The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007)

Three brothers undertake a train journey across India to find themselves, as is the standard agenda for travellers to the subcontinent. Of course, with this being a Wes Anderson film, any such motives are to be taken lightly and likely to be derailed by all manner of random incidents. The performances of the cast, with Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman as the brothers and a host of cameos from other regular collaborators, are as tongue-in-cheek and facially expressive as the wilfully idiosyncratic plot requires and they make for an amiable entourage, albeit that this time the storyline is even more frivolous than usual and doesn't really go anywhere at all. Still, it's hard to dislike Anderson's output, even when it just meanders like this: the touch is light and the ambience is warm, and that alone is no easy thing to do.

6/10

In Search of a Midnight Kiss (Alex Holdridge, 2007)

A 29-year-old jobless slacker is persuaded by his friends to place a personal ad in the hope that he might nit have to spend New Year alone. The date that results from this, with strong echoes of Linklater's Before Sunrise, duly involves a lot of talking about life. And then more talking about life, with whimsical overtones all the way through and a few escapades connected to the woman's possessive ex, and a bittersweet ending to cap it off. This kind of stuff goes down a storm in U.S. indie circles and with the waffling intellectual French tendency too, but less well so if you actually look for substance in a film. Nor does it help that the male lead, as clear a projection of the filmmaker himself as you can imagine, is terminally wet and his 'strong' female counterpart utterly insufferable, at least at the outset. It means well and is mildly amusing in places, but has all the sense of purpose of its diffident main protagonist. Also see Frances Ha.

5/10

Legend (Brian Helgeland, 2015)

The story of the Kray twins gets yet another treatment in the hands of the L.A. Confidential screenwriter Helgeland, and you know what to expect by now: a staple myth of 'sixties popular culture where the passage of time since then lends a certain patina to essentially foul characters, now almost anti-heroes. This one polarises the two brothers to a greater extent than previous depictions, with Ronnie, the gay and more unhinged one, made almost autistic and Reggie in turn mostly shown as trapped in the criminal life by the burden of being his brother's keeper. So you don't need to know all the facts to deduce that heavy simplification is being imposed for filmic effect.
Given other casting then, it might have sunk without much of a trace. But they managed to get Tom Hardy to play the gangster siblings, and he saves the whole film single-handed: as with so many of his performances, you can't take your eyes off him and soon forget that he's playing both of them, such is the difference in the portrayals, right down to fine details in body language. As for the actual story though, it can really now be put to rest: there's nothing more to be said about a pair of thugs who briefly upset the status quo fifty years ago.

6/10

Young Ones (Jake Paltrow, 2014)

Another day in dystopian future America, and this time lack of water is the chief vexation, along with the concomitant breakdown in social order, albeit a mild case as these things go. A father of two struggles to get his crops going in an area given up as lost by most of the inhabitants, except for ones with bad intentions. Michael Shannon, as the dad, cashes in his chips pretty early and then it's up to his son to exact revenge. The film tries for many different styles outside its basic Western set-up, and fails to really make much of any of them. There's clearly an earnest desire to say something meaningful behind it all, but the script is far too pedestrian to achieve that.

4/10

Black Sea (Kevin Macdonald, 2014)

Jude Law stars as a marine salvage expert who is made redundant and then comes across and opportunity to make millions plundering Nazi gold from a sunken submarine in the Black Sea. a ragtag team of Brits and Russians is assembled and tensions duly arise onboard their decrepit sub over the division of the loot, which inevitably leads to disaster.
There's nothing dramatically new in the premise or the crew composition, so it's all down to the tension to keep up the interest and Macdonald keeps this up adequately, with Law a surprisingly gritty presence at the heart, essaying a pumped-up Aberdonian accent that mostly stays the right side of parody, if not quite plausibility. The message, if there can really be said to be one, is of course that greed corrupts (duh!), but otherwise it's pretty much a horror-film exercise in guessing in which order the largely unlikable entourage are bumped off.

5/10

The Door (István Szabó, 2012)

Veteran director Szabó's umpteenth feature is an adaptation of a semi-autobiographical novel by his namesake Magda Szabó, where the author recounts the relationship she had with her housekeeper in communist Hungary. Martina Gedeck and Helen Mirren take up the roles, the former taken aback by the direct manner of her bluff supposed employee, who does pretty much what she chooses to. Nevertheless, an unconventional friendship forms between the pair over the course of the years. Gedeck isn't given that much to work with apart from try to break through the wall of the other woman's inscrutability, which is just as well because competing with Mirren on this form would be like trying to turn back the tide: it's amongst the best work she's done; a woman devoid of vanity, cutting and startlingly pragmatic. There is plenty of meat on the bone, so it's a pity that the decision was taken to dub all of the supporting cast into English too, which accentuates the awful clunkiness of some of the dialogue amidst the real gems that Mirren's character is given.

