Dreams of a Life (Carol Morley 2011)

In 2006 bailiffs broke into a Wood Green bedsit to find the decomposed body of 38-year old Joyce Carol Vincent. An investigation revealed that the body had been there for three years, with the television still running. Carol Morley’s documentary attempts to piece together how Joyce could have disappeared from public life, and why friends and family failed to contact her. The result is a moving work that combines straightforward interviews with reconstructions of Joyce’s life and childhood that attempt to uncover both her personality and the events that led to her tragic death.

Zawe Ashton plays the adult Joyce, with sequences covering her relationships in the late 1980s and early 1990s, while Morley scans back to partial recollections of her childhood in Hammersmith. With Joyce’s family not agreeing to take part, much of her life is narrated by former partners, housemates and colleagues. With varying degrees of disbelief and emotion, they struggle to reconcile a lively, if drifting personality, with her tragic death.

While some of these interviews suffer from repetition, it also acknowledges the guess-work that went into the investigation, with Morley frequently cutting to stacks of notes and possible connections. Riding through the documentary however is both a strong sense of the tragedy of Joyce’s life, and the many gaps and inconsistencies of her personality. In this way, the dramatised sequences work best when imagining the claustrophobia and loneliness of Joyce’s final hours, while also providing scenes of light relief from earlier periods of her life.

Dreams of a Life stands as one of the most significant British documentaries of the year, with a sense of craft that reflects both Morley’s rigorous research and efforts to keep the momentum and depth of Joyce’s life-story going. Helped by an excellent, virtually dialogue-free performance by Ashton, and some judicious splicing of real recordings, photos and footage of Joyce, the documentary is an intimate, but compelling warning of the dangers of losing touch with friends.

Haywire (Steven Soderbergh (2012)

Another foray by Steven Soderbergh into straight genre territory, Haywire is entertaining, if a bit forgettable. Focusing on special operative Mallory Kane (Gina Carano), it follows her her attempts to evade capture after being framed by her former employer (Ewan McGregor). Globe-hopping trips take in Barcelona and Dublin, while support from Michael Fassbender, Bill Paxton, Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas completes a starry lineup. Cutting between Mallory's pursuit and her explanation of the events leading up to an attack by another agent, Lem Dobbs' screenplay wastes little time on bridging a series of spectacular fight scenes.

Soderbergh's ability to move from precision-engineered genre thrillers to more experimental digital dramas, or the epic, creepingly-paced Che series is a credit to his polygot talents. Haywire rarely lets up the pace, delivering multiple fight scenes with the Mixed Martial Artist-trained Carano holding back on montage editing to deliver bone-crushing single shots and expertly choreographed collisions. Bursts of violence are savage and, in the case of an opening brawl in a diner, initially shocking as muscled fighters punch, kick and smash Mallory through furniture.

Like many female-led action films, there's a perpetual tongue-in-cheek tone to Haywire, where characters are warned against misjudging Mallory's femininity, only to be gleefully pummelled. As Ewan McGregor's character explains, 'don't think of her as a woman'. Soderbergh's taken on the hyper-feminised heroine before in Erin Brockovich (2000), although in a slightly more grounded take on the battle of the sexes. Mallory is more of a Terminator-like action figure, perhaps a wise choice given Carano's limited acting experience.

Still, while there's a lot to admire about Haywire's craft, it's still driven by formula and a delight as much in its construction as it's ability to draw genuine sympathy. Take away Soderbergh's expert direction, and the bare-bones plot could be lifted from most direct-to-video thrillers. In this case, style is enough though to make Haywire a success, at least on the modest terms that Soderbergh sets for himself. Not as stylistically challenging or emotionally engaging as last year's femme spy picture Hanna, but also not pure genre exploitation, Haywire contradicts its title to represent a well-tuned action exercise.

Moneyball (Bennett Miller 2011)

Despite being mostly about baseball statistics, Moneyball is never less than entertaining. That achievement might be the result of Aaron Sorkin's input on the final screenplay, reproducing his ability to convert heavy non-fiction subjects into an accessible narrative from The Social Network. Based on Michael Lewis's 2002 book, Moneyball explores how an approach to baseball rooted in sabermetric analysis of statistics rather than traditional player evaluations could revolutionise the sport. This becomes the case for the Oakland Athletics, a mid-level MLB team overseen by General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt).

