Vesničko má středisková (Jiří Menzel, 1985)

Rather optimistically nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, with its parochialism, lack of histrionics and tiny budget already disqualifying it from any consideration, My Sweet Little Village is stamped through like a stick of rock with Menzel's trademark brand of gentle social critique. As so often with his work, very little happens at all: two workmen, one a simpleton and the other his put-upon senior partner, potter about their village, while a woman has an affair with the local vet and an accident-prone doctor does his rounds, sending hypochondriacs packing left, right and centre. Apart from that, the only real plot is the attempt by a big-city politician to fob the simpleton off with a flat in Prague so he can get his hands on the former's large inherited house in the village, and some careful ribbing of the authorities accompanying this - communism still had a few years left to run, after all. It's all pleasant enough, but unlikely to leave much of a deeper impression, although you would probably have to have been a Czech living at the time to get everything out of it.

5/10

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)

After establishing himself solidly as a screenwriter with a plethora of wilfully leftfield but often captivating ideas, from Being John Malkovich through to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Charlie Kaufman struck out on his own as a director with Synecdoche: New York and Anomalisa, and it immediately became apparent that just being a font of creativity is not enough to make a fully-realised film. This one just confirms that judgement.

It starts with a couple driving through a blizzard to his parents' farm, with her constantly musing in voice-over about the uneasiness she feels about the future of their relationship, and when they do exchange dialogue, it only serves to trouble the waters further. This raises the alarming fear that the rest of the film will continue along the same trajectory of melancholic, teenage navel-gazing, so it comes as a welcome relief when they do get to the farm to be met by his parents, played by the ever-excellent David Thewlis and Toni Collette, who are both bags of quirks: his, suggestive goading and hers, barely-contained hysteria. When reality suddenly goes totally off-kilter, with the parents ageing and de-ageing from one moment to the next, it starts to feel like we may be headed into the dark waters of Get Out, and this is a promising turn. But Kaufman clearly does not know when he's on to a good thing, and so soon they leave, with Thewlis and Collette criminally discarded, and we're back to the couple in the car again, for the remaining one and a half hours of the film's running time, any sense of purpose dissipating faster than the contents of their petrol tank. This means random stops just to throw in freakish characters or interludes, scattered through the couple going through a random list of artistic/popular culture/philosophical conversation topics and assumed personae, to no coherent end at all.

Jessie Buckley and Jess Plemons, playing the couple, do make a Herculean effort to demonstrate the versatility that this demands of them, but it's like applauding skilled builders doing their best to follow a blueprint for a house of sand. There is no design, just a collage of clippings from the director's scrapbook, in the pseud hope that something meaningful about the human condition will miraculously be produced just through bunging them all together. It makes the approach of even Michel Gondry, who directed his script on Eternal Sunshine, look measured and focused, and on this evidence, it's Kaufman who really should be thinking of ending things.

4/10

A Christmas Gift from Bob (Charles Martin Smith, 2020)

The first instalment, A Street Cat Named Bob, was a slight but sweet autobiographical piece about former homeless heroin addict James Bowen's journey to salvation through his friendship with a stray cat. Funnily, this is just the same, and packages up the same material while inserting numerous improbabilities willy-nilly, such as the silly notion that animal protection services would not only turn out to be persecuting demons, trying to separate him from his pet, but even that this would make national news in the form of a manhunt after man and feline. Any feeling of realism dissipates very quickly, and you keep on expecting Sacha Baron Cohen to turn up as the antagonist. Optimistically trying to sell it as a Christmas movie is so transparently desperate as to not require any comment.

