Hector and the Search for Happiness (Peter Chelsom, 2014)

Simon Pegg uses up yet more of the goodwill he built up through Shaun of the Dead and its lesser successors in the humdrum story of a psychiatrist going on a globe-trotting story of self-discovery. Along the way, no broad national cliche from serene Chinese monks to brutal African warlords is left unused and a strong supporting cast is woefully squandered on spouting platitudes and worn-out aphorisms.
This is a film in the 'heart-warming life lessons' genre for the American market in the clothing of a British one. Besides the asininity of its self-help book content, this is evidenced by constant use of U.S. idioms such as 'skank' and footnotes within the dialogue to explain terms to the target audience, not to mention the story ending up in Los Angeles and a conviction that a happy ending can't exist without material wealth. Pegg remains an affable sort and therefore you may keep on watching simply through a sense of magnanimity that he engenders, along with the insertion of Michel Gondryesque fantastical cutaways, but the syrupiness really does become unbearable before too long.

3/10

Mænd og Høns (Anders Thomas Jensen, 2015)

Men & Chicken features a cavalcade of the internationally best-known Danish male film stars uglying up and dumbing down to play an assortment of cretins who discover that they share a father. But there's also a mystery to be solved about what their departed progenitor, a mad scientist, got up to.
It's not unreasonable to make two generalisations on the basis of this black comedy: firstly, that there seem to be only a dozen big names in the Danish screen actor world, and secondly, that there is a national preoccupation with half-wits and lunatics, as the set-up of the former asylum that serves as their home has strong echoes of The Idiots, for example. That notwithstanding, it's clear that the cast have a whale of a time spazzing out and that in turn keeps the audience on its toes by virtue of some bizarre twists on the way to a surprisingly sweet end. It's not exactly big or clever, but it is good fun and rather more substantial than its wacky premise promises.

6/10

Noruwei no mori (Tran Anh Hung, 2010)

Film adaptations of novels are often criticised for taking liberties with the source texts. and overly simplifying them in particular. Norwegian Wood commits no such sin, for the simple reason that it sticks to Murakami's story like glue. This is not a wise move on two accounts: firstly, it doesn't really develop a cinematic life of its own, and secondly, Murakami's book may have been hugely popular but it's also not particularly good material for adaptation into a medium where internal monologues and memories aren't an option. The main character is a sap pining for a self-absorbed girl with severe mental issues while life passes him by, and the sentiments expressed are what you could expect, but not hope for, from immature 19-year-olds. That this is then drawn out to more than two hours in filmic form makes for a bit of a self-indulgent ordeal, albeit somewhat leavened by the sumptuous photography.

5/10

Life in a Day (Kevin Macdonald, 2011)

Whittled down from 4,500 hours of YouTube footage by members of the public in nearly every conceivable country, Life in a Day purports to be a snapshot of one day in the life of humanity. As an editing achievement, it's quite a feat, but is does fall short of its remit through being weighted by necessity towards the technologically-enabled and Anglocentric world, which is understandable, but also by choice towards the telegenic and soundbite-like. While there are moments of genuine revelation, the imperative to move on to show us something else quickly in the name of even-handedness also means that nothing is gone into in as much depth as it might merit. In that sense, it's a sort of whistle-stop tour of the global community, giving a sense that something has been learned and yet, on analysis, not leaving much at all of substance in the memory.

5/10

R.I.P.D. (Robert Schwentke, 2013)

Some sad hack will have been sitting in the last chance saloon writing acronyms on napkins and slapped themselves on the back when they discovered two that could be spliced with ease to provide an entire film premise; a police department for the dead. Then all that needed to be done was shoehorn it into the Men in Black template, add a generous splash of Ghostbusters and hey presto, the rest wrote itself.
That may be a trifle tough on Jeff Bridges (doing the old-timer curmudgeonly Tommy Lee Jones one, armed with his tried and tested indecipherable Wild West patter) and Ryan Reynolds (the Will Smith disbelieving and impetuous rookie one), who are still an amiable pair in the midst of the never less than derivative CGI shenanigans and tired gags. But there really is nothing to distinguish it as a film in itself, and the best that can be said is that its box office failure makes a follow-up unlikely.

3/10

Attila Marcel (Sylvain Chomet, 2013)

Belleville Rendez-vous director Chomet ventures out with his first live action feature, although it's easy to go through the whole of it revisualising each shot as it would appear in animated form. This is also because its world is decidedly cartoonised and parodic, with a mute piano prodigy whose life is controlled by his aunts unearthing early childhood memories of his deceased parents through being administered mushroom tea by a hippyish neighbour. This then leads to a succession of hypercoloured musical trip sequences.
It's as imaginative and sweet as you would have expected from Chomet's Tatiesque animations, but also a bit aimless in terms of the balance between timing and making an actual point with any given scene or character, which is a lot easier to paper over when having the pure fantasy of the previous medium the director worked in as a get-out device in the event of impasse. Still, it's a pleasant jaunt and may serve to instil him with more self-confidence the next time around.

