Quick Takes

Fracture (113 mins)
Directed by: Gregory Hoblit
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling

Here is a big, handsome shyster of a legal thriller, pleading with the viewer to stick with its preposterous twists and turns on the guarantee that the crowning revelation will blow our socks off.
In this, as in all things, the film is not to be trusted. I was similarly suspicious of Anthony Hopkins, who appears to have hit on the bizarre idea of crossing Hannibal Lecter with a leprechaun.
He plays an Oirish-American sociopath who concocts the perfect crime and then twinkles merrily in the dock, winking at the judge as the case collapses around him. The courtroom scenes are a broad burlesque.
Outraged witnesses hurl themselves over tables and hotshot prosecutor Ryan Gosling is entirely at a loss. All of which is enjoyably silly. It’s just that the longer the film goes on, the more dull and pedestrian it becomes.
Gosling’s eureka moment is the final nail in the coffin, a threadbare little conjuring trick that makes a mockery of all that’s gone before.

Hacking democracy (82 mins)
Directed by: Simon Ardizzone, Russell Michaels

What a pity that this HBO documentary on voter fraud in the 2000 and 2004 US elections should combine the presentational razzle-dazzle of Al Gore and John Kerry.
The material itself is electrifying, exposing Diebold’s touch-screen ballot machines as fatally flawed and open to widespread tampering. But the delivery is as dry as dust and so full of cautious equivocations that one detects the dead hand of legal advisers. The evidence, for instance, implies that ballot rigging has disproportionately benefited Republican candidates. Elsewhere we are told that Diebold’s chief executive publicly promised to deliver the state of Ohio to George W Bush. And yet any skulduggery is airily attributed to some 16-year-old kid in a basement. I’d like to meet that teenager, if only to be reassured that it’s not Karl Rove in disguise.

Pathfinder (99 mins)
Directed by: Marcus Nispel
Starring: Karl Urban, Russell Means, Moon Bloodgood

Imagine a heavy metal album cover come suddenly to life and you pretty much have the measure of Pathfinder, the untold legend of a kick-ass Viking gone native in the new world.
We are in the ninth century; a time of dry ice, squawking ravens and sealskin loincloths. The Norsemen barrel in like WWF wrestlers, cackling to each other as they storm through the forest. The Native Americans are wise and drippy and speak fluent cliche. There are two wolves fighting in every man’s heart, says an old sage. One is love and one is hate. My own personal hate wolf had a blast throughout this dunderheaded action romp.

The reaping (96 mins)
Directed by: Stephen Hopkins
Starring: Hilary Swank, David Morrissey, Idris Elba

Satanic horror films are always good for a laugh, and this one is no exception. Globe-trotting miracle-buster Hilary Swank is called in to investigate what looks like a river of blood in a Bible belt backwater, and before you can blink frogs are raining from the skies, boils are erupting from every orifice, and locusts are chomping on the local cereal crops.
Pretty soon this turns into a confused Exorcist-meets-Deliverance mash-up, complete with freaked-out clergyman, spectral possessed kid, and picturesque hillbilly types all present and correct.Swank strides through it all with unflappable stoicism, doing what can only be described as a thoroughly professional job; the same can’t be said, sadly, of David Morrissey, who is awkwardness personified as a creepy local schoolteacher.

Distant voices (84 mins)
Directed by: Terence Davies
Starring: Freda Dowie, Pete Postlethwaite, Angela Walsh

Few British film-makers have dared to attempt such a thoroughly poetic treatment of their native land, and Terence Davies is the only one to have succeeded so spectacularly.
This re-issue of his 1988 debut feature is not only a disinterring of what is arguably the high point of postwar British art cinema, but is also testament to what we have lost, cinematically speaking, in the intervening period. There’s simply no way a film like this could be made now.
Davies casts an unapologetically myth-making eye over his own adolescence in wartime Liverpool, forging primal drama out of father-son conflicts, sisterly solidarity and maternal fortitude.
But what really sets his film apart is the stunning power of the images Davies conjures up.
Long, stately shots combine with impassioned performances to create a visual tour de force unmatched elsewhere in British cinema.
Davies’ subsequent stop-start output is a cautionary tale, perhaps, of the difficulties of maintaining a career as a working film-maker if you’re consumed with a particular creative vision, but I’ll say it again: this film is a masterpiece.