Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, 2015)

The stunts just have to keep getting bigger and Tom Cruise has to carry on pushing himself to do more and more in them, even though he's not many years from not needing latex to disguise himself as an old man any more. This time, as if the plot really matters, it's the good guys being discredited by their government and setting out to clear their names and prove the existence of international crime consortium The Syndicate. Cue the usual fights and chases, as efficiently handled as ever, and there is an able supporting cast, but it's pretty meaningless popcorn fare. These things only work well if there is a villain of real purpose and presence, a factor which seems to have been forgotten.

5/10

Passengers (Morten Tyldum, 2016)

A passenger on a spaceship bound for a new planet wakes up 90 years too early from hibernation, and spends a year alone trying to divert himself, until being irresistibly drawn to one of the other sleeping passengers, who he then wakes up to have a companion. They fall in love, until the day she finds out what he did.
There is a highly questionable underlying assumption here, which is that we would find what he did, i.e. curtailing her life, acceptable just because he's Chris Pratt and she's Jennifer Lawrence, and their telegenic compatibility means that their relationship is not only excusable, but was just meant to be. If you can overlook that, and the numerous plunderings of the plots and/or style of other material, Moon, WALL-E and The Shining being just some that spring to mind, it does manage to charm at times. But the director, Tyldum, whose last works were the taut thriller Headhunters and The Imitation Game, is on a slippery slope by taking the Hollywood dollar with such compromised material, which then descends into a wholly unnecessary action sequence at the end, to complete The Titanic arc.

5/10

The Hippopotamus (John Jencks, 2017)

A boozy, misanthropic burnt-out poet is tasked by his goddaughter to investigate supposed miracles at an estranged friend's country house in an adaptation of Stephen Fry's comic novel. Roger Allam attacks the character, so clearly Fry's caustically uninhibited alter-ego, with unbridled gusto and his expletive-ridden diatribes, bon mots and misbehaviour sustain the film until about halfway through, by which stage they have become tedious and then the enterprise is left running on empty as the plot itself is far too slender to impart much point to carrying on. Fry's smart turns of phrase just aren't quite enough for a full-blooded feature on this occasion, as amusing as they might be at times.

5/10

Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016)

Arrival posits that a dozen alien vessels appear one day over seemingly random locations around the world and hover there sphinx-like while humanity runs around in a flap trying to decide what to do about them. A linguist drafted in to try to communicate with the inscrutable newcomers takes centre stage.
Villeneuve's film has been much lauded, largely for eschewing the standard alien menace road in favour of a more intellectual angle. It is also strong on mood-setting. Irrespective of these virtues, when judged outside the genre confines it doesn't stand up so well to scrutiny. The notion that beings so advanced that they can get here, in their 2001 monoliths, would then be incapable of working out our crude syntax is as ridiculous as ever, never mind that we could decipher their fuzzy circles of supposed language instead. Accordingly, the message of hope that they finally impart is equally woolly.
The film's strongest aspects, i.e. the lead character's dawning realisation of the fate of her future daughter and how that impacts her choices here and now, twinned with the notion of events in time as something immutable and ever-present rather than linear and finite, are unfortunately somewhat buried under the global-level portentousness. A braver script would have trusted that these themes had sufficient power to sustain interest by themselves, without any of the sci-fi hoo-ha.

6/10