I decided to check out the new Transformers movie. Sure, I knew it would be trash. But Michael Bay trash has a certain something. Not least shapechanging robots who behave like adolescent boys. And who doesn’t enjoy a bit of giant robot action from time to time? Hey, I grew up on 2000AD, Dr Who, and Asimov: of course I’m going to get there sooner or later.

Only, it wasn’t quite that simple. I left the house, headed down the street. Where I live, there are terraced houses, and some of them have arched passageways to the rear, with gates at the front. I passed one, and a man looked out at me. He gestured to a cloth on a car parked outside the house, and said “Can you pass me the tissue?” in an East European accent. I passed him the tissue. This was all a bit odd. Why couldn’t he get it himself? The gate was closed. Was it also locked? He was smiling. Was he a prisoner, or reassuring me that everything was fine?

I texted a couple of friends about the incident on the way into town, and settled down to watch the film. Seems Americans landed on the moon in 1969 to check out evidence of an alien presence. Doubtless there are some on the internet who claim this as a fact, and that the film is a cover-up designed to make the idea ridiculous. Anyway.

Stung by accusations that the last Transformers film was a piece of meretricious racist shit, Bay has furrowed his brow and decided that this new opus needs weighty themes, and a substantial script. In practical terms, this translates as having the kid from the previous films being older now, and looking for his first proper job. See, real world resonance, social commentary — Bay is exploring new territory here, which maybe explains why it’s so hamfisted.

Oh, and it’s all in by-the-numbers film vocab. Meaning that the hero’s parents don’t arrive in a week like they’re supposed to, they turn up on the doorstep while he’s still jobless, maximising his humiliation. There is probably a name for this particular kind of character reveal happening at this moment, but frankly I don’t care. Besides, there was a thought nagging at me –

But hey, not for long. Turns out the bad guys have among their number a sneaky snaky piece of work who can move through buildings like a sea serpent would. If sea serpents existed. And travelled through masonry rather than water. That was a mondo cool display of software magic, the equivalent of a showcase guitar solo in the arena cinema that Bay traffics in.

Only, something wasn’t working. For all the heady excitement of shapechanging robots, lunar missions, Chernobyl and the hero’s leggy girlfriend, my mind was on other matters. The Polish man asking me to pass him some tissues. Really, what was that all about?

It’s a good sign that a film is failing to capture your attention when you spend more time mulling over an odd incident from earlier in the day than being engrossed in what’s happening on screen. Only, that’s exactly what I was doing. Realising the parallel between my curious encounter and those folk tales where a farmer meets a trapped goblin. In those stories, the goblin rewards the farmer by being of service to him and making his wishes come true.

Maybe I’m due to reap some karmic reward by being a benefactor the the trapped Pole. Maybe not. I do know that the incident fascinated me more than anything happening in that cinema. So I left. Early. And ran into a friend who as far as I know was supposed to be miles away on a silent Buddhist retreat. Only there he was, before me. I wasn’t fooled for an instant. Obviously this was his tulpa, a psychic thoughtform that looks exactly like him, of which there’s a long tradition among Buddhist adepts. All of which goes to show you’ve got to be pretty nimble to make your stories more enticing to audiences than what’s already going on in their heads…

Well, that was a surprise. More than one, as it happens. Bridesmaids turns out not only to be a fabulous celebration of female friendship delivered with zest and skill by some fabulous women performers with a gift for improvisation, but a brilliant demonstration that — in the right hands — normal rules about screenwriting don’t always apply.

At a time when alpha male comedians in Hollywood are delivering up increasingly tired versions of what they’ve done before, it’s a joy to report that Judd Apatow has used his powers for good and brought this project to the screen. If this goes right it could be another Reservoir Dogs moment. By which I allude to that earlier point in American cinema where a film came out of nowhere and had the chance to redefine how things are done.

The opportunity was there with Tarantino’s first movie to let more newcomers in with interesting low-budget films that didn’t kowtow to received wisdom. OK, in practice what happened was that Reservoir Dogs begat a whole bunch of potty-mouthed gangster films. But still, the moment was there. It could have gone either way.

Let’s hope that in the wake of the success of Bridesmaids producers and studios will give female talent more leeway than women typically receive in Hollywood. Hey, it could happen — let’s be positive here. While I’m not saying that every film with significant female input will be a winner, I’m also confident in asserting that I don’t know a woman who’d have put her name to Green Lantern, Predators, or Transformers 2.

