Film Carew

“I don't want to know!” screeches Andrea Risebrough, her eerie aura of stiff-upper-lip Englishness rustled by the blowhard bluster of Tom Cruise, demanding to know if she can handle the truth with the fury of a man jumping up and down on a television-set couch. It's an amazing moment: a character defiantly sticking their head in the sand, choosing cluelessness, desperate to stay ensconced in their blissful ignorance. Amazing because films like Oblivion - in which this moment is taking place - are always filled with characters on an obsessive mission to know the truth; to discover what the cracks in the utopia reveal. Yet there's always crazy dissonance between what those in the audience want, cinematically speaking - to know the answers to this mystery, too - and how they actually live their lives; which is, to say, entirely like Riseborough. As long as they get to keep their house on stilts with the see-through swimming pool and the immaculate touch-screen, who cares what evils lurks behind the utopian façade? Soylent Green may be people, but that's okay if it tastes good.

“Our job is not to remember,” Riseborough warns, to Cruise, a man haunted by memories, driven to know the truth; his 'mandatory memory wipe' having not quite taken. They're a pair of lovers/workers in 2077, running security and maintenance and “asset protection” on the abandoned planet Earth, which was nuked to pieces in a war between humans and an invading species; a species who still linger, eternally watching like stalkerish creeps with binoculars, as if the Predator channelling Jimmy Stewart.

Reporting back to a heavily-pixellated digital Melissa Leo drawn straight from Uncanny Valley Central Casting, Riseborough and Cruise are a “mop-up crew,” shitkickin' human collateral on the alien frontier. But they still dwell in a better-homes-and-gardens million-dollar-mansion - replete with clear-walled swimming pool, in which they have shades-of-Cocktail sex - perched atop a giant stilt, assumedly to keep it far from the post-apocalyptic Earth's scorched surface, but seemingly making it structurally perilous. If part of the complete destruction of the global habitat was caused by natural calamities - earthquakes, tsunamis et al - then making houses that teeter like letterboxes waiting for a baseball bat seems like questionable architectural practice.

Cruise is classic Cruise, but not to the point of self-parody that made Jack Reacharound so hilarious. Instead, he's just filling a role that could've been played by any Generic Leading Man, yet suits his long-established persona: cocky, swaggering, never playing by the rules, joyriding on motorcycles like a young David Miscavige; a man's man with an uptight wife waiting back home. He shows comically-awful jumpshooting form (especially when compared to Michael Fassbender's Harlem Globetrottin' gay robot in the comparable Prometheus), talks baseball and football - as if mankind's greatest loss in the apocalypse was the fact that they had to stop staging the Super Bowl - and, unbeknownst to Riseborough, has a secret rustic shack by a lake in a hidden idyllic oasis that harkens back to pre-war times. There he wears a flanny, fishes, collects ephemera from the Earth's old days - teddy bears, books, Blue Öyster Cult LPs - and dreams about a mysterious super-hot-Ukrainian-model on top of the Empire State Building. That happens to be Olga Kurylenko, who is introduced in an opening paying artful, unexpected homage to Chris Marker's eternal slideshow La Jetée; Cruise speaking of memory over a series of black-and-white stills. There's plenty of references to other pictures: in images, sequences, and motifs that lean on sci-fi masterworks like Solaris, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien; in some sort of comically next-level take on Planet Of The Apes, where the only remnants of old Earth are its most famous monuments, poking through the sand in glimpses of Empire State or Golden Gate; and, less charmingly, in lines Cruise barks when strapped into some high-tech flying machine - “I'm good to go!”; “I'm coming in hot!”- that feel like repurposed Top Gun dialogue.

Pretty much every word spoken is utterly banal, but, in the bigger picture, that matters little: this is a film with only seven listed cast members, yet unending pages of digital technicians. Oblivion is a CGI blockbuster, and, thus, people are paying not for sparkling repartée (Cruise throwing his hands up to the sky and shouting “not my goddamn bike!” is its idea of comedy), but the beautiful visual of a blown-apart moon in the sky, or the Star-Wars-esque laser-fire-from-planes-in-a-dogfight sequences that play like video-games, or the 'visionary' dreams of a vivid unreality.

Joseph Kosinski seemed like a fairly generic 3D-eyesore boardroom-pleaser in Tron: Legacy, but here he paints on a vast digital canvas with more impressive shades; drawing on the visual drama of volcanic Iceland; of craggy California mountains; of desert sands. The busy-cutting incoherence that dogs most blockbusters is often absent; there restraint in the stilled shots of the immaculate houses, calm in the way Kosinski surveys this new world order. And when the 'action' does arrive, it's usually handled well: an early scene where Cruise is lured into an alien trap in the decaying ruins of a library finds the tilting and throttling of camera adding to the tension of the action; a later plane crash turning visual cartwheels and spinning in giddy circles, creating a sense of kinetic energy as it tumbles over and over, and even fleetingly turning unexpectedly touching in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it-instant in which Kurylenko, in the confusing fury of crashing, puts her hand on Cruise's arm.

