I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach, 2016)

With this, Loach hit the age of 80 and feature number 26 with his righteous ire at the inequities of the world intact and vented at full force. Dave Johns plays a joiner forced to stop working after a heart attack, who is progressively ground down by the benefits system which declares him fit for work and not eligible for work incapacity payments, contrary to his doctor's opinion, and then still denies him his employment allowance as well. He finds some respite in helping a single mother settle in the area in between struggling to get to grips with computers and bureaucracy, but it's really an unwinnable war of attrition against his resolve.
Of course, various Tory ministers criticised the depiction of Jobcentre staff as bureaucratic drones intent on doing everything to disqualify people from getting support as being unrealistic, but anyone who has come up against the cold barbarism of the hoops you have to jump through will know that there's really very little exaggeration on show here. The story does accordingly follow a depressingly preset path, but the acting - once again, with supporting roles given mostly to non-professionals - is superlative and the fury is utterly justified.

7/10

My Dinner with Hervé (Sacha Gervasi, 2018)

Based on the director's actual encounter with the actor in 1993, days before he committed suicide, My Dinner with Hervé stars Hollywood's current go-to-dwarf (for only one can be accommodated at a time) Peter Dinklage as Villechaize and Jamie Dornan of Fifty Shades of Grey as a journalist who is a recovering alcoholic and very much in the last chance saloon with this interview. The casting is of huge relevance since, without it, what we have is a rather pathetic figure famous only for being in a supporting role in one Bond film and a long-running crap if popular TV series, which he will not stop going on about as if they were God's ways of compensating him for his physical limitations. The friendship that forms between the two, Villechaize baiting the journalist continually in his nasal tones with his boozing, leching, railing against the world and spiky personal barbs until he finally snaps, is wholly credible, and this sustains a story that would otherwise be too slender, even if we know that everything said by Villechaize is in effect part of a suicide note and stained all the way through by that.

6/10

Matchstick Men (Ridley Scott, 2003)

Somewhat of a departure for Scott, since comedy isn't a genre he really dabbles in, Matchstick Men stars Nicolas Cage and Sam Rockwell as a pair of conmen who bite off more than they can chew when attempting to scam a local businessman with a currency exchange play. To complicate matters, Cage has severe OCD and Tourette's, and also discovers he's the father of a teenage girl from a previous marriage.
The chemistry between the two male leads is very much the film's strong suit: Cage's performances in anything other than junk have been curate's eggs since the '90s, but doing crazy is something he can always rely on and his array of tics and phobias provide much hilarity, even if it is pretty broad as a source of humour. Rockwell duly contributes his standard good-natured flim-flammery, and Alison Lohman, as the insouciant daughter, is quite a revelation. Knowing the director, it doesn't come as any surprise when it all goes south, and the twist ending is less than adroit, but until then it manages a fairly high entertainment quotient.

6/10 

Pride (Matthew Warchus, 2014)

The fact-based story of how an unlikely alliance was formed back in 1984 between the striking miners and the burgeoning LGBT community, Pride is very much the feelgood film with a social hardship backdrop that The Full Monty was, albeit that the lightness is forced to take a back seat more often in the face of heavier real-world issues: unemployment, prejudice and, eventually, AIDS too.
You can of course criticise the makers' unequivocal political stance against the Thatcher government, but it's indisputable that what brought such disparate sides together was having such a clearly-defined common enemy. And while the closure of the mines can be economically justified, the manner in which it was done was barbarous and the film accordingly loses its jovial composure in flashes of ire for brief spells at this.
But plucky stoicism and good humour are never that far away, and a cast of steady hands such as Bill Nighy, Paddy Considine and Imelda Staunton ensures that it remains anchored to a bedrock of decency. It's hardly a work of great depth for all that, but it does do justice to the events of a very different era not so long ago, and without hectoring either.

6/10 

Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro, 2015)

Del Toro took quite a misstep with this, a Gothic horror piece with ghosts and incest thrown in for good measure. The titular setting is a decrepit mansion in northern England just after the turn of the century harbouring a dark secret, occupied only by an aristocratic brother and sister until he marries a naive young American, heir to her recently deceased father's fortune.
It begs incredulity as to how matter-of-factly she takes the visitations of her mother's ghoulish spirit in her stride, let alone the Addams-family in extremis aspect of the house, and when things go heavily down the Grand Guignol route, it really gets both distasteful and ridiculous. Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain are wasted as the sinister siblings and Mia Wasikowska is badly out of her acting depth as the wife in a blood-soaked descendant of The Fall of the House of Usher. It bombed justifiably.

4/10

Tomb Raider (Roar Uthaug, 2018)

Is the reboot a film genre by now? It's certainly starting to rival some others in terms of quantity, as franchises are repeatedly restarted to tap into whatever goodwill the fans might still have for their characters and relying heavily on being able to knock off the first round fairly securely as an origin story.
Not that Lara Croft has a Batman-like depth of back story: this is a video game character, for Christ's sake. Alicia Vikander brings a callow freshness to the role, in contrast to Angelina Jolie's bulletproof sex bomb, but the action is a yawnsome mix of a lot of running and things collapsing, sprinkled with some Raiders-derivative traps and cod archaeology, and the villain, a nasty treasure hunter after the tomb of a lethal Japanese witch, is straight out of some middling TV movie. Of course, none of this will stave off a sequel, as longs as any breath remains to be flogged out of this expiring horse.

4/10

Changing Lanes (Roger Michell, 2002)

A chance traffic collision between Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson turns both of their lives upside down in the space of twenty-four hours as a dispute over the incident escalates into a destructive feud. This is fuelled no end by the fact that they are, of course, chalk and cheese: the former an arrogant and wealthy attorney, the latter a recovering alcoholic trying to keep custody of his children. Setting aside the oversimplification of the dynamic between them that these polar roles create, it works well enough as tense conflict drama, all the way through to a thorough cop-out of an ending where it badly fails to uphold its prior convictions.