In some respects Bridesmaids is as much a tribute to the power of ensemble acting as it is anything to do with gender. The women involved in this film play off one another beautifully, and have a real skill for playing the scene rather than the role. That lends itself to some delicious humour, all the sweeter because often there’s not a man for the women to focus on. This is about what happens when the girls are doing their own thing, and not — as some men would like to believe — craving male attention. Big time kudos to writers Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumulo.

In the process, some of the funniest scenes I’ve witnessed for a long time are brought to life, as lifelong friend battles newfound best pal for the attentions of the woman who’s about to get married. That’s the core of it all, and around it layers of comedy emerge as the other characters reveal their foibles. It’s very very funny, and I hope to be seeing more of these performers again. Sure, a sequel could be one route, but I’m hoping for more imaginative ways forward, not least break-out vehicles to highlight some of the talent on show here.

Something about the genial nature of the story, and the quality of the performances, gives each scene breathing space that it may not otherwise have had. The characters are so enjoyable to spend time with, you can’t help wanting to see more of them. It’s an interesting dynamic, perhaps with a gender aspect. Rather than getting on with each beat and moving on to the next with machine efficiency, this is all about relishing the moment, and finding a couple of seconds more enjoyment to be had with the potential of the material. The difference between the way the women play it here and how men often do is that male actors often seem to be showing off more, whereas these women are just keen to share something they’ve seen and find funny.

I’ll stop there as I know I’m on dodgy ground. Women have egos just as much as men do — they reveal them in different ways, is the thing. And that’s what makes Bridesmaids such a joyful film, which I’m planning on seeing again as soon as I can, once more in female company.

One of the reasons that some genres have trouble getting mainstream acceptance is because of the unusual nature of aspects of the stories they tell. If you’re hardwired to a particular version of reality, then science fiction is always going to be a stretch for you. Sometimes, the issue isn’t so much with characteristics of the genre as defiantly different approaches to the use of a medium. I know one person, for instance, who will have nothing to do with stories that are drawn, whether Asterix, Batman, or Charlie Brown, because she thinks that’s cheating. God only knows what she’d make of Green Lantern.

The problems stack up when you see the approach the filmmakers take with their superhero comic source material. There are hundreds of issues of the Green Lantern comic, and the character also appears as a guest with other characters in their titles. Meaning, there’s a lot of backstory to get across — at least if you want to approach the matter in that manner. That’s unfortunately the choice that was made with the film, which commences with a tortuous sequence that is designed to allow viewers to follow what’s to come. Excuse me?

Oh dear. So, faced with reaching a worldwide audience unfamiliar with their oddly named character, execs at DC and Warner have elected to reach back into Green Lantern’s murky mythology and spend a fortune on turning it into the filmic equivalent of those leaden notes and maps obligatory in fantasy novels, outlining the relationship of the characters, their elven heritage, and showing which imaginary kingdoms they come from. I’m sorry, but that stuff is lethal to people who don’t buy into the genre. So why frontload a $300 million movie with a whole bunch of it?

If you want to see how this stuff is done, check out Sam Raimi’s masterful Spider-Man. He conveys Peter Parker’s origin sure enough, and does so in a fast-moving cinematic way that’s intrinsic to the story he’s telling, rather than being some kind of preamble designed to contextualise decades of comic book mythology for those new to it. The Green Lantern approach is the equivalent of sitting someone down and forcing them to listen to Wagner’s Ring Cycle so they’ll understand what happens when Ride of the Valkyries plays when helicopters swarm in Apocalypse Now.

There’s a visual issue here too. All of this portentuous stuff is very CGI-heavy and done in often lurid colours. You could rightly say that this is a very comic book looking way of doing things. But it’s also somewhat alienating, more so because there isn’t a human character on screen during this preamble. Having an otherworldy look and no humans in the opening sequence of what’s intended to be a summer blockbuster might be a choice that the filmmakers come to regret…and possibly already have given the film’s disappointing box office take so far.

Some of the details of the mythology look frankly silly when you spend a heap of money bringing them to life. The notion of dividing the universe into 3600 sectors, each policed by its own energy-ring wearing space cop, sounds kinda cool. Seeing 3600 rings zoom into the cosmos to find suitable fingers to slip on to…lacks a certain something.

