The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2013)

Jeunet's best films have always overflowed with joie de vivre while dicing with whimsicality, and after a four-year hiatus he accordingly produced more of the same, this time in English and based on someone else's source material, but very much stamped through with his idiosyncratic style all the same. In a nutshell, a serious 10-year-old boy genius undertakes a journey from his family ranch in Montana to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. Hung on this febrile framework are digressions into various sciences, flights of fantasy and altercations with various odd characters (yes, Dominique Pinon gets a shoe-horned cameo again). It's as sweet and imaginative as you'd expect from the director and also well cast, including the child lead who stays just the right side of cloying in his squeaky elaborations. But it has to be said that Jeunet is hardly stretching himself after his latest break: you won't feel or remember much of it the next day, largely because not only he but also Gilliam, Burton and Wes Anderson, to name his closest peers, have all been over this terrain many times before.

6/10

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, 2014)

The second part of the Planet of the Apes reboot series starts with newsreels cursorily explaining that most of the world's human population has been wiped out by a genetically-engineered disease, which conveniently allows an equal struggle to unfold between the smart(-ish) simians led by Andy Serkis's Caesar and humans holed up in the ruins of San Francisco. It is at once more intelligent and less interesting than its precursor: there is more focus on the political aspects of the confrontation between the species, and yet the story arc itself is purely by the numbers, with an ape-human clash followed by an ape against ape one. The clear improvement in the CGI does mean that Serkis can now actually act with his face through the FX, so it's a shame that for the most part his character has become less articulate in verbal terms. The plot respects its own internal logic only insofar as it doesn't interfere with the imperative to get to the next scene.

5/10

Fury (David Ayer, 2014)

Fury starts out in a Saving Private Ryan tone and progressively leaches out any individual attributes it might have had. Brad Pitt commands a tank ploughing through Germany in the closing days of the war with an off-the-shelf crew of a boorish hick, a bible-basher, a stolid Hispanic and a frightened rookie. The Nazi opposition takes two forms, both equally improbable: either unstoppable behemoth tanks or droves of irrationally charging rent-a-goons. Either way, the Americans simply have to be the plucky underdogs, no matter what anachronisms that might entail (this is the director behind the infamous U-571, which prompted what was basically an apology for misappropriation of history by Hollywood from President Clinton).
Killing the heroes and their paramours equals an anti-war message in this lunk-headed milieu. Then Star Wars laser effects are superimposed on the gunfire, complete with red-green colour coding for goodies and baddies. There is some efficient dialogue and a few jarring shots, but by the time day-night continuity also goes out of the window without a care, who would care at all?

4/10

Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh, 2014)

You hope with biographies of artists that the seeds of their genius or the reasoning behind their work will be tackled at some point, as conventional a demand as that may be, but Mike Leigh does not seem interested in anything beyond Turner's place in society and therefore this remains an opaque work, accessible only as a character study of a man who did not fit into his time. Timothy Spall may have won the prize of all real prizes for a film actor for his portrayal, namely the Cannes one, but throughout it feels like Leigh doesn't really know where he's going with the direction of the character's eccentricity and consequently Spall's Turner is frequently reduced to a comic figure with the actor doing his level best to strive for variation in cycling through his repertoire of scowls, shuffles, grunts and mutterings. Incongruously juxtaposed against this is some beautiful, lambent cinematography, a first for a Leigh film, replicating scenes that Turner would come to paint.

6/10

Deux Jours, Une Nuit (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2014)

The Belgian Dardenne brothers, veterans of Belgian socially earnest cinema, have ploughed a Loach-like furrow since the '70s with features and documentaries about lower-class life in their home country. Having a big name like Marion Cotillard therefore seems like somewhat of a departure, but she's asked to slot into their realist milieu and acquits herself with aplomb. Her depiction of fragility and despair is immense.
She plays Sandra, a woman discovering upon returning to work following a bout of depression that the company has forced the rest of the employees to vote between letting her keep her job and their own bonuses. She insists she is fit to return, but it's immediately clear that she's one stumble away from a relapse. Nevertheless, her husband persuades her to talk to everyone individually in a bid to change their minds before a second vote.
It may be hard to believe the callousness of the company's approach in effectively making the workers do their dirty work for them, and this is the one polemic note from the directors, but the varied reactions of the workers themselves as she encounters them, pleading, are very lifelike indeed, as they either justify their self-interest or succumb to guilt. And then you realise that whatever the end result, Sandra's victory will be a Pyrrhic one as too many bridges will have been burnt.
Two Days, One Night is a profoundly deep exploration of social conscience that asks questions long after the closing credits and was probably too close to the bone to get that Best Foreign Language Film nomination. Their loss.

8/10

Der Schneider von Ulm (Edgar Reitz, 1979)

The Tailor from Ulm relates the true story of early German pioneer of heavier-than-air flight Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger, who spends decades trying to construct a working hang glider in the face of public ridicule, penury and the politics of the Napoleonic wars. The setting and factual background lend it a certain curio interest, but it suffers badly from an autism not uncommon in German filmmakers of the period such as Herzog and Fassbinder, leading to the protagonist garnering little audience empathy with his single-minded quest. You don't really care if he succeeds for all the attempts by the director to engage us in the magic of his vision with drawn-out flight sequences, and this is a criminal failing. Reitz later on when to make the acclaimed Heimat television series, by which time he'd learned to cover his obvious emotional disconnection somewhat better.

4/10

Le Passé (Asghar Farhadi, 2013)

Farhadi's sixth film is another complex relationship drama preoccupied, as most notably in the case of A Separation, with the break-up of a marriage. But here we are thrown into the aftermath instead, with an Iranian man returning to France to tie up loose ends with his ex-wife, and the title, The Past, reflects the backwards-looking nature of the story with the couple dealing with the emotional fall-out four years after the event and buried events gradually coming to light. Farhadi again makes effective use of his trademark technique of the deliberate omission of certain links and information to draw the viewer in, although more understatedly than before.
The trio of principal actors put in layered, naturalistic performances in which body language and expressions play a large part, no doubt owing to the director not speaking French and so focusing on more than just the dialogue. It's not comfortable viewing, particularly Bérénice Bejo's portrayal of the self-centred and unstable ex-wife, a million miles removed from her perky charm in The Artist, but has an emotional truth that reaffirms Farhadi as a distinctive and thoughtful voice in modern world cinema.

7/10