One unexpected side effect of the attritional gore war waged by seemingly endless Saw and Hostel sequels has been the rise of more subtle ghostly chillers whose old-fashioned charms are in stark contrast to the shrieking white noise of modern torture-porn tedium. With the 12-rated haunted-house throwback movie The Woman in Black still making a killing at the UK box office, Nick Murphy's similarly spirited The Awakening (2011, StudioCanal, 15) offers home viewers a few creepy tingles in the vein of (though not of the same calibre as) The Orphanage and The Others.
At the centre of its efficiently executed spell is Rebecca Hall, whose expertly nuanced performance raises this above the level of the humdrum. She plays Florence Cathcart, a sceptical investigator with a penchant for debunking claims of paranormal activity in the ghostly aftermath of the first world war. Called to an isolated boys' boarding school where the apparent apparition of a deceased child has been terrorising the pupils, Cathcart makes a series of (self-)discoveries which should be familiar to anyone with a working knowledge of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, but which still manage to conjure up the occasional frisson of the uncanny. There is solid, sinister support from the ever reliable Imelda Staunton, while Dominic West injects a genuinely fraught sense of pathos into the tortured figure of schoolmaster Robert Mallory. It may not be groundbreaking, and the narrative knots are tied up rather too neatly, but at a time when the horror genre is in desperate need of a little restraint this makes for refreshingly understated, well-crafted fare.
Having cemented his role as everyone's favourite screen crazy in films such as Bug and My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done?, Michael Shannon goes for broke in Take Shelter (2011, Universal, 15), a brilliantly balanced tale of approaching apocalypse and brooding psychosis, brimful of End of Days madness.
Beset by Noah-like visions of a gathering storm, Shannon's increasingly unbalanced anti-hero, whose family history contains a thread of acknowledged mental illness, becomes obsessed with reinforcing an old storm shelter in which he hopes to hide his family. It's a dizzying piece which can be variously interpreted as modern political parable, timeless fantastical fable or razor-sharp depiction of impending dementia. However one reads it, there's no mistaking the power of Shannon's fearsome central performance which threatens to drag even the mercurial Jessica Chastain into a black hole of impending doom.
Owing more to Andrew Kotting's This Filthy Earth than to any previous screen adaptations of Emily Brontë's sacred text, Andrea Arnold's earthy reinvention of Wuthering Heights (2011, Artificial Eye, 15) has the ambience of a long, muddy walk over a wet and windy moor. At its best when dealing with the rough and raggedy edges of tormented young love (rather than its adult aftermath), this builds upon the promise of Fish Tank, as the director coaxes painfully believable performances from her adolescent leads, who exude a raw naturalism and spontaneity. The location of Heathcliff's roots amid the legacy of the slave trade (an interpretation long suggested by literary critics) is both radical and reasonable, and true to the source material.
There's much to like about 50/50 (2011, Lions Gate, 15), Jonathan Levine's ever-so-slightly downbeat bro-mance about a young man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) discovering who his real friends are (Seth Rogen, mainly), after being diagnosed with spinal cancer. The depiction of illness is refreshingly free of sentimentality, and the highs and lows of treatment are handled with authenticity. Shame, then, that an underlying thread of misogyny (crystalised in Bryce Dallas Howard's hateful girlfriend caricature) should leave a bitter taste, despite the perky, positive, balancing presence of Anna Kendrick's rookie counsellor.
To describe Tower Heist (2011, Universal, 12) as über-hack Brett Ratner's best film may be damning the movie with faint praise, yet there's something oddly enjoyable about this nuts-and-bolts caper, which sets a team of disgruntled workers (led by Ben Stiller) against the penthouse-owning millionaire (Alan Alda) who shafted them. After some recent career-torching centre-stage turns, Eddie Murphy reminds us that he's best when confined to a supporting role, a point most perfectly proven by his work voicing "Donkey" in Shrek.
Meanwhile, Murphy's Shrek co-star Antonio Banderas gets his very own animation spin-off in the shape of Puss in Boots (2011, Paramount, U), a disposable but not entirely unlikable rehashing of the already overstretched alternative fairytale franchise. The visuals are suitably shiny and sugary, but it's Banderas's velvety vocal tones that really carry the piece; for all the hi-tech digimation, this really is a movie you could happily watch with your eyes closed.
As for Happy Feet Two (2011, Warner, U), in which tap-dancing penguins sing karaoke pop hits cleverly reconfigured to reflect their struggles against globally warmed disasters (or something), it's actually a lot more fun than you'd imagine, benefiting from eye-catching set pieces, distracting comic sub-plots and a welter of incongruous but somehow heartwarming cheesy tunes.
Certainly, if you're looking for snowbound fun with a digital twist then you're much better off with this than with the latest utterly uninteresting remake-cum-prequel of The Thing (2011, Universal, 15). Whereas John Carpenter's 1980s template used cutting-edge robotics and latex technology to create the shape-shifting forms at which the Nyby/Hawks 50s original could only hint, this dreary 21st-century reboot simply rehashes Carpenter's riffs with digital monsters and cardboard characters. Boo!
