War Horse (2011)

Spielberg. Animals. War. Lost Innocence. West Country Accents. Rescue. Reunion. Gob-Smacking Tracking Shot. God Light. God Light. God Light. God Light. HEARTWARMING. Hanky.

Rating: 4/5

Cyborg Girl (Boku no kanojo wa saibôgu) (2008)

Ho-hum. Another month, another Korean directed human / cyborg rom-com.

Jiro is just your standard issue shy and nerdy student until, one lonely birthday, a kick-ass robot chick from the future drops in and turns his life upside down. Director Jae-young Kwak, who had already scored a massive hit with the more conventional romance "My Sassy Girl", here directs in Japanese in a wholly more ambitious project, but still feels at his most comfortable when on familiar ground. Keisuke Koide as the gobsmacked Jiro is initially a tad irritating with his dumbstruck jaw-on-the-floor performance, but gradually settles into a likeable and more rounded character. While Haruka Ayase as the beautiful machine from the future is not half as bad-ass as her Terminator-homaging introduction would like us to believe, and is all the more charming for it.

For most of its running time, Cyborg Girl (aka: Cyborg She) is sweet and gently amusing as this odd couple figure out their relationship and get involved in a bunch of life-saving scrapes, before proceedings climax quite unexpectedly in a massive set-piece with surprising emotional punch. Had things been tidied up around this point I would have nothing by praise for this unconventional but sweetly satisfying genre hybrid. However at around the ninety minute mark, Jae-young suddenly remembers he's also making a science-fiction, and we get a largely superfluous extended denouement involving A.I. style departures to new time zones, additional secondary characters and time-looping repeated scenes. It all goes on a bit and makes little sense, but fortunately doesn't completely undo the goodwill generated earlier. Nonetheless a tighter edit would have probably earned it an extra star.

Rating: 3/5