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

Justice League (Zack Snyder, 2017)

DC has a go at replicating Marvel's success with the Avengers, but it's a poor second. The problems are numerous: a chunky Ben Affleck, so clearly miscast as Batman, seems terminally bored and uninterested, which is a bit of a handicap when he's meant to be the one geeing up the disparate band of heroes to work together. Then the villain they're meant to take on is thinly conceived and dull. The plot is a direct copy of the baddie's quest in Marvel 's films to get all the Infinity Stones and absolute power (here, 'Mother Boxes'). And, least forgivably, the FX don't match those of its rival series: compare the exhilarating scenes with Quicksilver in X-Men: Days of Future Past with the treatment of The Flash here, which is pedestrian in comparison. And with a production budget of $300 million this is one of the most expensive films ever made. They'd be better off throwing in the towel and concentrating on their individual characters: at least Wonder Woman was watchable, and the Bale Batman films were high art in comparison with this.

4/10

Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi, 2017)

Wonders will never cease. Into the third round in the Norse god series we go, and the result of giving the director of the rather charming comedy horror What We Do in the Shadows the job is a film which is truly entertaining, far more so than its tedious precursors. This is chiefly because of its lightness of touch and wit, even though the storyline is hardly humorous, with Thor's evil sister Hela, the goddess of death, marching into Asgard to lay waste to it and then lay claim to what remains. Cate Blanchett clearly has a blast in the role, coming out with a stream of drier than dry observations, and Chris Hemsworth seems to enjoy his character being given more comic licence than before as well. It doesn't have much connection to the actual myth of the twilight of the gods, and is drowning in the usual excessive action and CGI, but at least it does it all with a cheeky wink.

6/10

1922 (Zak Hilditch, 2017)

Based on a Stephen King novella about a poor farmer who kills his wife for the land she owns, 1922's setting is essentially the same sepia world of grime and punishment as the recent Mudbound, albeit that with King behind it, the consequences of evil actions are even more severe. An almost unrecognisably craggy and drawling Thomas Jane proves for once that he has real acting chops as his guilt-ridden son runs away and Jane is left to disintegrate slowly, haunted by visions and rats which may only partially exist outside his fevered mind. Not cheery stuff, then, and it doesn't really go anywhere we haven't been before, but the foreboding mood is at least effectively generated.

5/10

Joy (David O. Russell, 2015)

Long-time Russell collaborator Jennifer Lawrence stars as real-life housewife turned inventor Joy Mangano, who came up with a revolutionary mop, eventually managing to sell it through QVC and make a fortune. Of course, there are many hardships along the way, with bankruptcy a continuous threat and her feckless ex-husband, bedridden mother and pessimistic father constant millstones around her neck.
Lawrence is as good as ever as the plucky Mangano, but the film plods on too much at times through the standard plot checkpoints and the decision to add fantasy scenes inside her head to liven things up is an odd one. Also, seen from the non-American perspective, it takes it far too much for granted that we would root for someone who basically introduced more clutter into the world.

5/10

Kill Command (Steven Gomez, 2016)

Trust robots to fight your wars for you at your peril, as if we didn't know already. In a film that truly manages to achieve new levels of derivativeness, a bunch of Aliens-identikit U.S. marines have the tech their mean old calculating military created turn on them and butcher them in fairly much the usual order, so that the last survivors are the leader, a scared doofus, a sort of cyborg woman and a tough black guy. The only interest is in the killer robots, which are so unstoppable and numerous that you might keep watching just to see if there's any feasible way to escape them. As is so common with lowish-budget British survival sci-fi/horror, it's basically just Outpost with machines instead of zombies, efficiently put together but with nothing more to justify its existence.