6/10

The Element of Crime (Lars von Trier, 1984)

Despite its frequent lack of focus as it tries to make a coherent point, von Trier's debut also indicates the way his later films would go in seeking for unorthodox ways to unsettle the viewer's sensibilities. Michael Elphick plays a policeman investigating a serial killer by means of following in his exact footsteps, until the act of mirroring the murderer so closely starts to take over his own personality. The lighting is a miasma of sickly sodium-yellow murk throughout, the world a crumbling, dystopian Europe of an indeterminate future and the air overall that of a Kafkaesque nightmare where the protagonist is quite lost and all the other characters cyphers whose interjections make little sense, indeed reminiscent of Haneke's 1997 adaptation of Kafka's The Castle. It takes many stumbling steps and is frequently wilfully discomfiting, as is von Trier's wont, but for all its flaws it's also immersive and quite singular.

6/10

Wheelman (Jeremy Rush, 2017)

About as low-budget for an action film as you can get, with nearly all of it taking place in one car and no recognisable stars, Wheelman follows a getaway driver through the might after he's been double-crossed, and is trying to work out through a succession of phone calls what might actually be going on. It seems that the director has seen the excellent Locke with Tom Hardy, and decided that it really needed a violent bank job remake, which is pretty much a workable metaphor for what Americans do when plundering and reconstructing anything of quality in the medium. The tension is fairly effective, but the premise is incredibly hackneyed and so, even after a running length of only 80 minutes, I guarantee you'll feel a bit soiled for having fallen for it. I did, anyway.

4/10

Mudbound (Dee Rees, 2017)

Another offering from the Netflix juggernaut, this is nevertheless a divergence from their action and comedy norm: an adaptation of a best-selling novel about race and poverty in the Mississippi delta of the 1940s.
There are two farmer's sons, one white and one black, who go off to war in Europe and return both scarred and deeply dissatisfied with where they are again after what they've seen of the rest of the world. This leads to a bond growing between them, and although it's a strictly stock dramatic progression, it's still the film's strongest suit. Also, it spends a good deal of effort on sidestepping our plot expectations. Unfortunately this can't quite last: worn-out genre staples creep in, such as the white family's virulently racist grandpa, the black family's unquestioned ineffable goodness and their son's near-lynching by the Klan. So, amongst the greys and browns and rain, the film does indeed become mudbound.

5/10

Suburra (Stefano Sollima, 2015)

There are some corrupt politicians, several brutal mafia factions, prostitutes, morally compromised clergy and a host of other assorted lowlifes. This, Suburra would have us believe, is not only the power in Rome but effectively the population of Rome, and that is the film's biggest failing as well as its selling point for many viewers, who believe there is integrity in being so one-sided. As the various parties clash against each other, with anyone who has a clean public image struggling to be sucked down into the mire through bribery and other forms of coercion, a seductively convincing, thoroughly hopeless and rather ugly picture is formed of Italian society. But it is disingenuous, and its hyperstylicisation of the city backdrops and moments of catharsis gives away its true colours.

5/10

Murder on the Orient Express (Kenneth Branagh, 2017)

Branagh's remake of Sidney Lumet's 1974 adaptation of the Agatha Christie whodunit relies heavily on its star cameos for its pulling power, even if it doesn't actually cram in as many as the original film: Branagh himself as Poirot, Johnny Depp, Judi Dench, Willem Dafoe, Penélope Cruz and Michelle Pfeiffer, just to list the biggest guns. Each suspect gets their five minutes in the spotlight and it's fun to see their turns, even if the production design is the biggest star: it's a sumptuously mounted film, from Istanbul to the snowy mountains of the Balkans, and the lavish air of the train itself. That is at once its appeal and the problem: it's heavy on the gloss and, in sticking so closely to the source material, presents no surprises, unlike some versions over the years of And Then There Were None, which have played around much more with both the setting and the plot to good effect. Nevertheless, it's a diverting ride and Branagh fills the shoes of the anally retentive master sleuth with ease and some nice comic touches too.

6/10

The Age of Adaline (Lee Toland Krieger, 2015)

In 1937, aged 29, a woman is hit by lightning and stops aging. In present-day San Francisco, she lives a self-imposed single life, having changed her identity every decade to avoid questions. Then romance enters her life for the first time in decades in the form of the perfect sensitive man.
This is hardly a new premise: the idea of eternal youth is a perennial fantasy and there will always be mileage in it. New spins on the idea therefore really have work hard to bring some twist to it, and The Age of Adaline doesn't make much of an effort to do so, settling instead for a sugar-coated romance. The chemistry between the two leads is an asset, and Blake Lively conveys well the sense of a woman who's at once afraid of the pain of any more commitment and also like someone who has stepped right out of the past, with her old-fashioned bearing and diction. In a supporting role, Harrison Ford recently-established irascible gramps schtick is as dependable as ever, playing an unexpected blast from her past. But it's all a bit too wet to have any real substance.

