TROUBLE EVERY DAY - This Claire Denis film came along around the time of all that French extreme stuff early in the noughts. It can probably count itself a fellow traveller on the strength of a few harsh scenes, even though, given the director, you wouldn't be wrong in expecting it to be screamingly auteurish in addition. It stars Vincent Gallo as a scientist, ostensibly on honeymoon in Paris, but actually on the tail of an ex-colleague who has developed and nurtured a strange virus. The same virus is making Beatrice Dalle shag, murder and eat random passers by whenever the mood takes her; it seems that Gallo might be afflicted, too. Gallo is quite interesting to watch and walks it like he's forever brewing a storm behind his wall of nervy distraction. This sullen mood seeps into and contaminates the rest of the film, which feels like a bleak take on l'amour, Cronenberg style. If that sounds a bit frosty, the soundtrack by the always great Tindersticks reaches beyond the elliptical arthouse chill to bring out a fuzzy melancholy. Excellent and maybe weirdly overlooked still.
ZODIAC - Few Killers have played the media like The Zodiac. All those cryptic proclamations and pages full of ciphers must've seemed like something from a movie in the first place. If mysterious true crime is always magnetic, David Fincher's 'Zodiac' shows there's a price to be paid by those who get wrapped up in that stuff. It's probably my favourite of his films to date - I like the way it uses the case not as the springboard for a semi-slasher style enterprise a la 'Se7en', nor even a procedural as such, but to frame a slow trawl through the damage inflicted by obsession. The three principal characters - cartoonist Jake Gyllenhal, journo Robert Downey JR and tec Mark Ruffalo - are laser-focussed on outwitting Zodiac and getting to the bottom of the case. But the case is bottomless, and rather than uniting in the manner of the heroes of a slightly unorthodox buddy cop thriller, all three men fall into despair and ruin, collateral victims of the forever unknown. Beyond all the talk (it's very dialogue-heavy), Fincher's stylistics conjure an air of descent and slowly simmering dread as the film arcs through the shifting seasons.
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