Er ist wieder da (David Wnendt, 2015)

Look Who's Back, the best-selling novel which posited that Hitler materialises in modern-day Berlin for some inexplicable reason, worked because the whole was narrated from Hitler's perspective and the author had Hitler's bombastic, self-important rhetorical style down to a tee. The film adaptation correspondingly only works when it sticks to the book, instead of giving the other characters back stories which only get in the way. Thus encounters between the Führer and real people are interwoven with the fully-scripted segments, with no clear distinction between the two, and the overall effect is sub-Borat because you never quite know what is meant as slapstick satire, what is serious political comment and what is just the filmmaker hedging his bets out of fear of the possible repercussions of making Hitler just a figure of ridicule even now in Germany. Unfortunately, the film never quite gets over this hang-up. The fact that the casting of an actor who's too physically imposing as the demagogue, even if he does get the voice more or less right, is a problem from the outset, becomes a secondary issue.

5/10

The Maze Runner (Wes Ball, 2014)

Another year, another 'young adult' fiction series to be given the film franchise treatment and it's tormenting teenagers for senseless reasons yet again in the dystopian future. One wonders whether this obsession is a natural consequence of being subjected the American school system.
Anyway, the boys here, an off-the-shelf assortment of ethnicities and stock personalities, have been trapped for years in a meadow in the midst of a foreboding maze filled with murderous yet boring machines and have duly divided themselves into the standard jock and nerd factions. Then their Jennifer Lawrence messiah figure turns up in the form of a feisty yet tearful boy who we are instantly told is 'different' for actually wanting to escape. Of course, there's some hazily cobbled-together nasty military-industrial entity behind it all, and the depressing promise of two more instalments of the same.

4/10

The BFG (Steven Spielberg, 2016)

Roald Dahl's story of a giant who befriends a little girl is a perfect vehicle for Spielberg's perennial message of a child's sense of wonder against the big, bad world. This means that there are naturally times in the film when eons of marvelling at coloured lights to a swooping soundtrack will get too much for an adult, but it has to be said that the visuals in the more down-to-earth sequences are truly captivating and peppered with inventiveness, even allowing for the regulation depiction of England as some kind of 1950s/Victorian cobbled candy store. The choice of Shakespearean heavyweight Mark Rylance as the performance-capture template and voice for the benevolent and gobbledygook-spouting giant may also have seemed wilfully off-centre, but it works perfectly and the actor's screen presence really comes through, which in turn prevents the whole affair from becoming the cloying confection that so many of Spielberg's forays into kids' films have been wont to be.

6/10

The Hunter (Daniel Nettheim, 2011)

Willem Dafoe stars as a mercenary hired by a shady biotech company to track down the Tasmanian tiger, which is presumed to be extinct, and kill off the species for good after collecting samples of its DNA. It's at times a sluggish build-up to the final deed, with Tasmania getting Deliverance-style bad press as a battleground between hostile unemployed loggers and environmental activists and Dafoe trudging around alone in the unforgiving wilderness. But the slow burn is worth it in the end as it generates an existential air that elevates the whole to something greater than what its fairly basic outline promises. Dafoe is also particularly commanding, always suggesting something dangerous and torn beneath his self-controlled exterior.

6/10

Hector and the Search for Happiness (Peter Chelsom, 2014)

Simon Pegg uses up yet more of the goodwill he built up through Shaun of the Dead and its lesser successors in the humdrum story of a psychiatrist going on a globe-trotting story of self-discovery. Along the way, no broad national cliche from serene Chinese monks to brutal African warlords is left unused and a strong supporting cast is woefully squandered on spouting platitudes and worn-out aphorisms.
This is a film in the 'heart-warming life lessons' genre for the American market in the clothing of a British one. Besides the asininity of its self-help book content, this is evidenced by constant use of U.S. idioms such as 'skank' and footnotes within the dialogue to explain terms to the target audience, not to mention the story ending up in Los Angeles and a conviction that a happy ending can't exist without material wealth. Pegg remains an affable sort and therefore you may keep on watching simply through a sense of magnanimity that he engenders, along with the insertion of Michel Gondryesque fantastical cutaways, but the syrupiness really does become unbearable before too long.

3/10

Mænd og Høns (Anders Thomas Jensen, 2015)

Men & Chicken features a cavalcade of the internationally best-known Danish male film stars uglying up and dumbing down to play an assortment of cretins who discover that they share a father. But there's also a mystery to be solved about what their departed progenitor, a mad scientist, got up to.
It's not unreasonable to make two generalisations on the basis of this black comedy: firstly, that there seem to be only a dozen big names in the Danish screen actor world, and secondly, that there is a national preoccupation with half-wits and lunatics, as the set-up of the former asylum that serves as their home has strong echoes of The Idiots, for example. That notwithstanding, it's clear that the cast have a whale of a time spazzing out and that in turn keeps the audience on its toes by virtue of some bizarre twists on the way to a surprisingly sweet end. It's not exactly big or clever, but it is good fun and rather more substantial than its wacky premise promises.