5/10

Snowden (Oliver Stone, 2016)

On the face of it, the story of the whistleblower Edward Snowden, still stuck in Russia with the U.S. having withdrawn his passport, should provide rich pickings for anyone wanting to stick the boot into the autocratic superpower and its machinations. It's a shame, then, that the work of the self-styled liberal conscience of America, Oliver Stone, has declined steadily in terms of focus and edge since his '80s and '90s heyday. And while the facts here speak for themselves and you're left in little doubt of the integrity of Snowden - unless you go along with the U.S. government's campaign of punishment against him for stepping out of line, by them invoking the traitor card - the impact of what's really being addressed is somewhat sucked out by the director's sentimentalisation of the character and his situation. Snowden comes across, and we have no reason to question this, as a serious patriot who couldn't stomach his paymasters violating the constitution by spying on their own populace and is consequently still paying the price for leaking this. But, despite Joseph Gordon-Levitt's nuanced and empathetic portrayal of the man, as drama it can't quite float on our sympathies alone.

5/10

Coco (Lee Unkrich & Adrian Molina, 2017)

Except for some unfortunate deviations into outright plastic junk-pushing, notably the Cars films, Pixar's legacy is impressive and when they seize on a fresh concept, the results are almost invariably of interest beyond a mere kids' audience. And so with Coco, where a young Mexican boy is taken to the Land of the Dead in search of his great-great-grandfather, a famous mariachi crooner. It does bung in every possible Mexican stereotype and douse the lot in layers of schmaltz and vague life lessons, but it's also effortlessly inventive, visually fabulous and has a decent, serious heart amongst the frivolity and hijinks, with a simple message to children in particular: there is no need to fear death.

7/10

Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013)

Based on the story of Ron Woodroof, a heterosexual electrician who was diagnosed with AIDS in 1985 (when, in case anyone needs reminding, the disease was almost exclusively seen as a gay plague), Dallas Buyers Club does an admirable job of involving us in the appalling environment of the time and indignant to the point of fury at the authorities who, in collusion with the pharmaceutical companies, denied sufferers the drugs they really needed to prolong their lives. Matthew McConaughey - an actor who, to put it mildly, divides opinion - plays a huge part in this: his performance as Woodroof, as he moves from enraged homophobe, through self-interested businessman profiting from those with HIV by selling them illegal medicines, to a final and deep fellow feeling with them, is immense. And that's not only because of his startling physical transformation for the role, into a shadow of the smugly corn-fed actor we know from before. For the first time, he's fully human and mesmerising, and rightly deserved his Best Actor Oscar.
It is a pity, though, that the script couldn't quite bring itself to address the complexities of the real-life Woodroof, who was in fact quite possibly bisexual, not homophobic and did not actually contribute a great deal to the furtherment of medication against HIV. But then, where would the uplifting story arc be? It serves best in the end as a reminder that big business in cahoots with government will rarely concern itself with ethics, and that society has moved on from darker times despite that hindrance.

7/10

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (the Coen brothers, 2018)

Well, even the Coens have got on the Netflix wagon. Then again, as evidenced by a number of remakes of other people's work like True Grit, they've always been pragmatic.
And they clearly love westerns with a passion, as this anthology reinforces. A six-shooter with stories ranging from the ridiculously skilled singing gunman to the wagon train beset by Injuns, with diversions to the tales of a grizzled, determined prospector and an exploited travelling performer, culminating in a supernaturally-tinged stagecoach-set finale, the style correspondingly veers from end to end with references across the whole panoply of the genre. The cast is a mix of character actor heavyweights and Coen regulars and a lot of is great fun, albeit fun constantly haunted by the omnipresence of death. It's not their most perfectly realised work by far, with too much time given to one segment and too little to another (James Franco's hapless bank robber in particular) but a smorgasbord of treats all the same.

7/10

You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay, 2017)

Yes, it's a film centring on a hitman/hired muscle. Yes, he's got psychological issues. So far, so blah.
But when you cast Joaquin Phoenix in the role, an actor who you can never be quite sure about in terms of the psychoses of his characters, things take on a different slant. Each one of his tortured flashbacks as he gets into deep water following an attempt to rescue a senator's daughter from a trafficking ring is horrifyingly credible. And despite the extensive and intensive violence committed along the way (purposely unglamorously shot), it's really just about a man going through the motions while being resigned to, and pretty much hoping to, die. It's simply quite the most compelling take on the genre for years and should be shown to Liam Neeson on a daily basis so he might finally just hang up his boots and go back to grown-up acting.

8/10

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (David Yates, 2018)

The milking of the Potterverse continues with Eddie Redmayne now charged with tracking down Johnny Depp's escaped Grindelwald in Paris. The FX-laden images are undoubtedly spectacular once more, with the 1920s cityscapes particularly stunning. But the beasts of the title are sidelined this time to adverse effect by a cast that has grown quite too large, all given their own agendas, some of which are frankly indecipherable. Depp's villain is obviously meant to channel Hitler, with his creation of an army of wizards to be set against mankind, but in truth he doesn't get much to work with except looking a bit scary and making speeches about his vague plans for the future of the world. Rowling simply cannot do political metaphors, and the film doesn't manage to sustain a sense of drama because of all its digressions. Then the realisation that we won't see any conclusion here because it's just meant to lead to a third part sinks in, and that's somewhat depressing.

