Subservience (S.K. Dale, 2024)

 

In the near furure, humans are being replaced by lifelike androids, not just at work but increasingly at home too. Sound familiar? Yes. it's an American film version of the British TV series Humans, which was itself a remake of the Swedish Äkta människor. As is usually the case with U.S. rip-offs of foreign source material, the subtleties have been erased and what was a fairly complex examination of the theme of artificial intelligence and what constitutes actual sentient life has been turned into a thriller that goes all the way to a slasher final chapter.  Megan Fox does actually prove good casting for once, already being self-confessedly artificial as a screen persona, as the domestic servant android who reprograms herself and becomes jealous in a Star Trek "what is this thing you humans call love?" manner, and then full-blown homicidal, of course. But that's all there is, a plastic simulacrum of an idea.

3/10 

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (Anthony Fabian, 2022)

A film straight out of yesteryear, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris sets its stall up as a feelgood comedy with just a slight edge. The ever-dependable Lesley Manville plays Mrs. Harris, a widowed cleaner for the rich in the London of 1957, with no small aplomb. She is endlessly optimistic and trusting and puts up with no end of classist snobbery, both from her English clients and from the haughty director of Christian Dior (a role that fits Isabelle Huppert like a glove), once she has got to Paris to buy the dress of her dreams with the aid of an unexpected windfall after a succession of self-inflicted mishaps.

It is a sugary concoction, the events improbable and Paris a fantastical picture postcard, all clearly aimed at appealing to telescopic tourists, particularly American ones. But it's impossible to avoid rooting for Manville's feisty underdog and coming away smiling.

7/10

Get Duked! (Ninian Doff, 2019)

Three miscreant teenagers, joined by a well-behaved fourth, are taken by their teacher to the Hinghlands to complete the Duke of Edinburgh Award challenge of a two-day trek. They immediately prove utterly clueless in the wilderness environment and things get a lot worse very quickly when a toff in a mask starts hunting them as 'vermin to be culled' with a rifle. In their flight they come across local farmers who improbably declare the boy with rapper aspirations a star and help them chase off the murderous aristocrats.

Plenty of hash and magic mushrooms are consumed along the way, resulting in long tripped-out sequences and the local police, only after a notorious bread thief, have little inkling of what's actually going on. The humour and class satire are broad, to put it mildly, but its total irreverence just about saves it from being utterly disposable, as does Eddie Izzard's OTT performance as the psycho duke with the gun. It's unsophisticated but trashily diverting fare.

5/10

Death on the Nile (Kenneth Branagh, 2022)

Branagh's playing around at being Poirot would always get a second go, and so here it is. What it does do dfferently from the Peter Ustinov classic is creating a preamble to explain the passengers on the boat and Poirot himself, as a damaged WWI veteran who has to solve multiple murders. No real changes to the 1978 version then, but at least it comes up with a decent cast (including, quite oddly, French and Saunders). The faked Egyptian setting doesn't get much of a look in, but Agatha Christie wasn't ever too concerned with that, so the film is just dutifully following the source text. The director could do with moving away from remakes, though, since while he does the job competently enough, a good part of the audience already knows what's going to happen and this rather takes away the key selling point of a whodunit.

6/10

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (Wes Ball, 2024)

The Planet of the Apes reboot franchise reaches its fourth part, and ominously this time the director is the hack behind the Maze Runner trilogy, which was a yet another poor cash-in on the success of The Hunger Games.

300 years after the death of Caesar, the first intelligent ape, apes in scattered settlements dominate Earth, while the few remaining humans are mute scavengers. So, pretty much the set-up of the 1968 film when the astronauts arrived there, and the film milks references to the source for all they're worth, the protagonists even naming a young human female they come across 'Nova'. The chimpanzees are peaceful and the gorillas are violently aggressive, the lead character Noa being one of the former, on a quest to get back to his clan and finding an ape labour camp ruled by a megalomaniac bonobo instead.