All of which is a massively expensive shame. Our introduction to the human ring bearer, test pilot Hal Jordan, looks spritely by comparison to the leaden stuff that’s come before. All of a sudden we’re in a film that moves at the pace of the jets he flies. But by then it’s too late. And the awkwardness of what’s already happened made me more conscious of the clunky scripting, as well as giving me the ominous sense that I knew what was going to come round — and didn’t want to be in the cinema when it happened. Which explains why I spent my time CD shopping when I could have been watching Hal Jordan get caught up in that turgid stuff his movie mistakenly kicked off with.

There comes a point when a given genre feature is so ubiquitous that it’s tricky to find something new to say with it. Note that I use the word ’say’ there, holding on as I do to the old-fashioned notion that stories are about something, even in the trashiest of entertainments. Have a look at Attack the Block for how that works with the alien invasion story: in the hands of Joe Cornish it becomes a way of demonstrating something about the unloved teenage monsters that live in tower blocks and are demonised by the media.

That need to find a new perspective is especially the case for horror films, when in the absence of meaning you’re left with thrills that are superficially enjoyable but soon pale. The only way forward in such a situation is to make the horror more horrific, which is how we end up with torture porn, a genre I deliberately choose not to engage with on the basis of what I’ve seen. The implicit horror there is the filmmaker’s belief that human degradation is entertainment, and that’s somewhere I’m just not going to go.

How then, to breathe new life into those horror staples zombies and vampires? I’m not at all sure that anyone’s finding new ways to use zombies to explore social or personal matters, despite the seemingly endless stream of zombie films in production. Watch them eat chavs, watch them feast on Cockneys, just don’t expect to get any nourishment as you do. George Romero remains the go-to filmmaker for zombie films that actually have content — his films are satires on consumerism, commentaries on gated communities — others merely ape his moves.

As for vampires, they’ve long been linked with sexuality. At least until Twilight defanged them and relpaced menace with swooning after teenage girls. Still, there is at least something of interest there if you’re a teenage girl yourself. Otherwise, the most interesting uses of vampires in recent years have been in Let The Right One In, with its heart in the friendship of children, and Daybreakers, in which the pervasive metaphor is of blood as oil.

And now we have Stake Land, the trailer for which gave no real clue as to the core of what makes it such a good film. Set in a post-apocalyptic America where vampirism is a plague that has brought the country down, I wasn’t expecting much beyond high octane action. Instead, I found myself watching a movie that’s profoundly moving at times, a meditation on family where the focus is on the survivors, struggling to get by in a world where making it to the end of the day is not something you can take for granted.

At the centre of it all is the relationship of a seasoned vampire-hunter known only as Mister and a teenage boy whose life he saves, and who he teaches how to get by. There’s a resonance with The Road, where a father and son had a similar dynamic. What Stake Land adds is genre trappings: vampires from the world of horror, and survivors from the post-apocalyptic tradition of Mad Max etc.

It’s remarkably effective, helped by strong casting — there’s nobody who looks improbably gorgeous, and one of the key supporting roles goes to an ordinary middle-aged woman — and well-judged use of plaintive piano and strings on the soundtrack, bringing to mind the quieter moments of Godspeed! You Black Emperor. This is a story about people getting by in a world where fellow humans are as big a threat as the undead.

Generally speaking it works well, though I did wince a bit at the heavy-handed view of the Christian right, who are the film’s real monsters. That said, the middle-aged woman is a sympathetic Christian character, which is balance of a sort. Altogether, Stake Land is a fascinating blend: a horror shocker with a real emotional core, that’s about people trying to get by in a world that’s gone crazy. And in that regard, it’s about right here and right now, which the best fantastic films tend to be, however grotesque their trappings. Director Jim Mickle and co-writer Nick Damici are to be congratulated for breathing new life into an often-tired subgenere. Now if only someone could do the same for zombies…

Creators who get to work in the fictional universes of superhero comics publishers Marvel and DC like to compare the experience to playing with cool toys. It’s an apt comparison, both because some of those creations are a lot of fun, and because merchandise in the form of toys for all ages is an ever-important part of the overall picture of the profitability of these dynamic examples of intellectual property.

Sales of Marvel and DC titles have been falling for twenty years, and publishers and creators are complicit in serving that small readership up reheated portions of what it’s been getting for decades now rather than risk putting anything else on the menu. Hopefully DC is intending to shake things up with its forthcoming Year Zero relaunch, with new creative takes on established titles and an emphasis on making them easily available digitally on the day of print publication.

