A Quiet Place Part II (John Krasinski, 2020)

 

A sequel was inevitable after the first part ended up narratively unconcluded and with critical acclaim, so the story picks up right where it cut off, with Emily Blunt still trying to keep her children safe in a hostile world where no sound goes unpunished. Nothing new is introduced, however, apart from Cillian Murphy's bereaved, reluctant ally, so it's really just a game of avoiding the aimless monsters, which are still given no motive or rationale, only relying on their presence as a means of forcing the human protagonists to cope with each other. This results in some emapathetic small dialogues as well as a constant sense of tension when the danger simply can't be planned for, but can't get any further than some vague War of the Worlds-type get-out clause. The franchise has duly reached the end of its natural lifespan, no matter how much anyone might still see bucks to be made by carrying on.

6/10   

Arctic (Joe Penna, 2018)

Without any preamble, we're with Mads Mikkelsen next to a crashed plane, surrounded by ice and snow. Most of what follows is without dialogue, just agonised grunting and panting as he goes through all means possible to feed himself and try to work out a way to contact civilisation, even after dragging a badly injured woman from a helicopter that crashes while responding to his distress beacon. The scenario is as bleak and unhistrionic as its setting, and while it certainly doesn't require artful writing and accordingly provides no great insights into the human condition as such, it does succeed in utterly immersing the viewer in the unforgiving situation, helped a great deal by Mikkelsen's determined command of the screen, not unlike Robert Redford's in the very similar set-up of 2013's All Is Lost.

6/10  

Enola Holmes 2 (Harry Bradbeer, 2022)

After the success of the first instalment with both critics and audiences, we get more of the same and can expect more to come, knowing that there are seven books so far in the series following the escapades of Sherlock's teenage sister. Though the question is whether the character alone can sustain the franchise, since while Millie Bobby Brown's performance as the titular heroine is again engaging, despite the incessant mugging to the camera, the vaguely women's lib-oriented plot (female matchstick factory workers being poisoned by their work environment) is fairly thin. So it requires plenty of filler, of which the lively wit of the dialogue is most welcome, and conversely the overlong and unconvincing action sequences decidedly less so. Fewer chases and more proper detective work next time, please!

6/10

Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

Waititi, between directing two instalments of the MCU Thor franchise, takes a step to the side to cover the Nazi era from a skew-whiff angle, with a ten-year-old member of the Hitler Youth, who has Adolf himself as his imaginary friend, finding out that his mother has been hiding a Jewish girl in their house. This causes no end of self-questioning in the callow lad, and he ends up reversing his untested views.

Superficially, this is the same set-up as in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, but the emphasis is much more, as you would expect from essentially a director of comedies, on breaking down the grotesque absurdity of the times through ridicule rather than earnest, explicit outrage. It may thus seem frivolous, but there's such an abundance of serious, weighty cinema about the topic that there is still room for an attack on the sheer concept of Nazism done just through jokes, with Waititi himself playing the imaginary Hitler as an utter buffoon. Laughing at the enemy does not mean making light of their crimes, no matter what po-faced critics of this approach would insist.

6/10

The Matrix Resurrections (Lana Wachowski, 2021)

The law of gravity cannot be disobeyed. However, in Hollywood the law of diminishing returns usually is. Hence, 18 years on from the flat conclusion to the Matrix trilogy, we get a sequel that is almost a reboot, bringing Neo back in one piece, again unaware of existing in a virtual world and having to relearn all the chopsocky stuff to fight a new version of the matrix. Of course, there are the blue pills too, and Trinity needs to be rescued, so the rest writes itself once lashings of unremarkable chases and fights are thrown in. It doesn't help that Hugo Weaving and Laurence Fishburne aren't there either to add at least some air of gravitas to the proceedings.

A small saving grace is a recognition of its futility and having some fun with that, but it brings nothing new to the table in terms of fresh conceptual ideas, so let's finally call it a day, shall we?

4/10

Thor: Love and Thunder (Taika Waititi, 2022)

The Thor saga continues with the hero still in "The Dude" Lebowski mode, moping around and performing slapdash heroics here and there with the Guardians of the Galaxy until he finally gets a mission when someone starts killing all the gods across the universe. Meanwhile on Earth, his ex, Jane Foster, staves off her terminal cancer by using his hammer, which also gives her his powers. So two gods of thunder then.

Yes, it's as much of a muddle as it sounds. And of course flashy FX have to be to the fore, though Christian Bale as the god-killer does make a more layered villain than usual, with actual justifiable motives, and the hammy comedy throughout, as you can expect with Waititi directing again, makes for a more diverting ride. Still, it's hard to see where they can go with the character from here. There's nothing much more to be explored.

