Harry Brown (2009)

Harry Brown (Michael Caine), an ex-marine and Northern Island pensioner, lives in a much maligned apartment block in South London that is overrun by violent youths. His wife is dying in the hospital and his best mate, Leonard (David Bradley) - with whom he plays chess with in the local pub, is intensely frightened by the goings on in their neighbourhood, and feels forced to carry around an old bayonet for protection. Harry visits his wife everyday, but always avoids a quicker route to the hospital via an underpass, as it is a favourite hang out of the aggressive troublemakers. This proves costly as one night he receives a phone call alerting him to his wife’s worsening health. Avoiding the shortcut again, he arrives too late to find she has died. On top of this, a few days later, Leonard is accosted after a gang of youths vandalise his home and is murdered by his own weapon. This proves too much for Harry and his disheartening faith in a weak police effort to do something leads him to take methods into his own hands.

The Black Keys - Brothers (2010)

 

As a dedicated fan since the release of their second album, Thickfreakness, it’s comforting witnessing a band evolve the way The Black Keys have. Their willing journey to experiment has yielded possibly their best achievement so far with Brothers. That journey, that has seen them move away from the stripped down basement fuzz production of a lone drum/guitar ensemble of the earlier records, to performing and producing a unique hip-hop record (Blakroc) to releasing the first thing that fully embraces every instrument and arrangement at their disposal. If producer Danger Mouse showed them the potential with a few keyboards on the excellent Attack and Release, Brothers proves that not only did the Akron duo learn from that, but utterly embraced it.

Iron Man 2 (2010)

IM2 proves to be a bit of a hard film to rate. For all its fairly obvious flaws, it’s still a better than average blockbuster, but without question, no match for its predecessor. Initially, I was very concerned. It wasn’t instantly engaging like the first film, and there seemed to be a lot of lazy script moments early on. It certainly picks up and gets better as it goes along, but the first half an hour was pretty weak indeed. The first proper action sequence, set in Monaco, was a joke compared to anything in Ironman, and just plain silly for the most part. Main baddie, Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), is introduced straight away, but his motives are not really explained well and feel wafer thin. Eventually the script kicks into what the movie is really about though; the development of S.H.I.E.L.D and The Avengers project.

Kick-Ass (2010)

Bored from masturbation and the typical high school life of a nerd, Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) one day decides to let his imagination take over. Sick of wondering the why of being an actual superhero, he decides to re-invent himself as one, calling himself Kick-Ass. As he costumes up and ineptly attempts to thwart minor crimes, he comes across Batman wannabe, Big Daddy (Nicholas Cage) and his 11 year old daughter, Mindy aka Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz). Though their's and Dave’s intentions are similar, Hit-Girl and Big Daddy are the real deal, killing and (literally) taking apart New York crime. Particularly, a violent drug syndicate led by Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong).

The Book of Eli (2010)

Eli (Denzel Washington), an expert hand-to-hand combatant nomad, is on a quest possessing the only copy of the bible believed to be left in the world, trudging over country suffering from an apocalyptic war 30 years previous and a "flash” caused by the sun that has burned virtually all of the landscape. Things go bad for our hero when he wanders into a town run by Carnegie (Gary Oldman) – a man persistently looking for a copy of the bible in order to use its words to manufacture a new population complete with blind faith.

The Road (2009)

With little to no explanation, the world has burned, now dying a slow death. From what we can gather, for approximately ten years until we join the film in present day. The few humans left trudge over nature's remains in search of food and mere survival. Cannibalism has become, for some, the only option. We follow nameless Man and Boy exclusively on their journey - constantly living in fear. This a world where the moral dilemmas of our protagonists are stripped down to being either "the good guys" or "the bad guys". The Road encompasses an other worldly atmosphere. A disturbing re-creation of a post apocalyptic world. Given the elements pulled together by director, cinematographer and production designer, I was blown away by the film's look. A gorgeous, moving artwork on a decaying future world.

Massive Attack - Heligoland (2010)

Heligoland is a good example of what Massive Attack driving force, Robert Del Naja, has claimed his ambition for the group was to inevitably become. Less a 'band', than a collective of musicians - varying with each release. The amount of different lead vocalists on this release (more than ever before) exemplifies a lot of that ideal. For example, Del Naja himself doesn’t even really speak a whole song until more than halfway through, plus, much like the last album, cover your ears for second and you’ll probably miss Daddy G’s minor involvement vocals wise - appearing only briefly on the third track, ‘Splitting the Atom’.