Tracks

(M) ★★★★

Director: John Curran.

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Adam Driver, Roly Mintuma, John Flaus.

"Just takin' my camels for a walk."

Anyone who has travelled through Australia's red centre will know it's a journey that is repetitive, sporadically dull, and seemingly endless.

It's also a trip that has to be seen to be believed, thanks to a beautifully alien landscape that is intriguing and somewhat mystical.

Fittingly, these sentiments equally summarise Tracks, the film about Robyn Davidson's 1977 trek from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean.

The film, based on Davidson's book of the same name, sets up the story slowly as the young Australian woman (played by Wasikowska) arrives in central Australia and sets about learning the arts of camel breaking and wrangling.

Securing funding support from National Geographic, Davidson eventually sets out on the 1700-mile journey with four camels and a dog, enduring dust storms, feral camels, harsh conditions, and intermittent visits from a talkative photographer (Driver) along the way.

The who, what, where, when and how of Tracks is interesting, but the kicker is the why. What possesses a seemingly sensible young lady to Burke-and-Wills her way across the most hellish portion of the outback?

Tracks hints at varying theories and it's refreshing that the film never gets carried away with answering the 'why?' definitively. As frustrating as it might seem, the movie encourages you to make your own guesses from the evidence presented, and is all the more rewarding for it.

Wasikowska's performance is top-notch, not only carrying the film, but making Davidson believable and wonderfully multi-faceted, with those facets running the gamut from "stoic and determined" to "more than a little bit bonkers". The adventurous "camel lady" also comes off as either socially awkward or desperately quiet, and again, this adds to the mystery of why she does what she does.

But as mentioned previously, the film manages to be much like the landscape - intriguing yet repetitive, and mystical yet sporadically dull. Wasikowska probably lost count of the number of times director Curran said to her, "OK, Mia, in this shot you're going to be walking through the desert with your camels".

While this might not make for scintillating viewing, it does suit the subject matter perfectly and it's still interesting to watch. You won't be on the edge of your seat, but you'll feel a sense of release at the ending.

The film is also understated in its drama - the troubles Davidson faces are never exaggerated and it seems like the filmmakers have erred on the side of fidelity, making for a quiet and at-times meditative journey, as opposed to hamming up the life-and-death nature of her trip.

A lack of tension is slightly compensated for by the episodic nature of the story, so at least something is constantly breaking the monotony of watching Wasikowska walking with camels. It certainly helps that the landscape is stunning and that Curran and cinematographer Mandy Walker capture it in all its picturesque glory.

Visions of this landscape will stick with you, as will the subject matter. Upon leaving the cinema, it was tempting to think of it as "walking walking walking, met some Aborigines, walking walking walking, chased by camels, walking walking walking...".

But there's something that lingers about Tracks and seems more impressive with a bit of distance.

As an insight into a trip none of us are ever like to take, Tracks is fascinating. It's pace and repetition might put some people off, but for mine this is the perfect way to tell this strange-but-true tale.

The Monuments Men

(M) ★★

Director: George Clooney.

Cast: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville.

Disposing of bodies is never easy.

There's a fake quote attributed to Winston Churchill that regularly does the rounds on Facebook and Twitter.

The story goes that when Churchill was asked whether England should cut its arts funding to boost the war effort during WWII, the prime minister responded; "Then what are we fighting for?".

It's a shame Churchill didn't actually say it (no one did - it's a total fabrication) as it would have been a perfect line for this based-on-fact tale of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program run by the Allied forces.

The team - seven people here, but about 400 service members and civilians in reality - was tasked with venturing into the warzone to recover artworks stolen by the Nazis during their invasion of Europe.

Led by Frank Stokes (Clooney), the hodge-podge squad of art experts go through basic training before heading to the frontline to reclaim such artefacts as the Ghent altarpiece and Michaelangelo's Madonna of Bruges.

But these raiders of the lost art are racing against Hitler's "Nero decree", which sees his troops burn and destroy any works they can't take with them as they retreat, and the rapidly advancing Russian army, who are seeking to claim the pieces as war reparations.

As subject matter, it's brilliant. And look at that cast - buddies Clooney and Damon in their sixth film together, Oscar winners Dujardin and Blanchett in side roles, and much-loved comedy actors Goodman, Murray and Balaban. What could possibly go wrong?

