The Interview (Craig Monahan, 1998)

Distinguished from its identically-titled peers by being solely about interviews, this has Hugo Weaving pulled in by the police for questioning about a stolen car. The interrogation is intimidatingly opaque and Weaving's innocence self-evident, until he suddenly turns from harassed victim to devil's advocate and starts running the show, giving them a convincing account of the multiple murders he has actually been behind. In parallel with this, the policemen doing the investigation are under investigation and eventually interview themselves for their unorthodox methods.
Weaving, with his soft voice and probing pale eyes, is a perfect fit for a character who veers abruptly between vulnerability and inhumanity. It's a small film with limited ambitions, but does leave us guessing at the facts beyond the closing credits, and that lack of gratification is gratifying in itself in a world of too many pat endings.

6/10

10 Cloverfield Lane (Dan Trachtenberg, 2016)

Mary Elizabeth Winstead wakes up from a car crash to find herself injured and handcuffed in a basement by a disconcertingly forthright captor in the form of John Goodman, who then informs her that she's in a bunker for her own protection because a chemical attack has killed everyone outside. Since Goodman has an abundance of previous in playing superficially friendly psychos, he doesn't exactly engender trust with that statement, and it soon transpires that he's an archetypal survivalist with several screws loose. For a while, the presence of a third person, another man who was contracted to build the bunker, keeps things from boiling over and the appearance of a dying woman at their door dispels doubt about the veracity of the disaster. But it doesn't end there, and when it goes truly off the rails, Winstead's reaction is priceless.
This is related to the 2008 found footage alien monster invasion smash in name only, and thank God for that, since the first film bearing the name was a ludicrously hyped barrage of shaky camera filming unbearable arseholes running to and fro. It's no masterpiece of any genre, but it does keep you watching because you simply don't know what genre it really belongs in until very late in the game.

6/10

La migliore offerta (Giuseppe Tornatore, 2013)

In Deception, Geoffrey Rush gives a tour de force performance as Virgil Oldman, an idiosyncratic ageing auctioneer who's contacted by a young woman requesting a valuation of her dead parents' antiques and paintings. He accepts begrudgingly after having been bombarded with her pleas, and it then transpires that she's severely agoraphobic and won't allow anyone to see her in person. A heavily Hitchcockian mystery story ensues as he finds himself falling for her and finally letting down his defences against the world.
Rush occupies the role of the truculent, supercilious Oldman effortlessly, making every one of his obsessive quirks real, and Tornatore's direction complements this perfectly. What works less well is some of the dialogue, which at times feels very much the product of stilted translation into a second language, as well as the unexplained and needless decision to film the whole thing in Italy and then fill it with only English-speaking actors without making any reference to the actual location. Also, while the emotional progression of the protagonist is credible, the actual twist denouement is too heavily signposted. It concludes in a frustratingly open-ended manner, which is a pity as it has continuously promised to deliver a concrete point until that moment. But you can't deny Rush or the style either.

6/10

Mute (Duncan Jones, 2018)

Netflix must have thought they were onto a winner when they got Duncan Jones, director of the estimable reality-bending sci-fi works Moon and Source Code on board to make a thriller set in a near future Berlin. Unfortunately, it's now apparent that the stinker that was his last film, the computer game spin-off Warcraft,  was no anomaly: his is a quicker flash in the pan than M. Night Shyamalan's and he has no innate quality control.
Plank-like Alexander Skarsgård plays a mute bartender whose girlfriend goes missing, launching him on a search for her through the city's underworld. In addition, he's Amish and therefore also technologically backward, so the search is beset with even more obstacles. Meanwhile, in a parallel story on a convergence course with his one, we follow two American black market surgeons as they torture and patch up people at a gangster's behest: Paul Rudd, doing a sort of psychotic version of Hawkeye from M*A*S*H and his paedophile friend. They are somehow meant to be likable too, and the world they're in is meant to be interesting. It is not. It's a mish-mash of pillage mostly from Blade Runner, all urban decay, neon advertising, holograms and flying cars, and wholly incongruous elements which the film does not have the intellectual rigour to bother to explain, such as the continued anachronistic U.S. military presence in the city and the co-existence of all manner of 1990s clothing and technological paraphernalia alongside the random future stuff. Just to underline how eclectic the society is, and simultaneously underline how derivative and anime-level infantile the set-up is, everyone apart from the leads has a stupid post-punk haircut and robot pole dancers get thrown in too.
It dawns on you very soon that the story being set in Germany is only for modish effect, because otherwise it's a wholly American affair, from the fundamentalist Amish background of the main protagonist to the bowling alleys and continuation of the war in Afghanistan in the news, and might as well have been set there instead. The transposition therefore really adds nothing of purpose and then it's just a pointlessly long slog through extreme violence to an unsatisfying resolution. Jones will have to pull something miraculous out of the bag next to earn trust once more.

