Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022)

At first there are only flashes of images and fragments of handheld video, and after a while, there's a creeping worry that there won't be much else. But then dialogue and story do make their entrance, and it's a young girl on holiday in Turkey with her dad, clearly some decades ago. Deliberately protracted and static shots still persist, and it becomes apparent that this and the use of colour in each frame are highly significant: these are just scattered recollections of a brief period that still matters to the adult recalling it, everything seen from the viewpoint of a child, too young to grasp her dad's underlying depression.

The director could have provided an earlier signal that what the viewer is about to witness is completely impressionistic, but persisting with it is worthwhile in that it provides something meaningful and real without the usual spoon-feeding. You get to live the memory instead.

7/10

American Fiction (Cord Jefferson, 2023)

The estimable Jeffrey Wright plays a literature professor whose highbrow novels aren't selling, sent on leave by his college for challenging his students' notions of political correctness. He duly goes to visit his family back in Boston.

It should be stated at this point that, as per the USA's one-drop rule, he's considered to be black, and his frustrations are largely due to the white-dominated publishing world only wanting black literature to conform to stereotypes of foul-mouthed rappers, gangstas with guns and drugs in the hood or proud, downtrodden individuals nobly suffering oppression, so that it sells to the majority white readership. Or, as he refers to it, 'black trauma porn'. So he sets out to write the very worst example of that genre for the purposes of ridiculing and undermining it, and is then dismayed when it's just taken at face value and becomes hugely popular instead.

What may strike non-American viewers as particularly surprising is finding an American film that combines a such subtle sense of ironic satire with a serious message. It doesn't consistently get the balance right, having to also somewhat needlessly incorporate the issues of other characters, mainly his mother with dementia, his intelligent-seeming new girlfriend and his reckless gay brother, but the point still gets through in the end, assuming that end isn't yet another fictional layer.

7/10

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Hettie Macdonald, 2023)

Rachel Joyce did write the best-selling novel in 2012, but the very thematically similar The Last Bus pipped the film adaptation of this one to the screen. Both revolve wholly around an elderly man going on a solo quest across the country to fulfil a promise and gain redemption. Both tragically lost a son years before and cannot totally avoid people on their way, their journeys going viral and then becoming no longer quite their own, with multitudes giving them assistance towards their respective goals. The two men are even played by go-to national treasures for hangdog, downtrodden elderly men roles, here Jim Broadbent as opposed Timothy Spall in the other film. The only significant differences are that Spall's character was carrying his wife's ashes, whereas the titular Fry's wife is very much alive and well and frustrated at her husband's loopy conviction that his trek will somehow cure the cancer of a dying former colleague at the end of the voyage, and that Fry's route is far more scenic, with secluded country lanes and small historic towns.

Unsurprisingly, it falls prey to sentimentality and could have done without all the flashbacks to past events to gradually explain the reaons for Fry's sense of guilt, which really break the atmosphere and flow of the story. Broadbent and Penelope Wilton as the Frys do their best, as usual, to compensate for these shortcomings.

6/10

Verdens Verste Menneske (Joachim Trier, 2021)

The theme of a young woman without a sense of vocational or emotional purpose is becoming a well-weathered trope, noticeably in affluent, egalitarian countries such as Norway, where appositely The Worst Person in the World is set. So the central character, Julie, flits aimlessly from studying one subject to another and from one relationship to the next, until settling down with a satirical comic artist fifteen years older than her, who warns her that she may still come to change her goals. And so it proves before long, a flirtation with someone closer to her personality turning into yet another relationship.

It is nominally a romcom, but one without much in the way of warmth or comedy, so while it does succinctly reflect many truths about relationships, overall it isn't much more focused than its protagonist, not that this seems to have bothered most critics or international awards juries.

6/10

Hard Truths (Mike Leigh, 2024)

Leigh, now in his eighties, still won't stop ploughing the same furrow of depicting complex, flawed characters struggling to deal with the real world, but in reuniting with Marianne Jean-Baptiste nearly 30 years after Secrets & Lies, he may have gone a step too far with the personality defects. Jean-Baptiste's Pansy is quite possibly the most misanthropic, paranoid, self-pitying, self-centred, exploitative and verbally abusive creation in the history of cinema. All she does for the length of the film is invent slights against her and then lay into anyone unfortunate enough to be around her. It's a great performance by the actress, and certainly works on a ludicrous level of that kind of monstrosity in the age of Trump, but is just too OTT to also work as a study of self-harming depression, which may well have been Leigh's intent as well. You can't always have your cake and eat it.

6/10

Der Tiger (Dennis Gansel, 2025)

80 years after the end of WWII and it appears we're finally ready to have action films that have German soldiers as the protagonists. But it's not that cut and dried: just like in Das Boot back in 1981, the safest way to go is still to have them cocooned safely away from where the actual atrocities towards civilians take place, this time inside a tank on a solo mission to bring back a single officer with secret documents from deep behind enemy lines.

So, for a good long while it's a standard actioner, and a pretty efficient one, with the crew negotiating hazard after hazard, interspersed with them questioning the purpose of it all and whether there'll be anything left to go back home to. This places The Tank above most of its Hollywood equivalents, so it's unfortunate that it goes off its tracks in the end sequence, which dismantles everything that has transpired before it with half-baked metaphysical aspirations.

6/10

War Machine (Patrick Hughes, 2026)

The plot, which won't have taken a whole napkin to write down on, is the off-the-shelf one of gung-ho U.S. squaddies getting hunted down by an unstoppable killer, this time an alien machine. There's the Rambo-style hero with mental issues, his black mate who doesn't get to play much of a  part beyond reassuring the audience that the hero isn't racist, and of course the speccy one. It's basically Aliens or Predator without the intellect of even the latter, as the purpose of the killer is not even implied. So, a framework just for panic and lashings of explosions. To be fair, it delivers this pretty efficiently. Just don't go expecting that it will ever suggest that the title actually refers to the one again globally invasive USA instead of the killer robot, because any kind of subtlety would really get in the way of the mayhem.

5/10