If she’d been a writer, you’d have said my gran had problems clearly establishing flashbacks and dream sequences from the main narrative she was relating. That’s something where there’s a clear distinction in, say, Billy Liar. Although young Billy is himself prone to fantasy, we the audience have no problem understanding when he’s fantasising and when life is more prosaic. Get this stuff muddled and the audience gets muddled too.

Somewhere along the line, Lost lost me. After a bravura opening, and some strong episodes in the first series, the piling on of weirdness on weirdness got too much. Having an air of mystery is one thing – the show’s writers being unable to explain the inexplicable is quite another. As timeslips and monsters and conspiracies accreted, my attention wavered. Lose the internal logic of a show to that extent, and it’s hard to care about the outcome. Same applies to hotly touted comic series Green Wake – when you’ve got not only an ambiguous setting but mysterious characters within it, it’s hard to form an emotional relationship with the story. When anything can happen at any moment, does anything matter?

I’ve mentioned my soft spot for amiable stoners Harold and Kumar before, liking these gently subversive and humane guys and enjoying the capers they get caught up in. They’re at it again with a new festive themed story, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, in the course of which they run afoul of a vicious Russian mob boss, turn into Claymation through the effect of hallucinogens, perform in a musical being staged at a cathedral, and shoot Santa in the face. Oh, and there’s a baby that develops a taste for Class A substances, a walk-on appearance by Jesus Christ, and a robot that makes waffles.

For all that craziness, there’s a solid core to the story, which however bizarre the circumstances never strays from two men reigniting their friendship under the threat of dire consequences if a Christmas tree isn’t found to substitute for one that the duo accidentally set in flames early on. That resolute focus on emotions and character held my attention in this, the third outing for the hapless duo. It helps that there’s some great humour and real visual inventiveness – but to get over my general distaste for drug stories the team putting Harold and Kumar together are clearly doing something right.

The ability to engage an audience with the plight of characters they care about is fundamental to your ability to tell a good story. Get that right, and anything else is possible. I’ve never experienced vast wealth, but found it easy to empathise with Howard Hughes in Scorsese’s The Aviator (contrast with the poor little rich girl in Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere). Never been pursued by supernatural forces, but have been at the edge of my seat in stories as varied as Blair Witch Project and The Omen. As humans, we’re equipped with the ability to empathise with one another. And can even identify with animal (Bambi, Lassie) and otherwise non-human protagonists (Wall-E, RoboCop) with ease. So please, when you’re writing a story, make it easy for us to do that. Get it right, and everything else will be fine.

Given that such books have established a firm footing in the industry (and my collection), it’s no surprise that film is joining in. First up, you could argue, was The Social Network, which masterfully related the story behind Facebook. And now we have Moneyball, which has to be the first baseball film that’s actually about statistics. Although, to be fair, it’s more concerned with what it takes to create change in a culture that’s been happy with the way things are for quite a while, and sees no reason to shake things up.

The trick with films of this nature is to root them in personal stories, so that audiences can relate to what’s happening – which can be quite abstract. Here, we have a winning double act. Peter is overweight, a Yale economics graduate who doesn’t look like he belongs in the world of baseball, where he’s found his first job. He’s got something though – an ability to understand player performance that’s all about cold hard statistics, and hence not subject to the vagaries of favoritism. Only, as a fat geek he’s in no position to put his ideas to the test. For that he needs a champion, who comes in the form of Brad Pitt as Billy Beane. A charismatic former baseball player, Billy has the swagger and confidence needed to put Peter’s concepts into practice, and create a worldbeating streak of 20 consecutive wins for the cash-strapped Oakland team he manages.

Naturally, he has to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds, as exemplified by a shaven-headed Philip Seymour Hoffman, who once again demonstrates his genius for creating a character who would be easy to hate, and inhabits them with a fundamental humanity that makes such ready dismissal diffiicult. There’s an equivalent power to the scenes between Billy and his 12 year old daughter, which in other hands could have been saccharine, but are saved from movie of the week status by excellent writing (from a team including Aaron Sorkin, who scripted The Social Network) and performances.

You could look at the story as confirmation that the stats-led approach is a failure, since Billy’s ultimate victory rests as much as his ability to connect with the team as him following Peter’s plans. And wouldn’t you know it, Peter loosens up too, in a fashion that could be mapped if you insist on being pedantic about it. Well, you can go to some other website for that thrill, and not just because this is a text-friendly operation.

