The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007)

Three brothers undertake a train journey across India to find themselves, as is the standard agenda for travellers to the subcontinent. Of course, with this being a Wes Anderson film, any such motives are to be taken lightly and likely to be derailed by all manner of random incidents. The performances of the cast, with Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman as the brothers and a host of cameos from other regular collaborators, are as tongue-in-cheek and facially expressive as the wilfully idiosyncratic plot requires and they make for an amiable entourage, albeit that this time the storyline is even more frivolous than usual and doesn't really go anywhere at all. Still, it's hard to dislike Anderson's output, even when it just meanders like this: the touch is light and the ambience is warm, and that alone is no easy thing to do.

6/10

In Search of a Midnight Kiss (Alex Holdridge, 2007)

A 29-year-old jobless slacker is persuaded by his friends to place a personal ad in the hope that he might nit have to spend New Year alone. The date that results from this, with strong echoes of Linklater's Before Sunrise, duly involves a lot of talking about life. And then more talking about life, with whimsical overtones all the way through and a few escapades connected to the woman's possessive ex, and a bittersweet ending to cap it off. This kind of stuff goes down a storm in U.S. indie circles and with the waffling intellectual French tendency too, but less well so if you actually look for substance in a film. Nor does it help that the male lead, as clear a projection of the filmmaker himself as you can imagine, is terminally wet and his 'strong' female counterpart utterly insufferable, at least at the outset. It means well and is mildly amusing in places, but has all the sense of purpose of its diffident main protagonist. Also see Frances Ha.

5/10

Legend (Brian Helgeland, 2015)

The story of the Kray twins gets yet another treatment in the hands of the L.A. Confidential screenwriter Helgeland, and you know what to expect by now: a staple myth of 'sixties popular culture where the passage of time since then lends a certain patina to essentially foul characters, now almost anti-heroes. This one polarises the two brothers to a greater extent than previous depictions, with Ronnie, the gay and more unhinged one, made almost autistic and Reggie in turn mostly shown as trapped in the criminal life by the burden of being his brother's keeper. So you don't need to know all the facts to deduce that heavy simplification is being imposed for filmic effect.
Given other casting then, it might have sunk without much of a trace. But they managed to get Tom Hardy to play the gangster siblings, and he saves the whole film single-handed: as with so many of his performances, you can't take your eyes off him and soon forget that he's playing both of them, such is the difference in the portrayals, right down to fine details in body language. As for the actual story though, it can really now be put to rest: there's nothing more to be said about a pair of thugs who briefly upset the status quo fifty years ago.

6/10

Young Ones (Jake Paltrow, 2014)

Another day in dystopian future America, and this time lack of water is the chief vexation, along with the concomitant breakdown in social order, albeit a mild case as these things go. A father of two struggles to get his crops going in an area given up as lost by most of the inhabitants, except for ones with bad intentions. Michael Shannon, as the dad, cashes in his chips pretty early and then it's up to his son to exact revenge. The film tries for many different styles outside its basic Western set-up, and fails to really make much of any of them. There's clearly an earnest desire to say something meaningful behind it all, but the script is far too pedestrian to achieve that.

4/10

Black Sea (Kevin Macdonald, 2014)

Jude Law stars as a marine salvage expert who is made redundant and then comes across and opportunity to make millions plundering Nazi gold from a sunken submarine in the Black Sea. a ragtag team of Brits and Russians is assembled and tensions duly arise onboard their decrepit sub over the division of the loot, which inevitably leads to disaster.
There's nothing dramatically new in the premise or the crew composition, so it's all down to the tension to keep up the interest and Macdonald keeps this up adequately, with Law a surprisingly gritty presence at the heart, essaying a pumped-up Aberdonian accent that mostly stays the right side of parody, if not quite plausibility. The message, if there can really be said to be one, is of course that greed corrupts (duh!), but otherwise it's pretty much a horror-film exercise in guessing in which order the largely unlikable entourage are bumped off.