5/10

Nerve (Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman, 2016)

What starts out as a run-of-the-mill American high school film with its jocks and bitches wanders off course as the lead character, an insecure (but of course still pretty) girl gets sucked into a game played on the phone that involves increasingly large prizes for increasingly dubious and dangerous dares, which unsurprisingly then seriously cross the line. Made by the duo behind 2010's cautionary documentary about Facebook, Catfish, this time their target is social media as a bullying force, a breeding ground for a kind of faceless fascism, as the game's participants are goaded on by a horde of followers everywhere they go. There is a valid point to it in that aspect, for teens at least. The rest of the plot, however, is purely and unambitiously lifted off The Hunger Games.

5/10

Focus (Glenn Ficarra & John Requa, 2015)

When someone burgles a pensioner's house, they're scum. When someone has refined tastes and robs the rich, they're Robin Hood. This is the bedrock of the smart con or heist genre, and feeds on the desire of the audience to bring those who have more than them down to earth. Thus the Ocean's Eleven series and countless others, such as this smoothly-executed but generic piece with Will Smith a shoe-in as a super-con artist who inevitably gets taken down a peg by losing his emotional focus when he gets emotionally attached to a sexy protege (Margot Robbie). It rolls along as slickly as you'd expect, with decent moments of tension when the games are played out, but ultimately loses its own focus too when too many twists and turns, the genre equivalent of explosion overkill in today's action films, are tacked on for the sake of bamboozling the viewer (read: mark) into thinking they've seen something far more clever and gripping.

5/10

Into the Wild (Sean Penn, 2007)

Based on the real-life story of Christopher McCandless, who turned his back on university, his family and the materialistic world to begin a trip without end through the vast open spaces of the States, Sean Penn's gravely earnest film captured numerous awards and the imagination of Americans with their idealisation of a lost frontier existence and the poetry of 'the road'. McCandless is essentially a fiercely idealistic, arrested adolescent with parent issues, who spouts pseudo-spiritual aphorisms constantly, and its clear that we're meant to not just indulge this but be drawn in my his single-minded vision, even if we know that he'll meet his end alone in the Alaskan wilderness.
The style is ponderous with lots of dwelling on animals and broad vistas, in the style of Malick, and you feel that if they could work in him swimming with dolphins too, they would. Meanwhile, the people he meets outside the cities are all salt-of-the-earth folk and kindly hippies, as you would expect of Penn with his usual putting of the 'common man' on a pedestal. To further underline the manly soulfulness of his quest, there's Eddie Vedder's dirge soundtrack seemingly stuck on a loop too.
Emile Hirsch's bright-eyed performance is a strong suit, as is the last chapter where he befriends Hal Holbrook's lonely widower. The character's end is also unexpectedly touching, despite his obvious stupidity at having brought it on inexorably. But the little fucker really could have perished at least an hour earlier, as far as I'm concerned.

5/10 

What Happened to Monday (Tommy Wirkola, 2017)

It's future police state dystopia time again and here the premise is that, with the global population having become unsustainably large, the world has turned to a Chinese-style one-child policy, which is brutally enforced. What does make it a much higher-concept affair is that identical septuplets have lived together for thirty years masquerading as just one person, each living her life outside for one day a week. If this had been explored in more detail, the end result would potentially have been fascinating. However, the director is best known for the daft-as-a-brush Nazi zombie flick Dead Snow, so it's no surprise that it soon turns to bloody, OTT violence as the evil authorities try to erase the siblings from existence. It still works pretty well as an action thriller, and Noomi Rapace has a good go at giving each sister a distinct personality, even if that means that each one is somewhat of an archetype, but it could have been a lot more than that.

5/10

Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017)

Thirty-five years it's taken, and the pressure that's created for it not be a cannibalisation of its iconic prequel has been quite substantial. It bodes well, of course, that even though the director has changed from Ridley Scott to the competent if less coherent Villeneuve, it has Scott's seal of approval and also the original screenwriter Hampton Fancher (albeit one that was dumped by Scott the first time around for penning something that concentrated too much on interior drama).
It's too much to expect that it could quite match the startling originality of the original, but it goes close enough. It's overlong, and while Ryan Gosling in laconic Drive mode occupies the screen comfortably as the replicant blade runner looking for the long-disappeared Harrison Ford and his own origins, he's also not allowed the acting licence Ford was due to the nature of the character. But my God, does it look stunning. The future is even more rain-lashed, toxic and grimy now. You'll be hard-pushed to find a film that captivates the eye so much in any genre. Also, unlike what the trailers would have led you to believe, it actually contains surprisingly little incessant action for a modern sci-fi sequel. This is also a good thing, because while they're sometimes fuzzily expressed, there's room for a lot of complex ideas about identity and purpose.
In short, it bombards you with mood for nearly three hours and then comes to a genuinely moving conclusion. A lot of questions are left open, even if some of the ones from the original film are also dealt with, so we'll just have to hope that the third instalment, when it comes, is handled with such panache.

