The Suicide Squad (James Gunn, 2021)

Seeking to capitalise on the moderate commercial success of 2016's Suicide Squad, and blithely ignoring the critical panning that received, what we get is more of the same: gleeful ultraviolence from the homicidal protagonists, the only alterations being an even greater emphasis on milking it for gallows humour, since it's now the director of the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy Gunn at the helm, and a scenario which is more a rip-off of The Dirty Dozen. Of course, the one truly popular character of the first film, Margot Robbie's utterly cuckoo Harley Quinn, has to be there too, and Idris Elba to all intents and purposes is the same character as Will Smith's Deadshot, i.e. a lethal assassin with a problematic relationship with his estranged daughter.

What else? Well, the U.S. Government official who sends the misfits to their near-certain demise is really the biggest villain and there's an alien kaiju they have to eradicate to carry out their mission. All totally ludicrous of course, and accompanied by lashings of the customary CGI overkill. But oddly still more coherent and entertaining than the first instalment.

5/10

Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (Zack Snyder, 2023)

Zack Snyder, almost as gravely as Michael Bay, has the unfortunate reputation of his name alone being the kiss of death for the quality of anything he chooses to direct. His shot-by-shot adaptation to screen of Watchmen was a rare exception, but apart from that it's been lunkheaded slo-mo hyperaction with scant regard for plot all the way. Rebel Moon is his transparent attempt to get a piece of the almighty Star Wars pie by nicking as much as possible from Lucas's saga. There is a tyrannical Imperium and a pseudo-Nazi evil villain, an orphaned heroine and plucky band of rebels who oppose them, random weird aliens, anthropomorphic droids and warriors with glowing swords. But Snyder doesn't stop there either with his ransacking of better sources. Seven Samurai, Dune and even John Carter are also pillaged, and to what end? The finished composite product doesn't even have the dignity of Frankenstein's monster, and certainly less right than it did to exist.

And yet, because this got in enough unwary punters, there will still be a second part very soon. Oh joy.

3/10

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (James Mangold, 2023)

Harrison Ford finally bows out of his other big action franchise role, years after Han Solo was killed off. God knows it's been long enough coming, but better than having the actor die on the job, though.

To wrap up the character's story, there are once more Nazi villains and a supernatural gizmo to find, this one being the dial of the title, created by Archimedes to travel in time.

Of course he always neds a sidekick, particularly as he can't be expected to do all the heavy lifting anymore. This is provided in the form of Phoebe Waller-Bridge as his goddaughter, also an archaeologist but one driven by money, and it takes a good part of the film and for her to turn from an antagonist to an ally. Oh, and there's a Moroccan street urchin in tow too. 

The film's interminable running time is just bickering between Ford and Waller-Bridge, which purports to be amusing, and naturally endless preposterous chase and fight sequences.

It wasn't long ago when the director closed the hero stories of Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart in a very satisfactory way in Logan. I assume he simply wasn't allowed to do the same here.

4/10

Leave the World Behind (Sam Esmail, 2023)

Julia Roberts takes her family to a holiday rental on Long Island, where their phones and TV stop working and things get progressively weirder, even before the owner of the property turns up out of the blue with his daughter and stories of blackouts in New York, asking to stay in the basement while the situation settles down. But nothing does settle down and it becomes apparent that the whole country is under cyberattack and descending into a state of utter chaos, the culprits quite unknown.

This was produced by the Obamas, and the connection gradually manifests itself: the unseen enemy isn't so much a tangible external power, but the easy spread of misinformation and paranoia in current America. And the seed for the growth of the societal disintegration that takes place has implicit parallels with the MAGA movement, underlined by their survivalist neighbour, who they turn to for help, laying out all the standard conspiracy theories propagated by the movement.

Structurally it is somewhat of a jumble and the message itself is not a subtle one, but the way it's snuck in under the radar, facilitated by able actors and being difficult to pin down in simple terms of genre, makes it both effective and worthwhile.

6/10

The Killer (David Fincher, 2023)

Michael Fassbender plays the titular character, narrating us through his modus operandi and life as a professional assassin. This means hearing his Zen-ish mantra of "avoid empathy" over and over again, and indeed it makes him impossible to empathise with, a cold fish for whom the only guiding principle is to be as efficient and business-like as possible, without emotional involvement.

This could be a serious dramatic problem for the film, even when the killer makes a mistake on a job which turns him instead into a loose end to be readicated and means that he has to set about methodically getting rid of those who would eradicate him. But giving him any more vulnerability would actually detract from the character and the point of the exercise, as would allowing any one of his targets an emotive final speech.

This is a dark world hidden in plain view, shot through with detached style, akin to Ryan Gosling's in Drive,  or the even more glaring parallel of Alain Delon in Melville's Le Samourai. Something quite uncommon, a killer who takes no pleasure in his work and all to a soundtrack of '80s tunes by The Smiths.

7/10

El Conde (Pablo Larraín, 2023)

Yet another vampire flick, but at least the twist here is a novel one: Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a 250-year-old bloodsucker who fakes his own death to escape justice and continues living on in seclusion. But now he is truly fed up with eternal life and wants to die, which brings his children to come to squabble over his inheritance, getting an odd accountant to tot up the value of his hidden holdings.

There is an abundance of gallows humour satire and lustrously sombre cinematography, but the silliness doesn't know to stop after the initial premise and eventually it all goes completely overboard.

