Vesničko má středisková (Jiří Menzel, 1985)

Rather optimistically nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, with its parochialism, lack of histrionics and tiny budget already disqualifying it from any consideration, My Sweet Little Village is stamped through like a stick of rock with Menzel's trademark brand of gentle social critique. As so often with his work, very little happens at all: two workmen, one a simpleton and the other his put-upon senior partner, potter about their village, while a woman has an affair with the local vet and an accident-prone doctor does his rounds, sending hypochondriacs packing left, right and centre. Apart from that, the only real plot is the attempt by a big-city politician to fob the simpleton off with a flat in Prague so he can get his hands on the former's large inherited house in the village, and some careful ribbing of the authorities accompanying this - communism still had a few years left to run, after all. It's all pleasant enough, but unlikely to leave much of a deeper impression, although you would probably have to have been a Czech living at the time to get everything out of it.

5/10

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)

After establishing himself solidly as a screenwriter with a plethora of wilfully leftfield but often captivating ideas, from Being John Malkovich through to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Charlie Kaufman struck out on his own as a director with Synecdoche: New York and Anomalisa, and it immediately became apparent that just being a font of creativity is not enough to make a fully-realised film. This one just confirms that judgement.

It starts with a couple driving through a blizzard to his parents' farm, with her constantly musing in voice-over about the uneasiness she feels about the future of their relationship, and when they do exchange dialogue, it only serves to trouble the waters further. This raises the alarming fear that the rest of the film will continue along the same trajectory of melancholic, teenage navel-gazing, so it comes as a welcome relief when they do get to the farm to be met by his parents, played by the ever-excellent David Thewlis and Toni Collette, who are both bags of quirks: his, suggestive goading and hers, barely-contained hysteria. When reality suddenly goes totally off-kilter, with the parents ageing and de-ageing from one moment to the next, it starts to feel like we may be headed into the dark waters of Get Out, and this is a promising turn. But Kaufman clearly does not know when he's on to a good thing, and so soon they leave, with Thewlis and Collette criminally discarded, and we're back to the couple in the car again, for the remaining one and a half hours of the film's running time, any sense of purpose dissipating faster than the contents of their petrol tank. This means random stops just to throw in freakish characters or interludes, scattered through the couple going through a random list of artistic/popular culture/philosophical conversation topics and assumed personae, to no coherent end at all.

Jessie Buckley and Jess Plemons, playing the couple, do make a Herculean effort to demonstrate the versatility that this demands of them, but it's like applauding skilled builders doing their best to follow a blueprint for a house of sand. There is no design, just a collage of clippings from the director's scrapbook, in the pseud hope that something meaningful about the human condition will miraculously be produced just through bunging them all together. It makes the approach of even Michel Gondry, who directed his script on Eternal Sunshine, look measured and focused, and on this evidence, it's Kaufman who really should be thinking of ending things.

4/10

A Christmas Gift from Bob (Charles Martin Smith, 2020)

The first instalment, A Street Cat Named Bob, was a slight but sweet autobiographical piece about former homeless heroin addict James Bowen's journey to salvation through his friendship with a stray cat. Funnily, this is just the same, and packages up the same material while inserting numerous improbabilities willy-nilly, such as the silly notion that animal protection services would not only turn out to be persecuting demons, trying to separate him from his pet, but even that this would make national news in the form of a manhunt after man and feline. Any feeling of realism dissipates very quickly, and you keep on expecting Sacha Baron Cohen to turn up as the antagonist. Optimistically trying to sell it as a Christmas movie is so transparently desperate as to not require any comment.

4/10

Glass (M. Night Shyamalan, 2019)

After the runaway success of superheroes-for-adults film Unbreakable 20 years ago and the respectable Split in 2016, it was only to be expected that Shyamalan would return to the key characters of the two previous instalments, bunging them all into one to bounce off each other. This has mixed results: Bruce Willis, as the indestructible David Dunn, has little to do except be stoic and Samuel L. Jackson as the comic-fixated criminal mastermind with brittle bones is apparently catatonic for a large part of the opening, and so it's left to James McAvoy as the man with 24 personalities overrun by a 25th, a physical manifestation of pure animal aggression known only as 'The Beast', to keeps things chugging along much as in Split, wowing us with his ability to morph from one persona and accent to another at the drop of a hat. The middle part, where all three are imprisoned and confronted by a daft psychiatrist trying to convince them that they're all just delusional and not superhuman at all, is diverting, but leaves the plot with nowhere to go except the inevitable stand-off between the three. It's by no means as bad as most critics would have you believe, with McAvoy again quite mesmerising every time he's on screen, but rather wastes most of its other potential assets and, with that, yet more residual goodwill towards Shyamalan.

5/10

Mortal Engines (Christian Rivers, 2018)

Based on the first part of Philip Reeve's successful series of young-adult sci-fi novels, Mortal Engines certainly can't be accused of lacking a high concept: it's another post-apocalyptic world, yes, but here the imagination behind it has gone into mental overdrive. Some time after a cataclysmic global war, mankind has regressed on one level to a steampunk level of technology where 21st-century artefacts such as toasters are a source of wonder, and on another developed a ridiculous civilisation where big cities roam the wastes on caterpillar tracks, hunting down smaller settlements for scarce resources. This gives rise to a quite stunning opening to the film, where the alpha predator city of London, run on severely socially-stratified lines, pursues a village.

The film continues to benefit from its awe-inspiring visuals and set design, with the city a baffling fusion of modern London, with St. Paul's Cathedral at its summit, and industrial machinery on a massive scale. But the plot itself runs out of steam, settling into a bog-standard young heroes (with Tom Sheehan as a second-rate stand-in for Eddie Redmayne in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them) trying to stop a nasty megalomaniac (Hugo Weaving, for whom this kind of role is bread and butter). It could have benefitted from a more adult approach to the consequences of its violence and political implications, but also getting very derivative of anything else in the fantasy and sci-fi genres, until a finale which is a straight rip-off of Star Wars: A New Hope does not help. It flopped in a big way, and as a consequence the follow-up parts may never see the light of day. Shame.

4/10       

La vita davanti a sé (Edoardo Ponti, 2020)

Who'd have thunk that Sophia Loren would suddenly turn up, 11 years after her last feature appearance, leading a Netflix drama about a former prostitute every bit as wizened as she is by now? Or that, despite the warning bells that start ringing right after a one-line precis, i.e. she reluctantly takes in an orphaned 12-year-old Senegalese urchin, the end result isn't sentimental claptrap?