5/10

The Infiltrator (Brad Furman, 2016)

Bryan Cranston moves to the other side of the war on drugs as agent Robert Mazur, seeking to bring down Pablo Escobar's cocaine organisation in the 1980s. He duly sets himself as the got-to-guy for money-laundering on a massive scale and survives numerous close calls where his real identity is nearly exposed.
The disadvantage of fact-based stories is always two-fold: firstly, we are likely to know the end result, and yet secondly the awareness that it is a representation of actual events can be intrusive, in that any more extreme moment can raise a nagging doubt about how much the drama or violence have been souped up for effect. Nevertheless, Cranston's performance is as good as his Walter White, all smooth topshow covering barely-contained panic, and the menace surrounding him is quite palpable at times.

6/10

Allied (Robert Zemeckis, 2016)

Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard star as allied spies in World War 2, who fall for each other and then have a child together. It's a splice of Casablanca, where the first half plays out under high tension, and, eventually, Pitt's previous actioner Mr. & Mrs. Smith when to moves to London. Pitt and Cotillard are dependably fine, but it all feels somewhat derivative, with all the standard wartime elements thrown in, including the Blitz, the doughty French resistance and even slimy August Diehl from the nerve-racking bar scene in Inglourious Basterds as a cunning Nazi again. And despite a concerted effort to make the second part, when doubt is cast on Cotillard's character, a proper psychological thriller, it falls as flat as the chemistry between its otherwise charismatic leads.

5/10

Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012)

Carax's return after 13 years of hiatus brought out a wave of critics genuflecting before a prodigal auteur, but why? Granted, his go-to-guy Denis Lavant has bags of range, from acrobat to emotive drama to out-and-out loon, and this is very much a vehicle to let him show absolutely all of that as we follow him through nine different acting jobs in a day across Paris in the course of a day, covering everything from dying old man through motion capture artist for a pervy CGI fantasy film and gibbering troglodyte from the sewers to professional assassin and former lover of Kylie Minogue. Then, in the end, a father to chimpanzees.
This is all for an audience that we're repeatedly told doesn't actually exist, because there are no cameras, and it's clearly meant to say something about the nature of performance arts and their purpose. But the point remains irritatingly, wilfully unfocused. It seems to be enough for Carax to chuck enough dissonant weirdness at the screen in the hope that the viewer will make some of it coagulate into a personal meaning. It's a tremendously lazy and self-indulgent presumption and Carax is hardly the only artist to have tried this, but not too many in the cinematic field have the sheer audacity to chance it. If that still sounds like a lure or virtue, it shouldn't.

5/10   

Red Sparrow (Francis Lawrence, 2018)

How makers of spy films must miss the Cold War. Since it's clearly too difficult to sell the indecipherable threat of China as the foremost rival to America in the modern espionage world and the Muslim terrorist groups lack regimented global reach, it becomes necessary to turn again and again to Russia as the sinister ideological nemesis. Doubtless Russia in its current form is a corrupt force for evil, as evidenced by any amount of recent news, but depicting its apparatus as merely a continuation of the Soviet KGB-led system, as here, is an unhelpful oversimplification and just leads to a recycling of the established tropes of the genre. Hence, Jennifer Lawrence starts out as a ballerina for the Bolshoi, is coerced into being trained into a dehumanised honey trap-come-superspy to root out a mole and then goes through a cycle of being suspected by both sides and sexually humiliated while trying to play her spy masters and the Americans off against each other. Lawrence is fine, but doesn't get much to do besides show a lot of skin and act hard. Meanwhile, a host of British acting stalwarts such as Jeremy Irons and Charlotte Rampling are used just to add their trademark opaque gravitas as her calculating bosses.
The film has been criticised for both sexism and extreme violence, but these aren't really the problem, since it's quite plausible that the world she moves in is still that crude and brutal. The bigger problem is the muddle that the plot gets into with its double-dealings and fuzzy character motivations, including a U.S. official who we're led to believe is prepared to sell top-level military secrets for an Austin Powersesque $250,000. The sheer lack of focus and realism ends up detracting quite badly from the tension that it seeks to build up.

5/10

Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson, 1996)

Wes Anderson's first feature already set the pattern for the flights of gentle whimsy that were to follow, including, of course, the presence of Owen Wilson and his brother Luke too, who's hardly a stranger to Anderson's films. They don't actually play brothers, but their relationship as close and bickering loser buddies is akin to the same thing as they go through the time-honoured tradition of the comically failed heist. It skips along breezily and amiably, but there isn't more than a napkin's worth of script to it and hence struggles to hold your attention, something you certainly couldn't accuse Moonrise Kingdom or The Grand Budapest Hotel of, once Anderson had got to stretch his wings.

5/10

Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017)

Nominated for multiple Oscars, it's at once easy to see why the U.S. audience loved it and why it doesn't quite travel intact across the pond. Saoirse Ronan, as the independent-minded teen who insists on being called Lady Bird for reasons only known to herself and Gerwig (because it's loopy, and that underlines her freedom of spirit?), puts in a compelling performance as she navigates the tribulations of teenage and young love. Laurie Metcalf is also solid as her mother, perpetually at loggerheads with her, and the film is to be applauded for having the courage to avoid cheap, overly-dramatic plot twists. However, as anyone who had the patience to sit through the Gerwig-scripted navel-gazing Frances Ha may recall, the dialogue is also very much Marmite, with everyone constantly bombing each other with dry witticisms, which can be quite suffocating. The unhistrionic plot just about outweighs this source of irritation.

6/10

Solo: A Star Wars Story (Ron Howard, 2018)

The Disney Star Wars juggernaut rolls on with another prequel, this time centring on the origins of fan favourite Han Solo, now played by halfway-credible young Harrison Ford lookalike Alden Ehrenreich. The studio obviously felt there was more goodwill out there for the character since having him killed off in the new batch of the main series. Thus, there is also a plethora of knowing references for the fans to reward their encyclopaedic knowledge of minutiae and dialogue from the original films, from how Han tricked Lando out of the Millennium Falcon onwards. This is all well and good, and while it's no sin at all to have a go at a franchise film which includes no Jedis, the action and storyline are too flat to work, and that is a more serious failing. This will, of course, not stop further run-outs for the character, with Ehrenreich signed up for another two films.