The answer is the script, written by director-star Clooney and co-producer Grant Heslov. After a very clumsy start that introduces the characters without really letting us know them, the film wanders around without focus - the task facing the Monument Men is so broad that there is a lack of tension and drama, despite this being set in the middle of WWII.

Perhaps it's fitting, this wandering plot, as that's what the characters are doing. They're traipsing around war-torn Europe, unsure what they're looking for and unsure where to look for it. But as interesting as this might have been in Robert Edsel's source book, it makes for a far-from-compelling narrative here. It's an approach that's more scattershot than sniper rifle, and the resulting episodic nature doesn't excite.

The Monuments Men comes to life when Blanchett is on the screen as a French museum curator forced to work for the Nazis. It adds a sense of peril and her character is more layered, adding some much needed spark and depth to the film. And whereas the rest of the cast is in varying degrees of cruise control (particularly Murray and Clooney), Blanchett thrives in an admittedly meatier role.

Bonneville is also good as a down-on-his-luck Brit brought onto the team by Stokes, but the cast feels predominantly under-used with their characters underdeveloped. Murray's trademark deadpan and Goodman's usual bluster have been comedic gold in the past, but here so much potential evaporates between infrequent laughs.

Obviously, the subject matter is not a laughing matter, and Clooney devotes a lot of time and a fair bit of repetition to the film's central questions - "is saving art worth losing lives?" and "why is art important?". But with his selected cast (handpicked by Clooney, with each character written with each actor in mind), the film's predominantly light and airy tone, and the likeability of its characters and actors, it seems there is a missed opportunity to create a comedy or dramedy with a message.

Things pick up in the final 15 minutes when the plot finds its focus and the stakes are raised and you can't help but wish the rest of the film had that attitude, instead of just drifting by on Clooney's charm.

The Monuments Men is certainly not terrible and is in fact sporadically enjoyable - it's just disappointing that such a great cast and a wonderful fact-based men-on-a-mission story falls short of its potential.

300: Rise Of An Empire

(MA15+) ★★

Director: Noam Murro.

Cast: Sullivan Stapleton, Eva Green, Rodrigo Santoro, Callan Mulvey, Jack O'Connell, Lena Headey.

Shirts are for wimps. Obviously

Word of the day: "sidequel".

It's where a film (or TV series or book) takes place at the same time as its predecessing film.

So 300: Rise Of An Empire is the sidequel, not sequel, of Zack Snyder's violent historical reimagining of the Battle Of Thermopylae.

It's narrative arc begins before the 2007 film's setting and finishes after King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans have fought the forces of Persian god-king Xerxes at the Hot Gates, and looks at the greater war happening at the same time.

The focus is on Themistocles (Stapleton), who rises to prominence after leading the Greeks to victory over the Persians at the Battle Of Marathon and killing the Persian king Darius in the process.

Darius' son Xerxes (Santoro) is goaded into revenge by vicious general Artemisia (Green), who manufactures Xerxes' rise to god-king status and sets about orchestrating the Persian Empire's second invasion of Athens.

Based on a yet-to-be-published graphic novel by Frank Miller, Rise Of An Empire definitely strives for the same Miller-inspired visuals of Snyder's film (which was based on a graphic novel as well).

Computer-generated blood gushes, the amount of slow-motion probably adds 20 minutes to the film, and every background is drawn from the same visual effects pallette - the highly stylised look of 300 returns and it's one of the best aspects of this follow-up. It's definitely pretty to look at, in as much as this kind of cartoonish, over-the-top violence can be "pretty".

But as the limbs go flying and heads start rolling, so too do all notions of logic, physics and history. This is to be expected in a film where historical figures such as Xerxes and Artemisia are redrawn as an eight-foot-tall mutant and a goth wet dream respecitively, but when you draw a CG moon into the background that is about 100 times bigger than any moon you've ever seen, it tends to rip you away from the reality the filmmakers are trying to create.

This enormous moon is symbolic of where Rise Of An Empire goes wrong. There's over-the-top, and then there's just bafflingly insane. A pointless sex scene in the middle of the film is unintentionally hilarious, but the film can't muster enough of a sense of humour to salvage the moment and embrace how laughable it has become.

