Tokyo! (Michel Gondry, Leos Carax & Bong Joon-ho, 2008)

A triptych set in Tokyo with three foreign directors, Tokyo! is more cohesive than most city-centred anthologies by virtue of all three pieces having a surreal element at their core. Gondry's is probably the most accessible, with a couple coming to the city and searching in vain for a place of their own, the woman's aimless existence allegorically resulting in a startling physical transformation. Bong Joon-ho's one also has a certain idiosyncratic interest, featuring the Japanese labelled phenomenon that is a hikikomori, i.e. an extreme social recluse, who is forced out of his shell by sudden earthquakes. Between the two, Carax's piece cuts a raucous and anarchic air with Denis Lavant as a sort of human sewer-creature Godzilla, going on a rampage through the city until put on trial, babbling in a language only his lawyer understands about his contempt for the Japanese. While initially arresting, it's the weakest of the three simply because Carax seems to have little faith in saying anything meaningful in just half an hour, and so resorts to shock tactics instead of properly developing the story's latent themes of terror attacks and xenophobia.

6/10

The Angels' Share (Ken Loach, 2012)

Loach continues his slow mellowing, starting in an familiar down-at-heel urban environment with a young Glaswegian man narrowly escaping a prison sentence for GBH, and ending in more optimistic climes. There isn't the usual polemic against the system as such, given that the miscreants sentenced to do community service with him are all victims of their own device: instead, Loach is now content to just set the course for a better tomorrow.
It might be pointed out that fundamental pragmatism still lingers, as it is only through theft that the protagonists are able to win against their circumstances. But then you can never take the social realism wholly out of Loach, and here its background presence really is needed in the blend as the plot relies on some serendipitous licences to have its quartet of bumblers manage to run off with a share of the world's rarest whisky. The director's latest batch of non-professional actors come across naturalistically too, so you sincerely want them to succeed in their little caper.

6/10

Arrugas (Ignacio Ferreras, 2011)

Wrinkles, a gentle portrait of a man entering a retirement home and succumbing slowly to Alzheimer's is not a typical subject matter for animation, but the medium allows a crystallisation of the internees as, first and foremost, human beings, that casting of live actors might obfuscate. The director worked on Chomet's The Illusionist of 2011, and  this shows, with the same tone of wry comedy complementing rather than swamping the immanent pathos. It's not a complex piece and the subject matter allows only one outcome, but its characters are drawn with warmth and sympathy.

6/10

Upside Down (Juan Diego Solanas, 2012)

A romance positing the idea that two planets with opposing gravity exist side by side, Upside Down invests massively in its visuals and makes do with loose change for plot. The opening titles, over which Jim Sturgess has to explain the set-up's pretend physics while clearly struggling with sounding both American and an adult at the same time, do not bode well, and the later additions of a simpering Kirsten Dunst as his love interest in the topsy-turvy other world and an avuncular Timothy Spall, also occasionally essaying an accent, do not improve matters. She's an Uptown Girl, living in an Uptown World, and indeed the whole shebang has the intellectual sophistication of a Billy Joel song, with dialogue written by a child and heavy-handed symbolism. Most unforgivably, it frequently fails in its sole real selling point when the ludicrous physics become too much for the scriptwriter to deal with. It's a shame so many beautiful images are sullied by the bothersome requirement to tell a pointful story at the same time.

4/10

Hard Times (Walter Hill, 1975)

This is most definitely not a Dickens adaptation, but Walter Hill announcing his trade as a maker of films for men on his debut, with a straightforward story of a drifter in the Great Depression years whose bareknuckle boxing skills attract the attention of a chancer indebted to the gills to loan sharks. The knowledge that Charles Bronson as the former and James Coburn as the latter are cast pretty much according to type gives a fairly accurate idea of how the dynamics between them work out and consequently how the plot will pan out too, the decent and taciturn Bronson stoically soldiering on to save his manager's bacon after the showy Coburn's big mouth and gambling keep landing them in trouble. It's fully populated by archetypes and stock scenes, but it does have a certain no-nonsense cool that Hill would go on to develop later in his directorial career.