5/10

This Beautiful Fantastic (Simon Aboud, 2016)

Bella Brown, an oddball girl with a phobia of plants and the dress sense of Winona Ryder's character from Beetlejuice, works in a library and dreams of becoming a children's book author. She's forced to confront her qualms when she comes under the threat of eviction for not maintaining her garden, and then also has to deal with her misanthropic neighbour.
The film attracted many comparisons with Amélie for its whimsical tone and headstrong but sweet protagonist, and mostly suffers under those comparisons, particularly when she meets an inventor of mechanical toys and is encouraged to start telling him the silly outline of her future book. Taken on its own, however, it's perfectly charming even if totally featherweight, and benefits from a good set of comic performances, Tom Wilkinson as the curmudgeon next door and Anna Chancellor as her humourless boss at the library being the stand-out ones.

5/10

Deadpool 2 (David Leitch, 2018)

More of the same as the first film, with Ryan Reynolds motormouthing and slicing his way with joyful abandon through hordes of gangsters until he comes up against a cyber-soldier from the future, who's set on killing a mutant orphan that Deadpool has formed a grudging bond with. Josh Brolin delivers his trademark stone-faced gruffness as the would-be killer - a sort of anti-hero version of his Thanos from the Avengers films - and Julian Dennison as the kid with a chip on his shoulder against authority, who really needs a father figure,  could easily be a superpowered version of his role from Hunt from the Wilderpeople. But since a major aspect of the film is constantly breaking the fourth wall with references to real popular culture and other Marvel films, perhaps that makes some kind of twisted sense. Needless to say, the action is absolutely relentless and the violence extreme, but it's a good popcorn fare all the same. It's less than sure, though, whether the character has the legs for the third instalment that's coming up.

6/10

Séance on a Wet Afternoon (Bryan Forbes, 1964)

A delusional woman who believes she has psychic powers bullies her ineffectual husband into kidnapping the daughter of a wealthy man so that she can enter the picture to help them find the daughter with her supposed abilities. But this is a dark piece, with stylistic echoes of Psycho and an overall air of Tales of the Unexpected, so when their ill-conceived plan soon goes south, it comes with a crushing sense of inevitability. It then gets even more claustrophobic and barmy, but the strong performances of Richard Attenborough as the henpecked husband and Kim Stanley as the monstrous wife are utterly commanding.

6/10

Movement + Location (Alexis Boling, 2014)

An idiosyncratic woman living in Brooklyn is gradually revealed to have come from 400 years in the future, in search of a safer life. Her situation becomes compromised as she first encounters a wilful teenage girl from her era and then here husband too, who she thought she'd never see again.
Boling's film is a micro-budget affair without any technobabble or FX, albeit that you get the feeling that the director wouldn't know where to start if forced to explain how or why the characters got there. But, disregarding that, what we get is a quiet New York relationship drama, playing on the idea of the refugees from a bleaker future, trying to stay under the radar, equating to the situation of all lonely, guarded immigrants in an alien world.

6/10

Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman, 2017)

By no means the first film to use rotoscoping, but certainly the first feature to paint over each individual frame, Loving Vincent tells the story of the circumstances of Vincent Van Gogh's death, incorporating flashbacks of his earlier life as Armand Roulin, the truculent son of an old friend of Van Gogh, is charged with delivering his final letter to his brother. When it becomes apparent that the painter's brother died shortly after the incident too, Roulin starts investigating what actually happened to cause his suicide at the age of only 37, and finds a host of complexities that make him suspect foul play.
It's a painstakingly-crafted labour of love, having employed a total of 125 artists from more than 20 countries, and the visual end result, bringing the landscapes and personages of the paintings to vivid life, is quite stunning. But it's also a tad flat dramatically, as the image and our awareness of what effort it took to create constantly overpowers the acting and slender plot, with the inevitable urge to identify the big-name actors behind the paint also a distraction. It is undoubtedly meant to educate, and does bring Van Gogh's work to light in a whole new way, but doesn't quite engage the emotions, meaning that it falls somewhat short of being a complete cinematic work.

6/10

Avengers: Infinity War (Anthony & Joe Russo, 2018)

Fight, fight, fight; fight, fight, fight, as Itchy & Scratchy taught us. And so with MCU 19, which is now forced to cram in all its stars in a top-heavy self-styled epic as the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy and Doctor Strange. plus assorted hangers-on, attempt to avert mega-supervillain Thanos (a CGId Josh Brolin who curiously looks more like himself than the real version) from killing merely a randomised half the population of the universe according to some half-baked personal code of his.
Of course, this would be to suggest that we're just dealing with a cynical market-tapping superhero blockbuster to end all blockbusters here. Which naturally it is. But an effort towards a workable film is actually made, even if that too is necessitated by having to preserve the individual selling points of all its zillions of characters, not all of whom have had their own films yet (though that will most likely come), so there's one-liners through the Guardians, manly grieving through Thor, bitchy superciliousness between Downey Jr. and Cumberbatch and teen geekery through Spider-Man. And that serves to make it watchable despite the endless cycle of each big hitter being put in a queue to have their go at the uberbaddie, just enough that when the end comes at last and it's actually surprising, it's a fair reward for the slog. Just don't expect too much from the sequels when the world gets rectified again. 

