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