Having lost a 2001 playoff, and forced to sell the team's key players, Beane's desperation turns him to Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a Yale graduate and proponent of sabermetrics. With his help, and against significant opposition from within the club and the media, Beane builds a cut-price team that collectively gels to take the Athletics' on a record 20-game winning streak.

Even without a knowledge of baseball, it's easy to get into the rhythm of Moneyball's central philosophy, with Pitt as Beane adding an extra layer of character development through flashbacks to his own career as a poorly scouted teenager. With Beane's family also getting some attention, much of Miller's film directs itself towards the day-to-day process of applying Brand's approach. In this way, Moneyball relies on the surefire sports movie formula of the underdog rising to success.

However, this is also levelled against Beane's pessimism over the entrenched opinions of the game, and the value of success. Like recent sports dramas such as Friday Night Lights, much of the thrill of individual victories is contrasted by the cynicism and misfortune that comes along with them. Ultimately Beane comes to make a personal decision over his career that accepts, but also resists some of the professional excesses of the game. The extra degree of pessimism about professional sports this brings helps elevate the still-engaging sports story, helped by a mix of real and staged footage.

Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen 2011)

Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen's best film in some time, retaining but also broadening the scope of his recent European city-hopping work. Like Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona, it deals with an American both enchanted and forced to come to terms with European nostalgia. Owen Wilson stars as Gil Pender, a frustrated Hollywood screenwriter and novelist visiting Paris with his needy Beverly Hills fiancee and her overbearing parents. Fascinated by Paris's cultural history, to the horror of his fiancee, Gil suddenly finds himself transported back to the 1920s while on a midnight walk.

Surrounded by figures like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Picasso, Gil bemusedly goes along with what becomes a nightly journey to the cafes, salons and parties of a Paris at the height of fashion, music, art and literature. He meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a model and girlfriend of various artists, leading him to question his future engagement, but ultimately the dangers of nostalgia as Adriana retreats to her own ideal past in turn-of-the-century Paris.

Allen's work has always been fascinated by nostalgia and characters caught out of history, from the future-hopping Sleeper, to his love letters to Manhattan, to classical Hollywood, jazz, radio and musicals. Midnight in Paris is perhaps closest in terms of story to Allen's Zelig, where he becomes an Everyman figure inserted into various moments of history. Gil's meeting of a wide-ranging cast of artists and writers is played straight, but with a casual approach that maintains his own bemused, but awestruck experience. With cinematography by frequent David Fincher-collaborator Darius Khondji, Paris has also rarely looked so beautiful, full of saturated yellow lights, rain-swept streets and gorgeously realized interiors.

However, like his earlier work, Midnight in Paris builds towards Allen's tendency for self-reflection and criticism of nostalgia. Gil realises that nostalgia is only a temporary solution to the disappointments of the present, imagining a golden time that never existed, or at least not in the ideal form he imagines. Like the grudging acceptance of the difference between romantic fantasy and reality in Annie Hall, or the pathos of Broadway Danny Rose and The Purple Rose of Cairo, Allen's characters ultimately see through the illusion to find a more pragmatic, but balanced attitude to art and life.

Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog 2011)

Continuing Herzog's prolific documentary output, Into the Abyss takes a hard, but unspectacular look at capital punishment in the US. Focusing on a triple homicide in Texas that has one killer awaiting execution, Herzog pieces together the original crime, the participants and those involved through three segments. Much of the film's power comes from Herzog's judicious use of original police crime footage to provide a chilling journey through the murder scene, and from simply staged interviews. Herzog's interest comes less in attacking capital punishment, although he comes out against it, then in attempting to find some common logic for the crimes committed.

The convicted Michael Perry gives up little than a refusal to be drawn on the murder, and a sense of wilfully failing to comprehend his situtation. More powerful are the interviews with the family of the victims, including a sister who has lost virtually all her immediate family, and a Death Row guard who admits that the job eventually broke him. At its best Into the Abyss is about the human consequences, the absurdity and the tragedy of the deaths at its centre, making a case that the punishment can't match the complexity of the crime. Like Herzog's best films, it's about the extremes of human experience, elevated through careful cutting and authorial detachment.

Limitations however emerge over the film's scope, being at once an exploration and a reflection on capital punishment that distances itself from explicit commentary. Unlike Herzog's powerful studies of man and nature, the anchor for recent documentaries Grizzly Man or Cave of Forgotten Dreams, it feels more voyeuristic, a director fascinated by capital punishment but aware of its more specific ambiguities. Although well-constructed, it also feels slighter than Herzog's most recent work, less invested in the potential of a technology like 3D than Forgotten Dreams, or as unique as his single character studies.

