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