3/10

Kraftidioten (Hans Petter Moland, 2014)

In Order of Disappearance (dignified with a considerably cleverer title for the international market than the original Norwegian) has Stellan Skarsgård go full Liam Neeson as a snow plough driver in the icy Norwegian mountains whose son is given a drug overdose by a ruthless local gang, and then proceeds to plough through them one by one. Supposedly a black comedy, it relies on turning each relished killing into a whimsy for its humour through insert screens after each one, announcing who just bit the dust, and the rest of the comedy is equally fumbling, as you might expect of Nordic culture where stand-up is still a relatively new and exotic thing. There are some moments of amusement when aggrieved Serbian gangsters turn up and comment on the cultural oddities of Norway, and the film could have done with much more of this. As it is, instead we get Bruno Ganz mumbling Serbian as their boss for some bizarre reason and an entirely foreseeably bloody ending.
In a development that sees life imitating satire to the nth degree, this is actually being remade in English, with...Liam Neeson.

5/10

The Big Short (Adam McKay, 2015)

Explaining the arcane world of the U.S. subprime mortgage-derived housing market crisis and how it led to the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 to the layperson is quite a challenge, never mind keeping them interested in the topic for all its gravity. The Big Short takes on the task by attacking it through a variety of techniques, ranging from incongruous celebrities breaking the fourth wall to give analogies of what went on to brief on-screen glossaries of the most nebulous terms. It still takes some work to keep up at some points, but, as the characters repeatedly point out, the very nature of the banking system that created the bond instruments that resulted in the crash is deliberately obscurantist, in order to conceal its misdeeds from the public.
On an entertainment level, the film is well served by its cast, led by Steve Carell as a perpetually angry hedge fund manager crusading against the inequities of the system, Christian Bale as a semi-autistic visionary who first discovers the impending disaster and Ryan Gosling as a smooth banker who makes no bones about simply wanting to cash in on the crisis. But, despite the comedy (unsurprising, as the director was behind the Anchorman films), what it finally imparts is a sense of indignation at how this was allowed to happen, and how no-one behind it really got their comeuppance at all. Hence, the film can be considered to have accomplished its difficult mission.

 7/10

Tardes para la ira (Raúl Arévalo, 2016)

A man whose girlfriend was killed in a jewellery store robbery eight years before sets out to hunt down all the possible perpetrators when the only member of the gang to have been caught is released from prison. Without knowing which of them was guilty of the murder, he loses whatever moral compass he had on the way.
The Fury of a Patient Man was abundantly rewarded in Spain's Goya awards, and it does have a certain complexity in its basic revenge scenario, with conscious decisions to steer away from the standard plot trajectory, but it's still just a revenge scenario, brutal and lacking in real-world consequences, and has little message beyond 'blood will have blood'.

5/10

Their Finest (Lone Scherfig, 2016)

In 1940, while the bombs fall on London, a young woman fights her own quiet war against the male-dominated working world within the Ministry of Information. After being assigned to the propaganda film department, she gradually establishes herself as the real author behind a full-length feature about the evacuation of Dunkirk.
Scherfig's film is as restrained as we imagine the British society of the time to have been, although this is also partly a result of the propaganda we've been subjected to about the era. This includes the humour, which is gentle, mostly poking fun at Bill Nighy as a fading, vainglorious actor, and means that the drama of the setting isn't compromised. In the lead role, Gemma Arterton reveals real acting talent for perhaps the first time: hers is a performance of subtlety and dignity in the face of the challenges that she's put through, and Sam Claflin as her cynical script-writing sparring partner is a perfect foil to her character. It does go through a somewhat gratuitous plot twist towards the end and sentimentalise the power of film, but it seems churlish to make too much of these shortcomings when there is such empathy behind it all.