5/10

The Door (István Szabó, 2012)

Veteran director Szabó's umpteenth feature is an adaptation of a semi-autobiographical novel by his namesake Magda Szabó, where the author recounts the relationship she had with her housekeeper in communist Hungary. Martina Gedeck and Helen Mirren take up the roles, the former taken aback by the direct manner of her bluff supposed employee, who does pretty much what she chooses to. Nevertheless, an unconventional friendship forms between the pair over the course of the years. Gedeck isn't given that much to work with apart from try to break through the wall of the other woman's inscrutability, which is just as well because competing with Mirren on this form would be like trying to turn back the tide: it's amongst the best work she's done; a woman devoid of vanity, cutting and startlingly pragmatic. There is plenty of meat on the bone, so it's a pity that the decision was taken to dub all of the supporting cast into English too, which accentuates the awful clunkiness of some of the dialogue amidst the real gems that Mirren's character is given.

6/10

The Element of Crime (Lars von Trier, 1984)

Despite its frequent lack of focus as it tries to make a coherent point, von Trier's debut also indicates the way his later films would go in seeking for unorthodox ways to unsettle the viewer's sensibilities. Michael Elphick plays a policeman investigating a serial killer by means of following in his exact footsteps, until the act of mirroring the murderer so closely starts to take over his own personality. The lighting is a miasma of sickly sodium-yellow murk throughout, the world a crumbling, dystopian Europe of an indeterminate future and the air overall that of a Kafkaesque nightmare where the protagonist is quite lost and all the other characters cyphers whose interjections make little sense, indeed reminiscent of Haneke's 1997 adaptation of Kafka's The Castle. It takes many stumbling steps and is frequently wilfully discomfiting, as is von Trier's wont, but for all its flaws it's also immersive and quite singular.

6/10

Wheelman (Jeremy Rush, 2017)

About as low-budget for an action film as you can get, with nearly all of it taking place in one car and no recognisable stars, Wheelman follows a getaway driver through the might after he's been double-crossed, and is trying to work out through a succession of phone calls what might actually be going on. It seems that the director has seen the excellent Locke with Tom Hardy, and decided that it really needed a violent bank job remake, which is pretty much a workable metaphor for what Americans do when plundering and reconstructing anything of quality in the medium. The tension is fairly effective, but the premise is incredibly hackneyed and so, even after a running length of only 80 minutes, I guarantee you'll feel a bit soiled for having fallen for it. I did, anyway.

4/10

Mudbound (Dee Rees, 2017)

Another offering from the Netflix juggernaut, this is nevertheless a divergence from their action and comedy norm: an adaptation of a best-selling novel about race and poverty in the Mississippi delta of the 1940s.
There are two farmer's sons, one white and one black, who go off to war in Europe and return both scarred and deeply dissatisfied with where they are again after what they've seen of the rest of the world. This leads to a bond growing between them, and although it's a strictly stock dramatic progression, it's still the film's strongest suit. Also, it spends a good deal of effort on sidestepping our plot expectations. Unfortunately this can't quite last: worn-out genre staples creep in, such as the white family's virulently racist grandpa, the black family's unquestioned ineffable goodness and their son's near-lynching by the Klan. So, amongst the greys and browns and rain, the film does indeed become mudbound.

5/10

Suburra (Stefano Sollima, 2015)

There are some corrupt politicians, several brutal mafia factions, prostitutes, morally compromised clergy and a host of other assorted lowlifes. This, Suburra would have us believe, is not only the power in Rome but effectively the population of Rome, and that is the film's biggest failing as well as its selling point for many viewers, who believe there is integrity in being so one-sided. As the various parties clash against each other, with anyone who has a clean public image struggling to be sucked down into the mire through bribery and other forms of coercion, a seductively convincing, thoroughly hopeless and rather ugly picture is formed of Italian society. But it is disingenuous, and its hyperstylicisation of the city backdrops and moments of catharsis gives away its true colours.

5/10