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