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