8/10

Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

Fashion designer Ford's second film, after 2009's A Single Man, is a psychological thriller centred around a relationship between an artist (Amy Adams) and a writer (Jake Gyllenhaal) that fizzled out some time ago. As is the fashion in half the things you see now, it's told in two sections in reality where she unexpectedly gets a novel written by him in the post, separated by the story of the novel itself, which turns out to be a very dark imagining of the rape and murder of a man's wife and daughter by Texas hicks, leading to him setting out for revenge. As she reads it, she's increasingly consumed by what thought process led him to the story.
All well and good in principle, but whereas A Single Man was a painfully honest dissection of someone's grief at loss, this is much more affected and it's a shame to see Ford revert to being so superficial. Adams doesn't have much to do apart from look distracted and troubled, while Gyllenhaal's story is a pretty bog-standard addition to the genre of having another go at backwoods psychos. You can see what he's trying to say about the emotional damage of separation, but it just doesn't come off.

5/10

Mindhorn (Sean Foley, 2016)

Julian Barratt plays a washed-up actor only known these days, if at all, for a detective show from the 1980s set on the Isle of Wight. He thinks a resurrection of his career is on the cards when the police ask him to talk to an obsessive fan who thinks his character was real about missing women.
But this is British low-budget satirical comedy in the Alan Partridge mould (Steve Coogan even plays a prominent part in it to underline the obvious similarity), so we know the character will basically remain a sadsack. It's not as sharp as Partridge or, say, the short-lived Channel 4 horror spoof series Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, partly because pastiches of detective shows or crap actors have pretty much been done to death, but there are some jolly moments along the way all the same.

6/10

A Perfect Day (Fernando León de Aranoa, 2015)

A group of foreign aid workers in Bosnia during an uneasy ceasefire find their path beset with obstacles while trying to find rope to get a body out of a village well. These range from mined roads and local hostility to ludicrous UN bureaucracy, and they keep on getting thwarted on their quest.
This is a film with much to commend it for its intentions, the farcical aspects of the situation in the broken country being its strongest suit. The interaction of most of the ragtag group is also strong, including the young boy they pick up, who thankfully isn't made just cute. But it's uneven: the black comedy that it goes for at times doesn't really come off and the group leader's former fling who ends up in tow against her will is a painfully shallow characterisation, involved in almost all of the forced, unnatural dialogue scenes. Add the superimposition of a soundtrack of rock standards at inappropriate moments (e.g. Marilyn Manson covering 'Sweet Dreams' after the boy's parents are discovered hanged), and you get the idea: despite the positive intents and elements, it doesn't quite gel.

5/10 

OtherLife (Ben C. Lucas, 2017)

A technology that provides life-like experiences lasting a fraction in real time of what they do in the virtual world sounds too good to be true, and of course it all goes south before too long as the commercial mind of the company behind it is touting the idea that it could be used to serve the prison system, with people serving their sentences of years in minutes. Then the lead character, the woman who invented the technology and is trying to adapt it to get her brother out of a coma, ends up being imprisoned in the selfsame virtual world for her unsanctioned activities.
There's a lot going on here, and barring a momentary disconnection with coherence towards the end, it just about hangs together. What it loses on some derivative aspects - Inception in particular looms large with the constant questioning of what is real, and the parallels with countless drug films - it makes up for with its visuals, soundtrack and ambience; it doesn't feel like a modern mass product but instead of those paranoid thrillers from the '70s like The Conversation or Three Days of the Condor.

6/10

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Davis Yates, 2016)

An extension of the Potterverse juggernaut, this takes us back to before the sprogs were entering school to a New York of the 1920s, where Eddie Redmayne, a wizard whose specialist interest is mythical creatures, arrives and has to set out soon in search of missing specimens from his menagerie. Meanwhile, Colin Farrell, as a senior wizard in the local fraternity, has sinister plans to gain power by controlling a cloud-like parasite called an Obscurus.
So far, so familiar. But despite being kid-friendly through the weird creatures in it, imaginatively realised, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them has more adult appeal than all the Potter films, largely because it's not set in a public school: the depiction of the New York of yesteryear is just as rich as that of the beasts. It's hardly a thing of great depth, but rollicking fun all the same.

6/10

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (James Gunn, 2017)

Diminishing returns begin to kick in with this sequel, largely because it diverges so little from the formula of the first instalment. Hence, it's still witty enough and full of irreverent fairground thrills, following the motley crew adventure away to a non-stop retro soundtrack and Kurt Russell turning up as Quill's long-lost dad to ham it up shamelessly as some kind of god, but also beset with one of those interminable genre-obligatory end sequences where everything gets blown up, to the point at which you start clock-watching and thinking about what to do next with your day. Naturally, there'll be another one too because they make money and they're harmless fun, but a little more characterisation really wouldn't go amiss; here, the thing on screen with the most charm by far is the animated twig who can only say "I am Groot".