While it succeeds in making the motion-capture ape cast engagingly real, the bare-bones plot in no way justifies the film's running time of nearly two and a half hours and no amount of pant-hooting and CGI leaping around can cover that up. This franchise has to end now.

5/10

1917 (Sam Mendes, 2019)

Two soldiers are tasked with delivering a message to a frontline unit about to attack the Germans, but in fact walking into a trap Prompt delivery of the message could save 1,600 British servicemen, so they cut through hazardous no man's land, a waste of barbed wire, craters and corpses.

Not too many modern war films deal with the First World War since its relentless, mindless meatgrinder progression leaves no room for tactical masterstrokes, daring missions or even moral high ground. This means that the key theme can be contemplations of futility instead of any pressure to slavishly work through historical events in order. 2017 achieves this ably, and as ever, the luminous photography of Roger Deakins is truly astonishing.

8/10

1408 (Mikael Hafström, 2007)

A writer whose sole topic is supposedly haunted locations checks into a New York hotel, insisting on staying in a room in which 56 people have died suddenly and bizarrely over the years. The hotel manager fails to dissuade him and subsequently the writer's sanity in the titular room degenerates rapidly under a constant bombardment of lifelike hallucinations. Nor does the viewer soon know either what is meant to be real or what is nightmare, and a succession of false endings ensues, with no certainty of wheteher he is still in the room or outside.

It's no surprise to learn that, being about a hotel room possessed by a malevolent presence and a protagonist driven insane by it, the original story was penned by Stephen King. While nowhere near as nuanced and accomplished as The Shining, it does succeed at generating scares effectively, and John Cusack's strong performance as the writer, initially cocksure and then terrified, is a big asset.

6/10

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (David Yates, 2022)

The Harry Potter prequel trilogy reaches its conclusion, and not a moment too soon. The megabudget on impressive FX and sets is really the key selling point, because the cursory storyline of Hogwarts going after the villain Grindelwald, Mads Mikkelsen now replacing Johnny Depp in the role without any explanation doesn't justify the running time of well over two hours. As usual, wands, surely the crappest weapon in sci-fi or fantasy. are wielded endlessly like ersatz guns and there are more weird and wonderful mythical creatures to behold. But it's a terrible waste of good actors and time. Surely even the kids are bored by now.

4/10

After the Flames: An Apocalypse Anthology (Velton J. Lishke, Johan Earl, Ronald J. Wright, Alexander Gordon Smith, Radheya Jegathevar & D.W. Hoppson, 2020)

Seven short mini-budget films by six directors, sharing the vague theme of a post-apocalyptic world. The cause of the end of days ranges from zombies to cannibals, alien invasion and the destruction of the entire planet. The stories are framed by being presented as told by a bunch of kids sitting around, in campfire fashion, trying to impress each other. The framing device is actually more entertaining and better scripted than the films themselves, which come up with nothing of great invention or import. This is a shame because without money to back it up, indie cinema is wholly dependent on ideas.

4/10

The Green Knight (David Lowery, 2021)

Dev Patel stars in an adaptation of the 14th-dentury poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain setting out on a quest to gain honour and knighthood by facing the supernatural being of the title and his own reciprocal decapitation. He is beset by numerous challenges on his journey, from thieves to a saint, a talking fox and lecherous nobles.

As it is based on a poem, the plot scarcely fills the back of a napkin, and so it's padded out to over two hours by moving at a glacial pace with a sparsity of dialogue and sumptuous images. It does try to say something about the vain futility of striving for heroism, but takes its sweet time to do so. Unconventional, but certainly not unmissable.

5/10

Operation Mincemeat (John Madden, 2021)

Based on the true story of an elaborate plot by British intelligence to fool the Germans into thinking the Allies were about to invade Greece instead of Sicily in 1943, this is a war film and espionage film not based on the ground where the fighting takes place, but in the offices where the planning is done. A corpse is found and given a full false identity, to be dumped off the Spanish coast with fake documents to substantiate the target of the assault. Colin Firth leads as the officer in charge of the operation, duty-driven and constantly anxious about its success.

