Kätilö (Antti Jokinen, 2015)

It's 1944 in the very northernmost extremity of Finland on the coast of the Arctic Ocean and a young midwife struggles to bring new lives into the bleak world while the German army carries on systematically around her erasing the Russian populace in the lands they have conquered to the east of the border. Naturally, since this is a Finnish wartime film, she's as stoic as they come and the atmosphere is hopelessly grim. When she falls for a young half-Finnish SS officer, we might expect a glimmer of sunshine, but that is exactly what we get, deprecatingly, as a glint on a mirror that they play with in one scene.
The barren landscapes have to be counted as the star of Wildeye (lit. The Midwife, also known as Finland 1944) since they are imbued with more character than the cackling, rotten-toothed locals or identikit evil Nazis, and shot to impressive effect. The lead is a decent actress but is given little to project besides sullen resistance, the sporadic aerial bombardment scenes are technically ludicrous, and the romance is a sterile affair, much as the victims of the Germans are hardly fleshed out at all either. Add playing fast and loose with historical accuracy to all of this, while presenting it as gospel, and there isn't much of value left.

4/10

Downsizing (Alexander Payne, 2017)

Matt Damon decides to have himself shrunk to five inches in height to dramatically save on living expenses (and his carbon footprint, as the film pointedly keeps underlining). His wife chickens out of the process at the last minute, so he's left by himself in a city of other little people. So far, fine as the concept goes, and the natural way for this to proceed is as sci-fi comedy centring on the drawbacks of being tiny, with perhaps some touch of melancholia as the dream life turns out to be less than what was hoped for. Failing that, taking the route of the classic '50s B-movie The Incredible Shrinking Man, which plays with the miniature person conceit until logically and bleakly ending in existential oblivion.
But no, Payne wants to use the concept as a vehicle to deliver a message on ecological collapse and the impending extinction of the human race. Damon gets equipped as politically correctly as possible with a strident Vietnamese cleaner and amputee girlfriend, Christoph Waltz out-Schinkens all his previous performances (and that really takes some doing) as his face-pulling Serbian black marketeer mate and then they go to Norway to hear an impassioned speech by the scientist who invented the shrinking process and is taking the little people underground to continue the human race after the rest of it has been wiped out by some vaguely predicted combination of disasters.
The ingredients for something idiosyncratically interesting are all there at the outset - a director with a solid track record of quiet dramas with substance, such as The Descendants or Nebraska, a starting premise offering many avenues to go down and a capable cast. How it ends up as such a cringeworthy mess is quite a feat.

4/10

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019)

Tarantino could hardly be suspected of mellowing with age, as disproved by the cartoonishly ridiculous ultraviolence of The Hateful Eight on his last outing, but the slower pace here - almost stationary at times - and concomitant lack of real incident, until a brief spurt in the finale, lend support to the idea that he's perhaps starting to steer away from his trademark hyperactivity. Of course, it's saturated in pop culture references and each dialogue is still liberally peppered with fucks, but for once there isn't a single 'nigger' to accompany them. It's almost as if he was trying to avoid upsetting people.
This is rather critical if the film is to work as a love song to a Hollywood in the settled wake of the summer of love. It's LA in 1969 and Leonardo DiCaprio's TV Western actor is nursemaided through a crippling attack of self-doubt by Brad Pitt his resolute stunt double and friend. The friendship between the pair, even as they do little else but drive around the endless sun-drenched city streets, have banal conversations and get trashed, feels solid and real, and is a major driver of the film alongside the perpetual TV and radio barrage of Californian hippy pop, rock and grating period commercials, allowing us to sail through its many potential longueurs.
When the spectre of the Manson family, set to commit the notorious massacre in the house next door, raises it head, then so too does the inevitability that we will get a bloody Tarantino climax after all. But even that doesn't transpire quite the way you'd expect. It's a definite change of direction from the enfant terrible director, and for the most part a welcome one.

7/10 

The Laundromat (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

A precis of the Panama papers money-laundering and fraud scandal that came to light in 2016, The Laundromat comes armed with a galaxy of stars, led by Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas, and a declaration of intent to lay bare the nebulous mechanism of the global financial opacity facilitated by intentionally sloppy laws that allows tax evasion on a massive scale.
Streep plays a widow determined to get full compensation from the boating company involved following her husband's death, finding just layers of shell companies behind the insurance, while Oldman and Banderas play the real-life crook lawyers Mossack and Fonseca who were behind setting up thousands of shells with no questions asked regarding what they'd be used for, of course. The duo play their roles as if they were Vegas showmen, starting with a comically-toned global finance 101 about the elusive nature of money, and so we have a serious subject turned into entertainment right from the outset lest the subject prove too dry to hold the audience's attention.
Interspersed with this main thread, there are sub-stories which have a rather too tenuous connection to the theme, particularly the protracted episode where Nonso Anozie's philandering African millionaire gets his comeuppance from his family. It does serve as an eyeopener on the dire state of things in the scarcely regulated financial market, but really only for those who haven't ever been exposed at all to its realities. And the fact that it moves from shoehorning in laughs to an earnest final polemic about what lies ahead from Streep, now no longer in character, makes for an uneven experience altogether.

5/10

Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019)

In the vein of Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian and Arrival, Ad Astra represents another opportunity taken by the school of higher-brow Hollywood filmmakers to use the medium of hard sci-fi as a vehicle to explore human relationships, fears and hopes while knowing that the trappings of the genre will guarantee bums on seats for the space thrills. In many ways, they are all aspiring to match the impact of 2001 in both spheres and all fail in one way or another, though some do better than others. Ad Astra, which sees Brad Pitt as an astronaut struggling to come to terms with his repressed anger at the father who disappeared years before while on an obsessive quest to search for intelligent life, and is then detailed to find him, falls on the right side of the balance of striving for emotional content and gratuitous action. However, the key word here is 'striving' and this means that it's as stifled as Pitt until the last phases of his quest. Hence when he does finally reach the goal, it doesn't feel as if effort has really been made to take the viewer there with him. Sincere and ambitious, but ultimately liable to engender indifference.

