Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

Himesh Patel's s struggling musician discovers after a worldwide power cut that no-one else has ever heard of the Beatles, and consequently uses every Beatles song he can remember to become the world's biggest rock star under the direction of his utterly unscrupulous American manager. Ultimately, he's torn between living the lie and the love he feels for his childhood friend, left behind in Suffolk.

With Richard Curtis behind the screenplay, cutesiness is to be expected, but this is mercifully tempered by having the spikier Boyle as director and letting the songs do all the work, which may be lazy, but does keep things chugging along as we're reminded, by getting them freshened up through the filter of Patel's delivery, of simply how good they were.

One to force on all of today's teens to hopefully make them reconsider the anodyne factory products that they idolise. 

6/10

L'incredibile storia dell'Isola delle Rose (Sydney Sibilia, 2020)

In  1968, engineer and crackpot inventor Giorgio Rosa decides he's had enough of living under Italian laws and constructs a platform outside the country's territorial waters. This then becomes an offshore club for allcomers and he declares the makesehift island an independent state. The authorities, naturally, take a dim view of this and set about shutting him down.

It would be hard to believe that Rose Island is a true story if you didn't know about how the machinations of the system in Italy, but knowing that it is a pretty unembellished version of the real events lends a pretty slender plot some added interest, and that's bolstered by its breezy comic air.

6/10

His House (Remi Weekes, 2020)

A refugee couple from Sudan are placed by the authorities in a grotty house in a small town. where they struggle to adapt to  the customs of their new homeland, including endemic racism. Their past has left them scarred, though, having lost their daughter on the way to England, and this soon manifests itself as waking nightmares where they are haunted by an evil presence hiding in the walls of their house.

Sadly, her's where it veers off course: it wants to talk about loss and trauma, but the horror trappings (not really helped by having Doctor Who Matt Smith as their case worker) prevent us from being able to engage properly with any serious intentions, and it doen't function too well as a horror film either.

5/10

Tove (Zaida Bergroth, 2020)

 

Swedish-speaking Finnish author Tove Jansson gained widespread international fame for her series of Moomin novels, which are one of thise rare beasts, children's literature that flips emotional switches in the psyche of the adult reader too, largely by virtue of their mix of homespun wisdom with a sense of the magic inherent in nature. When she eventually migrated to adult works, living for the latter period of her life on a remote Baltic skerry with her partner, the transition did not jar: the connection to the cycles of  nature was as intensely there as ever.

Tove does not concentrate on these periods of her life, but her formative years as an artist during the war and 1950s and her coming to terms with her attraction to women, including an affair with a self-centred theatre director. Alma Pöysti feels like a natural fit as the lead, but the structure of the film ultimately lets it down: yes, we may get a real person, warts and all, but that's not what  primarily interests us about Jansson. Her actual work is mostly absent, and then the film ends rather abruptly, feeling just like the first chapter of a trilogy.

6/10

Lucky (John Carroll Lynch, 2017)

In his final film, Harry Dean Stanton returns to a character and setting with echoes of his breakthrough lead role in Paris, Texas as a cantankerous, independent nonagenarian in a small desert town having to face up to his own mortality at last. The film consists of nothing more than following him on his daily routine from morning yoga, through coffee in the diner over a crossword and buying cigarettes from the local shop, to repairing to the bar for a Bloody Mary in the company of the regulars. And why should it force in anything more? This is real life, and accordingly the key note that carries throughout it is him looking up the dictionary meaning of 'realism' at the start and then insisting on telling those he meets what it means in practice.

Stanton was to die shortly after completing the film and his artless, moving performance is infused with a corresponding sense of urgency, as good as he ever did in anything before, each small gesture and vocalisation speaking volumes, and benefiting from a wryly witty script that allows a simple story to breathe.

