Den Skaldede Frisør (Susanne Bier, 2012)

Love is All You Need finds able director Susanne Bier, behind sensitive pieces such as After the Wedding, switching to romcom mode somewhat lackadaisically, relying heavily on the kneejerk charm of both the Bay of Naples and middle-aged women's creased crumpet Pierce Brosnan. He's the widowed dad of a Danish boy about to get married to the daughter of a hairdresser in this photogenic setting, the principal catches being that Brosnan is a hard-nut businessman, his son has cold feet and the hairdresser comes recovering from cancer and with a cheating husband to boot. Of course, they are destined to fall in love.
There are a fair few quite deft and fresh scenes in the build-up to the climax, with people's responses to potential crises diverging from the norm, but then it all gets out of hand in a manner akin to the director banging together all the figures in every permutation possible, like a child who's been playing with her dolls too long. This results in some utterly cringeworthy hand-wringing dialogue, particularly between Brosnan and son. It's a shame as some disciplined script editing could have salvaged the grain from the chaff. Perhaps Bier needed to get back to the basics and for her that seems to have meant getting back to grittier fare, as evidenced after several years of further strayings by her assured control over the BBC series The Night Manager.

4/10

What We Did on Our Holiday (Andy Hamilton & Guy Jenkin, 2014)

The Richard Curtis target demographic comedy-drama What We Did on Our Holiday features an array of familiar faces from British TV in a story of a couple in the process of divorce taking their kids to Scotland to celebrate his terminally ill father's probable last birthday. So far, so formula, but what saves the film is a script filled to the brim with sparklingly witty dialogue and pathos, and not least the kids, who manage to sidestep cloying cutesiness with utterly natural performances. The fact that Billy Connolly as the granddad, a sage and irreverent free spirit against the dying of the light, is basically just playing the popular perception of himself, works here to the film's advantage too. It's very funny in places and also imbued with genuine pathos, and so when it all inevitably gets a bit too feel-good by the end, it has earned just about enough of our indulgence to get away with it.

7/10

Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)

Notorious may superficially fit into Hitchcock's spy film production line, with Cary Grant's CIA man persuading Ingrid Bergman, playing the daughter of a convicted Nazi traitor, to seduce a member of a Nazi organisation in Brazil in order to root out their secrets. But it's also the director's first serious stab at a love film, albeit a typically darkly-tinged on at that, with Grant's character only interested for most of the way through in forcing her to carry out her mission.
It is somewhat of an curate's egg in having Grant play a bit of a bastard for once, and Bergman a self-centred alcoholic, but despite what sycophants would have you believe, it doesn't work as a whole: neither as an espionage film, because there is little substance to that element of the plot, nor as a romance simply because there is no chemistry between the leads. The trademark hallucinatory scenes, innovative camerawork and air of paranoia are all there, but act more as embellishment than serving to bolster the story. For comparison, see Bergman vs. Peck in the previous year's Spellbound and witness the result of Hitchcock knowing to stick to his knitting before really hitting his stride a decade later.

5/10

Die andere Heimat – Chronik einer Sehnsucht (Edgar Reitz, 2013)

In Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision, a prequel to his acclaimed Heimat TV film series, Reitz takes us back to the village of Schabbach of 1842, suffering disease and oppression under the Prussian yoke and with anyone still young and able emigrating for the new world in droves. The main character is a hopeless dreamer, studying Amazonian tribal languages as he fantasises about leaving for Brazil, embittered when his brother beats him to it and strands him to continue the struggling family business.
It's lustrous to look at, shot in monochrome but with unexpected flashes of colour, and there is a real sense of period too, which combine to make the running length of nearly four hours not drag at all despite the events largely being a continual cycle of hardship and death. However, as always with Reitz, perhaps most reminiscently of 1979's The Tailor from Ulm, but also with the '60s-set episodes of Heimat, there is a critical fault in asking the audience to empathise with a protagonist who lives in cloud-cuckoo land to the detriment of both himself and those around him: it's not enough to be a romantic to elicit our love. Reitz has never quite got this, and it's always a pity when in other aspects his films offer so much in terms of mood and beauty.

6/10

Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)

Nominally a sequel to the original trilogy, Mad Max: Fury Road is in effect really a recycling of the second and third films, with the world already completely gone to hell and all semblance of a normal society long vanished. To be fair, this does mean that by now Max is truly mad, but that's just about all the continuation adds, bar ramping up the action intensity even more. The mere fact that there is much less reliance on CGI, which is by now widely reviled, than in most modern action films has been held up as a virtue to a wholly depressing extent: there is just too little let-up in the pace and sooner or later anyone with an attention span of over two seconds will find themselves zoning out. Tom Hardy is an actor of real presence, but he could be replaced here by almost anyone and you wouldn't notice, with so little room for actual characterisation. It's hard to see what makes the whole any better than, say, the critically panned The Chronicles of Riddick.

5/10