There's a whole story about these memories, and about why Kurylenko comes back - love-interest showdown: the feisty Ukrainian vs the by-the-book Brit; dark vs pale; brunette vs redhead -  and a bunch of dramatic reveals and woah-twist reversals that I won't spill; in part because it was fun to watch Oblivion blind and be jolted back-and-forth by them like in a dodgem car, but also because, ultimately, they don't really matter. There's some mystical mumbo-jumbo, some chosen-one bullshit, some references to Horatius, and a bunch of clichés; like a dire, B-grade Bond sequence where Cruise is knocked-out cold and wakes up hostage, with guns pointed at Kurylenko to make him cooperate. They're all just functional marks to hit - hoops for Kosinski to pilot this glittering digital starship through - before we get to the showstopper showdown finale, where Cruise must make an assault on the alien mothership, backed by the blaring sounds of M83's awesome over-the-top '80s-stadium-synth-blowout score. Like the soundtrack, the climax is big and rousing and dumb and hilarious in a surprisingly pleasing way; Cruise evoking Horatius's determination to Die Well as a piece of adolescent nihilism; blowing shit up and saving the day and destroying the mothership and all who sail in it with a profound piece of rebellious pro-human philosophising: “fuck you!”

Zombies have spread through popular culture like a plague, with each iteration of the shuffling undead seeming more lifeless than the last. Warm Bodies offers a spin on the mythos, billing itself as a 'zom-com', exploring the tainted love between Corpse and Human; a veritable Romeo & Juliet in a dystopian New York walled in twain like some future Berlin. On the undead side, R (Nicholas Hoult) is a zombie who can't talk, sleep, or walk at any speed, but can sustain a self-deprecating running narration that let's us know he's a) funny; b) self-aware; c) totally hot for the human (Teresa Palmer) whose boyfriend's brain he eats, and, thus, memories he steals.

Palmer is a kind of sub-K-Stew presence herein, and of course the mystical-creature/human-girl love affair will make many think of Twilight; but the film is, really, an antidote to those anodyne, self-serious special-effects-pieces filled with religious subtext and mystical-chosen-one tedium. R may be capable of cracking his girl's head open and sucking out her brains, but he's still far less an abusive boyfriend than anyone in the entire Meyer canon. Initially, this film's veritable Bella is terrified by her suitor, but the zombie slooowwwly melts her heart and she warms his, as the two make eyes over old records spinning on the turntable (semi-artfully assembled in soundtrack-selling mode; and, man, is it just me or does Guns n' Roses Patience sound weirdly good after all these years?), and the film maintains its wry sense-of-humour when it comes to this post-apocalyptic milieu, painting their romance with a ribbing style that's far more 'realistic' - if you can call a zombie courtship thus - than the Earth-moving virginal handwringing of the tween-vampire-market establishment.

In the supporting cast, it gets better: Analeigh Tipton shows up as if she wandered in from the Damsels In Distress set, drolly delivering dry-wit one-liners and stealing every scene she's in; and John Malkovich does some amusing scenery-chewing yelling (“things don't get better, things get worse, people die, then I shoot them in the head!”) as an anti-Zombie hardliner who refuses to believe the brain-eaters are capable of emotion, and is ultimately proven wrong by that true, true love. The film becomes some variation of all-purpose allegory about accepting-differences and desegregation and etc, but mostly it's just a mildly amusing lark well-cast and, at times, well-written.

Thérèse Desqueyroux starts out familiar-period-piece enough: an independent, headstrong, before-her-time woman (Audrey Tatou, in the titular roles) is shackled by social convention, coerced into a tedious marriage to a man (Gilles Lellouche) with a family name but little else to offer. She grows resigned to her fate, her unhappiness standing in stark contrast to the fortunes of her head-in-the-clouds sister-in-law (Anaïs Demoustier), skipping merrily - then unhappily - through a forbidden fling with a shack-dwelling, boat-sailing Portuguese Jew. Growing more grim and taciturn - and Tatou, ever the childlike waif, feels truly like a middle-aged woman for the first time ever herein - she starts to look at her husband as a brute; a bluebeard keeping her essential prisoner, under the yoke of his prestigious surname; there no baggage like that of 'The Family'. That same feeling of stifling, stilted, tedious claustrophobia is echoed by the production, which is handsomely shot but effectively lifeless; a Sunday afternoon frock-movie that feels like a prison.

It's the last film Claude Miller ever made, which has earnt it some critical cachet, but Miller wasn't an unheralded, underrated voice in French cinema, as his epitaphs suggested, but someone who actually just never hit transcendent, auteurist heights. Speaking ill of the dead is always dicey -though, good lord, in a week in witch the Wicked Witch died, I sure wish 'Maggie' was buried with the vicious invective she deserved - but Thérèse Desqueyroux suffers in comparison to the 1962 version, made by Georges Franju, who truly could harness the power of cinematic shock; turning this drawing-room drama of hateful characters into something seething, gathering sinister power as it progressed. The 1927 novel on which they're based, too, has real teeth; François Mauriac shuffling chronology and perspective, alighting on tangental monologues, and refusing to impose tropes of standard morality - be it past or present - upon its characters. This, gladly, takes Miller's film to some uncomfortable and unexpected places, and leaves its central character seeming more like an unknowable mystery than a tragic heroine; a dame from classic-literature who doesn't come from sacrificing-for-love central casting.