All of which makes summer blockbusters the real arena for connecting audiences with superhero stories. Technology is now up to the task of conveying the scope and scale of the characters and their adventures, and the hoops they jump through can easily be conveyed to slack-jawed teens slurping from buckets of Coke who may not care for ambiguous motivations and complex backstories.

In the circumstances then, X-Men: First Class is quite an achievement. It’s a prequel to a patchy series of films chronicling the adventures of Marvel’s mutant misfits, and looks set to become a franchise in its own right. And for the first hour or so, it does a very impressive job at cherrypicking the most relevant bits from the comic’s history and presenting them in a form that makes sense to an audience that doesn’t come preloaded with footnotes about everything that happens onscreen.

The key to it all is the relationship of two men, both of them mutants. Charles Xavier is a telepathic geneticist with a utopian vision of what mutantkind can do for the planet. Erik Lensherr saw his people killed in concentration camps, and his mother shot by a doctor who wanted the young man to draw on his powers of magnetism.

Working together, under the guidance of the CIA, the two men assemble a team of young mutants, all of this setting the stage for what viewers of the previous films in this sequence have already seen: Xavier becomes known as Professor X, and his former ally Lensherr becomes his enemy Magneto.

It’s all done with impressive brio to begin with, but in an effort to contain both the history of the X-Men and dovetail it with the real world Cuban missile crisis, the script takes on entirely too much. The effect is of being stuffed with story, but there comes a point where it just keeps on rolling out plot points and I for one was less emotionally involved the more plot was covered. I was also let down by one underthought element: the mutants in the comics are often shoe-ins for the way that people are picked on for difference. Shame then, that the character’s only black X-Man is killed before he’s more than a cypher, and the sole Latino sides with the bad guys as soon as she can.

If you’ve ever talked with a comics fan about their favourite title, you may well have wished you didn’t as you’re subject to a seemingly endless list of betrayals, feuds, revenge and reconciliation between costumed oddballs who seem pretty much interchangeable. Unfortunately that’s how X-Men: First Class gets as it goes on, more and more story bullets being shot into the audience but few of them connecting with any emotional impact.

It doesn’t help that director Matthew Vaughn uses splitscreen techniques some way in to it all. He’s putting three or four slices of story up there at the same time, but the effect is much like being given a PowerPoint presentation about the line dancing festival a casual acquaintance went to. And that’s the abiding impression I came away with, despite some strong performances and an intermittently good script by a team of a half dozen or so writers. The sheer number of hands on deck is an indication of the problem, and in this case many hands did not make light work.

There are scenes you’ve seen in different shapes and forms a few times, and breathing life into them is hard. One such set piece is the surprise party. Quite often it’s a comedy staple, with a frisky couple having their plans interrupted by well-meaning friends. Or it’s played for irony, with the partygoer just having experienced some kind of calamity before the balloons and streamers appear. The familiarity of that scenario, a staple in weak sitcoms and soaps, means that a lot of writers would rule it off their list of scenes to write. All the more impressive then, that David Mamet makes such a scene a key element of what unfolds in The Edge.

Most of the pieces of the story are on the table by the time this scene comes round. A billionaire, Anthony Hopkins, adores his model wife, Elle McPherson. They fly to the wilds of Canada for a fashion shoot. The photographer is a bit of a poseur. The man who owns the shoot location warns of bears in the area, and the need to lock food away to ensure they’re not attracted by the smell.

Hopkins is reading in bed when his wife asks him to make a sandwich. Dutifully, he goes downstairs and finds bread, cheese, ham, and a tomato. And an open door. It’s dark, and he’s a man who accepts the possibility of danger. He slowly walks toward the door, and its frame is filled by the imposing shape of an enormous bear. It’s a terrifying moment, all the more so for his clear response to the situation — what practically can he do at this point?

In an instant, everything changes. The bear falls to the floor. It’s a skin held aloft by someone. Behind it, a room full of people gathered to wish Hopkins a happy birthday. Order is restored. Or is it?

It’s a brilliantly conceived and executed scene. And it sets up what’s to follow in a way that goes far beyond what passes for foreshadowing from most writers. The bear is a primal creature that represents death, or at least its possibility. As such it’s the antithesis of the jovial party scene that the other guests at the lodge are drawn into.

But there’s a sense in which Hopkins identifies with the bear more than he does the party. As soon as he suspects there might be a bear present, he accepts that information and deals with it in a mature fashion. He might be a billionaire used to city life, but the reason he’s become a billionaire is his capacity to respond intelligently to whatever situation he is in.