6/10

Vesper (Kristina Buožytė & Bruno Samper, 2022)

Yes, yet another post-apocalyptic dystopia film. This one is set in a world with a devastated ecosystem following a massively failed genetic experiment that wiped out all edible plants and animals, leaving behind a neo-feudal society of starving serfs around 'citadels' where the rich live. The protagonist is a resolute 14-year-old girl who is struggling to keep her paralysed father alive and has taught herself  to become an expert in biohacking to make self-sufficiency in edible plants possible again.

So, there are some touches in the scenario outside the standard wasted Earth set-up, as well as the perpetual tropes. There's little future tech on show, and the FX budget is really only used to bring weird, mutated flora to life. Being filmed in a grey, autumnal Lithuania is also unusual and adds to the reflective sombreness.

Not a masterpiece by any means, but nor just one more off-the-shelf actioner in the genre with a plucky resistance bringing down the new overclass.

6/10

A Royal Night Out (Julian Jarrold, 2015)

VE Day 1945, and Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret are permiited by their parents to go out in London to see the raucous festivities in person. That much is rooted in reality. The rest goes off into a flight of fancy where the pair give their bumbling minders the slip and have escapade after escapade across London at night, the 14-year-old Margaret ending up drunk in a Soho brothel and Elizabeth forming a bond with an embittered young RAF veteran on the lam as she looks for her sister. If you can accept the original germ of the story as just a springboard to take liberties with the facts and have fun with the mismatch between who the pair are and a society they have no experience of, you'll enjoy the frothy ride. I did and I haven't seen a single minute of The Crown.

6/10

The Great Escaper (Oliver Parker, 2023)

In 2014, the 89-year-old war veteran Bernard Jordan absconded from his care home to cross the Channel to see the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings. This made national and international headlines.

It's fitting that this is the final film for Michael Caine, who then announced his retirement, as Jordan, and Glenda Jackson, who died shortly after completing filming, as his wife. They are excellent in the roles, with a movingly deep on-screen relationship. Given the subject, it could also easily have strayed into little England flag-waving in Jordan's flashbacks to the events being commemorated, or outright sentimentality, but both are deftly avoided. The flashes of humour don't jar with the serious elements either. It's a worthy swansong for both actors.

8/10

Chiamami col tuo nome (Luca Guadagnino, 2017)

Elio, a 17-year-old American, develops a relationship with his academic father's assistant during a summer holiday in Italy. The relationship becomes a sexual one as Elio admits his infatuation with the older man. Call Me by Your Name garnered a host of accolades, partly helped by the theme having a universal resonance beyond just being another story of gay love against the odds and social stigma, but the age gap between the leads, as able asTimothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer are, is more questionable. So is the inherent cosiness of the understanding parents, the reliance on picture postcard locations and the boy effectively being a polymath, fluent in three languages, versed in local history and musically gifted. Clearly these attributes are meant to make us feel his sensitivity, but also provide an excuse to show him moping like any daft teenager for a large part of the considerable running length. The decision to go without subtitles in a trilingual film is also ill-advised. I may be able to cope with the French and Italian dialogue, but not everyone should be expected to.

It concludes Guadagnino's 'Desire' trilogy, after Io sono l'amore and A Bigger Splash, and certainly has fewer glaring flaws than its precursors, but is still limper than what the subject needs.

5/10 

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (Terry Gilliam, 2018)

It would be a shame if Gilliam bowed out after finally completing this, the very epitome of the concept of development hell. First conceived in 1989 and only getting around to pre-production in 1998, the film suffered the deaths of two of its leads, the departure of numerous others, flooding destroying sets and no end of financial setbacks. It speaks well for the director's determination that he never gave up and it's consequently a pity that the fruit of so many years of toil is such a muddle.

The nominal storyline involves Adam Driver as a film director trying to make a commercial in Spain with a Don Quixote theme. After revisiting a nearby village where he shot a film about Don Quixote as a student, he finds himself sucked into a series of surreal episodes increasingly blurring the line between the story of the errant knight and reality, following an elderly local (Jonathan Pryce) who he cast as the titular character in his student film and now believes he actually is the character he played.

So far, so The Fisher King, and full licence for Gilliam to throw everything including the kitchen sink at us in terms of wild imaginings. Which becomes just too much, although ironically that actually ends up achieving the purpose in the sense that it becomes the story of a man on an obsessive quest, confused by the sheer weight of reality. The Quixote story becomes the Gilliam story. Perhaps he's got it out of his system at last.

5/10

John Wick: Chapter 4 (Chad Stahelski, 2023)

Since it's quite clear that the John Wick franchise will not be stopped by Keanu Reeves choosing to make a dignified exit or declining popularity, the fourth instalment making even more sponds than its predecessors, only artistic discrimination could be hoped to put it out of its misery. But since the series never had any of that to begin with, that would be to hope in vain. The bodycount this time is around 140, meaning no room for even the most cursory of plots. Every assassin anywhere he goes wants to kill Wick and so he kills everyone instead, and it's quite remarkably boring. Bullets are of as much use as against zombies, since only a bullet to the brain will finish anyone off for good, and being hit by cars or falling from great heights is just an inconvenience. It shouldn't be so hard to grasp that there can be no real excitement without a real threat.

3/10

The King's Man (Matthew Vaughn, 2021)

It's an unwritten rule that proper British thesps will get an action lead role in when they can still move around independently, and so with Ralph Fiennes in a prequel to the Kingsman franchise, as an aristocratic spy seeking to get America involved in World War I by exposing the machinations of a terrorist with a serious chip on his shoulder against the British Empire. Not that there's a lot of spying on show, since as ever the director is more inclined to favour cartoonish fights instead. The one where the heroes take on a pirouetting Rasputin is particularly silly, almost as ludicrous as the liberties taken with historical accuracy, with the setting just serving as another resource to be strip-mined by writers short on ideas for characters and events.