5/10

Life (Daniel Espinosa, 2017)

Neither fish nor fowl, Life takes the setting of Gravity on the International Space Station, and then superimposes Alien as the crew, as unwisely as in any horror film, decide to play around with a Martian microorganism until it turns into a tentacled monster and tries to kill them all. The initial realism does not serve the idea of an exponentially growing, intelligent predator that isn't bothered by a vacuum at all, and the film consequently becomes the usual checklist exercise in second-guessing the order in which the various ethnicities and genders on board are bumped off. A smart twist at the very end just isn't enough compensation.

5/10

ARQ (Tony Elliott, 2016)

Time loop stories are a sci-fi staple, easy to do with just a bit of attention paid to continuity, with even a basic plot powering itself once revved up. They are, in other words, a bit of a cheat: you can assemble something that will hold the audience's attention just because everyone likes playing I-spy with minor divergences. To make one exceptional, however, you need to put serious amounts of hours in at the corkboard with pins and string to map out the timelines. ARQ doesn't pay much heed to that requirement, slapping on whatever deviation from the rules that suits it by virtue of having an arcane machine (the titular generator of limitless power in the lead character's basement, in the midst of a war-torn near future with a global energy crisis) serve as a MacGuffin to steamroller over anything that demands a logical explanation as a home invasion by men after money replays again and again. It's diverting enough, but makes sure to steer well clear that might possibly confuse the average Joe.

5/10

Veronica (Carlos Algara Alejandro & Martinez-Beltran, 2017)

Confusingly, both this Mexican thriller and a Spanish film by the same name came out at the same time: this one is to do with a retired female psychiatrist who agrees to treat a young woman with an undiagnosed trauma at her house in the mountains. The relationship between the two soon turns twisted and sexual, and then, having promised so much more with the foreboding mood it set up to begin with, sails directly into cloud cuckoo land. Doubtless, the directors thought that they were making some kind of homage to Hitchcock with all the twists and psychological references they lay on, but what they have actually created is no better than an off-the-shelf slasher.

4/10

Circle (Aaron Hann & Mario Miscione, 2015)

50 people representing a broad swathe of society wake up standing in a circle in a black room, and find that not only can they not leave their spots, but that one of them will die every two minutes. Then they come to understand, even as their numbers dwindle, that they can all vote for the next to die.
The nefarious premise is incredibly simple, and leads to all kinds of possibilities, most of which the script explores with gusto even if not always with finesse: racial and sexual differences come out, political factions form and the motives for altruism get questioned almost as often as selfishness is exposed. It's rough around the edges, but the sheer premise and what it gets right in the taut execution nevertheless make for quite edge-of-the seat viewing.

6/10

Free Fire (Ben Wheatley, 2016)

An arms deal in a warehouse goes awry very quickly amidst macho posturing and all the characters spend the rest of the film shooting lumps out of each other. And then more lumps.
It's all very easy for the director to deflect criticism of the casual and continuous violence under the cover that it's a pastiche of Tarantino, but Tarantino pastiches himself and Reservoir Dogs, from which this lifts the end scene and expands it into a whole film, not only had substantially more wit but made sure we knew that being shot hurts like hell. Here, in a misguided attempt at turning it all into Grand Guignol comedy, being hit by a bullet is just an inconvenient setback. The whole film is a more serious setback in the career of a promising, idiosyncratic director: it's worrying that his first film obviously made for the U.S. market (after five leftfield British ones) is so unambitious, wholly lacking any personality.

4/10

El bar (Álex de la Iglesia, 2017)

So, the murder mystery template of a suitably assorted bunch of strangers brought together in a confined environment has been tried and tested to serve horror and sci-fi too, by simultaneously giving us some kind of cross-section of society and therefore also people who don't know or trust each other, and this is what The Bar goes with in brisk style, with people trapped inside a bar near the centre of Madrid after a few people going outside its doors are abruptly shot by someone unseen. This could go in several different directions, but when you know that the director has hardly diverged from a preoccupation with horror ever since his 1993 debut, Acción mutante, it's hardly a surprise when he starts knocking over his pawns with glee and it turns properly schlocky. The feeding on current paranoias about terrorists, disease epidemics and - a particularly Spanish one, this - distrust of the government add some topical flavour, but like its characters it ends up wallowing in the sewer before too long.

5/10

Il capitale umano (Paolo Virzì, 2013)

Of course the technique of telling a film from three different perspectives is so common it's now quite standard, but that doesn't diminish its value provided that it's done to serve the drive of the narrative rather than just for modish effect. Human Capital uses it in the right way, unpeeling the events of one night like the layers of an onion. The basic story revolves around three families in Lombardy; one ultra-rich (a callous banker, his disempowered trophy wife and his spoilt son), one a level below (a hapless estate agent gambling on the markets, his blissfully unaware wife and his independent-minded daughter) and one at the bottom of the social scale (a sensitive boy shunned for his unconventionality and his wastrel of an uncle). Their lives intersect around the accidental running over of a cyclist and there's a good deal of fairly restrained social observation along the way about the nature of a money and status-driven society, helped considerably by the transposition of the story to Northern Italy (the source novel was actually set in Connecticut). It does veer somewhat perilously close to soap opera at some points, and in the end doesn't actually leave us with much substance, but it's a handsomely mounted piece all the same.