To Hopkins, the bear represents a stark kind of reality he doesn’t find in the empty antics that the partygoers are enjoying. And when he and the photographer venture into the wilderness, it’s a journey that confirms what kind of man each of them is. The photographer is a man who professionally is encumbered by accessories. So many that he needs an assistant to help him do his job. Then that assistant is killed as a result of the photographer’s laziness. Actions have consequences. And out in the wilds, those consequences can be fatal.

Mamet is being complained about because of his apparent turn rightwards in politics. It’s something you can arguably foresee in The Edge, and no wonder. Mamet is interested by people who have brutal real world choices to make, and there’s a black and white element to this particular situation that means it couldn’t be transplanted into the endless muted grays of urbane urban existence. As such, that apparent right wing aspect is no surprise. There’s no neat liberal etiquette to deal with what happens when you’re marooned with a fellow survivor who you’ve just found out has been sleeping with your wife. And the resolution of the film is such that no adherent to any particular ideology would find it suitably supportive of their stance.

Strong as my memories were of Walt Simonson’s run on Thor — strong enough for me to order the 1200 page omnibus collection without a pause — I was still cautious when it came to wading in. I’d hate to be disappointed, and I’m pretty sure that some of what I was reading then doesn’t stand up to the light of day now. And I’d had the authoritative word of a comic shop owner, the manager of what many believe to be Britain’s best store, that Simonson’s Thor was basically a bunch of thees and thous and not much else.

Thankfully, he’s wrong, on this at least. Sure, this is a comic of the 80s and reads differently than those of today. That doesn’t actually make it any worse though. Today’s tropes are today’s tropes. Nothing more, nothing less. And then there’s the majesty of Simonson’s artwork. He’s one of a select group of artists whose work is truly alive on the page for me, his vigour of line enough to persuade you that he conjures his images in a single furious movement. It’s an illusion, but the dynamism and vitality of Simonson’s art, and his way with designing panels and pages, impresses me — excites me — no end.

What I hadn’t banked on was the quality of the writing. Sure, there are times when it’s pretty wordy, and the cuts between scenes lack elegance at times. But the wordiness is actually an asset when it comes to getting across the mythic dimension to what’s going on. This, after all, is the adventure of a thunder god. You don’t want to see him umming and aahing over coffee. He’s a living archetype, and as such can be forgiven for doing things without prevarication or irony.

Besides, the key thing here is action. Thought and deed go together for Odin’s favoured son, and that’s as it should be. What truly impresses me though is Simonson’s ability to make heroes of the supporting cast. While the saga unfolds, there are some self-contained stories which are masterclasses in storytelling. And the one that’s just blown me away is a tale of Balder the Brave.

Balder was a mighty warrior, but he’s now a man of peace, sworn not to kill again. And Odin needs a message delivered, and Balder’s the man to do it as he’s known by all as a man of his word. So Balder goes forth and finds Loki’s lair. It’s overrun by demons in the command of a bad guy consorting with Loki, who shows no inclination to look at the message Balder’s brought.

Balder is in a terrible situation. He doesn’t mind dying. But his task is to give Loki the message. And the only way to do it is to carve a path through an army of demons. Which he does, slaying them by the hundred. He hates himself as he does it. But this is his duty, what he’s sworn to do to the Allfather. It tears him up, heart and soul, as he takes a blade to the legion of enemies. And when he cuts through their ranks, Loki still won’t look at the message. Enraged beyond anything, Balder takes his sword and swipes off Loki’s head. He’s failed in his task. And, worse still, he’s failed himself. Balder is crushed.

It’s bravura stuff. This is storytelling on an epic scale. A man destroys himself to fulfil an oath, and fails to deliver his promise in the process. The emotions are huge, the sense of waste and loss palpable. Truly brilliant.

It has to be said I’m tempted to borrow that story as a template for a thriller. It has something of the remorseless bleak quality of Point Blank, Lee Marvin relentless in the pursuit of what he’s owed. And there are other resonances. The anonymous corporation that Marvin is up against, hiding its obligations behind a bureaucratic facade. Loki’s self-regarding ennui: he’d be a fine corporate exec. Now there’s a thought…

Thank you. Thank you Joe Cornish, for realising every ounce of the potential implicit in the concept of aliens attacking a South London estate and meeting resistance in the form of local teenagers. Sound dumb? It is. Dumber than E.T.? Well, now you’re talking. Attack the Block twists the core of Spielberg’s alien yarn and transplants it from middle class America to underclass Britain.