7/10   

The Dead Don't Die (Jim Jarmusch, 2019)

Maybe the dead don't die, but the zombie genre decisively has, and I wonder almost as much why I still persist with watching them as I do at Jarmusch's motive for making one. Since he dabbled with the nearly equally moribund vampire genre to productive effect with Only Lovers Left Alive, it was tempting to think he might have something to breathe life into the less interesting species of the undead. Unfortunately, this is just a sleepwalking comedy take, borrowing heavily from Dawn of the Dead for its parallels between the mindless behaviour of the deceased and the mindless behaviour they exhibited when still living consumers, and while the deadpan dialogue between a cast of Jarmusch's heavyweight regulars engenders goodwill and the ho-hum air they have at their impending doom is a nice break from the normal hysterics that zombie apocalypses entail, it's really totally aimless.

5/10 

Army of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2021)

In his wisdom, Zack Snyder has decided to shoehorn a zombie film in between his DC superhero blockbusters, since apparently we need another one and no-one has quite filled the glaring gap in the market for undead carnage hung on a heist film framework. In brief, wrestling lunk Dave Bautista puts together a team to extract $200 million from a vault in the ruins of zombie-infested Las Vegas before the Government nukes the city. Somehow, the mayhem has to be padded out to an hour past its reasonable running time by including Bautista trying to engage with his estranged daughter and pointless parallel attempts to humanise the monsters. It adds absolutely nothing to the genre, but does remind you to go and rewatch the original Dawn of the Dead or Day of the Dead for gallows humour and 28 Days Later for actual scares. Instead, we get explosions and slo-mo shooting of big guns, Snyder's most chronic addiction, as lens flare is that of J.J. Abrams.

Quite bewilderingly, a prequel was deemed bankable and has already been made.

4/10

Love and Monsters (Michael Matthews, 2020)

So, the human population of the world has been nearly totally wiped out again, this time by monsters mutated from all the animals. The protagonist is a lovelorn lad of no particular ability who sets out from his safe haven to cover 90 miles across the hazardous surface to find his pre-disaster girlfriend.

What sustains such a thin premise is its wit and lack of reliance on special effects, as well as having a likable boy-next-door lead, previously only really known for the decidedly patchy Maze Runner films. Not a waste of money, then, but also not anything that you'll feel culturally deprived for not having spent two hours on.

5/10

Shazam! (David F. Sandberg, 2019)

The seventh film in the DC Extended Universe is the first one decisively aimed at children, with its titualr hero a 14-year-old foster child landed with an adult body, a host of magical superpowers and a mission to save the world from the demonic embodiments of the seven deadly sins. He initially seizes the opportunity to play Superman with all the maturity to be expected from a pubescent delinquent, until, of course, the  great responsibility that comes with great power has to be faced up to.

Mark Strong, as the villain who has a chip on his shoulder for having been deemed unworthy of the Shazam powers as a child, clearly has great fun chewing up the scenery, and there are some amusing slapstick scenes where the hero is pushed by another boy in his foster family to find out exactly what he's now capable of, but sooner or later one starts to miss a more demanding plot, and even the grim darkness and extreme violence of most of recent superhero productions.

5/10

Stowaway (Joe Penna, 2021)

Another year and yet another mission-to-Mars flick. They have to have a twist beyond the basic fight against the hostility of space by now, so this one posits that a three-person crew finds themselves burdened with an accidental extra passenger, and has to take an excruciatingly tough decision on how to deal with it, with supplies no longer being sufficient for all of them.
That really is the film's only selling point: the rest is the usual supposedly thrilling, interminable spacewalks to try to fix technical problems and a lot of tearful agonising over their plight. It sells itself as hard sci-fi and then cuts corners anywhere it can when that gets too awkward, so we're to believe, for example, that the multi-billion dollar spaceship's systems essentially have no built-in redundancy. Then, after two hours, it ends on an utterly illogical and avoidable act of self-sacrifice and yet no actual conclusion.

4/10     

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things (Ian Samuels, 2021)

It is apparent within a minute that the protagonist, a small-town teenager, has an awareness of everything that will happen around him through the day that can only mean that he's seen it all many times before. Sure enough, it doesn't take long before Groundhog Day comes up explicitly as he tries to explain to a friend what's happening to him.

So, we're on terrain as familiar to us as the recurring day is to him. But then the story has the good sense to introduce a variable: as he starts to feel lonely, he meets a girl who is experiencing the same thing, and the dynamic this creates allows the plot and tone to diverge enough from that of its parent, becoming less comic and more philosophical, and therby justifying itself on its own terms.

