The World's End (Edgar Wright, 2013)

Much as I have a wealth of goodwill towards Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, which is fairly inevitable considering I'm of a comparable age, slacker terms of reference and even used to live around the block from them when they were coming to the fore in their rather delicious Spaced TV series, followed by the thoroughly riotous Shaun of the Dead, it is wearing a little threadbare now. It doesn't really pull the wool over anyone's eyes to present that, Hot Fuzz and this being part of a coherent whole just by calling it the 'Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy'. But maybe I protest too much: this isn't Kieslowski, so is it funny?
Sporadically, yes. But numerous buddy scenes are rehashes reheated too many times over the years, which gives no sense of progression. And there are more derivative than meaningfully referential elements in the whole, which has Pegg's ageing goth, fighting against the dying of the light, frogmarch his friends from twenty years back around their old hunting ground on a pub crawl until they uncover an alien takeover plot. It would have been so much nicer if they'd not bothered with the token go at sci-fi/horror/kung-fu et al, because when the theme of having to face no longer being young occasionally pokes through, it's really quite sweet, just because they are such likable souls.

5/10

Kick-Ass 2 (Jeff Wadlow, 2013)

It is not a good idea to presume that setting your stall out as a superhero spoof gives you the licence to try to milk a franchise out of it yourself. Doubly so when all the wit goes out of the window at the same time: love or hate the first instalment, it had pizzazz and a guilty discomfiting sense of pleasure at having a little girl carve her way through hordes of thugs. This, however, is just hopelessly bereft of new ideas, and has to resort to even higher levels, if that were possible, of dumb violence and gross-out toilet humour. It's not a good sign when you start missing Nicolas Cage's pontificating solemnity from the last time around.

3/10

Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)

An arthouse horror drawn from the premise of 1985's panned Lifeforce, in that an alien female vampire preys on the male populace of Earth, Under the Skin earns a fair amount of kudos for opting to create disquiet rather than going for the jugular. The scenes where Scarlett Johansson drains her single male victims are nightmarish psychic events rather than being saturated with blood and the film is punctuated with longueurs where she's just driving around non-descript Scottish towns which force consideration of all the things we are asked to contemplate.
The Man Who Fell to Earth, on the level of a study in absolute alienation from contemporary society, is a relevant reference point. There are also strong echoes of Tarkovsky and Lars Von Trier in the sense of the character's haunted isolation. The lack of blood is a parallel with, though not a cause of, its bloodless air, just as the nudity is purely surgical: the predator is an autist who is defeated not by the traditional human bacteria as an insurmountable barrier to alien invasion, but her own sheer incomprehension at the complexity of the world. Credit must be given for the film's ambition, but it does succumb to mistaking that ambition for profundity.

6/10

The One Hundred-Foot Journey (Lasse Hallström, 2014)

Director Hallström does not need to break a sweat directing this feelgood fairytale concoction, seeing as he already did outsiders moving into an insular small French town and winning over the locals through the magic of food in Chocolat. This time the outsiders are an Indian family fleeing trouble in Mumbai and led by their obdurate patriarch to set up their restaurant right across the road from a snooty Michelin-starred establishment. This naturally precipitates a clash of cultures.
It's a sure-fire banker, with the Spielberg/Winfrey producers' seal of saccharinity. The trope of food as a font of memory is deemed deep enough to be revisited over and over again, while immersion in either traditional French or traditional Indian cuisine remains strictly superficial and the younger romantic leads rather lightweight. Thankfully, Helen Mirren and Om Puri are there to lend some class as the feuding seniors, and the film's best moments are all to do with them trying to cattily outmanoeuvre each other. It's a shame that an imminent break-out of love will never allow this to continue, just as you know Puri's son will return to his roots after dipping a toe into the world of stardom in nouvelle cuisine. Pleasant and undemanding sustenance, then.

5/10

Kong Curling (Ole Endresen, 2011)

Truls Pålsen is a man hard put-upon by his overmedicated OCDs and bossy wife, trying to make a comeback in the curling rink to win the money his ailing mentor needs for a transplant. Various complications and shenanigans ensue on the way to eventual triumph.
Curling King is a blatant copy of The Big Lebowski, right down to the zoomed face shots, tripped-out cutaways and the composition of the hero's motley crew and bragging rival, with just the thriller bit removed. With that large qualifier, it does however have some genuinely chortlesome moments of its own and an amiable irreverence that makes for a harmless piece of fun. Thank God the Norwegians clearly don't have the need for a fist-pumping Vince Vaughn to rally behind in this kind of thing: the frowning blob that is Pålsen remains endearingly hangdog-like even in victory.

