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