Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023)

Oliver, a social misfit from a lowly northern background befriends another student at Oxford, a handsome aristocrat, who invites him to spend the summer at his family's country house. The ridiculous opulence of the house, more a palace, is only matched by the eccentricities of the family, utterly divorced from the bulk of society and just regarding Oliver as their son's latest pet.

The film then swings from social satire to thriller, as Oliver, while erotically obsessed with the son, coolly begins to exploit cracks in the fabric of the family and bring them down. This plays out more in the fashion of The Talented Mr. Ripley than Kind Hearts and Coronets, but with a degree class envy/hatred and calculated sociopathy well in excess of what Patricia Highsmith could have conceived.

The casting is immaculate, from Barry Keoghan's scheming interloper to Rosamund Pike as the vacuous, self-centred materfamilias, the setting quite otherworldly, but the descent into Hitchcockian disintegration of all that stands is signposted too soon and too blatantly. Still, there are enough compelling scenes and lashings of stylistic excess to make it an animal of uncommon properties larger than the sum of its manifold sources.

7/10

The Critic (Anand Tucker, 2023)

Set the time and the place as 1934 in the West End of London, then drop in Ian McKellen as the veteran theatre critic of a national newspaper, infamous for his fantastically acerbic reviews, and you can pretty much sit back and let it play out like a pianola. Which it does, but then he's told by the new editor to tone it down, not only the personal attacks in the reviews but his riotous nightlife of drinking and encounters with rentboys, and he reluctantly does so, forming a relationship of sorts with a young starlet who has been a particular target for his barbs. Old leopards will not change their spots, though, and so he exploits the relationship to his own vengeful ends.

It does look great, all sumptuous period interiors and exaggeratedly misty streets, and there's a good cast around the eloquently misanthropic McKellen, but takes an unwise misturn when it wanders out of the theatre and becomes a more standard thriller. Hence a diverting production, but not quite a properly tuned one.

6/10

Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023)

Quirky days are here again! The latest get-together Anderson's troupe of fave actors drops them in the desert, Nevada or thereabouts, in a stylised 1950s of A-bomb tests, governmental Cold War paranoia and talent competitions for precocious kids. The colours are appropriately garishly primary, the dialogue overflowing with wit delivered at a breakneck speed and the characters all fitted with at least one eccentric aspect each from the director's box of foibles. The leads, insofar as they get slightly more screen time than the others, are Jason Schwartzman's father of three girls and recently widowed photographer, and Scarlett Johansson's disillusioned actress, who get talking. Then a UFO lands and an alien briefly pops out just to have a look, just because it's that time and place.

It's made clear that all of this is within a black and white TV show with a Twilight Zone-style narrator introducing each coming scene and some characters from the main production reproduced by actors in the 'real' world of the TV show. More meta than matter. Still, Anderson's trifles, even when so unfocused and rambling, are more inventive than most things out there.

5/10

Paddington in Peru (Dougal Wilson, 2024)

Given the quality and success of the last one, it was obvious that the story of the bear would continue with a third part where he travels back to his homeland. So this time his aunt has disappeared from her retirement home for bears and Paddingon, with the help of the Brown family, sets out to find her in the jungle.As before, there are lots of cameos by well-liked actors, alongside Antonio Banderas and the ubiquitous Olivia Colman as the potential baddies. It's as jolly as ever, with quite a few moments to laugh out loud and no need to worry about the film caving into any pressure to add a modish darker layer. It didn't need to pander so much to the kids with an overload of CGI action sequences, though.

6/10

Joker: Folie à Deux (Todd Phillips, 2024)

It was clear from the first instalment that Joaquin Phoenix was one of the very few actors who could do justice to the memory of Heath Ledger's Joker. Now the story continues and brings in Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn, an inmate at the same asylum who worships his madness and is therefore appropriately portrayed by another wilfully eccentric self-publicist. This also means that nearly half of the film consists of vintage musical numbers by the two, which varyingly take place inside his mind or in the parallel universe of musicals, where people start singing at the drop of a hat.

The plot, as much as there is one, is the Joker being on trial for the killings he committed in the first film, so there's scarcely an iota of the action you'd get with a standard superhero or supervillain production. That's all well and good, but the tone is uncertain, fluctuating constantly between serious drama and the show tunes, and so it's no wonder that most critics scorned it. I consider it an interesting take on the genre instead, although a pretty imperfect one.

5/10

Pikku Siperia (Dome Karukoski, 2025)

After an opening sequence skipping through billions of years of cosmic history, reminiscent of the prologue to Adaptation, We land in a village in present-day Finnish Northern Karelia in the middle of winter, with eccentric locals going about their daily business. then a small meteorite crashes through a man's car roof and stirs up the populace. There is much speculation about its commercial value to the depressed community, as well as about its possibly divine provenance, preoccupying the village vicar most of all in the midst of his crisis of faith.

So far, so good, roughly in the manner of Fargo, but when it follows that superlative film by turning into a crime thriller, with crooks after the meteorite, Little Siberia quickly loses its footing on the omnipresent ice, and both tone and purpose go out of the window along with that. A pity, because the initial set-up promised a lot more.

5/10

The Electric State (Anthony & Joe Russo, 2025)

Direct enough massive MCU superhero blockbusters, and you will be give $320 million to chuck at the screen in the hope that some of it sticks. So this is the Russo brothers adapting an acclaimed graphic novel about an alternative mid-1990s where a war took place between mankind and their sentient robot servants a little earlier, leaving the robots imprisoned on a reservation in New Mexico and the human populace, almost without exception, slavishly hooked on virtual reality and the actual world experienced only through their personal drones. A feisty young heroine sets out across the country with a bot that carries fragments of the conciousness of her lost brother, whom she hopes to find with the bot's aid. They're pursued by a ruthless robot hunter and joined by a black marketeer who has his own bot partner.

The bulk of the budget then goes on FX, particularly on animating the colourful cast of robots they meet on the journey and which join forces with them to fight the tech billionaire mastermind behind the whole sorry state of the world. It does manage to amuse at times between the protracted action sequences, but being squarely for young audiences, it can't delve too deeply into satirical dissection of the relentless march of society towards its own demise, following the will-o'-the-wisp of the promise of a future utopia of endless consumerist leisure.

Critics largely hated it, but it would probably have escaped most of the scathing reviews if only it hadn't spent so much time and money on big setpieces and just a little more on ideas with substance.

4/10