This superbly crafted drama based on a Kazuo Ishiguro novel is strange, haunting, disturbing and highly recommended if your taste runs to macabre tragedy. The less you know about the plot the better. Suffice to say the screenplay by Alex Garland (whose credits include Sunshine and 28 Days Later) focuses on three friends who are raised in the 1970s in what appears to be a boarding school named Hailsham in the English countryside run by the strict Miss Emily (Charlotte Rampling). The boarders are told they are special but, ominously, are instructed not to leave the school’s boundaries. Of their teachers, only one, Miss Lucy (Sally Hawkins), gives them any clue about what lies ahead. Fast forward to the 1990s and there’s an odd romantic triangle between these friends, Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield). Kathy describes herself as a “carer” and Tommy is about to have an operation. To reveal more would be giving away spoilers. Garland and director Mark Romanek skilfully create a creepy, isolated, alternate world that’s beautifully and movingly realised by the talented cast.   


 

A high school drop-out gets a law degree to fight for justice for her brother who’s been wrongfully imprisoned for murder in this engaging drama based on a true story. Directed in by-the-numbers fashion by Tony Goldwyn, it’s another saga of an underdog who triumphs against the odds. Hilary Swank embodies the tenacity and courage of the heroine, Betty Anne Waters, and Sam Rockwell is her hot tempered, boozy brother Kenny. Early scenes establish the close bond that developed between the siblings as kids in rural Massachusetts when they were taken from their neglectful mother and placed in foster care. When a widow is brutally murdered in her mobile home, a zealous cop (Melissa Leo) suspects Kenny. A sometime girlfriend (Juliette Lewis) thinks she saw him at the crime scene, he’s arrested, charged, convicted and gets a life sentence. Betty Anne pushes herself through college and law school while working at a bar and raising two sons at some cost: her marriage falls apart.  Minnie Driver plays her best friend and fellow law student who takes up her cause and Peter Gallagher is a hotshot lawyer who takes on the case.    
 

It’s no blinding revelation to say that young women can behave as just badly as men but rarely is female debauchery displayed as graphically as in this raunchy comedy. There’s copious swearing, talking dirty, belching, farting and vomiting: almost all of it by women. It’s a chick flick with balls, you might say. You can’t accuse the filmmakers of sexism: It’s directed by a bloke (Paul Feig, who created TV’s Freaks and Geeks) but written by Kirsten Wiig (who also co-stars) and Annie Mumolo. Wiig is a hoot as Annie, who works in a jewellery store after her cake shop went bust and dates a self-obsessed chauvinist (Jon Hamm).
Maya Rudolph is her best friend Lillian, who gets engaged and chooses as her bridesmaids Annie, rich socialite Helen (Rose Byrne), jaded  housewife Rita (Wendi McLendon-Covey), crude government employee Megan (Melissa McCarthy, who looks like a chubbier, female version of Ricky Gervais) and naive newlywed Becca (Ellie Kemper). Annie’s hackles rise as Helen tries to usurp her as Lillian’s best friend. When the girls hop on a plane bound for a bachelorette party in Las Vegas, the film veers into further into raucous Hangover territory.  Lurking among the chaotic set pieces and vulgarity is a sweet, endearing story about female friendship and rivalry. Roll on the sequel!
 

Tom Cruise did the producers a favour when he dropped out of this spy thriller and the role of a CIA agent was rewritten for Angelina Jolie. Arguably Ang is a more versatile and skilled actor than Tom and the casting switch makes the character of Evelyn Salt more complex. Evelyn is about to go home to celebrate her wedding anniversary when she’s named as an undercover spy for the Russians by a defector named Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski), who volunteers information about a plot to kill the Russian President. She escapes, as does Orlov (which doesn’t say a lot about the CIA’s security), pursued by the agency’s counter-intelligence expert Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and, ultimately, the Secret Service and NYPD. Director Phillip Noyce and screenwriter Kurt Wimmer succeed in keeping the audience guessing about Salt’s true identity and motives as she zips through Manhattan to the East River and back to Washington for a wildly improbable sequence in the US President’s bunker. Jolie handles the action scenes with athletic aplomb, a great advance on her Tomb Raider exploits. But her German arachnologist husband Mike (Inglourious Basterds’ August Diehl) is given so little screen time their relationship is sketchy, and her ability to dodge myriad bullets is miraculous.  
 

Writer-director Michael Haneke’s film is a chilling, intense saga of evil and the corruption of childhood innocence set in a village in rural Germany. Haneke constructs the film as an elaborate puzzle so I’m not going to give you many clues. It’s set in the horse-and-buggy era but the exact year isn’t revealed until late in the narrative. The narrator is an old man (Ernst Jacobi) who recounts long-ago events, some of which he confesses may not be true. Played as a young man by Christian Friedel, he’s a school teacher who sets out to investigate a series of bizarre incidents and is one of the few benign adults in the hamlet where life is dominated by an imperious baron (Ulrich Tukur). The local doctor (Rainer Bock) breaks his collarbone after his horse trips over a concealed wire strung across his gate.  A farmer’s wife is killed in an accident in a sawmill. A barn is burned. A boy perches precariously on the railings on a bridge and tells the teacher, “I gave God a chance to kill me.”  Another child is abducted and beaten. It’s shot in black-and-white, a technique that’s very effective in heightening the stark, austere realism of the unfolding tragedy. The film won the top prize, the Palme d’Or, at the Cannes International Film Festival and was nominated for two Oscars, for cinematography and best foreign language film.