6/10 

Spider-Man: Far From Home (Jon Watts, 2019)

In this round, teenage Spider-Man and his high-school chums go on the kind of whistle-stop tour so beloved of Americans who can tick off Paris, Venice, Prague and London after a day spent in each and assert that they have 'done' Europe. Bless. Anyway, since this is also ostensibly a superhero film, different varieties of giant elemental monster turn up at each location to wreak havoc, always fought off by a new hero dubbed Mysterio. And of course all is not what it first seems and Peter has to grab his suit again to hop around a lot.
If this summary sounds too churlish, it's hard to dish out praise on it apart from that young kids will probably love it, and there are more onerous way of passing two hours with a likable lead and some innocent humour. Let's just hope that with the next sequel they'll have added a bit more depth to the mix, though.   

5/10

Avant l'hiver (Philippe Claudel, 2013)

Before the Winter Chill stars those trusty warhorses of French drama, Daniel Auteuil and Kristin Scott Thomas, as a well-to-do couple (of course) whose marriage is stuck in neutral after years of drifting along. He's a truculent brain surgeon and she is a bored stay-at-home wife, and their fragile stability is rocked when he starts seeing a damaged young woman, a former patient of his.
The veteran leads are as solid as ever, but the whole set-up of an outwardly comfortable middle-class couple with repressed dissatisfaction, inevitably heading towards affairs, is just too much of a trope of genteel French cinema to engage the emotions deeply, unless something more raw is added to the mix, and this is yet another piece which is just too bloodless to be able to do that.

5/10

X-Men: Dark Phoenix (Simon Kinberg, 2019)

Ironically for something that promises an event in the X-Men universe of such monumental, shattering import, what we get here is the franchise effectively expiring not with a bang but with a whimper. Doubtless, considering the pig's ear that X-Men: The Last Stand was generally held to have made of the story of Jean Grey becoming nearly omnipotent and murderous at the same time, the studio execs probably thought there would be sufficient good will for yet another reboot. Should have made a better film than what you're rebooting then, shouldn't you?  It's not that the action or performances let it down so much, although when Jean gets into full apeshit mode, the pyrotechnics and targets for her mayhem are rather underwhelming, and Sophie Turner has little to do in the role apart from look stern lest she look just wet. It's just that it's so illogical, even for the genre (just to provide an example right at the start, some people seem to be able to breathe in space and others die instantly, with nary an explanation for the difference) and above all pointless. There's never any real sense of menace and most of the numerous characters crammed in serve as little more than scenery. Hugh Jackman was so right to sign out with the superlative Logan: this is a cash cow which yields less and less.

4/10

360 (Fernando Meirelles, 2011)

Meirelles really made his mark on the international stage with 2002's City of God, which managed the juggling act of being both politically excoriating and riveting as a thriller at the same time without compromising either element. Since then, however, it has not been plain sailing and 360 illustrates quite succinctly what happens when a director gets too much adulation: a host of stars from Law to Hopkins come in to prop up a story that doesn't quite deserve it.
Modishly, we're in globe-trotting  territory from the outset, with the action jumping between disparate characters and cities, whose paths cross from time to time but who are all related by one theme: awkward relationships. So, there's the pragmatic Slovakian prostitute, the businessman with the faltering marriage, a dentist infatuated with his assistant, a father refusing to accept the disappearance of his daughter decades earlier and a sex offender trying hard to stay on the straight and narrow after being released from prison. All of these vignettes promise, and occasional also deliver, something of substance. But a lot of what is produced by the characters' interactions is smothered in platitudes and it's perhaps quite indicative of the grasp of a director, now distanced from his roots, on what really matters or what happens in the real world that so much of it takes place in the vacuum of airports and hotels.

5/10 

El Camino (Vince Gilligan, 2019)

It may not be as much a standalone film as a drawn-out episode to bring dramatic closure to Breaking Bad with a conclusion to Jesse's story, and it could easily be argued that finishing off the series with Walter dead and Jesse fleeing, out of his mind, was a completely satisfactory ending. Nevertheless, when you've got such strong material to build on, it's hard to resist a viewing.
It starts with a brief flashback to months before, and then moves to Jesse in the moments after the final carnage that ended the series, and subsequently being constantly on the run and trying to get far away with an altogether new identity. The story is punctuated by flashbacks all the way through, but these are fairly clearly signposted by either Jesse having a beard or no beard, or someone appearing who we know is dead. In the present, the character has altered: his harrowing experiences have made him far more determined and focused, to the point of ruthlessness where necessary, but unlike the progression of Walter, Jesse retains a fundamental code of ethics and it comes as a welcome surprise that a succession of tense confrontations leads to none of the gratuitous bloodletting that characterised the last seasons of the series. And the dialogue and tension are as sharp as ever too. Of course, it is a final milking of the cash cow, and will not make any sense to anyone who hasn't watched all of the series, but for those who have, it's really quite gratifying, without ever descending to mere recycling. Now we just have to wait for the next season of Better Call Saul to bring Jimmy's story to a close too...

7/10

Mister John (Joe Lawlor & Christine Molloy, 2013)

A man goes to Singapore following the death of his brother there, and tries to come to terms with his loss. This is all that actually happens in a film that is beautifully shot, avoids histrionics and features a subtle performance by Aidan Gillen as the bereaved brother.
But. This is the kind of self-consciously sensitive affair much beloved of critics who pour excessive praise on anything which is quiet and slow and aspires to say something about the complexities of emotion while not actually saying anything at all, because that would be too pat for an arthouse filmmaker (see much of the more high-brow end of French cinema). Hence, after an hour and a half of watching Gillen projecting controlled grief with few words, the experience is just of having stared into a delicately constructed void and having learnt nothing.