Unlike its predecessors in the franchise, this one barely recouped its costs at the box office and one can only hope that will be the end of it, but since churning them out is so untaxing, we probably won't be so lucky.

4/10

The Old Oak (Ken Loach, 2023)

Ken Loach will not go out with a whimper, still throwing the inequities of society back in our faces, even with possibly his final film. This time it's about the treatment of refugees from war zones, faced with local prejudice when dumped in a particularly depressed area. Of course Loach cannot avoid drawing parallels between the situation in Syria that the new arrivals have fled from and the miners' strike that laid waste to their new home community, but just because the subject of his ire is a familiar one, it's still relevant. There is no shying away from depicting the locals frequenting the only pub they have left as racists for the most part, but neither is the context that made them that way avoided. Yes, as is pretty much par for the course with Loach, this is a lesson in politics in the form of a fictional story, with the kindly pub landlord and determined young newcomer that he befriends not much more than cyphers for the two sides of the culture clash, but as ever the passion is palpable and justified, and no pat resolution is to be expected.

6/10 

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (Will Sharpe, 2021)

Victorian illustrator Louis Wain may have sunk into the depths of obscurity over the course of time, his biggest claim to fame being stacks upon stacks of pictures of cats, which may jog the memory for some, but are too cloyingly winsome for modern tastes. Nevertheless, there's quite enough material in his chequered life for a biopic, and the ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch is just the right man for the job, bringing the requisite mania, fragility and weirdness to the portrait of a mentally unstable man who struggled to cope with the demands of a rigidly class-driven society and being the sole breadwinner for his five sisters and mother. The director does hedge his bets to make sure that the get the point about Wain's unconventionality and artistry by unnecessarly adding surreal visual flashes  and having Wain harp on incessantly about electricity as the motivating force behind everything, but the most emotional moments in the story do carry a real impact.

6/10

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (Guy Ritchie, 2023)

Guy Ritchie continues to plough his own furrow amongst British filmmakers who largely eschew big-budget action comedies and no amount of criticism will make him change the formula. So a team of spies, led by Jason Statham, jetset around using tech, explosives and old-fashioned kicks to the head to dupe billionaire arms dealer Greg Simmonds into leading them to a supergadget stolen by Ukrainian gangsters. Cue the standard non-stop chases and fights, with a few touches of relief provided by the turns of Hugh Grant as Simmonds reeling out pontific pronouncements on the real nature of the world in a Cockneyish accent, Statham with his trademark laconic asides and Josh Hartnett as a gormless Hollywood superstar roped in to help with the 'ruse', which is hardly an ingenious one, but then you wouldn't have expected much more from Ritchie. Harmless fun, but a bit more ambition wouldn't go amiss, though.

5/10

The Pale Blue Eye (Scott Cooper, 2022)

The setting may be unusual for a 19th century crime thriller, as for once we're not in a murky London but the West Point military academy in America. This is immediately dealt with by making Edgar Allan Poe one of the two principal characters and having an almost entirely English cast essay an approximation of a Transatlantic accent which may just about be feasible for a snooty East Coast establishment in1830. On top of this, able cinematography of snowy woods and dark interiors, and a troubled Christian Bale as Augustus Landor, the investigator of grisly killings at the academy, certainly ensure that a potent atmosphere for a period murder mystery is in place.

As for the actual plot, it promises much as Poe bombards Landor with hyperloquacious hypotheses about the murders and gradually the notion of occultists as the culprits, rather than just a serial killer, is introduced. But then it goes too far down that track, too fast and becomes derailed. A shame, since that means an ultimate waste of the ample resources and virtues on show.

5/10

The Strays ( (Nathaniel Martello-White, 2023)

Suffering from unspecified discrimination in an urban environment and avoiding contact with her husband, a woman of mixed ethnicity walks out of her house and there is an instant shift to "years later" and a glaringly wealthy small village, where she is now ensconced in a large house with a white husband, teenage kids and a job as the deputy head of a public school. She has adopted a home counties accent, wears wigs to appear straight-haired and talks with the faux empathy of a Tory politician, even to her children. She is in utter denial of her background and as the story progresses it becomes clear that we're dealing with not just a choice, but a mental illness. This is rapidly aggravated when a young black man and woman turn up in the village, befriending her children, For a while this works as a thriller as their motives are kept clouded and the director gets to make some astute points about racial identity and social status too. But then it shows through that Martello-White is an actor directing his first feature, with an inadequate sense of discipline when it comes to structure: the thriller and sociopolitical elements ultimately get in each other's way, the final act becoming unhelpfully reminiscent of Haneke's Funny Games. It does also have to be pointed out that it shoots itself in the foot with the casting alone: why has a black director decided to employ the one-drop rule, thereby making the relationships presented completely implausible, particularly when the film explicitly deals with race as a subject matter?
There are glimpses of promise here, particularly in the unconventional visual style and observations of telling details, but the overall result is frustrating.