6/10

Noruwei no mori (Tran Anh Hung, 2010)

Film adaptations of novels are often criticised for taking liberties with the source texts. and overly simplifying them in particular. Norwegian Wood commits no such sin, for the simple reason that it sticks to Murakami's story like glue. This is not a wise move on two accounts: firstly, it doesn't really develop a cinematic life of its own, and secondly, Murakami's book may have been hugely popular but it's also not particularly good material for adaptation into a medium where internal monologues and memories aren't an option. The main character is a sap pining for a self-absorbed girl with severe mental issues while life passes him by, and the sentiments expressed are what you could expect, but not hope for, from immature 19-year-olds. That this is then drawn out to more than two hours in filmic form makes for a bit of a self-indulgent ordeal, albeit somewhat leavened by the sumptuous photography.

5/10

Life in a Day (Kevin Macdonald, 2011)

Whittled down from 4,500 hours of YouTube footage by members of the public in nearly every conceivable country, Life in a Day purports to be a snapshot of one day in the life of humanity. As an editing achievement, it's quite a feat, but is does fall short of its remit through being weighted by necessity towards the technologically-enabled and Anglocentric world, which is understandable, but also by choice towards the telegenic and soundbite-like. While there are moments of genuine revelation, the imperative to move on to show us something else quickly in the name of even-handedness also means that nothing is gone into in as much depth as it might merit. In that sense, it's a sort of whistle-stop tour of the global community, giving a sense that something has been learned and yet, on analysis, not leaving much at all of substance in the memory.

5/10

R.I.P.D. (Robert Schwentke, 2013)

Some sad hack will have been sitting in the last chance saloon writing acronyms on napkins and slapped themselves on the back when they discovered two that could be spliced with ease to provide an entire film premise; a police department for the dead. Then all that needed to be done was shoehorn it into the Men in Black template, add a generous splash of Ghostbusters and hey presto, the rest wrote itself.
That may be a trifle tough on Jeff Bridges (doing the old-timer curmudgeonly Tommy Lee Jones one, armed with his tried and tested indecipherable Wild West patter) and Ryan Reynolds (the Will Smith disbelieving and impetuous rookie one), who are still an amiable pair in the midst of the never less than derivative CGI shenanigans and tired gags. But there really is nothing to distinguish it as a film in itself, and the best that can be said is that its box office failure makes a follow-up unlikely.

3/10

Attila Marcel (Sylvain Chomet, 2013)

Belleville Rendez-vous director Chomet ventures out with his first live action feature, although it's easy to go through the whole of it revisualising each shot as it would appear in animated form. This is also because its world is decidedly cartoonised and parodic, with a mute piano prodigy whose life is controlled by his aunts unearthing early childhood memories of his deceased parents through being administered mushroom tea by a hippyish neighbour. This then leads to a succession of hypercoloured musical trip sequences.
It's as imaginative and sweet as you would have expected from Chomet's Tatiesque animations, but also a bit aimless in terms of the balance between timing and making an actual point with any given scene or character, which is a lot easier to paper over when having the pure fantasy of the previous medium the director worked in as a get-out device in the event of impasse. Still, it's a pleasant jaunt and may serve to instil him with more self-confidence the next time around.

6/10

The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015)

The Lobster offers the premise of a future dystopia, where people who fail to pair up with a partner are turned into animals, as a metaphor for social pressure to choose between either the fully settled married life or hermitdom, when no such argument was really asked for. The bloody-mindedly idiosyncratic Lanthimos ploughs on regardless with his polemic, in much the same style as in his international breakthrough, Dogtooth. All characters speak with autistic, robotic flatness (though with some, such as Ben Whishaw or Léa Seydoux, this probably isn't much of a stretch), voicing platitudes or their literal thoughts, and while this can raise a smirk at its most artificial and incongruous, the effect starts to wear off soon enough.
This is a director who considers, in a curiously old-fashioned manner for one so young, sincerity to be bourgeois and so hides behind artifice and the deadpan covering screen. Then there is also the randomly inserted violence against animals and the schoolboyish insertion of four-letter words into the middle of dialogues, both just for shock effect. The film is more promising when the leads who start falling in love against the conventions of the counter-culture that they have escaped to - where conversely any romantic attachment is punished - are momentarily away from that milieu and there are barbs at decorum, consumerism and oppressive officialdom. But that isn't the focus, and it all ends up being let down for good by the conceit that people are required to be fully matched in some obvious way to be happy. One feels that this is really what the director believes, which places him quite far up the autism scale.

5/10

J.Edgar (Clint Eastwood, 2011)

Eastwood's account of the key and end years of the founder and head in perpetuum of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, is a usual Eastwood American history precis in many aspects - it has considerable longueurs, which might be seen as the ramblings of an aged director, were it not that this has always been his style: a historical subject is treated with too much reverence for the idea that all events and their effects have to be incorporated, which results in less a work of cinema than a faux-documentary. But, on the plus side, so much evidence is chucked in, and to his credit, whatever his suspect political leanings are, Eastwood never shies away from this, that the audience gets to do the job of piecing together their own position armed with the necessary material. This means that it's made clear that the character was in thrall to his mother and fanatical anti-communism, while also a repressed homosexual and fundamentally insecure.
It would probably not work at all were it not for yet another commanding performance by Leonardo DiCaprio in the role: once again, he makes you forget the actor behind the role entirely with changes of articulation, body language and reactions. It's far too long, of course, particularly for non-American audiences, but it does give some insight into how a country that gives the likes of Donald Trump the time of day was formed in living memory.

