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