Film & TV

The Grey; Haywire; The Descendants

From the outside, The Grey (2011, Entertainment, 15) looks like just another tired riff on the dreary "man v (his own) nature" theme that in the not too distant past gave us the ponderous tedium of the David Mamet-scripted The Edge. In that self-important dirge-fest, an air crash left Alec Baldwin and (Sir!) Anthony Hopkins to sort out their manly differences in the North American wilds while being pursued by a clumsily symbolic bear. The Grey similarly ditches its mismatched airborne characters into an inhospitably freezing landscape where their interpersonal conflicts will be played out against a background of baying – and occasionally attacking – wolves.

Liam Neeson, who has recently morphed from admired thespian to existential action hero, plays the lone wolf-hunter, a marksman who understands the call of the wild: Le Samourai in snowboots, with a hint of Jim Jarmusch's underrated Dead Man thrown in for good measure. The nihilistic narrative, from Ian Mackenzie Jeffers's short story "Ghost Walker", worries away at the characters' underlying weaknesses (greed, dishonesty, cowardice), allowing them to be picked off by a form of natural selection that is red in tooth and claw.

There's little doubt that Neeson's monosyllabic star power will ensure that his wolf-punching Ottway outlasts most of the supporting cast, nor that his personal demons (the haunting memory of a lost love) will play a key role in deciding the outcome of this impressively downbeat adventure. Yet positioned in a chilly netherland between Boy's Own yarn and quasi-Nietzschean tract, The Grey manages to juggle morbid metaphysics with well-orchestrated battle scenes and borderline supernatural suspense to surprisingly gripping effect.

Plaudits are due to co-writer/director Joe Carnahan who returns to the true grit of his calling card feature, Narc, after a profitable spell directing such disposable trash as Smokin' Aces and The A-Team. And while the survivalist narrative doesn't quite look death in the face, the void is at least glimpsed, in a manner that is both engaging and entertaining. All of which is more than could be said of Mamet's efforts, proving once again that exploitation cinema produces more artists than beret-wearing theatre ever could.

After the smart pandemic potboiling of Contagion, Steven Soderbergh continues to prove his populist genre credentials with Haywire (2011, Momentum, 15), an ass-kicking action adventure built around the eye-catching talents of mixed martial arts champion Gina Carano. A spy-v-spy romp with a twisty, double-crossing plot, this extremely likable bash-'em-up trades in believably physical punch-ups notable largely for their lack of superhuman stunts; unlike the Bond or Bourne franchises, this is a movie in which body blows hurt and in which a wrong-footed fall results in a sprained ankle. Which is not to say that the fight scenes are dull; on the contrary, the sense of real physical endangerment merely ups the dramatic ante in the manner of the very best martial arts movies.

Having first fallen for Carano while watching her "beating people to a pulp in a cage", Soderbergh surrounds this latterday Cynthia Rothrock with heavyweight dramatic talent, most notably the majestic Michael Fassbender who plays her sparring partner in the most physical bedroom scene of the year. Meanwhile Ewan McGregor acts with his hair, sporting a borderline psychotic cut that flags up his inherent untrustworthiness, accentuating the ever-so-slightly mad tilt of his grin, which remains his most charming/worrying feature. As for Carano, she breezes through with flying colours, oozing the kind of starry charisma that guarantees a healthy future in bankable B-movies for as long as she wishes to kick cinematic butt.

The peculiar thing about The Descendants (2011, Fox, 15), in which Alexander Payne either "went soft" or "grew up" depending on your point of view, is just how unassuming it appears for much of its running time. The story of a dowdy, middle-aged schlub (George Clooney – no, really) who discovers that his comatose wife was having a marriage-ending affair, this adaption of Kaui Hart Hemmings' novel depicts a Hawaiian paradise as a purgatorial hell in which people's capacity for suffering is in no way diminished by the alluring beauty of their surroundings. Forced to face up to his responsibilities as a (failed) father and husband, Clooney's Matt King heads off on a scenic tour of his life, attempting to unravel the quiet chaos of his existence via a could-be-cliched voyage of personal discovery.

The fact that The Descendants doesn't descend into utterly mawkish baloney is perhaps testament to the strength of the source material, but the unexpected wallop of the closing scene (which the film-maker cites as the key to the entire movie) says more about the still-potent power of Payne's direction, the often acerbic surface of which is finally starting to crack.