6/10

Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)

Right from the off-kilter music over the opening titles, you know that the Guess Who's Coming to Dinner set-up of a young black photographer going to spend a weekend at his white girlfriend's parents' plush country house will not run smooth. And as the bubbling menace builds up economically through small gestures and odd incidents, the course is firmly set on horror. But, while paying homage to the style of genre classics such as Suspiria, this is very much its own animal. It manages to deal with a plethora of issues to do with racism, all the way from slavery with the protagonist finding himself surrounded by compliant, anachronistic Uncle Toms (a definite nod to The Stepford Wives here too, without being overt about it), to the pernicious continued presence of positive racism and simply also the sense that for black people, the world outside the big-city cocoon is unsafe. As the evil atmosphere develops, it's impossible to avoid recalling another seminal horror movie, namely Brian Yuzna's Society, but the mix that Peele has created is deserving of recognition on its own terms.

8/10

Spider-Man: Homecoming (Jon Watts, 2017)

Marvel Cinematic Universe film No. 16 is a second reboot of the Spider-Man franchise, as if that were needed. Clearly Andrew Garfield doing a moody bear-adult wasn't getting the box office returns desired, even though they were more than healthy, so Tom Holland is given a full outing after his supporting turn as the character in Captain America: Civil War as a decidedly junior version, still trying to navigate his way through the standard American movie high school while being nursemaided by Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man. Indeed, his suit is now fitted with Iron Man tech, which is a wholly unnecessary dilution of the unique aspects of the character. Nor is it necessary to be so tokenistic that his love interest is now mixed-race and his best mate a podgy oriental, though the market research would probably disagree, and hence the tone is much lighter, in fact comic almost all the way through. This also means that Spidey quips and commentates almost constantly, which starts out fairly amusing and soon becomes tiresome. Michael Keaton steps to the other side of the hero-villain divide to give him an adversary, but there's no real menace in his persona either. In short, it's strictly for younger kids.

5/10

Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016)

Isabelle Huppert, the head of a video game company, is abruptly raped by a masked assailant in her home and subsequently carries on outwardly as if nothing had happened, to the concern of her friends, while simultaneously setting about trying to establish the man's identity. She doesn't even report the crime due to having no faith in the police after the way they and the media dealt with her as a child when her father was revealed as a mass murderer. Meanwhile, she continues to have her own brazen affair with her best friend's husband.
So, what we have here is every conceivable foul aspect of human nature, tucked away behind a prim middle-class facade, and we're meant to wring insight out of it, which is what most critics seem to have been seduced into doing, seeing Huppert's character as an unconventionally strong and empowering response to the rape scenario. This is may be former blockbuster director Verhoeven's work, but it's an über-French arthouse view of the world, revolving around dinner parties, property and affairs, with Huppert a borderline sociopath (even more so than usual, and God knows she's got plenty of previous for cold, sexually dysfunctional personae) rather than someone truly strong at its centre, all the supporting cast self-centred pricks, all the sex loveless and character motivations routinely completely illogical. There's nothing to learn here, and only a morbid fascination with what the next lateral step in the plot would be kept me watching.

4/10

The Interview (Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg, 2014)

James Franco and Seth Rogen star as a trash chat show presenter and producer, who grab an unlikely chance to up their credibility by interviewing the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, naturally followed by slight complications as the CIA asks them to assassinate him instead. It's as lightweight as this recap might suggest, but the duo make an amiable pair and, though the satire is too broad to have any bite and the comedy doesn't rise much above the puerile and tasteless gross-out/stoner level of Ted or Grimsby, at least it's far funnier and nowhere near as pointlessly offensive as Team America: World Police, not that this stopped the North Koreans turning its release into a major political altercation.

4/10

Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015)

Telling the true story of the Boston Globe newspaper taking on the Catholic Church over its decades of covering up of child sex abuse by priests, this could very easily be mired in the worthy-but-dull category. That it isn't is down to a wide range of factors. Firstly, it doesn't sensationalise the events: the investigative journalism process is only occasionally condensed to a montage and is largely shown for the agonisingly slow plod that it really is. Secondly, there are many other themes constantly playing in the background: the counter-reaction of a monolithic institution that is not just a part of society but makes up society when placed under threat, the ways in which the legal process and media can be used to sweep things under the carpet and the constant underlying menace in the subtle exhortations to the team of reporters to let sleeping dogs lie. It's also well served by a fine cast, particularly Michael Keaton as the editor of the team.
Unfortunately, not many who don't already have their mind made up against the hypocrisy of the Church will see this, and so the overall effect of the barrage of revelations about the magnitude of the problem is limited. But it still has to be done, nevertheless.

