Forušande‎ (Asghar Farhadi, 2016)

Farhadi's seventh feature bagged him the best foreign-language film Oscar, which the auteur then made optimal use of by publicly refusing to attend the awards ceremony as a protest against U.S. foreign policy. It speaks volumes of the man and his intelligence, just as his films do.
The Salesman continues along the same track that he's already carved out: a couple experience a moment of catharsis (here, a woman in Tehran is assaulted in their home while expecting her husband to return), where the viewer is denied crucial information, and then it is is up to us to piece together the truth, such as there may be any. It is detective work without a clearly delineated crime, but also a means of emphasising the subjectivity of experience, which in turn underlines how there are few cut-and-dried aspects to situations or people. Hence, the wife unhelpfully withholds what actually happened while the husband thunders on powered by the twin pressures of social stigmatisation and his own sense of self-righteousness. Neither is wrong or right: Farhadi's real craft is creating characters that are fully rounded, and he hasn't done it as well as this since A Separation.
A slow burner it may be, but that just means more time to think around the subject, from the fractured relationship between the couple to the values of the middle-class Iranian context and the parallels with the play Death of a Salesman, which they are starring in a production of, and all of these aspects are woven in with genuine purpose.

8/10

Shimmer Lake (Oren Uziel, 2017)

So, some bumblers rob a bank in an American backwoods town and it all progressively goes to shit, version 98.
The only ways a story as flogged to death as this, just as with zombie epidemics, can begin to justify its retelling is with superior casting, decent dialogue and some other distinguishing virtue. Recently, with Hell or High Water, the last one of these separators was a powerful melange of social context and atmosphere. Here, the director goes for the very modish gimmick of telling the story backwards instead, and the result isn't as compelling, but it does nevertheless manage to pull out a real twist at the end, which didn't seem possible given the structure and stock characters.

5/10

Predestination (The Spierig Brothers, 2014)

An odd hybrid emerges from the initial arrangement where Ethan Hawke, now well into his second career as a full-time player in left-of-centre science fiction B-films, is a temporal agent who hops into the past to stop a Unabomber type in '70s New York. So far, so Minority Report, Looper et al. But then it turns into a half-hour life story of another character's struggle with acceptance of being transgender, until getting back to the fray with a succession of loops upon loops until even the hardiest time-travel aficionados are liable to suffer motion sickness. It does become somewhat annoying in its desire to confound expectation as a result, but you do have to admire the Spierigs for still managing to create a consistent order of events in the chaos. The budget on Post-its, thread and drawing pins on boards in their workroom, needed to work it all out, must have taken up half the film's budget.

5/10

The Rover (David Michôd, 2014)

More truly unpeopled and hostile to life than any part of America, the Australian Outback is a fertile setting for dystopias where civilisation has collapsed, first seized on by Mad Max, of course, and this could almost be in the same universe as that series. Guy Pearce, building on an uncompromising character transition from pretty boy to grizzled Man with No Name, the latter more or less first seen as his outlaw in Hillcoat's The Proposition, is a tormented man with no apparent remaining purpose to live who goes off on a violent mission of vengeance after men who have stolen his car. Along the way, he picks up Robert Pattinson's twitchy, borderline halfwit criminal and the story proceeds in as direct a line as an Outback road to bloody retribution. Spartan and relentlessly nihilistic, it offers no redemption whatsoever, but does maintain a certain integrity in its refusal to fetishise.

6/10

Hundraettåringen som smet från notan och försvann (Felix & Måns Herngren, 2016)

The 101-Year-Old Man Who Skipped out on the Bill and Disappeared follows the further adventures of centenarian Allan Karlsson and his entourage as they go on a hunt for the formula for the world's best soda, which he lost some forty years before while still a double agent for the Americans and the Soviets. Cue flashbacks to the 'seventies, with characters such as Brezhnev and Nixon, in between scooting around from city to city in the modern day to the incessant accompaniment of a parping Kusturicaesque soundtrack. The comedy is as broad as before and its insistence on the hilarity of the proceedings grates at times, but, just as before, its blithe irreverence for decorum and daftness ultimately save the day.

6/10

The Girl with All the Gifts (Colm McCarthy, 2016)

It's another day in zombieland, which is now more familiar to us than any country with the possible exception of our own. A second generation of infected children who have normal human intelligence is being reared at an army base in the wake of the collapse of civilisation, and when the base falls it's one of them that holds the hope for a possible cure to the plague. What then follows is the attempt by her teacher, a scientist and a bunch of soldiers to take her across the country to shelter, dodging the screeching undead all the way.
It's impossible to have anything truly new in the genre any more, so we have to feed on what scraps we can. In those terms, a big-name cast of Glenn Close, Paddy Considine and, er, Gemma Arterton offer dependable support and the tension is well maintained. But ultimately, it's the stunning vision of a ruined London with its gutted high-street shops that is the real star.

