Er ist wieder da (David Wnendt, 2015)

Look Who's Back, the best-selling novel which posited that Hitler materialises in modern-day Berlin for some inexplicable reason, worked because the whole was narrated from Hitler's perspective and the author had Hitler's bombastic, self-important rhetorical style down to a tee. The film adaptation correspondingly only works when it sticks to the book, instead of giving the other characters back stories which only get in the way. Thus encounters between the Führer and real people are interwoven with the fully-scripted segments, with no clear distinction between the two, and the overall effect is sub-Borat because you never quite know what is meant as slapstick satire, what is serious political comment and what is just the filmmaker hedging his bets out of fear of the possible repercussions of making Hitler just a figure of ridicule even now in Germany. Unfortunately, the film never quite gets over this hang-up. The fact that the casting of an actor who's too physically imposing as the demagogue, even if he does get the voice more or less right, is a problem from the outset, becomes a secondary issue.

5/10

The Maze Runner (Wes Ball, 2014)

Another year, another 'young adult' fiction series to be given the film franchise treatment and it's tormenting teenagers for senseless reasons yet again in the dystopian future. One wonders whether this obsession is a natural consequence of being subjected the American school system.
Anyway, the boys here, an off-the-shelf assortment of ethnicities and stock personalities, have been trapped for years in a meadow in the midst of a foreboding maze filled with murderous yet boring machines and have duly divided themselves into the standard jock and nerd factions. Then their Jennifer Lawrence messiah figure turns up in the form of a feisty yet tearful boy who we are instantly told is 'different' for actually wanting to escape. Of course, there's some hazily cobbled-together nasty military-industrial entity behind it all, and the depressing promise of two more instalments of the same.

4/10

The BFG (Steven Spielberg, 2016)

Roald Dahl's story of a giant who befriends a little girl is a perfect vehicle for Spielberg's perennial message of a child's sense of wonder against the big, bad world. This means that there are naturally times in the film when eons of marvelling at coloured lights to a swooping soundtrack will get too much for an adult, but it has to be said that the visuals in the more down-to-earth sequences are truly captivating and peppered with inventiveness, even allowing for the regulation depiction of England as some kind of 1950s/Victorian cobbled candy store. The choice of Shakespearean heavyweight Mark Rylance as the performance-capture template and voice for the benevolent and gobbledygook-spouting giant may also have seemed wilfully off-centre, but it works perfectly and the actor's screen presence really comes through, which in turn prevents the whole affair from becoming the cloying confection that so many of Spielberg's forays into kids' films have been wont to be.

6/10

The Hunter (Daniel Nettheim, 2011)

Willem Dafoe stars as a mercenary hired by a shady biotech company to track down the Tasmanian tiger, which is presumed to be extinct, and kill off the species for good after collecting samples of its DNA. It's at times a sluggish build-up to the final deed, with Tasmania getting Deliverance-style bad press as a battleground between hostile unemployed loggers and environmental activists and Dafoe trudging around alone in the unforgiving wilderness. But the slow burn is worth it in the end as it generates an existential air that elevates the whole to something greater than what its fairly basic outline promises. Dafoe is also particularly commanding, always suggesting something dangerous and torn beneath his self-controlled exterior.

6/10