5/10

Honig im Kopf (Til Schweiger, 2014)

As a director instead of a rent-a-hunk, Til Schweiger does try, God bless. Here, it's with the topic of how to deal with a parent with Alzheimer's, and while the intention is clearly good, with many sensitive and informative scenes emphasising the hidden humanity in the afflicted that still needs to be fed with compassion, he can never quite hold back from going OTT for comedic effect, and that rather messes up the message (the wrecked garden party scene, in particular, is quite cringeworthy). It's like watching a Bollywood director who can't hold back the urge to chuck in a musical number at random.
All that said, Head Full of Honey is also basically a sweet story of an 11-year-old girl who bonds with her demented grandpa and takes steps to ensure that he goes out of life without pain. There is no narrative sense to how she achieves this and the universe that the characters frequent is pure consequenceless Hollywood opulence; this is the land of fantasy and that does grate when you are always aware of the real issue at hand, but Dieter Hallervorden's generous performance as the geriatric just about makes it work.

5/10

Julieta (Pedro Almodóvar, 2016)

Almodóvar goes back here to making serious films, or so it seems, because towards the end you realise you've been suckered into a Sirkian melodrama after all. As almost ever, it's driven by strong female leads and it's fairly redundant to state that a gay male director has, over the years, proved one of the best exponents of fully-rounded women as protagonists.
The story here, which revolves around a middle-aged woman trying to understand what led to her daughter's disappearance from her life decades ago, takes us back to before the birth of her daughter and then goes on through the key stages since, trying to explain both to herself and the viewer why what transpired did as it happened. It's visually sumptuous and keeps on promising a resolution, but that never comes and while you can admire individual components of the whole, it leaves virtually no coherent emotional impact. And that's something you would never have accused Almodóvar of before, even with his riotous comedies.

5/10

Captain Marvel (Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, 2019)

Despite its commanding commercial lead over its DC rival, the people behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe still seem to be suffering from Superman envy, and have acted accordingly to bring forth cosmically-powered hero of their own. Not surprisingly, in keeping with the current rather forced trend towards broadening the race and gender profiles of action protagonists, the character is a woman too, and a ballsy one to boot. This is all fine, but the twin demands of dragging us through yet another origin story (here, done piecemeal through increasingly complete flashbacks) and then providing something awesome for the hero to accomplish can't be staved off. And then there is also the perennial need to graft the finished product to the rest of the MCU. So the freedoms of the makers are severely constrained from the outset. This is, of course, a burden of all introductory hero franchises, but some do manage to overcome it through subverting the formula enough, and Captain Marvel does not really manage that. The cookie-cutter villains are after a cookie-cutter object of power and it's up to the amnesiac hero to fly around, punch and zap things until they desist. Actually, the best thing turns out to be Brie Larson as the lead; much panned by fanboys with suspect agendas for having the gall to be a woman who's abrasive and arrogant, it's her embracing of those flaws that gives the character some colour. But it's not enough to distinguish it from the crowd.

5/10

Avengers: Endgame (Anthony & Joe Russo, 2019)

With half the universe and therefore also half of all heroes dead after Avengers: Infinity War, the 'final' (for there are of course never such things when billions of revenue are involved) instalment in the most all-encompassing MCU saga rather has its hands tied from the outset by the need to kill the omnipotent Thanos and resurrect its key money-spinners at the same time. The decidedly bleak state of affairs also denies the humour of the previous films to leaven the inevitable mass pagga. And then there are so many characters to try to serve some kind of closure for, whereas before they could be brought in briefly, with the possibility to promote them to the forefront if that suited narrative or marketing purposes. Finally, it must somehow be made feasible that the rump of the goodies can succeed against far bigger odds than their full complement last time.
The attempted solution to all these troublesome challenges consists of a two-fold approach: firstly, making the running length a bladder-torturing three hours, and secondly, time travel, which is what you do when you have really painted yourself into a corner. It goes without saying that each hero must get an equal turn, regardless of their capabilities, and that each must be given a task that they might just about feasibly pull off. And so the tidal wave of fighting against conveniently weight-matched opponents ensues and doesn't abate for about half a lifetime.
It is as visually awe-inducing as you'd expect, you will find yourself at frequent intervals on the edge of your seat at the sheer speed, gall and peril of the action, and there is a small shock with exactly how the end pans out, but this really can't go on. Let's hope that Disney at least gives us a breather with some smaller-scale stories before the inavertible resumption of business as usual.

6/10

Early Man (Nick Park, 2018)

Aardman is a highly dependable brand and its productions manage to appeal across the spectrum without straining to do so. Hence, Early Man comes in the established painstaking stop-motion technique, with familiar-looking characters and a mix of broad daftness and wry references to contemporary culture. The storyline this time isn't too ambitious, though, revolving around the attempt by a stone-age tribe to avoid being expelled from their verdant little valley by unscrupulous bronze-age invaders, culminating in a football match to decide the issue, which is an overused plot and a bit of a cop-out, even allowing for the fact that this is essentially a kids' film. Still, it's an innocently jolly ride and there are plenty of diversions in spotting all the British comedy and acting greats doing the voices.