No, this does not boast the dyspeptic glee of Election nor the dysfunctional dynamism of About Schmidt or even the softer Sideways. But what it does have is the ability to catch the viewer off guard and catch them with an unexpected emotional truth when they are least expecting it. Add to this a wonderfully authentic Hawaiian jukebox soundtrack courtesy of Gabby Pahinui, Keola Beamer et al and this awards-garlanded oddity (which won the Oscar for adapted screenplay) becomes a deceptively deep surprise.

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The actor is noted for his huge range of work, from Shame to Jane Eyre and his new role as a robot in the prequel to Alien is likely to add to his plaudits

When Michael Fassbender was a teenager growing up in Killarney, Co Kerry, he wanted more than anything to be a heavy metal rock star. He grew his hair long, wore cut-off combat shorts and 10-hole Doc Martens and spent much of his spare time listening to thrash metal bands Metallica and Slayer at ear-splitting volume.

As it was, he performed a single concert in a pub with his friend Mike. It was the middle of the day and the regulars kept asking them to turn the volume down. "Nobody wants to hear Metallica at lunchtime," Fassbender recalled in a recent interview with GQ magazine.

But heavy metal's loss turned out to be acting's gain. At the age of 35, Fassbender has become part of the Hollywood A-list, an actor with a gift for teasing out the complex nuances of character. The sheer range of his work alone is impressive: in the last year, he has tackled gothic romance (Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre), comic-book heroism (Magneto in X-Men: First Class) and psychotherapy (Carl Jung in David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method). Next month, Fassbender will star as an android in Prometheus, Ridley Scott's hotly awaited prequel to his seminal 1979 film, Alien. Although details of the plot are closely guarded, Fassbender has described his character as "incredibly human… he cries robot tears – and creeps everyone out".

Scott has called his new star: "One of the best three or four actors out there. He holds the screen." And according to the director Steve McQueen, who has worked with Fassbender several times: "There is no one like Michael out there right now. And there hasn't been, for me, since Marlon Brando. There's a fragility and a femininity to him, but also a masculinity that can translate. You're not in awe of him. You're part of him. He pulls you in. And that's what you want from an actor. You want people to look at him and see themselves."

On screen, Fassbender is able to convey both intensity and vulnerability in equal measure: his haunting portrayal of a sex addict in Shame won him critical plaudits and a clutch of awards, including the Volpi Cup for best actor at the 2011 Venice film festival. To the astonishment of many, he was overlooked for an Oscars nomination.

Off screen, he is renowned for his dedication. He will read a script up to 300 times before filming and has attributed this perfectionism to his Teutonic ancestry – his father, Josef, is from Germany. "If I came home with 85% in a test," Fassbender has said, "he'd always ask what happened to the other 15%."

When he played IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in McQueen's 2008 film, Hunger, Fassbender survived on 900 calories a day – a diet consisting mainly of nuts, berries and sardines – and lost 40lbs, taking him down to nine stone. Hunger went on to win the Caméra d'Or at Cannes. For Jane Eyre, Fassbender learned to ride, although filming was repeatedly delayed because every time the actor mounted his horse, the animal got an erection – much to the amusement of onlookers.

Vincent Cassel, who spoke to the Observer earlier this year and was Fassbender's co-star in A Dangerous Method, said simply that he was "an amazing actor… he and I really got along. It was one of the reasons I was attracted to doing the film – getting to work with him". His fellow actors use similar phrases to describe him. Although he brings a fierce, almost obsessive passion to each role, when Fassbender is off-duty, he is "very sane", "good company" and "a laugh"; one acquaintance recalls the hilarity of seeing Fassbender solo Cossack-dancing at a friend's wedding a few years ago.

David Cronenberg has described him as "so perky, it drives you crazy. One day [while filming A Dangerous Method], I found him out in the sun in his costume and make-up, with this big smile. I said, 'Michael, why are you smiling like that?' He said, 'I don't know... life.' I said, 'It's so irritating that you're happy all the time.'"

