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