There was a risk that it could have ended up feeling stagebound, but the complex story and dry wit of the dialogue put paid to that. That, and the novelty of seeing how much wars are actually decided behind closed doors instead of through pyrotechnics and blood.

6/10

Deadpool & Wolverine (Shawn Levy, 2024)

This was bound to happen as the various franchises of the MCU get fused, bringing the X-Men in along with rogue elements such as Deadpool by utilising the multiverse concept introduced in Doctor Strange. So real-life chums Reynolds and Jackman, both playing their unkillable hero characters, get to rib each other on screen for two hours while seeking to save the timeline in which the latter's death in Logan has sparked off the impending end of that reality.

This being essentially a third instalment of the Deadpool series, it means that no opportunity is passed by to play with breaking the fourth wall, the leads referring to each other's actual film careers, the studios bringing all of the MCU together and any other character in previous Marvel films. It's both campy fun on a meta level and very tiresome. There are glaringly obvious parallels with how Family Guy continually takes the piss out of Fox, its parent company, and you may put up with it out of goodwill towards the actors as well as the freshness of a superhero film just ridiculing the ludicrousness of all productions coming from the same stables, but this is also no way to go ahead in the longer term.

6/10

Past Lives (Celine Song, 2023)

A Korean boy and girl attending the same school are separated when her family emigrates to North America. 12 years later, she finds out he's been trying to track her down and they begin chatting again over the internet. They find they get on just as they did as children and plans are made to visit each other, but life events get in the way, including her getting married to a fellow writer, and it's another 12 years until he finally makes it to New York to see her again.

This is far removed from the conventional love story outline. But then it isn't really about romantic love, more about attachments that never die and how people end up where they are through both choices and circumstances. The director's touch is light and sensitive and the performances of the leads nuanced. No emotional climax is forced through dramatic turns, instead things are just allowed to develop organically. Past Lives is refreshingly free of histrionics and true to real life.

8/10

The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)

Holocaust days are here again, with a largely factual account of the life of the commandant of Auschwitz living with his family in contentment right next to the death camp. Martin Amis's source novel took more liberties with the facts, so Glazer went straight to the documented events. Unlike any previous film tackling the issue, The Zone of Interest shows nothing of the mass extermination going on on the other side of the wall. It's only heard as screams, dogs barking and gunshots, and the implied constant stench of the crematorium. The family, in their ornately flowery garden, are not only unaware of what's actually going on, but uninterested and quite deaf to it. Yes, the eternal banality of evil, but also a study of the evil of materialism and self-interest.

This means virtually nothing of consequence happens on screen, so it's dramatically very flat, but also means it works as a new approach to explaining how the atrocities could keep being committed undisturbed.

7/10

El hoyo 2 (Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, 2024)

With depressing predictability, given the success of The Platform in 2019 and that Gaztelu-Urrutia, as a fledgling director, obviously has no other strings to his bow, a sequel is rolled out that does nothing but regurgitate the plot of the first film. That being prisoners within an underground complex with hundreds of floors, dependent on the fairness of those on the floors above them to leave enough food for them to take as the platform carrying the food descends through the prison. No more religious, social or political ideas are added, but of course the horror quotient is pumped up even more as if that will suffice as compensation, like so many cover singers believing that stretching a single syllable across several notes and increasing the volume to 10 somehow adds soulfulness.

The Platform 2 will only do for hardcore horror fans who haven't seen the inspired first film, but for those who have, it should be avoided at all costs.

5/10

Brightburn (David Yarovesky, 2019)

A childless couple in the rural American Midwest have their prayers for a child answered when a spaceship crashes near their house and they find a baby inside. They raise the child, who starts developing superpowers as he grows up. Sound familiar? Yes, it's a retelling of the Superman origin story, which then deviates from that template with the prepubescent alien becoming subject to the malevolent influence of a recurring message from the wreckage of the spaceship and gradually turning evil as a result. After that the film switches to full horror mode and concomitantly loses direction or interest. A pity, because the original premise had more potential.

