With its novel combination of rock and “nu-rave” (a term coined by band-member Jamie Reynolds), Klaxons’ debut album Myths Of The Near Future immediately sent waves through the scene. Surfing The Void builds on the band’s established sound. Initially rejected by the their record label for being too experimental, the album is texturally chaotic, featuring deliriously energetic layers of riffs and melodies.

The first track echoes the hook-laden pop of ‘Golden Skans’, but is noticeably less tight; the band provide a turbulent backing of pounded piano chords, eerie guitar drones and unrestrained polyphony. It is nonetheless an infectious opening, and sets the tone for the rest of the album. The title track sounds like the soundtrack to a party inside a hurricane, as guitar lines twist around furious drums, and a screamed invitation to “Take in! Mystica!”. The music takes a distinctly eighties turn with ‘Venusia’, which eschews the sonic chaos in favour of a relaxed groove. The chorus is instead driven by the album’s characteristically dense use of special effects, which are also used to wonderfully deranged effect on ‘Extra Astronomical’. Yet they sound overdone on ‘Flashover’, which, in spite of some dynamic variation, feels like an aural assault. The album closes with the rockier number ‘Cypherspeed’, whose lyrics and psychedelic licks are a testament to Klaxons’ futurist inspirations.

On Surfing The Void, Klaxons appear to have supercharged their nu-rave sound with vivid electric soundscapes. The album is certainly ambitious, and although overdone in places, it allures through its sheer energy.

Given Britain’s lack of exposure to European popular music, is it surprising that we’ve come to assume that little of it is worth hearing? Moreover, is it not natural that our ignorance should give rise to certain cultural stereotypes? Some associate France, for example, exclusively with the nostalgic chansons of Edith Piaf and Charles Trenet, or with the cheerful, vulgar sound of the piano-accordion.

But today, French popular music is in danger of drowning under a global deluge of British and American music. Another stereotype holds that France now listens only to the blander forms of British and American music, together with its cringe-worthy French derivatives. When the popular French radio station Skyrock is not blasting out Lady Gaga’ soulless whine, it’s playing one of a vast number of glittery but banal home-grown pop tunes, most of which are sung in English. The French Top 40 chart of a few weeks ago, over half of whose entries were either English or American, reflects this trend only too well. The video for that week’s Number One – “Mignon Mignon” (“Cute, Cute”) – has a cartoon beaver babbling incoherent words to the tune of “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands”. Perhaps the French just took inspiration from the “comic” value of the moronic Crazy Frog tune, which stormed the UK charts a few years ago.

Beneath this commercial façade, however, lies an indigenous scene which confirms the musical inventiveness of the French. While some French artists – notably Daft Punk, David Guetta and Justice – have entered the international mainstream (and in the process forged a new course in the global electro scene), most of the country’s talent remains unknown abroad. Yet the sound of “électronique minimale” is currently flourishing in France. Kavinsky (Vincent Belorgay) is an electronic composer whose experimentation ranges from heavy-bass techno and dance to more minimal beats, while Sophie Gonthier, singing under the pseudonym Anything Maria, combines sensual singing with clean, edgy beats, producing music that lies somewhere between the darkly hushed tones of Bat For Lashes and the upbeat flavour of La Roux.

Yet French bands are as keen to seek inspiration in the past as they are to promote progressive electronics. Anoraak, in their album Wherever The Sun Sets, plays with an eighties synth-pop sound; while Jamaica’s latest release No Problem mines the pure electro-rock genre, inviting comparisons with the dance-rock music of another French group, Adam Kesher. Despite releasing many records over the past decade, Syd Matters have yet to achieve a huge breakthrough in their own country, but have gradually built up a reputation for producing brilliantly harmonised, sensitive, folk-tinged melodies; they are perhaps France’s answer to Mumford & Sons. Even more accomplished are the pure vocals and ukuleles of folk duo Cocoon.

The pop music scene in France is, in truth, as varied as ours. I’ve given only a few examples out of a potential many, but they in themselves dispel any notions that the French don’t have a flourishing popular scene of their own. And it’s only a Eurostar away.

