Hush (Mike Flanagan, 2016)

A deaf and mute female writer who lives in a house in the woods is terrorised by a psychopath. The static set-up therefore excludes any greater twists beyond the to-ing and fro-ing of the power balance, with the duellists taking turns to take lumps out of each other, and the amount of violence is vicariously excessive as is now the genre norm, but at least making the victim unable to hear and therefore vulnerable in a different way than usual adds a dimension to the mechanics. The script exploits this to its full potential, and the result is undeniably tense, with the character's muteness also mercifully meaning there is less interminable screaming and more emphasis on visual pointers. That said, it's still just a slasher pic.

5/10

The Magnificent Seven (Antoine Fuqua, 2016)

We can let the fact that a remake of the 1960 Western is wholly pointless slide, never mind that the source film itself was still just a morally simplified retelling for the American audience of Kurosawa's masterpiece. Because this manages to fail entirely on its own merits. The warning bells are there right from the first second, as a CGI-enhanced landscape gives way to an old-style Technicolor palette, which may be a break from the modern propensity to alternate constantly between blue and yellow sepia, but also serves as a statement of intent to make an old-school western, whether we want one or not.
The action is transposed from Mexico to the States, because who cares about Mexican peasants in the Trump era? And what does it matter that when the cartoonish levels of carnage by the evil land baron who terrorises the townsfolk pass by entirely without government intervention, it makes even less sense because of the transposition? Then the band, which is slavishly built up of every improbable ethnic representation, right down to a Chinese man throwing knives and an Indian brave (liberal Hollywood really is its own worst enemy sometimes), have their teeth extracted at once by the mercenary motive that made the previous versions more nuanced being forgotten about without so much as a by your leave.
After several instances of robbery from a few more films and boring fighting conducted in the spirit of body count hyper-inflation being a virtue, the politically predictable assortment of survivors ride off into the sunset. Cue the original Elmer Bernstein theme and the opportunity to reflect on the hours and millions wasted.

4/10

My Old Lady (Israel Horowitz, 2014)

Kevin Kline arrives in Paris to claim the flat that he has inherited following his father's death, only to find an old Englishwoman (Maggie Smith) in residence and not only refusing to move, but claiming a monthly annuity from him under the arcane French 'viager' system. Then her daughter Kristin Scott Thomas turns up too and is soon at loggerheads with him over the arrangement.
These are three fine actors somewhat let down by overly simplistic characterisation, Kline's character a sort of ageing distillation of the self-centred and intellectually insecure fool he's been doing on and off since A Fish Called Wanda and Maggie Smith presenting her usual curmudgeonly bluntness. Kline mopes about like a superannuated adolescent with verbal diarrhoea as the messy past of his father's affair with Smith and its consequences is excavated and then, somewhat inevitably, he finds love with Scott Thomas. It does contain enough instances of wit to justify persisting with, but offers little real reward at the end.

5/10

Captain Phillips (Paul Greengrass, 2013)

Fairly faithfully based on the hijacking of an American cargo ship by Somali pirates in 2009, Captain Phillips is another vehicle for Tom Hanks to dominate the screen as the decent everyman in distress, whereas some depth to the background of how Somali piracy became so systemic would have been more interesting. But perhaps also too much of a divergence from the facts of what occurred.
So instead, what we get is a protracted hostage scenario with the captain being shouted at and jabbed with guns for hour upon hour by the group who have kidnapped him from his own ship, while the U.S. Navy prowl about in the background exchanging the usual military comms about how to neutralise the situation. At least the performance and character of the group leader is more multi-faceted than the norm, but the other three are pure stereotypes from the psycho to the scared kid. True to life it may be, but also rather boring.

