Mortdecai (David Koepp, 2015)

Journeyman scriptwriter Koepp ventures directing someone else's screenplay for the first time and, while the ones he has penned over the years have been of variable quality, this is most definitely not a good move. It's basically an opportunity for Johnny Depp and Gwyneth Paltrow to try to outdo the ridiculousness of each other's upper-class English accents while some sort of sub-Austin Powers action comedy takes place around them involving the recovery of a stolen painting. Depp does make a good posh twit a la Paul Whitehouse (who also cameos) as the titular cad, but without a plot of any consequence and saddled with running jokes that are tedious even on their second airing, it's really a test of the audience's indulgence.

3/10

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (Francis Lawrence, 2014)

The teen rebellion parable grinds on towards its inevitable conclusion with the weakest instalment thus far in the series. The heroine Katniss is now stuck as the reluctant figurehead of the burgeoning uprising against the tyrannical state and gets to do little else than mope and cry about her lot for the duration of an astonishing two hours. It's complete franchise-milking filler en route to the final showdown between her and Donald Sutherland's baddie President on a scale of brazenness that even The Hobbit films balked at, and the attempt to flesh out the plot with politics instead of non-stop violence, while in itself a welcome break, is scant consolation for the overall air of the saga kicking its heels.

4/10

Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014)

Michael Keaton plays a washed-up actor famous for a series of superhero films trying to salvage his reputation with a self-financed and heartfelt Broadway production, which runs aground at every possible turn. It's obviously easy to see this as Keaton himself and read the Birdman voice in his head taunting him for his failures as Batman, but the freedom the viewer is given to see those parallels really just bolsters the basic theme of the paranoia of a typecast actor very conveniently, and there's no real risk of mistaking his performance as akin to self-parodies such as Van Damme in JCVD and the like.
The secondary target, after the self-absorption of actors, is critics, and of course critics en masse flocked to praise it to dodge the attack. There is a fair amount to praise, from a technical point of view with its painstakingly crafted long tracking takes, and also in terms of the wit in the dialogue, but the Michel Gondry-style dream sequences and voluntary self-confinement within the walls of the theatre also veer dangerously close to navel-gazing at times.

6/10

Kosmos (Reha Erdem, 2010)

A dishevelled stranger stumbles into a snowy Turkish town near the Armenian border and finds initial acceptance for having rescued a boy from the river, which then turns on one hand to awe at the apparent miracles he performs and on the other increasing irritation with his cryptic religious pronouncements and unwillingness to work. In between, he keeps meeting a local girl with whom he communicates relentlessly in animal yelps and howls, which is presumable meant to impress on us what free spirits they are.
The film is lambently shot in an evocative setting and promises a lot with its dancing on the edge of out-and-out surrealism, but only manages to deliver one perceptible and limp message after two hours of spiritually flatulent Paulo Coelhoesque fannying about, namely that people are fickle and credulous on the whole.

4/10

A Most Wanted Man (Anton Corbijn, 2014)

Philip Seymour Hoffman, in his last leading role before his untimely death, still fills the screen despite his obvious physical decline - he barely gets above a mumbling shuffle for most of the film - and a somewhat slender script, not one of John le Carré's most focused works, taking swipes at American overseas interventionism rather too indirectly to have much bite.
You can expect the veteran rock video specialist Corbijn to produce a stylish-looking work, and so Hamburg gets its turn to look inhospitable and threatening in a retrogressive Cold War fashion. As for the slow-paced story itself, which involves Hoffman's German counter-espionage agent Bachmann trying to connect a pillar of the Muslim community with financing terrorism, it is at least plausible, though hardly fresh with both his superiors and the CIA tying his hands behind his back at every turn.
So, it doesn't offend the eye nor insult the intelligence with the cartoon action that is now the spy film default, but it does still fall back on three Americans playing Germans as its leads, despite the attendance of the estimable Nina Hoss and Daniel Brühl in the background, which somewhat undermines any anti-U.S. imperialist point that it could and should have had the courage to make. Without that ire or any sense of narrative urgency, the end result is somewhat dull.

5/10

Route Irish (Ken Loach, 2010)

Here, Loach turns his eye on the issue of Western intervention in Iraq, only obliquely in that the chief focus of his ire is the employment of unpoliced contractors to mop up the mess left by the invasion, the director probably having realised that the boat for attacking the war itself has long since sailed. The perspective is that of an emotionally scarred ex-contractor seeking redress and answers relating to the death of his comrade in Baghdad, the structure essentially that of a thriller. It's fundamentally nihilistic in outlook, with the protagonist becoming increasingly unstable as he uncovers more and more institutionalised corruption, and can easily be read as Loach publicly purging his system of any sinful temptation to entertain between the less single-note Looking for Eric and The Angels' Share.

5/10

Polisse (Maïwenn, 2011)

Polisse hoovered up the prizes at the French César Awards and won a Cannes Jury Prize to boot, but this is largely just testament to its political worthiness, being a depiction of daily life inside the harrowing world of a police child protection unit in Paris. So it tells it like it is, with little excess melodrama, but this also means little in the way of an actual predominant dramatic arc, jumping as it does from squabbling character to squabbling character - who are all fairly unlikable in a way familiar to viewers of the similarly 'gritty' Parisian police series Engrenages. Put simply, an actual documentary on the topic would have better served the purpose of educating, while in this form there is always a seed of doubt with regard to verisimilitude, while its fictional nature does not provide a compensatory emotional pull. It could have ended after half an hour or gone on for a whole series and the overall effect would have been the same.

5/10