It’ll be interesting to see if the relative success of Moneyball will inspire filmmakers to bring other conceptually-led material to the screen, and take greater risks than this film has. Sure, it’s a solid piece of entertainment, but I can’t help feel that a more adventurous take on the source material could have led to…and then I recall the recent Soderbergh virus movie Contagion, which just didn’t resonate with me.

At a time when old paradigms are failing us, cinema could play an interesting role in communicating some new ones. And not just in documentary form. Moneyball is a good film that uses old-fashioned methods to get us to like it. Is that enough? Well, according to who? Maybe what we need here is something akin to Slacker, a smart low budget film that introduced many to the concept of Generation X, and heralded the career of Richard Linklater in the process.

And I couldn’t be happier about being wrong. Sure, the film does indeed revolve around a man with apocalyptic visions, stunningly realised ones I may add: this is worth catching at the cinema purely for the overpowering skyscapes, where mournful clouds threaten to unleash hell on earth for…what exactly? Well, things being what they are, do we need anything specific? Or is the sense that – for the way we’ve treated the planet, each other, and allowed ourselves to use economics as a way of doing so as if it has nothing to do with us – a hard rain’s gonna fall, and that maybe what’s on the horizon is an inevitable consequence..?

Only, while all of that might be there in the background, it’s what’s in the foreground that surprises. Writer/director Jeff Nicholls makes the decision to have his protagonist be a working class guy – brilliantly portrayed by Michael Shannon – who is a decent man, a husband and father who in providing the best life he can for his family says all the things he can’t express verbally. He and his wife and mute daughter get by in a loving supportive fashion, until Curtis (the dad) starts to experience deeply troubling dreams that leave an impact on him into the day.

Part of the film’s unexpected brilliance is the decision to root Curtis’s visions in the context of his mother’s paranoid schizophrenia. In his solid dependable way, Curtis picks up a book on mental illness from the library and concludes that he is beginning to have some of his mother’s symptoms. And it looks like the film is going to be one in which this decent, honorable, and inarticulate man struggles with his inchoate fears of becoming what he saw happen to his mother.

Certainly, as Curtis becomes obsessed with the abandoned storm shelter in his garden, wanting to renovate it to protect his family, it seems that he may well be experiencing some kind of mental health issue, the task and its object being a metaphor for whatever demons he’s dealing with. And to complete the renovation, he borrows equipment from work – resulting in him losing his job just at the time when his medical insurance could secure an operation to restore his daughter’s hearing.

None of this goes down well with his wife and the local community. Is Curtis collapsing, and the shelter a way of protecting himself from purely internal issues? It’s certainly looking that way, and the film sticks with that logic. A more Hollywood version of the story would have a flashier take, but Nicholls sticks to his guns, though there is a cost: certainly the teenagers in the cinema were getting weary by this point, wanting more of the apparent genre content of the trailer and less of this drama stuff.

Looked at another way, Curtis is a Noah figure, and when he and the family are protected by the shelter there’s some validation for that viewpoint. Or maybe Curtis was just lucky? The scene with them down in the shelter, and Curtis unwilling to open up the doors after the storm has subsided, is masterfully resolved. And then? Well, let’s just say that what seems to be the climactic scene is not. On the advice of a psychiastrist, the family take a seaside holiday to rest and recuperate, and the real scale and theme of this brilliantly realised and understated story becomes apparent.

You’ll come across subtext all over the place. Except in this article so far. That’s because I’m experimenting with the writing style of Akiva Goldsman as demonstrated in the Joel Schumacher film A Time To Kill. Possibly because it’s based on a John Grisham book and his stories don’t have subtext. It’s very interesting watching a story where everyone says exactly what they mean. This runs counter to a whole bunch of advice about writing dialogue that you can find in books on screenwriting. But what do those guys know, huh? If they were any good, then they’d be doing what Joel Schumacher does and making films.

When you watch A Time To Kill you realise some of what it is to be autistic. I don’t mean that in a mean way. Just that autistic people are supposed to find it difficult to understand subtext. Well, this is a film they could enjoy because everything means exactly what it says. It would be great if everyday life was like that, wouldn’t it? That way, you could tell your boss “The thing is, I think you are a meanie. Everyone says so. Everyone except Stacey, who you slept with at that sales conference and got promoted when she came back.” As it is, you probably say something different. Maybe “You want me to do the spreadsheet? What is it, are Stacey’s nails still drying?” Which is clever, because it suggests without stating it directly that Stacey does not do much work, owing to her relationship with the boss, and spends more time getting her nails done than anything else, those nails maybe being one of the things that attracted the boss to her.

