Infinity Chamber (Travis Milloy, 2016)

In the near future (doncha just love period dramas?), a  man wakes up imprisoned in a single room with only his computer warden for company, and no explanation as to why he's been put there. Gradually, he starts trying to work out how to escape through his subconscious in the dreams induced by the apparatus around him.
Does this sound familiar? If so, it's because this particularly brand of dystopian nightmare scenario is almost a genre in itself, and the film also owes a large debt to a whole host of precursors, from The Demon Seed to 2001, Total Recall and The Prisoner, not to mention almost every single film where the character can't escape from a time loop (Source Code etc.) and we then watch them swing between determination and despair.
Nevertheless, Milloy has managed to fuse these elements together with enough craft and style that not only does Infinity Chamber feel its own film, but it sucks you in, at least until the point where sheer familiarity with the genre conventions signpost the inescapable twists and the logic starts to totter. Still, it gets full marks for effort.

6/10

Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, 2016)

A truly odd fish, this one, with a young American woman in Paris alternating being a personal shopper for a self-centred celebrity with trying to reach her dead twin brother in the spirit world. Kristen Stewart, who still hasn't developed more than a sullen teenage pout as an expression, should make you very wary about this as there's hardly a shot without her, but is actually for once pretty effective as a character with serious, suppressed emotional damage. However, the best aspect of the film has to be its constant unpredictability: it starts in a creepy country house reminiscent of The Others, has a brief interlude of ghostly FX and then moves to social drama about loss, dislocation and envy, before a stalker scenario also enters the mix. You never quite know what you're going to get next: while there are really too many longueurs, such as Stewart furtively trying on her employer's dresses, it's laudable to get a piece that isn't content with just being neatly bracketed. It's ultimately too cold to be affecting, but on the level of psychological horror it's not far behind its obvious influences, Polanski's Repulsion and The Tenant.

6/10

Bright (David Ayer, 2017)

Much has been made of Netflix now starting to make films that compete with the major studios in terms of both budget and cast, but on this evidence there's little for them to fear. Yes, they've got Will Smith on board, but despite the $90 million spent it feels very straight-to-video, with a painfully derivative and stupid script that melds Lord of the Rings with a run-of-the-mill gritty buddy cop movie.
The daft premise is that humans, orcs, elves et al. co-exist in modern-day society, with the orcs heavy-handedly representing the ghetto underclass and elves at the top of the ladder. Genius. You have to wring whatever relief you can from the Alien Nation-style interplay between Smith and his orc partner, because the plot itself, involving the pair trying to find some magic wand or other and getting badly beaten up at odd intervals in the process, sure won't provide you with any joy.

3/10

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson, 2017)

The saga rolls on with probably the most interesting choice of director at the helm, previously responsible for seriously off-centre thrillers such as Brick and Looper, and for the most part the choice works. There is far more tonality in this than in the last one, ranging from more epic battles than ever seen before to moments of proper calm and some truly surprising twists, albeit that too large a debt is still paid to the original trilogy with scenes like the Rey-Snoke confrontation towards the end. The occasionally excruciating dialogue of previous instalments has also been almost completely excised, although, again as a minus, cutesy creatures that serve no purpose have been reintroduced, and that's clearly the inseparable merchandising to kids to blame. And at two and a half hours, a far larger core cast to accommodate than the original three had, even without Han Solo around, there are irritatingly many diversions and plotlines.
But these are largely quibbles. It looks stunning, even for Star Wars, and the leads, Adam Driver's conflicted young Vader wannabe and Mark Hamill's Luke now as a convincing Gandalf figure who knows he's on his last ride in particular, hold your attention quite effortlessly.  J.J. Abrams had better not undo the good work done overall when he returns next time around.