All of this points to the fact that fame has not gone to his head. Despite his Hollywood success, Fassbender still lives in the same modest flat in Hackney, east London, that he has owned since his late 20s, when he was struggling to get enough work to make ends meet. When a magazine journalist visited the flat recently, he noted it was covered with boxes and clothes and had bubbling paint on the ceiling where there had been serious water leakage.

"My mother wouldn't be happy," Fassbender admitted.

The first thing everyone notices is the name. The actor was born in Heidelberg in west Germany, and "Fassbender" is the German term for someone who repairs casks or barrels. Michael was almost born on April Fool's Day but, according to family lore, his father told his mother to hang on a bit longer and he appeared at half-past midnight the next day.

His mother, Adele, comes from County Antrim in Northern Ireland and when Fassbender was two, his parents moved to Killarney, where they ran the West End House restaurant, with his father working there as chef.

Fassbender and his older sister, Catherine (who is now a neuropsychologist), spent summer holidays in Germany and he speaks the language fluently.

In County Kerry, he went to the local Catholic school and was head altar boy at the age of 12 – an onerous responsibility that required him to attend all weddings and funerals and to look after the keys to the church. "A couple of times I slept in," he admitted in an interview with the Guardian. "And the whole congregation was waiting outside the church… but that was my first experience in a way of being on stage, before an audience, of sorts."

At the age of 16, his parents allowed him to move into rooms over the restaurant in town and to live a relatively independent life in return for his working shifts at the weekend. Someone who knows him from that period remembers the young Fassbender as "a very hard worker. He was a great character, great fun. He had great interaction with the customers – he made lots of tips.

"I wasn't surprised that he became an actor. It was all in him. He always had that ability, that roguishness.

"He's still great fun and very down to earth. We're all very proud of him here. When he comes home at Christmas, everyone respects him greatly but he just wants to be plain old Michael and we respect that too."

After failing to make it as a heavy metal star, Fassbender decided to become an actor. At first, his father tried to put him off the idea. "It sounds funny now but I tried to talk him out of it because it is such an unstable profession," Josef Fassbender told a fan site in 2009. "It depends so much on luck, who you meet, how you are received."

Nevertheless, his son went on to study at the Drama Centre in north London, dropping out before graduating after being cast in Steven Spielberg's epic Second World War television mini-series, Band of Brothers. Although it was meant to have been Fassbender's big break, he spent several months in Los Angeles being rejected for parts before eventually retreating to London and carving out a living on British television; through the years, he has appeared on Poirot, Holby City and Murphy's Law.

His breakthrough came when he turned 30 in 2007 and met the artist Steve McQueen, who was then planning to make his debut feature film. Although the pair's first encounter was inauspicious – McQueen thought Fassbender was cocky – they were persuaded to meet again by the casting director. This time, things went more smoothly. McQueen has since compared the experience to "falling in love. You want to keep it. And I think myself and Michael are very pleased that we've found each other in that way".

Fassbender's performance as Bobby Sands gave him his breakthrough into the big time. A year later, Quentin Tarantino cast him as the English officer Lt Archie Hicox in Inglourious Basterds alongside Brad Pitt and there was no turning back.

His appearance in Ridley Scott's science fiction bonanza is likely to earn him yet more plaudits and box-office success. In his personal life, too, he seems more settled of late, having recently confirmed he is dating his Shame co-star, Nicole Beharie. No wonder David Cronenberg remarked on Fassbender's remarkable perkiness – he's got every reason to smile.

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Though hardly original, this taut thriller, written and directed by the Welsh documentary maker Gareth Huw Evans, is something of a tour de force. The setting is Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, but the action is almost entirely confined to a single ugly 15-storey concrete building that gives a fresh meaning to the architectural style known as the new brutalism. On the top floor lives Tama, an untouchable gang boss, and most of the lower storeys are let out to thugs of various kind beholden to him. One morning a Swat team arrives, largely made up of inexperienced cops. They're joined by a grey-haired, middle-aged lieutenant, who acts in a suspiciously peremptory manner, and they set about raiding the place, their aim being the arrest of Tama.

