Still Alice (Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland, 2014)

Julianne Moore hoovered up the awards here with her portrayal of a linguistics professor who develops early-onset Alzheimer's, and while her performance is certainly up to her usual solid standards, as far as the Oscars go it's hard not to think of the self-fulfilling prophecy of Kate Winslet declaring in a satirical context that she'll need to do a Holocaust film to get one, and then promptly doing just that a few years later. They do love degenerative conditions as a test of acting chops in just the same way. Having the character who is losing her use of language also be someone who defines herself by her command of it must have really had the directors in self-congratulatory mood.
The core problem here is flatness. Despite Moore's admirable efforts, the drama struggles to rise above the TV movie norm, not helped by centering almost totally on the more easily scriptable build-up to the end state rather than the blight itself. Hence, the mildly wayward daughter comes home to roost, the husband runs out of patience and the sufferer gets to make a teary public speech. The film is too squeamish in the end to expose the viewer to expose the viewer to the intolerable reality of the condition. Compare this to e.g. The Sea Inside or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly to appreciate how lightweight it really is.

5/10

Les Géants (Bouli Lanners, 2011)

Two brothers in their early teens are stuck in the countryside at the house of their departed grandfather, without parents either and down to the last of their money. They then hit on the brainwave of renting the house to a local drug producer, with rather predictable consequences.
The Giants is ostensibly a coming-of-age film, but the little fools seem to learn little through their dope-smoking and breaking-and-entering escapades except that some things are just not that good an idea. Then it all ends rather suddenly and vaguely as the director clearly has nothing more to say. The fact that the events are so much outside a realistic context of social services, police and starvation may be intended to mirror the unworldly nature of the mind in early adolescence, but it's incompletely communicated and so fails to convince as a conceit. This is also a pity because the kids do shine with what they're given to work with and the cinematography of the verdant Ardennes landscapes throughout is really quite sumptuous.

5/10

Brooklyn (John Crowley, 2015)

A girl emigrates to America in search of a life away from her stifling Irish home town in the 1950s, meets a nice boy, is torn between her new life and the old one and has to make a difficult choice between them. The plot of Brooklyn is a well-worn one, but the devil is in the detail and this is elevated beyond its bare bones by a combination of Colm Tóibín's source novel's sensitive characterisation, handsome period detail and Saoirse Ronan's spirited portrayal of the conflicted lead. She is maturing into the capable actress that numerous directors seem to have seen the potential in her to become through her teens, no longer just a simpering waif: as the story arc moves on and the character grows in confidence in her new environment, she conveys the transition quite credibly. It's also striking to note here, for such a slight story where - uncommonly for the cinema of today, one realises with some dismay - nothing unrealistically dramatic happens, with no violence, intrigue, plot-driving calamities or screaming confrontation, how much human interest can be generated simply through faithfully relating the challenges of an ordinary life.

7/10

Terminator Genisys (Alan Taylor, 2015)

The big studios must wish that all their franchises could incorporate alternative timelines so that when an instalment falls flat on its face, like Terminator Salvation did, it's as easy as pie to reboot by simply saying that the timeline has changed. This means that the audience is expected to approach the new set-up unprejudiced by past experience, the complications caused through having to cast new actors for established characters can be swept under the carpet, and, so preciously for the spaghetti mess of past and future potential and actual realities of this series, the plot is effectively reset to square one.
Except that clearly you can't alter the past that much. So it is that this instalment succumbs to destiny and also falls flat on its face. The recasting of feisty teen Emilia Clarke and simple-minded jock Jai Courtney for Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn is an unhelpful downgrade, but the film's real failings are in managing to get itself into a hopeless tangle once again despite having wiped the board clean, endless action sequences of little tension made worse by repeatedly 'reverentially' copying moments and dialogue from the first three films, and then having nothing of substance to put in their place when forced to come up with original content. It doesn't speak well for the film that the presence of Arnold Schwarzenegger as their creaking, superannuated cyborg helper is just about the only thing of any interest on show, nor is the fact that there is clearly no intention to stop milking the cash cow yet. Poor old Arnie should be reminded of one quote from the first film, so long ago: "And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead".

4/10

Before I Go to Sleep (Rowan Joffé, 2014)

Nicole Kidman stars as a woman with anterograde amnesia, waking up every day with all events of the past ten years wiped from her memory, her unrecognised husband stoically repeating the essentials to her before heading off to work. When a neurologist starts to treat her in the husband's absence, she gradually begins to make some progress in reassembling her past, which does not turn out rosy at all.
Although there have been numerous films that have featured the condition, they will now always inevitably be compared to Memento, where a slow reveal technique and a razor-sharp plot structure brought home the awful reality of the disorder with full force while enhancing the thriller element. With Before I Go to Sleep, on the other hand, you feel from the outset that a happy ending is in the process of being smuggled in and, as the ailment is proven to be a reversible one, the plot becomes increasingly degenerative, its logic falling apart a good while before the tired stalker phase and the flaccid denouement.

4/10

The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum, 2014)

As this was made not long before the The Theory of Everything, comparison between the two biopics of twentieth-century English geniuses with difficult life stories is inevitable, and while The Imitation Game is far more guilty of the Hollywoodisation that the genre is always prone to, it is markedly more compelling viewing. It helps, of course, that Alan Turing's life is partly shrouded in mystery owing to both his wartime code-breaking activities and his guarded private life as a gay man in an age when it was a crime: there is simply more intrigue to work with. Then there is the fact that what Turing did, i.e. effectively significantly shortening the war through his work and inventing the computer at the same time are simply easier for a non-scientific audience to relate to.
Yes, convenient events are frequently embellished or cooked up, and characters are made either more photogenic or more cartoonish to serve the drama - Turing himself is portrayed as nigh-on autistic - and that's a pity when there is so much to work with anyway, but it is compelling drama nevertheless and by no means unintelligent, with Benedict Cumberbatch delivering a formidable nuanced portrayal of the eventually criminally ostracised pioneer.

7/10