Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams, 2015)

"Best/worst film EVER!" (delete as applicable). Or, dare it be said, somewhere in between? Rebooter sans pareil Abrams applies the same jazz-ups as with Star Trek, creating a melange of equal parts sharper action and sharper repartees, with nods to fanboys in abundance, than has been witnessed in the last three instalments.
The rub here is, though, that a reboot wasn't exactly what was called for, just a continuation of the original trilogy that buries the memory of the largely execrable prequels. While it does the second part of the remit with efficiency, making sure that cutesiness and helplessly clunky dialogue are largely avoided (although the expository nature of Han's and Leia's lines in their brief re-meeting scene is somewhat painful to behold), generating an entirely fresh storyline seems to be somewhat outside Abrams's range. Basically, an orphaned youth on a desert planet dreams of the galaxy beyond and is then flung into taking a droid with vital information in it to the rebellion, who then proceed to attack the Empire's planet-destroying machine. It's a shame that more effort wasn't put into this, which really cannot be counted as a spoiler, when there is so much that really works, too. The actors' performances are never less than solid, the references to the minutiae of the canon are witty and aptly placed and the visual aspects, such as the sight of the wreck of a star destroyer buried in the sand, are also quite awe-inspiring at times. And, perhaps the most importantly for fan-gratification and studio alike, it provides a few genuine shocks and sends the audience home with plenty of teasing questions still buzzing around in their minds.
So, on the whole, high marks for execution and middling ones for originality. Star Wars fans may be a conservative beast en masse, but they can surely be taken a little more out of their comfort zone. Maybe the next part, under the helm of the director of time-travel movie with a brain, Looper, will dare to do that.

7/10

Still Alice (Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland, 2014)

Julianne Moore hoovered up the awards here with her portrayal of a linguistics professor who develops early-onset Alzheimer's, and while her performance is certainly up to her usual solid standards, as far as the Oscars go it's hard not to think of the self-fulfilling prophecy of Kate Winslet declaring in a satirical context that she'll need to do a Holocaust film to get one, and then promptly doing just that a few years later. They do love degenerative conditions as a test of acting chops in just the same way. Having the character who is losing her use of language also be someone who defines herself by her command of it must have really had the directors in self-congratulatory mood.
The core problem here is flatness. Despite Moore's admirable efforts, the drama struggles to rise above the TV movie norm, not helped by centering almost totally on the more easily scriptable build-up to the end state rather than the blight itself. Hence, the mildly wayward daughter comes home to roost, the husband runs out of patience and the sufferer gets to make a teary public speech. The film is too squeamish in the end to expose the viewer to expose the viewer to the intolerable reality of the condition. Compare this to e.g. The Sea Inside or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly to appreciate how lightweight it really is.

5/10

Les Géants (Bouli Lanners, 2011)

Two brothers in their early teens are stuck in the countryside at the house of their departed grandfather, without parents either and down to the last of their money. They then hit on the brainwave of renting the house to a local drug producer, with rather predictable consequences.
The Giants is ostensibly a coming-of-age film, but the little fools seem to learn little through their dope-smoking and breaking-and-entering escapades except that some things are just not that good an idea. Then it all ends rather suddenly and vaguely as the director clearly has nothing more to say. The fact that the events are so much outside a realistic context of social services, police and starvation may be intended to mirror the unworldly nature of the mind in early adolescence, but it's incompletely communicated and so fails to convince as a conceit. This is also a pity because the kids do shine with what they're given to work with and the cinematography of the verdant Ardennes landscapes throughout is really quite sumptuous.

5/10

Brooklyn (John Crowley, 2015)

A girl emigrates to America in search of a life away from her stifling Irish home town in the 1950s, meets a nice boy, is torn between her new life and the old one and has to make a difficult choice between them. The plot of Brooklyn is a well-worn one, but the devil is in the detail and this is elevated beyond its bare bones by a combination of Colm Tóibín's source novel's sensitive characterisation, handsome period detail and Saoirse Ronan's spirited portrayal of the conflicted lead. She is maturing into the capable actress that numerous directors seem to have seen the potential in her to become through her teens, no longer just a simpering waif: as the story arc moves on and the character grows in confidence in her new environment, she conveys the transition quite credibly. It's also striking to note here, for such a slight story where - uncommonly for the cinema of today, one realises with some dismay - nothing unrealistically dramatic happens, with no violence, intrigue, plot-driving calamities or screaming confrontation, how much human interest can be generated simply through faithfully relating the challenges of an ordinary life.

7/10

Terminator Genisys (Alan Taylor, 2015)

The big studios must wish that all their franchises could incorporate alternative timelines so that when an instalment falls flat on its face, like Terminator Salvation did, it's as easy as pie to reboot by simply saying that the timeline has changed. This means that the audience is expected to approach the new set-up unprejudiced by past experience, the complications caused through having to cast new actors for established characters can be swept under the carpet, and, so preciously for the spaghetti mess of past and future potential and actual realities of this series, the plot is effectively reset to square one.
Except that clearly you can't alter the past that much. So it is that this instalment succumbs to destiny and also falls flat on its face. The recasting of feisty teen Emilia Clarke and simple-minded jock Jai Courtney for Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn is an unhelpful downgrade, but the film's real failings are in managing to get itself into a hopeless tangle once again despite having wiped the board clean, endless action sequences of little tension made worse by repeatedly 'reverentially' copying moments and dialogue from the first three films, and then having nothing of substance to put in their place when forced to come up with original content. It doesn't speak well for the film that the presence of Arnold Schwarzenegger as their creaking, superannuated cyborg helper is just about the only thing of any interest on show, nor is the fact that there is clearly no intention to stop milking the cash cow yet. Poor old Arnie should be reminded of one quote from the first film, so long ago: "And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead".

