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