5/10

The Fundamentals of Caring (Rob Burnett, 2016)

Paul Rudd, a moping writer facing divorce, becomes the carer of Craig Roberts, a sarky teenager with muscular dystrophy. Naturally, a bond forms between them and they set off on a road trip to see America's regional curios, picking up a few more strays on the way. Rudd and Roberts do bounce off each other nicely, although nothing out of the commonplace for the comic odd couple set-up occurs, the film doesn't manage to penetrate under the skin in the manner of Little Miss Sunshine, for example, which it clearly seeks to emulate the mood of, and the ending is inevitably schmaltzy. It's amiable enough with a few decent pieces of dialogue that stave off complete saccharine overload,but at the same time completely throwaway as well.

5/10

Jason Bourne (Paul Greengrass, 2016)

Matt Damon is dragged out of hiding again through his ongoing quest to find out the whys and wherefores of his murky past, although by now it's difficult to see what else he needs to unearth, besides even more evidence of the CIA's utter villainy. To emphasise this, a secondary plot is added where the Agency Director (Tommy Lee Jones, effectively the Emperor from Star Wars) decides that a social media billionaire who won't play ball with them on allowing access to every user's personal details has to be bumped off. Then many, many foot chases and several city-wrecking car chases ensue across the usual assortment of locations, including Athens, Berlin, London and Las Vegas, with scant room for dialogue, particularly from the hero himself. There's very little credible espionage involved any more, and when the brave new face of the Agency declares at the end that Tommy Lee Jones's character belonged to the past, presumably with his propensity to reach immediately for guns rather than computers, one has to conclude that the makers of this are stuck with the same quandary. It is very difficult to make the technobabble of real modern spy games thrilling. But this really shouldn't be the way to go any more, even if the requisite thrills are still efficiently generated.

5/10

Remainder (Omer Fast, 2015)

A man rushing away from a building in the City of London is struck by falling debris from a building and, upon waking up from a coma, finds himself millions richer through an out-of-court settlement by the company that owns the building in question. Suffering from amnesia, he sets about recreating everything he can remember through sets and actors to jog his memory and things get out of hand as a criminal connection is revealed.
It's difficult to feel at all for the central character with his diffidence and disregard for anything beyond himself, and this the critical failing of the film. It's a shame, because it becomes apparent very late on that there's the seed of a very complex narrative structure struggling to manifest itself as time becomes a loop and every scene that has passed needs to be reevaluated. There is as much that frustrates as that which intrigues. This may have a lot to do with the director being a video artist: the end result generates more ideas than it's capable of, or even interested in, answering.

5/10

The Girl on the Train (Tate Taylor, 2016)

Emily Blunt stars as an alcoholic woman near mental collapse who keeps on taking the same train every day back and forth past the house of what she believes is the perfect couple, a dream that she hasn't been able to attain. This is the more solid part of the film adaptation of Paula Hawkins's bestseller, largely due to a very convincing portrayal of degraded, pitiful dependency and obsession by Blunt. However, the rest of the film struggles to match that level as the woman she has been spying on from the train goes missing and she, with her regular blackouts and constant revisiting of her ex-husband, becomes a suspect. It slides all too easily into schlock psycho film territory, and gets too much for Blunt alone to keep afloat. It has been frequently compared to Gone Girl, with some similarities in subject matter, but lacks most of that film and novel's Hitchcockian dramatic twists and tension.

5/10

The Nice Guys (Shane Black, 2016)

Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling play, respectively, an odd-job thug for hire and an ethically flexible, somewhat dim-witted private eye in Los Angeles on the trail of a missing porn star in another American nostalgicised revisitation to the 'seventies. Presumably the fact that the era is seen as full of enough modern comforts and vices, but without the complexities yet of technology become too fast to keep up with, has a lot to do with the current trend. Of course, as well as being when most of the filmmakers involved were growing up. In any case, when used well, as they are here, the selective period trappings add a lot of entertaining campy colour.
Then the second element that has to work, with the duo obviously being a mismatched partner coupling, is the chemistry between them and that is a resounding success. It bodes well on this front that the director wrote Lethal Weapon and then as a director brought us the oddball buddy noir Kiss Kiss Bang Bang too. The dialogue is frequently rip-roaringly funny and the overall style completely irreverent without being crass. The plot itself contains nothing much worth scrutinising, but if that can be accepted as the price of keeping it jaunty, The Nice Guys is a refreshingly diverting addition to a genre that's otherwise already starting to get a bit jaded.