4/10

Before I Go to Sleep (Rowan Joffé, 2014)

Nicole Kidman stars as a woman with anterograde amnesia, waking up every day with all events of the past ten years wiped from her memory, her unrecognised husband stoically repeating the essentials to her before heading off to work. When a neurologist starts to treat her in the husband's absence, she gradually begins to make some progress in reassembling her past, which does not turn out rosy at all.
Although there have been numerous films that have featured the condition, they will now always inevitably be compared to Memento, where a slow reveal technique and a razor-sharp plot structure brought home the awful reality of the disorder with full force while enhancing the thriller element. With Before I Go to Sleep, on the other hand, you feel from the outset that a happy ending is in the process of being smuggled in and, as the ailment is proven to be a reversible one, the plot becomes increasingly degenerative, its logic falling apart a good while before the tired stalker phase and the flaccid denouement.

4/10

The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum, 2014)

As this was made not long before the The Theory of Everything, comparison between the two biopics of twentieth-century English geniuses with difficult life stories is inevitable, and while The Imitation Game is far more guilty of the Hollywoodisation that the genre is always prone to, it is markedly more compelling viewing. It helps, of course, that Alan Turing's life is partly shrouded in mystery owing to both his wartime code-breaking activities and his guarded private life as a gay man in an age when it was a crime: there is simply more intrigue to work with. Then there is the fact that what Turing did, i.e. effectively significantly shortening the war through his work and inventing the computer at the same time are simply easier for a non-scientific audience to relate to.
Yes, convenient events are frequently embellished or cooked up, and characters are made either more photogenic or more cartoonish to serve the drama - Turing himself is portrayed as nigh-on autistic - and that's a pity when there is so much to work with anyway, but it is compelling drama nevertheless and by no means unintelligent, with Benedict Cumberbatch delivering a formidable nuanced portrayal of the eventually criminally ostracised pioneer.

7/10

The Theory of Everything (James Marsh, 2014)

The problem with biographical films, when judged against original drama, will always be that we simply know what will happen. This can be offset to a degree by being about a figure whose story is shrouded in some mystery or controversy, but when, as here, the focus is on someone who we effectively know everything about, there isn't really anywhere for the drama to go. Besides this, The Theory of Everything also has to grapple with several other challenges: firstly, making theoretical physics engaging for the lay viewer, and secondly having a protagonist who can effectively not move or emote for half of the film.
No solution is really found to the first hurdle except for the customary oversimplification, with advanced maths reduced to lots of visual metaphors of black holes, invocations of time itself as some kind of omnipresent/non-existent god and a soundtrack that hardly takes a breather in cajoling us towards the desired sentiment. So it's as well that the second and more essential element is handled a great deal better. Eddie Redmayne as Hawking does his humanly best with the role, bringing both an impishness and a stubborn defiance to the character that remain constant from the precocity of his student days through his long years of physical decline, to the extent of reaching the biography actors' hallowed land where the portrayal starts to supersede the real-life person in our minds.

6/10

The Last Days on Mars (Ruairí Robinson, 2013)

The surface of Mars is getting to be terrain so well-trodden it will probably come as a bit of a yawn when we finally get there. This effort, which squarely disappeared under the radar of the viewing public, has the by now customary supernatural slant, but takes it to a ridiculous extreme which some kind of lurgy turning the crew of the astronaut base into zombies. And that's your lot. Thankfully Ridley Scott redresses the balance somewhat with this year's The Martian, which realises, like Gravity, that the real-world based hard sci-fi model can be quite awe-inspiring enough without resorting to standard horror or wondrous alien culture tropes.
In the meanwhile, Liev Schreiber needs to take a good hard look at his career; he's criminally wasted on these things.

3/10

Avengers: Age of Ultron (Joss Whedon, 2015)

Well, having the continued presence of Joss Whedon at the helm for the second time does mean a continuity of sorts and a modicum of wit which seems to have charmed critics, but this is a lumbering beast with even more lead characters and even more sub-plots under the 'more is more' philosophy, which means that no single one gets room to breathe. Furthermore, James Spader doing the voice of the genocidal robot Ultron - given a woolly motive about wiping out mankind to save the Earth - is no substitute as a villain for a proper actor like Tom Hiddleston in the first round. To cap it, the fights, while they may be competent popcorn, have given up all pretence of explaining what business mortals have on the same team as gods and the like. Just because it's kids' stuff, it doesn't have to be quite so throwaway.

4/10

The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014)

An Australian take on the interminable demonic domestic possession genre, The Babadook is elevated above the norm by two factors. Firstly, it largely spurns the usual descent into spinning heads, torrents of blood and religious mania, choosing to cultivate disquiet instead. Secondly, it has real emotional content; the relationship between the widowed mother and her young son is not just a peg to hang the horror on but the heart of the story. Any parent whose frayed nerves are sorely tested by their offspring will empathise.
Of course, it does wobble in the final reel as these things are wont to do, uncertain as to when to stop the screaming and shocks, but just about manages to stay on the rails to a genuinely unusual end scene.

