Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2013)

This was terrific. Yes, it's an action film without much (if any) profundity to keep you pondering, and a number of the elements are already pretty familiar. (I found some of its methods of acknowledging influence pretty effective - calling a character Gilliam is both blindingly obvious and pretty deft!) But it plays an absolute blinder, accomplishes what it sets out to do, and then some. The action sequences are engrossing and visceral, and it manages to do what so many similar films - it seems to me - utterly fail to do: to not take itself too seriously without putting inverted commas around everything ("don't worry, none of this matters, we're all so splendidly ironic"). This includes its plot construction, which literalises linearity (we're going to move from the back of the train to the front of the train - that's the whole movie) and yet packs things full of unexpected inversions and twists (and, OK, yes, some predictable elements as well). Tilda Swinton has an excellent turn as a kind of riff on Pauline from The League of Gentlemen. Having seen another - longer, much more hyped - film also featuring both Swinton and Chris Evans last weekend (you know, the one named after the Beckett play), I have to say that this seemed to me almost infinitely preferable. There was never a heartsinking moment when the next hour's plot was spread out before us (oh, they've got to get the band back together... right, that's six stones we need to collect...). Turns out you can base an action film on something other than an interminable string of repetitions of "who's that... oh it's that character!"