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He's very damaged goods, alternating between being sullenly withdrawn and abruptly violent, and Casey Affleck conveys the dichotomy credibly.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