I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach, 2016)

With this, Loach hit the age of 80 and feature number 26 with his righteous ire at the inequities of the world intact and vented at full force. Dave Johns plays a joiner forced to stop working after a heart attack, who is progressively ground down by the benefits system which declares him fit for work and not eligible for work incapacity payments, contrary to his doctor's opinion, and then still denies him his employment allowance as well. He finds some respite in helping a single mother settle in the area in between struggling to get to grips with computers and bureaucracy, but it's really an unwinnable war of attrition against his resolve.
Of course, various Tory ministers criticised the depiction of Jobcentre staff as bureaucratic drones intent on doing everything to disqualify people from getting support as being unrealistic, but anyone who has come up against the cold barbarism of the hoops you have to jump through will know that there's really very little exaggeration on show here. The story does accordingly follow a depressingly preset path, but the acting - once again, with supporting roles given mostly to non-professionals - is superlative and the fury is utterly justified.

7/10

My Dinner with Hervé (Sacha Gervasi, 2018)

Based on the director's actual encounter with the actor in 1993, days before he committed suicide, My Dinner with Hervé stars Hollywood's current go-to-dwarf (for only one can be accommodated at a time) Peter Dinklage as Villechaize and Jamie Dornan of Fifty Shades of Grey as a journalist who is a recovering alcoholic and very much in the last chance saloon with this interview. The casting is of huge relevance since, without it, what we have is a rather pathetic figure famous only for being in a supporting role in one Bond film and a long-running crap if popular TV series, which he will not stop going on about as if they were God's ways of compensating him for his physical limitations. The friendship that forms between the two, Villechaize baiting the journalist continually in his nasal tones with his boozing, leching, railing against the world and spiky personal barbs until he finally snaps, is wholly credible, and this sustains a story that would otherwise be too slender, even if we know that everything said by Villechaize is in effect part of a suicide note and stained all the way through by that.

6/10

Matchstick Men (Ridley Scott, 2003)

Somewhat of a departure for Scott, since comedy isn't a genre he really dabbles in, Matchstick Men stars Nicolas Cage and Sam Rockwell as a pair of conmen who bite off more than they can chew when attempting to scam a local businessman with a currency exchange play. To complicate matters, Cage has severe OCD and Tourette's, and also discovers he's the father of a teenage girl from a previous marriage.
The chemistry between the two male leads is very much the film's strong suit: Cage's performances in anything other than junk have been curate's eggs since the '90s, but doing crazy is something he can always rely on and his array of tics and phobias provide much hilarity, even if it is pretty broad as a source of humour. Rockwell duly contributes his standard good-natured flim-flammery, and Alison Lohman, as the insouciant daughter, is quite a revelation. Knowing the director, it doesn't come as any surprise when it all goes south, and the twist ending is less than adroit, but until then it manages a fairly high entertainment quotient.

6/10 

Pride (Matthew Warchus, 2014)

The fact-based story of how an unlikely alliance was formed back in 1984 between the striking miners and the burgeoning LGBT community, Pride is very much the feelgood film with a social hardship backdrop that The Full Monty was, albeit that the lightness is forced to take a back seat more often in the face of heavier real-world issues: unemployment, prejudice and, eventually, AIDS too.
You can of course criticise the makers' unequivocal political stance against the Thatcher government, but it's indisputable that what brought such disparate sides together was having such a clearly-defined common enemy. And while the closure of the mines can be economically justified, the manner in which it was done was barbarous and the film accordingly loses its jovial composure in flashes of ire for brief spells at this.
But plucky stoicism and good humour are never that far away, and a cast of steady hands such as Bill Nighy, Paddy Considine and Imelda Staunton ensures that it remains anchored to a bedrock of decency. It's hardly a work of great depth for all that, but it does do justice to the events of a very different era not so long ago, and without hectoring either.

6/10 

Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro, 2015)

Del Toro took quite a misstep with this, a Gothic horror piece with ghosts and incest thrown in for good measure. The titular setting is a decrepit mansion in northern England just after the turn of the century harbouring a dark secret, occupied only by an aristocratic brother and sister until he marries a naive young American, heir to her recently deceased father's fortune.
It begs incredulity as to how matter-of-factly she takes the visitations of her mother's ghoulish spirit in her stride, let alone the Addams-family in extremis aspect of the house, and when things go heavily down the Grand Guignol route, it really gets both distasteful and ridiculous. Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain are wasted as the sinister siblings and Mia Wasikowska is badly out of her acting depth as the wife in a blood-soaked descendant of The Fall of the House of Usher. It bombed justifiably.

