The Revenant (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2015)

Loosely based on a real story, The Revenant is set in a frozen winter in the American North-West in 1823, amongst trappers and local Indian tribes. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, a scout who is left for dead by his compatriots after being mauled by a bear. The film follows his single-minded agonising journey to recover and track down one of the party, the killer of his half-Pawnee son.
It's hard to believe that two-and-a-half hours of watching a man crawl through snow could be so compelling. The adult DiCaprio is a commanding presence on screen, but the film really belongs to the landscape and elements, shot with imperious beauty, aloof and utterly above human concerns, in effect becoming a character in the story. You feel the cold and pain to the bone in every scene, and the knowledge that the basic revenge quest plot will inevitably be followed through hardly matters when the experience is so immersive. It's like watching Terrence Malick edited to the vital essence by John Hillcoat, and probably Iñárritu's greatest achievement as a director.

8/10

En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron (Roy Andersson. 2014)

Those who've seen the first two parts of Andersson's 'Living' trilogy will know what to expect by now, and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence duly follows the same formula, being a series of loosely linked, blackly comic vignettes where a series of hapless people appear on screen and stay there until some point has been made about the petty nature of human existence. It would be in fact be more apt to call the scenes tableaux, because the camera in each scene is totally static and always set at a distance from the characters, without even the need to pull focus, and the characters too are frequently arranged in positions that are in effect still-lifes. The title of the film is in fact a reference to Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow, and the similarity in the approaches of the painter and director is blatant even without knowledge of this, even down to understated political subtext in the surreal scenes, such as when an 18th-century army from Swedish history barges into a cafe.
The problem with a succession of still-lifes in the filmic medium, however, is that the end result is just that: Andersson doesn't do cinema, and this may grate against some viewers. The wilfully glacial pace and repetitive mundanity of the dialogue don't help in this either. What he does do, though, is art, and art of quite a unique kind.

7/10

Creed (Ryan Coogler, 2015)

Rocky VII is a strictly join-the-dots concoction, with the space between the dots infuriatingly large, as the son of Apollo Creed arrives in town to persuade Rocky to train him up for what of course turns out to be the world title by a later plot contrivance. On the way, there are the trademark heavy-handed aphorisms and several training montages, along with reprises of chicken-chasing and the ageing trainer falling gravely ill. A love interest with an unobtrusive hearing condition fills in the gaps between the gym sessions, on the way to the cauliflower-face finale.
It's not a duff film as such, with the ersatz father-son chemistry between Stallone and Michael B. Jordan quite sweet at times and the fight photography tautly exciting. But the terrain is just so well marked out, that there's not really anywhere for it to go.

5/10

Captain America: Civil War (Anthony & Joe Russo, 2016)

Blah. Yet more Captain Hamerica, and it may never end. Since in the comics, this one started out as a crossover story between different titles, it does involve other heroes too, but noticeably the big guns of Thor and the Hulk have been left out to let their own franchises run and level the playing field a bit as two teams of costumed goodies come head to head over the demand of world governments that they submit to the authority of the UN. Cue lots of fighting then, but of a pretty toothless nature as none of them seriously want to hurt each other, not that Marvel would put up with their property being wiped out anyway.
The latest incarnation of Spider-Man is now along too, this time in enhanced pipsqueak mode, amongst others, but this just proves yet again that less is more as no-one apart from Chris Evans as the Cap and Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man gets to utter much more than one line at a time before it's back to levelling buildings once more. It has its fun moments amongst the mayhem, but here's a thought: instead of giving child-friendly characters darker costumes and some back stories to wring their hands over, why not leave all this for the kids and go out on a limb with proper complex adults for once? Watchmen 2, anyone?  

5/10

Fantastic Four (Josh Trank, 2015)

Director Trank promised a fresh angle on superheroics with his debut, Chronicle, which at least had the virtue of being darker-tinged than the standard Marvel/DC merchandising exercise. If he'd had any common sense, then, he would have run a mile when Marvel did come calling with yet another reboot request, furthermore for one of its less interesting franchises. Sadly, this was not to be and the end result is much worse than the somewhat excessively reviled 2005 film, with none of the humour, the characters faddishly and pointlessly turned into teenagers and the action, when it does finally arrive after an incomprehensibly protracted origin segment, muddled and illogical. The main plus is that it may actually not lead to sequels as a result.

3/10