5/10

Der ganz große Traum (Sebastian Grobler, 2011)

Daniel Brühl stars as an idealistic schoolteacher who comes back from England to a stuffy German boys' school in the late 19th century and sets about introducing football to his pupils alongside English and a sense of 'fair play'. Predictably, this meets with the disapproval of the establishment and parents alike.
Lesson of a Dream may be based on a real story, but the liberalism and non-conformity of the teacher is pure fiction, being just a convenient frame on which to hang the usual cycle of tribulations and aspirations found in any Hollywood equivalent. That said, Brühl is always a likable presence and there are some sprightly enough scenes in a film that never strives too far beyond the feelgood level.

5/10

Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2013)

Frances, a struggling dancer, shares a flat in Brooklyn with a friend who moves out, forcing her to reassess her life. A series of relocations follows, taking in various jobs and probings into relationships, until she ends up more or less back where she started, except living alone.
This is a film heavily influenced by Woody Allen's Manhattan/Annie Hall period, with the use of black and white clearly acknowledging the debt: very little of consequence happens and it is entirely driven by conversations revolving around how to live rather than any actual forward momentum. The character of Frances is symptomatic of this: flippant, irrepressible, flighty, knowing and aimless. It is a vivacious portrayal by Great Gerwig, and there are as many occasions when you laugh with her as you want to give her a kick up the backside, but humankind can only bear so much navel-gazing. Unsurprisingly Gerwig, the film's co-writer, has also worked with Whit Stillman, the uncrowned king of ineffectual and contrivedly quirky American middle-class introspection, now that Allen's output has dwindled to ever-decreasing circles around his original preoccupations.

5/10

Song For Marion (Paul Andrew Williams, 2012)

Not yet the swansong of Terence Stamp and Vanessa Redgrave, which is just as well as they'd be going out with a whimper rather than a bang. He's a curmudgeon railing against the world and she is his dying wife, trying to stay spry to the last with a local old folks' choir. The irrepressibility of the well-wishing entourage will of course erode away the fortifications of his grumpiness before long, just as the resistance of the viewer is clinically targeted by singalongs which rely on the idea that pensioners doing Motorhead is intrinsically hilarious. A more cynical mind might suspect sanitised depictions of retirement homes and old age in this well-worn genre to be nothing more than propaganda, but it's really just preaching to the converted.

4/10

Oz the Great and Powerful (Sam Raimi, 2013)

The star of Sam Raimi, once so radiant, seems inexorably on the wane. Nothing for four years after the lacklustre Drag Me to Hell, and now an utterly pointless prequel to The Wizard of Oz, which relies on reproducing elements of the original for all its best moments, such as the transition from black and white, small-screen Kansas to the technicolour and panoramic Oz via another tornado. This scene, in fact, crystallises all that is wrong with the concept: it is quite clear that Oz is a real place and not merely a wish-fulfilling product of the protagonist's feverish mind, and so a vital layer of the story is lost right at the start.
More is quite simply not more: as with George Lucas's ill-conceived revisits to the universe of his youthful imaginings, all sense of wonder is drowned under a wave of vexatious bluescreen fripperies and desperate CGI. The songs are forgettable, the origin stories of the wizard and witches uninvolving and new sidekicks invested with little character. A waste of both the talents of a respectable cast and an unforgivably large budget, resembling Burton's regurgitation of Alice in Wonderland in not only its folly but even its look, with its failure to defile the memory of the classic source its biggest achievement.

3/10

Les Saveurs du Palais (Christian Vincent, 2012)

A comically tinged dramatisation of the story of Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch, the first woman to serve as the French President's personal chef at the Élysée Palace, Haute Cuisine is a fairly self-explanatory confection of basic ingredients, which comprise arcane bureaucracy and formalities, the deeply ingrained chauvinism of the environment and a feisty heroine set on upsetting the status quo. It's whipped up to something more than the sum of its parts by Catherine Frot's no-nonsense take on the character, while having to ride scenes of gastroporn of ludicrous degrees that make Babette's Feast seem homely fare. All in all, a witty and frothy amuse-bouche, but no full meal.