5/10

Le Tout Nouveau Testament (Jaco Van Dormael, 2015)

It's fair to say that The Brand New Testament is a very odd fish indeed: a Brussels-based fantasy which posits God as a misanthropic bastard cooped up before his computer, devising new ways to give people false hope and make their lives less happy at every turn. His 10-year-old daughter becomes determined to scupper his plans, and sets out into the real world to find herself apostles after letting everyone in the world know the exact date of their death through phone texts. Predictably, this has mixed consequences.
The beauty of the film is that you simply never know what it will do next, including in the dialogue, where smells and sounds are constantly described with very left-field similes. It does take its wilful weirdness a bit far at some junctures, such as when rich housewife Catherine Deneuve, facing death in five years, shacks up with a gorilla. But it's also wonderfully imaginative and very funny at times.

7/10

Bone Tomahawk (S. Craig Zahler, 2015)

Another genre extension of the Western in which Kurt Russell, who spends a lot of screen time being roughed up these days, as if his grizzled aspect invites it, takes on a bunch of cannibalistic troglodytes. The level of gratuitous violence is jacked up to the levels now demanded of horror films in the Saw vein, and while there is a certain skill in making the viewer cringe and believe that none of the characters are safe, it is basically just a zombie film with stetsons, made with clinical efficiency.

5/10

Renoir (Gilles Bourdos, 2012)

A biopic of the painter's last years and the fractitious relationship he has with his middle son, Renoir certainly looks the part cinematographically: some shots are utterly lustrous. However, it also does little more than relate the events, with a flatness of insight - and an odd lack of attention to the quality of the actual paintings - that is not elevated by the painter periodically just telling his son that he doesn't understand art. There is also a preoccupation with undressing the headstrong young model who is his muse, to an extent that smacks rather of the perving after little girls which is endemic of much French cinema with artistic pretensions.

5/10

Kollektivet (Thomas Vinterberg, 2016)

The Commune relates the story of a middle-class couple who decide to invite an assorted bunch of people to fill the big house they've inherited as an experiment in communal living (in the seventies, of course). Along the way, the usual tropes of fiction on the topic crop up: there are squabbles about budgets and habits, and the project turns sour as the father and owner, who entered into the undertaking unwillingly, engages in an affair with one of his students, which makes his wife bitterly regret taking the idea so lightly.
Nothing out of the ordinary as such occurs, and the film is therefore heavily reliant on realistic depictions of interpersonal relationships - which it mostly manages, except for some uncertainty of tone when it can't decide whether to satirise the cohabitants instead - and indebted to strong performances, particularly by Trine Dyrholm as the naive wife whose life is ruined by the changes. But, overall, it doesn't really add anything new to the theme.

5/10

Orfeu Negro (Marcel Camus, 1959)

Black Orpheus made a clean sweep of every major award going on its release, and it's easy to see how resetting the Orpheus story in the heady environment of the Brazilian carnival bewitched audiences in the post-war European gloom. It's far removed in this aspect from the melancholia of Jean Cocteau's artful and surreal take, for example. The pace is hyperactive, the characters overblown, and yet this works effectively to create a sense of dislocation and romanticism that's powerful enough that the supernatural element of the original myth can be done away with when the denouement is reached. It's very much a product of its time, and no less fascinating for that, even if just for anthropological reasons, with sexual morality being seen as very much an optional extra rather than a guiding principle.

6/10

Comes a Bright Day (Simon Aboud, 2012)

The British off-centre heist film has become quite a sub-genre of its own, and Comes a Bright Day ticks all the boxes, with the narrator's voiceover, random violence, self-consciously quirky elements and Geoff Bell in the wings. Basically, a young lad dreaming of a brighter future in the big city gets caught up in a bungled armed robbery at a jeweller's and the rest of the story is the unfolding of the hostage situation that ensues. Timothy Spall is also in attendance for star value as the jeweller, getting some fairly cringeworthy monologues on what precious objects represent in terms of history and dreams. It passes by innocuously enough, and at the same time is quite untrue to life and pointless as an exercise.

4/10

Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016)

Well, here it finally is, the comic book fan boys' wet dream. And appositely a sticky mess. The film bends over backwards to achieve the implausible fight between DC's biggest hero guns, and having achieved that, suddenly realises they have to pal up subito to deal with the villains. There is far too much time wasted on meandering towards this, with Batman's origin story yet again inexplicably filling up screen time, while Jeremy Irons doing his stint as a sardonic and weary Alfred, on the other hand, is criminally underused. Then there's Jesse Eisenberg not so much channelling as karaokeing Ledger's jittery and psychotic Joker in the Lex Luthor role, a pointless digression mid-action where the next characters in the franchise chain are set up through having Wonder Woman look at computer files - yes, really - and a monster at the finale who could just as well as ogre #373 in the background of some Lord of the Rings scene. The script also manages to ransack the bits from the Batman and Superman histories that are probably of the richest dramatic potential - i.e. the Dark Knight Returns graphic novel and the death of Superman story line, thus ensuring they can never be done properly again, while leaving us none the wiser to anyone's motivations, least of all Luthor, who just seems to want Superman dead because he's nuts, not because there's some grand plan.
It's a pity because if you listen carefully enough, there's some pithy dialogue tucked in amongst the bombastics, and the cast is brimming with quality. As for the characters, Batman should really be rescued from this, scurrying around like a mouse between giant explosions by the end with sod-all else to do. It's dismaying to see that Christopher Nolan is along as executive producer; his moody creation deserves better than this ignominy, which will only get worse with the silly sequels coming up.         