The key in The Life Ahead lies in the performances, and the director's willingness to use them to their best advantage: Loren is every bit as majestic and fiery in old age as she ever was, and Ibrahima Gueye, the boy, is a revelation. He starts out a little shit, railing out against all and sundry, and is still dealing drugs happily and being truculent well into the story, not magically transforming into some angel. It's a hard job for any novice actor to perform, but Gueye retains our sympathy without having to cute down unrealistically. Which means that, against so much of the more cloying tendencies of Italian cinema, what you get is fully-rounded characters who somehow still connect, and you believe it when they do.

7/10

 

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse ( Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman, 2018)

With the appeal of Spider-Man to kids above and beyond that of almost all other superheroes, and the way the comics have both cultivated and exploited this, with multiple versions of the character, it was inevitable that they would make it into cinematic form. It also figures that computer game-style animation is the only way to go about it, since having infant anime and comedy pig Spider-People amongst the line-up would hardly have worked within the confines of the real universe. That said, it turns out to be surprisingly good fun at times, centring on the teenage Miles Morales version as a way of still sneaking in the eternal bane of the comic-book film, the origin story, but then zipping along with some inventive visuals until caving into the all-out whizzbang hypercolour action of the final fight with the Kingpin, anguished villain of the week, and wrapping up with the usual homilies. Strictly for kids, of course, but not the most painful thing an adult will ever have to sit through either.

6/10

Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

Well, the classics of horror are there to be mined for remakes, aren't they, so we should be thankful after 2006's Nicolas Cage atrocity (which must surely be a tautology of the highest order by now) that this settles for keeping the commune of pagan nutcases but changing enough to stand in its own two feet. Yes, it's still The Wicker Man, and transposing it to Northern Sweden (played by Hungary) is a cosmetic alteration, but making the lead's personal problem the fact that she's emotionally trampled over by her blank boyfriend, rather than Edward Woodward's own self-crippling religion in the corresponding character, is quite effective too in providing some depth.

Of course having young Americans hopelessly out of their depth in Old Yurp in the context of a horror film lowers expectations from the outset, but this has no aspirations to compete Hostel in the insane mutilations stakes. Rather, there's a slow rise in tension and when the brutality does come, it's in short, operatic shocks, and followed immediately by a return to sunshone and downplaying which creates the impression in our minds almost as much as the characters' that maybe what we just saw was just a bad dream. Add to that cinematography which is quite astonishingly beautiful at times, constantly drawing you in beguilingly, and the result is something of a curate's egg.

7/10

Papadopoulos & Sons (Marcus Markou, 2012)

The overreaching ambition of food industry magnate Harry Papadopoulos leads him to take out a massive loan on a property development just before the bank granting it collapses and the end result is that when his estranged livewire brother turns up to propose reopening the chippy that they ran together decades back, he's forced to accede to the idea. The shock adjustment to slumming it proves easier for his kids, as he resists what he sees as abject failure in returning to where he started from. But then this is a feelgood comedy, where we know that any seed of residual kindness in the protagonist is destined to grow eventually. And so it proves.

Made in Morden on a micro-budget, Papadopoulos & Sons is hardly cinema breaking out into fresh pastures, with its basic East is East set-up, but fares well on a combination of good performances, particularly Stephen Dillane as the beleaguered, resigned and finally reborn Harry, crisp dialogue and an obvious love for its characters.

6/10

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Jason Woliner, 2020)

14 years down the line, Sacha Baron Cohen obviously just couldn't resist returning to his most successful creation and so we have the hapless Kazakh journalist sent off again to act the buffoon in America's backwaters in an attempt to draw out the prejudices that his soft targets have, bubbling only just under the surface. Only this time it's all a tad too familiar (just as Baron Cohen is forced to admit at the outset, with Borat being recognised everywhere he goes) and there's a lingering feeling with nearly every scene that it's stage-managed, which rather defeats the satirical purpose. The backing storyline of having Borat accompanied by his daughter whom he now intends to marry off to some rich old politician ("like Melania" in her dreams) does provide some choice moments as he keeps consulting a manual of husbandry of women to keep her in line, and Maria Bakalova proves an able comic foil to him in the role. But this invariably draws the focus away from where it should be, and the strongest suit of the first film, namely ripping the piss mercilessly out of toxic bigots.
Of course there are still some genuine chuckles, but the teeth are lacking too much of the time, and the topical anti-Trump reelection message, while of course welcome, is nothing anyone else couldn't do. Perhaps Baron Cohen has just got tired of getting of torrents of death threats and litigations.

5/10

El hoyo (Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, 2019)

To describe The Platform as a dystopian prison film is at once reductionist and misleading. It's so much more than that. The premise is that prisoners exist two per cell in a stack of an unknown number of cells, depending each day on a platform of food that passes from the ceiling to the floor of their cell for sustenance, with the catch that they can only cram in the butchered scraps what the occupiers of the floors above haven't managed to eat yet, and each month they find themselves transferred in drugged sleep to another, randomly-assigned level. The concept is brutalising by its very nature: if they find themselves on level 100 rather than level 10, starvation is more than likely, and desperation will lead to any means necessary to survive, as far as cannibalism. 
Having thus utterly grossed out the audience, and in a novel manner too, many directors could consider their work done. Not so Gaztelu-Urrutia, for this is a deeply serious film, making an incendiary point not just about social stratification, which is obvious, but the fallacy of trickle-down economics and the ridiculous inadequacy of religion as a comfort to boot. You won't have seen anything like it before, and its damning message haunts the mind long after the gore has faded.

8/10

 

Lilting (Hong Khaou, 2014)

A young man tries to reach out to the mother of his recently-deceased boyfriend. He's English and she's Chinese, and they have no shared language, so he brings in a British Chinese woman to interpret between them and also, as an olive branch, between her and a man who she has a sexual relationship with in the care home she's cooped up in.

Ben Whishaw has perhaps been slightly stuck with being cast repeatedly as emotionally awkward characters, and Cheng Pei-pei as the mother presnts a truculent and nonconciliatory front at first, railing against all she does not understand about either her son's death, the society she's still an outsider in and Whishaw's motives for helping, but the film delicately develops a quiet charm nevertheless as they gradually reach some of kind of understanding.

6/10
 

Mission: Impossible - Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie, 2018)

Tom Cruise and his assistants-cum-sounding boards are back again and so is the same storyline, give or take, as in 2015's Rogue Nation. Nominally, this means trying to find some plutonium to be used in a fiendish plot to build bombs, but also numerous global locations for shoot-ups and manic chases. Kashmir (played by New Zealand) for the finale might be a slight, modish divergence, but apart from that it's business as usual with Berlin, Paris (with the Eiffel Tower never out of sight, of course) and London. It's a bit more po-faced than before, with even Simon Pegg not allowed much rein as the comic relief, as if not only the characters but the ageing cast were caught in a race against time, and the plucky Cruise requires a greater and greater suspension of disbelief on our part as he sprints non-stop from shot to shot, only pausing to deliver his lines as if he were talking through a sock.