6/10 

The Invitation (Karyn Kusama, 2015)

A man grieving the loss of his son two years previously accepts an invitation to a dinner party from his ex-wife, which is also a reunion of friends from the time of the accident. Since we know we're in horror territory or thereabouts, it's clear that all the cloying L.A. platitudes and mild ribbing will have to step aside at some point, and when it becomes evident that the hosts are effectively missionaries for their new-found cult, that points the way for the inevitable development. Nevertheless, it takes far longer than usual to get there, builds up atmosphere effectively and, most importantly, actually has some emotional content rather than just relying on genre cliches.

6/10

A Cure for Wellness (Gore Verbinski, 2016)

Dane DeHaan, a young high-flyer in an American company is sent to fetch the CEO, who seems to have lost his marbles, from a Swiss sanatorium. But all, of course, not as it first seems and he starts questioning his sanity upon witnessing more and more horrors in the manner of Shutter Island, which is rather heavily signposted by both the setting and DeHaan's obvious similarity to a young DiCaprio.
If the film had been content to be just a clone of that, with at least its striking visuals providing some balancing merit, a considerable amount of face would have been saved, even if its occasional pontifications on human nature are annoyingly shallow. But this is a work by Verbinski of Pirates of the Caribbean fame, and so after a depressing number of false denouements it goes utterly and stupidly over the top and you end up wishing the hero really had just given up with his fruitless efforts and gone home half the way through.

4/10

Logan (James Mangold, 2017)

In the near future, an ageing Wolverine and Professor X, who now has crippling seizures, are hiding out after an event that has decimated the mutant population. But the sinister forces behind that aren't done yet, and sooner or later they are forced to go on the run, with a young girl in tow who has abilities like Wolverine's.
The action jacks up, of course, but this is very much darker than the costumed X-Men outings of late. It's really about mortality, and with Hugh Jackman having been in the role for 17 years now, he's weathered convincingly into a weakened, middle-aged version of the character who just wants to be left in peace. The character is really defined so much by his physicality unlike, say, James Bond, that it's quite compelling to see the change, and the harsh, elegiac tone of the film overall, for all its hyper-action, makes this basically one of the finer of the Westerns of recent years rather than just a mere superhero film.

7/10

The Woman in the Fifth (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2011)

The Woman in the Fifth stars Ethan Hawke, the go-to guy when you need someone for your sensitive American in Paris, as a divorced writer arriving in the city to try to see his daughter. It is evident that he has also suffered from some form of mental illness. At any rate, he now doesn't have a sou to his name and takes up a job as a night watchman in exchange for board, spending his nights working on his new book. He then begins a dalliance with a mysterious woman at her flat, while also growing closer to the barmaid at his hostel, until things turn dark.
This is a film of uncertain intent and direction, and while it may be tempting to see that as a metaphor for the character's fragile state, and the intent it has to unsettle the viewer is lofty, it doesn't really satisfy in the end. Incidentally, it's also hard to believe that anyone can understand Hawke's appalling accent in French, which really does become a distraction.

5/10

It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014)

American teens getting stalked by a malevolent demonic force is hardly new terrain. It Follows is raised above the genre average to a great extent by its obvious influences: Cronenberg for the longueurs and determinedly unphotogenic cast and settings, Carpenter for the soundtrack, and auteurs quite outside the horror genre for techniques such as knowing when to do away with dialogue and elisions in the narrative. The plot itself, which is to do with the key character being slain by a shuffling, motiveless entity unless they pass on the curse through sex, is pretty cursory and playing once again on the guilt-ridden American relationship to the sexual act, but at times it does allude to that paranoia in a wider societal sense, which few horror films have any interest in.

6/10

Bacalaureat (Cristian Mungiu, 2016)

The third feature by Mungiu, director of the acclaimed 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which was centred around an illegal abortion in Communist Romania, Graduation tackles equally serious social themes as a girl is raped the day before her high-school finals. This jeopardises her chances of qualifying for her scholarship at a university in England and her father decides to take control of matters, going behind her back to influence the examination officials.
His motives are convoluted: we see that he's far more concerned with getting his daughter out of a place that he repeatedly tells her she does not have a future in than with the inconvenience of what has happened to her. We see more of his emotional reaction to the incident than we do of hers; he's emasculated by it and, as with the balancing act he has between his wife and his mistress, more concerned with being seen to do the right thing than actually taking the wishes of others into account.
Likewise, Romanian society is depicted as a hopeless tangle: it subsists on backroom deals, back-scratching and outright bribery, and if the director is being excessively pessimistic in his view, it's a very convincing picture all the same. Nothing is morally clear-cut, and there is correspondingly no tidy dramatic conclusion either. It's one of those films that raises questions that linger on, and while it could have benefited from a more cinematic sensibility to add contrast, it is nevertheless a satisfyingly adult piece of film-making.

