemingly in control of his own fate, here too the protagonist Moss stumbles from place to place, motel to motel, knowing he must do something but never sure exactly what that something should be. Sheriff Moss, the ageing, jaded sheriff seen in a thousand Westerns, is similarly unheroic, preferring sitting in cafes reading the local newspaper over a coffee to the serious business of law enforcement. The key player in moving the action along is thus Shigurh, the hitman, yet even his actions seem haphazard. He is, for the most part, the only character in control of his own destiny, yet on several occasions he seems content to allow lady luck to decide the outcome of a situation, a man’s life decided by the toss of a coin. Fate, and sheer luck, is one of the key themes in the film – can the idea of predestination be possible in a world so seemingly arbitrary as this?

Sticking close to the original Cormac McCarthy novel somewhat restricts some of the Coens’ usual philandering, but given recent form this seems to have been a benificial reining in. There is their trademark cast of oddball cameos, including a succession of memorably deadpan receptionists, and a US border guard who takes his job a little too seriously. For all the onscreen violence, their signature blackly comedic tone is happily present, making it difficult to establish exactly when to laugh and when not to; at the screening I went to, smatters of chuckled waved across the auditorium at different times, before people became aware that not everyone else was laughing with them. Such are classic Coens films.

The leads are well cast; Josh Brolin as the confused but determined Moss, while surely only Tommy Lee Jones could have possibly played the weary Sheriff Bell. And then there is Javier Bardem’s Anton Shigurh. Gone is the handsome star of the likes of Jamón, Jamón and Carne trémula, gone is the pathos of his performance in Mar Adentro, his finest work so far. Instead we have a psychopath that even Fargo‘s Peter Stormare would be shit-scared of. Much has been made of his haircut, but Bardem’s physical transformation is a complete one, down to his killer stare and walk. What a revelation from this actor whose increasing range consistently suprises.

Regular Coens cinematographer Rogers Deakins, Oscar nominated for a sixth time here, once again comes up trumps with his magnificent eye for setting; while his work on Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was grand and spectacular, here there is the sense of the epic but also constrasted with the mundane claustraphobia of the endless succession of cheap, poky motels which populate the country. One other interesting feature was the almost entire absence of a musical score; Carter Burwell, composer for all of the Coens’ films so far, is perhaps best remembered for his haunting score for Fargo, one of the key aesthetic aspects of that film, but here his contributions are barely audible, let alone memorable. Yet it is remarkable how this absence is not noticeable to the viewer on first watch.

The film functions perfectly well as a thriller, a black comedy, a neo-western and possibly whatever else one wished to read into it. But the title gives more than a clue to the main theme; that 1980s Texas is indeed becoming no country for old men, that times are changing and new manifestations of violence and evil are emerging. Shigurh’s trademark weapon, a compressed air canister, seems strangely out of place in the western setting, and Moss never seems to be able to fathom out just what has caused the damage that it has. He is a relic, from another time to that of Shigurh and heroin deals and kids with green hair walking down the street. The film closes on a reflective note, one which seems somewhat detatched from the rest of this dark, richly comic fable, but one which seems to end it all rather fittingly.

In the US, the NC-17 rating is the modern equivalent of the X-rating, given by the MPAA to films it deems to be containing extreme scenes of graphic sexual or drug-related imagery. It is generally considered box-office poison: many film producers will rather issue a film unrated than risk an NC-17 rating, or will recut down to gain the lesser R rating. So it is perhaps a little surprising that Ang Lee, a relatviely mainstream director of both popular and critical repute, has chosen to release his new film Lust, Caution with an NC-17 rating. After all, the last (and indeed only other) film to gain a widespread release at this rating was Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 exploitation shocker Showgirls. Not exactly a fine pedigree.

The rating is due in this case to a series of rather graphic sex scenes, which have been subsequently edited out of the Chinese release; but they are important to the film’s integrity, and it is understandable why they have been left in the Western releases; we need them just as we need that initial raw, fleshy coming together of Ennis and Jack in Ang Lee’s last film, the great Brokeback Mountain (2005).

At the centre of the story is an extraordinary debut performance by Chinese actress Wei Tang as Wong Chia Chi, a young student in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation of northern China in the late 1930s. She becomes involved in a politically-conscious acting group performing nationalistic propagandist plays, where she develops an attraction to its leader, Kuang. Their involvement in the conflict becomes more proactive, and they plot to kill Yee, a member of the puppet government in the pocket of the Japanese occupiers, using Wong as the honey trap. As with most espionage thrillers, to reveal too much of the labyrinthine twists and turns of the plot would be to spoil the fun, but needless to say Wong and Kuang inevitably get hot and heavy eventually.

Ang Lee is one of that breed of film school directors like Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, who have an awareness of cinema history, and a keenness to pay respectful homage. In Lust, Caution the key reference text would be Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 thriller Notorious, the espionage thriller where Ingrid Bergman must go undercover to spy on Nazis in South America; at one stage we even see a brief clip of Bergman in a scene at a cinema, as well as seeing another featuring that film’s other star, Cary Grant. In Notorious, Bergman’s character Alicia is an enigmatic one, we are never entirely sure what her motivations and true feelings are towards the task she has been forced into performing; there is the similar doubt in our minds about Wong in this film.