4/10

Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman, 2015)

Kaufman's second film as director after a string of successful screenplays takes us further into the relationship drama through a surrealistic perspective with physical actors replaced by unnervingly life-like stop-motion figures. This serves to support the air of dissociation that the script is predominantly concerned with, as a motivational business speaker finds all people around him with the same faces - reminiscent of everyone turning into John Malkovich in a scene in one of Kaufman's earlier work - and even the same voice. This is until the titular figure turns up, and there is a flash of love between them.
The painstakingly-created animation in puppet form of mundane real environments is an effective medium to convey the solipsism of the principal character. It also highlights the shallowness and homogeneity of, varyingly, what people say - as we inevitably focus more on verbal content than on real faces - and the American customer service experience as the epitome of the crushingly anodyne to a degree which is almost excruciating to behold.
But, here's the rub: it's also deeply disingenuous. The director chucks in a sweet nothing of an ending in a throwaway manner to steer the viewer towards thinking they've learnt something, and this is done in a far more brazen way than in, say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. whereas it's actually just a deflection from what has been a barrage of barely contained misanthropy, alternating with wallowing in the main character's shallow mid-life crisis, up until that point. While it doesn't quite inflict pseud torture on the audience like his ridiculously lauded Synecdoche, New York, it would appear that Kaufman is someone used best as a source of ideas which are reined in and refined by another director.

5/10

ID:A (Christian E. Christiansen, 2011)

A woman wakes up in the French countryside with memory loss, a bag full of money and several murders having occurred nearby. Discovering she's from Denmark, she returns there pursued by sinister men and discovers on getting there that she's also married to an opera singer. The film manages well until this point on atmosphere, if not entirely on originality. This is unfortunately undermined by a modish and suspense-deflating time structure, where we rewind at a critical juncture right back to before the start and then have to wait a good while for the story to trudge its way to the present again. On the way, the action element racks up too, to no particular avail, with a horror-film unreality to how easily the murderous pursuers keep on finding her over and over again, and then the chase takes over completely, with gruesome killings piling up. It can be noted that a panned American horror film is indeed what the director did right after this.

4/10

Dans la Cour (Pierre Salvadori, 2014)

In the Courtyard deals with two aspects of life: firstly, the nature of depression as it is undramatically and quietly experienced by people in reality, and secondly, the peculiar politics of the traditional Parisian concierge-tenant arrangement. The two elements mesh through a diffident and troubled man who takes on the job of caretaker, seeking to be left in peace, which of course the residents will not allow him. He forms a friendship along the way with a manic retired woman, played by the ageless Catherine Deneuve, and various other misfits.
The tone of the film is only gently comic, unlike the broader strokes in Salvadori's previous black comedy and screwball work: the focus is more on picking out the ludicrosities in people's everyday behaviour than going for out-and-out laughs, probably forced in part by a perceived need to tread softly around a sensitive subject. In truth, little happens and that includes in terms of insights, but it's an honest and mature piece all the same.

6/10

 

The Revenant (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2015)

Loosely based on a real story, The Revenant is set in a frozen winter in the American North-West in 1823, amongst trappers and local Indian tribes. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, a scout who is left for dead by his compatriots after being mauled by a bear. The film follows his single-minded agonising journey to recover and track down one of the party, the killer of his half-Pawnee son.
It's hard to believe that two-and-a-half hours of watching a man crawl through snow could be so compelling. The adult DiCaprio is a commanding presence on screen, but the film really belongs to the landscape and elements, shot with imperious beauty, aloof and utterly above human concerns, in effect becoming a character in the story. You feel the cold and pain to the bone in every scene, and the knowledge that the basic revenge quest plot will inevitably be followed through hardly matters when the experience is so immersive. It's like watching Terrence Malick edited to the vital essence by John Hillcoat, and probably Iñárritu's greatest achievement as a director.

8/10

En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron (Roy Andersson. 2014)

Those who've seen the first two parts of Andersson's 'Living' trilogy will know what to expect by now, and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence duly follows the same formula, being a series of loosely linked, blackly comic vignettes where a series of hapless people appear on screen and stay there until some point has been made about the petty nature of human existence. It would be in fact be more apt to call the scenes tableaux, because the camera in each scene is totally static and always set at a distance from the characters, without even the need to pull focus, and the characters too are frequently arranged in positions that are in effect still-lifes. The title of the film is in fact a reference to Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow, and the similarity in the approaches of the painter and director is blatant even without knowledge of this, even down to understated political subtext in the surreal scenes, such as when an 18th-century army from Swedish history barges into a cafe.
The problem with a succession of still-lifes in the filmic medium, however, is that the end result is just that: Andersson doesn't do cinema, and this may grate against some viewers. The wilfully glacial pace and repetitive mundanity of the dialogue don't help in this either. What he does do, though, is art, and art of quite a unique kind.