It would be great if there was no subtext. People would get what we meant, and we would understand them. A wife would not be able to tell a husband that the reason she is upset is he did not pick up that she is disappointed with him about leaving it to late to book the Spanish villa, even though she told him it was OK, which disappointment has caused her to be furious with herself, that he has failed to notice, which is why she looks down at him and does not do that thing he likes any more. That kind of subtext takes a Nobel standard psychic gymnast to work out.

Having a courtroom drama without subtext is especially impressive. Usually there’s lot of stuff that’s hard to follow if you get a phone call during the movie. Like if someone hums a tune they know the other person hates to make them mad in front of the judge. That would definitely be subtext.

In conclusion, I can say that Akiva Goldsman is a visionary for the way he creates scripts that do without an outmoded tool. And that life would be a bunch easier if we could live in a John Grisham novel, as long as we weren’t bad guys.

The problem starts with Robert de Niro, who plays a character called Louis Ciphre. Now, de Niro’s performance is pretty fine. The issue is his name. Louis Ciphre = Lucifer. Yes, Satan himself takes on the form of a bearded and boiled egg eating Bobby de Niro. Even our hero says it’s a cheesy name, and it takes some cojones to call out the Lord of Darkness on stuff like that. It demeans the Fallen Angel even to hint that he may have a weakness for dodgy puns that you can imagine heavy metal bassists signing in to hotels as on 30th anniversary tours.

It doesn’t help that there isn’t a shadow director Alan Parker (also responsible for the script) doesn’t like, and that he can’t get enough of them in combination with spiral staircases, rotary fans, and any other damned circle he can put in the shot, all the better to signify lurking menace. Well, that’s the intent. In practice, it means everything looks like an overly styled music video, complete with cats slinking in alleys and moody sax. Much as it pains me to say it, as someone who once loved Pink Floyd’s The Wall, you can see why Parker got the job directing the film of the album with his thing for clodhopping symbolism.

What’s interesting is that there could be a much better film made with the same concept, if only it was handled with a lighter touch. Rather than have yer actual Satan being a puppetmaster for the evil that unfolds, wouldn’t it be much more powerful to hint at that possibility without confirming it? As it is, there are times when the direct occult aspects of the story seem heavyhanded, straight out of a fifties EC horror comic. And they’d have probably worked better there, where a short pulp tale with suitably moody artwork might still be regarded as a classic. Spending a fortune telling that story with cameras and actors only makes its inherent ludicrousness clear.

Much of the time – in storytelling generally as well as film in particular – ambiguity is your friend. It’s arguably more powerful to show someone to be devilish than to give them the horns and tails of Beelzebub and remove any doubt. And certainly chimes with contemporary understandings of evil in the world. From that point of view, Elephant and We Need To Talk About Kevin - both responses to the Columbine shooting – are far more haunting than Angel Heart could ever be.

What all this comes down to is that it’s generally better to hint at things than state them outright. Imagine the dilemma of a protagonist believing that Satan is after them, but knowing it sounds ludicrous and that it will get them sectioned if they admit it outright. How much more powerful a situation to play with than having an actor – even one as notable as Bobby D – with a forked beard and some dodgy effects on his eyes to make it unmistakeable that this is the Lord of the Flies leering at you.

Shadows are interesting because of what might be hiding in them. The French film Them made that abundantly clear, relating a night when a couple are terrorised by what turns out to be children – the tension and ultimate revelation made it one of the scariest films I’ve seen in recent years. Dragging things into the light, stating starkly that this is how things are, is a choice to be made with full thought given to the implications. Angel Heart demonstrates what happens when that thinking process isn’t engaged with.

I’ve not caught any of those films – all of which seemed to feature Terry Thomas to represent all that’s best, or at least funniest, about a certain type of British male – for a long time now. Sprawling family-friendly comedies are as rare these days as men of the Terry Thomas breed. Besides, this is a different world we live in. Americans have ventured out into it, and been kidnapped and worse. Not only that, but a good few of the foreigners are disrespectful of the Stars and Stripes. That’s the sort of thinking that leads to Hostel’s popularity, tapping into American fears that godfearing folk are sure to be tortured if they leave their home soil.