7/10

Paddington 2 (Paul King, 2017)

Picking up the story some time afterwards, with the bear now settled in with the Brown family, this is a rare example of a sequel which not only justifies its existence as more than just exploitation of the success of its predecessor, but actually outdoes it in every way. It helps that the set-up has now been got out of the way and so there is free rein to expand each character when it feels apposite, while chucking in as many scenes of hilarious pandemonium as the structure can take. Hugh Grant, coming in as the villain, a vain has-been actor now after hidden treasure, is also an absolute hoot and many other beloved faces of British comedy drama chip in to good effect too. It's just as accessible to adults as children, and although there is, once again, the obligatory manic chase at the end, when taken as a whole it's truly warm and charming, not to mention very funny.

7/10 

Miranda (Marc Munden, 2015)

One of those low-budget pieces where English filmmakers, hopeful of an international audience, shoehorn in a few big names, in this case Christina Ricci, John Hurt and Kyle MacLachlan, Miranda centres on John Simm's innocent librarian, who falls in love with Ricci's mysterious Yank. She turns out to have quite another real history involving large-scale property fraud, but with this basically being a romantic comedy, he's undeterred and pursues her all the way to a happy ending through encounters with her nutjob mark, MacLachlan as a pervy banker. It's flimsy stuff and really tries far too hard to be off-centre, with Ricci also highly unconvincing as a femme fatale, but at least the dialogue has enough wit about it to provide some relief.

4/10

Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981)

I've given this a miss for decades now, knowing that the overly-venerated hack De Palma was at the helm, and it seems to have been with good reason. He rips off his idol Hitchcock shamelessly yet again, besides taking the plot, with additions from Coppola's The Conversation, from Antonioni's Blow-Up, and the fact that the title blatantly acknowledges the debt does not make it an hommage to the latter.
John Travolta plays a sound engineer who witnesses the assassination of a presidential candidate and is then first persuaded by political forces to drop the matter, and then pursued by more sinister forces to the same end. It looks pretty, thanks to veteran cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, and that's about it. The progression of the story is hackneyed, the director's regular filmic tricks such as split focus over-used, the soundtrack dreadful in its lack of appropriacy and cheesiness and the female co-lead, who Travolta tries to protect, too stupid to live. That critics like Roger Ebert have elevated this to the pinnacles of perfection tells you everything you need to know to distrust anything they ever say too.

4/10

Biancanieves (Pablo Berger, 2012)

This unorthodox retelling of the story of Snow White, which owes far more to the dark undercurrents of the Brothers Grimm fairytale than any subsequent Disneyfied bastardisations, had the colossal misfortune of entering production when The Artist hit the festivals to everyone's surprise and then swept away all resistance to the idea of a black and white, silent film shot in the cinematic environment of today. This is a great pity, because it has just as much merit as the runaway success of Hazanavicius's film, making as full use of the visual medium to convey content and nuance with an Eisensteinian deftness, and also constantly throwing in unexpected twists to the tale. The setting, transposed to the bullfighting world of Andalucia in the 1920s, at first bemuses utterly but then the pieces begin to slot into place and it becomes truly captivating, fully sustaining its two hours until an equivocal and startling ending.

8/10

Black Mass (Scott Cooper, 2015)

The biopic of the Irish-American gangster James 'Whitey' Bulger, focusing on his rise to the top of the organised crime heap in Boston in the '70s, aided by the FBI's turning a blind eye to his activities in exchange for supposedly informing on his rivals, is a relentlessly grim and violent tale which derives its rhythm from a "fuck" count that easily hits the hundreds. It's territory that we have seen countless times before in Mafia films, of course, but the factual nature of the story lends it a potency above most of its fictional counterparts and almost allows it to dodge charges of exploitation. This in itself wouldn't be enough, for all the film's ingenuous desire to have us see what machinations allow evil to flourish, but Johnny Depp's portrayal of the sociopathic mobster is a tour de force, easily the best thing he's done in years and a transformation from all his other characters that needs to be seen to be believed, and not just because of ice blue eyed-make-up and voice alterations. You'd be hard pushed to find any villain as terrifying in any horror film; there's never a feeling of security at any point when he's on screen, always liable to break out into violence at the drop of a hat.

6/10