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