6/10

Durante la tormenta (Oriol Paulo, 2018)

It's getting harder and harder for time travel films to distinguish themselves from the torrent that the genre has become, and while Mirage eschews technobabble and indeed physical time travel itself, bar the fact that a woman influences the past and hence the present by talking to someone 25 years earlier on through a TV, it's doubtful whether this is for much gain.
The key point is a 72-hour storm in 2014 that is a replica of one in 1989, and the lead character learns just before finding an old TV in her house that it was on that precise day in the earlier storm that a boy who lived in their house died accidentally. She prevents this from happening, and then finds on waking up that she has no daughter and no-one close to her recognises her. This produces a brand of hysterical denial of glaring reality in her which frankly gets tiresome, since we've been here many times before and it's no fun seeing the protagonist lag so far behind the audience in terms of moving on. In any case, eventually a solution to her predicament must be found, and when it turns up it makes even less sense than the initial divergence event.
It's there emotionally and in terms of mood, but since it sets its stall out to play with butterfly effects and then seems to lose interest in the fiddly mechanics of all that, it has to ultimately be counted a failure.

5/10

I Am Mother (Grant Sputore, 2019)

Humanity is nigh-on extinct once more following an unspecified apocalyptic event and the only apparent survivor is a girl raised by a robot from one of hundreds of stored embryos in a bunker. The years pass as the robot mother raises the girl with a firm but loving hand, until the girl begins to question the state of things as she reaches teenage.
The set-up, a composite of everything from THX 1138 through 2001 and The Terminator to say, the recent Spanish Orbiter 9 or, in the non-scifi sphere, Room, is at once familiar enough that we know two things from the start: there is obviously something more to be discovered outside the confines of the bunker, and kindly robots will prove to be otherwise. And so once a woman from outside does turn up with tales of the horrors she's experienced, we're well on course to one of a limited range of endgames. All that said, it does manage to add elements all of its own along the way, mainly around the theme of social engineering, and the ambiguity of the mother character is retained long enough to keep up interest.

6/10

The Light Between Oceans (Derek Cianfrance, 2016)

A traumatised returnee from the horrors of World War I takes up a solitary post as a lighthouse keeper off the coast of Australia. For a while, his existence is brightened up by being joined there by his new young wife, but then the succession of miscarriages she suffers destabilises their happiness, until the unexpected discovery of a baby in a boat that washes up to the shore.
Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender got married shortly after this film, and the chemistry between them is palpable. On the other hand, while I would usually watch Fassbender painting a fence for two hours, and Vikander projects a strong vitality as well, here he mumbles his lines too monotonously (to cover up an inability to do an Australian accent?) and conversely her character, desperate for a child and little else, goes OTT with hysteria. All that said, it is beautifully shot, making the most of the isolated setting, and manages to evoke an air of melancholy romanticism, albeit through some melodramatic overbombardment.

6/10

Contre toi (Lola Doillon, 2010)

Kristin Scott Thomas is an actress with great range from restrained and fragile to coldly calculating, and will always be worth watching, but In Your Hands is something of a misstep as film choices go. We see her at first making a dash out of a house where she has been held captive, and then the story rewinds to explain how she was kidnapped and the period of her captivity. The idea that a sort of mutual Stockholm syndrome develops between her, an emotionally isolated doctor, and her captor, an aggrieved husband of one of her former patients, is an interesting one, but ultimately not psychologically convincing, and the apparent determination of the director to provide her with closure against any logical plot progression is frustrating.

5/10

Den 12. mann (Harald Zwart, 2017)

Based on historical events, The 12th Man relates the story of the sole survivor of a failed Norwegian sabotage mission to their home country. Injured, traumatised and pursued relentlessly by the Germans, he's forced to stumble from one hiding place to another, and is only able to do so with the help of numerous locals. It's a thrilling story in a chilling wintry landscape, with echoes of The Revenant as you wonder how he'll survive to make it to the next refuge, never mind all the way to neutral Sweden, even though you know he will due to the film's historicity. The lead Nazi is of course the usual bastard stereotype, but that's a minor quibble with a gripping stab at a subject that is still current for countries that were occupied, 75 years after the event.

7/10

Le Prénom (Alexandre de La Patellière & Matthieu Delaporte, 2013)

What a curiously old-fashioned thing What's in a Name? feels like. Stagebound, which is clear from early on since it was based on a play, it never actually overcomes that. A small cast bounce off each other in a single set in psychologically unconvincing ways, starting with one of them pretending he's about to call his imminent new-born Adolf, which causes a ruckus, and then leading to all the rest successively unburdening themselves of their resentments and revelations. Simply talking or screaming at a mile a minute does not equate to comedy, and while some of the separate exchanges are witty enough, even occasionally perceptive, the total amounts to nothing much more than the self-absorbed middle-class dinner party waffle that French cinema, for all its successes, is too frequently guilty of.

5/10

Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2013)

If you mix a French sci-fi graphic novel with a Korean director in the same field, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out what the progeny will be. Thus, there is an improbable scenario of a near-future world where the whole planet has frozen over because of a global overreaction to global warming having messed everything up, and humanity's sole survivors are on a class-segregated train travelling endlessly through the wastes. It's a very limited premise, and while actors such as Tilda Swinton, who seems to love doing demented characters and steals the show in her too-brief spell as a psychotic NHS-spectacled bureaucrat maintaining the warped status quo, or Ed Harris as the reasonable voice of evil behind her, have a field day with their roles, and the action is perfectly serviceable, it seems to add up to less than the sum of its parts. It was wildly plauded on its release, and it's hard to see what people saw in it, except that at least it tried.