7/10  

Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016)

Critically plauded to the heavens by the likes of Sight & Sound, Toni Erdmann shuffles on screen sideways and delivers a drama under the guise of a comedy. An eccentric and lonely divorced father undertakes to enter the life of his harangued business consultant daughter in her work milieu in Bucharest, causing her no end of trouble as he inveigles his way, sporting ridiculous comedy teeth and wig, into all her professional dealings posing as a vaguely-defined businessman.
At two hours and 40 minutes, the film could have done with some editing as mundane scenes are repeatedly drawn out beyond a meaningful span, giving the impression that someone simply forgot to turn the camera off or just didn't know how much it took to make a single point. But, on the plus side, the longueurs do allow for something that is increasingly a rarity in modern cinema: time to think. As a consequence, the essence of the story, that of a father trying any way he can to reconnect with his child, comes through with a more powerful impact and has become quite affecting by the time we reach the final fade into the ether of the rest of their lives.

7/10

All Is Lost (J.C. Chandor, 2013)

We come across an old man, Robert Redford, stranded in the middle of the Indian Ocean writing his final words to his family. Then there is a rewind to eight days earlier, showing how he got to be there when a sequence of calamitous events began with his yacht being holed by a drifting cargo container. At no point do we learn his name, see another person or get any more actual dialogue apart from his cries and mutterings as hope drains away. Instead, we watch Redford wading in and out of water trying to overcome the increasingly desperate situation.
It's even more hard going than most survival stories with their false dawns because there is nothing inflatedly dramatic, and no change of scenery. The character makes mistakes, learns from them and still fails repeatedly, though not necessarily through any fault of his own. Gigantic cargo ships thunder by oblivious to him and in effect, now largely unmanned through technology, become impassive forces of nature as much as the storms that buffet him. It's too simple a structure to really hit filmic greatness, but as honest story-telling it deserves full respect.

7/10

Star Trek Beyond (Justin Lin, 2016)

The helm is handed over to a pure action movie director and the scriptwriting to fanboy and serial maker of bad career choices Simon Pegg, and the end result equals meh. The Enterprise gets totally wrecked again by another embittered baddie with a grudge against the Federation, Idris Elba struggling to project a persona from under piles of generic reptilian latex, and the explosion count may well have reached a series record. It's not offensive in that it doesn't shit on anything that went before and when it does occasionally pause for breath and allow some interaction between characters to take place, it manages to generate some indulgence towards its cavalcade of silly derring-do. But this franchise really is in danger of disappearing down the toilet if the course isn't readjusted quickly towards a better guiding star.

5/10  

Our Kind of Traitor (Susanna White, 2016)

A chance meeting with a defecting Russian money launderer, super-hammy Stellan Skarsgård laying on an extra-thick accent, plunges the couple of innocents played by Ewan McGregor and Naomie Harris into a web of spy business with the Russian mafia after them and MI6 (mostly represented by Damian Lewis, channelling Smiley) vacillating about whether to take the defector and his family in.
There have been better examples of source material from John le Carré than this offering and while the outline remains feasible, ramping up the violence, making the villains - the aforementioned mafia, British politicians taking bribes - so obvious and basically serving up The Man Who Knew Too Much with modern trappings doesn't really add up to anything which demands attention or to have been made at all. It goes through the motions competently without ever actually becoming gripping.

