Incendies

Director: Denis Villeneuve (which might just be the coolest name of all time)

Starring: Lubna Azabal, Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin
After her death, a mother sends her adult children on a mission to find the father and brother they never knew they had. Their journey takes them to the Middle East and the village where their mother was born, as they find the truth about her past.
I originally wanted to see this because I loved the play - also called Incendies, or Scorched in English, by Wajdi Mouawad. The story is an intriguing albeit formulaic "going back to my roots" one, but the beautiful performances from the mother and daughter leads - particularly Lubna Azabal as the mother, Narwan - and the washed-out, harrowing cinematography kept me riveted from the very beginning. The hard-hitting reveal unfolded with delicacy and grace and when the penny dropped for the majority of the audience there was a rustle of horror through the cinema. The film is a little too long and could have benefited from some culling of unnecessary scenes and the titles which separate each "chapter" are joltingly out-of-place with the stark beauty of the landscapes or the classic method of storytelling. However the end product rises above all this and puts this among the best films I've seen this year.

X Men: First ClassDirector: Matthew Vaughn
Starring: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender

Just putting it out there, I am a massive fan of X-Men. I saw the third one at the movies three times. Being that the third one has a pile of tripe in place of a plot, that's true commitment. I even enjoyed the hackneyed, overblown Wolverine spin off, although that might have been because of the triple leading-man whammy of Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber. When I heard Matthew Vaughn was following up last year's reboot of the superhero genre, Kick-Ass, with this, I pretty much actually wet my pants.

Vaughn, of course, is a fan of muscular violence and gritty realism, something which was much-missed from the last X-Men movie. And from the very beginning, he whips us into a fully-realised world. It's the 1960s, but not as we know them (actually it looks nothing like the 1960s, even though James McAvoy does say "groovy"), Professor X and Magneto don't yet exist, or rather they exist only as Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, young men struggling to hone their mutant powers. Both are recognised archetypes: Lehnsherr a brittle and emotionally-scarred Holocaust survivor, hooked on vengeance as he travels the world to find the Nazi who killed his mother. McAvoy is the foppish and affable young professor, arrogant with success and always capable. It was a real stroke of casting genius to ask two character actors to ham it up like this: their budding friendship and mutual appreciation provides the beating heart to the film, and they look like they're enjoying not starving to death in an Irish prison or suffering from gangrene on the beaches of Normandy. In fact, their chemistry is so palpable and their charisma so awesome that really, it would've been better if there had been no other characters in the film, save for Kevin Bacon's multilingual baddie. The other mutants, which clearly exist for the fan boys alone; the sometimes sloppy CG effects, a dull subplot involving Beast's burning desire to be human and Rose Byrne's boring love interest should really all have taken a backseat to the development of these guys' powers. Instead, we are left with a rather cluttered plot which, despite cleverly incorporating the Cuban Missile Crisis and being helmed by Vaughn, never feels truly real. When your current competition in the superhero canon is Christopher Nolan's Batman and Vaughn's own Kick Ass, realism is essential. McAvoy and Fassbender shine when they're allowed and when Fassbender remembers to drop his native Irish accent, and the rest of the time is just filler between the sometimes tense, sometimes touching scenes involving these two.

However despite this, it's still X Men. Did I mention it's X Men? I am happy to ignore all its faults because, well, it's X Men...