5/10

Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (Rodrigo Gracia, 2000)

Five loosely connected vignettes of women in Los Angeles, this is a product of quality as uneven as its range of acting talent, which goes from Glenn Close and Holly Hunter at one end to Cameron Diaz and Calista Flockhart at the other, with nothing in between. The latter two are given the most contrived characters, respectively a pontificating blind woman and a lesbian fortune-teller with a terminally ill partner, signalling the director's lack of confidence in their ability to sustain interest without props, and their episodes are accordingly of little interest. The only story with real legs in a male director's rather blatant attempt to make a gesture for wimmin is the Holly Hunter one, where she plays a bank manager seeking an abortion who is repeatedly accosted by a pushy homeless woman. The rest is largely unexplored and therefore remains inconsequential chaff, even if scattered with a few perceptive touches.

5/10

Pain & Gain (Michael Bay, 2013)

Bay takes a small break from playing with his giant robots to present a caricaturisation of a true story of three muscle-bound dimwits kidnapping a rich Miami businessman. Of course, it all goes belly up pretty swiftly through a combination of their steroidal delusions of grandeur, dependence on ludicrous motivational mantras and inability to lie low once they're in the money.
By Bay's standards, this is a thoughtful film, which is to say that the crass tastelessness and pop video style is leavened by some kind of satirical agenda revolving around the American dream and having slightly fewer explosions than normal. For me, though, it's only the scenes with The Rock, who is great value for money as a child-like cokehead Christian man mountain, that make the whole enterprise halfway palatable.

4/10

Ha-Mashgihim (Meni Yaesh, 2012)

In God's Neighbours, a young Jewish fundamentalist and his comrades violently enforce the Sabbath laws in their community, in between having skirmishes with Arabs. His single-minded life gets complicated when he falls in love with a girl who doesn't fit his extremist position. It's therefore a classic trajectory, in which the path to self-awareness and moderation has the usual pitfalls and way stations, but the characters are drawn with both care and a cool distance, and the artless principal performances in a courtship that is almost archaic in its sense of restraint make their story an involving one.

6/10

Zaytoun (Eran Riklis, 2012)

Beirut, 1982 and an Israeli fighter pilot is shot down and taken prisoner by the PLO. He escapes with the aid of one of his captors, an adolescent refugee to whom he promises passage to his dead father's house in Israel. They start the trek towards the border and go through the seven stages of enemies becoming friends on the way as if they were mere formalities and they had no reason for antipathy beyond force of habit. The film is nicely shot and feelgood, and it really shouldn't be. Digging a little into its making reveals what you would probably suspect anyway from the liberties it takes with logic, let alone its caricatures of comic and shifty Syrians and woman-murdering Arab militias, i.e. that the script was systematically purged of any meaningful attribution of guilt upon Israel by the country's censors. Any enjoyment had from the light interplay between the two protagonists is therefore hopelessly tainted.

4/10

Like Someone in love (Abbas Kiarostami, 2012)

A Tokyo student moonlighting as a high-class prostitute to fund her studies is sent one day to a client who turns out to be an elderly widowed professor, with whom she forms an unexpected bond. Meanwhile, she has a possessive boyfriend in the wings, who forms the latent threat to their connection.
It's clear from his previous work that Kiarostami has a fixation with cars, not as a fetishist or as a road movie devotee, but instead as a stage where characters are at once enclosed and trapped in duologue, while the oblivious world goes on in plain view around them. So here too, the key incidents such as the professor's encounter with the boyfriend and then with someone who compromises his identity take place in cars. It's an example of the undercurrents to be found throughout the director's superficially mundane accounts, paralleled by the frequent recourse to pregnant silences in exchanges.
This is not the director's most focused work, having only one substantial idea and being somewhat uncertain about how to bring the episode to a close, but is nevertheless to be valued for allowing the viewer time to think, which is rare in most cinema.

6/10

Staub auf unseren Herzen (Hanna Doose, 2012)

In her last film, Susanne Lothar plays a domineering mother seeking control over her daughter, a budding actress, to the extent of  trying to take her grandson from her with claims of parental irresponsibility. She is at once a monster and yet one that is very true to life, getting her own way through passive aggressiveness. She also harbours a deep well of bitterness towards her ex-husband, who turns up in Berlin seeking reconciliation in vain, and the end result is that she drives everyone away from her.
Dust on Our Hearts has the production values of a TV movie, but doesn't need any more to get its message across. There is an acute emotional intelligence at work here from writer-director Doose, and while the actress playing the daughter is too listless for the demands of her role, this is more than made up for by Lothar, who effectively humanises a petty tyrant. Damaged family stories are rarely this perceptive.