Hugo (Martin Scorsese 2011)

The idea of Martin Scorsese making a child-friendly film was always going to invite curiousity. How would the director of Taxi Driver and Casino adjust to the demands of catering to a large family audience, while working around the visceral content that often drives his work? Hugo ultimately demonstrates both the director's love of cinema's universal, child-like appeal, but in its reverent tone also falls just short of the the kind of depth and accessibility found in the best work of Disney, Pixar and Spielberg.

Set in 1930s Paris, Hugo follows Hugo Cabret, an orphan fighting to survive in a train station. While eluding an accident-prone inspector, Hugo tries to rebuild an automaton writing machine discovered by his recently deceased father. Encountering Georges, an elderly toy shop owner at the station, Hugo befriends his godddaughter Isabelle. She helps him locate the key to the automaton, while uncovering the broader mystery of Georges' past. They discover his identity as Georges Melies, a filmmaker whose innovations in special effects pushed the boundaries of cinema as a fledgling medium in the late 19th and early 20th century. Converted to the joys of Melies' masterpiece La Voyage Dans La Lune, they attempt to revive the old man from a decades-long bitterness at a disappearing audience for his films, prompted by new expectations of narrative cinema and the economic hardships of WWI.

Hugo is Scorsese's love letter to cinema and Melies, delivered through a glowingly realised, 3D-enhanced fable. The Paris setting is an assortment of whimsical touches, with Scorsese using 3D to accentuate depth and perform elaborate tracking shots through space. The romantic orphan story of Hugo, itself backed by questions over identity and place, overlaps neatly with Georges' personal recuperation. Cinema, and the simple joy of mechanical movement and illusion, drives the two plots forward. Scorsese's use of 3D works in this way to draw attention to how characterisation becomes fused with different forms of mechanical purity, from Hugo's identification and desire to recover the automaton and its links to his father, to the emotional connection made between the children and Georges' films.

The latter is however perhaps the most heavy handed example of Scorsese's enthusiasm, often delaying action to sweep through key moments in cinema history, and to recreate Melies' films in flashback and as contemporary documents, occasionally interspersed with real footage. Hugo and Isabelle also sneak into a Harold Lloyd film, delighting as he navigates a skyscraper, while a story of a filmed train terrifying first-time cinemagoers enters into Hugo's nightmares. Hugo and Isabelle's desire to achieve resolution through the discovery and the celebration of the magic of cinema, is satisfying for the cinephile, with the use of 3D merging with the mechanical roots of the medium to generate a pleasing fusion of form and content.

However, it is difficult to move past admiration to the kinds of emotional connection that Hugo strives for throughout. It's particularly easy to see Hugo's slow-pacing and history lessons boring child audiences while enchanting film lovers, straying into worthy territory without the catharsis and slick pacing regularly produced by Pixar. There's no doubting the care that Scorsese invested into the film, but it's lasting impact may be more as a treasured oddity from the director than a children's classic able to stand up to extensive re-viewing.

The Ides of March (George Clooney 2011)

Earnest but dull, George Clooney's The Ides of March fails to make the most of its award-winning cast. Set during an Ohio Democratic Primary, Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling) is part of a team attempting to elect Mike Morris (Clooney). The campaign takes a wrong turn when Myers becomes involved with intern Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), leading to revelations over Morris' character. Meanwhile, Myers struggles to keep his head above water as campaign managers Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffmann) and Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti) attempt to manipulate him. With its wintry Ohio climate, and ground-level perspective on the election machine, The Ides of March is guilty of working through political film cliches, with campaign cynicism, illicit revelations and individual compromise all present.

Clooney and producer Grant Heslov previously collaborated on HBO miniseries K Street, which served up a similar take on insider politics. Both reference the negotiations of political and private life of 1970s conspiracy films, but both also suffer from a lack of real energy at their core. While the A-list cast do their best, early scenes in The Ides of March feature rapid-fire conversations that feel like warmed-up West Wing drafts, while a sudden shift to melodrama midway through the film upsets its momentum. Clooney's direction is also workmanlike, failing to reproduce the cast chemistry or the retro stylings of his previous major directorial efforts Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) and Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). Although not as forgettable as Clooney's Leatherheads (2008), The Ides of March ultimately revisits well-worn territory without generating new insights.