4/10

See How They Run (Tom George, 2022)

Spoofing Agatha Christie is very much shooting fish in a barrel, and to be fair, See How They Run is fully cognisant of this and so opts for not just dialling up the silliness, but deconstructing itself as it goes along, not so much breaching the fourth wall as taking a wrecking ball to it. Sam Rockwell, cautiously essaying an English accent with a modicum of success as a wearied London policeman investigating the murder of an American film director backstage at the 100th performance of The Mousetrap, is ideal in the role and Saoirse Ronan as the rookie he's saddled with as a partner by his PR-obsessed boss, proves a great comic foil to him. The recreation of the London of 1953, facilitated by the coronavirus having emptied public areas at the time of filming, is also a strong suit. It doesn't try to to go down the full-blooded murder mystery route and settles instead for witty dialogue, but a good time is clearly had by all of the quality cast.

6/10   

Nomadland (2023 (Chloé Zhao, 2020)

Based on a non-fiction work telling the stories of people across America effectively made jobless and homeless by cold economics and choosing to range across the country from one transitory job to another, finding a loose sense of community along the way, Nomadland is as pensive and comfortless as its subject matter requires.With no promise of a happy ending and correspondingly no histrionics for dramatic effect, it just seeks to tell us things as they are. Frances McDormand as the central character, recently widowed and stoic, is just perfect, utterly unmannered casting, facilitating the use of real-life nomads around her instead of actors. Of course there will have been a liberal sense of the duty of the privileged behind many of the awards that the film picked up, but they also have to be seen as a recognition of something in real danger of being lost amidst the fanfare of blockbusters: a real story, patiently told. The lambent cinematography of impassive prairies and weathered faces also greatly assists in engagement with the lot of the protagonists.

7/10

Prey (Dan Trachtenberg, 2022)

Action and horror franchises just love having a seemingly unkillable enemy that can be brought out again and again to menace a new set of victims, but the fifth film in the Predator series proper appears to have bitten off more than it can chew, pitting another of the relentless hunters, kitted out with its space-tech arsenal, against Comanches armed with bows and tomahawks in 1719.

Accordingly, it carves its way through all the braves who confront it and an encampment of nasty French trappers whose muskets also prove useless, until only the heroine remains, a feisty and resourceful teenage girl, who of course no-one listened to until it was too late.

It's certainly novel to have a main cast of native Americans of sorts in this genre, and the utter mismatch between hunter and prey calls for more invention than usual. But apart from that this is still just a monster mayhem feature, with cinematography which veers between some beautifully-lit shots and an annoying habit of repeating the same moment over and over in the action sequences, to unhelpfully confusing effect. Clearly better than Predators, but still not a very pointful exercise.

5/10

 

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (James Gunn, 2023)

 

MCU #32 eradicates any residual doubt that this is solidly a Disney product. It has even more cute talking animals than before, even less bothersome darkness despite a pretence of offering something serious for adults too in the shape of the baddie, a genetic engineer called the High Evolutionary who exterminates unworthy species in an attempt to create 'perfection' and even more merchandising opportunities for kiddies across the board. The plot, if there can be said to be one, consists of the bickering team trying to save the life of their raccoon friend through a mission that naturally involves endless busy but unexciting CGI battles and explosions. It overstays its welcome by an hour, even with the sustaining liveliness of the comic interplay between the heroes, and the apparent disbandment of the crew at the end is so very welcome. Too much popcorn will make you sick.

5/10 

Venom: Let there Be Carnage (Andy Serkis, 2021)

Somewhat unsurprisingly, given the commercial success of the first film in the franchise, we get a second instalment. More surprisingly, given the artistic poverty of the concept, this has Andy Serkis at the helm and Tom Hardy not just starring again, but also involved in the script and production. You'd have thought they'd have known better. As it is, it's a CGI bombardment with the human-symbiote antihero taking on his villainous counterpart, the hybrid offspring of the original symbiote crossed with a psychopath on death row, and in typical superhero adversary fashion, just the same as the protagonist, except bigger and meaner. The only relief to be had from the tedious pagga is the deft quipping between the hero and his amoral other half, which has been much boosted and thereby raises it above the level of the first film.

5/10

They Cloned Tyrone (Juel Taylor, 2023)

A drug dealer, a pimp and a prostitute in an all-black neighbourhood uncover a sinister conspiracy of social control over their community. The fact that the three are blaxploitation archetypes proves to be a fundamental part of what they unearth, as the film takes an abrupt turn into Soylent Green/Stepford Wives territory.

Much of the appeal of They Cloned Tyrone, apart from the comic interplay between the trio, peppered with every pop culture refence imaginable, lies in its splicing of genres that don't often meet. It's not so much that the individual components are new, but the blend certainly is, and makes for an entertaining ride which also manages to make serious points about the sense of the ghetto and boundaries laid down by race and background in the U.S. being a prison you can't escape from, thereby adding a layer to the satirically-tinged sci-fi set-up.

6/10

Living (Oliver Hermanus, 2022)

Whilst I'm no fan of remakes per se, largely due to the constant bastardisation of foreign originals by Hollywood to make them palatable for the U.S. audience and because the studios are too bereft of ideas themselves, every so often the source is so far removed in culture and time that it might just be an excusable act. Here, the source is Kurosawa's Ikiru from 1952, transposing the story of a grey Tokyo bureaucrat who only learns to live when he finds out he has terminal cancer to London in the same era. The plot sticks so closely to the original, that all that needs to be changed is the language and minutiae of the environment for it to ring true.

Of course, having Bill Nighy on top form in the wan lead role virtually guarantees that it will be no debasement, but other small tweaks also add to, rather than subtract from, the whole: the subtle use of a colour palette that plays endless shades of grey against period hypercolour flashes, understated turns of phrase to wryly satirical effect, such as the repeated refrain "we can keep it here for now" whenever a new document is forwarded to Nighy's office by the byzantine bureaucracy, and the toxic omnipresence of the social stratification of the time also plays a significant part.

