Venice Film Festival 2011: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Dark Horse

Empire's official five-star review of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is online, and it reflects the opinion of pretty much every British critic on the Lido. I may have to see it again but I'm afraid I'm not quite in the blown-away camp; many aspects of the film are indeed excellent but I don't think it's a film I could or would ever say I loved. The performances and set dressing are immaculate, the latter especially in the recurring scenes of MI5's Christmas party, a cheap and cheerful affair in what looks like a working men's club. The whole film appears to be stained with Woodbines and dipped in Double Diamond, and if there's one thing Swedish director Tomas Alfredson can certainly do, it's period – especially Cold War period, which added an extra layer of chilly atmosphere to his breakout film Let The Right One In.

But though it created a plausible world, this was not a story I could immerse myself in. I found the exposition heavy going, made more difficult by Alfredson's use of flashback and dummy flashback, by which means dead characters reappear and vice-versa (that's meant to be cryptic, by the way). This in itself is no bad thing, but the story is also so dense with characters as well as intrigue that the film doesn't give you much time to ponder. I suppose my main point is that the hunting of a long-established Russian mole in the British secret service should take a bit longer than two hours. As retired spymaster George Smiley (Gary Oldman) mounts his investigation, the film never really explores the characters of the suspects in any detail, presenting instead, at various points in the film, a montage of their faces filmed in POV as Smiley remembers them. Is it the smirking Colin Firth? The shifty Ciarán Hinds? That bloke who played Truman Capote in the one that wasn't Capote? Or the other one?

I must confess that I didn't have much invested in any of them, not even Smiley, by the end, so the big reveal didn't really come with any great impact or surprise. Still, Tinker Tailor… at least engaged me, which is more than Todd Solondz's Dark Horse (pictured) did. Solondz is to cinema what Kevin Smith is also to cinema: by no means a great filmmaker (and that's being charitable) but an often funny writer who can sometimes get it together to pull off a great, if uncinematic black comedy. Dark Horse is a product of one of those other times, despite some wonderful but underused character parts and Christopher Walken wearing the best wig of his twilight years.

The entirety of Dark Horse is like a vignette from one of Solondz's earlier films, which could have covered all of the material here in a few lines of dialogue. Jordan Gelber stars as Abe, a mid-30s loser who works for the family business and lives at home with his mum and dad (Walken and Mia Farrow). As the film begins, Abe meets Miranda (Selma Blair), decides she is the girl for him and sets out to marry her. Which is about all story we get. From here, as Abe pops the question and the sullen Miranda mulls it over, the film becomes a dog's dinner of dream scenes and fantasies, mostly involving his father's mousey secretary Marie (Donna Murphy), who Abe imagines as a secret cougar, living a fabulous house and driving a gleaming red Ferrari.

There are some good lines and details. At work, Abe's idiot cousin asks him sincerely if he's going to see Tron Legacy, because the trailer “looks good”; instead of filling out spread sheets, Abe uses his computer to buy old Power Rangers from E-Bay, and his room is a shrine to Simpsons and Gremlins memorabilia. Murphy, too, is excellent in her transformation from catatonic dogsbody to power-dressing man-eater. But there's not really any heart in the film, an accusation made of pretty much every Solondz film since Welcome To the Dollhouse. I've disagreed with that reading in the past but here I can't. This is quite a cynical film about a boy who grows up thinking he's going to be the “dark horse” of the family but realises, too late, that this is just the spin his family have put on his loserdom. And that's all. I came out of this downbeat, pointless film feeling pretty cheated.