Fisherman's Friends (Chris Foggin, 2019)

A music company exec from London is tasked by his boss with trying to sign a troupe of local folk singers in an idyllic Cornish fishing village, overcomes their scepticism of his motives and then falls for a local girl and the place itself. That's the plot in a nutshell, of course culminating in the hoary crew of performers of sea shanties getting their big record deal after going viral through their curio value. What does save the film from being just a progression through the standard checkpoints of feelgood drama is that, in essence, we know that the group is real and did get their breakthrough in the end, although actually well after the film came out. The version you see now tags the events that followed as end text. The musical numbers do pad out the running time but are also the main attraction, rich in lyrical wit and a sense of music as a preserver of history. The film's success led to a sequel that couldn't add anything to the formula, but then what else could possible be expected when the music itself hasn't changed for hundreds of years?

6/10

Bank of Dave (Chris Foggin, 2023)

A local millionaire in Burnley who has been lending money to locals in the town for years decides to apply for a licence to set up an actual bank. This means going up against the Financial Services Authority, a closed shop for the big banks and riddled with entrenched class snobbery. They consequently employ underhanded means to try to put down the northern arriviste.

This is actually based on a real story, albeit that the opening titles already state that what follows is "true-ish". Some characters are composites, namely the idealistic young London lawyer taking on Dave's seemingly impossible case, while others are entirely made up as cyphers of the forces ranged against them. A happy ending is never in doubt, but it is gratifying when it arrives, and the journey there is nicely leavened with comedy.

6/10

The Last Bus (Gillies MacKinnon, 2021)

An elderly widower sets out on a mission to travel, using only his bus pass, all the way from John o'Groats to Land's End to scatter his wife's ashes in the sea near where they both grew up. There are complications on his odyssey involving encounters with drunken racist louts and officious ticket inspectors, as well as meeting kind strangers who help him on his way. The incomparable Timothy Spall, managing to project through the encumbrance of playing a man thirty years older than himself, carries a film with a fairly off-the-shelf storyline and the sum total is a heartwarming piece, though also a clichéd one. The modern world does get a cursory look in too, with hen parties, Ukrainian immigrants and the universal obsession with mobiles and selfies, albeit that for once the last of these is viewed as a positive aspect as the voyager's mission goes viral and gains him a supportive following.

Not many marks for originality, but nevertheless a far more cohesive and immersive work than anything the veteran director has managed for many years.

6/10

Subservience (S.K. Dale, 2024)

 

In the near furure, humans are being replaced by lifelike androids, not just at work but increasingly at home too. Sound familiar? Yes. it's an American film version of the British TV series Humans, which was itself a remake of the Swedish Äkta människor. As is usually the case with U.S. rip-offs of foreign source material, the subtleties have been erased and what was a fairly complex examination of the theme of artificial intelligence and what constitutes actual sentient life has been turned into a thriller that goes all the way to a slasher final chapter.  Megan Fox does actually prove good casting for once, already being self-confessedly artificial as a screen persona, as the domestic servant android who reprograms herself and becomes jealous in a Star Trek "what is this thing you humans call love?" manner, and then full-blown homicidal, of course. But that's all there is, a plastic simulacrum of an idea.

3/10 

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (Anthony Fabian, 2022)

A film straight out of yesteryear, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris sets its stall up as a feelgood comedy with just a slight edge. The ever-dependable Lesley Manville plays Mrs. Harris, a widowed cleaner for the rich in the London of 1957, with no small aplomb. She is endlessly optimistic and trusting and puts up with no end of classist snobbery, both from her English clients and from the haughty director of Christian Dior (a role that fits Isabelle Huppert like a glove), once she has got to Paris to buy the dress of her dreams with the aid of an unexpected windfall after a succession of self-inflicted mishaps.

It is a sugary concoction, the events improbable and Paris a fantastical picture postcard, all clearly aimed at appealing to telescopic tourists, particularly American ones. But it's impossible to avoid rooting for Manville's feisty underdog and coming away smiling.

7/10

Get Duked! (Ninian Doff, 2019)

Three miscreant teenagers, joined by a well-behaved fourth, are taken by their teacher to the Hinghlands to complete the Duke of Edinburgh Award challenge of a two-day trek. They immediately prove utterly clueless in the wilderness environment and things get a lot worse very quickly when a toff in a mask starts hunting them as 'vermin to be culled' with a rifle. In their flight they come across local farmers who improbably declare the boy with rapper aspirations a star and help them chase off the murderous aristocrats.

Plenty of hash and magic mushrooms are consumed along the way, resulting in long tripped-out sequences and the local police, only after a notorious bread thief, have little inkling of what's actually going on. The humour and class satire are broad, to put it mildly, but its total irreverence just about saves it from being utterly disposable, as does Eddie Izzard's OTT performance as the psycho duke with the gun. It's unsophisticated but trashily diverting fare.

5/10

Death on the Nile (Kenneth Branagh, 2022)

Branagh's playing around at being Poirot would always get a second go, and so here it is. What it does do dfferently from the Peter Ustinov classic is creating a preamble to explain the passengers on the boat and Poirot himself, as a damaged WWI veteran who has to solve multiple murders. No real changes to the 1978 version then, but at least it comes up with a decent cast (including, quite oddly, French and Saunders). The faked Egyptian setting doesn't get much of a look in, but Agatha Christie wasn't ever too concerned with that, so the film is just dutifully following the source text. The director could do with moving away from remakes, though, since while he does the job competently enough, a good part of the audience already knows what's going to happen and this rather takes away the key selling point of a whodunit.

6/10