5/10

Age of Consent (Michael Powell, 1969)

Michael Powell's penultimate feature, Age of Consent stars James Mason as an Australian painter who takes refuge from the rat race of the art world on a small island on the Great Barrier Reef. An adolescent local girl becomes his new muse and revitalises his creativity.
The semi-autobiographical source novel was banned for decades in Britain for supposed indecency; Powell might have cast a 22-year-old Helen Mirren in the role of the girl but could not escape censure either, with reference made to her being under-age and shown nude at the same time. Mason, on the other hand, seems to have been cast with deliberate reference to Lolita, as if the director were needling the actor. If one is prepared to give the film the benefit of the doubt as regards its prying eyes, with no physical relationship actually occurring, it is engagingly acted and as sunny in disposition as its paradisiacal setting, with some deft verbal exchanges. At times, Powell does seem somewhat at sea in trying to adapt his style to the late 'sixties free love vogue, and consequently things get a tad too silly, but it does feel like a breath of fresh air from the man who provided a light in the stifling wartime years with his imagination.

6/10

Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen, 2013)

The collective sigh of relief felt across the media and viewing public these days when Woody Allen manages to turn out a film that isn't a total embarrassment is quite palpable. However, for this to be achieved, it takes heavyweight help and a huge debt of gratitude is owed to Cate Blanchett here.
The story is basically a not too subtly disguised ransacking of A Streetcar Named Desire with a delusional and self-medicating snobbish woman coming to stay with her younger sister, who has a blue-collar life that she can't abide. There is a back story of how she came to lose her New York socialite lifestyle, and her mental stability in the process, which is visited too often in intrusive flashbacks featuring Alec Baldwin as her ex-husband, turning in another of his trademark womanising sleazebag performances. The story would have been better served by sticking just to her fallen life as she tries to start out afresh in San Francisco, all too evidently having learnt nothing.
Allen is clearly still petrified of contemplative moments, which is hardly likely to change any more, and so any second which is not taken up by verbal diarrhoea has to be filled with his usual recourse to plodding old-time jazz. The realities of the world beyond the cloistered one of the rich and comfortable are also only nervously guessed at, and therefore wholly unconvincing. But at least he's not in front of camera this time, and when he does, just occasionally, let Blanchett have a proper scene, she shows what the film could have been with a more daring helmsman. It's just a pity she's probably scuppered her chance at doing the actual Blanche DuBois character ever again with this act of charity for Allen.

5/10

Leo the Last (John Boorman, 1970)

It's quite hard to believe how Boorman could have conceived this between the muscular Hell in the Pacific and the iconic Deliverance. An end-of-the-'60s bender of colossal proportions would not explain the fey and stumbling mess presented here. It is somehow hung on a perpetually confused Marcello Mastroianni as the titular character, an ineffectual idealist and last scion of some defunct European monarchy Boorman doesn't bother to specify, much as the blighted Notting Hill setting is a cloud cuckoo land one, presumably complacently meant to signify 'everywhere'. He turns his twitcher spyglass to peeping on the poor black ghetto locals instead as he sits in his mansion, surrounded by toadies, and suddenly sprouts a social conscience, which rather goes against the grain of what his untrustworthy entourage, composed tokenistically of a doctor, lawyer, major domo, conniving girlfriend and nanny, wish for him.
There are impressively atrocious original songs by some self-styled poet of the people and laughably pretentious theft, through voiceover babble, of T.S.Eliot's 'He Do the Police in Different Voices', amongst numerous other objects of 'homage'. Presumably it was meant to be as incendiary as 1968's If..., but is somewhat hindered in this by having as little spine or sense of purpose as its ennui-stricken protagonist. Its limp-wristed stab at upsetting the establishment with hippy nihilism also falls short of the same year's spaced-out Zabriskie Point, in which the final demolition scene at least looked cool. Yet, in its high-flown airs, it even fails to attain so-bad-it's-good status.

2/10

To Rome with Love (Woody Allen, 2012)

Yet another round in Allen's travelogue series of the world's glamorous cities, as approved by conventional wisdom, once again relies on the crutch of following idly rich American tourists there. This means that hackneyed local stereotypes, free-spirited and passionate without exception, can be played off against their transatlantic bland sounding boards and all the regulation sights can be visited too, which fills up screen time nicely and looks pretty to boot. It has been very important for Allen for decades now to do nothing at all to upset his obedient audience, who only want the cosy slippers of the same thing in a slightly different location every year, and that includes teaching them nothing as well. The devotees must be able to feel secure when a building, spectacle or piece of music comes up that they recognise it. One Italian character here is of course revealed to have hidden talent as an opera singer - it was always going to be either that or an artist of some kind - and naturally it's Nessun Dorma that he blasts out repeatedly.
Allen makes an unwelcome return in front of the camera as well, his peevish twerpishness now way beyond amusing or even tolerable, and the mini-Allens and silly natives that populate the other scenes, which mostly consist of excruciating sex comedy episodes, dutifully recycle the old navel-gazing middle-class amateur philosophy and chewing over of relationships on his behalf. And then of course there's the lack of any interest in the real city with its real people and their problems, which must not be seen, because that would really make the fans uncomfortable. So Rome might as well be Paris, London or Barcelona. Send the little tit to Coventry instead next time, I beg you.

