After a sojourn away from the somewhat staid literary adaptations (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement) with which he made his name, Joe Wright returns to another classic text, clearly invigorated by the audience-pleasing lessons learned on the somewhat sentimental The Soloist and the full-on action-romp Hanna. For all its flaws, his adaptation of Anna Karenina (2012, Universal, 12) is a laudably full-throttle affair, packed with unembarrassed flourishes of Russellian visual invention, theatrical daring and even dance.
Using a proscenium arch device to circumvent the problems and/or expenses of location shooting, Wright's rendering of a well-worn but still thorny narrative boasts splendidly fluid cinematography by Seamus McGarvey, a swoony score from Dario Marianelli, and an especially fine turn from Jude Law as Anna's unloved husband. That the film itself should be perhaps more cerebrally impressive than emotionally engaging is partly a result of Anna's frosty ambiguity – an unsympathetic quality that the increasingly admirable Keira Knightley pitches just right. The result is understandably chilly fare, occasionally bloodless but never lacking in ambition, and unafraid of its own dark heart.
For sheer venal cynicism, Taken 2 (2012, Fox, 15) is hard to beat. In cinemas, this lazy, lame-brained sequel (in which Mom and Dad, rather than daughter, are kidnapped) was trimmed and softened for a 12-certificate, betraying its exploitation roots to reach a more profitable audience. The cutting paid off; despite lousy reviews, Olivier Megaton's lumbering mess of a movie outperformed its predecessor at the box office, making Taken 3 a horrible inevitability ("They took his cat – now he wants it back!"). On DVD, the 15-rated "Extended Harder Cut" reinstates the "elements of violence and threat" deleted by the film company (rather than the censors) to maximise returns, but sadly credible plot, exciting action and tolerable dialogue remain notable only by their absence. Liam Neeson looks like a man marking time until the cheque arrives, which was presumably very large indeed.
From the sublime strangeness of Tales from the Gimli Hospital and Archangel, through the peculiar heartbreak of The Saddest Music in the World to the deranged-documentary genius of My Winnipeg, Guy Maddin remains one of cinema's most delightfully wayward auteurs. Obsessed with the mechanics of early film-making, and in love with the light-and-shade of monochrome photography, Maddin's movies draw upon the history of the medium in a manner that is playful, subversive and utterly distinctive.
Described (with a degree of wilfulness) as his first experience of "pure narrative film-making", Keyhole (2011, Soda, 18) centres upon a haunted house in which gangster Ulysses Pick (Jason Patric) embarks upon a tortuous odyssey toward Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini). As with all of Maddin's work, there's a dreamlike quality that bleeds into an investigation of memory, but the dark humour of his finest films remains as evasive as the storyline itself. Despite a nod toward populist pulpy 30s noir, this is anything but approachable fare, the Lynchian surrealism tipping too often into impenetrability, although as Maddin sardonically observes: "The movie will be crystal clear upon your third viewing."
The least annoying Adam Sandler movie of recent memory, Hotel Transylvania (2012, Sony, U) still seems terribly mundane when compared to its generic animated stablemates Frankenweenie and ParaNorman. Sandler voices Dracula, struggling to maintain a safe-haven rest-house for ghouls in the run-up to his daughter's 118th birthday. As with Monsters Inc, it's the humans who are scary, with Dracula convinced that a dopey hiker presents a threat not only to his daughter's heart but to his entire supernatural species. Steve Buscemi has fun as a harassed wolfman, and Sandler proves that he's altogether more lovable when heard but not seen.
A huge hit in its native Germany, Christian Petzold's award-winning Barbara (2012, Soda, 12) is an enigmatic thriller that takes its time to reveal its deep, dark secrets. The titular character is a "separate" young doctor, exiled to a rural backwater where she bonds variously with a pregnant girl, a suicidal man and a fellow physician whose friendship she innately distrusts. The air of paranoid claustrophobia is ironically heightened by the woodland setting, which lends something of the menace of a Grimms' fairytale to the proceedings, the suggestion of danger lurking in even the most seemingly innocent gesture.
A leading light of the Berlin school of new wave German film-makers, Petzold's work has received less international attention than that of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck or Oliver Hirschbiegel, charged with being too inward-looking for widespread foreign export. Like leading lady Nina Hoss, whose extraordinary face is alive with mystery even as it holds the camera with its deadpan stare, Petzold's work is troubling, hard to read and all the better for it.