6/10

The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro, 2017)

At the height of the Cold War, a mute cleaner at an American government laboratory encounters a humanoid water creature captured to be studied and weaponised, and falls in love with it. Unsurprisingly, the military are more interested in vivisecting the creature than nurturing it, and she soon hatches a plan to get it out of their hands.
Del Toro has built his career on far-fetched premises like this, and the conviction with which he pursues them is almost essential to make them work. But here, he may have gone a step too far. As good as Sally Hawkins is as the delicate but determined heroine, with sterling support by Richard Jenkins as her gentle closest friend and Michael Shannon as the irredeemable soldier-villain (akin to the evil captain played by Sergi López in Pan's Labyrinth), a seething mass of prejudice and loathing, and as fabulous the whole of the production design and soundtrack are too, it has to rest on the feasibility and charm of the premise of spontaneous interspecies erotic love, and that's asking a bit much.
It picked up a plethora of accolades and awards, including the Best Director and Best Picture Oscars, and it's easy to see the in an age of big-budget kids' animations with something always included to placate the grown-ups, and droves of sci-fi and superhero films watched by all and sundry, the time is right for romances which are also out-and-out fantasies. Hence the success of La La Land, and now this. They're both full of magical and delightful moments and lovingly made, but also heavily dependent on our surrender to their essential conceits. One wonders how much further we'll go down this road.

6/10

The Limehouse Golem (Juan Carlos Medina, 2016)

Peter Ackroyd's source novel, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, was as rich in historical flavour and detail as any of his other works, and there is an attempt to transfer some of this through to the long-awaited film adaptation, even if that means an overly familiar Victorian London of perpetual night and fog, populated by leering grotesques. The hunt for a psychopath in the Jack the Ripper mould by Bill Nighy's harangued police inspector cannot help but remind you, to somewhat unhelpful effect, of Johnny Depp tasked with the same job in From Hell, since the director has rather lazily fallen back on souping up the graphic details of each killing, and the saving, differentiating graces are limited to the knowing music hall numbers that punctuate the plot and the inevitable but nevertheless nifty twist ending. It suffers in comparison with other recent productions with a similar backdrop but more complexity, such as the BBC series Taboo, maybe just because we've reached breaking point with the scenario by now.

5/10

Ready Player One (Steven Spielberg, 2018)

Spielberg follows a pattern of output well-established over his career where a serious adult-themed film (in this case, last year's The Post) is immediately followed by a child-friendly adventure, by adapting Ernest Cline's science fiction hit novel. The computer game-addicted shantytown world of the near future is a dystopia, but it's dystopia-lite: the teenage heroes striving to win the ultimate competition in the online games world that most of mankind spends most of their time in, while a megacorp tries to stop them, are very much to be seen as cool and plucky: Spielberg young protagonist archetypes. Here, they are also calculatedly target audience-driven: there are the white American romantic leads, and their second-billing accomplices are black and Japanese, with layers of naff anime style and characters thrown in for good measure. Ironically, half the cast is actually British and the few real (as opposed to CGI) urban scenes shot in Birmingham.
As the Avatar-graphic quest progresses, we go through the most intense saturation of mostly 1980s pop culture references ever seen, at least what Spielberg was allowed to use, from Batmobiles and Duran Duran through to a complete recreation of The Shining as one of the challenges. This proves both daft fun and also as exhausting as the pace which is ramped up to beat even the video games that it reproduces, because it's clearly felt that it has to in order to retain the jaded audience's attention. Of course, both of these characteristics and the FX overload are conveniently justified by the plot.
On a base level, the message is that games-obsessed teens are good and adults are squares, and pop culture cannibalising itself is perfectly acceptable. It would have been nice if there was a more complex message in it, but you don't usually get that with Spielberg's kiddie products, so it was probably pointless to expect one. Compare this with Ender's Game, which was also built on a kid hero playing games to save the world, and yet managed to work in a morally ambiguous resolution.

5/10

Maze Runner: The Death Cure (Wes Ball, 2018)

Another Divergent Runner Games saga mercifully comes to an end when even the people behind it can't justify stretching it any further, not to their consumers or to themselves. It's not that this particular one has been objectionable per se, just that it offers absolutely no surprises or distinguishing characteristics. Hence, the painfully bland hero dives straight into baddie HQ ('the last city') to rescue a mate and that leads to a lot of running around, zombies by some other name and explosions follow, with a final confrontation with big meanie Aiden Gillen on the horizon. Ta-ta then.

4/10

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh, 2017)

Bigotry and simmering violence abound once more in small-town heartland America, with a mother still seeking justice for the rape and murder of her daughter seven months earlier, believing the local police to be less than committed to the search for the culprit. She then incenses the townsfolk when she takes out three roadside billboards attacking the police: this is firmly conservative country where sleeping dogs should be left to lie.
The setting may not be new terrain then, but the film reaped just plaudits for what it actually makes of its fairly stock ingredients. There is a complexity at work throughout, with standard plot waypoints constantly avoided and a refusal to succumb to pat moralising. Then the cast really does loom large: Frances McDormand as the mother is immense; a sardonic, hard dogged shell over a damaged inside, and decent Woody Harrelson and a toxically prejudiced Sam Rockwell as the police are excellent foils to her on her quest. The film is even sure enough of its tone that it can accommodate black humour at the start, though this has to fade away out of necessity as the story moves on.

7/10

Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Taika Waititi, 2016)

A thirteen-year-old delinquent from the city is placed with a middle-aged foster couple in the remote countryside where, after an initial urge to escape, he starts to become acclimatised to his new surroundings. But when his foster mother dies abruptly and social services are on their way to get him back into the system, he takes flight once more and is reluctantly followed by his woodsman foster father, a cantankerous woodsman. A nationwide manhunt for the pair is launched and their mutual antipathy is duly worn away over the course of their trials and tribulations.
The basic plot outline could easily go the way of mawkishness and the familiar trails of buddy movies. It's completely saved from either by excellent chemistry between Sam Neill as the grizzled substitute father and Julian Dennison as the boy, sparkling humour and the playful, knowing interposition of a plethora of filmic references amongst moments of genuine pathos. It really makes the most of all its ingredients, and although it loses focus for a moment when the chase comes to a climax, the abiding impression it leaves is feelgood in the best sense of the word.

