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