Kätilö (Antti Jokinen, 2015)

It's 1944 in the very northernmost extremity of Finland on the coast of the Arctic Ocean and a young midwife struggles to bring new lives into the bleak world while the German army carries on systematically around her erasing the Russian populace in the lands they have conquered to the east of the border. Naturally, since this is a Finnish wartime film, she's as stoic as they come and the atmosphere is hopelessly grim. When she falls for a young half-Finnish SS officer, we might expect a glimmer of sunshine, but that is exactly what we get, deprecatingly, as a glint on a mirror that they play with in one scene.
The barren landscapes have to be counted as the star of Wildeye (lit. The Midwife, also known as Finland 1944) since they are imbued with more character than the cackling, rotten-toothed locals or identikit evil Nazis, and shot to impressive effect. The lead is a decent actress but is given little to project besides sullen resistance, the sporadic aerial bombardment scenes are technically ludicrous, and the romance is a sterile affair, much as the victims of the Germans are hardly fleshed out at all either. Add playing fast and loose with historical accuracy to all of this, while presenting it as gospel, and there isn't much of value left.

4/10

Downsizing (Alexander Payne, 2017)

Matt Damon decides to have himself shrunk to five inches in height to dramatically save on living expenses (and his carbon footprint, as the film pointedly keeps underlining). His wife chickens out of the process at the last minute, so he's left by himself in a city of other little people. So far, fine as the concept goes, and the natural way for this to proceed is as sci-fi comedy centring on the drawbacks of being tiny, with perhaps some touch of melancholia as the dream life turns out to be less than what was hoped for. Failing that, taking the route of the classic '50s B-movie The Incredible Shrinking Man, which plays with the miniature person conceit until logically and bleakly ending in existential oblivion.
But no, Payne wants to use the concept as a vehicle to deliver a message on ecological collapse and the impending extinction of the human race. Damon gets equipped as politically correctly as possible with a strident Vietnamese cleaner and amputee girlfriend, Christoph Waltz out-Schinkens all his previous performances (and that really takes some doing) as his face-pulling Serbian black marketeer mate and then they go to Norway to hear an impassioned speech by the scientist who invented the shrinking process and is taking the little people underground to continue the human race after the rest of it has been wiped out by some vaguely predicted combination of disasters.
The ingredients for something idiosyncratically interesting are all there at the outset - a director with a solid track record of quiet dramas with substance, such as The Descendants or Nebraska, a starting premise offering many avenues to go down and a capable cast. How it ends up as such a cringeworthy mess is quite a feat.

4/10

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019)

Tarantino could hardly be suspected of mellowing with age, as disproved by the cartoonishly ridiculous ultraviolence of The Hateful Eight on his last outing, but the slower pace here - almost stationary at times - and concomitant lack of real incident, until a brief spurt in the finale, lend support to the idea that he's perhaps starting to steer away from his trademark hyperactivity. Of course, it's saturated in pop culture references and each dialogue is still liberally peppered with fucks, but for once there isn't a single 'nigger' to accompany them. It's almost as if he was trying to avoid upsetting people.
This is rather critical if the film is to work as a love song to a Hollywood in the settled wake of the summer of love. It's LA in 1969 and Leonardo DiCaprio's TV Western actor is nursemaided through a crippling attack of self-doubt by Brad Pitt his resolute stunt double and friend. The friendship between the pair, even as they do little else but drive around the endless sun-drenched city streets, have banal conversations and get trashed, feels solid and real, and is a major driver of the film alongside the perpetual TV and radio barrage of Californian hippy pop, rock and grating period commercials, allowing us to sail through its many potential longueurs.
When the spectre of the Manson family, set to commit the notorious massacre in the house next door, raises it head, then so too does the inevitability that we will get a bloody Tarantino climax after all. But even that doesn't transpire quite the way you'd expect. It's a definite change of direction from the enfant terrible director, and for the most part a welcome one.

7/10 

The Laundromat (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

A precis of the Panama papers money-laundering and fraud scandal that came to light in 2016, The Laundromat comes armed with a galaxy of stars, led by Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas, and a declaration of intent to lay bare the nebulous mechanism of the global financial opacity facilitated by intentionally sloppy laws that allows tax evasion on a massive scale.
Streep plays a widow determined to get full compensation from the boating company involved following her husband's death, finding just layers of shell companies behind the insurance, while Oldman and Banderas play the real-life crook lawyers Mossack and Fonseca who were behind setting up thousands of shells with no questions asked regarding what they'd be used for, of course. The duo play their roles as if they were Vegas showmen, starting with a comically-toned global finance 101 about the elusive nature of money, and so we have a serious subject turned into entertainment right from the outset lest the subject prove too dry to hold the audience's attention.
Interspersed with this main thread, there are sub-stories which have a rather too tenuous connection to the theme, particularly the protracted episode where Nonso Anozie's philandering African millionaire gets his comeuppance from his family. It does serve as an eyeopener on the dire state of things in the scarcely regulated financial market, but really only for those who haven't ever been exposed at all to its realities. And the fact that it moves from shoehorning in laughs to an earnest final polemic about what lies ahead from Streep, now no longer in character, makes for an uneven experience altogether.

