Film Carew

After 2006's Casino Royale sought to reboot martini-swillin', babe-beddin', tool-of-colonialist-rule, British service double-agent James Bond in gritty, realist, violent shades, Skyfall marks the reBonding of Bond; the film in which the series, now three films deep into its Daniel Craig era, can relax on the distancing from its history, and, instead, embrace it; climbing back into a vintage Aston Martin with a smirk and a wink. After serving a two-film penance, the old spirit is back: this picture able to be camp and silly, have a mincing super-villain and, indeed, have its hero be more like a superhero, his derring-do as comic-book as it is pulp. In short, this Bond era has gone from aping the Bourne movings to borrowing, heavily, from Christopher Nolan's Batman barneys. Here, Bond bottoms out as a broken-down man, retiring from his career of killing-in-the-name-of to live in a blissful wilderness, assumed dead. He also apparently grew up in a giant Gothic mansion and swore to fight evil when his parents were killed. When he attempts to reengage with his brilliant career, he's battling a failing body, his mortality, and the doubts of concerned pseudo-parental parties. Yet, persist he will, and, after a parade of colossal collateral writ large in explosions and bigger explosions and murders unending and fistfights and one-liners, Bond is back in the game, ready and reset, reloaded for a whole new era of $200mil, two-and-a-half-hour capers.

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of James Bond movies, Skyfall's feelings of familiarity – both within the greater series and within the realm of contemporary action blockbusters – have tapped a vast critical reserve of giddy nostalgia; the recamping of an icon met with lavish praise. Where Quantum Of Solace was a dour film of dry delivery, terrible title, deliberate pace, and contemporary political parable – and where the Pierce Brosnan-era pictures were just splatters of stinking, dribbling shit – Skyfall is easy to love; especially for those who see the brilliant Ben Whishaw and the everyman Rory Kinnear and giggle with glee at their Charlie Brooker connections (the former Pingu in Nathan Barley; the latter the PM fucking a pig in the astonishing satirical-mini-series-of-our-times, Black Mirror). Here, Sam Mendes moods out with artful shallow-focus in some moments, but also blows up a fucking castle in a giant fireball; Bérénice Marlohe's fifteen minutes of Bond Girl fame are a shocking mix of super-cheese and ultra-bleak; and Javier Bardem's show-turning turn as high-camp villain takes its initial tired tenor of gay-terror jokes and contorts them into some ridiculous funhouse ride of psycho-sexual projection, Freudian failing, self-mocking mummy-issues, and a tendency to play even the darkest lines as comedy. With his bleached-out eyebrows and bug-eyed visage making him look like some terrifying cross between Fantômas, Baby Jane, and an Austrian downhill skier, Bardem is less chewing the scenery than erotically nibbling at it; his character coming across as a grotesque parody of a neo-con's nightmarish visions of Julian Assange as new-millennial monster. Only, y'know, gayer. When Bardem's on screen, the film is wildly entertaining; his groans of annoyance when his dastardly plans don't unfold accordingly are a bona fide delight.

But all the praise being heaped on Bond for being Bond again seems to be happily glossing over the troubled notions of this regressive retreat. The condescending colonialism has largely vanished – with the film even understanding the diminishing powers of psycho-geopolitics; enemies no longer nations, but individuals – but Skyfall's depiction of women is, at best, conflicted, and, at worst, abhorrent. Judi Dench is the scowling school-ma'am, a Mother England figure who didn't love her children enough; hers is the bosom unsuckled from, her careerwoman life in defiance of nature. Noemi Harris is a silly, pretty thing who thinks she can hang with Bond – all parrying flirtatious quips and car-chasin' operative field work – only to discover that she hasn't got the nerve (or, y'know, testicles) for the job; instead backing that sweet can into the office, settling for a role as, um, secretary. And Marlohe, for all her exotic glamour and magnetising presence and sad-eyed life behind her thin character, is a former child sex-slave turned gangster moll who, after a quarter of an hour on screen, is jovially shot in the head, with not a tear shed; vanishing so completely, and being so instantaneously forgotten, that you wonder if she ever really existed. Craig may share a few pensive, sad-eyed moments with this fatalist femme fatale, but the emotions are transient at best, perfunctory at worst; and the fact that the film chases big, emotional crescendos later on – with dead parents and subsequently adopted parental figures; with childhood ghosts and the scars of suffering; with disappointment and failure and regret – makes the give-a-shit treatment of its tacked-on love-interest seem positively inhumane.