4/10

Tomb Raider (Roar Uthaug, 2018)

Is the reboot a film genre by now? It's certainly starting to rival some others in terms of quantity, as franchises are repeatedly restarted to tap into whatever goodwill the fans might still have for their characters and relying heavily on being able to knock off the first round fairly securely as an origin story.
Not that Lara Croft has a Batman-like depth of back story: this is a video game character, for Christ's sake. Alicia Vikander brings a callow freshness to the role, in contrast to Angelina Jolie's bulletproof sex bomb, but the action is a yawnsome mix of a lot of running and things collapsing, sprinkled with some Raiders-derivative traps and cod archaeology, and the villain, a nasty treasure hunter after the tomb of a lethal Japanese witch, is straight out of some middling TV movie. Of course, none of this will stave off a sequel, as longs as any breath remains to be flogged out of this expiring horse.

4/10

Changing Lanes (Roger Michell, 2002)

A chance traffic collision between Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson turns both of their lives upside down in the space of twenty-four hours as a dispute over the incident escalates into a destructive feud. This is fuelled no end by the fact that they are, of course, chalk and cheese: the former an arrogant and wealthy attorney, the latter a recovering alcoholic trying to keep custody of his children. Setting aside the oversimplification of the dynamic between them that these polar roles create, it works well enough as tense conflict drama, all the way through to a thorough cop-out of an ending where it badly fails to uphold its prior convictions.

5/10

Snowden (Oliver Stone, 2016)

On the face of it, the story of the whistleblower Edward Snowden, still stuck in Russia with the U.S. having withdrawn his passport, should provide rich pickings for anyone wanting to stick the boot into the autocratic superpower and its machinations. It's a shame, then, that the work of the self-styled liberal conscience of America, Oliver Stone, has declined steadily in terms of focus and edge since his '80s and '90s heyday. And while the facts here speak for themselves and you're left in little doubt of the integrity of Snowden - unless you go along with the U.S. government's campaign of punishment against him for stepping out of line, by them invoking the traitor card - the impact of what's really being addressed is somewhat sucked out by the director's sentimentalisation of the character and his situation. Snowden comes across, and we have no reason to question this, as a serious patriot who couldn't stomach his paymasters violating the constitution by spying on their own populace and is consequently still paying the price for leaking this. But, despite Joseph Gordon-Levitt's nuanced and empathetic portrayal of the man, as drama it can't quite float on our sympathies alone.

5/10

Coco (Lee Unkrich & Adrian Molina, 2017)

Except for some unfortunate deviations into outright plastic junk-pushing, notably the Cars films, Pixar's legacy is impressive and when they seize on a fresh concept, the results are almost invariably of interest beyond a mere kids' audience. And so with Coco, where a young Mexican boy is taken to the Land of the Dead in search of his great-great-grandfather, a famous mariachi crooner. It does bung in every possible Mexican stereotype and douse the lot in layers of schmaltz and vague life lessons, but it's also effortlessly inventive, visually fabulous and has a decent, serious heart amongst the frivolity and hijinks, with a simple message to children in particular: there is no need to fear death.

7/10

Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013)

Based on the story of Ron Woodroof, a heterosexual electrician who was diagnosed with AIDS in 1985 (when, in case anyone needs reminding, the disease was almost exclusively seen as a gay plague), Dallas Buyers Club does an admirable job of involving us in the appalling environment of the time and indignant to the point of fury at the authorities who, in collusion with the pharmaceutical companies, denied sufferers the drugs they really needed to prolong their lives. Matthew McConaughey - an actor who, to put it mildly, divides opinion - plays a huge part in this: his performance as Woodroof, as he moves from enraged homophobe, through self-interested businessman profiting from those with HIV by selling them illegal medicines, to a final and deep fellow feeling with them, is immense. And that's not only because of his startling physical transformation for the role, into a shadow of the smugly corn-fed actor we know from before. For the first time, he's fully human and mesmerising, and rightly deserved his Best Actor Oscar.
It is a pity, though, that the script couldn't quite bring itself to address the complexities of the real-life Woodroof, who was in fact quite possibly bisexual, not homophobic and did not actually contribute a great deal to the furtherment of medication against HIV. But then, where would the uplifting story arc be? It serves best in the end as a reminder that big business in cahoots with government will rarely concern itself with ethics, and that society has moved on from darker times despite that hindrance.

7/10

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (the Coen brothers, 2018)

Well, even the Coens have got on the Netflix wagon. Then again, as evidenced by a number of remakes of other people's work like True Grit, they've always been pragmatic.
And they clearly love westerns with a passion, as this anthology reinforces. A six-shooter with stories ranging from the ridiculously skilled singing gunman to the wagon train beset by Injuns, with diversions to the tales of a grizzled, determined prospector and an exploited travelling performer, culminating in a supernaturally-tinged stagecoach-set finale, the style correspondingly veers from end to end with references across the whole panoply of the genre. The cast is a mix of character actor heavyweights and Coen regulars and a lot of is great fun, albeit fun constantly haunted by the omnipresence of death. It's not their most perfectly realised work by far, with too much time given to one segment and too little to another (James Franco's hapless bank robber in particular) but a smorgasbord of treats all the same.

7/10