In the past decade, it has become an increasingly rare occurrence for a film director’s ambition to exceed the capabilities of the medium. CGI has developed so rapidly that it is now possible to render convincingly entire planets onscreen, and visual limitations are still continuously being eroded. Yet one only need look at ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’ or the blunderingly moronic ‘Avatar’ to see that flawless digital effects do not equate to a good movie – more often than not they will take detract from an original story or interesting characters. With this in mind, it is perhaps unsurprising that with ‘Buried’, director Rodrigo Cortés has proved that limitations – both geographical and budgetary – can be an extremely good thing.

The pitch of the film is extraordinarily, deceptively simple: Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) wakes up in a coffin, buried alive, with a mobile phone and little else for company. For ninety-four minutes, the camera remains with him inside this cramped wooden box as he tries to figure out who put him there and, more importantly, how to get out. Indeed, so simple is this concept that it is somewhat surprising that no filmmaker has attempted it before, and Cortés himself has spoken of how he couldn’t believe his luck when he was handed the script; in particular it seems tailor-made for Hitchcock, stretching the audacities of ‘Lifeboat’ or ‘Rear Window’ as far as possible. Then again, it is difficult to conceive of a greater challenge for a director, limited as the film is by the dimensions of a coffin.

It is to the great credit of Cortes that not only does the film maintain a grippingly dramatic narrative, but it also manages to be hugely inventive; the camera is continually spinning, zooming, moving to ensure an unceasing visual kineticism, the colour palette is impressively varied thanks to the presence of different sources of light, and the sound design regularly amps up the tension with occasional ominous creaks from the fragile wood. Surrounded by all this, Reynolds is onscreen the entire time, and as such, the film succeeds or fails on his performance. Fortunately, his ferociously intense and naturalistic acting ensures that the audience shares his panicked claustrophobia to a thoroughly uncomfortable degree.

The notion of being buried alive may be a familiar one, explored by everyone from Edgar Allen Poe to Quentin Tarantino, yet here it feels utterly fresh. Together, Cortés and Reynolds reinvigorate the concept, unleashing the full primal horror and panic that it entails while also exploring effectively themes of technology and bureaucracy. ‘Buried’ is by no means an easy watch, taking as it does the terrifying claustrophobia of ‘The Descent’ to the extreme, yet it is also utterly thrilling and moving, leaving its viewers drained of emotion and energy. There is unlikely to be a more original and forcibly immersive film this year than this minor taphophobic masterpiece.

Ben Kirby

Buried has a simple concept: a man, Paul Conroy, is trapped in a box underground and being held to ransom for $ 5 million. Not much else to it, right? Well, it is a credit to both leading and only on screen actor Ryan Reynolds and director Rodrigo Cortés that they manage to make something this simple one of the tensest films released in months.

The film starts off with an incredibly ‘Hitchcockian’ feel: the use of music, the every day man trapped in a situation that he didn’t cause; surrounded, in this case using a phone, by people and none of them can help you. Cortés borrows a lot from the master of tension and it makes the first half of the film un-missable. Add to it the close camera angles, face shots and occasional submersion into darkness and each member of the audience is taken into that claustrophobic box. Then, just as quickly, the cameras will pan out and surrounding the coffin is blackness and a sense of complete hopelessness. Cortés plays with the audiences’ emotions very effectively.

Being the only person on screen, Reynolds has a tough job of carrying the whole 94 minutes, but he does it superbly and is excellent to watch, for the most part. Conroy goes through a whole spectrum of emotion from anger, to despair, to acceptance, to hope and everything in between with Reynolds demonstrating them all superbly. However, he is not alone for the entire film as there are plenty of voices on the other end of the telephone. Some of the voice acting was excellent, such as Robert Paterson as Agent Dan Brenner, while others felt a little clichéd, such as Jose Luis Garcia Perez as the Iraqi kidnapper. Reynolds admitted himself that this was likely the toughest shoot he has ever done. He left the set after 17 days of being buried with splinters all over his body, singed fingers and heavy asthma; it all seems a very long way from Van Wilder.