As previously stated, the central performance by Wei Tang is exceptional for a debut; she displays a fine array of different emotions, leaving enough ambiguity in the audience’s mind as to not allow us to second-guess what will happen next. It is even more impressive that she manages to hold her own against an acting heavyweight such as the legendary Tony Leung, playing against type here as a sleazy but jaded political chameleon.

What is also significant, in what is otherwise a fairly standard espionage thriller, is the cultural and historical themes touched upon in the film. The ladies in the film play a LOT of Mahjong, a culture which it is difficult to overstate the importance of to the western audience – it is an important social rite, like an Eastern form of poker night, where spreading and relaying gossip and rumour is much more important than the game itself. Similarly interesting is the rich variety of languages spoken in the film: Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Shanghainese as well as plain old English all make an appearance somewhere along the way; I was reminded of the rich tapestry of dialects populating Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s wonderful A City of Sadness (1989), which also threw Taiwanese into the melting pot which, perhaps surprisingly, Taiwanese Ang Lee does not here.

The historical background is one which is significant, too; the Sino-Japanese wars lasted from approxiamately 1931 until the the Japanese surrender in 1945, and is still a subject of bitter resentment between the two empires. It is believed that there were as many as 35 million casualties on the Chinese side alone, with the creation of a further 95 million refugees. The film gives snapshots of the effect of the occupation in Shanghai: the daily shootings, shortages and rationing of food, even the hijacking of Western films with pro-Japanese propaganda in cinemas. But although this is a period piece, it does not try to give a large-scale idea of the political situation.

Lust, Caution won the Golden Lion at Venice last year, making Ang Lee only the second director ever to win it twice, the other being Louis Malle. By sheer coincidence, Hou’s A City of Sadness received the award, too, in 1989. But although it shares much in common with its Golden-Lion-winning big brother, Brokeback Mountain, it never feels as substantial or important a work. It has received only a lukewarm reception in the US, in contrast to the unanimous praise heaped on it in China, though this may be reflective of the popularity of the original Eileen Chang source story. That said, as a wartime espionage thriller, it is hard to find significant fault.

A starry sky turns into a stunning seven minute time-lapse shot of sunrise over a Mexican landscape, announcing the beginning of Silent Light, winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes last year. Its overarching themes may suggest, partially truthfully, a Bergman-esque exploration of the soul; indeed, the title appears a conflagration of two of Bergman’s “Faith Trilogy”, namely Winter Light and The Silence. But although the film owes much to the late Swede, there is also the quiet sadness of Ozu at play here, as well as the austere natural beauty of the best of Terence Malick, and a series of superbly understated performances from its non-professional cast make Silent Light a beautiful, delicately balanced human drama.

The most important introduction to the film is to explain its setting; the location is rural northern Mexico, but the story focuses on a small Mennonite community, God-fearing folk who speak Plautdietsch – a kind of cross between Dutch and German. Early on we see middle-aged farmer Johan and his family around the dinner table, locked into a long, silent grace-giving before eating, dressed in their customary Ahmish-like garb, the only sound the repetitious ticking of the wall-clock. There is a visible tension between Johan and his wife Esther. After dinner, Johan is left alone at the table and starts to cry uncontrollably. We soon discover why; Johan has been having an affair with a neighbour, Marianne, whom he believes to be his true love, not Esther. But he is torn between this newly-found love and his religious and domestic ties to his wife. He discusses as much with his father, who tells him it is the work of the devil; Johan himself counters that it is God’s will.

The setup appears to be a straightforward melodrama, but director Reygadas does not play it this way; instead of heated arguments, stormings out and moments of blind rage, what we get instead is a melancholy inner torment on Johan’s part, perhaps repressed by the environment and religion that he is situated within. Similarly with the two women – neither Esther and Marianne rant or rave, but seem to be quietly haunted, and saddened by the situation.

Reygadas manages to coax some wonderful performances from his cast, who are all assembled from real-life Mennonite communities, all natural Plautdietsch speakers, giving their roles an added level of authenticity. If some of the peripheral characters are perhaps not entirely comfortable in front of the camera, the same cannot be said about the leads, who undergo close scrutiny from the camera during the film’s two hours. Canadian novelist Miriam Toews perhaps has least to do as the stilted, quiet Esther, until one moment of pure emotion in the poruing rain – her outpouring of grief all the more powerful for the fact that up to that point she had been so distant. Maria Pankratz is a sensual but cautious Marianne, while Cornelio Wall is fantastic as the emotionally torn Johan.

What follows in the story should not to be revealed to those who have yet to see it, but it is surprising. Some may baulk at what happens in the final ten or so minutes, but I feel that the film earns the right to do what it gives us; others may not. This is decidedly arthouse fare – long, lingering shots, some scenes stretched out for much longer than really necessary, and the occasional lapse into Lars Von Trier-dom will be enough to put off a significant portion of a mainstream audience. But stick with it, and it provides rich rewards.

