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