WINTER'S BONE (*****)

Dir: Debra Granik. Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Kevin Breznahan

Occasionally films show you a glimpse of another world. Winter's Bone, a slow-burning thriller, does that with its bleak Ozark Mountain setting, where the few unfriendly hillbilly residents have moved from moonshine stills to P labs and outsiders are unknown and unwelcome.
In this strange world we meet Jennifer Lawrence's tough 17 year old Ree: her mother is ‘sick' (some form of dementia), she has to look after two kids, and her father, we discover, is on the run from the police and has put up their meagre house as bond. If she can't find him before the hearing she loses everything.
What follows is very low key. She searches for her father, which means actually talking to an increasingly dangerous assortment of mountain dwellers. These are not people one would want to meet, dark alley or elsewhere.
Lawrence gives a fantastic naturalistic performance (quite justifiably awarded an Oscar nomination), there are rich cameos from the likes of Sheryl Lee, and the script is a marvel of laconic understatement filled with a raft of quotable lines. There's also a dynamite hill-country soundtrack and the whole thing looks fantastic without ever becoming too pretty. A tough little gem of a film.

As a snob who detests American remakes of excellent foreign films, I was less than enthused to be watching Let Me In (****), director Matt (Cloverfield) Reeves' take on Let The Right One In, possibly my favourite film (Swedish) of the past couple of years. But, while it changes the focus of the originally understated vampire masterpiece away from it's themes of teenage bullying and isolation and places the emphasis squarely on young vampire girl Abby (Kick-Ass's Cloe Grace Moretz), the film still packs a punch. The occasional violence is considerably more explicit and there's even a car crash, which is very impressively filmed if thematically redundant. But, all in all, very good.
Watching The Resident (**) is really an exercise in wondering why they bothered. And why Hillary Swank, who usually makes sensible movie picks, would want to be engaged in such unadventurous fare. She is a young doctor who moves into a new apartment, where the only residents appear to be overly solicitous landlord Jeffrey Dean Morgan and his slightly creepy old uncle Christopher Lee. And, unsurprisingly, one of them turns out to be a complete psycho who – at boringly interminable length – menaces her. Think Sliver, without Sharon Stone or the hi-tech devices; the only surprise is the lack of surprises.
Telstar (***) is the first film from actor turned director Nick (Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) Moran, based on his own stage play. It is a biopic about groundbreaking 60s English record producer Joe Meek, who recorded from a suburban house and was famous for his unusual effects (most famously on the titular instrumental) as well as his unstable mental state and lifestyle. This is a fun once-over-lightly, which will engage fans of the era with its spot-on cameos for Gene Vincent and others. Con O'Neill delivers a dynamite central turn and Kevin Spacey has fun in support.
Meanwhile, fans of the arty and obscure will be chuffed to hear that a collection of several hard-to-find early films of eccentric English director Peter Greenaway has just been released. There are seven films in all (ignoring The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, which has been widely available).
My picks are: the brilliant period mystery The Draughtsman's Contract (*****); a take on Shakespeare's The Tempest, Prospero's Books (****), featuring a career-best from Sir John Gielgud; Eastern erotica in the shape of The Pillow Book (****), based on the writings of Sei Shonagon and exposing a lot of naked Ewen McGregor; and my favourite, Drowning By Numbers (*****), which includes three women called Cissie Culpitts (all of whom kill their husbands), extravagant multi-player games involving sheep, and the numbers one to a hundred playfully hidden on the screen for alert viewers.