But everything goes wrong, and gradually we understand why. Behind the chaos is the treachery, corruption and inefficiency of venal police and politicians. "We don't kill cops, we buy them," says an exasperated Tama, and in order to restore the status quo it becomes necessary for the crooks to kill all the invading lawmen and dispose of their bodies. The story explodes (unfolds would be a wholly inappropriate word) over a couple of hours in what is in effect almost real time. The fast-cutting, the rapid camera movements and the percussive music grab us by the lapels and throw us around like the Indonesian form of martial arts known as pencak silat that the chief characters employ when not using guns and machetes.

A couple of charitable acts punctuate the mayhem and malevolence, most predictably those involving two brothers on different sides of the law, and a point is made of there being a couple of good apples in the rotten barrel that is the city's constabulary. But generally there's no moralising or sentimentality beyond the usual kind that displays of machismo inevitably reveal. Some sequences go on too long and feature unfeasible quantities of physical punishment. But Evans, who's clearly an admirer of Walter Hill, John Woo, John Carpenter and John McTiernan, maintains a fierce pace that never lets up.

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This dour slice of prison life centres on a depressed juvenile offender coming into conflict with the insensitive warders and the understanding governor during the last days of his sentence in a run-down Romanian jail. The trouble is triggered by his determination to prevent his feckless mother taking his younger brother to live in Italy. The tone, though not the style, brings to mind The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

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Ken Sykora (1923-2006), the son of a Czech cavalry officer and a Swiss woman with aristocratic connections, was one of Britain's finest jazz guitarists and a prolific and accomplished broadcaster on almost any subject you care to mention on all four BBC channels. At the height of his popularity he left London and took his family to a remote corner of Scotland where he remained for the rest of his life, becoming a major figure north of the border. He accumulated an enormous archive and this along with interviews with friends and family and some witty animated footage has provided the basis for Marc Mason's affectionate, affecting and altogether delightful documentary.

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Arguably the finest British film made during the second world war, Powell and Pressburger's 1943 epic traces the career of General Clive Candy (Roger Livesey), a bluff, middle-class British soldier from the Boer war, where he won a VC, up to 1943 when clearly a less gentlemanly form of military behaviour was needed to defeat the Nazis. They were inspired by David Low's celebrated military fogey, Colonel Blimp, but they turn the cartoonist's caricature into a character. Anton Walbrook is outstanding as an honourable German, Candy's friend of long standing, a figure who infuriated Winston Churchill, and Deborah Kerr, Powell's lover at the time and the love of his life, is enchanting as three different women over successive generations. She adds that haunting touch of romantic mystery we find in much of Powell and Pressburger's best work.

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The Moonrise Kingdom star tells all about his acting break, his taste in cassettes and his favourite film of the 70s

You've worked with Wes Anderson many times, do you feel like a staple element of his films?
Oh no, Bill Murray is the staple. And the stapler. He's like the King of Staples. Wes and I are close friends and he's technically a mentor to me. He gave me my first ever acting job on Rushmore when I was 17, so I kind of owe everything to that. But I'm always surprised if he calls me to say there's a part for me in his new film.

How long did you give to Moonrise Kingdom?
Er, three days. Which doesn't sound very much, but I didn't want to go home after. He's got so good at establishing this vibe on set. It's much more efficient than when we started, very nimble and agile. There are no trailers for actors to hide in, no nonsense. Most movies are like coffee, herky-jerky, spike and drop, action then nothing for hours. This was more like afternoon tea, but from first thing in the morning.

Describe your character Cousin Ben.
He's a very fine man with a moral centre. Otherwise, I would have obviously refused to play him. No, but to me he was like the Han Solo of the scout world, a man with a sense of humour who could be tough and bend the rules. Everyone needs a cousin Ben.

You have a large family in this business, from your mum, Talia Shire, to your cousins like Nic Cage and Roman Coppola. Any of them like Cousin Ben to you? [Long pause]
My cousin Sofia [Coppola], she gave me a tape of David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust when I was just 11. There's what you might call an Almost Famous moment. I loved her for that, and still do, all because of Ziggy.

Has music replaced acting for you?
I have my label Coconut Records and I love it. I do it every day, like yoga or going to a gym. I do the composing and everything. It's not for any band,just for me, singing and playing up in my room. And I love that. But acting is fun because of all the people involved, so the two things service different parts of my brain.

I loved you in Bored to Death. It reminded me of Elliott Gould in Altman's The Long Goodbye...
Oh good - that was the inspiration. It's one of my favourite films of the 1970s.