The same impetus drives the revenge thriller Taken, in which Liam Neeson’s daughter is kidnapped and ends up in the only hands more feared than those of atheists – Muslims. Sure enough, just like in Victorian penny dreadfuls the dastardly foreigners are out to have their wicked way with the teenage girl. So much for the Peace Corp. It doesn’t even help if daddy is the President, as is the case in the otherwise exemplary David Mamet thriller Spartan – those Arabs just can’t get enough of white flesh.

The lotsa stars format seems to have been embraced by the heist movie more recently, since it provides the chance for a gang to gather and each member to demonstrate their idiosyncrasies. Reservoir Dogs and Usual Suspects are two of the more grown up versions, but then the Ocean’s sequence appeared, influenced by the Rat Pack films – another sixties phenomena, in which Frank Sinatra and his buddies Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr would badda-bing baby, and there was always a knowing wink to defuse the badder-badder aspects.

All of which brings us to Tower Heist, which in its own half-assed way takes these various strands and puts them together. It’s got the ensemble cast, led by Ben Stiller, and featuring Eddie Murphy, Casey Affleck, Alan Alda and others. And it’s got that light-hearted tone, mixed with perhaps too many plot elements for it to be the smooth ride it aspires to be. The fact that three names were credited with story, only one of whom is credited with co-writing the script suggests that the business of writing the thing was not straightforward either.

What’s interesting is that, just as the sixties films mentioned had something of the Kennedy era about them, so too does Tower Heist bear the imprint of right here, right now. The villain of the piece is a corrupt financier, and his crimes are made personal by him having defrauded the staff of the luxury hotel where he lives of their pensions. Which justifies them banding together to right the wrongs they’ve been done, while at the same time putting a damper on the proceedings because of the credibility of his crime.

It’s good-natured hokum but it rarely sparks, despite some decent performances. The film is more interesting because of its relationship with the zeitgeist than anything else. And there’s more to come, with a screen version of the classic Michael Lewis book Liar’s Poker on the way, a…I was going to say ‘ruthless dissection’ of working life at Salomon Brothers, but that phrase pales next to the conduct of Salomon Brothers itself. Too, there’s a movie account of how come things have got as messy as they are, re: global economy. All solid stuff to be developing stories about, but right now perhaps not the time to be using it as the basis of lightweight comedies. Audiences feel the reality too much to laugh.

In this case, the masterpiece is We Need To Talk About Kevin, a major step up even by the high standards that director Lynne Ramsay has shown in Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar. It’s an adaptation of a book that I’ve not read, and is such a thoroughly cinematic experience that I find it hard to imagine what the prose version is like. Surely it can’t have the fluidity that the film has, its apparently effortless ability to conjure feelings and states of mind and questions about motherhood…but that’s being unfair, since Ramsay’s ability to make the screen her canvas is pretty much unsurpassed.

The most obvious point of difference is that this is a film with virtually no dialogue. And what speech there is, is quite often talking used in a way to avoid communication, where the manner of address makes it clear that the speaker has an intent at odds with the meaning of their words. Sure, you can do that on a page. But it’s a whole different thing when it’s happening in real time with gifted actors – and with Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly as Kevin’s parents, you’ve got two fine performers.

At the heart of it all is Kevin himself, who even as a baby seems to be engaged in a battle of wills with his mother. He doesn’t just cry in his pram, he shrieks with a voice that’s a barbed weapon, and in one memorable scene his mother pauses by someone operating a pneumatic drill to get respite from the piercing pain her child produces. Is this a difficulty in bonding with her first child, or is Kevin someone any mother would have problems forming a relationship with?

That question is one that would go through his mother’s mind however Kevin grew up. But there’s a more pressing reason that the mother-son bond is questioned: he grows up to slaughter his father and sister, and run amok in the high school where he’s a student. Only, put in the sequence the last few paragraphs have it, there seems to be a linear sequence to all this. The power of the film is that it gets all this and more across through resolutely non-linear means, while being easily comprehensible at all times.