7/10

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, 2015)

A socially awkward high school kid with a passion for movies is forced by his mum to befriend a girl with leukaemia, something that then turns into a real platonic relationship. We are very much in American independent Dave Eggers/Michel Gondry country here, with the quirkiness laid on thick just so we know how magical life can be, and both the lead character's incongruously street black mate and the waning, poetic girl serve rather flimsily as mere foils for the stock self-obsessed white middle-class male in the centre, but it is redeemed overall by having a sparkling sense of wit - evident in the film spoofs that the boys make in particular - and a real emotional sensitivity too, even if it falls quite decisively short of saying anything truly insightful.

6/10

I.T. (John Moore, 2016)

For an actor who, post-Bond, has been able to demonstrate bags of acting talent and commands the screen too, Pierce Brosnan really does make unwise choices. Here, as a self-satisfied aviation tycoon who inadvertently upsets a socially dysfunctional employee, it's not that he does anything wrong per se in the role, just that the role is shallow and so's the psycho stalker plot that we're then plunged into without much further ado. Then it's just a matter of joining up the dots, while wondering what on earth I.T. really has anything to do with it, besides the looney utilising technology as his torture instrument of choice.

4/10

John Wick: Chapter 2 (Chad Stahelski, 2017)

This is a rarity in the world of action sequels in that it's actually superior to the first instalment. Unfortunately, since the first film was almost entirely an exercise in monitoring the body count, with only a cursory origin story serving as a respite, this is not high praise. Keanu Reeves has slowed down noticeably in dutifully wading through more and more disposable thugs and it isn't a pretty sight for Neo: jowlier does not always equal more grizzled, and he's always been an actor heavily dependent on how he comes across visually in the absence of any greater talent. It covers its Ronseal non-stop violence remit and finishes open-endedly with Wick even worse off than before, and that is pretty much the sum total of its virtues.

5/10

Death Note (Adam Wingard, 2017)

Hollywood's ransacking of Japanese horror manga continues with a wholly unnecessary loose remake of the first of the live-action versions of the story. The story essentially involves a high school student who comes across a notebook which causes the death of anyone known to the writer whose name is written in it. He begins by offing just truly evil people and then predictably loses focus. It's a premise with legs, explaining why it has gone on for so long in Japan, and the death god Ryuk who periodically visits the hapless protagonist to taunt and cajole him is an unsettlingly opaque presence: having Willem Dafoe voice the character was probably the best decision made in this adaptation. On the other hand, focusing excessively on the sulky teenage lead instead of his more interesting demonic tormentor, adding a spurious love interest and cramming in as much as possible from the source material in case the U.S. franchise doesn't take off do it no favours at all.

4/10

A Street Cat Named Bob (Roger Spottiswoode, 2016)

Based on James Bowen's best-selling autobiographical book about his life on the streets as a heroin addict and subsequent salvation attributed to finding a cat to take care of, this is quite a departure for a director best known for Hollywood action films. But then many people get soppy with old age, and despite the bleak beginnings, this is a film with a very soft centre. Which is no bad thing in itself, because while offering hope, it still doesn't eschew showing the realities of the gutter, and it ultimately works because we can believe that all this really happened. Although you may have to be a cat-lover to swallow that having to look after a feline can really provide you with enough of an emotional anchor to drag yourself out of the mire.

6/10

Coherence (James Ward Byrkit, 2013)

A bland dinner party of friends turns into an existential nightmare in an impressive zero-budget debut by the director. But who needs a budget when you have a brain, and although the notion of a bunch of people becoming trapped in a confusion of realities, which occurs here as a comet passes close to Earth, is now becoming another sub-genre in itself - partly owing a debt to films such as Nacho Vigalondo's Timecrimes and now continued by the films of Mexico's Isaac Ezban, for example - the twists here are both unexpected and deeply disturbing, even if it does giddily overreach itself and turns into quite a muddle in the process.
It's a very difficult film to categorise; a summary of the premise would suggest science fiction, but it's really a drama that turns into horror without violence. And to say anything more would be a cruel spoiler.

6/10

Toivon tuolla puolen (Aki Kaurismäki, 2017)