Other way-too-bonkers moments, such as using a horse in a naval encounter, are an attempt to one-up 300, but the film devolves into a vague repetition of sea-battle after sea-battle, all the while lacking the emotional core Gerard Butler and his Spartans provided in the first movie.

Aussie Sullivan Stapleton, adopting the faux-British accent we've come to expect in all historical films, does an admirable job with the endless soldier-stirring speeches he has to give, and if nothing else, here's hoping this sets him on a path to the A-list because there is plenty of potential in his performance.

Green also gets some serious credit for what is likely to be a love-it-or-hate-it performance. For my money, it's a memorable and enjoyably devilish turn as the warmongering warrior princess Artemesia, and Green saves Rise Of The Empire somewhat.

Fans of the first film will probably enjoy this return to Snyder (who's back as producer) and Miller's loose interpretation of the ancient Mediterranean, but even they will feel this is a disappointing follow-up.

12 Years A Slave

(MA15+) ★★★★★

Director: Steve McQueen.

Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Lupita Nyong'o, Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti, Sarah Poulson.

"Come now, child; we're black people in a historical drama. What could possibly go wrong?"

Great films don't have to be enjoyable to watch, and 12 Years A Slave is a fine example.

This is an outstanding film - it's a collection of remarkable performances driving a strong script, deftly handled by director McQueen (Hunger, Shame) and dealing with its heavy subject matter impressively.

But it's also a brutal film, packed with the lynchings, whippings, rapes, beatings and other forms of mistreatment that went hand-in-hand with the American South's institutional slavery.

This unflinching look at legally endorsed prejudice and racism is told from the point of view of Solomon Northup (Ejiofor), a free man living with his wife and children in New York until he is kidnapped and sold into slavery.

Beaten for insisting he is not a runaway slave named Platt, Solomon soon learns he must keep his head down and his mouth shut if he is to survive this nightmare.

His ownership passes from the comparatively kindly plantation owner named Ford (Cumberbatch) to the ruthless cotton grower Epps (Fassbender), and all the while Solomon tries to figure out a way to get home.

What's fascinating about the story is the multi-faceted way it looks at slavery, prejudice and the social structures and moral issues within the white and black cultures. The slaves try to stick together, but without sticking their necks out, adding guilt to their already woeful lives. The whites are predominantly racist, just at varying levels, and those that aren't are struggling against an almost overwhelming tide of deeply ingrained bigotry.

As such, 12 Years A Slave is powerful and emotive - devastatingly so - and offers only small reprieves in between. It's a relief when McQueen directs his camera at the beauty of the Georgian everglades or when the soundtrack features the slaves singing a work song.

The fact that slavery existed is horrific enough - the fact that this is based on a true story, written from Northup's own experiences and published in 1853, makes it all the worse.

But what really drives it all home is the performances. Ejiofor, Fassbender and Nyong'o are outstanding. Ejiofor is in every scene and carries the film with a performance that can't have been easy, but is note-perfect and unwavering.

The depth of his portrayal is displayed in a sequence where a group of slaves are gathered around a fresh grave, having buried one of their own who died while picking cotton. As they stand around singing, Ejiofor's Solomon goes from utter dejection to defiant resilience, barely containing his fear, sadness and despair all at the same time as he refuses to "drown in his melancholia". It's a powerhouse moment and just one of many examples that have led to the British actor being listed as a nominee for every acting award on offer.

Fassbender and Nyong'o are equally good. Fassbender is suitably despicable as Epps, while Nyong'o has the distasteful task of playing Patsey, a slave girl who is the object of Epps' affections.

Undoubtedly this is a tough watch, but that's to be expected when dealing with such a subject. 12 Years A Slave pulls no punches and is all the better for it. This is a truly impressive piece of filmmaking.

Lone Survivor

(MA15+) ★★★

Director: Peter Berg.

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Ben Foster, Emile Hirsch, Eric Bana, Yousuf Azami, Ali Suliman.

You don't got a beard, you don't get a gun.

A couple of years ago, real-life Navy Seals took part in the making of action film called Act Of Valour, which the Navy hoped would do for its recruitment levels what Top Gun did for the Air Force in the '80s.