All in all, a remake well worth doing which becomes quite affecting as it unfolds.

8/10

Det norske hus (Jan Vardøen, 2016)

An Iranian man arrives in a remote part of Norway on a bicycle, seeking to pass a series of tests to gain asylum. We're very soon disabused of the notion that this is a factual representation of the process as the tests grow increasingly more bizarre: it's a Kafkaesque satire of the Norwegian immigration system, at some turns grotesque with the lingering possibility that some of the hoops he has to jump through may be not that far removed from real life after all, and at others very funny in their sheer ludicrosity, such as when the panel of judges closely watches every step of the applicant's attempt to make a sandwich in the approved Norwegian fashion. Droll and salutary too, House of Norway is a rare case of a film that would also well withstand being remade for any other market because of its wealth of culturally-specific references that its comedy is dependent on, and its universal applicability with regard to ideas of  nationality and the immigrant experience.

6/10

Dating Amber (David Freyne, 2020)

Two teenagers in small-town Ireland in 1995 face constant homophobic jibes at school for not chasing the opposite sex, so they adopt the front of being boyfriend and girlfriend so that they are left in peace. Of course, the arrangement doesn't run smoothly, but through visits to gay establishments in Dublin even he starts to accept his sexuality, until she is outed by the priest of their home town.

Coming out/coming of age stories cannot really offer any narrative surprises, but what sets Dating Amber apart from the crowd is its vitality and humour, making it easy to root for the beleaguered duo.

6/10

Rye Lane (Raine-Allen Miller, 2023)

It would be neat and tidy to sum this up as a Richard Curtis film set in Peckham and Brixton, Notting Hill with a young black cast, and it is indeed a breezy rom-com. But a far better point of reference is Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, with two very recently-dumped people meeting at an art exhibition and bonding quickly and deeply over the next few days. Thereafter, any discord is sure to be no obstacle to a happy end, but there's nothing cloying about this certainty. The two protagonists are highly engaging and the tone skips assuredly between pragmatic and riotously funny all the way through. The director and lead actors are definitely worth keeping an eye on.

7/10

Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021)

Astronomers Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence discover a huge comet on a course to collide with Earth six months down the line, and set about trying to convince the U.S. Government to take action to stop it. However the President is only interested in the coming elections, and the media treat their warnings of imminent global apocalypse as just too heavy for their entertainment output, so the while DiCaprio's character caves in and grabs his 15 seconds of fame, Lawrence's ends up a universal object of ridicule for letting her sense of despair show through in public.

It soon becomes patently obvious that the improbable comet is just a metaphor for climate change to allow the makers to forcibly, unambiguously drive home the point of the utter idiocy of those who deny it because they can't see it or understand it, because it's all just part of another 'fake news' conspiracy to them and because it's gloomy rather than fun and therefore surely the work of the 'wokerati'. So what's truly terrifying here isn't at all the contrived device of the doomsday comet, but the depressing credibility of the facile, moronic, self-serving political and public response to the crisis. The film can certainly be accused of heavy-handedness and bringing the big guns to bear on the viewer, such as Meryl Streep's scarily Trumpesque President, Mark Rylance's Zuckerberg/Musk self-styled tech visionary and a host of other OTT big-name cameos is almost overkill. But the ire is so justifiable and necessary that some degree of clumsiness is forgivable.

6/10 

Glass Onion (Rian Johnson, 2022)

The Southern gent master detective Benoit Blanc is back, now apparently Daniel Craig's new day job after Bond. The director has pragmatically decided not to change the formula at all from Knives Out, so it's another modernised Agatha Christie set-up, the country house replaced by the island estate of tech billionaire Miles Bron, who invites an assortment of his friends there for the weekend to play a murder mystery game. Naturally twists ensue as the contorted, unhealthy nature of the guests' connections to their host is gradually revealed. Craig's accent is even thicker than before and Edward Norton makes for a particularly contemptible villain as the vain, self-serving Bron, clearly modelled with relish on the likes of Elon Musk. It's less of a crime puzzle than a multi-pronged assault on the vapidity of the business, celebrity and media world, jam-packed with surprise cameos, but diverting enough for all that.

6/10

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (Peyton Reed, 2023)

MCU #31, and quite surplus to requirements. The character of Ant-Man simply doesn't have the legs, relying entirely on Paul Rudd's likability and the notion that the subatomic universe is an interesting place to eplore. It is not, proven by the two hours we have to spend trapped there with the Lang and Pym families while another generic creation-threatening villain in the form of Kang the Conqueror turns up to menace them aimlessly. Cue a deluge of nonsensical CGI battles between the baddie's legions and the daftly-conceptualised denizens of the quantum realm. There is wit, but it's all allocated to the dialogue, leaving the plot without any and therefore the whole exercise a pointless one.

4/10

I onde dager (Tommy Wirkola, 2021)

An unhappy Swedish-Norwegian couple go to a remote cabin for the weekend with the sole intention of killing each other. So far, so The War of the Roses, but this being Nordic and with the director of schlock horror films such as Dead Snow at the helm, The Trip is guaranteed to be both considerably darker and more ludicrously violent than that. Noomi Rapace and Aksel Hennie give it a decent shot as the bitter duo, but when the cabin is invaded by three fugitive killers, it all unravels rather swiftly, like a Grand Guignol Funny Games. Inoffensive, for all it tries its bloody hardest to offend, but quite disposable.