5/10

Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017)

You might imagine that a pretty historically stringent retelling of the victory-in-defeat that was the Dunkirk evacuation would offer up no surprises, and hence dramatically have its hands tied behind its back. However, Nolan had taken quite a different tack here. He transforms the events into a form of impressionism that manages to communicate the essence of the story more effectively than any faithful documentary account could, with entire sequences of visual poetry containing little dialogue beyond a functional level required to lead to the next stage. Neither is the usually modish splitting of the narrative into incidents occurring at different times over a few days just a trick: it gives a sense of how chaotic the situation would have been from multiple perspectives, jumping between an RAF pilot with just an hour of fuel left in his tank, a stoic volunteer taking his sons across the Channel to rescue the evacuees and a young soldier just trying everything possible to get away. It's quite possibly one of the most artistically proficient attempts ever to try to capture war at the level of raw feeling, rather than just reciting the strategic details. All that said, it still fizzles out because the story has nowhere else to go than the historical chain of events, and the soundtrack, when it does come in, is unnecessarily bombastic and jars accordingly. But a bold go at a tough nut to crack nevertheless.

8/10

Pacific Rim: Uprising (Steven S. DeKnight, 2018)

The gigantic Kaiju monsters sprouting out from the middle of the Pacific are back, and so a new batch of plucky pilots of giant robots is needed to stop them. Incredibly, the plot in this sequel takes up even less space on a napkin than that of its predecessor: John Boyega is the son of the deceased hero Idris Elba, and he has issues with the interdimensional behemoths and his own past missteps, as he's pressganged to train a bunch of multinational teenagers (of course they are; the target audience is king) to do the job. The characters are tissue-thin, the action that ensues manages to be both nonsensical and boring, and the trillions of property damage depicted on the cities rampaged through make even what occurs in the Avengers films look like a spot of light DIY. By the time that the rail-guided plot reaches Mount Fuji, relocated to the edge of the suburbs of Tokyo, it's really quite hard to remain interested in what happens.

4/10

Incredibles 2 (Brad Bird, 2018)

If it ain't broke, don't fix it, and while the quality of animation may have moved on a bit since the first instalment in 2004 (although this hardly gives added value, since the pleasure of the first film was always more in the humour and inventiveness than in the FX), the set-up remains the same, with Brad Bird wisely returning to helm instead of leaving the franchise for someone else to mess up.
Now, the family has been forced into a quiet life due to superheroes having been declared illegal, until a marketing man comes calling with an offer to revamp the image of superheroes in the eyes of the public. Of course, this turns out to be a bit of a poisoned pill.
While the action sequences are quite stunning, they are also interminable and the film's strongest suit is again in its comedy in the slower scenes in between, namely Mr. Incredible's wearying travails at looking after the kids while his wife is out saving the world for PR purposes. Doubtless, the franchise won't end here, so it would be nice to think that a better balance between the rollercoaster parts and the domestic and satirical stuff would be achieved next time. Chance would be a fine thing. Nevertheless, it's still head and shoulders above most modern blockbuster animations in all aspects, and with plenty that adults can really sink their teeth into too.

7/10

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (Matthew Vaughn, 2017)

The junior chav James Bond returns, which was to be expected with the first part having made a tidy profit, and it's very much more of the same: cartoonish ultra-violence, broad and puerile gags and ridiculous technology, with the boy spy set on a mission to stop a cartel's plot to kill the world's drug users through infecting their products with a deadly virus. The pseudo-topical twist is that this is wholeheartedly supported by the rabidly right-wing U.S. President that the cartel is trying to blackmail with their threat to have him legalise the lot, and this would have seemed even more truly out there than the action and tech, if it wasn't for the sad fact of Trump's existence.
It's quite pointless by now to keep castigating Vaughn and perennial co-writer Jane Goldman for their comic-book infatuations: at least here this means something that may be irresponsible and hyperactive, but also full of moments of gleeful silliness that serve as a healthy antidote to the increasingly po-faced Bond films.

5/10

Atomic Blonde (David Leitch, 2017)

The setting is classic Cold War Berlin as the Wall starts to fall, the director was involved in the John Wick films and the superspy charged with finding a Stasi defector with a vital list of Western spies is Charlize Theron, who has an established history of badass roles. Putting all this together, it therefore comes as no surprise that the result is a hypercharged and ultraviolent affair with evil Russians thrown in for good measure as the principal antagonists, and little time for actual spy work. That said, the action sequences, of which there are so many that it's hard to catch breath between them, are exceptionally well choreographed, the soundtrack of '80s alt-rock classics that accompanies all the action is aptly chosen and James McAvoy, as her smirking, double-dealing MI6 colleague, offers his usual dependable support. Naturally, a sequel is in the pipeline.

6/10

Valley of Love (Guillaume Nicloux, 2015)

This brings together heavyweights of French cinema Gérard Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert as a separated couple who reunite after their son's suicide to follow mysterious clues he left behind about reappearing in Death Valley one last time. There is a rather self-indulgent meta level to their characters, since they're both actors called Gérard and Isabelle, and really the interest of the film depends on your indulgence of the alarmingly corpulent Depardieu and the spiky Huppert as they bicker and dissect their erstwhile relationship while trudging from desert site to desert site, complaining about the heat all the way. The introduction of a supernatural element promises some sense of purpose, but doesn't really bring any dividends.

5/10

Todos lo saben (Ashgar Farhadi, 2018)

Iranian prodigy Farhadi moves into directing in Spanish, with mixed results. In Everybody Knows, a family gathers to celebrate a wedding in a small town, which turns sour as the daughter of the sister of the bride is kidnapped in the middle of the festivities, and the family are left helpless to do anything without any clues and a warning that going to the police will result in the daughter's death. The film relies strongly on the chemistry between real-life couple Penélope Cruz as the distraught mother and Javier Bardem as her first love from decades before, but the problem is that she's given little to do besides cry, while his role has more meat on it as he sets out to try to track down the kidnappers. Farhadi makes use of his trademark non-disclosure of information at a critical juncture, and this works, and there's also the mature complexity in the interrelationships that we've come to expect of the director. In other words, there are plenty of things to ponder and reward the viewer's patience, but it's more disjointed than his previous works.

