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

Andið eðlilega (Ísold Uggadóttir, 2018)

And Breathe Normally cannot be described as uplifting viewing, but it is heartfelt, honest and pointedly avoids succumbing to melodrama. The paths of an Icelandic single mother struggling to stay above water and an African asylum seeker cross after the former, in her new job as a border guard officer, shops the latter for trying to enter the country with a forged passport. Her young son then bonds with the woman, who is facing imminent deportation, despite their having no common language. This is not given an improbable sugar-coating in any way and comes across in as natural a manner as the understated performances of the protagonists. The end may have a flicker of optimism, but it is fragile and double-edged.

6/10  

Kes (Ken Loach, 1969)

Seeing Kes for the first time 50 years after it was made (yes, I acknowledge the magnitude of the omission), I'm rather unfortunately struck at once by how many comic Northern stereotypes it has played a part in engendering. Men going down t'pit, people eating nothing but fish suppers, working-class people who seek to grind down anyone displaying signs of independent thought and terrible music acts at the local working men's club etc.
This is wholly unfair on the film, which is a bleak but sensitive portrayal of a teenage boy bullied on all sides finding solace with a kestrel that he nurtures. The dialects of the largely non-professional, local cast (a standard practice for Loach even then) present somewhat of a challenge to follow, even for locals 50 years down the line with all the dilution of regional differences that has occurred and there isn't much hope on offer for a waning community. But the sincerity and indignant passion burn strong, and David Bradley as the young waifish lead is a revelation.

7/10

Mielensäpahoittaja (Dome Karukoski, 2014)

An adaptation of Tuomas Kyrö's hugely successful Finnish satirical novel The Grump (an unsatisfactory translation of the title, but then 'Self-upsetter' doesn't really roll off the tongue), this first of all has to deal with the tricky challenge of converting short first-person chapters of railing against some fault or other of the modern world into an actual story. The route taken is to have the fossilised and ultra-opinionated septuagenarian taken in temporarily by his wishy-washy hipster son and his family, and then letting the old git bounce off his exponentially increasingly riled daughter-in-law for comic effect as he rambles on self-righteously and bumbles about with all the aspects of modern life that he singularly fails to understand.
It doesn't take long before we're as irritated with him as she is, and this is in part something that can be avoided when exposed to the character on paper as, unlike a filmic story, a book can always be put down when it just gets to be too much. The characterisation begins to run the risk of ridiculing the aged as hopelessly stuck in the past, but then the fact that there is a linear narrative allows the director to steer the tone away from mere parody and round out the persona through providing some backstory to explain his intransigence and even achieve a degree of poignancy.
A number of the things he rails against will probably not travel well due to their specifically Finnish context, but nevertheless there are also many universal themes and the interaction between the stick-in-the-mud and his exasperated family works well to comic effect. It's not surprising that the author has followed this up with a whole series of books and that a film sequel was made recently: we're in a world which has changed drastically in every way in less than two generations, and the existence of a larger aged segment of the populace who are left behind by this rapid march onwards will continue to be a rich source to be mined for reflection and comedy alike.

6/10