5/10

Macbeth (Justin Kurzel, 2015)

Any new retelling of Macbeth has to work hard to justify its existence after so many versions. That this one does is already an achievement in itself. Casting a brooding Micheal Fassbender, already grimly resigned to his fate from the outset, and Marion Cotillard scheming blindly and without regard for consequences, is a good start. When this is married to superb staging and cinematography, all tones of hellish grey and crimson, through bleak landscapes and visceral, bloody battles, the end result begins to become very good indeed. Mists and smoke constantly envelop turning points in the plot, not just creating a natural confined stage out on the heaths, but accentuating the sense that it is the supernatural that is always in control and that Macbeth is effectively a victim of destiny. Fassbender increasingly wears a ghostly smile at each setback as this becomes apparent to him, and Cotillard in turn is given a moment of horror at the sudden realisation of what she has helped to engender.
There is a considerable amount of reinterpretation of the soliloquys in terms of how they are verbalised: some are made wholly internal, others projected to a far wider audience, and occasionally this does not serve any apparent purpose. The accents of the actors, notably the two leads, are also incongruous. But then the film pulls off a second piece of inventiveness in the costumes and scenography: both involve such a melange of styles, from Roman field tents through Eastern Orthodox clergy to woad-daubed warriors that insisting on authentic Highlands brogue becomes somewhat pedantic.
Despite critical acclaim, the film fairly much bombed at the box office, strongly suggesting that audiences have no appetite any more for Shakespearean language, even though the stories themselves continue to be recycled ad infinitum in less challenging forms. Therefore this screen version may be the last for a long time. If so, it serves as a fitting testament to the essence of the play.

7/10

David Brent: Life on the Road (Ricky Gervais, 2016)

Ironically, Gervais's resuscitation of his David Brent character, both his money-maker and cross to bear, is as much a self-directed and produced vanity project for an ageing comedian in a rut as Brent's decision to pay a bunch of young musicians to go out on tour with him to allow him to indulge a pipe dream away from his sales rep job. And about as pointful. It doesn't really qualify as a real film, being more a continuation of The Office except with all the other characters of interest from the TV series removed, and along with that both more diverse sounding boards and contrasts to the excesses of Brent and quality control too. All that the supporting cast get to do is roll their eyes endlessly as Brent launches into yet another inexorably gaffe-bound ramble. It's not that these can't still produce the occasional smirk or guffaw at how cringeworthy they become, but that over one and a half hours they become mechanical repetition: there is nothing else here but watching a sad little man digging a grave for himself over and over again.
The recent Alan Partridge film largely managed to avoid the pitfalls of over-familiarity with the similarly embarrassing character by still remembering to have a story and other funny personae around him too. If Gervais can't or won't take a leaf from that book, perhaps it's time to call it a day.

4/10

X-Men: Apocalypse (Bryan Singer, 2016)

The very first mutant, the millennia-old En Sabah Nur, is reawakened in 1983, ten years after the events of the last film and sets immediately about destroying mankind. In parallel with this, in order to provide the nearly omnipotent baddie with opposition, the existing characters in the timeline are all revisited and a few more are added for good measure, such as an emo Nightcrawler, some in line with continuity and others with completely rewritten back stories.
The ranks of the X-juniors continue to grow with each instalment, the scriptwriters half-heartedly building a narrative bridge to the first X-Men film at the same time. This is leading to a serious case of superhero inflation, with each one of them having to be given an opportunity to do their turn, and the amount of CGI the film piles on top of that as the global destruction gets under way effectively chokes the drama out of it: almost every dialogue has to be cut short after serving its primary function of exposition of what's going on. The need for linkage between the films is also a burden, as is the obligatory Wolverine cameo. Meanwhile, Oscar Isaac, playing yet another character doused in blue make-up. is wasted as the megalomaniac villain.
There are moments when there is some relief, such as an extended rerun of the Quicksilver bullet time scene from the last film, and Singer struggles manfully with all the demands placed on him, but the franchise really can't go on developing this way.

