I read the second in the series, The Girl who Played with Fire for a book group, and enjoyed the experience without falling in love with the series. Too many endless details, I sniffed. But now I’ve seen the film of the first, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I wonder if I was mistaken. For the movie is a humdinger. Casting is a primary strength – Noomi Rapace is perfect as the emotionally fragile but unstoppable super hacker, Lisbeth Salander, and Michael Nyqvist steals every scene as the dogged investigator Mikael Blomkvist. By necessity the film version truncates the exhaustive plot of the book but under the direction of Niels Arden Oplev, it maintains a kinetic pace while constantly revealing the characters. The lovingly shot Swedish countryside and cities, plus the exotic (to my ears) Swedish language, convey Larsson’s fascinating Swedishness. Not peppered with violence like most modern thriller, the film nonetheless is graphically raw when it depicts one of Larsson’s major themes, that of male violence toward women. All of this intoxicating package unfurls at the best movies do – two and a half hours vanished from my life.

It is now clear to me that Larsson does indeed weave modern storytelling magic, and the film version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo captures that magic triumphantly. 4 stars.

A once-famous Russian conductor, fired as head of the Bolshoi orchestra thirty years ago during the height of Brezhnev-era suppression, now works as a janitor. One night he spies a fax requesting the Bolshoi orchestra for a concert in Paris. He seizes his chance and assembles his old team of musicians scattered in dead-end jobs, and off to France they go. Misadventure piles upon misadventure; a poignant subplot deals with the conductor’s insistence on having a young female French violinist as lead musician.

The fantastical plot of The Concert mostly brushes aside viewer doubts, the acting is solid to great (Dmitri Nazarov is especially strong as best friend Sasha), and there are enough laugh-out-loud scenes to make up for some characterization cliches. The broader observations on modern Russia and the Slavic character are painted lightly. The final, extended climactic scene is directed with amazing assurance.

An unusual near-pitch-perfect modern farce. 3 stars.

So when The Blind Side came out as a movie, one in particular starring Sandra Bullock, I groaned. Well, I can report that John Lee Hancock has written a decent script and directed a movie that engaged me and, dare I say it, moved me. Sandra Bullock’s performance, while hardly the stuff of an Academy Award, is creditable, and Quinton Aaron is splendid as the centrepiece youth. The real life story is interesting and wonderful enough to excuse the many Hollywood-style melodramatic devices. But without the other analytical side of Michael Lewis’s book, the film struck me as mawkish as soon I left the cinema.

Capable but ordinary. 2½ stars.

• Food, Inc. finally hits Aussie screens
• Fresh from its Oscar, The Secret in Their Eyes
• A comedy set in modern Russia, The Concert
• The DVD of Where the Wild Things Are
• Although I’m sick of vigilante flicks, hopefully Michael Caine will lift Harry Brown out of the mire

• Robert Connolly is an intriguing Australian filmmaker, tackling varied genres and styles. In Balibo he takes on a controversial dark event from the 70s, the murder of five journalists in East Timor at the start of the Indonesian invasion. Much of the never-ending furore over the murders arises from the Australian government’s apparent collusion with the Indonesian authorities in hiding the truth for decades, but the story itself is a rousing one, bristling with themes such as courage and the importance of war-front journalism. Connolly frames his dissection of the murders around pudgy, burnt-out reporter Roger East (brilliantly played by Anthony LaPaglia) reluctantly being drawn in (by charismatic José Ramos-Horta in an excellent portrayal by Oscar Isaac) to investigate the journalists’ disappearance days earlier. Interwoven flashbacks of the journalists themselves, waiting for the invasion, are presented in a rather confusing handheld-camera style. Connolly’s direction is a mixture of clarity and muddiness, and the film fails to make for consistently compelling viewing, but the force of the story itself makes up for the messiness. A worthwhile drama. 3 stars.
• Beneath Hill 60 also presents a little-known wartime story, that of Australian engineers digging tunnels underneath the horrific trenches of World War I, but its style is very different, reverential and dramatized instead of sharply documentary. The movie, ably directed by Jeremy Sims, follows a late-joining engineer leading a band of engineers and sappers down into muddy, claustrophobic quagmires, fearful always of German engineers digging on the other side. The lead role is convincingly played by the always-excellent Brendan Cowell but some of the other performances are scratchy, and the script is infused with clichés and sentimental set pieces, yet the fascinating setting and story win through. I was struck by the closeness to my viewing experience with The Hurt Locker – once more I was repelled (probably against the filmmakers’ messages) by the hellhole operatically rendered, and I staggered out shaken but reconfirmed in my pacifistic leanings. A flawed but convincing portrait of war. 3 stars.