7/10 

Tom of Finland (Dome Karukoski, 2017)

There aren't many internationally-known Finns besides racing drivers, but the pioneer of homoerotic art Touko Laaksonen, who adopted the nom de plume Tom of Finland, certainly qualifies. The film is a pretty straightforward biopic, charting his life from the trauma of war through the anti-homosexual repression of the '50s and '60s through to his breakthrough as a figurehead for an emerging worldwide community of gay men. It doesn't get very explicit about his own sexual life, but also doesn't shy away from showing his art, all impossibly sexualised beefcakes, and while the theme of gay men being forced to hide themselves away in a less-enlightened era is one that has been well explored in film and literature, the Finnish angle, the detailed recreation of the period and the complexity of the character lend it a substantial amount of interest beyond its most obvious target audience.

6/10

La gloire de mon père (Yves Robert, 1990)

Based on Marcel Pagnol's quasi-autobiographical novel about his early years, My Father's Glory follows his parents moving from their little Provencal town to Marseille after his birth in 1895. The young Marcel proves precociously intelligent, swallowing entire books from an early age against his worried mother's wishes and with his relentlessly optimistic schoolmaster father's wholehearted support. Then the family moves to a remote house in the hills for the summer, and Marcel undergoes formative experiences in the wild landscape.
It is rose-tinted; nothing much transpires at all, and certainly nothing ill. Yet that's really the point: it's childhood remembered rather than factually recounted, as a succession of magical moments and atmospheres never to be recaptured in quite the same way again. Provided you surrender to its vivacity and can accept its perpetual cuteness, it's quite charming.

6/10

Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, 2012)

Sightseers dates back to the phase of Wheatley's directorial career when he was still laying down the foundations for the eventual rise to centre stage, and it consolidates many of the aspects of a world view based on a lack of trust in human nature as well as a love of farce that Down Terrace and Kill List evidenced.
In a nutshell, a new couple set out on a caravanning tour of England's endearingly crappiest attractions; tram and pencil museums and sites of similar drabness, and alarm bells are soon ringing as it becomes evident that he's a grade A sociopath, first running over a man for littering, and that she's far from a full basket of sandwiches herself, first taking on board his homicidal proclivities by just getting a bit upset, and then getting into the spirit of their spree herself. Imagine Natural Born Killers shot through a League of Gentlemen (the blacker than black TV series, of course) filter, and you have some idea of the overall effect. It really is as dark and misanthropic as that would suggest, under its veil of stifled, mannered mundanity, and that alone lends it a substantial amount of interest, although whether Wheatley is really saying anything meaningful beyond that is another matter.

6/10

Avril et le Monde Truqué (Christian Desmares & Franck Ekinci, 2015)

April and the Extraordinary World takes its cue from the copious and varied French comic book/graphic novel culture, in which science fiction is a large component. The genre has not had a great history of translating successfully to the big screen, as evidenced by the recent Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, but the decision here to stick to animation rather than live action proves a judicious one, allowing a cavalcade of sumptuous backdrops of a sooty steampunk Paris.
The scenario begins with an interesting premise; a 1940s still stuck with coal and steam instead of oil and electricity, as well as perpetual war between a repressive imperial France and the United States, and follows its set-up through quite conscientiously with abundant incidental detail. Less interesting is the adventure plot, with a plucky young heroine seeking her parents and a solution to her grandfather's great and secret experiment, accompanied by her talking cat. It all goes completely bonkers along the way, but at least it stays well away from cuteness; one can only imagine how unwatchable an end product would have resulted if this outline had been handed over to an anime studio.

6/10

The Party (Sally Potter, 2017)

The intermittently-directing Sally Potter, still best remembered for Orlando 25 years earlier, brings together a bunch of veteran thesp chums for a concise affair involving a ton of secrets emerging at a party to celebrate Kristin Scott Thomas's ascension to a shadow-ministerial position. It's fundamentally a black comedy, with strong echoes of Abigail's Party except without a single dominating socially paranoid monster, more a collection of navel-gazing middle-aged middle-class individuals with more subtle flaws. At an hour and ten minutes, it can hardly be said to overstay its welcome, but aside from the divertingly fine cast which also includes the likes of Timothy Spall and Bruno Ganz and some choice lines given to them, neither does it leave much to digest besides an overall air of social unease.

6/10

En man som heter Ove (Hannes Holm, 2015)

A Man Called Ove centres around a recently widowed man who's also then forced into early retirement, and sets about trying to join his departed wife. He then fails at every varied suicide attempt, in a manner strongly echoing Jean-Pierre Leaud in Kaurismäki's I Hired a Contract Killer. So, this is a black comedy in the Scandinavian mould, but since it's also primarily in the rapidly-growing genre of fiction to do with the elderly not being allowed to go out quietly, from The Bucket List onwards, positivity creeps in very soon through his persistently cheery neighbours and his rather amusingly misanthropic and curmudgeonly ways are blunted. Thankfully, this wasn't Hollywood, since he's still allowed to retain some of his grumpy essence and hence the conclusion never becomes too cloyingly sentimental, so it remains a pleasant, unpatronising experience as a whole. That said, apparently it is being remade with Tom Hanks in the role. God help us.