7/10

Creed (Ryan Coogler, 2015)

Rocky VII is a strictly join-the-dots concoction, with the space between the dots infuriatingly large, as the son of Apollo Creed arrives in town to persuade Rocky to train him up for what of course turns out to be the world title by a later plot contrivance. On the way, there are the trademark heavy-handed aphorisms and several training montages, along with reprises of chicken-chasing and the ageing trainer falling gravely ill. A love interest with an unobtrusive hearing condition fills in the gaps between the gym sessions, on the way to the cauliflower-face finale.
It's not a duff film as such, with the ersatz father-son chemistry between Stallone and Michael B. Jordan quite sweet at times and the fight photography tautly exciting. But the terrain is just so well marked out, that there's not really anywhere for it to go.

5/10

Captain America: Civil War (Anthony & Joe Russo, 2016)

Blah. Yet more Captain Hamerica, and it may never end. Since in the comics, this one started out as a crossover story between different titles, it does involve other heroes too, but noticeably the big guns of Thor and the Hulk have been left out to let their own franchises run and level the playing field a bit as two teams of costumed goodies come head to head over the demand of world governments that they submit to the authority of the UN. Cue lots of fighting then, but of a pretty toothless nature as none of them seriously want to hurt each other, not that Marvel would put up with their property being wiped out anyway.
The latest incarnation of Spider-Man is now along too, this time in enhanced pipsqueak mode, amongst others, but this just proves yet again that less is more as no-one apart from Chris Evans as the Cap and Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man gets to utter much more than one line at a time before it's back to levelling buildings once more. It has its fun moments amongst the mayhem, but here's a thought: instead of giving child-friendly characters darker costumes and some back stories to wring their hands over, why not leave all this for the kids and go out on a limb with proper complex adults for once? Watchmen 2, anyone?  

5/10

Fantastic Four (Josh Trank, 2015)

Director Trank promised a fresh angle on superheroics with his debut, Chronicle, which at least had the virtue of being darker-tinged than the standard Marvel/DC merchandising exercise. If he'd had any common sense, then, he would have run a mile when Marvel did come calling with yet another reboot request, furthermore for one of its less interesting franchises. Sadly, this was not to be and the end result is much worse than the somewhat excessively reviled 2005 film, with none of the humour, the characters faddishly and pointlessly turned into teenagers and the action, when it does finally arrive after an incomprehensibly protracted origin segment, muddled and illogical. The main plus is that it may actually not lead to sequels as a result.

3/10

Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg, 2015)

Based fairly closely on real events, Bridge of Spies relates the story of a lawyer charged with defending a Soviet spy at the height of the Cold War. There is also the parallel story of the capture of spy plane pilot Gary Powers in the Soviet Union, and the two stories eventually merge as the lawyer shuttles back and forth between different factions in East Berlin, trying to arrange an exchange of the respective prisoners.
Tom Hanks does wounded nobility well as the lawyer, but the film's stand-out performer is undoubtedly Mark Rylance as the diffident Soviet spy, quietly resigned to his fate. That the Coen brothers were behind the screenplay helps a lot with the dialogue and goes some way towards counterbalancing Spielberg's tendency to overdramatise and get sentimental, along with the usual cliches, such as that anywhere behind the Iron Curtain simply has to be always be snowbound. It does start to drag at nearly two and a half hours, but there are enough handsome setpieces to perk up interest at the right intervals that the film ends up in credit overall.

7/10

Grimsby (Louis Leterrier, 2016)

Sacha Baron Cohen turns his attention to satirising action films this time around, under the helmsmanship of an out-and-out action director. The basic set-up is Mark Strong, a super-spy, having a council-estate football yob as a brother, and the rest follows on from there in a very join-the-dots manner as they bond and save the world. More than ever, Baron Cohen has gone down the maximum gross-out line, with scenes such as the pair stuck up an elephant's jacksy while it's pleasured by a stream of male elephants indicative of the level of wit. It's a symptom of the frat-boy comedy era, I suppose, but Baron Cohen is capable of better than this. It simply gets tiresome before long at all.

4/10

High-Rise (Ben Wheatley, 2015)

J.G. Ballard's near-future novels were largely preoccupied with the perverse behaviour of people in the modern urban environment, and as such are cold affairs, almost by necessity. Therefore the film adaptation of his 1975 work, High-Rise, involving the rapid and extreme disintegration of society in a hulking tower block, on one hand benefits from having a director who is associated with nightmare scenarios, whether past or future, but on the other enforces the nihilism of Ballard's source.
The film does achieve one thing brilliantly: this is the future as seen from 1975, and the period detail is something to savour. The casting, led by Tom Hiddleston's divorced doctor who moves into the bizarre environment, is also solid across the board. Nevertheless, it really needed its satirical aspects to work and that's difficult when it's such a stylised distortion of the state of the world, with too much relish shown for ultra-violence. It's not a million miles away in this sense from A Clockwork Orange.

6/10

Deadpool (Tim Miller, 2016)

Gratuitously violent well beyond all Marvel adaptations so far, and with Ryan Reynolds wise-cracking all the way through at a rate rivalling Jim Carrey, this should not be an object of approval. The character isn't exactly that appealing either, a disfigured result of an experiment that saves his life and makes him unkillable a la Wolverine at the same time, a martial arts-laden mercenary anti-hero with a standard revenge mission. But Reynolds is clearly having so much fun doing his pet project, breaking the fourth wall continually to diss not only all of Marvel's other franchises but even his own career, that it's hard to not enjoy the ride.