3/10

Le conseguenze dell'amore (Paolo Sorrentino, 2004)

A solitary man has lived for eight years in a Swiss hotel and regularly goes out on the same assignment over and over again, depositing a suitcase of notes in a bank. He spurns all human contact bar a nightly card game with an elderly aristocratic couple fallen on hard times, who he also eavesdrops on through the wall of his room. It gradually becomes clear that his estranged family rejects him and that he is effectively a prisoner of the Mafia, forced to do their bidding indefinitely. It's only when he finally dares to let his guard down with the hotel barmaid that the interminable pattern of his life, frozen in aspic, finally changes.
Toni Servillo, in one of his many collaborations with the director, most notably 2013's The Great Beauty, does an admirable job of communicating the inner turmoil behind the poker face of a self-possessed and misanthropically cynical man whose life has been taken from him. The strong suits of Sorrentino's films always include the camerawork and eclectic soundtrack, and The Consequences of Love is no exception to this, competing with anything Nicolas Winding Refn might produce in laconic stylishness, but there is a purpose under the gloss. His gilded cage and imposed, unvarying routine create a prison from which there is only one escape, and it's at the realisation of that fact as a universal human predicament that an emotive connection with the shielded character is finally formed.

7/10

Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963)

Without Billy Liar, British lives would be so much the poorer as generations of comedians thereafter would have been deprived of the perfect model for comedy variants on the kitchen sink drama. With the possible exception of the people of Leeds, that is, which is depicted as a hulking block of crushing prosaicism populated by raucous simpletons. Tom Courtenay's performance as the child-man Billy Fisher, hiding in his own fantasies and unable to stop his congenital lying, is a nimble one, even if his babbling hyperactivity - think Jerry Lewis or Robin Williams - grates across space and time before the end of the first reel. But there is a serious core to it too, with only one possible conclusion: you can take the North out of the man, but not the man out of the North.

6/10

Fear X (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2003)

Mall security guard Harry Caine lives in limbo following the unsolved murder of his wife and sets out to find the killer himself. There is an explanation of sorts somewhere down the line, but the director is really only interested in creating a destabilising air which sucks the audience into the character's walking hell. Moments of almost unendurable tension, created with nothing more than the old box of tricks of angles, lighting and an ominous drone, are somewhat undermined by abstract Lynchian interludes, of both the trippy visual and random behaviour variety. Winding Refn also risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater in seeking to keep the viewers in the dark by paring down the links and exposition between events to a minimum, but the power of the atmosphere and the emotional intelligence of the directorial choices do prevail, as does John Turturro against the emotional straitjacket of his role.

6/10

Jack Reacher (Christopher McQuarrie, 2012)

Much fuss was made by fans of the airport shop thriller novels about casting hobbit Cruise as the giant ex-military policeman, whereas more concern should have focused on the character's duff name, suitable only for an elderly groundskeeper, or the star's ego, which has reached alarming levels of self-delusion in his unwilling descent to desk job status as far as action films go.
Here, the plot, which has Cruise applying his own maverick brand of justice while seeking to clear a former army sniper of a civilian massacre, is of course perfunctory, with the usual tiresome car chase. And while some of the action scenes work through reasonable choreography, others are purely gratuitous and off-the-shelf. Regardless, lingering star power has vouchsafed us an imminent sequel.

4/10

Dah (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002)

Ten, probably one of the lowest-budget films you'll ever see, being entirely shot on two digital cameras fixed to a car dashboard, is a collection of ten sequences where a female taxi driver in Tehran talks to her passengers, who range from a woman going to prayer to a prostitute. The real-life son of the actress also features heavily, with the two of them bickering about her character's divorce.
It's no fault of the director that a number of influential publications picked such an uncinematic piece as one of the greatest films of the decade or all time with wilful perversity. It's better ignore this and appreciate how much a sensitive treatment of mostly non-professional actors can bring out in terms of substance, particularly when access to the varied lives of women in such a restrictive society is so hard to obtain by other means.