Well the people held their breath
When they heard about Jesse’s death
And they wondered how poor Jesse came to die
It was one of his guys, called Little Robert Ford
And he shot Jessie James on the sly

So explains ‘The Ballad of Jesse James’, which tells us of the great man, and how he stole from the rich and gave to the poor, but was killed by ‘that dirty little coward’ Robert Ford. But in Andrew Dominik’s remarkable film we the story from another perspective: that of a man who, like so many of his time, was fixated by this cult hero, but also a man whom history has deemed destined for infamy.

As is obvious from the title, the film focuses on the last chapter of the life of Jesse James, and the events leading up to his death. Indeed, the title is integral to the film’s central thesis, so important in fact that star Brad Pitt stipulated in his contract that the full-length title of Ron Hansen’s 1983 source novel had to remain if he was to work on the project. That the title reveals the key event of the film is not the point; anyone with a knowledge of the legend or the famous song knows what will inevitably happen in the narrative. What is key to the long-winded title, and the film itself, is the ‘coward’ himself, Robert Ford. Who was he, what motivated his actions, and is he deserving of his widespread notoriety? And how does this reflect back on our opinion of the ‘heroic’ Jesse James himself?

We join the story as Jesse and his gang embark on a large-scale train robbery. Here we see the ‘hero’ in action: violent, brutal, unpredictable and seemingly out-of-control. From the outset, the myth of the brave, moral figure is being deconstructed. We are introduced to the young, 19 year old Robert Ford, starstruck to be alongside the great man himself, and who practically begs to be let in with an almost embarrassing sense of desparation. Nevertheless, he is admitted into the group, and the ageing James appears to take a shine to the boy.

A superbly nuanced performance from Casey Affleck gives us all of this, and more. His Robert Ford is shy, awkward, twitchy, but equally determined to somehow prove his worth to the world. It is interesting that comparisons to both Judas and Mark Chapman have been made – both figures set about destroying icons they apparently revered, yet in doing so fed further into their mystiques. Ford is clearly obssessed with James, and has been since boyhood, and when he meets him at the start of the film is clearly in awe of him. And as he gains James’ confidence, this obssession grows deeper, darker, more disturbing. “Do you want to be like me, or do you want to be me?” James asks at one point.

Whilst Ford is seen to live rather vicariously through his hero’s actions, Jesse James presents a much more contradictory character. He is shown from the outset to be violent, recklessly so at times; he pummels a young boy, supposedly to get information out of him, but gives him no chance to actually speak. This is in stark contrast to his seemingly loving home life – loving husband, and father to two young children. He can be equally charming and menacing, depending on the present company, or what he wants from a situation.

I am no great fan of Brad Pitt; he is certainly no character actor, and his range is somewhat limited. But his Jesse James here is nigh-on perfect: charismatic and charming, yet enigmatic and elusive, we fittingly have here one of modern cinema’s modern icons playing one of America’s great mythical figures. The film addresses this early idea of celebrity; at one stage, James boasts that he is only one of two Americans known in Europe. I get the sense that this is a somewhat personal project of his: certainly the idea of ‘Brad Pitt’ the movie star, dwarfs both his off-screen persona, as well as his less-than-impressive on-screen body of work. Perhaps this is his riposte to the myth of the celebrity hero-worshipping culture we are increasingly witness nowadays.

As the story unfolds, and characters are crossed and double-crossed, we begin our march towards the inevitable outcome described in the film’s title. But as the film goes on, we see James grow more and more weary with life, and seems to be embracing more and more the idea of death. On a frozen lake, he confides to Ford’s brother of having been “to the edge” of living, and not wanting to come back. Like Jesus’ embracing of what Judas was to do, he mysteriously seems to know what Robert Ford must do, and does nothing to stop it. “You’re going to break a lot of hearts” he tells him, Ford not fully comprehending the meaning of this.

As well as the two fantastic central perfomances, of note is the superb cinematography, which captures the epic sweep of the Wild West setting, and used cleverly to chart the passing of time through the changing of the seasons. British DP Roger Deakins, a regular collaborator of the Coen brothers’, captures the snow-covered landscapes and rolling fields of wheat with equal panache as he does the dimly lit interiors of houses. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis reprise their excellent work on The Proposition with a suitably restrained score, which punctuates the film’s running time nicely.

Mentioning the running time, this is a long film, but never feels as long as its 160 minutes, which seem to whisk by. Critics have complained that director Dominik is too generous with his lingering shot lengths, but i felt it matched the tone of the film perfectly. The film has been a flop at the US box-office, so far grossing only $3 million on its budget of $30 million, despite the generally positive reviews and the presence of Mr. Pitt, and this does not surprise me; i can imagine that the long title of the film is enough to put off a significant portion of the mainstream audience. But for those who do see it, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a richly rewarding experience, an impossible film to fault, and one whose ideas, images and emotions linger for some time.