6/10

Chappie (Neill Blomkamp, 2015)

District 9 director Blomkamp directs more sci-fi, back in his native South Africa, with very mixed results. The idea of a robot becoming sentient is nothing new in itself, but there is a twist in his creator tussling with a nasty gang to educate the child-like machine with diametrically opposed values. That aside, there are lashings of extreme violence and the worst collection of haircuts in living memory, including Hugh Jackman's rare turn as a mulleted baddy. It manages to retain the attention for the most part simply through eccentric ideas, but there has to be something fundamentally wrong when the most sympathetic character in a film is a droid.

4/10

Jupiter Ascending (the Wachowkis, 2015)

The impact with which The Matrix hit the screen seems like a distant memory now and the Wachowskis prove to really have lost their mojo for good with this daft prepubescent-targeting bloated sci-fi product, featuring Mila Kunis as a young woman who discovers she's intergalactic royalty with Channing Tatum as a shirtless Vulcan-eared lunk of a protector to her from Eddie Redmayne's limp villain, who has designs on harvesting Earth for human material. The CGI space battles are a true incoherent mess, characters stumble from one scene to the next repeating the same dialogues and sentiments seemingly because there isn't enough plot to fill the running length and, most unforgivably, given the huge budget, there is no originality in the visual design. It's a bloodless mish-mash of half a dozen precursors and amazingly boring at many junctures.

3/10

Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann (Felix Herngren, 2013)

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared, an adaptation of Jonas Jonasson's picaresque best-seller, which features the escapades of a centenarian on the lam with misappropriated loot in the present and flashbacks to his Gump/Zelig-style adventures through the ages, suffers from some discontinuity by choosing to skip over some of the colourful episodes of his preposterous life - not that more than the film's two hours is really called for. What clearly passes for humour in Sweden is also cringeworthily broad at times, but the overall tone is nevertheless so light, as the ingenuous and virtually idiot savant protagonist stumbles through life from one moment of serendipity to another, at the music-driven tempo of Kusturica at full comic tilt, that it's hard not to be charmed.

6/10

Kingsman: The Secret Service (Matthew Vaughn, 2014)

What begins as a rollicking Bond-spoof yarn, thanks largely to the comic interplay between Colin Firth's gentleman spy and the council-estate urchin he takes under his guidance, descends by the end to a tiresome splatterfest with lots and lots of beheadings. Vaughn and his perennial writing partner, Jane Goldman, are still the pubescent comic-book fans that now have the budget of their dreams and need to be reined in: as with Kick-Ass, the dazzling acrobatics and blinding pace are badly undermined by the sheer puerility and tastelessness of scene upon scene. Meanwhile, Samuel L. Jackson hams as only he can with yet another set of character quirks as the megalomaniac villain, this time Gaia-lite, cheeseburgers and a lisp. That about covers it.

5/10

The Loveless (Kathryn Bigelow & Monty Montgomery, 1982)

Bigelow's first feature and also that of Willem Dafoe as the lead, this film noir-biker flick hybrid sees a gang of young motorcycle punks ride into a Deep South one-road town and upset the locals. It's basically a more violent and graphic version of The Wild One with the added realism making the behaviour of the directionless scumbags less tolerable, but then the redneck townsfolk don't exactly command respect either. Its main message, such as there is one, is that folks are shit and 'We're going nowhere. Fast', in the words of Dafoe's laconic gangleader. It does have a certain style and pithiness of expression, but it's a very unpolished work and stands up less than well against, say, the Coens' Blood Simple from a few years later.

5/10

Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014)

Much has been made of the greater-than-standard scientific accuracy of the wormholes in Nolan's sci-fi epic, but this also completely ignores the numerous other unsatisfactorily explained implausibilities, starting with the premise that in the near future nearly all the world's crops have died out, and then moving on to set up Matthew McConaughey as the only man to save our bacon by virtue of stumbling onto what's left of NASA so that he can be roped in to pilot a mission to another galaxy. There are spectacular scenes along the way courtesy of the mega-budget but the tension factor in the build-up isn't actually on a par with the much-derided Mission to Mars, the deus ex machina finale owes too much to 2001: A Space Odyssey and McConaughey's Texan mumble is more wilfully incomprehensible than ever.

5/10

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (Peter Jackson, 2014)

Whither now, Peter Jackson? The Tolkien well finally runs dry - there can't be enough takers even in the world of fandom for a pounding of The Silmarillion into cinematic form - and it's just as well as the series has been running on empty for a long while now. Piling on more and more battle scenes does not an interesting film make, particularly when the superheroics involved have got so ridiculous that they invite guffaws, which partly come as just an emetic reflex against their sheer repetitiveness as well.
This is not to say that the last chapter is without any assets: the scenery, both the natural and the studio-designed, is as breath-taking as ever; the build-up to the final showdown with the orc horde is paced patiently and the scenes involving the dwarf leader Thorin in the throes of gold-induced madness almost touch the level of Shakespearean tragedy. It's just a shame that one is constantly aware that this is all in the lull before the interminable CGI storm to come.