4/10

Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund, 2022)

Östlund follows up 2017's estimable and startling The Square with something that at first appears to be less complex, opening with some easy jabs at the triteness of the fashion industry and social media influencers, then moving onto the equally easy target of the idle, entitled and amoral rich on a luxury cruise ship. Presented with such an open goal, the vitriolic barbs come thick and fast, with the rich passengers fully exploiting their position to humiliate the crew, who concomitantly accept their lot as serfs. A sea change is brewing, and accordingly, and actual storm breaks out which demolishes the superior airs of the passengers in a graphic and vicarious manner, the Marxist captain emerging from his cabin to get his own back on the cargo he depends on. Then another calamity in the form of a pirate attack leaves a small band of surviving passengers and crew on a desert island and the former social order is swiftly overturned.

It's tempting to think that Östlund got his second Palme d'Or at Cannes for this because the jury were simply too scared of being seen as anything akin to the primary subjects that draw the director's fire. But that would be reductionist: as on many occasions before, Östlund has oodles to say about social mores and disparities, and duly puts forth his arguments on a platter so skilfully as to pick up quite enough points for the award.

Where the film does fall somewhat short is in not nailing its colours to any mast since committing itself would naturally lead to vulnerability. This is reflected in a maddeningly open-ended denouement. But any frustration felt at this has to be offset against the fact that the two and a half hours to get there have provided so much sustenance.

7/10

Nobody (Ilya Naishuller, 2021)

It's clearly last chance saloon for Bob Odenkirk to be an action hero, and he does succeed here in making us forget Saul Goodman within 15 minutes, which seemed improbable at the start, with him stuck in a dull 9-5 suburban family existence, briefly upset by a botched burglary attempt on their house.

Then he cracks, and the ride into mayhem begins. A point of comparison would at first be Death Wish, but really what manner of beast this turns out to be is in the vein of  Oldboy, The Punisher and John Wick. I shouldn't have been surprised if I'd remembered that the director was also behind Hardcore Henry, which had little else than an ambition to hit the highest on-screen kill count in history, but Odenkirk's genial presence both lulls you into a false sense of security and elevates what follows far beyond the norm for the genre, since he's plainly not a run-of-the-mill killing machine.

6/10

Zombieland: Double Tap (Ruben Fleischer, 2019)

The brain-blowing bunch are back, as you knew they would be, with the same sure-fire combo of quip-splat-quip-splat. Again, it takes a devoted watcher of the undead-killing genre and fratboy humour/pop culture refence-laden Family Guy fare to enjoy this, which I confess to being at times (mind you, switching your brain off does leave zombies nothing to hanker after). The comic interludes evenly spaced between the carnage scenes are at least enjoyable, although probably wouldn't work if it wasn't for the likable cast, this time departing residence in the White House on a pilgrimage to Graceland. It passes the time, and the makers don't pretend to be too bothered about anything more, giving the viewers what they want.

5/10

The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022)

On a small island off the west coast or Ireland in 1923, Pádraic (Colin Farrell) meets his best friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson) for their regular drink to be told that he doesn't like him any more, without any further explanation. This sends Pádraic into a spin as he tries to find out what he has done to be shunned out of the blue, and then Colm takes increasingly draconian actions to emphasise the point that he wants nothing more to do with him.

On one level, this is a dark comedy, with wry, aphoristic asides crossing over into existential observations. Then there's also the backdrop of the Irish Civil War on the mainland, and the fact that Inisherin means 'the island of Ireland' leaves us in no doubt that the sudden rift between the two men is meant to mirror that in the country as a whole. But this isn't hammered home: like so much else in this nuanced and multi-faceted film, from the local priest doubling as the village shrink and the confining nature of living in an incestuously small community where everyone knows what everyone else is doing, to posterity and the purpose of life itself, it's just another layer that is left up to the viewer  to engage with or bypass. The twin leads, reunited by the director for the first time since 2008's In Bruges, play off each other unforcedly and convincingly, and thereby create a small, unpretentious gem of a whole. It deserved every one of the many accolades that it garnered.

8/10

Oxygène (Alexandre Aja, 2021)

A woman wakes to find herself locked in a cryogenic capsule with no memory of her identity or how she got there, and a call centre-like computer voice offering no real help except to give her constant updates on how little air she has left. Sound familiar? Yes, it's 2010's Buried with a sci-fi twist, unsurprising as the French are almost as fixated on futurising everything as the Japanese are, plus the amnesia, so we're as much in the dark as Mélanie Laurent's character is about what's going on and follow her going through the same stages as Ryan Reynolds does in the former film, from denial to anger, determination and despair. But Oxygen brings nothing more to the table apart from Laurent's air-depleting bouts of screaming hysteria and the riddle of who, where and when she actually is. A lot to work through, then, but unfortunately the eventual resolution falls quite flat.

5/10

White Noise (Noah Baumbach, 2022)

Following on from 2019's more straightforward and surprisingly poignant Marriage Story, here Baumbach decides to throw absolutely everything into the pot, so the basic set-up of an overly loquacious family of an anxious academic, his wife with a secret and their cleverclogs children is overlaid with an ecocatastrophe, parallels drawn between Elvis and Hitler, right-wing conspiracy theorists, religious and philosophical musings about the nature of death, sensations of déjà vu, ADHD, the cult of self-medication, modern information overload and mindless consumerism. Amongst other things. The influence of late '70s Woody Allen, Baumbach's self-professed biggest one, is clearly still there, most particularly in the preponderance of rapid-fire intellectualising conversations that veer wildly from topic to topic, but by now Baumbach  has decided to try to cover everything. The overall result is definitively the white noise of the title, so mission achieved in a sense, and the sheer audacity is quite something to behold. While the flitting may grate at many junctures, it never stops being watchable. This is considerably helped by the director casting his stalwart regular, a quite unrecognisable Adam Driver, in the role of the middle-aged father.

