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