Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015)

The chief virtue for me in the 24th official Bond outing is probably that the director has made a conscious decision to make all the Craig films a continuity, which is rewarding if you've seen all of them and makes sense in that the first of them was already a reboot of the franchise. As it had to be: no series could sustain all that baggage and unevenness of tone, never mind having the face and global political set-up change radically too over the years. Christoph Waltz, needless to say, also makes a superlative villain - albeit very much recycling his jovially psychotic Hans Landa - and the action scenes, of which there are the usual too many, are executed sharply enough to almost make you forget that the hero is quite indestructible. But, for all the attempts to flesh out Bond's psyche and provide a new menace for him to combat (the global commodity under threat here is intelligence), history weighs as heavy on the overall product as the script keeps on underlining that it does on the character's mind, and staging the biggest explosion ever committed to film in turn underlines the dearth of fresh ideas left in the tank.

5/10

Bikur Ha-Tizmoret (Eran Kolirin, 2007)

The Band's Visit has an Egyptian's policemen's band lost in Israel while looking for the venue of their performance to open an Arabic cultural centre, tramping along like the hapless bunch from Leningrad Cowboys Go America and being taken in overnight by quizzical locals in a town in the middle of nowhere. Gradually, the two sides find common ground, but this isn't a sermon on Arab-Jewish relations, instead, the interest is just on what makes individuals tick, and it's all the better for it. There are some wryly amusing vignettes along the way, the scenes in the roller-skating rink a particular highlight amongst these, and a basic underlying decency and sweetness that make a small story carry more political weight than overt polemicising ever could.

7/10

Mr. Holmes (Bill Condon, 2015)

Ian McKellen plays a retired Holmes in the last years of his life, fighting against the dying of the light as his mental faculties decline inexorably. A growing friendship with the precocious son of his housekeeper drags him enough out of his torpor and wallowing in regret to finally tie up some loose ends, but now ones of the emotional kind, rather than of the factual. And that's fairly much the whole story: no murder mystery, this, rather a study of ageing and memory.
McKellen is clearly a loss to screen portrayals of Holmes; even in the dawning senility that the role requires, he fits it like a glove. The relationship with the forthright young boy who pushes him to revisit the past is also sweetly realised. It is a slight film, in that its perambulations don't lead anywhere except back to the beginning, but the walk there is nevertheless a pleasant and thoughtful one.

6/10

Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015)

Garland directs one of his stories for the first time with an addition to the AI genre, and gathers critical acclaim largely for eschewing excessive histrionics or didactic exposition of what is going on in the mind of the burgeoning consciousness at the centre of the film. Of all the recent films on the theme of a machine reaching self-awareness, Spike Jonze's Her is by far the closest in the sense that while the machine is the centre, it is a conflicted human trying to make sense of how he feels about the machine that is the actual heart of the story. Of course, this has to be a man and it's quite easy to see how the machine, again in the form of an attractive woman, represents the mystery of womanhood altogether for the agonised nerd facing her. This standard arrangement would be nice to get away from if the genre still has any fuel in its tank.
As it is, Ex Machina is capably acted, well shot with impressive effects and gets under the skin in a genuinely disconcerting way at times, albeit mostly in the interaction between the unhinged inventor and the naïf protagonist employed by him to test his creation. However, there is also too much that is left unanswered by the film, being so taken with its style and clinical intellect while leaving the new-born entity a closed book. Or, indeed, a tin man.

6/10

Turist (Ruben Östlund, 2014)

Released internationally as Force Majeure, this esoteric Swedish drama wrongfoots the unsuspecting viewer on several occasions. The bare outline, a family on a ski holiday in the French Alps whose lives are turned upside down by an avalanche, suggests a survival nail-biter. This is what a diet of Hollywood pap does to our expectations, but then when it slowly becomes apparent quite another animal is on show, the longueurs of the static long shots and hyper-real mountain landscape cutaways in between the family's semi-autistic interactions start to jar. Until you realise that there is a metaphorical level at work throughout, and then the real agenda dawns: this is a representation of insecurity and miscommunication. After that realisation, it becomes vital and compelling. It does sail dangerously close to Bergmanesque introspective mania at several junctures, reminiscent of Scenes from a Marriage, but it's so rare to find a film these days that wears its art openly on its sleeve and really engages the mind, that the close calls simply have to be forgiven. It's not just for its magical cinematography that it lingers in the mind long after the screen has turned black.

8/10

Casino Jack (George Hickenlooper, 2010)

Kevin Spacey has compliantly become the go-to man for playing conniving gits in the milieu of Capitol Hill, and so you pretty much know what to expect when he presents himself as the real-life lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who pushed his remit beyond the bounds of what even the decidedly twisted Washington set-up could put up with. Years of fiddling the system under the banner of representing the interests of minority groups led finally to jail sentences for him and his closest cohorts, and the film deals with this in a matter-of-fact way, but having Spacey, the winking political anti-hero even before his turn in House of Cards, as the sloganeering and movie-quoting focus and a caperish slant to the whole affair don't do the seriousness of the message any favours. It serves as overly familiar and passable entertainment, when really the subject matter cried out for a polemic.

5/10