5/10  

Alien: Covenant (Ridley Scott, 2017)

It would have been better to pretend that this was another not-Alien film like Scott did with Prometheus, because it adds as little to the saga as the Predator cross-overs, and is quite easily the weakest one in the series proper. At least the touch of Jean-Pierre Jeunet lent some novel demented twists to Alien: Resurrection. This is just painfully derivative, with a nondescript crew blundering idiotically into peril at every juncture to die in droves. It is somehow undeservingly kept afloat by Michael Fassbender playing a twin role as David, sole survivor of the last film, who has now become a mad-scientist psychopath, and his human-serving counterpart. Sure, the knee-jerk thrills are still there, but what we were supposed to get was the plot moved on further towards discovery of the purpose behind our creation, which the ending of Prometheus meretriciously promised, not just a slasher with high production values.

4/10

War on Everyone (John Michael McDonagh, 2016)

Roughly Starsky & Hutch put through a Bad Lieutenant filter, what we have here is two wise-cracking corrupt cops who, in between cracking skulls and getting drunk, philosophise on random topics in the manner of men learning a page of an encyclopedia every day. It's quite convinced that its irreverence is a colossal virtue and, granted, that does keep you watching, but the duo are nowhere near as charming as they should be to justify rooting for them. It's to The Nice Guys what Family Guy is to The Simpsons, a grossed-out derivative with added pop culture references, though the comparison falls down in that Family Guy frequently hits the comic sweet spot too in a way that its predecessor couldn't. War on Everyone makes do with just offending more minorities and sensibilities instead.

4/10 

Captain Fantastic (Matt Ross, 2016)

Viggo Mortensen makes a good son of the soil as an earth father raising a gaggle of children in the wilds alone after the suicide of his wife. It's an idyllic hippy commune of sorts, the children growing up preternaturally book-smart and politically indoctrinated against the capitalist system, but what droves of critics seem to have missed entirely is how the target of criticism isn't just the orthodox system, but also the father, who is given many of the attributes of a cult leader, albeit a benevolent one. His is the only voice that counts and the children repeatedly trot out dogma that they cannot possibly understand the full import of. The status quo cannot endure and is duly put to the test when they have to venture out into the world to travel to the mother's funeral, meeting hostility from the mother's conservative parents, who refuse to accept the lifestyle choice imposed on their grandchildren.
It's by no means a perfectly-realised piece, with unsteady jumps in tone from escapades and satire, often broad, to attempting to make earnest points about parenting and unconventional ways of living. In that sense, Weir's The Mosquito Coast, its harsher obvious precursor, was a more complete work. But it has a sustaining optimism and vitality that carries it over the choppier waters in the end.

6/10

Atmen (Karl Markovics, 2011)

A 19-year-old serving time at a juvenile detention centre for a murder five years before is attempting to secure his release through work placements, which his sullenness and pent-up anger prove a hindrance to, until working as a mortuary attendant starts to open up his eyes to the point of life.
Breathing is a dour, ascetic affair, with the camera's constant focus on the nonreactive, nondescript lead bearing a large responsibility for this. However, it is also resolutely set against indulging in melodrama, even at cathartic junctures where greater expression would usually be expected and excused. It treads a singular path, preaching us nothing, just taking pains to faithfully present the dog end of life as it is for some.

6/10

War Machine (David Michôd, 2017)

Brad Pitt stars as a blood-and-guts general sent to Afghanistan to bring the country under control, predictably soon finding that this is a war unlike any other he's known before. He ploughs on undeterred, fuelled by rhetoric and tortuous reasoning, but all the while the ground slips away from under him.
It's a satire with obvious targets, shooting fish in a barrel even without the unnecessary voiceover hammering the point home, and uneven of tone - Ben Kingsley doing the Afghan President Karzai, a faux-naif washing his hands of any involvement, is close to rehashing his comic turn as The Mandarin out of Iron Man 3, while for a spell near the end, with the troops engaged in a firefight in some ruined town, it seems to want to have The Hurt Locker cake too.
Nevertheless, Pitt gives the general out of his depth a wounded pride alongside his blatant ridiculousness, and while it is heavy-handed, to say the least, in how it spells out the anti-U.S. Middle East crusade argument for the viewers, these days you have to conclude that the American public in particular need this kind of approach, all else having failed.

5/10