Attack the Block is fresh and fun, and has its roots in the kids who Cornish workshopped with to get the feel of the dialogue right. They seem rough and unpleasant, and the film doesn’t shy away from their criminality, opening with a nurse being mugged by a gang of teenagers. But every interaction reveals new facets of their personalities, so by the time a group of badass aliens have arrived, we’re rooting for the teens who are out to protect their turf from otherworldly interlopers.

With all the hostility in the media to young people in Britain, typically portrayed as drug-addled and concerned primarily with their Playstations, it’s reassuring to come across a gang of youths who stick up for one another and know when to do the right thing. Sure, they’re dope smoking Playstation addicts too, and that’s part of what makes the story work: there’s a very real feel to these youthful estate dwellers, who despite the impoverished environment they live in have an admirable sense of community.

It’s a beautiful contrast to the bullshit machismo of Battle: Los Angeles, which was basically a wet dream created by people who either really believed they’d stand up and protect their fellow citizens if their city was under attack, or cynically recognised that there was an audience out there of people who had just that fantasy. Battle: Los Angeles was a militaristic wankfest with no nuance or sophistication. Attack the Block is spritely, witty and engaging — you care about these teenagers, and experience all the emotions they go through as the story progresses.

I was impressed with how Cornish handled the camera as well as the actors. There are moments of real beauty amid the chaos, and the pacing is nimble and effective. None of the scenes outstay their welcome, and structurally it’s basic but does its job — the story beats are set up efficiently, and it all proceeds smoothly. Cornish has acknowledged his debt to Spielberg, and it’s there to see in his facility with visual storytelling and comfort in populist genre filmmaking. The UK needs more creators with that kind of outlook, and I look forward to seeing his future work.

Particular note should go to the setting. The tower block the kids live in and around is brought to life expertly. It’s very much a character in the film, and the kids inhabit the space convincingly: this is their territory, some of it space where they can swagger, other areas where they tread carefully. They’re a gang for their own protection, and that of course leads some to be wary of them — rightly so.

In that realistic depiction of its young heroes, and its affinity with the lives they lead, Attack the Block is more than a fun film. It’s put a generation up on screen for them to see themselves. That’s another thing that differentiates it from Battle: Los Angeles, a confirmation that the city is as vacuous as some commentators have suggested. This raw, funny, engaging, inspiring movie is a celebration of British urban youth. An old fart like me shouldn’t really get it, and maybe bits of it passed me by. But I can recognise spirit and attitude when I see it, even if it doesn’t speak to me personally.

I thought I knew what I was going to write about in this piece, having seen The Infidel. It’s a film with a lot to commend it, a comedic exploration of cultural identity spinning off what happens when a Muslim taxi driver in London discovers he’s actually adopted, and was Jewish by birth. Naturally, this happens at a time of maximum inconvenience: when his son plans to marry the daughter of a firebrand fundamentalist Muslim cleric. And in looking into his actual rather than presumed roots, he wants to hide what he’s actually doing from his family, with the comic consequences you might expect.

All of which paints The Infidel out to be a farce, a genre that has its roots in the stage. And really, that’s one of the film’s failings. It barely embraced its cinematic potential, consisting largely of set pieces involving people sat together in rooms and exchanging views, connected by a plot that saw the mad mullah to be revealed as not the person he’d like you to think he was, and all being well in the end.

Scripted by David Baddiel, it was funny enough on occasion, but came across very much as a series of intellectual points. In fact, one of the key scenes was a debate between the cabbie and the mullah, and frankly films aren’t good or bad because of the force of their intellectual argument. And that was a point reinforced by what I discovered just before I started this piece: one of my favourite jazz musicians, violinist Billy Bang, died a month ago.

The memories and feelings stirred by that knowledge are more powerful for me than the conscious mind tricks of The Infidel. I’m thinking simultaneously of the first Billy Bang record I came across, on vinyl; the concert I saw him play in a Birmingham hotel as a warm-up to a residency in London; the CDs I picked up over time tracing different facets of his style and interests.