Will you be making any more series?
The show's cancelled now. We did three series but, fear not, I don't think it's the end for my character, Jonathan Ames. I'd love to bring him back.

What was the best film of the 70s?
I should say Rocky, because my mum's in it, or The Godfather, of course. But if it isn't The Long Goodbye, I'll go for The Last Detail or Heaven Can Wait.

Moonrise Kingdom opens in the UK on Friday.

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There's a thesis to be written about water in the cinema. Key texts would include Bad Day at Black Rock, Once Upon a Time in the West, Jean de Florette/ Manon des sources, and Chinatown. To these can be added Even the Rain and The Source, European-financed movies about impoverished citizens in respectively Bolivia and north Africa battling with the authorities over the provision of water to their communities. The better of the two is the gripping Even the Rain, scripted by Ken Loach's regular screenwriter Paul Laverty and directed by the Spanish actress Icíar Bollaín, author of a book about working with Loach. Intertwined are a real-life story of a battle to prevent the privatisation of water in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba in 2000 and the fictional production in the neighbourhood of a feature film about Christopher Columbus and his legacy. The makers of the movie-within-the-movie are themselves continuing the very exploitation of natives that Columbus introduced.

Less good but often rather moving, The Source was shot in southern Morocco where the women of a small village stage a sex strike to compel their indolent husbands to build a pipe that will bring water from a remote spring in the hills above the village, thus saving them back-breaking work. The strike attracts national attention, the government becomes involved and, with the Arab spring in the background, the possibility of larger social changes is raised. It's too long and the tone uncertain. But it's painful in a way Aristophanes's Lysistrata isn't.

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Cannes film festival

Based on the true story of three bootlegging brothers in 1931 Virginia, John Hillcoat's Lawless, which premiered at Cannes on Saturday, is star-studded and violent yet empty as a broken whisky bottle.

The film signals the first of several Hollywood big hitters in the Cannes competition this year, although it probably stands a better chance of featuring among next year's Oscar nominations than it does of unduly troubling the jury here on the Croisette.

Transformers star Shia LeBeouf, British actor Tom Hardy and Australian Jason Clarke (no, me neither) are the Bondurant brothers, moonshiners in Franklin County trying to protect their flourishing operation from a puritanical clampdown spearheaded by a Special Deputy named Rakes, a part played with a memorable fury and dandyish fuss by Guy Pearce.

The inclusion of Pearce in the cast hints that the film wants to be taken as the new LA Confidential but despite its spurts of blood, gangsters and corrupt cops, Lawless never quite succeeds at building convincing portraits of its characters nor its setting. Based on a memoir, The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant, writing about his real grandfather, the script is adapted by musician Nick Cave but, unlike the whisky stills which chug away in the woodsheds, it takes its time to build up steam.

Someone in the art department was clearly enjoying mocking up heaps of battered vintage signage for soda and car batteries but it all feels a bit of struggle, laden with folksy bluegrass songs, drawled voiceover and occasional hillbilly lyricism: "I had a little too much whooppee for one night," slinks Jessica Chastain's barmaid.

Lawless does heat up after an hour or so, when Shia Lebeouf's Jack Bondurant starts selling liquor to gangster Floyd Banner (played with steely style by Gary Oldman, albeit too briefly) and the net of the law tightens around the brothers.

But ultimately it's the violent images that linger: a man tarred and feathered and dumped on the porch; Tom Hardy's throat being slit; Oldman whacking Noah Taylor with a shovel; and Pearce sneering in disgust as he gets blood on his lilac leather gloves after pummelling Shia Lebeouf's face.

Australian-born director Hillcoat last teamed with Nick Cave on the Outback western The Proposition, which also dripped with violence and centred on outlaw brothers. However that 2005 film had a lean sense of purpose and was ripe with surprises.

Lawless also treats themes of survival and family loyalty, but feels aimless and predictable, all dressed up with nowhere to go. Except up a few red carpets, of course.

Rating: 2/5

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Day four at Cannes saw Keith Lemon misbehaving with Kelly Brook, while Tim Roth convened his Un Certain Regard jury, Nick Cave revealed his lawless streak and Ben Drew chilled out at the Majestic Beach

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