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