You might find their decision to seek out all the moments of wonder in a single day in the life of their town as a means to finally escape the loop a tad too sugary as a concept, but the performances of the couple are engaging and there's a real lightness of touch throughout that makes for a pleasant, if undemanding, experience.

6/10

Made in Italy (James D'Arcy, 2020)

Actual father and son Liam Neeson and Micheál Richardson play a burnt-out artist and his art gallery manager son, who go to Italy to do up the Tuscan house they have never got rid of in the years since the accidental death of their respective wife and mother, in order to be able to sell it. While there, the son starts developing a romance with a local woman, and the father and son bond, coming to terms with unresolved issues from the death of the wife and mother.
It's inevitable that parallels must be drawn between the outline of the story and the tragic death of Neeson's wife Natasha Richardson back in 2009, and to an extent this lends a depth to the film that its otherwise off-the-shelf plot does not deserve. Neeson is as great as usual when he is persuaded to do something other than butchering criminals, completely commanding the screen, and there are some sweetly funny scenes scattered throughout, but overall it's a stock Richard Curtis derivative with middle-class characters who bemoan being skint yet are never seen to do a stroke of work, and wax lyrical over authentic pasta sauces and limpid sunsets instead.

5/10

The New Mutants (Josh Boone, 2020)

Well, it's been sold as the final instalment in the twenty-year old X-Men franchise, but what a shame to go out with such a whimper, with only a tenuous connection to the rest - naturally, including none of the expensive big guns - and wholly confined to one location, where five mutant teenagers are kept in an institution for their own protection, each having suffered some trauma as their powers manifested themselves in the outside world. The modishly diverse quintet (two boys, three girls, their ethnicities being Brazilian, Irish, hillbilly, Russian and vaguely native American) snipe at each other like high school kids, act equally truculently towards their supposed doctor and guardian, and then have to fight a supernatural mess of their own making, which turns out to be just as uninteresting as the build-up to it was. It's not that it's incompetently made, just utterly pointless.

4/10

Enola Holmes (Harry Bradbeer, 2020)

The notion of Sherlock Holmes having a sleuthing teenage sister is a worrisome one, promising just more throwaway tween adventure fodder. And when it opens with the titular character talking straight through the fourth wall, armed with the knowledge that Bradbeer also directed several episodes of the terminally annoying Fleabag, things really do not look good.

What follows is a quite a revelation. As she sets out to find her free-spirited missing mother, we get economically-crafted action scenes, a lovingly-constructed late/post-Victorian London like Dickens shot through a Lemony Snicket filter, and an actual adult context, as the subjugation of women and their struggle for universal suffrage always looms large in the background. It's witty, well-paced and bolstered by a great supporting cast, with Helena Bonham Carter as the radical mother, Henry Cavill as a diffident Sherlock and Fiona Shaw as the headmistress of a conservative finishing school for ladies, amongst others. Millie Bobby Brown as Enola, though, really stands out: she's passionate, inventive and determined, and her winking camera-mugging never proves tiresome, as you can well imagine it might have done with almost any other teen actress. An unexpected and very welcome pleasure.

7/10   

Aquaman (James Wan, 2018)

If there's a superhero team franchise, each character must eventually get their own origin spin-off. It's the law. Thus fishy shenanigans with half-Atlantean Arthur Curry, surely named after a reclusive pet shop keeper, but played instead by glowering meat mountain Jason Momoa. He's forced to finally go to the rainbow-coloured underwater kingdom when they have had enough of the pollution of the oceans by the landlubbers and decide to start a war against the world. Thereafter, it's business as usual: fish-out-of-water (except oddly completely in water this time) has to fight to be accepted for what he is, faces trials of bravery, fails, tries again and emerges triumphant. Tacked onto this basic outline, there's also fighting for the throne with his nasty half-brother (lifted straight out of Thor) and looking for his long-lost mother.