But as disposable thrills go, you can acknowledge why the franchise is so popular. The chases and other action sequences are even more breathtaking than before, shot with panache and edited with maximum efficiency, the skydiving scene over Paris and the subsequent street pursuits in the city itself in particular. That's really what these films are for, after all, and Fallout accordingly delivers them in spades.

6/10

Upgrade (Leigh Whannell, 2018)

Body horror comes as no surprise from director Whannell, as he wrote the first three Saw films. But there is more to this than just exploitation, and it's a curious mix of sci-fi, revenge drama and doom-mongering about the perils of AI that just about gels. Basically, a couple's self-driving car crashes, and then men turn up to kill her and leave him quadriplegic. Then, when a reclusive tech company head offers to restore his mobility by implanting a revolutionary chip in his spine, he grabs at the chance and of course uses it to seek out those responsible for his wife's death. This turns very nasty quite soon as the chip dishes out horrendous violence, operating his body with unstoppable killing machine efficiency, while calmly talking to him in his head, offering options for each step like an interactive story.

It wears its numerous influences brazenly on its sleeve (The Terminator, The Matrix, Existenz, Ex Machina etc.) and doesn't really end up saying anything new about the inadvisability of tampering with what the good Lord gave you, but it thunders along enjoyably and hits its finale with an efficiency many of its bigger-budget equivalents singularly fail to do.

6/10

Venom (Ruben Fleischer, 2019)

Marvel seem to have started scrabbling around somewhat for which franchise to invest in next, none more so than here with a alien symbiote taking over and making an anti-hero out of Tom Hardy. The character first appeared in the ill-fated Spider-Man 3 and perhaps that, for all of Hardy's charisma, should have served as a bad omen for this effort. By the time the monster parasitically occuping his body starts talking to him like an American gangster, presumably for comic effect, things have already sailed well up the Swanee, with an off-the-shelf millionaire scientist villain bent on exploiting the alien, and all the subsequent frenzied overspend on FX can't retrieve the situation. Not that the audience paid much heed, since it ended up as the sixth-most profitable film of 2018 worldwide and had a sequel out in 2021.

4/10

The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)

Does great cinema have a duty to edify as well as inspire awe? If so, The Lighthouse fails as such, since it is essentially a study in despair and degeneration. However, on all other counts it's a triumph.

It's 1890 and two men arrive at a remote lighthouse on a tiny North Atlantic island to man it for a month. One is a grizzled veteran (Willem Dafoe) and the other (Robert Pattinson) is to serve as his apprentice. This soon proves to mean that the former puts the latter through one arduous chore after another, while denying him access to the light itself. The quality of their relationship takes on the pattern of a degrading sine wave, as spells of warming are followed by ever more aggressive confrontations. At first, it feels at moments like Steptoe and Son seen through an Edgar Allan Poe Gothic horror filter, but the reassurance such a comparison might provide fades away under a bombardment of complex and profoundly disturbing symbols and allusions.

It leaps without resolution from one unsettling scene to another in the manner of The Shining, cuts suddenly into nightmarishly expressionistically-shot close-ups at moments of heightened tension and becomes increasingly hallucinatory, with Pattinson seeing a live mermaid after finding a figurine of one in his bed, masturbating furiously over the image. Semen, the merciless sea, oil, undrinkable drinking water, alcohol and finally blood: liquids dominate the symbolism throughout, akin to the mediaeval humours. Visual symbols, such as the obvious phallicism of the lighthouse, are presented in an insistent, explicit fashion, akin to what you might find in the films of Béla Tarr, through a Hitchcock filter. And as the dynamic between the two characters starts to veer from alcoholic set-tos in the fashion of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (with accompanying homoerotic undertones) through Godot-esque deconstructed dialogue to something more terminal, Dafoe takes on a persona that is closer and closer to that of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, with a glint in his eye, first spinning tales of disaster at sea and then prophesying doom. We know doom cannot be averted, as in truth we've known from the start, but when it comes, its manner is still startling, Greek myth merging with 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The actors suffer more for their art before our eyes than can be faked in any way, therefore adding to the impact, and when this is married to artful editing and a true understanding of the purpose of shooting in black and white as opposed to just using it to invoke period, for example, the resulting brew is a heady one. 

Only afterwards did I find out that it did actually take an unfinished Edgar Allan Poe story as its starting point, which makes perfect sense and serves neatly to inform the viewer in advance too of what to expect. Just not the sheer, excoriating impact of what follows.

8/10

A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018)

A Quiet Place is savvy enough to know that exposition is largely no longer demanded or even desired as it plunges straight into a post-apocalyptic survival scenario with a family looting an abandoned supermarket. The premise is also establshed without undue waffle, which is appropriate as it's immediately apparent that waffle is the killer, with the family having to maintain silence at all times lest they be pounced on. Not by the customary zombies, as it turns out, but some kind of extra-terrestrial monsters that instantly zero in on any sound.

Nothing too revelatory so far here, but the ace up the film's sleeve isn't the aliens - of an unlikely origin of which we are asked to ask no questions, and which are wholly generic by visual design - or the set-up as such. No, it's the killer idea that there is and there can be virtually no dialogue, so the cast are forced to use sign language instead, with all the effects that this has on their interaction, and the viewer soon becomes aware of the potential sound made by every single mundane activity, and this idea is pursued with rigour. Noise, rather than the monsters, is itself something to fear and this is a genius conceit. I found myself acutely conscious for minutes after it finished of every sound I made, and any such transformative effect that a film achieves is to be applauded. Naturally enough, a sequel is imminent, albeit unnecessary, since it can't possibly come up with a better premise. 

7/10

Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach, 2019)

It's impossible for any film about the acrimonious divorce of a New York couple and the accompanying custody battle over their young son to escape comparisons with Kramer vs. Kramer, and Marriage Story doesn't try too hard to do so. The differences are superficial: here, they both work together in theatre, and it's her that takes off with the son, to L.A. With the characters firmly entrenched in a middle-class arts world that is so obviously the extent of what the director will be comfortable with depicting and there being no risk of them suffering real penury, navel-gazing would be an easy accusation, but there is a wide range of tonality too from scene to scene, and ultimately the film stands squarely on the excellent performances of Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, with solid support from Laura Dern and Ray Liotta as their toxic rival lawyers. All in all, it's quite moving, while at the same time highlighting once more what a twisted, parasitic business the American legal system is.