6/10

Saudâji (Katsuya Tomita, 2011)

Saudade follows a group of disaffected Japanese youths as they seek to come to terms with their identity in a modern-day Japan that does not readily offer them a niche or opportunities. Some are builders, others bar hostesses and wannabe hip-hop artists. The addition to the mix of the exclusion felt by Brazilian-Japanese and Thai immigrants gives the film another layer which serves as a serious declaration of political intent on the part of the director. As such, it's of primarily anthropological interest to a western audience, with subjects which Japanese cinema has rarely touched on, and it is overlong for what it has to say, with little of real consequence occurring. Nevertheless, the freshness of the perspective is welcome.

5/10

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (Paul Mazursky, 1969)

This sex comedy drama was quite a hit in its day, probably considered somewhat adventurous by the middle-of-the-road punters, which is just how the characters within it view the swinger lifestyle they try so hard to acquire. They're two couples trying to stave off middle age with pipe dreams of free love and subsequently finding it a poisoned chalice. The tone is thoroughly breezy and, even if it is irredeemably dated in its outlook and basic prudishness, it makes quite an entertaining excursion all the same, with a denouement of surprising depth too.

5/10

I skoni tou hronou (Theodoros Angelopoulos, 2008)

Angelopoulos's death in 2012 meant that this trilogy centering on modern Greece was never completed, and so the esteemed director's career unfortunately fizzles out with a damp squib. The trademark painterly photography is still in evidence as a filmmaker traces the life of his Greek communist mother across decades and countries, but The Dust of Time is a listless telling of a story which has to be passionate, with characters repeating hopelessly stilted lines when not struck dumb by the symbolism of it all, sleepwalking from scene to scene. The location shifts from nation to nation to little purpose, like those restaurants that do eight different national cuisines and all of them badly, the last resort of many an artist bereft of ideas, i.e. reeling off places and global events in the vain hope that their names alone will lend some meaning. Willem Dafoe, a serial culprit in reverence of directorial sacred cows, does his usual open-mouthed hand-wringing, Bruno Ganz looks lost and falls back on inappropriate avuncularity and Irene Jacob, as the mother, is quite stunningly wooden. Only one scene, with the recollections of an old man related through sound and dialogue as if they were current and real around him, rather than the standard recourse to flashbacks, hints at what the director was capable of at the height of his powers.

4/10

A Lonely Place to Die (Julian Gilbey, 2011)

Be thankful for small mercies; this low-budget British thriller does not have Danny Dyer in it, despite the presence of a Serbian warlord and gun-toting kidnappers. The plot, such as there is one, has a group of mountaineers in the Highlands find a young girl interred in the wilds and then get chased by the aforementioned abductors, who are hell-bent on shooting the lot of them for running off with their moneymaker. The taut execution of the chase is as efficient as it is exploitative in its violence, and overall it would have been decent of the makers to provide mouthwash for viewers subjected to its gun-priapism, which unfortunately overshadows its adept cinematography and bold landscapes.

4/10

Io Sono Li (Andrea Segre, 2011)

Shun Li and the Poet is set in a modern-day Italy much preoccupied with the relatively new phenomenon of large-scale immigration into the country and the resistance, often bordering on xenophobia, that it has engendered. Here, a Chinese illegal immigrant called Li - the Italian title of the film means both 'I am Li' and 'I am there' - faces ridicule and suspicion in Venice from local fishermen who frequent the bar where she works while being under the exploitative yoke of her Chinese isolationist bosses, who forbid all fraternisation with the locals. Then a growing friendship with one of the fishermen, an elderly Serbian immigrant, brings an unexpected ray of sunshine to her toiling existence.
This is a simple film with no massive agenda beyond wanting to make its audience see the situation from the other side, but makes its point unhistrionically and with genuine feeling for its downtrodden characters, making full use of the evocative mist-shrouded setting. There is a bittersweetness that lingers past a moving ending.