5/10

Mortdecai (David Koepp, 2015)

Journeyman scriptwriter Koepp ventures directing someone else's screenplay for the first time and, while the ones he has penned over the years have been of variable quality, this is most definitely not a good move. It's basically an opportunity for Johnny Depp and Gwyneth Paltrow to try to outdo the ridiculousness of each other's upper-class English accents while some sort of sub-Austin Powers action comedy takes place around them involving the recovery of a stolen painting. Depp does make a good posh twit a la Paul Whitehouse (who also cameos) as the titular cad, but without a plot of any consequence and saddled with running jokes that are tedious even on their second airing, it's really a test of the audience's indulgence.

3/10

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (Francis Lawrence, 2014)

The teen rebellion parable grinds on towards its inevitable conclusion with the weakest instalment thus far in the series. The heroine Katniss is now stuck as the reluctant figurehead of the burgeoning uprising against the tyrannical state and gets to do little else than mope and cry about her lot for the duration of an astonishing two hours. It's complete franchise-milking filler en route to the final showdown between her and Donald Sutherland's baddie President on a scale of brazenness that even The Hobbit films balked at, and the attempt to flesh out the plot with politics instead of non-stop violence, while in itself a welcome break, is scant consolation for the overall air of the saga kicking its heels.

4/10

Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014)

Michael Keaton plays a washed-up actor famous for a series of superhero films trying to salvage his reputation with a self-financed and heartfelt Broadway production, which runs aground at every possible turn. It's obviously easy to see this as Keaton himself and read the Birdman voice in his head taunting him for his failures as Batman, but the freedom the viewer is given to see those parallels really just bolsters the basic theme of the paranoia of a typecast actor very conveniently, and there's no real risk of mistaking his performance as akin to self-parodies such as Van Damme in JCVD and the like.
The secondary target, after the self-absorption of actors, is critics, and of course critics en masse flocked to praise it to dodge the attack. There is a fair amount to praise, from a technical point of view with its painstakingly crafted long tracking takes, and also in terms of the wit in the dialogue, but the Michel Gondry-style dream sequences and voluntary self-confinement within the walls of the theatre also veer dangerously close to navel-gazing at times.

6/10

Kosmos (Reha Erdem, 2010)

A dishevelled stranger stumbles into a snowy Turkish town near the Armenian border and finds initial acceptance for having rescued a boy from the river, which then turns on one hand to awe at the apparent miracles he performs and on the other increasing irritation with his cryptic religious pronouncements and unwillingness to work. In between, he keeps meeting a local girl with whom he communicates relentlessly in animal yelps and howls, which is presumable meant to impress on us what free spirits they are.
The film is lambently shot in an evocative setting and promises a lot with its dancing on the edge of out-and-out surrealism, but only manages to deliver one perceptible and limp message after two hours of spiritually flatulent Paulo Coelhoesque fannying about, namely that people are fickle and credulous on the whole.

4/10

A Most Wanted Man (Anton Corbijn, 2014)

Philip Seymour Hoffman, in his last leading role before his untimely death, still fills the screen despite his obvious physical decline - he barely gets above a mumbling shuffle for most of the film - and a somewhat slender script, not one of John le Carré's most focused works, taking swipes at American overseas interventionism rather too indirectly to have much bite.
You can expect the veteran rock video specialist Corbijn to produce a stylish-looking work, and so Hamburg gets its turn to look inhospitable and threatening in a retrogressive Cold War fashion. As for the slow-paced story itself, which involves Hoffman's German counter-espionage agent Bachmann trying to connect a pillar of the Muslim community with financing terrorism, it is at least plausible, though hardly fresh with both his superiors and the CIA tying his hands behind his back at every turn.
So, it doesn't offend the eye nor insult the intelligence with the cartoon action that is now the spy film default, but it does still fall back on three Americans playing Germans as its leads, despite the attendance of the estimable Nina Hoss and Daniel Brühl in the background, which somewhat undermines any anti-U.S. imperialist point that it could and should have had the courage to make. Without that ire or any sense of narrative urgency, the end result is somewhat dull.

5/10

Route Irish (Ken Loach, 2010)

Here, Loach turns his eye on the issue of Western intervention in Iraq, only obliquely in that the chief focus of his ire is the employment of unpoliced contractors to mop up the mess left by the invasion, the director probably having realised that the boat for attacking the war itself has long since sailed. The perspective is that of an emotionally scarred ex-contractor seeking redress and answers relating to the death of his comrade in Baghdad, the structure essentially that of a thriller. It's fundamentally nihilistic in outlook, with the protagonist becoming increasingly unstable as he uncovers more and more institutionalised corruption, and can easily be read as Loach publicly purging his system of any sinful temptation to entertain between the less single-note Looking for Eric and The Angels' Share.

5/10

Polisse (Maïwenn, 2011)

Polisse hoovered up the prizes at the French César Awards and won a Cannes Jury Prize to boot, but this is largely just testament to its political worthiness, being a depiction of daily life inside the harrowing world of a police child protection unit in Paris. So it tells it like it is, with little excess melodrama, but this also means little in the way of an actual predominant dramatic arc, jumping as it does from squabbling character to squabbling character - who are all fairly unlikable in a way familiar to viewers of the similarly 'gritty' Parisian police series Engrenages. Put simply, an actual documentary on the topic would have better served the purpose of educating, while in this form there is always a seed of doubt with regard to verisimilitude, while its fictional nature does not provide a compensatory emotional pull. It could have ended after half an hour or gone on for a whole series and the overall effect would have been the same.

