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