7/10

Zimna wojna (Pawl Pawlikowski, 2018)

Cold War tells the tempestuous love story between a musical director and a young folk singer in Poland, starting shortly after the war.He aspires to make it out of the country before the country's freedoms are completely curtailed under the communist yoke and the Iron Curtain fully becomes a reality. Her conviction is less certain. He duly escapes to France to play jazz piano in a nightclub and they meet again some years later, resuming their relationship, which is doomed due to her inability to settle down in a foreign land.
The couple are forced to make many compromises along the way and their arguments become more and more vitriolic, but in the end they are fated to be together. This could be problematic in terms of maintaning our engagement were it not for the characters being so fully rounded, a mix of self-interest, passion and stridency. The stark black and white photography is captivating, the numerous musical pieces linger in the memory and the jumps in the story are executed with maximum economy. It's quite a singular work and it's easy to see why Pawlikowski was considered worthy of Best Director award at Cannes for it.

7/10

Gisaengchung (Bong Joon-ho, 2019)

An almost wholly unemployed family in Seoul, so firmly on the bottom rung of society that they cannot afford to live properly above street level, come up with a scheme to elevate their fortune when the opportunity for the son to be employed as an English teacher to the daughter of a rich family presents itself. They then engineer getting rid of the family's household staff by ingeniously foul means, stepping into their jobs. Life is momentarily sweet, but the happiness is fragile.
What distinguishes Parasite from a host of other twist-filled black comedies revolving around false identities is ultimately its social aspect: while the farcical elements where they repeatedly almost get caught are a hoot, what really fuels the film is its ire at the injustice of a system in which the only way to stay above water is to accept the status quo hook, line and sinker, and acquiesce to being seen as nothing but a leech. Its Palme d'Or at Cannes was well deserved for managing this juggling act, and that's not always the case.

8/10

Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (Cathy Yan, 2020)

It was only logical that Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn character should be the only one to escape the general debacle that was Suicide Squad with a sequel in her own name, given that her turn was the one incontrovertibly positive element in the noisy mess. Not that this is any less messy, as Quinn sets out on her own against Ewan McGregor's preening psycho crime lord, accruing a band of female companions along the way. Of course, as usual we're asked to subscribe to the daft, if not downright insidious, notion that skinny women without guns can acrobatically twat droves of armed, muscled thugs, with nary a scratch to show for it, but this has become such an established trope that it's only when all the women present do it that it strikes you anew.
Naturally, the day-glo film is wholly Robbie's: motor-mouthed, ultra-girly and ultra-gurning, almost as much an irritation to us as she is to the baddies, but nevertheless thoroughly watchable as she wisecracks and pirouettes her way out of bother in a fourth wall-straining manner that is so obviously DC wanting to have its share of the Deadpool cake that it's hardly worth mentioning. It's all utterly disposable, of course, but there are some real moments of giddy fun nevertheless.

5/10

The Day Shall Come (Chris Morris, 2019)

The less-than-prolific genius provocateur Morris returns to helm a film six years after Four Lions, and it's hard to see what he's been doing since, apart from continuing to rest on the laurels of his imperious reign of TV satire in the '90s. The protagonists may now be poor would-be black revolutionaries in Miami, but they're essentially just the same hapless bunch of clowns as the wannabe terrorists of the last film. The changes in the set-up, so that the FBI are constantly trying to come up with ways to incriminate the four-man 'army' in order to keep their anti-terror success rates up, and that the crackpot crew refuse to take the path of violence again and again, to the frustration of the FBI, shift the emphasis enough so the target isn't really the idealistic protagonists but the amoral machinations of the US Government, but it's far too unfocused and broad to work. There is still an acute ear for absurd turns of phrase, but one would expect so much more from Morris. He needs to rediscover his precision targeting quickly, because we need him badly.

5/10

The Old Guard (Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2020)

For the moment, still basking in the afterglow of 2017's astonishingly violent Atomic Blonde, Charlize Theron is the action queen of Hollywood, although it may be hard for her at 44 to keep it up too much longer: it's still unlikely that they'll apply the same rules to a hardass woman than to, say, Liam Neeson.
Anyway, she's the leader of a bunch of immortal soldiers who Wolverine their way out of peril again and again until things get seriously hairy with an unscrupulous millionaire in pharmaceuticals after their secret and prepared to do anything to get it. Cue a lot of balletic gunplay, bar a few brief pauses where they mull over the burden of living forever while friends and family grow old and die (yes, the Highlander thing). Its sheer freight-train momentum keeps you watching, but there's nothing new here for superpowered genre buffs.

5/10

Game Night (John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein, 2018)

A group of friends meet every week to play increasingly competitive games, and the stakes are upped when intruders burst into one of their sessions and seemingly kidnap one of them. The rest assume that this is just the host's attempt to outdo them and treat everything they find out as yet another clue left for them to follow, until things go south when, predictably, this turns out not to be the case.
It's strong on witty dialogue and character interplay among a likable cast (Jesse Plemons as the cop neighbour who's excluded from the games on the grounds of being too straight and stolid puts in the stand-out performance), but all the twists thrown in can't quite make up for a lack of originality, being essentially a daft version of David Fincher's The Game. It's diverting enough, but no more than an actual competitive game night would be.

5/10

Still Life (Uberto Pasolini, 2013)

John May, a solitary man who works quietly and conscientiously in a council office, tasked with locating the next of kin of the departed, is confronted with sudden redundancy due to budget cuts, but still feels duty-bound to complete one last case. This takes him on a search from one end of the country to the other, as he pieces together the fractured life and death of an alcoholic who died alone.
As the title suggests, the visual style of the film is a collage of long, carefully-framed static shots which mirror May's almost OCD-like obsession with creating order out of chaos, including leaving no previous case forgotten, just as the title also alludes to the static nature of his existence. The director may be Italian, but the ambience is very much that of a small, down-at-heel and neglected England, with a social concern echoing that of  Loach but without Loach's overt fury at the callousness of the powers that be. Its very quietness and slowness is a virtue: it draws the viewer in hypnotically, and Eddie Marsan is immaculate as May, with his small, sad expressive eyes and unassuming demeanour. The end, after there is a glimmer of light for him at last, comes with a jolt that left me reeling.

