With the year half way done we're on the second part of our regular mid-winter wrap up of the best of the year so far. Last week's column (now on-line at sunlive.co.nz) looked at comedy, documentaries, sci-fi and animation; this week the rest of my favourites from the first half of 2010.

Crime
The first part of the Swedish trilogy that has become an international publishing sensation is an equally good film, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (*****). If you like a good mystery thriller this ticks all the boxes: a tough complex story, well told, an interesting relationship, and – in the film's heroine – a new and intriguing central character. This is a masterful adaptation of the book and a long involving story that will keep most guessing. It does, however, contain some strong – but not gratuitous – violence.
The French also weighed in strongly with Mesrine: Public Enemy Number 1 (****), a duo of films that charts the rise and fall of France's most famous bank robber, from being called upon to commit brutalities as a soldier in Algeria, his initiation with Gerard Depardieu's mob boss and subsequent rise through the criminal ranks, to his celebrated escapes from the police and inevitable death. Vincent Cassel, always a force to be reckoned with, turns in a career best performance as the mercurial thug.
Shutter Island (****), Martin Scorsese's lurid mystery, set in a facility for the criminally insane, boasts a brilliant cast and for all its over-the-top plotting shows the director as the master he is, with brilliant control of a complex structure that deftly balances its deluge of dream sequences, hallucinations and flashbacks.
And I don't know if it's a crime film but Bronson (****), Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's first film in English, is set almost entirely in prison as it tells a highly-stylised version of the true story of Michael Gordon Peterson, a Welsh criminal often referred to in the English press as the 'most violent prisoner in Britain”. A stunning, wild and weird biography of a life of violence.

Action
It really should be a crime movie but Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes (****) skews more towards amiable action, riding on the relaxed, knowing, and never less than charming relationship between Robert Downey Jr's roguish Holmes and Jude Law's faithful Watson. And if the plot is possibly both too complex and too simplistic, the period setting, snappy direction and buddy cop leanings more than compensate, creating a valiant effort at a Sherlock Holmes update for modern action cinema times.
John Woo returns to China after some less than stellar American films to helm that country's biggest-budget film, and a cracker it is too, revelling in all the stylistic and thematic elements that made Woo such a force in the first place. The Battle Of Red Cliff (****) takes us back many centuries into Chinese history, centring on one of the country's most famous military encounters. It loses a star because this is a stripped-down version of the original five hour epic, but it is still immensely impressive.

Others
Silent Wedding (*****) is pretty much the best film I've seen this year, a short and sweet miracle of economical filmmaking. In a clever story within a story structure it tells a bawdy, lively, funny tale of life in a rural Romanian village under the dysfunctionally brutal rule of communist Russia. With flashes of magical, almost surreal beauty and undercurrents of tragedy, it adds everything to the mix, from a ghost story to a black and white slapstick sequence. And it all fits perfectly.
Terry Gilliam's films are always hard to classify, none more so than The Imaginarium Of Dr Parnassus (****), a sprawling mess of creative imagination that is wonderfully unlike anything else you'll see. This is a film that celebrates the power of storytelling and revels in its own joyful eccentricity.