6/10

Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018)

On to movie 18 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and after going for the female empowerment angle with Wonder Woman, it's time for the black vote. This proved very successful at the box office and with critics too, but once the novelty of a hero from an African kingdom more technologically advanced than any other on Earth and an almost all-black cast wears off, the plot is strictly off the shelf and the themes - a hero who must prove himself worthy and cast aside self-doubt, and a villain with a semi-justified chip on his shoulder (who, in the style of all unimaginative superhero match-ups, has exactly the same powers as the hero for their final showdown) - so tired they're threadbare. As for the Africa aspect, the kingdom of Wakanda is a mish-mash of anything vaguely African enough to satisfy a Western audience as bona fide, with tribal dancing and rhinos, and the principal cast is actually mostly composed of American and English actors competing for the title of least embarrassing generic accent. It's got the FX and pacy action of course, but that really is a given for the MCU series. Bah.

5/10

Logan Lucky (Steven Soderbergh, 2017)

Soderbergh is clearly well and truly out of his notions of premature retirement by now, and it's just as well as he is, with plenty more in the pipeline and this rollicking piece, where Channing Tatum and Adam Driver play hick brothers planning a heist, this time not to do with a bank, but instead stealing the gambling proceeds of a NASCAR track. This being a compound of Soderbergh's wry slant on things and the modern heist formula, they of course turn out to be overconfident and dice with bungling the whole job at several junctures, of which there are dizzyingly many. It's not as much of a flashy parade of setpieces as its natural predecessors, the Ocean's Eleven films, but taken out that of that frame of reference, well in the upper quality echelons of the genre in terms of smartness and lightness of execution. Daniel Craig provides able comic support as an expert safe cracker, his mouth fumbling alarmingly with a southern accent, and overall the tone is effortlessly breezy. The director's break seems to have made sense.

7/10

The Founder (John Lee Hancock, 2016)

The story of how the McDonald's empire arose from one outlet in California run by a pair of brothers, The Founder benefits from the decision to give the role of Ray Kroc, the itinerant salesman who approaches the brothers in the 1950s to develop their business to Michael Keaton, who can do persuasive sloganeering and wheedling in his sleep. This is exactly what the role requires, as Kroc's natural capitalist opportunist sees the brothers' intransigence when he repeatedly tries to convince them to compromise for the sake of financial gain as carte blanche for him to act as he pleases with their brand, first rapidly creating a chain of franchises and then taking over completely. In other words, the title of the film really refers to Kroc as the founder of the empire, rather than the actual founders of the first restaurant. His machinations are the dramatic driving force of the story, and while that doesn't leave for much else of a human dimension, it's surprisingly entertaining given the potentially dry subject matter.

6/10

Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016)

A loner janitor in Boston is called to his small coastal home town upon the death of his brother, to discover that he has been appointed the guardian of his teenage nephew in the will. It's immediately apparent that he left the town years before under a cloud, and the root cause for that unfolds through flashbacks and encounters with the locals.
He's very damaged goods, alternating between being sullenly withdrawn and abruptly violent, and Casey Affleck conveys the dichotomy credibly. The relationship with his nephew, who's outwardly cocksure, seeming to take his father's death in his stride, while being inwardly very brittle, is also affectingly portrayed. It never lapses into the formula of inevitable healing or bonding between clashing males and different generations: they remain co-passengers on a road of sorrow. The script is also confident enough in its emotional substance that it even allows humour to exist where it occurs naturally, without any danger of this trivialising the key theme. There is a flaw in that not only the protagonists but the film itself almost suffocate under the weight of their suppressed grief, leading to a lack of tonality, but it still deserves the plaudits it garnered for its fundamental truthfulness.

7/10

The Square (Ruben Östlund, 2017)

The curator of a Stockholm art museum meanders through various escapades and trials after his phone and wallet are stolen, distracted enough to neglect the museum's hare-brained marketing campaign for their new exhibition, vaguely themed around the idea of a square as society. And that's about it for two and a half hours, but Östlund's grip on the tiny details that make up human interaction is masterful, and the characterisations accordingly all have depth and subtlety.
It has been sold as satire, but the complacent vacuousness of the affluent culture vulture world feels scarily lifelike, and so the whole thing comes over more as a sneak peek behind the facade of how that sphere ticks, with all its hypocrisies. This is most evident in a protracted scene where a performance artist playing a gorilla assaults the guests at a grand dinner for the museum until they just snap. Meanwhile, the world of the homeless and socially excluded is constantly pressing in at the margins. It's hypnotic, daring, perceptive and maddeningly fluctuating in terms of tone and message, but never boring.

8/10

The Death of Stalin (Armando Iannucci, 2017)

As The Thick of It, The Day Today and Veep have proved, just to name a few of his body of work, Armando Iannucci can be relied on to wring the tragicomedy out of any political situation. But the story of the poisonous power struggle following Stalin's death is almost too rich with satirical potential, like Trump, and it's true that given such a wide target, the end result actually has less of a bite than Iannucci's attacks on more evasive prey. Taking that caveat into account, the film still succeeds as frequently rip-roaring entertainment, undoubtedly aided by a fine cast: Steve Buscemi's calculating Khruschev, Simon Russell Beale's monstrous Beria and Jeffrey Tambor's vacillating Malenkov as the leads, with a plethora of able support from veteran faces of British comedy such as Michael Palin.
It plays out as a dark farce, which is the only logical way to go as the panicking Central Committee have to go through the motions of maintaining a united front while frantically backstabbing each other at the same time, the constant threat of a one-way trip to Siberia malingering in the background. It's both extremely funny in places and also oddly convincing as a historical document of the goings-on behind the scenes in the Soviet Union, aided rather than hindered by its frequent recourse to modern vernacular and generally playing out things too grim to contemplate as comedy instead. No wonder the Russians and many other former Soviet states banned it, proving its fundamental verisimilitude and judicious choices of target at once.

