Les Hommes Libres (Ismaël Ferroukhi, 2011)

In a gap-filling addition to the Nazi-occupied France genre, Tahar Rahim plays a young Algerian black marketeer in Paris who gets reluctantly sucked into the politics of the resistance. He cuts a diffident and uncertain figure, the film's main point seeming to be that heroism can happen quite without design or intent, and it's down to Rahim's charismatic portrayal that you never end up throwing your hands up in frustration at his non-committal comportment. At the same time, though, a story that was ripe for mining of deep drama never quite takes off: it's a curiously flat affair, with protracted scenes of Magrebi singing that feel like filler, vindicated largely just by its worthiness and adherence to realism.

5/10

Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014)

Ah, the old "we use only ten percent of our brains" fallacy that has got so many sci-fi dreamers drooling about the what-ifs of using more. Because this is Luc Besson at the helm once again, despite his promises to retire, the individual endowed with ass-kicking superpowers is of course a tasty starlet in the form of Scarlett Johansson, and there are the obligatory countless guns and car chases as well as Oriental gangsters, ultraviolence never more than a scene away.
Limitless may have been silly, but it was a model of hard science and restraint in comparison to this as Johansson develops god-like powers, preposterously first learning languages without any exposure to them. Then she's suddenly able to manipulate all matter, while becoming more and more estranged from mankind in a Lawnmower Man fashion, which is shown by her acting as blankly and ruthlessly as in Under the Skin. Besson was always cited as a key figure in the 'Cinéma du look', but now there really is nothing beneath the gloss, as impressive as the veneer may be.

4/10

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (Lasse Hallström, 2011)

This does indeed cover what it says on the tin, and makes sure we understand where we're going straightaway too, with Ewan McGregor's salmon specialist signposted as a closet romantic who'll end up with Emily Blunt's financial consultant as they chug along exclaiming disbelief at the conceit, namely creating a salmon-fishing river in the desert.
The film wants to have its cake and eat it by satirising a political establishment that wants to fix its Middle East image problem with a cuddly project and at the same time wanting to bolster the thin plot with spurious Islamist terrorists trying to sabotage the dam required because it's a Western symbol or somesuch thing. The fruit of their labours ends up wet and shallow, the appositeness of which hardly needs pointing out. Kristin Scott Thomas emerges from it best as the PM's press secretary, an over-the-top bitch of the first order and a departure from her serious roles that she sinks her teeth into with obvious relish.

4/10

Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn, 2014)

The superhero film production line has now reached Marvel's lesser-known heroes in its hunger for material to feed the mill, but it has to be said that this succeeds a whole lot better than many of the big-name vehicles. It's basically Serenity pushed through a Space Jam filter, which sounds awful but ends up not a million miles from Men in Black in overall tone, or, if you like, very close to what the dire TV series Farscape should have been. The reason I cite all these references is because there is nothing new here as such, with an Earthman and his band of disparate alien chums fighting a megalomaniac set on annihilating life as we know it, but it's zippy and quite funny in places too while providing solid popcorn thrills without having to resort to excesses of gore.

6/10