7/10

   

Finding Your Feet (Richard Loncraine, 2017)

You only have to take the stalwart luvvie cast list (Imrie, Staunton, Spall, Sessions, Lumley) together with the setting (Notting Hill or thereabouts) to know that the end result of feeding these into a film autogenerator will only be a feelgood product for middle-aged, middle-class people, most likely with bittersweet overtones and a life-affirming message. And so it proves. The plot, in which prim Imelda Staunton is cheated on by her husband and goes to live with her free-spirited sister, gradually loosening up in the process, is a strictly join-the-dots affair. Of course Imrie, as her sister, cares not a jot for social decorum. Of course Spall as her new love interest appears rough at first and then is revealed to be deep. And of course she'll leave her old life in the end. Still, while both audience and cast remain securely within their comfort zone throughout, it's like a good Sunday roast: comforting fare without any nasty surprises.

5/10

Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee, 2020)

Having covered the single subject of racial conflict in America in BlacKkKlansman, Lee moves on to armed conflict between the US and other countries, albeit also still through the filter of institutionalised racism against black people with four Vietnam War veterans returning to the country to look for the remains of a comrade of theirs, as well as hidden gold bullion. But there is another filter too: the fog of memory, which colours the view that each one has of the past, and also how that past is shown to us.
Overall, the film straddles the buddy adventure genre and a polemic on the theme of American historical ethnic persecution with overt comparisons made between the race riots and police brutality back in the States, through newsreel footage, and the simultaneous ideological crusade that the soldiers are forced on in Vietnam, shown in flashback. The balancing act is an uneasy one, and that impacts the message adversely. It doesn't help that Lee cannot escape the one constant of American war films: the action is stylised like a shoot 'em up and one dead American, be they black or white, is meant to be more tragic than dozens of anonymous gooks shredded by bullets in Ramboesque fashion. The traumatised Viet vet trope is also overplayed: we've seen it too many times before for it to have much impact, however true it may be, and not all that convicing going on 50 years after the event either. Delroy Lindo, as the one of the group who hasn't been able to let the past go at all, turns in a bravura performance of instability, but that also overshadows the contribution of the other characters. Then another stock theme, that of gold against the soul, is overlaid and accordingly at times the film starts to remind you of those C-grade Spaghetti Westerns where the protagonists just rant incessantly about 'the gold, the gold'. And then when one of the band expires abruptly after stepping on a landmine, it's shot in such Grand Guignol fashion that the first though that came to my mind was Mr. Creosote exploding in The Meaning of Life, which surely was not the intention, unless Lee really is making a clever allusion to the perils of greed.
The director's explicit contribution to the Black Lives Matter movement, Da 5 Bloods does have many strengths too: the interplay between the old-timers is vibrant and the intermittent use of the Viet Cong radio propaganda broadcasts back in the day by Hanoi Hannah, imploring black GIs to give up doing The Man's dirty work, has unsettling parallels with Samuel L. Jackson's soothing radio DJ throughout Do the Right Thing. But ultimately it's a lack of focus in Lee's fusion of elegiac drama, bloody action and political diatribe that lets down the whole. And, caught between a military establishment who sent them to die and the local populace for whom the soldiers are just another bunch of imperialist invaders, the protagonists are the ultimate victims and playing the victim card over and over again just can't be the way forward.

6/10

Rückenwind von vorn (Philipp Eichholtz, 2018)

A young schoolteacher in Berlin has an immature boyfriend who wants them to have a child regardless of her career and dreams of travel and her sole relative is her grandmother, who is ailing. This forces a number of big decisions to be made, so she goes out and gets utterly blotto.
It's surprising to find out that Away You Go was made by a director in his mid-thirties with several features under his belt since the characters here are all feckless, and yet apparently we're to see them as just free spirits. Likewise, there is the jittery cutting in sudden leaps from one scene to another once the director feels that he's reached another marker in his join-the-dots plot diagram and therefore considers that adding any more characterisation or depth is quite unnecessary and just such a drag. Accordingly, in only 80 minutes, it manages to fit in half a dozen turns which can only not be barmy to a flittering adolescent. It's not a horrible film per se, just so avoidably inept.

4/10

Lazzaro Felice (Alice Rohrwacher, 2018)

Lazzaro, a simple peasant lad, lives in a sequestered village of tobacco farmers somewhere in the hill country of central Italy, put upon by the others because of his unprotesting demeanour but nevertheless ceaselessly happy with his lot. The time period is at first difficult to determine, with the villagers' quality of life seemingly stuck in the 18th century although, strangely, they have electricity too, albeit in the form of a few lightbulbs. Then it gradually becomes apparent, through regular visits by their hectoring overseer, that they are in fact stuck, not only in indentured servitude to the owner of the estate, but within the confines of the village too, quite unaware of the world outside. The estate owner's otherwise indolent son befriends Lazzaro and rails against his mother's explotation of the serfs, pretending to have been kidnapped, but this comes to nothing and then circumstances shatter the dam placed between the villagers and the modern world anyway. From then on, nothing is the same again.
Happy as Lazzaro is a decidely odd concoction, unsteadily straddling the tightrope between magical and social realism. This sometimes serves to have one aspect reinforce the other, but they can also equally well get in each other's way as the limits of the fantastical elements are left undefined, or the clearly impassioned social critique is undermined by the underlying sense of unreality, forced whimsy or some rather heavy-handed Catholic allegorical allusions around the theme of the long-suffering martyr. It manages to retain interest through being so singular and leftfield a blend, but the same blend is ultimately its failing, as no clear message gets through the resulting interference.

6/10

Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)

A star-studded whodunnit squarely of the Agatha Christie school, Knives Out proves to be a resoundingly enjoyable, riotous ride. Christopher Plummer, playing best-selling crime novelist Harlan Thrombey, is found dead in his house on the night of his 85th birthday party, attended by all of his back-biting family, and master private detective Daniel Craig (gamely essaying a Southern gentleman accent to no small comic effect) arrives to investigate. It soon transpires that all of the family members have something to hide and a motive of some kind for doing away with the head of the family, who was about to cut them off from his considerable fortune. The only apparently innocent member of the household, Thrombey's South American nurse, duly becomes the detective's confidante, even as it is revealed in gradual increments that things (of course) are not quite as clear cut as they may first appear.
The house, full of creepy curios, is obviously a direct nod to that of the crime novelist played by Laurence Olivier in Sleuth, and the casually elitist and self-centred bulk of the characters and the Poirotesque detective, with his odd little mannerisms and sayings, are all straight out of Christie. So far, so familiar. However, what Johnson has managed to add to the basic formula is a sprinkling of black humour, some very witty dialogue (Christie was never too concerned with wit) and a sociopolitical subtext that, likewise, Christie couldn't really give a fig about, as it becomes clear how much the fact that the nurse is an immigrant really means to the condescending family. All the players involved obviously enjoy themselves hugely, and it's nice to see what Johnson, an able director with a deftness of touch, can do when not constrained by having to satisfy hordes of disparate fans, as was the case with his last work, The Last Jedi.