Lone Survivor's first act feels like the Hollywood version of Act Of Valour - a propaganda-ish love letter to the brave (and slightly insane) lads who sign up to be Navy Seals.

After an opening act detailing the disturbing levels trainees are pushed to to become elite soldiers, four interchangeable soldiers (played by Wahlberg, Kitsch, Foster and Hirsch) are sent on a mission in Afghanistan to kill Taliban leader Ahmad Shah (Azami).

But things go terribly wrong. It turns out the title is the massive spoiler you suspect it to be and not just two random words stuck together.

When things do go terribly wrong, Lone Survivor abruptly stops seeming like a challenging enticement for wannabe soldiers and becomes a harrowing and intense hour-long shoot-out that is as relentless as it is brutal.

Ever since Saving Private Ryan, war movies have followed the credo of "stick the audience in the thick of it" and Lone Survivor certainly adheres to that ideal. For 60 terrifying minutes, you are part of a firefight that is genuinely nail-biting and scary.

It will also put most rational people off the idea of ever wanting to become a Navy Seal.

It's a credit to the direction of Peter Berg (earning partial redemption for the massive turkey that was Battleship) and the editing team that the shoot-out that dominates so much of Lone Survivor's running time is so impressive and immersive.

But it also means that other important aspects of moviemaking - characterisation, emotions, and dialogue - fall by the wayside. As a result, an overwrought coda at the end showing the pictures and names of the real-life soldiers of Operation Red Wings fails to strike an empathetic chord. We know nothing about these guys except one of them has to buy his girlfriend a horse for their wedding for some reason ... and I can barely remember which soldier that was, such is their interchangeability.

Surprisingly, these downsides don't ruin the film. The last act is surprising and adds an interesting and unexpected angle to proceedings, somewhat redeeming things, and the cast is quality, adding to the believability and verisimilitude of the whole thing.

Ultimately Lone Survivor will be remembered for its bone-breaking, blood-splattering, white-knuckle skirmish - not for its performances, characters, plot or dialogue. On this level, it works. Add in the last act and a strong sense of reality, and there is more good than bad here.

This is not really a war movie - it's a "battle movie". It's focus is not on the broad themes of why nations go to war or what they're really fighting for or the fallout back home or the long-reaching effects these things have. It just wants to tell the story of what happened on this particular Afghan ridge in 2005, even it never properly introduces us to the men involved.

And as such, Lone Survivor loses the war, but definitely wins the battle.

The Railway Man

(M) ★★★★

Director: Jonathan Teplitzky.

Cast: Colin Firth, Jeremy Irvine, Nicole Kidman, Stellan Skarsgard, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tanroh Ishida.

Colin didn't believe in trains, which ultimately meant nothing to the oncoming train.

David Lean's 1957 war story The Bridge On The River Kwai may be rightfully revered as a classic film, but it's never been highly acclaimed for its veracity.

While it never shirked away from the fact that war is "madness", to quote its last line, it barely scratched the surface of the reality of the atrocities inflicted on the POWs and slaves that worked on the Thailand-Burma Railway - an endeavour not called the Death Railway for nothing.

In The Railway Man, based on the book by British POW Eric Lomax, we are presented with those atrocities and the lingering after-effects in far more graphic detail.

And while the details of Lomax's personal story have been changed, most of the important themes remain, as does the impact of what happened between Lomax and one of his Japanese captors many years later.

When not focusing on what happened to Lomax on the Burma Railway (where he's played by Jeremy Irvine), it looks at his life in 1980s, where the older Lomax (Firth) has settled down with his new wife Patti (Kidman).

Unfortunately, his newfound happiness seems to kick his post-traumatic stress disorder into overdrive, leaving Lomax a distant and haunted mess prone to nightmares and strange outbursts.

Concerned for her husband's mental health, Patti contacts one of Lomax's army buddies (Skarsgard) and tries to uncover what happened in the darkest days of working on the railway.

Firth's performance is top-notch. He portrays the damaged ex-soldier as hollowed-out yet still human and hopeful, as both broken and angry, as distant yet somehow sympathetic and ultimately likeable. It's a tough turn and a great one to rival his Oscar-winning role in The King's Speech.

And let's not forget young Irvine (best known previously as the lead in War Horse), who not only makes the torture scenes and other hardships believable but also gives a more than passable impersonation of a young Firth (or should that be a young Lomax?).