6/10

The Ritual (David Bruckner, 2017)

You know the set-up: four friends take a wrong turn on a hike into a deep, dark forest and end up in serious trouble. The only difference here is that it's in northern Sweden (albeit really Romania for financial reasons) instead of the Appalachians and that the protagonists are English. In any case, the group dynamics are familiar: the constantly complaining speccy one, the no-nonsense leader type, the one who quickly goes nuts and the lead, who is a sort of moderated amalgam of all three and therefore naturally likely to be the last one standing. This means that Rafe Spall gets to play action hero for once, and he must have relished the prospect. The rest is just a hotch-potch of disembowelling monster stuff and creepy cultish locals. After a fairly promising, atmospheric opening, once the curtains are drawn back and the full scope of the menace is revealed it turns into the usual parade of running and screaming.

4/10

Horrible Bosses (Seth Gordon, 2011)

Three friends with awful employers hatch a plan to do away, in the fashion of Strangers on a Train (which is knowingly quoted) with each other's tormentors. Naturally, it all goes pear-shaped very quickly.
The initial part of the film, in which the bosses Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston and Colin Farrell, respectively a tyrannical sociopath, amoral nymphomaniac and coked-up prick, is good fun as they take turns in chewing up the scenery. Unfortunately, as this is very much in the depressingly enduring tradition of gross-out comedies in the mould of The Hangover at al,  it becomes progressively less interesting under a barrage of puerile cock, drug and race gags which are, of course, also borderline homophobic, sexist or racist, because the protagonists are, after all, three regular white Joes. It could have been so much better with a little more restraint and the courage to be darker.

5/10

Safety Not Guaranteed (Colin Trevorrow, 2012)

One of those low-budget Sundance successes with a cast of unknowns, this is essentially the sort of thing that independent cinema in the U.S. keeps turning out and which is plauded for being down-to-earth and insightful. Whimsicality is almost a hallmark and seen as an asset, rather than a blight.
Which is not to say that Safety Not Guaranteed, where a jaded magazine reporter and his interns take off to investigate a crackpot who claims he can travel back in time, is a bad film at all: the quirkiness is kept fairly low-key, which its kin don't manage that often, and the characters are fairly rounded. It's perfectly sweet and pleasant. There's just not a lot of substance to it besides that, and I guarantee you'll have forgotten you ever saw it within a month.

5/10

Hardcore Henry (Ilya Naishuller, 2015)

This is by far the most accomplished transference of the FPS experience to the big screen to date, told entirely from a first-person perspective, as a man wakes up as a cyborg, immediately plunged into fleeing for his life through Moscow. It's also soon as interesting as watching someone else playing an FPS, while the non-stop pace is simply exhausting. Even the most OTT shooter games have their quiet moments to allow not only for a pause for breath, but for mood to build up.
Not in Naishuller's macho Russian/adolescent wank fantasy world, though, where the chief aim is to come up with not only a higher body count achieved by the protagonist than ever seen before but ever more tasteless ways to achieve that. The effect is mind-numbing and worryingly desensitising: this may be one of the first cases I've ever seen, and God knows I'm no opponent of extreme violence as entertainment, where I've really questioned the validity of allowing anyone with an impressionable mind to see it. You can't help marvelling at the sheer technical skill involved in the enterprise, and yet feel morally aghast at the result too.

4/10

9. april (Roni Ezra, 2015)

April 9th tells the story of Denmark's six-hour capitulation to the German invasion in 1940, told from the perspective of a platoon on the border who put up a spirited resistance against overwhelming odds, only to learn after the event that their government already gave up hours before they had to surrender. Due to its reverential adherence to historical facts, there is little in the way of the heroic cliches of most war films, and the characters into a sense of emasculated betrayal as defeat comes so soon. This is clearly meant to mirror the overall mood of the nation at the time about the event, and it conveys this effectively for outsiders. The few skirmish scenes are also unflashily and tautly shot, and the platoon, while having its usual strong leader, sullen tough guy and nervous youth, is still nuanced enough to avoid being a collection of outright stereotypes. It's not amongst the greats of the genre, but nevertheless thoughtfully told.

6/10

The Voices (Marjane Satrapi, 2014)

It's quite remarkable how the star of Marjane Satrapi fell in the seven years between her captivating debut, the Iran-centred animation Persepolis, and this sorry mess. Satrapi's first foray into the English-language market, The Voices relies heavily on the boyish charm of Ryan Reynolds and his association with feelgood comedies, but casting him as a guileless schizophrenic who inadvertently turns into a serial killer, in the manner of Norman Bates, simply asks for too much indulgence. Initially, there's some promise in the device of his conversations with his pets, a psychopathic Scottish-voiced cat and a decent American-voiced dog, respectively goading him on to further excesses and trying to steer him in the right direction. But this is soon lost as women's heads begin to pile up in his fridge, and it stops being funny or pointful long before that. The dire musical end scene is almost worth watching just for condensing everything that's wrong with the tone of the film.

3/10

Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017)

Making an American live-action film based on popular Japanese manga or anime is never a good starting point, with the inevitable whitewashing of the characters the least of the problems, and giving petite Scarlett Johansson once again the power to slice her way through hordes of adversaries makes the heart sink too. In these aspects, Ghost in the Shell does not disappoint: it is just as poor than those factors might lead you to believe, with adolescent computer-game philosophising on the nature of identity as she attempts, with her brain stuck inside a robot body, to make sense of her purpose. The plot is a composite of any number of sci-fi dystopias where an evil corporation weaponises its vulnerable victims, the cybersphere has to be visualised in the standard ludicrously graphic ways and the city has to have a 'lawless zone' for the underclass, of course. The torrents of action and FX are impressive, but this is no real virtue since it has become a baseline for the genre by now. The most horrifying (and original) amongst all the violence turns out to be the proliferation of animated holographic advertising everywhere, even taller than the towering skyline.

