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