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