4/10

La Nana (Sebastián Silva, 2009)

Those who've seen this year's Best Foreign Language Oscar winner Roma will be struck at once by how much it shares with The Maid, which came out nine years earlier. The lead character is a live-in maid for a wealthy family in a Latin American country (here, Chile). But there are also significant differences. Unlike the sweetly compliant Cleo in Cuarón's film, Raquel here is sullenly truculent and gets paranoid when the family decide that she needs someone to help her with her never-ending workload of chores. Her reaction is then to try to get rid of each successive arrival through various hostile acts of increasing irrationality. It doesn't exactly make you warm to her, but then that's the principal tonal difference between this film and its Mexican successor: she's not meant to be liked, just understood. As such, where Roma was poetic and also set against a real unstable political environment, The Maid is as messy and mundane as life, and the society it plays in hardly gets a look in. It's a very different beast, but doesn't stand up badly at all in the comparison.

7/10

Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)

Adapted to a length of two and a half hours from a Haruki Murakami short story, Burning cannot be described as an easy film in any way. The lead character, an aimless lad fresh from university, with vague aspirations of becoming a writer, is an introvert who takes an eternity to express himself and when he falls for a complicated girl from his childhood, we watch him wait until too late to assert himself. She then disappears without trace, and the action he finally takes becomes trying to establish whether the smooth and inscrutable rich guy she befriended while on holiday abroad is behind it.
On the surface of it, this outline has the makings of a standard thriller. It confounds that at every turn. Not only are the usual markers for dream sequences entirely absent, but so too is the whole narrative support framework where turns in the plot are explained explicitly for our benefit, and there is no moral either. It takes some adjustment after being used to being fed so much pap to realise how unnecessary all of that is when the characters and events speak for themselves. The end result is quite haunting.

8/10

Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (Dany Boon, 2008)

What are Ch'tis? This has to be explained at the outset, even for the French audience, in the second most watched film of all time in France. Put simply, they're the people of the countryside in the very north of the country, with a dialect which is seen as bizarre and makes up the bulk of the humour in this low-brow but amiable comedy, as a post office manager from the sunny south is seconded to a small town in Ch'ti country as punishment for his misdeeds. Naturally, despite his misgivings about his exile to the virtual Arctic, he soon warms to the locals and then has to keep lying to his wife, still in the Provence, about the horrors he faces daily to affirm her prejudices and dissuade her from coming up to see for herself.
Since the humour is so heavily dependent on the language barrier, as a foreigner one has to rely on a competent translation to convey the gist and the subtitler makes a game attempt here, even if that means that trying to decipher the garbled English produced as a result is somewhat of a distraction from the French source. In any case, the jollity generally makes it through intact, and while it should hardly win any awards for sublety or ingenuity, Welcome to the Sticks is a pleasant enough ride.

6/10   

Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018)

It's doubtful whether Alfonso Cuarón went out seeking a wide international audience with a black and white recounting of the environment that he grew up in, a socially divided and politically troubled Mexico City of 1970, but he got one anyway and an Oscar to boot. And it's well deserved. The story is a slow burner, as we follow a patient young maid go about her chores in a white middle-class family, but the lack of histrionics (or coaxing soundtrack, for that matter) serves to slowly draw us in, until the final third, which becomes quite gut-wrenching. When added to unaffected acting and photography which is mostly restrained, yet suddenly luminous, the overall effect is a beguiling one and gets a plethora of ideas across under the radar that keep working on you long after the credits have rolled.

8/10

BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018)

Lee's latest 'joint' has been lauded as somewhat of a return to form after decades of decline since his 1980s heyday, reaching the bottom of the barrel five years ago with an awful remake of Oldboy. But in truth, the fact that the story of a black cop who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan in the '70s by posing as a potential recruit is a real one, is just the excuse for a heavy-handed polemic about race that you expect these days from the director.
It does keep you watching largely due to the mechanics of how the character gets away with it, by doubling up with a white cop so they play the same person, one for the phone and the other for face-to-face encounters with the virulent supremacists. Nevertheless, the fact that the duo of actors simply can't do each other's voices is a glaringly obvious problem, although this is insignificant in comparison with the sheer amount of stereotyping on show, like Tarantino with the ironic detachment extracted. All the other black characters are militants ranting about pigs and The Man, and have the same afros, while the pathetic losers in the KKK are given no dialogue besides saying 'nigger' and 'kike' a lot. Lee seems incapable of understanding how such crude reductionism works against what he's attempting to say: racism in the real world is rarely as two-tone and blatant, and far more insidious.
You want to support him for the worthiness of his mission as the film ends on the nauseating recent footage of Trump publicly courting the far right, but as a filmmaker Lee is just too scattergun when he goes off on this track.

4/10

Mia Madre (Nanni Moretti, 2015)

Italian writer-director-actor Moretti has often used himself as the basis of his gentle ponderings on life, but here withdraws into a supporting role to give centre stage to a female director whose ailing mother is on her way out, while having to deal with the foibles of an American star actor on her latest production and her other relationship problems. The fact that the character is essentially unsympathetic due to railing against everyone and everything isn't the problem, as her reaction to the pressure is quite feasible, but the fact that the film ultimately says very little of importance is, and John Turturro's semi-comic turn as the vain and buffoonish actor seems to have been shoehorned in just because they managed to get a Hollywood star who could actually speak Italian. Not Moretti's most substantial or coherent work.