7/10

Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017)

As a director, Anderson could not be called much more profilic than his leading man here, Daniel Day-Lewis, at least over the last twenty years of the actor's career. But normally it matters little when each film with them behind is an event to be savoured. So it's frustrating that this is not quite a brilliant swan song for Day-Lewis. There's nothing wrong with his performance as a fashion designer in 1950s London, as studied and driven as ever, or that of the support either, with Lesley Manville as his acerbic sister and Vicky Krieps as his young muse, who becomes increasingly obsessed with holding onto the waspish and egocentric artist. But the Hitchcockian/Gothically-tinged tone feels uncertain and when it reaches its denouement, it has already played all its cards. I can understand the ambition here, and it is full of sumptuous detail, but I'm just not quite convinced that it knows what point it wants to make.

6/10

Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

It's debatable how much this should be labelled, despite having the DC universe as its backdrop and one of the said universe's best-known characters as its subject, as a comic-book screen incarnation. Once you have chosen Joaquin Phoenix as the psychotic titular character, we're automatically not going to be in the primary-colour world of superheroics any more, and it proceeds accordingly. Aside from nods late on to the Batman origin story, which are actually quite unnecessary and seem to be there just as concessions to fans so that they can't go away bleating that the film wasn't about their Joker, this is essentially a dark depiction of a descent into mental disintegration, containing very little in the way of the standard action sequences.
Phoenix, an actor whose real mental state can generally only be guessed at, with his history of throwing up smoke screens, naturally goes full method with drastic weight loss as bullied, needy wannabe stand-up comedian Arthur Fleck, who has severe mental issues and lives with his ill mother, at the receiving end of an already dangerously divided society. The seeds for the eventual unravelling of his mind are all painfully obviously there at the outset, and the film thus has to depend heavily on Phoenix to avoid being merely a story of a man turning into a murderous nutjob with a perverse world view.
But his portrayal carries the whole with aplomb, unsettlingly unbalanced yet utterly mesmerising, and, above all, not pandering to 'How to Act a Looney' conventions. It feels quite frighteningly real. And the inclusion of Robert De Niro as an anodyne talkshow host who Arthur hero-worships at first until the host ridicules him publicly, is also a nice touch, with its overt allusion to De Niro playing a similarly obsessively delusional fan in The King of Comedy. Let's just hope that sense prevails and the urge to automatically turn its uniqueness into another franchise is resisted for once.

7/10

The Bookshop (Isabel Coixet, 2017)

A widowed woman (Emily Mortimer) arrives in a small seaside town in 1959 and sets about opening a bookshop in a long-abandoned house, to the disapproval of the town's wealthiest woman, who immediately begins trying to chase out the new resident, underhandedly coercing the already suspicious, provincial locals against her. Her only real allies in defending her home and dream are a precocious young girl and a reclusive older widower, and the battle can only be a losing one as her vindictive opponent brings the brunt of the law to bear against her as well.
Mortimer is fine as the plucky lead, although, as is so often the case, Bill Nighy rather steals the show without raising a sweat as her widower friend. The execution is understated and sensitive in many scenes, but problem here, ultimately, is the Dickensianly caricaturish characterisation of the townspeople, either just plain simple, pompously officious or sneering, and an overall tendency to veer towards melodrama. Vicissitudes pile up on the beleaguered single woman until her situation starts to uncomfortably remind you of nothing so much as the sentimentalised plight of Little Nell in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop. Consequently, it doesn't work as a reflection of the constraints of a stifling era on independently-minded women, and surely that in part is what it was hoping to achieve.

5/10
 

Terminator: Dark Fate (Tim Miller, 2019)

What a happy get-out clause the Terminator franchise has in already being based on the concept of alterable pasts, thereby allowing this umpteenth addition to do away with a whole three films and a TV series to bring back the superannuated stars of the first two films almost three decades later and resume proceedings as if nothing else had been committed to soil the memory of the series openers, which stood head and shoulders above the dross that followed them. So that makes it doubly imperative that the continuation of Sarah Connor/Arnie adds to the storyline.
With depressing predictability, it singularly fails to do that or even seem interested in trying. It's not just lines that are recycled knowingly, but entire scenes upon scenes, and making the target for termination a young Mexican woman this time around is just window-dressing. The few moments where Arnie gets to do Data from Star Trek by explaining how he's striven to become more human in the years since are a brief respite from the otherwise tediously incessant mega-action, and I swear I've never seen so many visual FX credits for any film, or so little evidence in the finished product for their need.

4/10 

Code 8 (Jeff Chan, 2019)

Well, let's see what the punters like...superpowered mutants, check. Near-future authoritarian dystopias, check. Heists, check. That about does it. Do we need a premise beyond splicing all of this together? Hell, no.
It's Canada and individuals with 'powers' are being ostracised by the rest of society, à la X-Men, after having served their purpose in building up the economy to the point where they can now be replaced by machines. That'll be the somewhat heavy-handed political message dealt with, then. As for the actual story, a preternaturally powered young man falls in with similarly-gifted crooks to try to make enough money to restore his mother's rapidly failing health, and then has no end of moral hand-wringing over it. There is the requisite number of bangs and chases, but the hero is a drip and the principal villain, their gangster boss, is strictly cookie-cutter odious. Nothing reprehensible here, but nothing of distinguishing merit either.

4/10

Jeune Femme (Léonor Sérraille, 2017)

Meet Paula, a 31-year-old Parisienne in a state of manic desperation after being chucked out of her boyfriend's flat with nothing but the clothes on her back and his cat in a box. Mentally unstable, she has no work experience and no friends who trust her, and things look dire until she manages to start rebuilding her life through jobs as a live-in maid and childminder, selling knickers in a shopping centre and forming a few new, more solid friendships.
The first part of Montparnasse Bienvenue, as it's called internationally, is exactly what you might have feared: it's pig-headedly quirky in the belief that being contrary and dissonant always means being refreshing and daring, which is a common affliction in many modish off-centre productions, and particularly widespread in French popular music or American independent cinema. The character is motor-mouthed, self-centred, needy, slovenly and unappreciative of help offered to her. Thankfully that begins to change before it's too late for her redemption and actually turns more mature and upbeat at the same time. It still keeps walking a tightrope between ridiculing and empathising with its heroine, but you do find yourself wanting to see what conclusion is drawn. To an extent, it finally satisfies in the consistently allusory way you might have expected.

