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