7/10

The Purge (James DeMonaco, 2013)

2022, and America has been taken over by the New Founding Fathers regime who have instituted an annual one-night event called The Purge. This involves citizens being permitted to commit any crime whatsoever, with the rather spurious justification that the introduction of this has slashed the crime rate by allowing people an outlet for their inner aggression. Ethan Hawke sells security systems to the rich to hide behind for the duration, but of course watching him sitting with his family in his house for the night would not make much of a thriller, and so the violence gets let in when a gang of privileged psychos demands that they release a homeless fugitive they had targeted for summary execution.
There is the seed of a good idea here about the social self-exclusion of the rich and the inherent contempt of swathes of American society towards the poor, but it gets hopelessly swamped by dependence on the violence it purports to condemn, the irritating dimness of the victimised family, the transparent Heath Ledger's Joker-channelling of the gang leader and above all the ludicrous nature of the whole premise. Goodwill generated through attempted condemnation of the brutality of (U.S.) society has dissipated long before the hoary device of the last-gasp rescue by an off-screen shooter is used for the fourth time.

4/10

Seven Thieves (Henry Hathaway, 1960)

Hollywood workhorse Hathaway turned his hand to the heist genre with a strong cast and Joan Collins, and the setting is the perennially enticing French Riviera, although large parts of it are only shown as back projections, which is odd considering the next shot is then in situ again. Edward G. Robinson has spent years planning to rob the casino in Monte Carlo and recruits a truculent Rod Steiger as the seventh member of the team. The film alternates between Collins's cringeworthy cabaret dancing and Steiger barking orders at the rest of the crew, while holes in their master plan big enough to drive a truck through appear, even if making allowances for their not having to deal with Ocean's Eleven-level security systems. Nevertheless, it just about holds together because of the interplay between the veteran leads.

5/10

On the Road (Walter Salles, 2012)

Kerouac's cult novel finally made it to the big screen, over sixty years after it was written, and it took a French-Brazilian collaboration to do it, casting an English actor as the narrator and focal character to boot. You wonder why the Americans would be so uninterested in their own national mythology when it comes to the beat generation. Perhaps there is too great a degree of dissociation between the mix of pretentious naivety of the self-styled poets drifting in the vacuum immediately after the war and the post-Vietnam and post-hippy world: the beats have nothing relevant to offer any more.
The film did not receive a favourable reaction, in any case. For me, the fault does lie with the source, as the adaptation is quite faithful and actually reduces the cringeworthiness of the worst excesses and self-indulgences in the novel, bringing out some of the poetry of the characters that originally attracted readers and contextualising their actions more successfully than the novel, as the lens gives us a third-party perspective outside the narrator's prejudiced eye. It is quite clear we are dealing with hopelessly immature pricks. It is also handsomely shot and Garrett Hedlund is a revelation as the mercurial drifter, Dean Moriarty. But you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and Salles's attempt, while brave, is always fighting an uphill battle, frequently too enamoured of its stars and the novel's status to retain a healthy distance.

5/10

Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011)

Elena, a humble woman trying to do well for her feckless unemployed son and his family, lives in an opulent Moscow flat with her rich husband, who also has a spoilt daughter of his own. He refuses to subsidise her son's life despite her repeated entreaties. Then he has a heart attack and an opportunity presents itself to rectify matters.
The character of Elena is closely akin to how the Russians seem to see their nation; silently and stoically suffering the vicissitudes of a cruel world. All the characters apart from her are self-centered and there is no sense of any community between the enclaves of the rich and the tower-block slums, the gap being filled only by TV and anarchy. The main virtues of the film, its adherence to realism and avoidance of pat moralising, also make it a grim experience to sit through as the director clearly sees no prospect of redemption for the society he dissects so succinctly.

6/10

The Fearless Vampire Killers (Roman Polanski, 1967)

Rattled off by Polanski in a frivolous moment between Cul-de-sac and Rosemary's Baby, The Fearless Vampire Killers is a comedy horror film which has the unfortunate drawbacks of being neither funny nor scary, and populating it with moments of entirely random weirdness does not adequately make up for these oversights. Polanski plays the timid assistant of a daft professor on the trail of the local Dracula type, and in keeping with Hammer spoof practice there are timorous oddball villagers, a hunchback henchman, heaving bosoms and a lot of crucifixes and garlic. It has cult status largely for its English-as-a-foreign-language chopsocky film approach to dialogue, where large parts of the acting consist of deranged chuckles, grunts and other verbal and physical tics, but is basically little better in execution or ideas than any Carry On film, and frequently a whole lot more irritating than one as well.

4/10

A Bucket of Blood (Roger Corman, 1959)

Master of the cheap and cheerful B-movie, Corman was churning out productions at a ridiculous rate in the '50s and '60s, with a highly variable quality level. A Bucket of Blood is at the better end of the range, a sardonic little Twilight Zone-flavoured piece about a nobody who aspires to emulate the local beatnik hipster artists and gets recognition from them as their peer through the accidental killing of his own cat. He is then forced into having to trump his achievement, and things soon go pear-shaped. The dialogue satirising the groovy cats is very funny in places and, while there's not much in it beyond that, it once again demonstrates Corman's ability to make something watchable out of a few bits of string.