5/10

Wonka (Paul King, 2023)

The director of the rather marvellous first two Paddington films takes on a bigger task in competing with the fondly remembered Gene Wilder-led original and Tim Burton's competent remake. Yes, it is a prequel which does not bother to explain how the titular chocolatier became the deranged misanthrope of the previous films, Willy Wonka being thoroughly nice and full of dreams, but Timothée Chalamet, who proves to be highly adept at both singing and dancing, drives the musical on, supported by the ubiquitous Olivia Colman as one of the villains and Hugh Grant as a haughty Oompa Loompa, of all things, as well as a huge cast of British comic stalwarts.

Wonka arrives in town intending to set up his own chocolate shop and soon, through his naivety, ends up in serfdom in a launderette alongside a host of other unfortunates. Undeterred, he puts his mind to escaping and never gives up despite numerous setbacks caused by the malicious chocolate cartel running the town.

The musical numbers are endless and the production design is as garishly over the top as Wonka's confections, but it does all click, at least on a cute level for kids young and old.

6/10

Wicked Little Letters (Thea Sharrock, 2023)

In the wake of the First World War, a single Irish woman with a daughter arrives in the small town of Littlehampton and unsettles the local Christian community with her raucous behaviour and profuse swearing. Her particularly devout neighbours are most upset, and when local residents start getting scabrously abusive, anonymous letters, the immigrant is seen as the natural culprit.

The film is based on a true story, but also puts a blackly comic slant on it, while also not neglecting the poisonously sexist and conservative environment of the time. The mystery element of uncovering the real perpetrator of the hate mail isn't especially complex, but there are a fair few guffaws to be had and the interplay between Jessie Buckley as the single mother Rose, Olivia Colman as her religious neighbour Edith and Timothy Spall as Edith's tyrannical father is as compelling as you could wish for from such a cast. The F-word and C-word count is through the roof within minutes and continues at such an excessive rate that it actually serves to drive the film on relentlessly by steamrolling through all constrictive social mores. Better to ridicule such a society than to just remain aghast at it.

7/10

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (Guy Ritchie, 2024)

Guy Ritchie's films do have a Ronseal quality to them, so whatever the topic, cheeky chappies, cross-referential quipping and lashings of extreme violence are guaranteed. This time, the formula is applied to a loose retelling of the British Operation Postmaster during the Second World War, with Henry Cavill leading a regtag band to sink a cargo ship integral to the U-boat menace in an African port. Scene by scene, it resembles Inglourious Basterds so heavily that Ritchie really should be paying Tarantino royalties. The Germans are caricatures, there's a cat-and-mouse game between Til Schweiger's head Nazi and the sole Jew in the marauding party and interludes with an ahistorical Churchill, who orders the mission.

It starts promisingly enough, like a comic Boys' Own escapade, but the wilful disregard for historicity soon becomes grating, and then it descends into nothing but endless shooting and explosions. Any tension evaporates as it does so, and so does interest in the outcome. Perhaps time to take the director's toys away now.

5/10

The End We Start From (Mahalia Belo, 2023)

Jodie Comer plays a woman who has just given birth when most of the UK is flooded, precipitating a national food shortage and forcing people to leave the cities. Going to her in-laws doesn't prove a long-term solution, so she and her husband are forced to move on again until they're separated when the shelter they find will only take one parent per child. But the country is in utter chaos, so it doesn't end there either.

This would be a standard apocalypse scenario in most hands, and admittedly the breaking down of society is overplayed. However the set-up is more plausible than most due to the very real threat posed by global warming and the focus is squarely on the insecurity of a mother whose child is in danger. Comer also puts in a strong performance, totally erasing any associations with her psychopath role in Killing Eve. In summary, the whole is not perfect by any means, with a lot of dead air, but deserves recognition for trying a different tack to the genre norm.