6/10

Midnight Special (Jeff Nichols, 2016)

A father goes on the run across the southern states with his young son, fleeing from both the cult that adopted the boy and the government, both parties after him for having supernatural powers. What these powers are and what the point of them is, is unfortunately never coherently explained - the boy claims to come from a higher dimension and variously makes satellites fall out of orbit and picks up encoded transmissions with light shooting out of his eyes. A decent cast of actors make a game attempt at emoting portentousness, and the arthouse feel likewise promises much, but it fails to deliver any satisfactory conclusion and ends up with an eruption of futuristic architecture from The Jetsons via Tomorrowland as the supposedly magical pay-off.

5/10

St. Vincent (Theodore Melfi, 2014)

When making a Wes Anderson-lite comedy driven by slightly off-kilter characters doing slightly off-kilter things, be sure to cast Bill Murray, who brings the twin benefits of getting the target audience and bringing the requisite hangdog air and likability, even when cast as a misanthrope, as here. His Vincent is a curmudgeonly and broke pensioner, dreaming of a big win on the horses while caring for his dementia-stricken wife and reluctantly taking his single-parent neighbour's bullied son under his wing. The chemistry between these two forms the backbone of a slight story and its best scenes, with some crisp dialogue between the pair enlivening fairly standard set-ups. It's gentle fun until drifting into schmaltz after Murray suffers a stroke and effectively becomes a toothless presence.

5/10

Ted 2 (Seth MacFarlane, 2015)

This time around, the irksome evil of needing a plot to hang the gags on is that the potty-mouthed teddy bear has lost his legal status as a person and so has to set about re-establishing it. But that's by the by; what you judge this on is whether it contains any new innovations in upsetting the thin-skinned with irreverence, and unfortunately it doesn't. MacFarlane is too smug to bother; he's got his legions through Family Guy and clearly can't be bothered to work to get any more fans. Of course, giving the punters more of the same is the rule in Hollywood rather than the exception, but it does rile a bit when that's exactly what the best bits of his comedy are built on attacking.
So, we get entire scenes recycled from the TV cartoon like wrecking an incriminating laptop full of porn, a mishap in a sperm bank and a stoned car crash, followed by a cute Disney woodland animal bit, and then there's the tedious business of having the bear and Mark Wahlberg get caned again and again, reeling off cock jokes.
A few star cameos momentarily liven it up, but they're all too fleeting and then we're back to the plod again, with the knowledge that there's still over an hour to go and storyline boxes have to be ticked off. It's a pointless exercise, with none of the novelty and sweetness that raised the first film above the gross-out comedy norm.

4/10

L'une chante, l'autre pas (Agnès Varda, 1977)

One Sings, the Other Doesn't charts the progress of the friendship and lives of two women over 14 years. One is a mother who becomes widowed at an early age and the other a hippyish free spirit composing feminist-themed songs, of which the film contains many in a semi-musical style. The relationship is depicted in a thoughtful and relatable manner, and the wholly female perspective is refreshing, if disheartening at the same time as it underlines how far removed most cinema is from that. However, it's also badly dated in its viewpoint of gender politics and heavily burdened by dialogue that is either polemic or characters externalising their thoughts with unnatural directness, which is effective at first until you realise that all the characters do it. One also suspects that the songs, with some ludicrous lyrics by the director, are not there to be laughed at, which is a pity as many of them are hilarious.

5/10

Bleeder (Nicolas Winding Refn, 1999)

The fourth of the director's Danish films before his setting up shop in America, Bleeder is, like the Pusher trilogy before it, set in the marginalised world of working-class and dead-end urban society, part kitchen-sink drama, part in the underworld, heavily indebted to Scorsese around Mean Streets. Kim Bodnia, the lead from the first Pusher film, plays an emotionally-repressed man who has just found out he's about to become a father and the central thread is his story into disintegration in the face of being unable to cope with it or express what he feels before it's too late. The violence is intense on both a physical and mental level, and it's some comfort to have Mads Mikkelsen playing support as a no-hoper obsessed with films who finally starts to come out of his shell, providing some crumb of hope.

What Winding Refn's films had back then, while already stylised to the full extent the low budget allowed, was a fundamental heart, even if it was an angry one. By Only God Forgives, the hyperstyle had utterly swamped whatever substance there was, and one has to doubt whether The Neon Demon can recapture get him back on track to making films which also mean something beyond the fantastic gloss. But looking back at his early work, you still hold out some hope.

6/10

   

Slow West (John Maclean, 2015)

The Western vogue won't go away, but this wave has taken it on in the sense of an environment that's virtually sci-fi in terms of the diversity and sheer weirdness of the universe. Yet certain conventions are still beholden to. Hence, Slow West, with all its nods from El Topo down to the lowly likes of Seraphim Falls, contains ultraviolence and surrealism in equal measure, and this could be irritating indeed were it not for a simple backbone to the plot that remains constant. Once again, it ends up one of those films where, after all the beautiful scapes and ideas that suggest something larger, as probably the last thing the director wanted, i.e. simply a more thoughtful than average addition to the modern Western genre. You do have to sympathise with how hard it is to add anything more to the Western, though, or how once you've chosen that as your carrier of stories it ties up your hands.