Ultimately, of course, none of the deaths even really matter. Not even when Bond himself 'dies', on opening. Because, in this universe, only the central character carries meaning; and as long as he's alive on close, it's immaterial if every other character an audience has encountered ends up toe-tagged. There's a sitcom element to this wiping of the slate; every episode of Bond its own Groundhog Day, a variation on the same theme. As long as the theme music, the car chase, the fistfight on top of moving train, the exotic woman in an evening dress, and the world saved before bedtime are tossed out like fresh fish, the audience will clap like trained seals. Casino Royale's Bourneing of Bond now feels forever ago. Bond is Bond again, and the world will be as one.

Miss Bala

Miss Bala is an 'action thriller' in the same sense that The Hurt Locker was an action thriller. Any synopsis of the film is sure to be a misrepresentation: this action thriller finding an aspiring Tijuana beauty queen kidnapped by a cartel kingpin, and dragged into a shoot-out between crims and cops as live bait. That scenario could give rise to abhorrent clichés of crime-movies and/or Women In Peril pictures, but Gerardo Naranjo's film is above all of that. Instead, it turns the turf skirmishes of border towns – where the war on drugs has inched towards Civil War – into a phenomenological experience; the filmmaker taking the audience hostage just as the narrative takes its main character. The film is full of long, unbroken tracking shots shot from the elevated, above-the-head perspective of the first-person shooter; we're looking at this grim world as if angels on the shoulders of Stephanie Sigman's callow, would-be princess, in frames that show the influence of both Children Of Men and Elephant. Naranjo ignores moments of release – through edits, cut-aways, B-plots, or environmental Second Unit shots – and stays forever locked into the stand-off; tension mounting through its entirety. It's a remarkable movie that works as sobering polemic, piece of cinematic art, and popcorn picture for dudes who like gunfire, all at once.

Sound Of My Voice

Sound Of My Voice plays as super-contemporary American indie movie; effectively landing in the middle-ground between meticulously-mounted cult study Martha Marcy May Marlene, time-travel lark Safety Not Guaranteed, and sci-fi think-piece Another Earth. Co-written by and starring Another Earth's Britt Marling – thereby cementing her reputation of one of American cinema's most interesting budding talents – it's a film about a pair of sceptical interlopers (Christopher Denham and Nicole Vicius) infiltrating a tiny, underground, locked-in-a-basement cult to debunk it as a fraud. Marling plays the group's leader as a calm, sweet, kindly dreamer, a Cinderella who's stumbled back to the present day from the year 2054. The film's subtle genius is displayed in a wonderfully-underplayed, dryly-comic scene in which, when asked to sing a song from her time by her slightly-less-than-devout followers, Marling murmurs a heartfelt version of Dreams by The Cranberries. When questioned as to why she's singing an innocuous staple of '90s radio, she serenely intones that, in her day, it's been made re-popular. Framing the film through the sceptical eyes of its undercover journalists, it's another smirking sign that this mystical leader is shilling grade A bullshit; but the film maintains a non-judgmental moral approach to its depiction of cults. Truth is, as ever, up to individual interpretation; and people may be willing to suspend disbelief – to swallow the Kool-Aid – even if they know they're buying a myth, using their Movement simply as a placebo for the aching pain of life. Which makes this cult akin to every religion ever; but also an analogue for group therapy, self-help believers, and cinema itself.