5/10

Ant-Man and the Wasp (Peyton Reed, 2018)

More romping in the microverse for cheeky chappie Paul Rudd, this time accompanied on a miniature scale by his love interest from the first film, Evangeline Lilly. The plot, for what it's worth, involves rescuing her mum from the quantum realm, while fighting off an interphasic woman who's trying to get back to the physical world at any cost. But really it's just an excuse for microscopic FX thrills that the makers of the '60s series Land of the Giants would have killed for, punctuated by quipping between the two leads. Unlike almost all of the other recent Marvel adaptations, there's no darkness or depth here: as with the first film, it's decidedly kid-friendly, and so naturally lightweight, but harmless fun nevertheless.

5/10

Stan & Ollie (Jon S. Baird, 2018)

This follows the legendary comic duo in the twilight of their careers, as they embark on a tour of Britain's music halls after failing to get the backing to make one more film. Their quality as performers is still there, but the audiences have drifted away and Hardy's health is failing.
There's nothing particularly revelatory in the trajectory of the story, but that hardly matters: the casting of Steve Coogan as Laurel and John C. Reilly (under highly convincing prosthetics) as Hardy is nigh-on perfect, from the look to the mannerisms, including Coogan's immaculate impersonation of Laurel's faux-stilted Transatlantic delivery. And, above all, it's as bittersweetly funny and affectionate as how you wanted to imagine the deep friendship between the pair to have been. It makes you want to see their 107 features and shorts all over again.

7/10

Rosetta (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 1999)

17-year-old Rosetta lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother and no real prospects of changing her situation. Her sole focus is on finding a job, with which successive employers let her down due to her age, and her living circumstances mean that the state fails to help her either through providing benefits. She marches on, grimly determined and forced to be prematurely resourceful just to keep above water.
The Dardenne brothers have always had an overriding concern with what happens to people on the bottom rung of society, and while the pervading, claustrophobic gloom here could be critiqued for being excessive, to the extent that they seem to have gone out of their way to film only under grey skies, their righteous passion has to be respected. Making the protagonist so introverted, guarded and single-minded risks making her wholly unsympathetic, as we only see her express emotion as desperation when being ejected from another job, but the truth of the character cannot be denied and the final image of the film, not promising a light at the end of the tunnel but rather just laying bare her soul, hits with unexpected power.

7/10

Bird Box (Susanne Bier, 2018)

Ah, another European film director whose career has gone downhill for years takes the Tinseltown zloty to make a big-budget sci-fi film. Hollywood is really running out of apocalypse scenarios by now, and the suicidal mass hysteria communicated by eye contact here has the sense of dredging the bottom of the barrel. This might not be the case if the pandemic could be used to serve better as a metaphor for the pernicious blight of viral media, or if something was made of the set-up where Sandra Bullock's lead character starts off as a reclusive visual artist (the vital importance of being able to see etc.). But first the standard survival horror boxes are ticked off - including the gleeful raid on a supermarket while the nasties lurk outside - and then, completely unforgivably, the logic of the menace is done away with, since it was invisible supernatural beings after all. Bullock then runs around shouting a lot at her two kids (who she calls just 'boy' and 'girl' in some ridiculous reversion to pseudoprimitivism), there is a completely unexplained leap from them being trapped in the city to safety in a sylvan setting and finally a denouement that makes just as little sense. Shyamalan's much-panned jumble The Happening, which this decides to copy, having no other ideas of its own, was actually a far more coherent and unsettling work than this sorry affair.

3/10

Ghost Stories (Andy Nyman & Jeremy Dyson, 2017)

Recalling classic British portmanteau horror films like Dead of Night or From Beyond the Grave, Ghost Stories has a professional debunker of supernatural incidents challenged to disprove three extreme cases. All three short tales are strong on atmosphere and chills, always holding something back where modern horror usually just goes straight for the jugular. The support by Paul Whitehouse as a spiky night watchman and Martin Freeman in a more pivotal role is also an asset. But the stories are also quite unsatisfying in themselves, since none of them reaches a conclusion, cutting off just pre-climax, and there's no sense that these are unsolvable mysteries either, being easy to put down as the fevered imaginings of individuals. It takes a closing chapter to tie it all together and while this starts off in decidedly wobbly fashion, there is dramatic closure at the end. It's not to be listed among the heights of the genre, since it could really have done with a tighter edit, but it's worth lauding nevertheless for its mood and ambition.

6/10

Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009)

Wes Anderson converts Roald Dahl's children's novel into a different kind of beast where Dahl's dark undertones are replaced with a breezier, if still sardonic, air that the director just can't help injecting into all of his cabinet of curios. George Clooney is a great choice to voice the titular anthropomorphic fox, his deadpan delivery adding a layer to the stop-motion character as he comes up with scheme after scheme to fight the evil human farmers who seek to wipe his family out and the rest of the voice cast, from the regular Anderson cadre to the likes of Michael Gambon and Meryl Streep, help flesh out the host of animals too. It's a tad too whimsical to really engage the emotions - a charge often levelled against Anderson - but the wit and invention are impeccable and the puppet-driven animation is the real star, utterly eclipsing any of its digitally-generated competitors with its craft and texture.

7/10

My Cousin Rachel (Roger Michell, 2017)

The second big-screen adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's mystery-romance novel, My Cousin Rachel is told from the perspective of Philip, an orphaned young man, now heir to the wealth of his deceased cousin, beset with doubts about the manner of his cousin's passing. The doubts are focused on his beguiling widow, the Rachel of the title, and Philip is soon inexorably smitten with her. The story then proceeds to play out pretty much to a gothic formula, and accordingly even the end doesn't come as much of a surprise, but the dialogue is sharp and the interplay between Sam Claflin as the naïf and Rachel Weisz as the possibly deceitful widow is a delicately poised dance.

6/10