Chappie (Neill Blomkamp, 2015)

District 9 director Blomkamp directs more sci-fi, back in his native South Africa, with very mixed results. The idea of a robot becoming sentient is nothing new in itself, but there is a twist in his creator tussling with a nasty gang to educate the child-like machine with diametrically opposed values. That aside, there are lashings of extreme violence and the worst collection of haircuts in living memory, including Hugh Jackman's rare turn as a mulleted baddy. It manages to retain the attention for the most part simply through eccentric ideas, but there has to be something fundamentally wrong when the most sympathetic character in a film is a droid.

4/10

Jupiter Ascending (the Wachowkis, 2015)

The impact with which The Matrix hit the screen seems like a distant memory now and the Wachowskis prove to really have lost their mojo for good with this daft prepubescent-targeting bloated sci-fi product, featuring Mila Kunis as a young woman who discovers she's intergalactic royalty with Channing Tatum as a shirtless Vulcan-eared lunk of a protector to her from Eddie Redmayne's limp villain, who has designs on harvesting Earth for human material. The CGI space battles are a true incoherent mess, characters stumble from one scene to the next repeating the same dialogues and sentiments seemingly because there isn't enough plot to fill the running length and, most unforgivably, given the huge budget, there is no originality in the visual design. It's a bloodless mish-mash of half a dozen precursors and amazingly boring at many junctures.

3/10

Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann (Felix Herngren, 2013)

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared, an adaptation of Jonas Jonasson's picaresque best-seller, which features the escapades of a centenarian on the lam with misappropriated loot in the present and flashbacks to his Gump/Zelig-style adventures through the ages, suffers from some discontinuity by choosing to skip over some of the colourful episodes of his preposterous life - not that more than the film's two hours is really called for. What clearly passes for humour in Sweden is also cringeworthily broad at times, but the overall tone is nevertheless so light, as the ingenuous and virtually idiot savant protagonist stumbles through life from one moment of serendipity to another, at the music-driven tempo of Kusturica at full comic tilt, that it's hard not to be charmed.

6/10

Kingsman: The Secret Service (Matthew Vaughn, 2014)

What begins as a rollicking Bond-spoof yarn, thanks largely to the comic interplay between Colin Firth's gentleman spy and the council-estate urchin he takes under his guidance, descends by the end to a tiresome splatterfest with lots and lots of beheadings. Vaughn and his perennial writing partner, Jane Goldman, are still the pubescent comic-book fans that now have the budget of their dreams and need to be reined in: as with Kick-Ass, the dazzling acrobatics and blinding pace are badly undermined by the sheer puerility and tastelessness of scene upon scene. Meanwhile, Samuel L. Jackson hams as only he can with yet another set of character quirks as the megalomaniac villain, this time Gaia-lite, cheeseburgers and a lisp. That about covers it.

5/10

The Loveless (Kathryn Bigelow & Monty Montgomery, 1982)

Bigelow's first feature and also that of Willem Dafoe as the lead, this film noir-biker flick hybrid sees a gang of young motorcycle punks ride into a Deep South one-road town and upset the locals. It's basically a more violent and graphic version of The Wild One with the added realism making the behaviour of the directionless scumbags less tolerable, but then the redneck townsfolk don't exactly command respect either. Its main message, such as there is one, is that folks are shit and 'We're going nowhere. Fast', in the words of Dafoe's laconic gangleader. It does have a certain style and pithiness of expression, but it's a very unpolished work and stands up less than well against, say, the Coens' Blood Simple from a few years later.

5/10

Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014)

Much has been made of the greater-than-standard scientific accuracy of the wormholes in Nolan's sci-fi epic, but this also completely ignores the numerous other unsatisfactorily explained implausibilities, starting with the premise that in the near future nearly all the world's crops have died out, and then moving on to set up Matthew McConaughey as the only man to save our bacon by virtue of stumbling onto what's left of NASA so that he can be roped in to pilot a mission to another galaxy. There are spectacular scenes along the way courtesy of the mega-budget but the tension factor in the build-up isn't actually on a par with the much-derided Mission to Mars, the deus ex machina finale owes too much to 2001: A Space Odyssey and McConaughey's Texan mumble is more wilfully incomprehensible than ever.

5/10

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (Peter Jackson, 2014)

Whither now, Peter Jackson? The Tolkien well finally runs dry - there can't be enough takers even in the world of fandom for a pounding of The Silmarillion into cinematic form - and it's just as well as the series has been running on empty for a long while now. Piling on more and more battle scenes does not an interesting film make, particularly when the superheroics involved have got so ridiculous that they invite guffaws, which partly come as just an emetic reflex against their sheer repetitiveness as well.
This is not to say that the last chapter is without any assets: the scenery, both the natural and the studio-designed, is as breath-taking as ever; the build-up to the final showdown with the orc horde is paced patiently and the scenes involving the dwarf leader Thorin in the throes of gold-induced madness almost touch the level of Shakespearean tragedy. It's just a shame that one is constantly aware that this is all in the lull before the interminable CGI storm to come.

5/10