5/10

The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)

Based on the memoirs of stock market scamster Jordan Belfort, who defrauded the system and investors with glee in the '80s and '90s, this unites Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio for the fifth time, but in truth brings little new to the table. It's basically a real-life Wall Street shot in the style of Casino and Goodfellas, complete with an ironic, winking voice-over by the antihero, and plenty of digressions to fit in knowing cutaways and period pop tunes. It is riotous entertainment, and DiCaprio commands the screen as the self-aggrandising and voracious monster Belfort, pill-popping, snorting and fucking his way like a machine through the years. But at three hours it's also far too long for the point it has to make and as Scorsese can churn out this kind of thing in his sleep, you have to ask whether, given such a meaty topic, a black comedy was all that he should have contented himself with making of it.

6/10

7 Days in Havana (Julio Médem, Laurent Cantet, Juan Carlos Tabío, Benicio del Toro, Gaspar Noé, Pablo Trapero & Elia Suleiman, 2012)

A loosely-linked anthology film with a multinational band of directors, each taking a day-long segment, 7 Days in Havana has all the usual failings and virtues of the form, the uneven quality promising an improvement after a duff segment and conversely a deterioration after a stronger one, even though in this case the screenplay comes from a single local writer. As a common denominator, it would be fair to say that a fair degree of appreciation of Cuban music and of the vivacity against adversity of the Cuban people are prerequisites for a sympathetic response.
The stand-out episode here is the furthest from conventional narrative, with Elia Suleiman directing and starring as a silent Middle Eastern observer walking around Havana simply looking at things in detail, to some telling and wryly humorous effect, while Laurent Cantet's end piece on the penniless residents of an apartment building banding together to build a shrine overnight is also of human interest. Conversely, Julio Médem's contribution is a soap and Gaspar Noé's voodoo ritual nightmare exactly as tiresome as you'd expect of him. The rest is filler.

5/10

Rush (Ron Howard, 2013)

The directorial career of Ron Howard has fluctuated wildly between the saccharine and weighty, with particular lows in his Dan Brown adaptations and highs whenever the source material is a biopic. So, it comes as no great surprise that when he turns to the story of the intrinsically dramatically-charged Hunt-Lauda Formula 1 confrontation of 1976, the end result comes with a virtual guarantee of quality. Put simply, a ready-made real-life drama like this is easy to convert and it would take a poor director to mess it up completely, which he doesn't.
The two contrasting leads, Chris Hemsworth as the playboy Hunt and Daniel Brühl as his calculating rival Lauda, the latter getting his character's voice and accent down to a tee, do admittedly contribute a lot to make the package work. This is particularly difficult to do for a viewing generation used to the idea of the sport being an anodyne economic comparison between manufacturers of cars rather than slightly unhinged mavericks dicing with death, which it really was back then and which means that the tension can work even for people, such as this reviewer, who are not seduced in the slightest by millionaires in very fast cars. Basically, Rush achieves everything required of a decent sports biopic: it involves you in the event itself while filling in the human drama around it with some intelligence. I wouldn't go expecting any follow-ons either, which is a blessing. Mansell vs Prost, anyone?

7/10

Les Hommes Libres (Ismaël Ferroukhi, 2011)

In a gap-filling addition to the Nazi-occupied France genre, Tahar Rahim plays a young Algerian black marketeer in Paris who gets reluctantly sucked into the politics of the resistance. He cuts a diffident and uncertain figure, the film's main point seeming to be that heroism can happen quite without design or intent, and it's down to Rahim's charismatic portrayal that you never end up throwing your hands up in frustration at his non-committal comportment. At the same time, though, a story that was ripe for mining of deep drama never quite takes off: it's a curiously flat affair, with protracted scenes of Magrebi singing that feel like filler, vindicated largely just by its worthiness and adherence to realism.

5/10

Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014)

Ah, the old "we use only ten percent of our brains" fallacy that has got so many sci-fi dreamers drooling about the what-ifs of using more. Because this is Luc Besson at the helm once again, despite his promises to retire, the individual endowed with ass-kicking superpowers is of course a tasty starlet in the form of Scarlett Johansson, and there are the obligatory countless guns and car chases as well as Oriental gangsters, ultraviolence never more than a scene away.
Limitless may have been silly, but it was a model of hard science and restraint in comparison to this as Johansson develops god-like powers, preposterously first learning languages without any exposure to them. Then she's suddenly able to manipulate all matter, while becoming more and more estranged from mankind in a Lawnmower Man fashion, which is shown by her acting as blankly and ruthlessly as in Under the Skin. Besson was always cited as a key figure in the 'Cinéma du look', but now there really is nothing beneath the gloss, as impressive as the veneer may be.