Apart from that, the customary millions are pissed up the wall on interminable, over-busy CGI action sequences built on the 'more is more' principle but no aesthetic sense, and it finally comes to a merciful end way later than you would have wished for. About the only things that keep it afloat (sorry) are a full awareness of its own ridiculousness and Momoa, who does a very good line in the superhero as lovable jock doofus, and more of that would have been nice. But that would involve writing dialogue, which is harder work than giving pretty pictures to digital studios.

Of course, the sequel is on its way, and you know with depressing certainty that it will try for even more FX. This is also the law.

5/10

Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

Temporal CIA agents attempt to stop a Russian oligarch from not just ruling or destroying the world, but ending it altogether. This all revolves around the modish-sounding but confused notion of 'inverted entropy', the gist of which is that objects and people can be inverted to travel in the opposite direction in the linear flow of time.
Sadly, Nolan, the doyen of the high-concept thriller, has overreached himself here. He may have remembered to distance himself from asserting that the concept is feasible, but it's crucial that it stays true to its own internal logic, and instead it's used on too many occasions in the film just as a McGuffin to take us from one high-octane scene to the next. As always, his ambition has to be applauded, but here the premise takes centre stage to the detriment of also including original settings, characters and some emotional content. Rewatch Inception instead.

5/10    

In Fabric (Peter Strickland, 2018)

Strickland adds to the panoply of cursed object films with a hyperstylised mish-mash, like an Amicus production helmed by Dario Argento, set in an indeterminate, imagined 1970s or '80s. The object in question is a red dress which is a killer in both senses of the word, bought by a divorced woman for wearing on blind dates from a department store seemingly staffed by witches. If Roald Dahl had written supernatural horror, the end result would have not been too dissimilar in terms of plot, but that only gives you half the picture, which also incorporates seriously disturbing sexual undercurrents, the character's creepily prying faux-friendly employers and the very British and blackly comic, bland mutedness of reaction to the horror when it becomes overtly inexplicable. Then there is the soundtrack, with disjointed, exaggerated effects only designed to disturb, and visual cutaways to the same effect. It's kitschily sumptuous and utterly demented at the same time, and unlikely to resemble anything you'll have seen since Strickland's previous features.

7/10

Sorry We Missed You (Ken Loach, 2019)

Now well into his eighties, Loach certainly can't be accused of softening with age. Sorry We Missed You, with a Geordie family struggling to cope under the yoke of zero-hours Britain, is as angry as anything he's ever done, and the depressing thing is that even if you know his focus will always selectively be on those dealt the hardest of hands and scant prospect of a light at the end of the tunnel, you also know that what you get is something true.

For what it's worth, the succession of cruel blows landed here befall a dad who has to take on a delivery driver job and work every hour God sends lest he be fined for falling ill or any other imaginable cause, his wife who's a care worker with a thankless employer, and out of their two kids the teenage son is a truant who only wants to cover the town in graffiti and looks down on his father a a failure at the same time.  Anyone who calls it wallowing in misery is either too jaded or socially privileged to be able to take the message, and criticising Loach's films for not really being cinema is not the point: of course they're not, they're the docudramas he's always made because any artifice or gloss would detract fatally from the realism. 

You do wonder who'll take up the mantle of screen firebrand-in-chief once Loach is gone. Perhaps the anaesthetic effect of modern materialistic culture as an environment to grow up in makes that impossible.

6/10

The Man with the Iron Fists (RZA,2012)

Well, we know what a chopsocky fetish the Wu-Tang Clan leader has, with repeated samples from the films on their tracks, the group calling the Staten Island of their origin Shaolin and even releasing a kung-fu video game featuring the lot of them. Sure enough, then, that The Man with the Iron Fists crams in every possible homage to/plundering of the Hong Kong originals (it even features a cameo from Gordon Liu, for Christ's sake), particularly those of the Shaw Brothers Studio. This proves both shamelessly stupid fun and a lazy approach to putting together a film, with the wire-work action virtually non-stop and the cartoon violence pumped up to the max. The off-the-shelf plot (RZA is a devout weapons maker, Russell Crowe the incongruous, scenery-chewing interest for English audiences, Lucy Liu a brothel madam and Rick Yune - as someone has to be - is out to avenge his father's murder) serves really just as something to hang the ridiculously choreographed mutilation on. But genre fans will still like the reference-spotting.

