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