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