7/10

A Futile and Stupid Gesture (David Wain, 2018)

The name 'National Lampoon' may not mean much else to people outside America, apart from a string of low-brow comedies, beginning with the tiresome, overly venerated fratboy comedy Animal House until reaching the bottom of the barrel with National Lampoon's Vacation, which gave an unjustified living for the insufferably smug and charmless Chevy Chase through a series of execrable follow-ups. However, this story of the founder of the satirical magazine that started it all, Doug Kenney, at least shows that in the context of the stifling 1970s, there was some point to the enterprise: it was ahead of its time in terms of irreverence and crudeness but also downright surrealism and off-centre thinking, giving America a much-needed boot up its staid ass, as they say.
So, it's a shame that it can only serve as a pseudo-documentary and not actually entertain as a film, largely due to casting Will Forte, who, as we've seen from The Last Man on Earth TV series, is a comic actor of the school where being deliberately unfunny and irritating is seen as worthwhile humour. He is forced to tone it down a bit in the interests of there being a story to get through, but then this is also largely padded out by appearances from a host of actors representing other comic collaborators of the time, such as the aforementioned Chase and a host of other names from back then, most of whom have appeal that really doesn't travel outside the time or the culture. A futile and stupid gesture, indeed.

4/10

Baby Driver (Edgar Wright, 2017)

So, it's yet another getaway driver film, but Baby Driver has enough individuality to make it worth the effort. For one thing, the Baby in question, played by Ansel Elgort, is given a quirk that makes him and the film more interesting: due to having to suppress tinnitus from a childhood accident, he listens to his iPod all the time, meaning that the film has a virtually constant wide-ranging soundtrack, and director Wright has shown he knows what to do with this. Secondly, despite looking like a pizza delivery boy, he's totally unintimidated by more fearsome criminals (such as Jamie Foxx rather good against type as a borderline psycho). Then there are the driving sequences, and they don't disappoint either: he of course turns out to be ridiculously good at his job, but the way the scenes are shot and edited has to match that, and it so often doesn't in other action-based films. It's well worth the effort, not that I mean that as encouragement for anyone to make another heist film, ever again.

7/10

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (Luc Besson, 2017)

Besson returns to outer space fantasy 20 years after The Fifth Element, adapting a popular French comic strip, and the results are less than edifying. The previous film was bonkers, of course, but in a largely creative way, not least in terms of production design. As is so often the case over time, when a director is called on to outdo his last FX blockbuster, more turns out to be significantly less. It's a total overbombardment of weirdness just for the sake of it, and the fact that the already throwaway plot of a couple of 28th-century space agents running around a space station full of thousands of odd and oddly uninteresting aliens hangs on us caring about the duo is a recipe for disaster. The casting of Dane DeHaan and model Cara Delevingne is spectacularly ill-advised: they look like children and the latter in particular cannot act at all, never mind the straight-from-French hammy dialogue they have to work with.

4/10

Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins, 2017)

So, we now move on to the first superhero film with a real female lead rather than just having a woman as a supporting character (let's forget Catwoman, shall we?) and Wonder Woman was always going to be the obvious choice for the topic. There's little residue of the campness of the 1970s TV series, which is in keeping with treatments of all other superheroes, including making the costumes dark and moody, although the film isn't without some fair culture-clash humour as the Amazon enters the world of men for the first time. The action is efficient too.
But, but...there's little else to actually distinguish it from its run-of-the-mill male counterparts. The opening scenes, with the origin of the character on the island of the Amazons, smack of nothing so much as a higher-budget Xena: Warrior Princess in terms of their faux mythology, while her quest to stop the Germans/the God of War causing global mass annihilation likewise takes so many liberties with history that it seems almost pointless to list the number of offences. Gal Gadot does do a creditable job with the character, making her both likable and imperious, but it could and should have been braver in going for a more adult market instead.

6/10