7/10

The Spikes Gang (Richard Fleischer, 1974)

Uncertain in tone, starting as a comedy western and then trying its hardest to turn gritty and sombre, and uncertain in location, being filmed in Spain to no great effect, this is a forgettable episode for both the director of cult classics like Soylent Green, and the formidable screen presence that is Lee Marvin. He plays a brusque aging bank robber who takes three pipsqueaks fancying a shot at the romantic life of the outlaw under his wing. The fact that one of them is Ron Howard just before Happy Days may give some advance warning of how credible the juvenile gunslingers are, and Marvin's worldly gruffness cannot save the film from slowly fading out of sight through a succession of drab shoot-outs, culminating in a contrivedly cynical ending.

4/10

Försvunnen (Mattias Olsson & Henrik JP Åkesson, 2011)

A woman driving across Sweden to a new life after her brother's suicide is followed and then abducted by an off-the-shelf loon. She manages to escape and is then pursued through the woods, the directors ticking off the genre boxes dutifully from the false dawn when a stranger offers a way out, through the stranger's immediate summary execution and the heroine's unlikely resistance to having lead in her. Storywise, there is nothing in Gone beyond joining the dots and the only points of interest are the relative absence of hysterical screaming and effective use of the austere forest environment, where danger can lurk in any direction.

4/10

Kriegerin (David Wnendt, 2011)

A twenty-year-old girl lives in a dead-end eastern German town, in adulation of her dying grandfather and his Nazi past. She duly falls in with a gang of Neo-Nazi thugs and, like them, covers herself with fascist tattoos. Then her beliefs are compromised by meeting an Afghan refugee, and an eventual renunciation of her delusions is set under way.
Combat Girls is a bleak and pessimistic piece with little of the faith in redemption present in the similarly-themed American History X, for example. In comparison, it benefits from the stark reality of its setting - Dessau, where it was filmed, is notorious for the not-too-distant murder by the authorities of a failed asylum seeker - and the committed performance of its lead. Its principal asset, showing things as they really are, is also inescapably its failing as a film: it's hard to sustain interest or involvement with so incorrigibly repugnant personages and such a hopeless environment.

5/10

Citadel (Ciaran Foy, 2012)

A young father on a condemned estate in an unspecified British city suffers from agoraphobia after the murder of his wife by juvenile hoodies. They continue to hound him until their abduction of his baby daughter forces him to face up to his fear.
The Glasgow tourist board may count themselves lucky that the filming location is not expressly given, for this is effectively hell on Earth, a place too desolate to exist even in the grimiest inner-city or kitchen sink stories. It is clearly meant to be a projection of the character's mental state, and is an element of the film that works relatively well, twinned with the camera's limited field of view at moments of stress, sowing anxiety outside its margins. However, it is over-reliant on this mood and its protagonist's constant petrified whimpering, becoming mired in a single track, and there was really no need to make the faceless gang that torments him supernaturally inhuman: it detracts from any social point the film might otherwise have been able to make alongside the psychological horror, and what remains is a licence for reactionary demonisation of the dregs of society.

4/10

Two for the Road (Stanley Donen, 1967)

Primarily of interest these days for film students for being an early example of Hollywood experimenting with non-linear narrative, musical and comedy director Donen's attempt to incorporate personal and serious themes is the story of twelve years in a couple's relationship, from when they first meet to when divorce seems imminent. It's related as four separate trips they made through France and the jumps from one timeline to another are frequently signposted by a passing car from the former continuity, which is a neat device that is missed when the scenes don't allow for it, as changes in the couple's hair and attire aren't stark enough, and Albert Finney's demeanour in particular remains fossilised.
He seems to have been cast because the director's favourites Gene Kelly and Cary Grant were too old and too comedy-bound, and having him as a romantic lead nearly sinks the film, for all of Audrey Hepburn's lightness, some funny catty scenes and moments of perspicacity regarding love and marriage. He barks out all lines in a pompous and flat drone, as if issuing orders to colonial servants, and it's quite impossible to believe, even if allowing for period tolerance of hectoring pricks as charmers, what anyone would see in him.

5/10