5/10

Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)

Unlike Anderson's big hits of the '90s, this somewhat slipped under the radar of moviegoers despite a fair number of critical plaudits and an all-star cast. It may be that having Joaquin Phoenix as the lead these days automatically stamps a film as arthouse, if being based on a Pynchon novel didn't already do that. Regardless, it's a diverting enough leisurely saunter in a sardonic noir vein through the Los Angeles of the flower power era, now as mythical as the Wild West with its retro fascist cops (yes, Josh Brolin brings his lantern jaw along to play the main one of these again) and antediluvian hippies and the Vietnam war and the Mansons looming somewhere in the background,
Phoenix's character, a private eye investigating the disappearance of his ex and her millionaire sugar daddy, is more or less like The Dude if he actually committed himself to do a real job, bumbling and mumbling from encounter to encounter powered by a non-stop chain of spliffs and somehow coming up trumps at the end, with the overall tone reminiscent of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, for example (in fact Downey Jr. was originally lined up for the role). The period flavour is strong, the dialogue is cute and it takes two and a half hours to arrive pretty much where it started, with the audience wondering where they've just been. This is probably a case of mission accomplished on the part of the director, but a bit more substance wouldn't have hurt either.

6/10

Trumbo (Jay Roach, 2015)

Dalton Trumbo was at one point the highest-paid screenwriter, until the House Un-American Activities Committee got him blacklisted for his Communist beliefs and forced him to spend ten years writing execrable B-movies, as well as Oscar winners such as Roman Holiday, in the shadows under pseudonyms.
We've been here many times before: Hollywood does feel comfortable dealing with the era of McCarthyist repression from the perspective of its own denizens. Nevertheless, Trumbo is competently made with a dry humour that is usually lacking from approaches to the subject but is in keeping with the farcical nature of the events of the time. It is also well served by its cast, except for the decision in a few cases, such as the depiction of Kirk Douglas, to find lookalikes instead of more subtle portrayals. But it would all be pretty easily forgotten without Bryan Cranston as Trumbo, an avuncular and self-deprecating moral crusader on one hand but also a man who wants recognition and material comforts for his family: his performance is the glue that holds the film together and raises it above the standard persecuted artist biopic.

6/10

Eye in the Sky (Gavin Hood, 2015)

Related in real time, Eye in the Sky goes through the stages of a British drone strike on Islamic suicide bombers in Nairobi. The painstakingly assembled operation hits a hurdle when a small girl is spotted on the ground right next to the target, and then numerous levels of hierarchy right up to the Prime Minister have to be consulted for approval with the seconds ticking away. This is all handled with credible complexity, with political qualms creating procrastination and buck-passing and those detailed with executing the actual kill shot almost unable to cope with the ethics of their actions. The human drama is somewhat hindered by the very nature of the set-up, with all the involved parties thousands of miles apart and communicating through screens and phones, but the technical verisimilitude is convincing and the strong cast, notably Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman in his last film as the British military representatives, helps to overcome the scenario's inbuilt barriers to viewer engagement.
But it's nevertheless a shame how it seems to have been felt necessary to make the focal point for the moral dilemma something so cliched as a totally innocent little girl, and that this would somehow cause hardened military personnel to cry their eyes out. We ultimately know the world depicted is a more cold and mechanical place than this film would have you believe.

6/10

Rupture (Steven Shainberg, 2016)

Noomi Rapace is abducted after leaving her son at his dad's and her sinister captors perform cryptic tests and terror experiments on her, the eventual reason turning out to be that they're trying to convert her into them, the next stage in human evolution, which basically involves having spooky eyes and a skin fetish. Somehow, decent actors the likes of Peter Stormare and Lesley Manville were also duped to be on board and you cringe every time they open their mouths to utter more tripe. Perhaps least forgivably for something with the trappings of the sordid torture porn genre though, it isn't even frightening at any point. Any comparison made between this film and a pile of shit should justifiably result in a court victory for defamation of character by the aforementioned pile of shit.

