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