4/10

Glass (M. Night Shyamalan, 2019)

After the runaway success of superheroes-for-adults film Unbreakable 20 years ago and the respectable Split in 2016, it was only to be expected that Shyamalan would return to the key characters of the two previous instalments, bunging them all into one to bounce off each other. This has mixed results: Bruce Willis, as the indestructible David Dunn, has little to do except be stoic and Samuel L. Jackson as the comic-fixated criminal mastermind with brittle bones is apparently catatonic for a large part of the opening, and so it's left to James McAvoy as the man with 24 personalities overrun by a 25th, a physical manifestation of pure animal aggression known only as 'The Beast', to keeps things chugging along much as in Split, wowing us with his ability to morph from one persona and accent to another at the drop of a hat. The middle part, where all three are imprisoned and confronted by a daft psychiatrist trying to convince them that they're all just delusional and not superhuman at all, is diverting, but leaves the plot with nowhere to go except the inevitable stand-off between the three. It's by no means as bad as most critics would have you believe, with McAvoy again quite mesmerising every time he's on screen, but rather wastes most of its other potential assets and, with that, yet more residual goodwill towards Shyamalan.

5/10

Mortal Engines (Christian Rivers, 2018)

Based on the first part of Philip Reeve's successful series of young-adult sci-fi novels, Mortal Engines certainly can't be accused of lacking a high concept: it's another post-apocalyptic world, yes, but here the imagination behind it has gone into mental overdrive. Some time after a cataclysmic global war, mankind has regressed on one level to a steampunk level of technology where 21st-century artefacts such as toasters are a source of wonder, and on another developed a ridiculous civilisation where big cities roam the wastes on caterpillar tracks, hunting down smaller settlements for scarce resources. This gives rise to a quite stunning opening to the film, where the alpha predator city of London, run on severely socially-stratified lines, pursues a village.

The film continues to benefit from its awe-inspiring visuals and set design, with the city a baffling fusion of modern London, with St. Paul's Cathedral at its summit, and industrial machinery on a massive scale. But the plot itself runs out of steam, settling into a bog-standard young heroes (with Tom Sheehan as a second-rate stand-in for Eddie Redmayne in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them) trying to stop a nasty megalomaniac (Hugo Weaving, for whom this kind of role is bread and butter). It could have benefitted from a more adult approach to the consequences of its violence and political implications, but also getting very derivative of anything else in the fantasy and sci-fi genres, until a finale which is a straight rip-off of Star Wars: A New Hope does not help. It flopped in a big way, and as a consequence the follow-up parts may never see the light of day. Shame.

4/10       

La vita davanti a sé (Edoardo Ponti, 2020)

Who'd have thunk that Sophia Loren would suddenly turn up, 11 years after her last feature appearance, leading a Netflix drama about a former prostitute every bit as wizened as she is by now? Or that, despite the warning bells that start ringing right after a one-line precis, i.e. she reluctantly takes in an orphaned 12-year-old Senegalese urchin, the end result isn't sentimental claptrap?

The key in The Life Ahead lies in the performances, and the director's willingness to use them to their best advantage: Loren is every bit as majestic and fiery in old age as she ever was, and Ibrahima Gueye, the boy, is a revelation. He starts out a little shit, railing out against all and sundry, and is still dealing drugs happily and being truculent well into the story, not magically transforming into some angel. It's a hard job for any novice actor to perform, but Gueye retains our sympathy without having to cute down unrealistically. Which means that, against so much of the more cloying tendencies of Italian cinema, what you get is fully-rounded characters who somehow still connect, and you believe it when they do.

7/10

 

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse ( Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman, 2018)

With the appeal of Spider-Man to kids above and beyond that of almost all other superheroes, and the way the comics have both cultivated and exploited this, with multiple versions of the character, it was inevitable that they would make it into cinematic form. It also figures that computer game-style animation is the only way to go about it, since having infant anime and comedy pig Spider-People amongst the line-up would hardly have worked within the confines of the real universe. That said, it turns out to be surprisingly good fun at times, centring on the teenage Miles Morales version as a way of still sneaking in the eternal bane of the comic-book film, the origin story, but then zipping along with some inventive visuals until caving into the all-out whizzbang hypercolour action of the final fight with the Kingpin, anguished villain of the week, and wrapping up with the usual homilies. Strictly for kids, of course, but not the most painful thing an adult will ever have to sit through either.

6/10