4/10

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (Lasse Hallström, 2011)

This does indeed cover what it says on the tin, and makes sure we understand where we're going straightaway too, with Ewan McGregor's salmon specialist signposted as a closet romantic who'll end up with Emily Blunt's financial consultant as they chug along exclaiming disbelief at the conceit, namely creating a salmon-fishing river in the desert.
The film wants to have its cake and eat it by satirising a political establishment that wants to fix its Middle East image problem with a cuddly project and at the same time wanting to bolster the thin plot with spurious Islamist terrorists trying to sabotage the dam required because it's a Western symbol or somesuch thing. The fruit of their labours ends up wet and shallow, the appositeness of which hardly needs pointing out. Kristin Scott Thomas emerges from it best as the PM's press secretary, an over-the-top bitch of the first order and a departure from her serious roles that she sinks her teeth into with obvious relish.

4/10

Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn, 2014)

The superhero film production line has now reached Marvel's lesser-known heroes in its hunger for material to feed the mill, but it has to be said that this succeeds a whole lot better than many of the big-name vehicles. It's basically Serenity pushed through a Space Jam filter, which sounds awful but ends up not a million miles from Men in Black in overall tone, or, if you like, very close to what the dire TV series Farscape should have been. The reason I cite all these references is because there is nothing new here as such, with an Earthman and his band of disparate alien chums fighting a megalomaniac set on annihilating life as we know it, but it's zippy and quite funny in places too while providing solid popcorn thrills without having to resort to excesses of gore.

6/10

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2013)

Jeunet's best films have always overflowed with joie de vivre while dicing with whimsicality, and after a four-year hiatus he accordingly produced more of the same, this time in English and based on someone else's source material, but very much stamped through with his idiosyncratic style all the same. In a nutshell, a serious 10-year-old boy genius undertakes a journey from his family ranch in Montana to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. Hung on this febrile framework are digressions into various sciences, flights of fantasy and altercations with various odd characters (yes, Dominique Pinon gets a shoe-horned cameo again). It's as sweet and imaginative as you'd expect from the director and also well cast, including the child lead who stays just the right side of cloying in his squeaky elaborations. But it has to be said that Jeunet is hardly stretching himself after his latest break: you won't feel or remember much of it the next day, largely because not only he but also Gilliam, Burton and Wes Anderson, to name his closest peers, have all been over this terrain many times before.

6/10

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, 2014)

The second part of the Planet of the Apes reboot series starts with newsreels cursorily explaining that most of the world's human population has been wiped out by a genetically-engineered disease, which conveniently allows an equal struggle to unfold between the smart(-ish) simians led by Andy Serkis's Caesar and humans holed up in the ruins of San Francisco. It is at once more intelligent and less interesting than its precursor: there is more focus on the political aspects of the confrontation between the species, and yet the story arc itself is purely by the numbers, with an ape-human clash followed by an ape against ape one. The clear improvement in the CGI does mean that Serkis can now actually act with his face through the FX, so it's a shame that for the most part his character has become less articulate in verbal terms. The plot respects its own internal logic only insofar as it doesn't interfere with the imperative to get to the next scene.

5/10

Fury (David Ayer, 2014)

Fury starts out in a Saving Private Ryan tone and progressively leaches out any individual attributes it might have had. Brad Pitt commands a tank ploughing through Germany in the closing days of the war with an off-the-shelf crew of a boorish hick, a bible-basher, a stolid Hispanic and a frightened rookie. The Nazi opposition takes two forms, both equally improbable: either unstoppable behemoth tanks or droves of irrationally charging rent-a-goons. Either way, the Americans simply have to be the plucky underdogs, no matter what anachronisms that might entail (this is the director behind the infamous U-571, which prompted what was basically an apology for misappropriation of history by Hollywood from President Clinton).
Killing the heroes and their paramours equals an anti-war message in this lunk-headed milieu. Then Star Wars laser effects are superimposed on the gunfire, complete with red-green colour coding for goodies and baddies. There is some efficient dialogue and a few jarring shots, but by the time day-night continuity also goes out of the window without a care, who would care at all?

4/10

Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh, 2014)

You hope with biographies of artists that the seeds of their genius or the reasoning behind their work will be tackled at some point, as conventional a demand as that may be, but Mike Leigh does not seem interested in anything beyond Turner's place in society and therefore this remains an opaque work, accessible only as a character study of a man who did not fit into his time. Timothy Spall may have won the prize of all real prizes for a film actor for his portrayal, namely the Cannes one, but throughout it feels like Leigh doesn't really know where he's going with the direction of the character's eccentricity and consequently Spall's Turner is frequently reduced to a comic figure with the actor doing his level best to strive for variation in cycling through his repertoire of scowls, shuffles, grunts and mutterings. Incongruously juxtaposed against this is some beautiful, lambent cinematography, a first for a Leigh film, replicating scenes that Turner would come to paint.