Sanada as Takashi Nagase and Skarsgard are also excellent. Kidman gets the short straw with the least developed main character in the film (who also happens to be the plot's catalyst) but still performs admirably, despite being the one who has to deliver many of the script's lesser lines.

The subject matter is obviously confronting but the film is not graphic. It's certainly intense and there's no shying away from what went on between the Japanese forces and their POWs, but the important thing is it helps build towards the emotional outpouring at the end, where all the themes of hate and healing, forgetting and forgiving, and vengeance and vitality meet.

The biggest problem with The Railway Man is its disjointed delivery, which flips back and forth between the war and the '80s, slowing the pace and creating a jarring effect as we switch time periods. Having said that, it's hard to think of a better way of dealing with the alternating eras.

Outside of one major CG sequence which presents the fall of Singapore as a backdrop, the film doesn't go for any big flashy visual moments. The English sequences are typically grey and sombre, while the jungles of Burma and Thailand (filmed partly in Australia) are hot and yellow.

What's interesting about this film, aside from its amazing reality-based climax, is that it's a rare look at what happens after the guns have stopped firing and the soldiers have gone home. So often we see the battles and the intensity, but the lasting impact of the war wounds - both physical and mental - is rarely shown. Such movies do exist - The Best Years Of Our Lives is a good example - but they're far less common than "war movies".

With it's impressive performances, The Railway Man is a great example of a "post-war movie".

Robocop (2014)

(M) ★★

Director: José Padilha.

Cast: Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Abbie Cornish, Jackie Earle Haley, Jennifer Ehle, Jay Baruchel, Samuel L. Jackson.

"You look ... different."

Reboots and remakes aren't necessarily a bad thing.

Without them we wouldn't have Martin Scorsese's The Departed, Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's 11, the Coens' True Grit, or John Carpenter's The Thing, nor would we have seen Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy or Marc Webb's recent The Amazing Spider-man.

These "re-imaginings" only work when the new film gets exactly what it was that made the original movie or character tick. They may tinker with things but they understand the reason the idea existed in the first place.

This remake of Robocop doesn't get it.

In fact, it's strangely boring, which would seem impossible when you're talking about a movie where a half-man-half-robot police officer runs around shooting things for nearly two hours. How can that be boring?

Whereas the original film asked what this half-man-half-robot police officer represented and what kind of society could allow him to come into being, the new version is more concerned with how he works, leading to a seemingly endless origin story involving countless scenes where Robocop is either operated on, tweaked or tested.

José Padilha's remake attempts to humanise Alex Murphy aka Robocop (Kinnaman) and address the issue of where the man starts and the machine ends, but misses out thanks to a disconnecting performance from Kinnaman and the fact the original was so good because it was a cleverly dark satirical comedy that just happened to star a killer man-bot who blew things up.

The satire is almost entirely gone as we watch Murphy dig too deep in the wrong case, end up fatally wounded, and then become a $2.6 Billion Dollar Man with a badge. The closest we get to the wonderfully dystopian humour of the original is in Samuel L. Jackson's hilariously over-the-top bit part as a biased TV show host and Baruchel's blunt PR man.

It's people like Jackson and Baruchel that add some much-needed credibility to this B-grade-with-a-budget actioner.

Oldman and Keaton are solid and bring more detail and gravitas than is necessary to their roles of "reluctantly immoral scientist" and "morally ambiguous businessman" - in fact, the most exciting moments of the film are when the ex-Batman and the former Commissioner Gordon talk things out.

The story does pick up momentum by the end, but Kinnaman's performance doesn't draw any empathy. The big guy has his moments but his expression rolls from mortified to bored with little in between. When Weller's Alex Murphy was gunned down and turned into Robocop, we cared, even though the movie was an exaggerated satire, but audiences will struggle to feel anything for Kinnaman's Murphy, so bland is his character and so lacking is the chemistry between him and Murphy's wife Clara (Cornish) and his son.

There are some ideas in here that are interesting, such as its themes about man vs machine, the war on crime, and of what it is to be human, while a handful of decent performances save proceedings somewhat.

But there is a lack of engagement and freshness that leads to a creeping sense of boredom - not something you would want if you were trying to reboot the Robocop franchise.