6/10

Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (Paul McGuigan, 2017)

Based on the final months in the life of the Hollywood actress Gloria Grahame, in the last stages of cancer and finding refuge with the family of her English former lover Peter Turner, Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool is, through necessity, elegiac in tone and also has obvious echoes of Sunset Boulevard with a fading star and her accordingly fragile ego. Ageing is a constant theme, not just in the final moments of the story but already in the flashbacks to when she and the far younger Peter were first together. What really elevates a fairly rudimentary structure in the end is Annette Bening's performance as Grahame: at turns coquettish, vain, sardonic and brittle, the character fits her talents and presence like a glove.

6/10

Flushed Away (David Bowers & Sam Fell, 2006)

The final film made as a collaboration between Aardman and DreamWorks, Flushed Away features the voices of Hugh Jackman and an array of British acting heavyweights as an assortment of anthropomorphic rats and frogs, and as usual, adult viewers will enjoy identifying who's who, along with those witty jokes that sail right over the heads of the ostensible target demographic of children. Jackman's character, a flapping posh twit of a rat flushed into the sewers from his palatial Kensington digs, does appear to have been expressly written for Hugh Grant instead, and Bill Nighy as a dim-witted cockney henchman is decidedly leftfield casting, but it's clear they all have fun with it nevertheless, and it zips along breezily enough with a plot involving a toad gangster scheming to kill off the rat population of the sewers while the Jackman rat tries to get back home. All that said, you miss the warmth of Aardman's stop-motion style that the computer animation doesn't quite succeed in reproducing, and so when they finally got back to doing it the old-fashoioned way with Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists in 2012, it was a welcome reminder of what they bring to the animation world that no-one else does.

6/10

La Vérité (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2019)

Kore-eda, who achieved widespread international success with Shoplifters in 2018, directs a cast of European actors for the first time and seems to have bitten off more than he can chew. The French cast of The Truth, led by Catherine Deneuve as a vain, insecure, spiky ageing actress and Juliette Binoche as her resentful daughter, is as dependable as you can expect and they have a real chemistry, but Kore-eda seems to afraid to step outside the set conventions of the French middle-class family drama and really bring his own style to the piece. And so we watch them bicker for the whole duration, until the whole affair fizzles out without true resolution and I promise you that it will not stay in your mind the day after. And God knows what Ethan Hawke is doing there as Binoche's American, monoglot husband. Presumably it was enough for the director that he's been in enough films set in France before, but his presence is completely superfluous.
The best aspect of the film is probably the parallel storyline involving Deneuve shooting a sci-fi film as a old woman whose mother is stuck in space and agelessness and can only visit her daughter once every seven years through her whole life lest she die. But this never quite gels with the Deneuve-Binoche dynamic to give it added value.

5/10

Mrs Lowry & Son (Adrian Noble, 2019)

This is a very self-contained film, as easily happens with direct conversions from stage plays, particularly when they really only have two characters in a single room. It's simply the story of the idiosyncratic Lancastrian painter L.S. Lowry looking after his bed-ridden elderly mother as he struggles to get out from beneath her smothering yoke, and there is no relief for him just as there is no relief for the audience either: we are as trapped as he is in the never-ending cycle of his self-sacrifice to an insecure old woman who has always sought to crush his artistic dreams under her class-based notions of proper art and deportment. Thus the story keeps on revolving around the same ideas, and this would be an insurmountable hindrance, were it not for the casting of Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave in the roles, who breathe such life into the fractious relationship that the obvious dramatic limitations of the script are surmounted.
You do find yourself thinking at times, though, now that Spall has been Turner and Lowry, which iconic English artist someone is still thinking about asking him to represent.

6/10

Mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017)

Aronofsky moves on to psychological horror and the result is somewhat of a mess. Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem star as a couple living in seclusion, Him (this is literally the name the character is given, with pretentions of universality) a poet with writer's block and Mother (likewise, that's her moniker) a younger woman who just wants a child to fill the void. Then creepy fans of his start turning up and imposing themselves to an intolerable degree on the couple, which Him is blithely unconcerned about while her mind starts to unravel, in the manner of Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion or, as still another obvious Polanski influence, Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby. The air of simmering menace and mystery sustain it for a while, but then it goes into the territory of The Purge in an orgiastically brutal manner and Lawrence is just left to weep and scream more and more. Aronofsky has proved with certain films, such as The Wrestler, that he can occasionally keep his auteurish excesses in check, but the lack of discipline here is more akin to that evidenced in his windbag sci-fi The Fountain.

5/10

SuperBob (Jon Drever, 2016)

A Peckham postman is hit by a meteorite and turns as a result into the world's first and only superhero. However, this being a British comedy film, the twist here is that the unassuming hero continues as a civil servant, with a handler who controls his public image with a tight leash and swamps him in mountains of paperwork before he's able to perform any epic feats.
Also, as with so many low-budget British forays into comedy features, this has the obligatory set of cameos from a host of stand-ups in bit parts and is very hit-and-miss in its success rate and clumsy attempts to introduce depth to offset the slapstick. But it is vicariously gratifying to see, before Trump actually assumed his station as the most powerful sociopath in the world, that a healthy contempt for U.S. imperialism was already taken for granted, with the only real villain of the piece a populist American politician who comes over to try to make the decent man, who they claim is also a WMD not under their control, kowtow to the Stars and Stripes.

5/10

Dolemite Is My Name (Craig Brewer, 2019)

Eddie Murphy in entertaining film shocker! After appearing mostly in unbearable turds for nearly 30 years, with only the secure relative anonymity of voiceovers for animations, a still blindly-devoted and undemanding fanbase and the occasional brief respite from the dross such as his supporting role in Dreamgirls to keep his career going, Murphy takes centre stage in a biopic of an oddball and actually makes it work quite spectacularly.
Blaxploitation filmmaker Rudy Ray Moore's zero-budget output may not have been quite as awful as Ed Wood's, saved largely by a tongue kept constantly in the cheek, but quality cinema it was not and owed a lrge amount of its phenomenal popularity in the '70s to its utter, devil-may-care amateurishness. Naturally, this is what My Name is Dolemite mines for rich comic effect as the indefatigable motor-mouthed comedian Moore decides that he deserves a slice of the hollywood pie after several false starts with other enterprises. The caricaturish period patter is fast, the 'fuck'-count would put Tarantino to shame and there are many bumbling setbacks along the way to inevitable ultimate success against the odds.
The perpetual likability of the character does blatantly serve to massage Murphy's ego, the assumed hilarity of Moore's stand-up performances is hackneyed and the ending has to be sprayed in schmaltz, of course, but it's such good-natured fun, and the realisation that Murphy can actually do drama as well in the occasional scene when he's required to is so startling, that it would be mean-minded to begrudge him a long-overdue justified return to respectability.