5/10

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Sam Raimi, 2022)

 

MCU cinematic instalment #28 is notable for persuading Sam Raimi out of apparent retirement to bring his trademark wit and brio with fantastical material to continue the story of Earth's erstwhile Sorcerer Supreme. It cannot be a straightforward sequel to the 2016 film as everything in the MCU, including the ever-growing number of TV series, has to accommodate what has transpired in all the other linked sagas in the meanwhile.

So, as is increasingly the case, only Marvel completists will be able to get all the references, and getting the references is a large part of the fun with such a weighty catalogue. And now the rest of all pop culture is chucked into the pot too.

Beyond that, what we have is an overlong stampede of glittery FX, leavened with quips. Doctor Strange now has to migrate through a succession of universes, seeking to protect a teenager who can transverse the multiverse from the Scarlet Witch, who has a serious case of PTSD after the events of the WandaVision TV series and is now hell-bent on getting to a universe for herself where the children she created in the imaginary realm of the TV series actually exist, at the cost of all other realities.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Elizabeth Olsen do get plenty of substance to work with as the protagonist and antagonist and pour themselves readily into the roles, and the abundant humour is very welcome alongside the mind-bending drama. But even if it would mean diverging from the technicolour bombardment characteristic of the genre, a little less dazzle and a bit more mysticism would be a nice move next time around.

6/10

Buba (Arne Feldhusen, 2022)

 

Jakob 'Buba' Otto lives with his brother Dante in a small town in Northern Germany, working as a hopeless stuntman and also taking the fall for his scheming brother in all manner of petty thefts and swindles. He has gone through life in the belief, since their parents' death when they were children, that any time he experiences pleasure or happiness, others will suffer instead. So he actively seeks out whatever will cause him the most pain possible and is thus constantly a shuffling bag of cuts and bruises. Things get even worse when his brother has them join the local mafia as enforcers, with the promise that they can finally make enough sponds to go to Disneyland in California.

For most of the way, with the hapless Jakob soldiering on through countless torments in the good-hearted delusion that otherwise he'll lose his brother too, it works pretty well as a black comedy, peppered with references to Titanic and the brutal German fairytales they were told as children, and the repeated refrain that only the Disney versions end happily. Unfortunately, this also means that the plot no longer knows either how to tie things up happily and so it eventually turns into an all-out bloodbath of gang warfare, losing sight of what charm it had built up.

It's actually a prequel to a three-season TV series, How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast), so may well serve best as a primer for anyone to decide whether the series will be their bag. As a standalone film in itself, you could do worse if you fancy a thrown-together mash-up of Guy Ritchie and Jean-Pierre Jeunet and have a strong stomach.

5/10

No Time to Die (Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2021)

 

Daniel Craig reaches the end of his innings in Bond #25, now visibly creaking under the weight of the baggage dumped on him during the previous episodes. The last film's baddie is still alive and likewise his deceased lover from the first part of the reboot still haunts him. A new villain is therefore called for and eventually materialises in a pretty off-the-shelf form with a diabolical scheme involving spreading targeted assassin nanobots across the world. The rest is an overlong series of action sequences where keeping track of the kill count soon proves impossible and superfluous. The fact that Craig's weariness with it all no longer seems like acting and the occasional references in the dialogue and soundtrack to the back catalogue of the character just about retain enough tolerance to see it through to the bitter end of the character.

Except 'Bond' will return because of $s. But it would be so nice if he didn't.

5/10

Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts, 2021)

 

So, MCU#27 and yet another instalment in the Spider-Man saga. You sit back, armed with the knowledge that as there is, for once, an actor settled in the role for a protracted run and therefore no immediate need for another tiresome webslinger reboot with the obligatory origin round, at least you expect the backstory of one more out of the hero's endless cavalcade of villains with a bee in their bonnet against him and humanity.

And then...it confounds this expectation in quite a novel way. My spidey sense didn't warn me of that at all. It goes for playing with the multiverse conceit to bring all three live-action Spider-Men together into the same world, as well as their principal antagonists. Having created this mess through having talked Doctor Strange into casting a spell to make the whole world forget his real identity and then meddling with the spell after getting cold feet, Tom Holland's current incarnation of the hero sets about trying to rectify it all with the aid of the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield versions. The comic interplay between the trio, as they alternately compare their lots and bicker, actually gives the film a point, alongside easy but welcome shots at 'fake news'. Of course, it must end in the usual loud showdown between the trio and those of their nemeses who've reverted back to type, but it's so much more fun getting there than on most of these outings. Just re-breaking the fourth wall and interdimensional boundaries can't be relied on next time around, though.

