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