6/10

La double vie de Véronique (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1991)

The Double Life of Veronique tells the mystically entwined stories of two identical women with the same name, one a soprano in Kraków, the other a music teacher in Paris, unaware of each other's existence. The former dies suddenly mid-performance and then we switch to the French half where her counterpart has unsettling intuitions of something beyong her ken. A psychologically highly-strung love story develops between her and a puppeteer who tells a story with his puppets that mirrors what happened to the Polish Weronika.
This is a work of nuances and luminous images rather than a prescriptive narrative, and that is both its strength and weakness: its primary purpose is to allude and discomfit, and that may not work for everyone. But the fresh-faced Irène Jacob in the twin role (dubbed into Polish for the first part) is a captivating presence, coquettishly flighty at one moment, fragile the next.

7/10

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (J.J. Abrams, 2019)

The King is dead, long live the King. The saga may come to an end, but its lucrative offshoots will continue. These have been a mixed bag, but at least Rogue One gave us something new by judiciously choosing to go with heroes who were all disposable and so liable to be in real peril.
None of that here. The final instalment follows the pattern taken by its two predecessors, namely that it crams in as many elements of the original trilogy as possible. This includes the improbable return from the dead of The Emperor, the saga's villain-in-chief, which is a lazy idea and duly leads to a finale straight out of Return of the Jedi. In the meanwhile, there is a massive new fleet of Star Destroyers which look suitably menacing but sit there doing nothing so that the outnumbered goodies can locate a McGuffin to get rid of them all, several protracted lightsabre fights and much agonising by Rey and Kylo as to their purpose. It looks spectacular, of course, but it's a hollow exercise in attemting to placate fans and somehow tie things up. Oh, and of course Tatooine and Endor feature again too, which may be generously taken as dramatic closure but also feels as if a galaxy of millions of worlds has run out of ideas for new settings. More risks could and should have been taken.

5/10

Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)

Peele follows up his acclaimed horror Get Out with another set of black protagonists in peril from the supernatural, with a family under attack from their own doppelgangers. However, this time the characters only happen to be black and there is no overt racial element, although undertones of division and privilege are still present. This is a small pity, as the result is a film that, while being an unconventional and effective addition to the nuclear family-under-siege and bodysnatcher genres, has no more layers to the onion than that. Perhaps it's unfair to expect Peele to dish out more social allegory or satire, and see the film as it is, which is as disturbing and stylistically singular work as you can get, all the way from the dissonant Goblins-like soundtrack, albeit one that does lose its sense of focus towards the end under the sheer pressure of having to provide a bigger scheme to tie all its ideas together.

6/10

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (Chad Stahelski, 2019)

Picking up the story minutes after Keanu Reeves's unkillable hitman is forced to run with open season declared on his head, this hits the action without anything so attention-demanding as a preamble and then keeps on steaming ahead at full throttle. Keeping track of the bodycount, which some tried to do with the previous instalments, is quite futile by now. Perhaps stats might, by this stage, be better kept on the methods of dispatching the droves of goons who keep on materialising everywhere he goes, as conveniently timed as in any FPS so that there's always no more than two popping up any second to be sent to Hades with a kick in the balls - which actually seems to be more effective than the ultrafetishised arsenal of guns brandished - followed by the obligatory headshot or three for good measure.
If the first two films left any room for doubt, that is now decisively dispelled: this is action as a two-hour porn film, with all the begrudging concessions to story that implies. The increasingly jowly and single-expression Reeves occasionally just has enough time to growl a piece of wit unworthy of a Schwarzenegger actioner after another execution and then it's on to the next swarm of nondescript enemies. It becomes quite staggeringly boring long before the half-hour mark and reviewers praising the hyperstylisation of the violence choreography (which they always call 'balletic', as if that conferred any artistic merit on it) are either corporate shills or have the minds of 13-year-old boys.

3/10

L'homme qui voulait vivre sa vie (Éric Lartigau, 2010)

The initial fifteen minutes or so of The Big Picture fill me with an ominous foreboding that once again a French film has decided that the daily lives of smug, wealthy Parisians with their nannies and dinner parties are quite enough to entertain a middle-class audience for two hours, but then the central character, a young lawyer, starts suspecting his wife is having an affair, there is a confrontation with the other man involved and suddenly everything unravels in quite a shocking way. My hands are rather tied by the necessity to refrain from laying out exactly what transpires next, but suffice it to say that there is a strong Hitchcockian air in following a tortured, guilty protagonist (Romain Duris, who proves a perfect fit for this) desperate to avoid being caught and it keeps you guessing right up to the end, which is no easy feat in a well-worn genre.

7/10

Tuntematon Sotilas (Aku Louhimies, 2017)

Version 3.0 of The Unknown Soldier comes over 30 years after the second iteration and over sixty years after the first, furnished with a bigger budget and hence replete with bigger bangs and more artful photography, in partial justification of retelling the story once more and to ensure that this generation will also flock to see it in droves, although the top-selling Finnish novel ever is so revered that the screenplay pretty much writes itself as a plethora of key lines and scenes have to be adhered to. This does automatically run the risk of making the notion of a remake rather redundant.
The plot, in brief, follows one infantry company through the 1941-1944 Continuation War against the Soviet Union as the Finns first seek to regain what they lost under Soviet assault a year earlier and then, when the tide inevitably turns against them, to survive as an independent nation under the onslaught. The film adaptations assume the viewer's full familiarity with the history and also the characters of the novel, so there is little in the way of exposition for outsiders, but the utter lack of jingoism, glorification of war - even in defence of one's country - or exaggerated action still comes across clearly as does a fundamental cynicism about human motivations and a deep sense of omnipresent threat.
The combat scenes towards the end are overlong, hammering home the point of impending doom, and the three-hour-long film would have benefited from more fleshing out of peripheral characters instead of choosing to focus so heavily on the redrafted middle-aged farmer Rokka, a reluctant killing machine without any regard for authority, as charismatic the persona and the actor's performance may be. It's also easy to get the feeling that the Finnish army was all but wiped out simply because most of the named characters bite the bullet. Nevertheless, just as with the previous versions, one overriding uncommon virtue in the war film genre remains: it's so artless and unstylised that there is no doubt that this is really what it must feel like to face unseen and indifferent death.

7/10