6/10

  

The Good Liar (Bill Condon, 2019)

 

Securing the services of McKellen and Mirren, actors who haven't needed first names for a good while by now, as the twin leads will have convinced the backers of this enterprise of already having hit pay dirt before filming began and not having to bother too much with the minutiae of a coherent screenplay. Which The Good Liar duly doesn't: all the duo and audience need to know is that he's a conman and she's his prospective mark. Then we can sit back and watch them go and bounce off each other, which they do effortlessly, keeping us happily glued to the story even while it starts going through too many twists and turns and taking bigger and bigger liberties with credibility. The hackish director should have to cope without thespian stabilisers on his next ride.

6/10

The Duke (Roger Michell, 2020)

In 1961, Kempton Bunton from Newcastle, newly sacked from his job as a taxi driver for handing out freebie rides to the needy and preaching politics at passengers, is outraged by the fortune spent by the Government on ensuring that a portrait of the Duke of Wellington stays in the country. Indignant at yet another perceived slight against the common man, he launches a plan to steal the painting in protest.

This is a field day for Jim Broadbent in the role, backed up by a second national treasure with a virtually unrecognisable Helen Mirren as his sour-faced, put-upon wife. Bunton, a socialist firebrand with more than a touch of stand-up comic, steals every scene and leaves no doubt about a feelgood ending of some kind, even when he hands himself over to the police, resulting in a highly class-centric court case. It manages to be hugely entertaining and yet carry a real soul-felt message at the same time.

8/10

The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson, 2021)

 

Anderson, always fond of having a vast number of characters and wide-ranging ideas for them to voice, takes the next step and presents a portmanteau film about the American office of a fictitious periodical publication in a fictitious French town across an indeterminate time period. The aesthetics are impeccable, the cast of 'blink or you'll miss them cameos' are all commanding and the dialogues delivered by a succession of journalists and the subjects of their articles are crammed with verbiose wit. But all this comes at a cost. He forgot to include a unifying plot in all the excitement to fit everything in, and so we get a series of diverting vignettes instead, and thus a brief switch to animation in the third story comes as no surprise. He now needs to be told firmly that less can be more: Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel may also have been jam-packed with stars and flights of fancy as well, but were more rewarding for actually having a sense of going somewhere.

6/10

Kunsten å tenke negativt (Bård Breien, 2006)

The Art of Negative Thinking centres on a bitter man confined to a wheelchair after an accident being forced by his wife to join a council-funded positivity group for the disabled. This he recoils at violently, but the insufferably dogmatic group leader piles all the participants into his house regardless, and an evening ensues that degenerates into drunken mayhem and recriminations.

Yes, you may think, so far so Nordic, but the Norwegians as a whole aren't traditionally quite as guilty of wallowing in depression as their two neighbours to the east and there is a sense of lust for life underlying it that offsets the bleakness to some extent. And even though it's palpable that it's stumbling towards some kind of unlikely positive message through all the wreckage, at least the turns it takes on the way aren't wholly predictable and its portrayal of the disabled is refreshingly unsentimental.

6/10

The House (Emma de Swaef & Marc James Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr and Paloma Baeza, 2022)

 

A stop-motion animation film with three different stories, this may have the linking strands, owing to having only a single writer behind all all three, of all of it being set inside the same house and each part being saturated in a creepy surrealism. But the end results, after the adjustments made by each director, are wildly variable.

The first, about a family offered a huge house by a wealthy architect in exchange for their own hovel, is the one that stands out, having the clearest sense of purpose. It becomes truly unsettling as their new home turns into a maze they can't escape from and the parents literally become part of the furniture.

The second and the third, respectively featuring anthropomorphic rats and cats voicing mundane human concerns and agendas, are less sure-footed. Yes, the animation is still splendidly realised and the dialogue is witty, but using animals instead of the blank-faced people puppets of the first part feels a little aimless, as if that's just what you're supposed to do with stop-motion, rather it than adding any value to the stories.

So, a mixed bag, but still one with plenty of incidental moments to savour, including of course the game of identifying all the well-known voice talents behind the puppets.

6/10

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2021)

MCU feature #25, and the sound by now is that of the bottom of the barrel being scraped. Now it's the turn of Shang-Chi, originally created by Marvel to cash in on Bruce Lee mania and then given a mystical dimension to fit into the world of superheroes. There's now a glaringly obvious cash-in motive for Disney to promote the character to centre stage, namely the Chinese market, and accordingly large cheques have also been thrown at Michelle Yeoh and Tony Leung to lend their names as back-up to the lesser-known younger leads.

There is a suggestion of wit in the dialogue, and Ben Kingsley reprising his ham actor character from Iron Man 3 raises hopes briefly, as does having a more than usually complex antagonist in the person of the hero's father, who's prepared to bring about doom to bring back his dead wife, but it's ultimately submerged by the generic chopsocky sequences (nothing Chinese about these any more, since every MCU fight is rooted in all protagonists being expert martial artists) and daft dragons and monsters duking it out in the finale.

Move along, nothing to see here.