Opening with hordes of young people at the Tomatina festival, where the revellers are knee-deep in tomato pulp in Spain, the viewer soon realises that a lot of the film is about seeing red. It’s there on the walls of Swinton’s house, splashed there by people who know her as the mother of a high school killer. It oozes from the ketchup sandwiches that Kevin relishes. And he scrawls it on the maps that line his mother’s room.

Sound is a key aspect in the film’s construction. Environmental noises permeate, and link from one sequence to another, creating a rhythm and with it a kind of logic that leads the viewer’s attention from Tilda as a new mother bewildered by her truculent baby, an older Kevin interacting with his young sister, being read Robin Hood by his mother when he’s ill and they’re experiencing their only moment of communion. Each is a jigsaw piece, but rather than be frustrated by an intellectual puzzle the experience is of emotional immersion, being transported by the flow of it all as the story slowly forms around the mystery of this child and the terrible crimes he commits.

Filmmaking of this calibre is rare, and this is an extraordinary film that rewards repeated viewings. Before this project, Lynne Ramsay devoted a lot of time to a version of The Lovely Bones that, on the evidence of what she’s done here, would have surpassed the trite Peter Jackson version which he was able to get made because of the clout that Lord of the Rings money gives him. Hopefully, Lynne Ramsay will be in a position to assert herself about future films without such abuse of power.

That’s one use of metaphor. Others pop up all over the place. Zombies as stand-ins for consumers. Aliens as migrants. You get the idea. But it can be taken further, which is what writer-director-producer Andrew Niccol has done with In Time, that like his previous sf outing Gattaca takes a somewhat cerebral approach to a story built around a simple premise – in this case, that time serves the same function as money in the world of the film.

Essentially, to get past the age of 25, you have to earn extra time. You get it for work you do, and pay it out for things you want or need. Sound familiar? Our hero comes across a jaundiced centenarian – still looking youthful – who gives him all his remaining years before choosing intentional death rather than continue a life he considers pointless. That’s the start of things, but just as Spider-Man needs the death of his uncle to kickstart him into heroism, our protagonist here suffers the death of his mother, who dies because the bus has increased the cost of a ticket to 2 hours and she has less than that before she plans to hook up with her son to get more time.

The steely look of the film encourages a detached response, as does the emphasis on wordplay. For the first half hour in particular, phrases predicated on time are prevalent, hooking you into the mindset not just of the characters but helping you realise just how much our own lives are bound up with time. Consider the implications of ‘taking forever’, ’seconds to spare’, ‘time to give’.

If that somewhat heady approach is one that sits well with you, fine. It won’t work for everyone. And effective though the metaphor of money as time is, it’s not entered into conviction by all the actors. The leads are fine, but there’s a dodgy bunch led by a bad guy who’s supposed to be intimidating, whose performance says otherwise. To what extent that’s because of the degree of abstraction involved in the core concept, rather than poor casting, I’m unsure.

That said, would you expect visceral performances in an essentially Kafka-esque story? Arguably it’s unfair to expect the same story to deliver intellectually satisfying notions and get people excited by fight scenes. Only, audiences have been spoiled by the likes of Adjustment Bureau, which made an emotionally engaging thriller from a ridiculous premise, and the spiritually-centred Source Code.

The real issue here is whether you like the films of Andrew Niccol. There absolutely should be room in the market for filmmakers like him, who have an imagination that doesn’t begin and end with product placement deals and Happy Meal tie-ins. And it’s great that he’s doing somewhat challenging material, that in its own polite sophisticated way is sending out the same message as the Occupy Wall Street protesters and their supporters.

Tintin can wait. It’s got Spielberg behind it, and there’s no danger of it disappearing from our screens any time soon. If you want to see a film that will stretch your thinking and leave you wondering, rather than full of gee-whizz, then In Time is absolutely worth investing some of your time in.

It has to be said I wasn’t expecting much from Real Steel. Just some metal-fisted hokum to act as light relief after Clooney was done with parading ethical issues. The surprise was how good the film looks. Seriously. Much of the photography is gorgeous, and between that and the art direction, which gives the futuristic film a touch of an old carnie feel, there’s a bit of a Ray Bradbury tinge to the proceedings. And hey, why not? I can imagine Bradbury writing a story about a father and son bonding through their love of a beaten-up old boxing robot. Sure, the story is entirely predictable, but it’s very well executed by director Shawn Levy, and I’d absolutely recommend it to anyone looking for some good family viewing.