In short, cinematic Marmite. Which I like.

7/10

Three Thousand Years of Longing (George Miller, 2022)

It's safe to say that the directorial career of George Miller has been an eclectic one. Mad Max and all its sequels, Lorenzo's Oil, Babe: Pig in the City and now Tilda Swinton as a professor of narratology who releases the djinn Idris Elba from a bottle she buys in Istanbul, and then we're off with him telling his story over the last 3,000 years, quite clearly aiming to convince her to make the three earnest wishes that will set him free for good that while she insists that she is perfectly content with her life.

The tales he tells, all set in the Middle East and illustrating human desires, folly and cruelty, are somewhat overburdened by the opulent visuals, but the interplay between Swinton and Elba is captivating, with her accusing him of being a trickster as in all classical stories about djinns and him retorting by effectively questioning her very humanity. Certainly an uncommon premise for a romantic fantasy, it's chaotic as a whole, but the two leads hold it together.

6/10 

Eternals (Chloé Zhao, 2021)

The MCU takes its 26th outing to deal with characters less known to the general public, a bunch of superpowered immortals tasked with protecting Earth from their scheming counterparts. A two-and-a-half hour bombardment of the usual flying, zapping and fighting ensues, with oodles of utter hokum vaguely linked to mankind's mythology. It's both dependent on a good cast for the viewer's goodwill and also wastes them, so all there really is to keep you going is some pretty cinematography and a few nuggets of novelty such as the first superhero fight to take place at Camden Lock. And this, highly incongruously, from the director of the arthouse hit Nomadland, surely only here for a fat paycheque. Meh.

4/10

Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, 2022)

 

Seven Oscars is a compelling argument for at least giving a film the time of day. Unfortunately, Everything Everywhere All at Once is quite possibly the worst example ever witnessed of how meaningless the Academy Awards really are. The grounds for the awards are, firstly, blatant tokenism: the lead characters are all Chinese Americans and the film vaguely gestures at saying something about the immigrant experience. Then it cashes in on the faddish, currently massively overused notion of alternative universes, with Michelle Yeoh's protagonist jumping in swift succession from one to another, gathering resources from the lives of each of her parallel selves while being pursued by her moody daughter who has done the same. Interspersed with all of this is switching constantly between any novelty medium or genre you can name, including martial arts (of course), animation and puerile comedy, lest those with zero attention spans get bored or anyone twigs onto the fact that it really has nothing to say. But Academy voters cannot admit being confused, so it has to be plauded as being a virtuoso work of diverse genius, encapsulating the 'everything' promised by the title. And naturally there's also a reassuringly feelgood ending, with the whole philosophical life lesson ending up as 'be happy with what you've got', after nearly two and a half hours frenetic sensory bombardment. Yes, it's visually imaginative, but when that serves no purpose, it's nowhere near enough.

4/10

Prospect (Zeek Earl & Chris Caldwell, 2018)

 

An odd little fish, this. In the age of mega-budget FX-heavy sci-fi blockbusters, it's highly uncommon for indie filmmakers to venture into the genre at all, let alone the extraterrestrial future subgenre. Nevertheless, we're asked to take on faith that the characters of Prospect, a father and daughter looking for treasure, are on a biohazard-filled alien planet and not just the American national park which it was filmed in, and their spaceship and tools, which would have looked dated even in the 1970s, somehow got them there.

So the film has to fall back on plot, performances and dialogue, and while there are no surprises in terms of how the story turns once the protagonists' venture quickly heads south, is just about stands up on the strength of the latter two aspects, particularly a pre-The Mandalorian Pedro Pascal as smooth-talking chancer in the mould of Tom Hanks in the remake of The Ladykillers. It's at least diverting and proves that there is still hope for sci-fi aspirants outside the big studio system.

5/10

Bullet Train (David Leitch, 2022)

One should take exception to Hollywood plundering a Japanese novel with Japanese characters in a Japanese setting and populating it instead with American stars, as they commonly do, but it's hard to imagine that a wholly authentic native version of a plot just about assassins on the Shinkansen trying to do away with each other could be all that enjoyable. Casting Brad Pitt as the lead, a hitman coming back to work from a protracted spiritual retreat, is a scream, proving once again that his greatest aptitude actually lies in comedy, just as in the case of his pal George Clooney. And the able cast around him are given stacks of choice lines and personality quirks to work with too,  such as one of them basing his whole judgement of people on Thomas the Tank Engine. Of course the numerous deaths on the way are as as Grand Guignol as anything, but they are inventive enough to slot neatly into the comedy. An unexpectedly guilty treat, provided you are sold on the idea of Snatch put into a blender with Kill Bill and Burn After Reading.

6/10 

Dune: Part One (Denis Villeneuve, 2021)

 

Well, as seen in the outcry by Tolkienistas over the Rings of Power TV series, spraying real ale into their cardigans over each tedious detail of the author's painstakingly crafted world skipped in favour of making the story actually dramatically work on screen, so too did Lynch's condensed 1984 version of Frank Herbert's draw the fire of obsessive fans for mining the source for the outright weirdness therein and jettisoning the chaff. Villeneuve takes a much more cautiously reverential approach, so the end result is, as with his Blade Runner 2049, something more ponderous than its predecessor, relying heavily on entrancing visuals and a brooding atmosphere.  With the story of the novel only half told in two and a half hours, the second part will naturally follow soon and will not be unwelcome, given that it does represent an antidote of sorts to all the pervasive hyperactive sci-fi around, but Herbert's saga hardly has the legs to sustain a franchise that runs beyond that point.