6/10

Tomorrowland: A World Beyond (Brad Bird, 2015)

Here, director Bird continues with live action instead of the animation with which he made his name, albeit that it's cartoonish and CGI-laden enough that it might as well dispense with physical actors. The premise of a very child-oriented story is basically that there is another futuristic world that the young and spirited have access to through contact with magic pins, and a feisty teenage girl becomes determined to get there again after her first exposure to it. George Clooney turns up as a disillusioned man expelled from Tomorrowland as a child, playing a kind of substitute father figure who trots out the moral of the story, which is in essence a very middle-of-the-road woolly Disney philosophy about the value of hope and positivity in the face of the mess that the adult world is. Bird is a competent enough hand at the helm to ensure that it zips along lightly for the most part, but it's vexing to discover that there's far less substance and emotional complexity here for the adult audience than what any of his animated works contained.

5/10

Dokhtari dar šab tanhâ be xâne miravad (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)

Boy meets girl in a nameless nocturnal Iranian town, except that the girl in question is a vampire preying on the male lowlifes of the town.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night garnered much international praise, and beguiles with its blend of spaghetti Western and Jarmuschian film noir. But it's difficult to separate the just plaudits for its immersive mood and stylised look from the constant awareness that elements like drug-taking, prostitution and a total lack of religious presence are simply not what you expect from an Iranian film, and so there is a great temptation to be seduced by the novelty of that alone. It does look gorgeous in inky monochrome, uses music to great effect and understands the value of stillness, but, like its characters, doesn't actually know where to go. Still, it will be intriguing to see what Amirpour does next: there is an evident self-assuredness in the direction that promises a great deal.

6/10

The Future (Miranda July, 2011)

American independent cinema can turn out real gems that undercut the bombastic mainstream juggernauts. And then, frequently it also turns out ineffectual pieces of whimsy with all the intellectual rigour of wet tissue paper, where any unconventionality in terms of characters and events is held up as some profound statement on the meaning of life. Guess which category this tale of an aimless, largely jobless and mildly quirky Los Angeles couple, intercut with narrative asides from a cat they adopted and magical realist elements, falls into. It doesn't help that it irritates from the word go, with the cat given a croaky little-girl voice to utter pseud wisdom and the lead characters being completely devoid of any gumption. There are a few moments when the script does display a level of self-deprecation, but these turn out to be false dawns and the overall effect is to parasitically drain the viewers' energy as if the intention really was to leave them as listless as its protagonists. Avoid at all costs.

3/10

La Giovinezza (Paolo Sorrentino, 2015)

If Youth had proved to be a swansong for Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, it would have been a respectable way to go out. They play friends on a long stay in a Swiss hotel, the former a retired composer and the latter a director trying to make his 'testament' work, spending their days mulling over their lives.
There is always a danger of an artist disappearing up their own fundament when they make their main characters artists too, but on the other hand it's no sin to stick to what you know, provided you have something universal to say too. In this, Youth succeeds to a great degree, admittedly helped immensely by an arrestingly eclectic soundtrack and photography that will frequently leave you speechless. But it isn't beauty just for beauty's sake: images of this power reinforce the concept of the value and fragility of life, which works to support the central ideas of the film. Then, at other times, it's unexpectedly wryly funny too.
Thematically, this is the director recycling his preoccupations from his previous works such as The Consequences of Love and The Great Beauty; wistful musings on ageing, and it is somewhat odd to have a man in his mid-forties so fixated with the end of life. Again, it is also very stuck on the perspective of the self-involved wealthy white male. He will need another string to his bow sooner or later. But for now, you do have to marvel at the sheer command of atmosphere that Sorrentino has. It just leaves most other cinema looking heavy-handed and tawdry.

7/10

Ant-Man (Peyton Reed, 2015)

The Marvel production line moves onto its lesser superheroes with a strictly bog-standard offering where the protagonist, in this case Paul Rudd's failed burglar turned self-miniaturising powerhouse, goes through the regulation cycle of saving the world from a loon while getting back access to his daughter. Since most of the heroics occur at microscopic scale, the FX budget was always going to be even more predominant than the norm for the genre, and of course the final showdown, as with the Hulk, Iron Man etc. is with the baddie as a souped-up clone of the hero. One wonders what would happen if they accidentally got each other's nemeses just once. Anyway, the best that can be said is that the premise does allow for some decent visual jokes as things keep on changing size, and that will be quite enough to keep the kids entertained.

5/10

August: Osage County (John Wells, 2013)

A family with a fractious history is brought together when the patriarch commits suicide and each member comes with unresolved baggage, which is torn into with vigour by the surviving matriarch, who has cancer and is addicted to a panoply of prescription drugs, as well as too much truth. The film very much revolves around Meryl Streep's caustic performance in the role, and it's really that which keeps you watching, despite other able turns by the rest of the cast, since otherwise it's basically a Tennessee Williams-derivative Southern melodrama which doesn't successfully escape its stagebound origins, with a very clear sense of what is off-stage and when someone has started a monologue. The dialogue is too often prey to clunky exposition too, with characters providing the audience a potted summary of their relationships and backgrounds when lifelike interaction is really called for. But Streep really does serve up a tour de force, and that alone outweighs the negatives in the end.

6/10

Room (Lenny Abrahamson, 2015)

Adapted from Emma Donoghue's hugely successful book, Room takes on the considerable challenge of relating a story told in novel form through the unreliable narrative filter of a five-year-old boy who thinks that the whole of reality is the room that he and his mother have been held captive in for the whole of his life. Whereas the novelist has absolute dominion over what we have to take as reality, the filmic medium will always compromise this by sheer force of the visual image, so it's very much to the credit of all involved that it still works. It also depends heavily on the casting, of course, and it's a blessing that the child actor at the core is quite remarkably self-possessed yet credible as someone who is effectively both alien and abused child at the same time. Maybe it speaks a lot for the strength of the source material too, but we've seen countless adaptations of novels fall flat on their faces with far easier tasks before them, and the end result is quite affecting.

