V Tumane (Sergei Loznitsa, 2012)

In the Fog is a spartan exercise, with only as much character or historical background, or indeed plot, as is required to get its point across. It's set in a German-occupied Belarus in 1942, with a local man released by the Nazis after an act of sabotage and therefore immediately suspected by the community of collaboration, two of whom take it upon themselves to execute him in the woods. The woods form an amorphous and directionless stage for a story that feels very much like a play, accentuating the sense of the indifference of the universe to the characters' switching concerns, and the encroaching fog at the end has been there all along in the obfuscation that occurs in people's minds during a war where it's not taken as a given what an individual can do to remain morally in the right. The pace does get pretty funereal at times, but there is plenty of food for thought here nevertheless.

7/10

Saving Mr. Banks (John Lee Hancock, 2013)

A selectively embellished telling of how author P.L. Travers was coaxed by Disney into having Mary Poppins made, Saving Mr Banks is patently a Disney product with its ultimate message of the power of fantasy as salvation. Yet there is also an adult core to the story, with the writer's childhood flashbacks, centred around the decline of her alcoholic father, resonating through her work and present day mindset. The greatest factual liberty the film is guilty of taking is creating a genuine friendship between a genial Walt Disney and the spiky, distrustful author, but the soft-soaping is bearable because this is done to accommodate the film's principal assets, Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson, with the latter's performance being somewhat of a tour de force. a scream when delivering streams of cutting bon mots and quite affecting when required to dig into the character's conflicted psyche. A rare beast, then: a film that serves Disney's marketing purposes to make you want to see Mary Poppins again, while working as entertainment and drama in its own right.

7/10