6/10

Deux Jours, Une Nuit (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2014)

The Belgian Dardenne brothers, veterans of Belgian socially earnest cinema, have ploughed a Loach-like furrow since the '70s with features and documentaries about lower-class life in their home country. Having a big name like Marion Cotillard therefore seems like somewhat of a departure, but she's asked to slot into their realist milieu and acquits herself with aplomb. Her depiction of fragility and despair is immense.
She plays Sandra, a woman discovering upon returning to work following a bout of depression that the company has forced the rest of the employees to vote between letting her keep her job and their own bonuses. She insists she is fit to return, but it's immediately clear that she's one stumble away from a relapse. Nevertheless, her husband persuades her to talk to everyone individually in a bid to change their minds before a second vote.
It may be hard to believe the callousness of the company's approach in effectively making the workers do their dirty work for them, and this is the one polemic note from the directors, but the varied reactions of the workers themselves as she encounters them, pleading, are very lifelike indeed, as they either justify their self-interest or succumb to guilt. And then you realise that whatever the end result, Sandra's victory will be a Pyrrhic one as too many bridges will have been burnt.
Two Days, One Night is a profoundly deep exploration of social conscience that asks questions long after the closing credits and was probably too close to the bone to get that Best Foreign Language Film nomination. Their loss.

8/10

Der Schneider von Ulm (Edgar Reitz, 1979)

The Tailor from Ulm relates the true story of early German pioneer of heavier-than-air flight Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger, who spends decades trying to construct a working hang glider in the face of public ridicule, penury and the politics of the Napoleonic wars. The setting and factual background lend it a certain curio interest, but it suffers badly from an autism not uncommon in German filmmakers of the period such as Herzog and Fassbinder, leading to the protagonist garnering little audience empathy with his single-minded quest. You don't really care if he succeeds for all the attempts by the director to engage us in the magic of his vision with drawn-out flight sequences, and this is a criminal failing. Reitz later on when to make the acclaimed Heimat television series, by which time he'd learned to cover his obvious emotional disconnection somewhat better.

4/10

Le Passé (Asghar Farhadi, 2013)

Farhadi's sixth film is another complex relationship drama preoccupied, as most notably in the case of A Separation, with the break-up of a marriage. But here we are thrown into the aftermath instead, with an Iranian man returning to France to tie up loose ends with his ex-wife, and the title, The Past, reflects the backwards-looking nature of the story with the couple dealing with the emotional fall-out four years after the event and buried events gradually coming to light. Farhadi again makes effective use of his trademark technique of the deliberate omission of certain links and information to draw the viewer in, although more understatedly than before.
The trio of principal actors put in layered, naturalistic performances in which body language and expressions play a large part, no doubt owing to the director not speaking French and so focusing on more than just the dialogue. It's not comfortable viewing, particularly Bérénice Bejo's portrayal of the self-centred and unstable ex-wife, a million miles removed from her perky charm in The Artist, but has an emotional truth that reaffirms Farhadi as a distinctive and thoughtful voice in modern world cinema.

7/10

V Tumane (Sergei Loznitsa, 2012)

In the Fog is a spartan exercise, with only as much character or historical background, or indeed plot, as is required to get its point across. It's set in a German-occupied Belarus in 1942, with a local man released by the Nazis after an act of sabotage and therefore immediately suspected by the community of collaboration, two of whom take it upon themselves to execute him in the woods. The woods form an amorphous and directionless stage for a story that feels very much like a play, accentuating the sense of the indifference of the universe to the characters' switching concerns, and the encroaching fog at the end has been there all along in the obfuscation that occurs in people's minds during a war where it's not taken as a given what an individual can do to remain morally in the right. The pace does get pretty funereal at times, but there is plenty of food for thought here nevertheless.

7/10

Saving Mr. Banks (John Lee Hancock, 2013)

A selectively embellished telling of how author P.L. Travers was coaxed by Disney into having Mary Poppins made, Saving Mr Banks is patently a Disney product with its ultimate message of the power of fantasy as salvation. Yet there is also an adult core to the story, with the writer's childhood flashbacks, centred around the decline of her alcoholic father, resonating through her work and present day mindset. The greatest factual liberty the film is guilty of taking is creating a genuine friendship between a genial Walt Disney and the spiky, distrustful author, but the soft-soaping is bearable because this is done to accommodate the film's principal assets, Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson, with the latter's performance being somewhat of a tour de force. a scream when delivering streams of cutting bon mots and quite affecting when required to dig into the character's conflicted psyche. A rare beast, then: a film that serves Disney's marketing purposes to make you want to see Mary Poppins again, while working as entertainment and drama in its own right.

7/10

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden, 2015)

A sequel was inevitable given the pressure of the likelihood that some of the veteran cast would soon start popping their clogs for real and so we have another instalment of the same, drawn our over two hours. This is no bad thing in that it's as cosy as a cup of cocoa and the principal players are always watchable, but the main plot is even thinner than last time around, largely ripped off from Fawlty Towers as Dev Patel's jittery young hotel impresario gets it into his head that a particular guest is a hotel inspector, with all the predictable consequences. The awkward real India of the film is also pushed so far into the background as to remain completely out of view. Still, it would be foolish and pointless to expect social realism here and the spiky verbal interplay between Maggie Smith and co. remains a delight, even if a lightweight one.

5/10

Small Apartments (Jonas Åkerlund, 2012)

Great British TV comedians have not, on the whole, had a happy history of trying their luck on the big screen, and sadly Small Apartments is no exception, though it does prove that Matt Lucas is actually capable of acting as well as doing silly voices, so he's really not to blame. He plays Franklin Franklin, a blobby loser given to playing an Alpine horn in his dingy little Californian flat, with an assortment of oddballs for neighbours and a pantomime villain landlord who he ends up killing inadvertently, leading to scrapes thickly ladled with gallows humour as he attempts to cover up the crime. The tone swings uncertainly from absurdism and gross-out comedy to pathos, and there is the vexatious overall air of a belief in the notion that if you stick enough weirdness in, profound meaning about life's rich tapestry will be generated, which is a cloying hallmark of much of American independent cinema and fiction. Thank God, then, for Lucas, who may yet have a film career on this evidence, successfully bridging the gap between his Little Britain monstrosities and a real dramatic persona.