7/10

The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino, 2015)

Tarantino clearly decided he wasn't done with westerns after Django Unchained and so here we have another round which sprawls in terms of running time and yet is confined in a one-room cabin for the duration. The director's trademark ingredients are all there: smart-aleck exchanges, the story retold from a different perspective, idiosyncratic choice of soundtrack, Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth and Kurt Russell, liberal use of the n-word alongside many more gleefully inventive uses of racial and sexual epithets and last, but not least, the customary Grand Guignol bloodbath.
The story, then, is a simple one to hang all this ware on: a blizzard traps a bunch of unsavoury characters from bounty hunters to hangmen, murderers and racist war veterans in a cabin and suspicion between the strangers is rife from the outset. It heads in a promising direction as it turns into a murder mystery of sorts, but the boy Quentin just can't resist his bucket of blood, quite likely feeling a little trapped by the claustrophobic set-up he has stuck himself in, and when it flies, it flies to a more ridiculous extent than ever before. It's a shame after an entertaining first half, but it's probably too late to expect Tarantino to change at this late stage.

6/10

Insurgent (Robert Schwentke, 2015)

And while The Hunger Games fizzles out, this smudged carbon copy plods on towards the same cynical splitting of the third book into two parts still to come. Shailene Woodley's lead character, now put through a succession of virtual challenges to establish for once and for all that, Neo-style, she's 'The One', is a central weakness, watered down in every aspect from Jennifer Lawrence's version. But overall, besides Kate Winslet's cold villain, there's not much else to shout about either, with little of its progenitor cycle's subtlety in fleshing out the brutalistic society with some political or psychological depth. This one will limp over the finishing line, when that mercifully comes.

4/10

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (Francis Lawrence, 2015)

One teens-against-fascist dystopia franchise finally comes to an end, but it has left a host of unfortunate derivatives in its wake. So, the arrow-toting heroine gets back into the action to finish off the fight against tyranny of Donald Sutherland's cartoon baddie, and at least there is a small twist at the end as well as some attempt to introduce some political complexity, as with the otherwise yawnsome last part, but it's all drawn out very thin to justify its running time. Really, the whole concept would have been better served by tying everything up with the first film in the series, which had the virtue of some really quite gripping action that none of its follow-ups have come close to.

5/10

Puhdistus (Antti Jokinen, 2012)

Two Estonian women, one young and one old, meet and their traumatic stories are related, parallels becoming apparent between them. The parallels in question are all to do with their dehumanisation: for one, being turned into an informer on her family under the brutalisation of the Soviet regime, for the other being forced into prostitution.
Based on Sofi Oksanen's best-selling novel, Purge is of the school that holds that if you show true horrors in full, your art is irreproachable, regardless of whether there is actually any dramatic justification to stretch the point to two hours. It wallows in degradation, and it has to be said that Finnish filmmakers have a long-standing propensity for this. Hence, men feature as raping bastards, or fools at best, and the best that can be hoped for in existence is to be freed from pain. Meanwhile, noisome strings attempt to railroad the viewer into acknowledging the tragedy of it all. For all the film's serious intent and the strength of the acting by the two female leads, there is nothing to be learnt here.

4/10

De Ofrivilliga (Ruben Östlund, 2008)

Involuntary flits between five parallel stories with group behaviour as a common theme; teenage girls out drinking, a coach driver taking a stand against his passengers, a schoolteacher with a grievance against a colleague, a bunch of young men on a rowdy weekend and a birthday party where an accident occurs. The director has a keen eye for the minutiae of social interaction, and certainly at many moments the film is excruciatingly true to life. However, he's also overly fond of the static and obstructed camera position just for the sake of it, even when the action in no way demands or benefits from it. It would also have been welcome to have some overall message instead of falling back on the lazy safety net of life having no neat and tidy ends. It's therefore a series of well-observed vignettes rather than an actual film. However, there is clearly a germinating talent present and by 2014's Force Majeure a clear refinement can be seen in the director's process.

5/10

Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014)

Tom Cruise does start off playing a coward here, shanghaied into service as unstoppable aliens sweep the Earth, but never mind the fact that you know that won't last long. What's initially more alarming is the fear that this will be no more than gung-ho grunts again playing with very big guns (now they've got exoskeletons too, like all good future soldiers do these days) and one tiresome explosion after another. All of which does of course come to pass. Yet it's quite compelling stuff, simply for the key idea: each time Cruise dies on the battlefield, he wakes up at the start of the same day, and that day is a lot harder to get through than its Groundhog Day template, as each time he has to mechanically execute the same actions just to get further to some hoped-for goal. In other words, there isn't a sense of free will: it feels like a Sisyphean hell.
Naturally, since the mission-style scenario, and even the look of the weapons and aliens are straight out of countless FPS games, you have to wonder whether the writers were fully aware of the film's vulnerability to scorn by presenting a narrative guided by scenes set in stone as, in effect, gaming save/respawn points. Nevertheless, it's a riveting ride.

6/10