The iconic director's 17th feature film outing is a revisit to the theme of Third World immigrants interacting with Europeans, as with his last film, Le Havre. This time however, the director is on more solid ground with the setting moved to Finland and his anger is more pronounced, with racist thugs turning up at times to victimise the main character, a young Syrian asylum seeker, who is also treated unfairly by the system that decides to send him back to Aleppo after judging the situation there to be not perilous enough to warrant asylum.
The structure of The Other Side of Hope is one with two parallel storylines: the asylum seeker's tribulations and a middle-aged travelling shirt salesman who leaves his wife to somehow manage to set up a restaurant in Helsinki. That these storylines exist in isolation from each other for so long into the film is its major weakness: the tone in the former is serious, whereas with the Finns it's overwhelmingly comic. Correspondingly, when we get the characters staring wordlessly into space or the camera in Kaurismäki's emblematic style, the effect with the asylum seekers is one of suffering and saudade, while with the less-troubled Finns it conveys a broader range of emotion from dismay to disapproval or hostility.
Nevertheless, this is Kaurismäki's most complete and satisfying film for a long time, and not just because it's a great exercise in ticking off literally every one of his trademarks (characters smoking incessantly as a substitute for conversation, sparse deadpan dialogue, protracted interludes of awful music, dismal anachronistic interiors and expressionist lighting, to name just a few). By the time the restaurateur takes the would-be immigrant gruffly under his wing, we've been waiting for it a long while and it's truly gratifying.

7/10

The Lady in the Van (Nicholas Hytner, 2015)

Adapted from Alan Bennett's own play, this is an account of sorts of the 15 years that Bennett had an old woman living in a van in front of his house in Camden. Alex Jennings does a sterling impersonation of the curmudgeonly writer, with much of his trademark caustic wit on display, while Maggie Smith is an odorous and truculent force of nature as the unwanted guest. The dramatic interludes where the woman's shrouded past is explored work somewhat less well in conjunction with the modern-day satire, but director Hytner is as safe as pair of hands as his stars and so they don't get to detract much from the overall pleasure of the experience.

7/10

The Family (Luc Besson, 2013)

Besson, who it's fair to say hasn't made a truly decent film since the 1990s, still ploughs on with variable results despite his recent promises/threats of quitting. Here, a Mafia family is relocated under witness protection to a small town in France, where they are supposed to keep their heads down at all costs. Because the apparent aim is to create a comedy of cross-cultural differences, they naturally fail to do so, with the kids proving their gangster toughness at school, while Robert De Niro as the father pretty much blows his mob cover completely at a film showing and Michelle Pfeiffer as the mother blows up a local store who have upset her. It's broad stuff, with only a few comedic moments that work, and ends up in the usual Besson action finale. Ho hum.

4/10

Green Room (Jeremy Saulnier, 2015)

A young punk band find themselves in hot water after stumbling across the aftermath of a murder at a gig for neo-Nazis. Their hosts then set about trying to kill them by any means at their disposal.
The griminess promises the genre norm of messy killings and a low survival rate for the protagonists, and Green Room duly obliges. Patrick Stewart, essaying some kind of accent, comes in out of the blue as the leader of the supremacists and his casting against type is an interesting choice, and the execution overall is certainly more efficient than what the warring parties manage. But really it's just about the body count, as is usually the case with this template.

5/10

These Final Hours (Zak Hilditch, 2013)

An asteroid has hit the Atlantic, setting off a creeping global firestorm that is due to reach Australia in twelve hours, and society falls to pieces at a rate unprecedented even in the worst excessive apocalypse porn. Because apocalypse porn is what this is; easy to write and generate ready-made human tragedy from, even though it's elevated to some extent by its poignant tone and a superior performance from the asshole trying to make good in his final moments by taking a girl looking for her father under his wing and rejecting the rampant hedonism that he sought to exit the world with.

5/10

Self/Less (Tarsem Singh, 2015)

Dying property mogul Ben Kingsley has his consciousness transplanted into a freshly-grown young body, except of course this is playing at being God and so complications are sure to follow. For the remainder, we're following Ryan Reynolds as the host trying to resolve the unholy mess created. What starts as a fairly fresh premise, not wholly derived from anything existing, dissolves very quickly into a standard actioner complete with car chases, with the occasional weepy interlude to assure us that we're dealing with an issue of philosophical substance to do with memory, feelings, identity and all that deep stuff.

4/10

Chef (Jon Favreau, 2014)

Jon Favreau directs and stars as a top chef who falls out with his boss and a food critic over being forced to churn out conventional fare, and then goes on a road trip which turns into a bonding exercise with his son. Somewhat ironically then, the film itself proceeds to churn out plenty of conventional fare along the way and no surprises at all: Favreau just cooks, eats, quips and lays on the feelgood sauce until the viewer is both satiated and slightly sick. It's all very amiable, and makes a nice change from his superhero blockbusters, but also more of a souffle than a solid meal.

5/10

Spiklenci slasti (Jan Švankmajer, 1996)

To say Švankmajer is an acquired taste is somewhat of an understatement. Things never start too normal and will always go really sideways before too long. In Conspirators of Pleasure, his third feature, he takes surreal flights of fancy too far at times, and too aimlessly: even a stream of consciousness needs to be directed when put on screen. Nevertheless, in his observations of the intersecting lives of six people with their own individual sexual perversions, there are plenty of moments of delight at the sheer inventiveness, particularly in how far he takes his characters' individual dogged quests for the ultimate onanistic turn-on. The stop-motion animation could probably have been left aside this time though: the live players are putty enough to serve the director's purposes.

5/10