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