What connects it with The Ides of March is theme. Real Steel sees a son connecting with his father as the principle narrative, having been let down by him in his life to date. And they do so through a shared passion for robots. Dad was a boxer who turned to controlling robot boxers when the real sport fell out of favour, and he was no more successful there than he had been in the ring himself. You won’t be surprised to hear – first – that they surprise the robot boxing fraternity by working with an antique, and – second – winning the day by getting their ‘bot to shadow the father’s own boxing moves.

The bit that becomes interesting in light of Clooney’s robot-free yarn is that though the kid and dad undoubtedly win the fight against the badass robot, the result technically goes the other way thanks to the politics of the sport. Meaning, that father and dad get their reconciliation (the point of the whole thing), but are cheated of victory in the strict sense.

So, what happens is essentially dad and son win because of their love, which outweighs the fact that the world is corrupt. And there’s a similar dynamic going on in The Ides of March, with the protagonist a man of undoubted integrity at the start of the story, who is working to progress Democratic governor Clooney’s presidential chances. Only, the thing here is that our man does side with the forces of corruption and compromise, assisting his own and Clooney’s professional prospects, but at who knows what personal cost.

Interesting stuff. And what connects the films is the theme of loss of innocence. In Real Steel, it’s there but doesn’t really affect father and son. It’s an indication of the world the kid is growing up in, that has already defeated his father in so many ways, and driven him to cynicism and complicity. The Ides of March features an adult protagonist who does sell out, and knows that’s exactly what he’s done regardless of how he chooses to describe what he’s done to others.

In a nutshell, that’s the difference between adult and child protagonists. It would be a very harsh writer who chose to script a story about a child knowingly succumbing to the forces of darkness in the world. But that’s exactly the sort of material that makes for rich material for adult audiences where they’re seeing people who are likewise grown up, since we will all have some stab of recognition for the moment that a choice is made that introduces grey into a world that we may have kept black and white for years.

Have you seen Wanted? Now, if the writer is alluding to it being fantastical nonsense of a high order, and assumes that the reason for such nonsense is inspiration, rather than desparation, an out of control art department, and a director doing his damnedest to build on a slender and unconvincing premise as outlined in a flaky Mark Millar comic…then that sentence makes sense. Otherwise — and I cannot stress how fervent I am about this — the claim is utterly redundant. And it becomes more so when you watch Salt.

In some respects, Salt is an old school epsionage thriller, what with it being rooted in Cold War tensions. And it may have been nothing more than that were it not for two things. One being skilful plotting on the part of writer Kurt Wimmer — the script is taut, presents its surprises skilfully, and allies action to the development of plot and character. The other is Angela Jolie.

Let me explain. The script was originally written with a male protagonist in mind. And you can easily see it working with any number of male leads flexing their pecs and narrowing their eyes as the story unfolds. Having Jolie play the lead is a stroke of some kind of low grade genius. And I’m presuming the idea was hers, since she is rare in the industry in not having the usual phalanx of nodding heads to kowtow to her every whim.

Jolie is a sharp cookie with a singular talent and intelligence, and Salt is one of her more interesting choices. Simply, it enables her to play a female action hero unencumbered by the bullshit that would inevitably have accompanied that choice were a script to be written with that in mind. Sure, she has a relationship complication, but it’s dealt with when her husband is killed in front of her, adding further fuel to her desire for revenge. And she certainly doesn’t have any kids for cutesy moments, or have cloying moments where she admires a friend’s choice to give birth.

In the absence of all that, Jolie is free to deliver a performance that’s based as most male leads are on someone going out to do what they need to do. Which in this case means an awful lot of running and hitting and coming up with smart ways of dodging the people after her using improvised weaponry and quick thinking. Not only that, but there are points when it seems feasible that she really is running with the bad guys — Angelina Jolie, a Soviet sleeper agent? What has the world come to?

Rest assured Jolie is no such thing, and the end result is a cool thriller with old school dynamics directed with muscular efficiency by Philip Noyce, and a refreshing new twist brought to it all by the presence of its lead. At a time when the lesson most people have learned from the success of the Bourne movies is to have thrillers with amnesiac protagonists, be thankful there’s one where another conclusion has been drawn, in making an unexpected choice about the gender of its hero. Amazing, isn’t it, that such an issue should be noteworthy in 2011. But that really is the case. Roll on Salt 2…