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