The film, however, is not perfect and suffers from not quite believing enough in itself. After about half way through someone seems to have felt the audience might be getting a bit bored and decided to crank up the tension factor, using some very obvious cinematic ploys. Some of these ploys work and keep the audience on edge, but some don’t, only serving to accidentally break up the tension. Sadly, the film never really recovers from these blunders, and it is a real shame that no one felt the situation would be tense enough without having to force further jeopardy upon it.

That being said, this remains a very good film with a great concept, though one which unfortunately couldn’t be maintained throughout the entire film. If ‘Buried’ had been made 20 minutes shorter, all the cheap thrills could have cut out, leaving the audience more on edge and making the film better for it.

Matt Isard

For the most part, it’s fair to say that neither labour disputes nor the process by which laws are created lend themselves terribly well to the medium of film. Made in Dagenham tells an entertaining endearing story of striking female factory workers, but from the clear effort to make a neglected chapter of history more box-office friendly.

Directed by Nigel Cole (Calendar Girls) and written by Billy Ivory, Made in Dagenham stars Sally Hawkins as Rita O’Grady, the catalyst for the 1968 Ford Dagenham strike by 187 sewing machinists that eventually lead to the passage of the Equal Pay Act. Working in challenging conditions for long hours, the women at the plant are infuriated when management changes their place on the pay scale, classifying their work as ‘unskilled.’ Led by Rita, the women take on their corporate foes, fickle union bosses, an increasingly sour and cash-strapped local community, and eventually the government itself to demand equal pay for women. Throughout, Rita’s struggle is echoed by that of Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson) in the male-dominated political sphere, who eventually takes up the workers’ cause.

The best thing about Made in Dagenham is the opportunity it provides to watch talented actors and actresses chew the scenery. Sally Hawkins is the very definition of the ‘mouse that roared’ as Rita, and great fun to watch. Miranda Richardson is (predictably) captivating as Barbara Castle and has some of the film’s choicest dialogue; her ‘fiery redhead’ speech will make you grin and cower at the same time. Rosamund Pike plays Lisa Hopkins, a middle-class housewife who supports the machinists’ cause and her relationship with Rita feels gawky, touching and real. Bob Hoskins is squeezably endearing as the women’s curmudgeonly union rep.

Unfortunately, many of the film’s smaller characters are less intriguingly developed. Jaime Winstone and Andrea Riseborough aren’t given enough to do, and I found myself wanting to see more of each of them. Also, for a film that argues so stridently against stereotyping women, Made in Dagenham is surprisingly reliant on stereotypes about men, portraying them as either over-the-top villains or incompetent fools. In the former category, we have the American executive from Ford Headquarters in Detroit, Robert Tooley (Richard Schiff), who is so nefarious it’s surprising there aren’t stalagmites and a talking mirror in his office. The film’s straw men are lead by Daniel Mays, who plays Rita’s dim-witted husband, Eddie. Most of his time is spent doing the kind of ‘dad can’t make toast’ shtick that is pretty much what I imagine every single episode of King of Queens to be like. When he faces off against Hawkins, he clearly never stands a chance, but its fun to watch her take him to pieces nonetheless.

It seems Cole and Ivory could not decide if they wanted to make Made in Dagenham a comedy that happens to make a strong case for women’s rights or a more sober dramatic picture about female workers’ struggles. They try to make the film both at once, and the two elements don’t mesh together particularly well. On the one hand, the film evokes the free-spiritedness of the swinging sixties, and for a while things are all giggles and beehives. Though we’re told the conditions in the factory are intolerable, watching the women at their machines in bras and knickers – gossiping, laughing, and catcalling any luckless man who happens to pass through – it seems kind of fun, like the prison in Chicago. As the film goes on, however, people are topping themselves and Rita’s bravely holding back tears in every scene. Then, the ending is simply too upbeat, making it seem as though discrimination against women in the workplace all but ended by 1970.

