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