4/10

Emil und die Detektive (Gerhard Lamprecht, 1931)

The first screen adaptation of Erich Kästner's children's adventure best-seller, the popularity of which extended far beyond Germany, Emil and the Detectives is somewhat of a historical curio due to the novel's setting in the years of the Great Depression and subsequent filming in the last days of the Weimar Republic. Added to this is the presence of Billy Wilder as scriptwriter before his flight to Hollywood and the end result is very odd indeed. The basic framework is a precursor of the Famous Five genre, with a plucky young boy and his cohorts bringing down an adult villain who has robbed him, but the Berlin setting with its low-lifes, unusual for the children's literature of the time, and the strong influence of expressionism in the photography, particularly in a tripped-out sequence where the hero is drugged by the crook, confound expectations constantly.

6/10

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller, 2014)

Both a prequel and a sequel to Sin City, in that it consists of loosely interconnected stories with the same main characters set both before and after those of the first film,  Sin City: A Dame to Kill For strives for the seemingly impossible in trying to outdo both the violence and misogyny of its predecessor, which already set the bar high in both terms for a big studio flick. The stark monochrome comic book look is the same, and it is striking, but we've been here before and whereas the first time around it impressed by being so fresh, going a considerable way to alleviating if not excusing the pubescent boy's fixations with strippers and guns, we've seen it now and the film has nothing to offer except many more scenes of Jessica Alba gyrating on stage or even more people getting decapitated or shot in the eye. Nor is there any semblance of plots beyond revenge ones this time. As a pure spectacle, it still dazzles the eye. As cinema, it's worthless.

3/10

X-Men: Days of Future Past (Bryan Singer, 2014)

Bryan Singer makes a welcome return to the helm in the clearly never-ending X-Men saga after Brett Ratner's botch-job with the main characters in the third film, a teen version by Matthew Vaughn and two stand-alone Hugh Jackman wankfests. However, the weight of all this is clearly a lot to bear: once again, Jackman has to play a more central role by virtue of his pulling power than his character would logically merit and there are just too many personae and strands to tie together, never mind then having a plot on top of that that has to somehow make feasible leaps over chasms of causality as Wolverine is sent back from a ruined future to 1973 to change history with the X-juniors. Still, it's nice to see them try gallantly, even though it hardly holds together, and having McAvoy, Stewart, Fassbender and McKellen all present alongside Jackman is a great boon. I do feel sorry for anyone who didn't grow up with the comics trying to make sense of it all, though.

6/10

The Two Faces of January (Hossein Amini, 2014)

Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst star as a seemingly carefree American flâneur couple working their way through Mediterranean cities in 1962, meeting Oscar Isaac (of Inside Llewyn Davis fame), a young American small-time con working as a tour guide in Athens. The older man's dark past soon catches up with him, however, as seems to happen a lot to Mortensen's recent characters, and the trio have to take flight to Crete.
As with The Talented Mr. Ripley, the source is a Patricia Highsmith novel, and the parallels - rich Americans on the run from a murder scene in the Mediterranean of yesteryear etc. - are obvious. It makes good use of its locations and the cast are as dependable as you would expect from their track record. But it lacks the subtlety of the earlier film, simply because there is never any prospect that getting off scot-free is an option, nor is there a character as interesting as the utterly amoral sociopath Ripley at the core. Nevertheless, in comparison with most thrillers currently made with contemporary settings, it stands up well in terms of both tension and restraint.

6/10

Memory Lane (Shawn Holmes, 2012)

Supposedly made for $300, which you don't need to be a film student to find a ridiculous claim, this is time-travel sci-fi somehow trying to splice together Primer, Source Code and Flatliners and end up with the pathos of The Time Traveller's Wife. This is a mistake as all of the above had real actors and something original to say about the device, for all their other failings.
Basically, a traumatised war veteran comes home to a small town, stops a girl killing herself , which she then does anyway, and spends the rest of the film grieving and having his friends kill him and bring him back to life so he can revisit the past to try out work out what actually happened to her. I suppose some credit ought to be given for an attempt to say something about the inability of the mind to accept shock, instead of just going off down an action route, and the editing and camerawork are rather impressive given the budget constraints, but it's to little avail. Although it might have helped if the love interest had not been such a gurning coquette or the lead such a sadsack, the end result would still have been a bit of a mess.

4/10

The Love Punch (Joel Hopkins, 2013)

Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson play a separated middle-aged couple who take it on themselves to get revenge on an unscrupulous businessman who has driven them to penury, although only the kind of pretend penury that exists in smug films for the chattering classes. They consequently end up hatching a plan to rob him in the Côte d'Azur, for that's where you go in a thoroughly unimaginative romantic comedy without a single original idea, wholly reliant on the charm of the leads and the support of Timothy Spall and Celia Imrie. You do wish they hadn't all been so lazy, though.

3/10