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