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