Past Lives (Celine Song, 2023)

A Korean boy and girl attending the same school are separated when her family emigrates to North America. 12 years later, she finds out he's been trying to track her down and they begin chatting again over the internet. They find they get on just as they did as children and plans are made to visit each other, but life events get in the way, including her getting married to a fellow writer, and it's another 12 years until he finally makes it to New York to see her again.

This is far removed from the conventional love story outline. But then it isn't really about romantic love, more about attachments that never die and how people end up where they are through both choices and circumstances. The director's touch is light and sensitive and the performances of the leads nuanced. No emotional climax is forced through dramatic turns, instead things are just allowed to develop organically. Past Lives is refreshingly free of histrionics and true to real life.

8/10

The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)

Holocaust days are here again, with a largely factual account of the life of the commandant of Auschwitz living with his family in contentment right next to the death camp. Martin Amis's source novel took more liberties with the facts, so Glazer went straight to the documented events. Unlike any previous film tackling the issue, The Zone of Interest shows nothing of the mass extermination going on on the other side of the wall. It's only heard as screams, dogs barking and gunshots, and the implied constant stench of the crematorium. The family, in their ornately flowery garden, are not only unaware of what's actually going on, but uninterested and quite deaf to it. Yes, the eternal banality of evil, but also a study of the evil of materialism and self-interest.

This means virtually nothing of consequence happens on screen, so it's dramatically very flat, but also means it works as a new approach to explaining how the atrocities could keep being committed undisturbed.

7/10

El hoyo 2 (Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, 2024)

With depressing predictability, given the success of The Platform in 2019 and that Gaztelu-Urrutia, as a fledgling director, obviously has no other strings to his bow, a sequel is rolled out that does nothing but regurgitate the plot of the first film. That being prisoners within an underground complex with hundreds of floors, dependent on the fairness of those on the floors above them to leave enough food for them to take as the platform carrying the food descends through the prison. No more religious, social or political ideas are added, but of course the horror quotient is pumped up even more as if that will suffice as compensation, like so many cover singers believing that stretching a single syllable across several notes and increasing the volume to 10 somehow adds soulfulness.

The Platform 2 will only do for hardcore horror fans who haven't seen the inspired first film, but for those who have, it should be avoided at all costs.

5/10

Brightburn (David Yarovesky, 2019)

A childless couple in the rural American Midwest have their prayers for a child answered when a spaceship crashes near their house and they find a baby inside. They raise the child, who starts developing superpowers as he grows up. Sound familiar? Yes, it's a retelling of the Superman origin story, which then deviates from that template with the prepubescent alien becoming subject to the malevolent influence of a recurring message from the wreckage of the spaceship and gradually turning evil as a result. After that the film switches to full horror mode and concomitantly loses direction or interest. A pity, because the original premise had more potential.

5/10

Wonka (Paul King, 2023)

The director of the rather marvellous first two Paddington films takes on a bigger task in competing with the fondly remembered Gene Wilder-led original and Tim Burton's competent remake. Yes, it is a prequel which does not bother to explain how the titular chocolatier became the deranged misanthrope of the previous films, Willy Wonka being thoroughly nice and full of dreams, but Timothée Chalamet, who proves to be highly adept at both singing and dancing, drives the musical on, supported by the ubiquitous Olivia Colman as one of the villains and Hugh Grant as a haughty Oompa Loompa, of all things, as well as a huge cast of British comic stalwarts.

Wonka arrives in town intending to set up his own chocolate shop and soon, through his naivety, ends up in serfdom in a launderette alongside a host of other unfortunates. Undeterred, he puts his mind to escaping and never gives up despite numerous setbacks caused by the malicious chocolate cartel running the town.

The musical numbers are endless and the production design is as garishly over the top as Wonka's confections, but it does all click, at least on a cute level for kids young and old.

6/10

Wicked Little Letters (Thea Sharrock, 2023)

In the wake of the First World War, a single Irish woman with a daughter arrives in the small town of Littlehampton and unsettles the local Christian community with her raucous behaviour and profuse swearing. Her particularly devout neighbours are most upset, and when local residents start getting scabrously abusive, anonymous letters, the immigrant is seen as the natural culprit.

The film is based on a true story, but also puts a blackly comic slant on it, while also not neglecting the poisonously sexist and conservative environment of the time. The mystery element of uncovering the real perpetrator of the hate mail isn't especially complex, but there are a fair few guffaws to be had and the interplay between Jessie Buckley as the single mother Rose, Olivia Colman as her religious neighbour Edith and Timothy Spall as Edith's tyrannical father is as compelling as you could wish for from such a cast. The F-word and C-word count is through the roof within minutes and continues at such an excessive rate that it actually serves to drive the film on relentlessly by steamrolling through all constrictive social mores. Better to ridicule such a society than to just remain aghast at it.

7/10

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (Guy Ritchie, 2024)

Guy Ritchie's films do have a Ronseal quality to them, so whatever the topic, cheeky chappies, cross-referential quipping and lashings of extreme violence are guaranteed. This time, the formula is applied to a loose retelling of the British Operation Postmaster during the Second World War, with Henry Cavill leading a regtag band to sink a cargo ship integral to the U-boat menace in an African port. Scene by scene, it resembles Inglourious Basterds so heavily that Ritchie really should be paying Tarantino royalties. The Germans are caricatures, there's a cat-and-mouse game between Til Schweiger's head Nazi and the sole Jew in the marauding party and interludes with an ahistorical Churchill, who orders the mission.

It starts promisingly enough, like a comic Boys' Own escapade, but the wilful disregard for historicity soon becomes grating, and then it descends into nothing but endless shooting and explosions. Any tension evaporates as it does so, and so does interest in the outcome. Perhaps time to take the director's toys away now.

5/10