4/10     

Dean Spanley (Toa Fraser, 2008)

A man with a curmudgeonly father in genteel Edwardian English society becomes fascinated by the new local clergyman, Dean Spanley, who goes off on odd ruminations about his past life as a dog after imbibing Tokay wine. He sets about acquiring as much of the expensive vintage as possible to draw out more of the Dean's supposed recollections.

The film would fall utterly prey to its wilful whimsicality, eventually incorporating fantasy sequences with frolicking dogs as the Dean's narrative takes over, were it not for the strength of the cast, with Peter O'Toole effortlessly playing imperious and semi-senile in the twilight of his career as the father and Sam Neill as solid as ever as the weird Dean. The performances of these two in particular just about keep the daffy enterprise above water.

5/10  

The Midnight Sky (George Clooney, 2020)

On the evidence of this, Clooney as director should stick to his strengths, which so clearly lie in political and/or historical drama, and leave half-conceived melanges of social comment and sci-fi well alone. He may only have starred in Tomorrowland,  but has managed to create an even bigger mess than that film was.

In a nutshell, it's 2049, Clooney is a dying scientist, choosing to remain alone at an Arctic base while the rest of the inhabitants leave to a world which has just been struck by an unspecified extinction-level catastrophe, and setting out to warn a space exploration ship on its way back to Earth to stay away for their own good. He finds a mute young girl who has seemingly been left behind during the evacuation and takes her under his wing, while starting to increasingly resemble a mad Santa. In the meanwhile, the story keeps hopping back to the returning spaceship, which is a strictly identikit number from any number of better films, and its crew go through the usual technical dramas without adding anything of dramatic interest, but a lot of sub-Gravity padding.

If, from a structural angle, it's easy to get annoyed with the uneven switches of tone in the story - a musical singalong amongst the crew leading immediately to a horrible disaster - and flabby pacing, what is actually its biggest failing is its utter disregard for scientific content. The disaster about to snuff out all remaining life on Earth is never explained in the slightest (at one point, just when you think they might give it a stab, radio static between Clooney and the ship conveniently does away with that) and in an era where even space operas have to make some effort at hard sci-fi plausibility, we get an idyllic faraway planet with no exposition of where it is or how to get there, regular asteroid storms and 'uncharted space' within the solar system.

The intention is clearly to issue a warning about what we're doing to our planet (thanks, George), but the level of infantility on show here with regard to the actual boring details ends up doing the eco-cause a huge disservice. For Christ's sake, get someone to sit Clooney down for a long hard talk before he thinks of doing anything like this again.

4/10      

Ballon (Michael Bully Herbig, 2018)

Based very closely actual events, Balloon tells the story of two East German families who devised a plan in 1979 to escape to the west by hot air balloon. This is in fact the second version, following an English-language Disney original in 1982, and unsurprisingly feels more authentic as a result. It is overreliant on following one close shave after another, making each one seem more dramatic through repeated misdirection of the viewer where the Stasi pursuers of the families are implied to be right on top of their prey, and you're not left in much doubt, regardless of any setback that might transpire, that the escapees will prevail, but with the knowledge that no other significant liberties have been taken with the facts, it is a pretty compelling narrative all the same.

5/10  

Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)

Harold is a young man exasperated with his materially cosseted life and his emotionally detached mother, vainly trying to get her to desist from drawing up plans for him through repeatedly staging his own suicide. Things change when he meets Maude, a septugenarian free spirit, who takes his attention completely off his own proccupations with her antics, leading to the blossoming of a romantic relationship between them.

To call Harold and Maude wilfully oddball is somewhat stating the obvious, and socially it's very much a product of its era, a time capsule of Vietnam-era West Coast lack of respect for authority and conventional behaviour. It's also very funny in places, then swinging to true pathos, without one tone steamrollering the other. To see it is to be reminded again that, once, there was such a thing as New Hollywood, a cinema that could genuinely surprise, and that was not just considered arthouse for the few.

7/10