7/10

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017)

Lanthimos returns to the twisted family scenario of Dogtooth, except this time the twisted element comes from outside and the tone is turned up to full horror. It's a loose retelling of the Greek tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis, and certainly Lanthimos is well-qualified to do justice to the form, with its endless expository monologues and overblown themes. He's proven himself to be an autist of the first order, with the cypher-like actors given the brief to deliver their lines as robotically as possible, and a vicarious desire to upset bourgeois sensibilities, with random violence and sexual deviancy as his principal tools. In that aspect, the director is a sort of blood brother of far too many Austrians in particular, such as Ulrich Seidl.
Colin Farrell takes the lead role again, as a cardiac surgeon who for some initially unexplained reason welcomes an odd teenage boy into his family home. It's clear as he begins effectively stalking Farrell and his daughter that he's a sociopath, but with the rest of the cast virtually as mechanical as he is, the end result is utter dramatic flatness, which recedes far too late: only once the tragedy is almost complete and Farrell and Nicole Kidman as his wife finally get to show some emotion. Of course it's very strong in visual style and blasts of unsettling music, and has once again earned the director some rave reviews for the combination of these with the shock quotient. But whoever is impressed by this is basically as far up their own fundament as Lanthimos is.

4/10

Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016)

The first film with an all-black cast to win the Best Picture Oscar, and with a gay lead character to boot, Moonlight at first glance goes through all the standard motions for both genres: he's a skinny poor kid in a Miami ghetto, bullied for being so different from an early age, his mum's a hopeless crackhead, and then he goes to prison to emerge a beefed-up drug dealer. That would indicate that there's nothing new on offer.
But that summary is exactly the point of the film: it's a causal progression that suggests that given an unfavourable enough set of circumstances to begin with, your destiny is inescapable. That would still be thoroughly depressing if the monosyllabic, withdrawn lead wasn't given an inner dream life and it wasn't handled with such finesse. The sheer desperate loneliness of the character at all the three stages of his life that we see is a searing indictment of how society can force those who don't fit in into a guise of hyper-masculinity and a lifetime of opportunities missed. It won't be everyone's cup of tea for all that, but the merits do have to be acknowledged.

7/10

Órbita 9 (Hatem Khraiche, 2017)

A young woman lives in isolation on a spaceship heading to a remote planet, having spent her whole life there. Her whole life changes when an engineer arrives to repair the ship's systems and they fall in love. Thereafter, it's unsurprisingly revealed that there is more to her environment than meets the eye.
Orbiter 9 borrows heavily from a host of sources in terms of both its initial premise and subsequent revelations, and does strain credibility more and more as things move on, but it does make the most of its limited budget and the twists work just well enough to keep you watching nevertheless.

5/10   

Z for Zachariah (Craig Zobel, 2015)

Following a nuclear apocalypse, Ann, a young woman lives on alone in a rural valley that has somehow escaped most of the effects of the devastation. Then, one day another survivor, a scientist, appears and they gradually develop mutual trust and grow closer despite their differences. Just as things seem as close to idyllic as circumstances allow, a third survivor appears, a miner who has a dubious backstory and shares Ann's local background and religious convictions. Tension inevitably arises between the three.
It's a surprisingly unhistrionic film with a patient air, and unlike pretty much all of the rest of the genre, isn't at all interested in doing sci-fi or horror. In fact, it doesn't need the armageddon history at all, since any isolated place with three different people stranded in it would do the same job. The closest parallel would probably be Polanski's Knife in the Water, but here you're never really as sure that there will be violence. Margot Robbie, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Chris Pine all fit their roles like a glove, and any allusions to differences in race. age or religion are nicely understated and not made into outright driving forces for the story. It's an unexpected small gem of a film.

7/10

The Florida Project (Sean Baker, 2017)

Moonee, a six-year-old girl, lives with her young white-trash mum in a motel down the road from the theme parks of Florida, and a million miles removed from them. The title alludes ironically to the original name for Disneyworld, but of course 'project' in America also means their equivalent of a council estate, and that reflects what the residents of the motel are; largely unemployed and reliant on scams to make ends meet. None less so than Moonee's mother, a torrent of f-words and disrespect for others, including Willem Dafoe's put-upon and kind-hearted motel manager, and only barring her daughter, who skips blithely along with her little friends, oblivious to the bleakness of the situation. With such role models, Moonee and her friends are clearly growing up semi-feral, and think nothing of the consequences of their pranks, which eventually include burning down an unoccupied building with glee.
It's a small film, its topic hardly new ground for anyone who has seen enough serious dramas about the underclass, with two distinctions: the unlaboured juxtaposition of the hand-to-mouth life of the characters with the material excesses of tourist traps next to them and the casting, which is excellent, not least the almost frightening naturalness and confidence of the child lead.

6/10

Suburbicon (George Clooney, 2017)

It may have been co-written by the Coens, and Clooney has proved on several occasions that he can direct, so why is this such a mess? Part of the problem lies in the fact that it doesn't know what it's meant to be. It starts as a satire in Pleasantville fashion of stifling 1950s American suburbia, and then tries to work in a serious racist theme as a black family moves into the WASP stronghold, and is met with unbridled hostility. Finally, it evolves into a full-on Grand Guignol crime film, as Matt Damon's weaselly family father attempts to get out of paying the crooks who he had kill his wife so that he could hitch up with her twin sister, both played by Julianne Moore. Nothing gels, and it may be directly due to the film effectively having been in planning for thirty years, or the fact that there are four writers. But you expect Clooney, Grant Heslov and the Coens to be experienced enough to work around that, so the only conclusion that can be drawn is that they all had a very off-day at the office.

4/10