5/10

Bigbug (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2022)

Jeunet jumps on the 'perils of AI/overreliance on technology' train with a household confined for their own protection by their domestic servant robots while an android uprising takes place outside. This being Jeunet, wackiness abounds and while it can't be faulted for visual inventiveness, that used to be accompanied by narrative inventiveness as well. Instead, the plot is quite off the peg. Also beyond that, Bigbug doesn't have much to say about the theme that hasn't already been said more succinctly before. Jeunet on the topic of AI is uncomfortably akin to watching your uncle disco-dance at a wedding.

It's still drolly entertaining enough, provided that you can withstand the level of hyperactivity. The director really does have to rediscover his personal sense of direction, though.

5/10

La Belle Époque (Nicolas Bedos, 2019)

 

Daniel Auteuil plays an illustrator in his sixties who has lost his mojo along with his joie de vivre and is on the verge of  losing his wife too. Then his son persuades him to fork out for a role-playing exercise run by a company that recreates any point in the past that the client desires in painstaking detail, with period sets and actors. So he starts reliving the moment in 1974 when he first met his wife, and soon can't distinguish fact from fiction, seduced by forced recollections of all that he'd lost over the years.

Soon, neither can the viewer, and herein lies both the charm and vexatiousness of the film. We're moving in Kaufman/Gondry country, where magical realism serves as the medium for drawing us into a fresh view of the world we take for granted when it works, and sojourns in cloud cuckoo land when it doesn't. Overall, it just about manages to tread the right side of the line between the two, but don't go expecting to take away great personal insights.

6/10

Mestari Cheng (Mika Kaurismäki, 2019)

 

A widowed Chinese man, with his son in tow, arrives in a roadside cafe in Finnish Lapland searching for someone called "Fongtron", and has no luck with this. However, things take an upturn when he starts making Chinese meals there, initially to the bewilderment of the backwoods locals, then earning their universal approbation.

A Spice for Life is a film of limited ambition or scope, content to rely on the culture clash set-up for sustenance, but it's a sweet concoction nevertheless, full of little moments of comedy and pathos.

6/10

Black Widow (Cate Shortland, 2021)

 

The 24th film in the MCU gravy train, Black Widow continues the trend of giving the less than superpowered Avengers characters their own vehicles and in this case it means Scarlett Johansson reprising her role as the former KGB assassin, now in hiding after the disbandment of the Avengers and prior to her impending death in Avengers: Endgame. The fact that we know at the outset that the character has no long-term future is quite a yoke for the prequel to bear, and then there's the expectation that the film will deliver two hours of the standard non-stop martial arts acrobatics in between high-octane chases, and of course that's what we get. What does come as something of a relief is the back story that she connects to, meeting her fake family of undercover secret service operatives again, separated from them since they had to break cover. Here the dialogue and comic interplay sparkles intermittently, but then it's back to her hunt for the man responsible for her darker past, who is now building an army of similarly mind-controlled black widows. Yes, the action's efficient, but that's par for the course and suffers in comparison to the real sense of danger in Atomic Blonde, which casts a great shadow over this more commercially-hampered affair.

5/10

  

Maudie (Aisling Walsh, 2016)

 

Sally Hawkins plays Maud Dowley, a poor woman with acute arthritis in 1930s Nova Scotia in a biography that merits credit for sticking to the facts of her life instead of exploiting her tribulations and descending into tear-jerking, not least those to do with her relationship with a fisherman, played by Ethan Hawke, a brute of a man who takes her on as a cleaner and turns quickly into her virtual captor. But even his character is more complex than that, so when an affection develops between them as the cards and pictures she paints, initially just to keep her dreams alive, find wider and wider popularity and a degree of local fame, the introduction of a small note of happiness at last is not implausible or mawkish. The performances of the two leads help a lot too: Hawke's is nuanced and Hawkins, as much as we're used to seeing her signature role by now as an irrepressibly cheerful one, delivers the portrayal with delicate poise and deserved all the plaudits she got for the performance.

7/10

Transit (Christian Petzold, 2018)

 

It only gradually dawns on you as the story of Transit develops, that while we're in present-day France, it's really the world as it was in 1940, with Jewish refugees trying to get out of France before the Germans reach the south of the country. A curious transposition, and one that leads you to wonder whether budgetary concerns about recreating the look of the past also played a part in the decision as well as it obviously allowing the director to universalise the them of Anna Seghers's novel to include the plight of any refugees from any time.

So we follow Georg, determined to make it onto a ship in Marseille, assuming the identity of a deceased writer to get the transit visa he needs. Then he falls in love with a woman who is also trying to get away, and the ethics of keeping up so many lies start to complicate things further.

There are a lot of themes competing for space here, at times to each other's detriment, but the progression is unconventional enough to hook the viewer and reward persevering with it.

7/10