5/10

Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019)

In the vein of Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian and Arrival, Ad Astra represents another opportunity taken by the school of higher-brow Hollywood filmmakers to use the medium of hard sci-fi as a vehicle to explore human relationships, fears and hopes while knowing that the trappings of the genre will guarantee bums on seats for the space thrills. In many ways, they are all aspiring to match the impact of 2001 in both spheres and all fail in one way or another, though some do better than others. Ad Astra, which sees Brad Pitt as an astronaut struggling to come to terms with his repressed anger at the father who disappeared years before while on an obsessive quest to search for intelligent life, and is then detailed to find him, falls on the right side of the balance of striving for emotional content and gratuitous action. However, the key word here is 'striving' and this means that it's as stifled as Pitt until the last phases of his quest. Hence when he does finally reach the goal, it doesn't feel as if effort has really been made to take the viewer there with him. Sincere and ambitious, but ultimately liable to engender indifference.

6/10 

Spider-Man: Far From Home (Jon Watts, 2019)

In this round, teenage Spider-Man and his high-school chums go on the kind of whistle-stop tour so beloved of Americans who can tick off Paris, Venice, Prague and London after a day spent in each and assert that they have 'done' Europe. Bless. Anyway, since this is also ostensibly a superhero film, different varieties of giant elemental monster turn up at each location to wreak havoc, always fought off by a new hero dubbed Mysterio. And of course all is not what it first seems and Peter has to grab his suit again to hop around a lot.
If this summary sounds too churlish, it's hard to dish out praise on it apart from that young kids will probably love it, and there are more onerous way of passing two hours with a likable lead and some innocent humour. Let's just hope that with the next sequel they'll have added a bit more depth to the mix, though.   

5/10

Avant l'hiver (Philippe Claudel, 2013)

Before the Winter Chill stars those trusty warhorses of French drama, Daniel Auteuil and Kristin Scott Thomas, as a well-to-do couple (of course) whose marriage is stuck in neutral after years of drifting along. He's a truculent brain surgeon and she is a bored stay-at-home wife, and their fragile stability is rocked when he starts seeing a damaged young woman, a former patient of his.
The veteran leads are as solid as ever, but the whole set-up of an outwardly comfortable middle-class couple with repressed dissatisfaction, inevitably heading towards affairs, is just too much of a trope of genteel French cinema to engage the emotions deeply, unless something more raw is added to the mix, and this is yet another piece which is just too bloodless to be able to do that.

5/10

X-Men: Dark Phoenix (Simon Kinberg, 2019)

Ironically for something that promises an event in the X-Men universe of such monumental, shattering import, what we get here is the franchise effectively expiring not with a bang but with a whimper. Doubtless, considering the pig's ear that X-Men: The Last Stand was generally held to have made of the story of Jean Grey becoming nearly omnipotent and murderous at the same time, the studio execs probably thought there would be sufficient good will for yet another reboot. Should have made a better film than what you're rebooting then, shouldn't you?  It's not that the action or performances let it down so much, although when Jean gets into full apeshit mode, the pyrotechnics and targets for her mayhem are rather underwhelming, and Sophie Turner has little to do in the role apart from look stern lest she look just wet. It's just that it's so illogical, even for the genre (just to provide an example right at the start, some people seem to be able to breathe in space and others die instantly, with nary an explanation for the difference) and above all pointless. There's never any real sense of menace and most of the numerous characters crammed in serve as little more than scenery. Hugh Jackman was so right to sign out with the superlative Logan: this is a cash cow which yields less and less.

4/10

360 (Fernando Meirelles, 2011)

Meirelles really made his mark on the international stage with 2002's City of God, which managed the juggling act of being both politically excoriating and riveting as a thriller at the same time without compromising either element. Since then, however, it has not been plain sailing and 360 illustrates quite succinctly what happens when a director gets too much adulation: a host of stars from Law to Hopkins come in to prop up a story that doesn't quite deserve it.
Modishly, we're in globe-trotting  territory from the outset, with the action jumping between disparate characters and cities, whose paths cross from time to time but who are all related by one theme: awkward relationships. So, there's the pragmatic Slovakian prostitute, the businessman with the faltering marriage, a dentist infatuated with his assistant, a father refusing to accept the disappearance of his daughter decades earlier and a sex offender trying hard to stay on the straight and narrow after being released from prison. All of these vignettes promise, and occasional also deliver, something of substance. But a lot of what is produced by the characters' interactions is smothered in platitudes and it's perhaps quite indicative of the grasp of a director, now distanced from his roots, on what really matters or what happens in the real world that so much of it takes place in the vacuum of airports and hotels.

5/10