2/10

T2 Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 2017)

This long-awaited sequel to the iconic Trainspotting was by no means inevitable due to differences between the director and cast, even if Irvine Welsh had already penned the literary follow-up years before. But thank God it's finally here, and more importantly that it proves worthwhile.
It's now twenty years later, with McGregor's Renton, still clean, turning up in Edinburgh again to track down his former friends, finding poor old Spud still struggling with addiction and the calculating Sick Boy planning to start up a brothel. Meanwhile, Carlyle's sociopathic Begbie has been in prison for the whole intervening period and his fury at Renton's betrayal so long ago has only festered instead of abating. The tension really gets racked up when he escapes and then finds out that Renton is back again.
It would be impossible to reproduce the anarchic freshness of the original film, and Boyle is well aware of this: there are several metalevels in how the characters mull over a past they can't recapture, varyingly seeing parts of it through rose-tinted glasses and others through regret. In the words of Sick Boy, Renton has become a tourist to his own youth, but so are they all. It manages to be affectingly elegiac and still give room for moments of innocent, open hilarity. And the updated techno-centric soundtrack is a stonker too, smoothly complementary in its references to the original one. It's a wonderful, emotive return and when it had to be pointed out to me afterwards how many plotholes there actually were (most notably, Begbie hiding out after his jailbreak in, er, his own house), I found for once that I didn't really care.

8/10

A Bigger Splash (Luca Guadagnino, 2015)

Named decoyishly after the Hockney painting, A Bigger Splash is nevertheless a fairly non-divergent remake of La Piscine, to the point that even the characters' names aren't changed, with Tilda Swinton taking the Romy Schneider role and Matthias Schoenaerts the Alain Delon one, albeit that this time the former is the dominant power in their relationship as a Bowie-ish rock star who's recovering from laryngitis. But the change in gender dynamics is possibly the film's one concession to modern times, despite a sub-plot involving refugees flooding to the Mediterranean island where the couple are staying on holiday.
Their seemingly contented sojourn is rudely shaken up by the arrival of Ralph Fiennes's record producer, a former lover of Swinton, together with his sultry daughter. Fiennes has a field day with the role, boisterous, drunken and talking a mile a minute, with Swinton forced to be non-verbally reactive, and they are the best thing about the film by a mile. In contrast, the sexual tension that the set-up tries to generate to justify the descent into chaos that occurs is weak and unconvincing. It would have been far better to use the source as just a starting point and then create a new story focused on the Fiennes and Swinton characters, since nothing of value is actually added - even the photography is deliberately 1960s arthouse, with its sudden unnaturalistic zooms - and the refugee story in the background only serves as a gloss of contemporary flavour. One suspects that the director's upcoming remake of Suspiria, featuring the female leads from this, will likewise do nothing to validate itself.

5/10

Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

Faithfully based on Gillian Flynn's best-selling novel, Gone Girl follows the marriage of Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike (both great choices for once), writers who moved reluctantly to a small Missouri town. The structure both rewinds to the start of their relationship from the morning that she goes missing and from then on relates the past five years through her diary entries, and continues the present where he is accused of her murder as the main storyline. Until...we find that these are unreliable narrators, and then things get rather more complex.
For once a film worthy of its protracted running length, it's edge-of-the-seat stuff with wholly unexpected twists, which is a rarity in itself these days in Hollywood. It also contains considerably more substance, with its searing attack on the media circus that surrounds these events and the sheep-like way people are led one way and another by the reportage, than most films that purport to be serious critiques of populism. The charge made against it by some parties that the film doesn't also deal in an even-handed way with issues like false rape allegations is irrelevant: this is still fiction, not social activism.
Finally, Fincher has come up with something that almost matches the quality of Fight Club, even if it's only an efficient and nuanced thriller instead of anything iconic. It only took him 15 years to do so; let's hope that doesn't set a precedent.

7/10

Allegiant (Robert Schwentke, 2016)

The Divergent series drags itself onwards towards its demise more and more blindly, with the wet 'pure' heroine and her pals now discovering a city beyond the wall that has been responsible for their messed-up factionalised society all along, having created it as a sort of eugenic experiment. There's not an iota of originality here any more, just a succession of increasingly ridiculous bits of futuristic architecture and a lot of sanitised shooting. It's being rumoured that due to the film's poor box office showing, the last instalment will actually only come out as a TV movie. Doesn't schadenfreude feel good sometimes?

3/10