In weiter Ferne, so nah! (Wim Wenders, 1993)

Faraway, So Close! picks up from where Wings of Desire left off six years earlier, with Cassiel, the angel who'd decided against giving up his wings, now forced to do so to rescue a girl falling from a balcony. He has tremendous difficulty adjusting to the limitations of life as a human, and then falls in with a gangster to boot.

All the main characters from the 1987 film show up, including Peter Falk with another cameo as himself, and likewise Lou Reed and Mikhail Gorbachev. Nastassja Kinski and Willem Dafoe as otherworldly observers are given one ponderous speech after another to deliver about time, human perception and purpose.

Wenders also wants to use the fact that the Wall has fallen since the first film to say something meaningful, but clearly doesn't know what that is, and having overtly succumbed to Christianity in the interim has also muddled his mind, since it's now stuffed in as part of the message at every possible opportunity. The strong supporting cast and sprinkles of humour are compensations, but it's overlong, totally unfocussed and very reliant on continued goodwill accrued by its masterpiece of a predecessor, which it adds nothing to in terms of substance.

5/10

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice (BenDavid Grabinski, 2026)

This one requires tolerance of two Vince Vaughns, because a time travel MacGuffin sends one from six months in the future back to the present to correct the mistakes of his current gangster self. Of course that means it's a comedy, and with the gangster theme also extremely violent, to the point of taking anything that the John Wick films get away with for granted. The baseline is thus firmly in the region of The Hangover franchise, but the sci-fi twist adds a lot and playing around with any other stock elements of various genres is genuinely entertaining.

6/10

45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015)

Those 45 years being how long Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay have been married, and are about to celebrate their wedding anniversary until she discovers that he lost a German partner in an accident years before they met, and would probably have married her first instead. She accordingly becomes fixated on the idea that their whole marriage has been a sham of sorts, unable to process what she's learnt, in an alarmingly adolescent way.

Rampling has always specialised in unsympathetic characters, and this is no exception. The performances by the couple are strong and very true to life, but dramatically it's all as flat as the Norfolk Broads that they live in.

6/10

Enola Holmes 3 (Philip Barantini, 2026)

So, the Sherlock's little sister bandwagon rolls on, and this time she's getting married to a toff on Malta, which of course immediately gets derailed by her brother being kidnapped. Directorial duties have now been handed over to the man behind the estimable Boiling Point and Adolescence, so it could be supposed that there'd be a concomitant shift to seriousness after the enjoyable frivolity of the first two films. But instead the change of setting away from the vividly-realised Victorian London of parts I and II robs the enterprise of much of its charm, which it doesn't compensate for with a thin plot with little proper detective work, flabby action sequences and a vague anti-imperialist message. The lively performances and dialogue are still there, but the franchise really can't keep going on the strength of these alone.

5/10

These Final Hours (Zak Hilditch, 2013)

Australian filmmakers have clearly been somewhat fixated since Mad Max with the notion that when the end of the world comes, their country will be the last to go, and this film is unequivocal about its mission from the very first lines and shots. Of course this goes even further back, to Nevil Shute's 1957 novel On the Beach and its subsequent Hollywood screen adaptation, but there the armageddon was manmade, whereas here it's an asteroid hitting the other side of the globe that starts the countdown to doom.

So, a wastrel of a man in Perth leaves his pregnant gorlfriend, heading for an end-of-the-world party, and his derailed by deciding to rescue a young girl from being raped as society turns to total anarchy and barbarism, as tends to happen in virtually all apocalypse scenarios. The absolute certainty that there will be no deliverance does set this apart from others in its genre, and so does the concomitant lack of a purpose to any action at all, but saying that the final scene (unsurprisingly, on a beach) was lifted three years later by Rogue One: A Star Wars Story isn't giving the game away in the slightest.

6/10

Project Power (Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman, 2020)

To misquote Tina Turner, "We don't need more superheroes". Project Power tries to get around this challenge by making superpowers the selling point of an illegal drug that may give the person taking it five minutes of an unpredictable type of power, or just kill them instantly. In this scenario, the drug barons are not just out to make money, but to use their customers as subjects in de facto clandestine unregulated clinical trials aimed at creating the 'next stage of human evolution'. So, we have a mishmash of the X-Men, supersoldiers à la Captain America, and various other derivatives of the Human Torch, the Hulk, the Invisible Man, Wolverine and so on. Plenty of FX and breakneck pagga, of course, and an off-the-shelf plot to hang it on, with the team of heroes composed of a father looking for his lost daughter by means fair or foul, the last good cop left in New Orleans and a teenage dealer with a sick mum.

So, it's wholly unsurprising that the end product is not essential viewing. It does have solid leads, gets through its countless action scenes efficiently and is adequately leavened with humour, but that's the least you'd expect.

5/10

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller, 2024)

Apparently Charlize Theron's hardnut character from Mad Max: Fury Road needed a prequel backstory of her own, and the decision to give her one had nothing at all to do with the hefty profits made by the 2015 film. So, the same formula is judged fit for purpose too, meaning non-stop road battles through the Outback with splatterings of ultraviolence and gallows humour. Oh, and since it's a prequel, Anya Taylor-Joy takes over as a younger Furiosa, for what it's worth. The dialogue, when you can actually hear it above the engine noise and explosions, is as sparse and matter-of-fact as required, apart from the verbose pronouncements of Chris Hemsworth's self-styled Messiah warlord to his followers.When he declares to Furiosa that "there is no hope", this sums up the futility of the whole overlong exercise quite nicely. Of course the relentless clashes between cars are as impressively choreographed as ever, and there's some kind of stab at having a wider messages, namely institutionalised misogyny, religious fanaticism and disregard for maintaining the planet, but these are decisively drowned out by the imperative to never stop piling on more and more repetitively chaotic action.

Time to pull out the spark plug.

5/10