6/10

The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015)

The Lobster offers the premise of a future dystopia, where people who fail to pair up with a partner are turned into animals, as a metaphor for social pressure to choose between either the fully settled married life or hermitdom, when no such argument was really asked for. The bloody-mindedly idiosyncratic Lanthimos ploughs on regardless with his polemic, in much the same style as in his international breakthrough, Dogtooth. All characters speak with autistic, robotic flatness (though with some, such as Ben Whishaw or Léa Seydoux, this probably isn't much of a stretch), voicing platitudes or their literal thoughts, and while this can raise a smirk at its most artificial and incongruous, the effect starts to wear off soon enough.
This is a director who considers, in a curiously old-fashioned manner for one so young, sincerity to be bourgeois and so hides behind artifice and the deadpan covering screen. Then there is also the randomly inserted violence against animals and the schoolboyish insertion of four-letter words into the middle of dialogues, both just for shock effect. The film is more promising when the leads who start falling in love against the conventions of the counter-culture that they have escaped to - where conversely any romantic attachment is punished - are momentarily away from that milieu and there are barbs at decorum, consumerism and oppressive officialdom. But that isn't the focus, and it all ends up being let down for good by the conceit that people are required to be fully matched in some obvious way to be happy. One feels that this is really what the director believes, which places him quite far up the autism scale.

5/10

J.Edgar (Clint Eastwood, 2011)

Eastwood's account of the key and end years of the founder and head in perpetuum of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, is a usual Eastwood American history precis in many aspects - it has considerable longueurs, which might be seen as the ramblings of an aged director, were it not that this has always been his style: a historical subject is treated with too much reverence for the idea that all events and their effects have to be incorporated, which results in less a work of cinema than a faux-documentary. But, on the plus side, so much evidence is chucked in, and to his credit, whatever his suspect political leanings are, Eastwood never shies away from this, that the audience gets to do the job of piecing together their own position armed with the necessary material. This means that it's made clear that the character was in thrall to his mother and fanatical anti-communism, while also a repressed homosexual and fundamentally insecure.
It would probably not work at all were it not for yet another commanding performance by Leonardo DiCaprio in the role: once again, he makes you forget the actor behind the role entirely with changes of articulation, body language and reactions. It's far too long, of course, particularly for non-American audiences, but it does give some insight into how a country that gives the likes of Donald Trump the time of day was formed in living memory.

5/10

Le Tout Nouveau Testament (Jaco Van Dormael, 2015)

It's fair to say that The Brand New Testament is a very odd fish indeed: a Brussels-based fantasy which posits God as a misanthropic bastard cooped up before his computer, devising new ways to give people false hope and make their lives less happy at every turn. His 10-year-old daughter becomes determined to scupper his plans, and sets out into the real world to find herself apostles after letting everyone in the world know the exact date of their death through phone texts. Predictably, this has mixed consequences.
The beauty of the film is that you simply never know what it will do next, including in the dialogue, where smells and sounds are constantly described with very left-field similes. It does take its wilful weirdness a bit far at some junctures, such as when rich housewife Catherine Deneuve, facing death in five years, shacks up with a gorilla. But it's also wonderfully imaginative and very funny at times.

7/10

Bone Tomahawk (S. Craig Zahler, 2015)

Another genre extension of the Western in which Kurt Russell, who spends a lot of screen time being roughed up these days, as if his grizzled aspect invites it, takes on a bunch of cannibalistic troglodytes. The level of gratuitous violence is jacked up to the levels now demanded of horror films in the Saw vein, and while there is a certain skill in making the viewer cringe and believe that none of the characters are safe, it is basically just a zombie film with stetsons, made with clinical efficiency.

5/10

Renoir (Gilles Bourdos, 2012)

A biopic of the painter's last years and the fractitious relationship he has with his middle son, Renoir certainly looks the part cinematographically: some shots are utterly lustrous. However, it also does little more than relate the events, with a flatness of insight - and an odd lack of attention to the quality of the actual paintings - that is not elevated by the painter periodically just telling his son that he doesn't understand art. There is also a preoccupation with undressing the headstrong young model who is his muse, to an extent that smacks rather of the perving after little girls which is endemic of much French cinema with artistic pretensions.

5/10