And that reminiscence takes me to Four Lions, which has the emotional power that The Infidel lacks. The Chris Morris film makes no pretence of being even-handed, of engaging in the liberal tradition of rational debate. Instead, it forces you to empathise with Muslim terrorists by making them as real and inept and confused and vulnerable and funny as the rest of us are. No concern with balance within the film itself — we’ve got a media dedicated to doing Islam down and linking it to terror; how can one 90 minute film seek to redress that imbalance?

The point of all this? There are script gurus out there who have got people believing that scripts should follow certain templates and strictures to be acceptable to Hollywood. To be fair to the likes of McKee and Truby, what they actually say is considerably more nuanced than that. The general message is learn the form before you play with the form. Same with music: get those scales down before you soar off into the realm of improvisation.

It’s sad to see wannabe writers handicapping themselves by obeying restrictions which many of their peers will tell them are essential, but in practice are arbitrary. If you’re going to make a mistake, make your own mistake in a heartfelt and honest way. You can always find other ways to do what you had in mind. But unless you reach beyond the formulaic in the first place, how will you ever discover what you’re capable of?

Billy Bang bought his first violin in a pawnshop. A friend convinced him it could be a means of communicating what he felt and wanted to say. He dedicated himself to doing exactly that, committing himself to a life of almost certain poverty, as fortune favours few in jazz. It became his life path, and it all seemed to lead to his greatest accomplishment: assembling other musicians who’d fought in Vietnam, and some Vietnamese players, to come together and create music that communicated what they felt about the war, and about the impact it had on them all. If I could look back at my life knowing I’d created art as truthful as those two albums, I’d know I’d lived my life the right way. And that counts for more than any amount of doing the right thing, the professional thing, the industry thing, when your heart’s not in it.

A young girl is brought up by her father to be a killing machine, and demonstrates her fighting prowess in impressive fahion against some truly evil opponents. Where Kickass treated this simple enough notion in simplistic popculture style, all hip moves and designer violence, Hanna takes the same premise and creates a modern day fairy tale from it. And like any fairy story — at least until it’s had a Disney makeover to strip it of its meatier aspects — it has a power allowing it to resonate so that, while comprised of simple elements, they reach deep within us.

Director Joe Wright amps up the primal elements from the start, a girl dressed in skins hunting and killing a deer which she drags home to eat with her father in a setting which is part fairytale cottage, part aeons old cave. Despite the timeless quality, this is a film set here and now, though its roots are in mythic relationships. Here we have a man who has left his tribe, seeking to save a young girl from being influenced by a woman who is in effect an evil stepmother. OK, the tribe is the CIA, and what follows includes helicopters and guns, but deep currents run throughout, though it’s delivered in a fresh, visually inspired, and sometimes haunting fashion.

This is a story that could have happened at any time in any culture. The fact that it happens now is actually a distraction in some respects, one that the heroine herself feels when — experiencing the modern world away from the forest — she is bombarbed with the multiplicity of ways we use electricity to divert ourselves from the business of survival. Focused as she has been on learning to survive, Hanna is unused to distractions like television, kettles, and air conditioning.

She’s also not used to people. And a core part of the story is to do with how alienated Hanna is. Not only has she been brought up in the wilderness, she’s the product of a DNA-tampering experiment and has been shaped to get her revenge on those who created her. In the process, she’s missed all kinds of stuff that regular kids are used to, and part of the narrative is to do with her making a friend — a brattish young girl who has been brought up by a post-hippy family.

So, there’s a gulf between her and other kids. And it’s explored in the same way that the inhumanity of the robots in Wall-E is: through dance. Like them, she is fascinated by song and dance, which in some way articulate humanity at its finest. And not just humanity, come to think: bees communicate the whereabouts of new sources of pollen in a dance that has meaning to their peers. When they’ve got the message across, the bee then does a dance of pure liberation, for the sheer joy of it. Well, that’s a very anthropomorphic description, but you get the idea.

There’s a real charm to Hanna, compared to the taste of artificial additives that I was left with after watching Kickass. It’s a skilfully told story that’s at one level an experiment in telling a modern day fairy story, and pretty directly at that, at least in its visual execution. How much of that is implicit in David Farr and Seth Lochhead’s script I couldn’t tell you. But it makes for a striking and often beautiful film, where strong images are accompanied by a well-judged Chemical Brothers soundtrack.

The script is often spare, the storytelling being done through the look of the characters and the setting as much as anything. It’s good to see such a mythic tale delivered primarily through images: this is a film told in the language of dreams and storybooks, that might have the trappings of a thriller but is at its heart something timeless.