5/10

Believe (David Scheinmann, 2013)

Bend It like Beckham with an even younger lead and a concomitantly simplified social agenda, Believe is another addition to the kids' fairytale football flick canon where the path is plotted out with a time-tested sense of security. The steady presence of Brian Cox is always a plus, this time playing a retired Sir Matt Busby, who takes it on himself to coach the team of plucky Mancunian working class nippers to a cup final against the local grammar-school toffs. But these things very much hang on the likability of their heroes or heroines to generate goodwill, even amongst an audience of children, and the rebellious 11-year-old with the magic feet who the film revolves around is just too hopelessly dim to put up with all the way through, never mind the rest of the hokum on show.

4/10

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1943)

Powell and Pressburger could do no wrong in the '40s, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is the peak of their insouciance, being filmed in the middle of the war and containing barbs at the establishment and war heroism in no uncertain terms. It follows the life of a career soldier over forty years, starting in jaunty screwball mode in the years before the Great War and gradually progressing to a wistful ending as he finds himself to be a man out of his time. Sentimentality does creep in strongly and the prevailing environment in which it was made colours the message propagandistically, but at the same time no film until the 'fifties dared suggest the notion of a good German, and the nominal hero is by no means a paragon of virtue either in his beliefs and actions. Mannered dialogue and comic national stereotyping may have dated aspects of it, but the humanistic heart lingers on.

7/10

Gold (Thomas Arslan, 2013)

If the mere idea of a German western seems as incongruous as the spaghetti variety, the scenario here actually makes perfect sense: the Germans are would-be prospectors struggling to cross Canada to make their fortunes. They have little idea of the challenge ahead and are largely unlikable in their self-interest. Gradually, one by one, they fall along the wayside. There is little heightened action, in its place strong period detail instead, and this is welcome, but there is also an emotional blankness at the core of the film which is not helped by an obvious fascination with the landscape leading to making each shot as sun-saturated and picturesque as possible, when involving the hostility of the elements would have supported the sense of hardship that the script is meant to convey.

5/10

Ta'm e guilass (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)

A mid-period work from the prolific Iranian director, Taste of Cherry is a minimalist piece in which we follow a man driving around Tehran trying to get one of his hitchhiking passengers to agree to bury him in the event of his suicide. Some are completely freaked out by the notion, while others attempt to persuade him to abandon the attempt on religious or philosophical grounds. It's a small but interesting study of human nature, with insistently repetitious dialogue reminiscent of a Mamet screenplay, somewhat undermined by the opaqueness of the protagonist as no explanation is ever given for his actions beyond the simple conviction that life is no longer worth living, and therefore any wider parallels that might be drawn also remain unrealised.

5/10

The Bay (Barry Levinson, 2012)

The success of the The Blair Witch Project licensed a wave of low budget-encumbered filmmakers to have a stab at features in the 'found footage' style and by now even well-established industry names like Barry Levinson are not above putting out pet projects for tuppence ha'penny, feeling legitimised by the format's popularity. But this popularity has also sent it well past the point of effective freshness by now, especially for horror, such as here. The Bay tries gamely to sucker in a horror audience with the style to sneak an overt eco-message under their radar, with an pollution-spawned outbreak of killer parasites laying waste to a small town on the U.S. east coast and works neither particularly well as horror because of its finger-wagging priorities nor as a serious political sermon due to being compromised by the need to keep topping up the gore quotient.

4/10

The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski, 2013)

With a character upstanding and all-American enough to evoke nostalgia Stateside while being utterly family-friendly and the Verbinski-Depp partnership to the fore again, Disney must have been convinced they were onto a winner on the scale of Pirates of the Caribbean. But the character is the primary problem: he has the personality of Superman without the powers, and the trappings of Zorro without the dash or licence to kill. The makers obviously realised this at the outset and gave Depp's Tonto a far larger part to play. Predictably, he's a hoot as part stone-faced shaman, part pontificating clown, and of course completely eclipses Armie Hammer's bland nominal hero. The end result is a lot like Wild Wild West with better quality control, which just means that you won't find it as painful to sit through with your kids, who are its only feasible audience despite the occasional confused strayings into adult themes.

4/10