• I’ve only read the second volume in Stieg Larsson’s trilogy but still want to see the Swedish filmic version of the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• The trailer of Micmacs suggests this will be another cinematic feast from Jean-Pierre Jeunet
• Welcome, a refugee drama
• Ben Stiller can be a very effective actor with the right script and director – is Noah Baumbach the one to tame Stiller in Greenberg?
• I’ve been hanging out for Food, Inc. since I missed it during last July’s Melbourne International Film Festival
• Just out on DVD, another regrettable miss at the cinemas is Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are
• And some comedy from Ricky Gervais, The Invention of Lying
• Older still is my only Australian film for the month, Last Ride
• Shrink, starring Kevin Spacey, is another one to catch up on
• Ditto the harsh Bronson

• A week before his wedding, a bridegroom drives to Las Vegas with two mismatched buddies and an odd soon-to-be brother-in-law. The next morning, the groom is missing and the other three remember nothing. A recipe for a frat-boy comedy dud, surely? Yet the script of The Hangover, directed by Todd Phillips, is full of delightful surprises and the acting, especially by Bradley Cooper, lifts this film into the category of quite sophisticated, belly-laugh fun. 2½ stars
• In District 9, by writer/director Neill Blomkamp, hideous aliens from a stranded spaceship are sequestered in a camp behind barbed wire. When a naive company man (superbly played by Sharlto Copley) ventures among the ‘cockroaches,’ as they’re dubbed, he stumbles upon truths about them and himself. Fast-paced, artful sci-fi that plays up the apartheid theme, District 9 belies its low budget by being instantly credible and fascinating. Great idea, great plot, great script. 4 stars.

• Jay Parini’s novelization of Tolstoy’s weird last days, The Last Station, was favourably reviewed and I always regretted not reading it. But the film of the same name, directed by Michael Hoffman, is a sanitized, over-earnest failure. Fine acting by Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren and the impressive James McAvoy cannot overcome a laborious script and lack of insight into Tolstoy, Russia or idealism. A special black mark for intrusive, saccharine music. 2 stars
• The Eclipse is one of those low-key Irish dramas that observe pain and joy at close quarters. Cierán Hinds is marvellous in the role of a grieving widower who falls for a visiting celebrity author. The dialogue and nuanced acting are just fine, the scenery and music fitting and lovely, and the emotional terrain is carefully exposed. All in all, a recipe for a worthy piece – but director Conor McPherson unseats the film by staging histrionic ‘ghost’ scenes straight out of a schlock movie. A botch. 1 star.

• Sophie Barthes’s Cold Souls offers the absurdist conceit of an actor (Paul Giamatti brilliantly playing himself), overburdened by his on-stage character, temporarily storing his soul in a locker and then struggling to get it back. The script engages without producing riveting drama, the atmosphere is suitably moody, and the film’s reflections on meaningful living are rolled out without histrionics. Clever and engaging. 3 stars.
• Richard Kelly’s The Box, also very much a director’s film, offers another humanistic challenge: a macabre man gives a 1970s American couple twenty-four hours to decide if they’ll accept a million dollars in exchange for the death of an unknown person. In contrast to the playfulness of Cold Souls, Kelly delivers a chilled, ambiguous ambience – complete with stylised acting from James Marsden and Cameron Diaz that accentuates the sense of unreality – to match the Twilight Zone plot. Fascinating without igniting. 3 stars.

• Even when his films miss the mark, as half of them seem to, Steven Soderbergh never fails to sizzle. The Informant takes what is apparently a true story of a 1990s whistleblower in a chemical corporation, and hams it up almost outrageously with a restless plot and excellent acting from Matt Damon (believe it or not, he can act, witness The Good Shepherd). An intelligent script demands the viewer’s focus. A quirky potboiler. 2½ stars.
• Rand analyst Daniel Ellsberg was one of the gung-ho architects of US Cold War policy and Vietnam War strategy, so when he leaked a 7,000-page Top Secret study to the press in 1971, the consequences shook the nation. The new documentary about those events, The Most Dangerous Man in America (based on a Kissinger label), makes brilliant use of invaluable interviews from the participants in the drama. Ellsberg himself comes across as grounded and principled. Directors Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith weave the facts together skilfully, even at one point using animation. Absorbing and inspirational. 4 stars.