6/10

The Batman (Matt Reeves, 2022)

Since Christopher Nolan left the building for good and the attempt at shoehorning Batman into the primary-colour fantasy world of the Justice League with stolid Ben Affleck in the role fell flat on its face, it's time for yet another reboot of the DCEU's most layered protagonist. Emo is now the way to go, and that Robert Pattinson can certainly do, but it's an all-round improvement, with the fewest gadgets on show of any Batman film, and being as close to realistic action and violence as the genre can possibly allow. Even the daft batgrowl of Nolan's films is replaced with Pattinson talking so softly that it forces the viewer to actually pay attention to what he's saying, and the villains, likewise, are stripped of their most cartoonish elements to good effect, including the Riddler, who Batman has to stop from sending the city into chaos by exposing and killing all the agents of corruption within its administration. Not quite just a regulation nutjob, but one with an agenda twisted by America's current fixation with the notions of empty promises and fake news.

It's definitely overlong, which now seems to be the norm for the big hitters in the superhero field, but gets by on not insulting the intelligence of the audience and some captivating visuals in the midst of the predominant murkiness. 

7/10

Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins, 2020)

Considering the paucity of recognisable characters the DCEU  has in comparison with the MCU, it's pretty futile to attempt to compete any more. It won't stop them trying to get a small slice of the massive superhero franchise cake, though. And since the first Wonder Woman film did make a tidy profit, turning out another was a foregone conclusion.

But a decent script would have helped, with the heroine now having progressed to 1984 and having to deal with a dodgy businessman who uses the power of a magical artifact that grants anyone who touches it one wish to - drumroll please - rule the world. And of course the wishes have horrendous adverse effects too, leading to a neat set of bland moral lessons to be drawn once the dust has settled, after two and a half hours of nothing much to engage the mind except spotting the numerous infringements of the film's own internal logic. Gal Gadot still makes for a strong lead and there are some entertaining scenes playing on the bewilderment of her miraculously resurrected lover from 70 years before with the world of the '80s, but that's just about all.

5/10

Mary Poppins Returns (Rob Marshall, 2018)

 

54 years after Mary Poppins, Disney finally get around to giving us a sequel. Thank God they didn't go for a reboot, although it replicates the flavour of the original so closely, from the plot to the songs and the hand-drawn animation in the cartoon sequences (in stark contrast to the sterile CGI of most modern Disney productions), that it hardly differs from one.

As before, Mary Poppins is summoned to guide the Banks family out of choppy waters when they face eviction from their house. She takes charge of the children through the tried and tested combination of a firm hand and leading them on fantastical adventures, and  naturally a happy end is never in doubt. The performances by the children, thankfully never quite too cloyingly winsome, Emily Blunt as the titular nanny, ably channelling Julie Andrews, though with steelier undertones and Lin-Manuel Miranda as their Cockney jack-of-all-trades helper, managing the accent a whole lot more convicningly than Dick Van Dyke's legendary mangling of it in the original film, are an obvious strong suit. Spotting cameos from a panoply of veteran stars is also pleasingly diverting.

But a musical will ultimately stand or fall by its songs, so while Mary Poppins Returns is unable to provide any that will linger in the memory as its predecessor did, the choreography of the dance numbers is perky and the sheer wit of the lyrics is a pleasure too. 

In short, not a disappointment or defilement by any means.

6/10

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Ryan Coogler, 2022)

 Another MCU franchise trundles on, unsurprising considering the huge commercial success of the first instalment and it's very much a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", with all the same principal protagonists, apart from the original hero played by the sadly-deceased Chadwick Boseman. The film milks his memory for all it's worth, and then moves on to introducing a new antagonist in the form of Namor, the king of a sub-aquatic civilisation with a bee in his bonnet about the possibility of the greedy surface nations acquiring the super-mineral vibranium, the source of both Wakanda's and his people's power and security.

It is sad to see how many people will insist on this again being somehow fresh and divergent from the superhero film norm, when all that's actually different is that the majority of the cast are black. That aside, we still get non-Europeans mostly played by British and American actors, interminable and repetitive fight scenes, oodles of unimaginative CGI (fittingly, the sub-aquatics are really just Na'vi underwater) and all this built on the infantile notion that all a nation needs to become technologically and socially advanced is to be gifted one natural mega-resource. Don't believe the hype.

5/10

Jäniksen vuosi (Risto Jarva, 1977)

 

The first screen adaptation of Arto Paasilinna's picaresque novel (followed by Christopher Lambert in the somewhat slipshod  Le lièvre de Vatanen in 2006), The Year of the Hare follows Kaarlo Vatanen, who quits his job in deodorant advertising to live a quiet life in the wilds of Finland with a hare that he adopts after it's hit by his colleague's car. However the quiet life proves difficult to find, even in the middle of nowhere, being disturbed in turn by the police, aggressive landowners, backwoods oddballs and irritating tourists who want to meet a real hermit.

The patient pacing of the film allows the novel's blend of wry humour and philosophical contemplation to come through intact, and thereby makes a persuasive case for following the sympathetic protagonist's example to likewise give up on the rat race altogether.

7/10