4/10

Life of Crime (Daniel Schechter, 2013)

Based on Elmore Leonard's novel The Switch, the sequel of which was adapted into Jackie Brown, this follows one of the earlier escapades of Louis Gara and Ordell Robbie (De Niro and Samuel L. Jackson in the film sequel), as they hit on the idea of kidnapping the wife of a wealthy property speculator. This being an Elmore Leonard plot, things soon get complicated, and twists arise.
It's nice to see Jennifer Aniston for once in something other than a romcom, since she proves she's clearly capable of more as the wife, who displays increasing cool-headed pragmatism towards her weaselly husband as he refuse the pay the ransom. John Hawkes and Mos Def also make good substitutes for the Tarantino film's crooks, if with softer edges, since this isn't an out-and-out hard-hitter, with Tim Robbins credibly loathsome as the husband. So, what we have here is fairly standard material delivered by a solid cast, and bolstered by some snappy dialogue. Not a masterwork like Tarantino's film, but good-natured and entertaining nevertheless.

6/10 

Good Time (Ben & Josh Safdie, 2017)

Robert Pattinson carries on with his desperate flight from Twilight by taking a detour into Vincent Gallo country as a loser with a mentally retarded brother who messes up a bank heist and is then forced on the run. Surely, this premise is getting to be a genre of its own and truly fossilised as a topic, but Good Time does have the not inconsiderable saving grace of choosing not to take every prescribed turn along the standard path of the bungling robber, including resisting the temptation to ramp up the violence to ultra levels, just because everyone else seems to thinks you need to. Honourable, if somewhat insubstantial.

5/10

Annihilation (Alex Garland, 2018)

Garland continues to move over from writing to directing with a sense of purpose, which isn't immediately apparent here at the start, where we're led to expect a sort of splicing of Contact with Southern Comfort, as a team of female scientists is sent into a constantly-growing anomaly that has appeared suddenly in swampland and caused the disappearance of everyone already sent in to investigate it. bar the lead character's husband, who came back a wreck. They then get tooled up in Predators-style, and begin coming across the same kind of lethal mutated beasts that would imply.
Most sci-fi/action films would stop there, but as Garland showed with Ex Machina, where the AI template was subverted to disquieting effect, his ambition is greater. 2001 large, in fact, as the alien presence behind the nightmarish chaos turns out to be unlike anything we've seen before. It has plenty of rough edges, but that's usually what you get with things destined to become cult classics.

7/10

La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016)

Somewhat similarly to The Artist, which swept the board with the awards back in 2011, La La Land bases much of its appeal on being a loving recreation of the films of a bygone era. In this case, it's the golden age of the Gene Kelly-led musical, through fantastical song-and-dance sequences spliced into a modern-day love story, and you'd swear some of the routines are exact replicas.
Wherein lies the rub. While it's nice to see the attention to detail, by the time one sequence actually has the sailors from On the Town in the cast, it starts smacking less of homage and more of pure exploitation. Likewise with the jazz element: Ryan Gosling's idealistic muso expounds at great length about the lost creativity of jazz, and then produces the most trad stuff imaginable. The film was accused of whitewashing the genre, but that's not really the problem. The problem is one of not adding anything to the two musical traditions that it champions, just using them.
All of the above, however, should not be allowed to overrule the film's manifold virtues. The relationship between Gosling and Stone is a sweet one, the numbers are great, all saturated primary colours and perfect editing, and the ending, against all logic, is truly moving. It's a deeply flawed mish-mash, but deserves plaudits nevertheless for its ambitions and sheer brio.

7/10

War for the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, 2017)

The reboot series continues with the same director as last time around, and that continuity proves to facilitate far greater depth than in previous outings. Of course, the motion capture effects are even more astounding than before, which is fairly important since the majority of the screen time is taken up by the apes. But there is serious content in the storyline too, with intelligent real-world parallels to be drawn as the beleaguered apes attempt to rescue their fellows from a concentration camp run by Woody Harrelson playing a fanatical  racist colonel, with obvious echoes of Ralph Fiennes's sadistic camp commandant in Schindler's List. The comparison is not a spurious one, and neither is the plot so pat as to provide equivalents among the humans to the inevitable 'good Germans' in WW2 films, with the only decent human a mute girl adopted by the apes. For once, this is actually a franchise that has justified its continuation.

7/10