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

Assassin's Creed (Justin Kurzel, 2016)

I confess that I haven't played the game that this is based on, but I bet it was not only more fun but more coherent. The plot, for those who would care, has a man sent back into the body of his 15th-century ancestor, a member of a sect seeking to keep the Apple of Eden, which contains the genetic code for free will, out of the hands of the Templars. That it manages to make every aspect of this fantastically uninvolving is quite a feat, preferring instead to have Michael Fassbender as the protagonist hack, kung fu and parkour his way through the mire for two hours while the rest of the criminally misused principal cast - Cotillard, Irons, Gleeson and Rampling - have to stand around delivering ridiculous lines robotically.
The fact that a film that is ostensibly about the fight for free will should move in a more mechanically predestined way than the sandbox game is staggeringly ironic. Likewise, despite the use of dramatic real-world locations across Spain, you feel that you're in a more confined environment than a virtual one is, with mist and shadow draped over everything for no good reason, as if reality was too expensive to animate. Beyond that, even the interminable fight scenes are dull and so poorly put together that it's largely impossible to follow what's happening at any given moment.
Finding out that the man who directed both Fassbender and Cotillard in the previous year's rather impressive adaptation of Macbeth was actually behind this turgid mess is the icing on the cake of its nonsensicality. It must surely have been a joke on the studios and easily-led game fanboys. Unfortunately, it's not a very funny one.

3/10

Los Parecidos (Isaac Ezban, 2015)

In the midst of torrential rains somewhere outside Mexico City in 1968, eight characters find themselves stuck in a cut-off bus station and tensions between them come to the boil even before things start going very, very badly south in an unreal sense.
Ezban's The Incident the previous year created a nightmare of time and place out of skew on a seemingly global scale, and likewise here the radio keeps blaring out reports of the world going to hell in a handcart even as the characters experience it first hand, continually turning on each other trying to apportion blame until the true cause becomes apparent.
The Similars is shot in a sickly blue-tinted sepia and makes no attempt at rationality or fleshing out the personalities, because what Ezban really wants to do is bash them - and the viewer - against each other and the impossible until the disorientation is thoroughly unsettling. The Twilight Zone-style narrative framing at the start and end almost seems to have been imposed to isolate the viewer from continued ill effects of the spillage of the film into the real world.
In fact, the outline was actually lifted from a Twilight Zone episode of 1961, but nothing there could ever have been so demented. Maybe it takes a Mexican - there's plenty of previous in the country's filmic heritage for truly insane work, from Jodorowsky onwards.

6/10

Big Game (Jalmari Helander, 2014)

The U.S. President's plane is shot down over the wilds of Finland (actually Bavaria) by a regulation vaguely Arabic psycho in a paper-thin conspiracy plot, but as the President survives the crash, he's befriended by a boy out on his own undergoing a rite-of-passage hunting trip. The hunt for them by the crooks is then under way.
This is preposterous stuff, with clunky characterisation and dialogue, but carried out with such conviction and vigour that it actually works, the action set pieces in particular, which by the end make no attempt at credulity and just try to jump an even higher stack of sharks. Presumably that's why the likes of Jim Broadbent and Felicity Huffman signed up, back in Washington, while Samuel L. Jackson must have enjoyed playing against his regular typecasting as a badass by having his handed to him on a platter at every attempt to act tough. It's good, harmless fun, against any reasonable expectations.

5/10

What We Do in the Shadows (Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi, 2014)

Such a bite in the neck for the exhausted vampire genre, this mockumentary has a bunch of vampires living as flatmates in Wellington, New Zealand and explaining the daily burdens of their life, starting with squabbles about whose turn it is to mop up the blood. It takes in every genre cliche and plays with them to hilarious effect. You'll recognise the co-director and co-writer, Jemaine Clement, from the fantastic Flight of the Conchords and so already be familiar with the tone, and it fully delivers on that expectation, with one cringeworthy episode after another and so many quotable lines. Highly recommended.

7/10

American Honey (Andrea Arnold, 2016)

Films with 'American' in the title do so, as a rule for one of two reasons: either as a direct attempt to sell to the average Joe Punter in the U.S., or as a statement of intent to say something of import about American society. With Arnold, you can guess it won't be the former, and a rambling road movie where a Texas teenager escapes her abusive father to take up with other young misfits to sell magazine subscriptions across the length and breadth of the country is hardly going to sell anyone the American dream.
They're a feral bunch, pumping themselves up continuously on booze, drugs and rap music before diving into another bout of door-to-door scamming. The rowdy travelling family, under daily pressure when leaving yet another identical motel to make good on the day, without any light at the end of the tunnel, is easy to see as an indictment of employment under faceless corporations, but it's also as much about the shorted-sighted hedonism of youth. It does labour to make its point at more than two and a half hours - some editing would really have helped here - but its avoidance of stereotypical plot turns and characterisations of the people they encounter in nearly every possible case is a huge, refreshing plus. There are no rapes, no drug overdoses, no shoot-outs, not even an arrest for their wayward actions. This is clearly deliberate: the director wishes not just to defy the genre conventions, but to suggest that things can still be fucked up even without obvious dramatic consequences.
It's not Arnold's most perfectly-realised film - you would have to go to the much smaller and more succinct Fish Tank for that - and the sound is a real hindrance, particularly with all the mumbling in accents from all over the States, but it is thought-provoking. The Lord of the Flies allusion at the end is hardly necessary, because if you've paid attention you'll have got that right at the start, but then it also underlines that for all that the lead character might have learned, no real progress for society is within sight.

7/10