While the opportunity to watch Hawkins and Richardson chew the scenery alone is worth the cost of admission, I nevertheless found I wanted to like Made in Dagenham more than I actually did. At the end of the film, interspersed with the credits, there are clips of interviews with the actual strikers. These heroic women set in motion meaningful, lasting change, and I left the theatre wanting to hear more of their story, and less of this film’s version.

The first scene begins with admirably brawny arms glistening under a rising sun, and sets the tone for the surprisingly raunchy ‘Tamara Drewe’. The film is based on Posy Simmonds’ comic strip serial, published weekly in The Guardian, which is, in turn, loosely based on ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’. Indeed, there is no better word than ‘mad’ to describe this highly enjoyable yet slightly disturbing production. It seems at times as if the director, Stephen Frears (‘Chéri’, ‘The Queen’), had a pile of Country Life magazines in one hand and a bursting bag of LSD in the other. However, this mixture has worked well for him, particularly in the way he has managed to retain visual elements of the comic strip, such as splitting the screen when two people are on the phone, letting characters have hazy flashbacks (you can almost imagine the thought-bubbles) and, sometimes, adding in a bout of graphic violence just for good measure.

The film is set in Ewedown, a countryside backwater, and follows several characters, all dissatisfied in one way or another, whose lives are brought together by the return of Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton) to her home-town. Once a posh girl known only for her massive nose, she has come back, fully rhinoplastied and a columnist to boot, to sell her mother’s house. Her first appearance amongst the villagers creates shock and awe; Beth Hardiment (Tamsin Greig), proprietor of a farm and Writers’ Retreat, and long-suffering wife of Nicholas Hardiment (Roger Allam), a writer, comments: ‘She’s poured herself into those shorts, I hope they don’t give her thrush!’ True, they are possibly the tiniest hot-pants ever worn onscreen, and calculated to catch the attention of the forever unfaithful Nicholas, with whom the audience infers Tamara has had flirtations in her youth.

From here, it begins to transpire that Tamara Drewe is actually not a particularly nice character – although Arterton herself is very hard to dislike. She reencounters her first love, Andy Cobb (Luke Evans, surely destined to become a star), only to ask him to redecorate her house (incidentally his ancestral home, which he had been forced to sell to the Drewes), before conducting affairs with several men, married or otherwise. She becomes engaged to a member of a rock band, Ben Sergeant, played by a fantastically convincing Dominic Cooper, which sends a local celebrity-obsessed fifteen year-old, Jody, into fits of jealous rage. Jody, helped by the fact that Tamara always leaves her house-keys handily under a flowerpot, soon begins to cause an inconceivable amount of mischief, which eventually results in a bovine stampede: the breaking off of Tamara’s engagement and the disgusting breakage of her plastic nose (this is the graphic violence part). She is wonderfully cast and deliciously unlikeable as a bored and utterly inconsiderate brat of a teenager.

The most likeable character of the film, on the other hand, excepting the honest Andy, must be Beth Hardiment, who provides the film with a constant undercurrent of real sadness and sympathy, as she patiently looks after the egos and stomachs of sensitive wannabe writers, whilst trying to forget about the fragile state of her marriage to the suave and pompous Nicholas. His insatiable appetite for younger women and his lame alibis break down her confidence bit by bit, as she examines and re-examines her middle-aged body and finds both herself and everything she does for him – from filling in tax returns to typing up his manuscripts – wanting and worthless. Their dysfunctional marriage constitutes the most biting and painful part of this effectively middle-class satire.

Nonetheless, after enduring all these trials and tribulations, the audience is granted a happy, albeit slightly rushed, ending. It is a shame that after meandering along at a leisurely pace, the film finishes with such a hasty tying up of ends, and it is less satisfying for it. Still, it remains a very entertaining way to spend a rainy afternoon, as good performances and cinematography more than make up for a rather thin plot – but what else would you expect from a comic strip?