6/10

Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve, 2024)

Unlike with most franchises, it was clear from the start that there would be a second instalment, so little exposition is needed to pick up where the story left off. Paul Atreides continues along his path to become messiah to the Fremen on the most strategically crucial planet in the galaxy while the cartoonishly evil Harkonnen plot to take over the Empire. It's mostly Timothée Chalamet moodily gazing over oceans of sand, for going on for three hours and for no particular dramatic justification. Sure, it looks spectacular and postures at grand drama, but really has very little to present or say that wasn't already covered in the first world-building part.

5/10

Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)

Loosely based on a true story of an Italian American paid to drive a virtuoso black pianist on tour around the Deep South in 1962,  Green Book is basically a buddy movie also dealing with racial issues. Somewhat of a departure from the rest of the director's output of puerile comedy films, it recreates the atmosphere of the time vividly and does not flinch from depicting the poisonous racial intolerance that pervades society, even the lack of acceptance the pianist encounters from other black people for his educated mannerisms. It has been criticised for being yet another example of the white saviour trope, with the white driver repeatedly saving the pianist from assaults and even introducing him to the music of Aretha Franklin and the pleasure of eating fried chicken, but it really goes both ways, the pianist teaching the driver to write letters properly to his wife and stop characterising black people as a homogenous mass. Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali, respectively as employee and employer, put in sterling work and the chemistry between them is palpable. It's genuinely affecting and for once, a deserving winner of the Best Picture Oscar.

8/10

Breaking Infinity (Marianna Dean, 2023)

A low-budget time travel piece more in the mould of Shane Carruth's Primer, or Nacho Vigalondo's Los cronocrimenes, favouring ideas over effects, and like the two antecedents mentioned, attempting to make lack of budget a matter of no import. This would work if it managed to be coherent, and it does start promisingly, with an amnesiac man repeatedly waking up in hospital either injured or uninjured, displaced with increasingly regularity to the apparent end of the world. He comes to believe it's within his power to stop that end. So far, so good, but then the film's logic and structure fail badly, which is vital for making it a meaningful exercise. Marks for trying, but unfortunately not for end product.

4/10

The Beautiful Game (Thea Sharrock, 2024)

National treasure Bill Nighy plays against type as a former football coach who takes an assorted bunch from London to the Homeless World Cup in Rome. Naturally, were this a Hollywood product, you'd expect them to triumph against all odds, but although it still ends up a feelgood affair, it's more concerned with mental health issues, principally the sense of stroppy aimlessness felt by the team's star striker. The standard sports drama boxes are still ticked, it goes on for far longer than necessary to make its point and the Japanese delegation at the competition are just used to run through all of Rome's best-known photogenic attractions. So, no great shakes on any front, but the at least the humour is gentle and sweet, making for a reasonable heartwarmer.

5/10

Nope (Jordan Peele, 2022)

 

Peele's caustic and scintillating directorial debut, Get Out, set the bar high indeed, and while Us in 2019 was a more conventional horror film, it atill bore enough distinguishing chracteristics, chiefly in its social nuancing. However, all that Nope has to nod in that direction is that the principal protagonists are a black brother and sister who happen to rear horses. As much as I loathe the term 'woke', that alone seems to have scared critics into puring universal acclaim on this film, because it has nothing else to recommend it. The UFO that appears in the skies above their house to harass them has no rational motive and ascribing its poor conceptualisation to an intentional decision by Peele to critique overreliance on gore and CGI in sci-fi films is ludicrously generous. The barbs against the superficiality of social media are tired and blunt, and on top of all that it's overlong and, frankly, dull. I know that the director has much more in his tank, so laziness is the most apparent reason for this pointless exercise.

3/10

Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

The Shining needed a sequel as much as, say, Citizen Kane would have done, but since the never-ending mine of Hollywood horror material that is Stephen King had already written one, it was bound to happen. And one wishes they hadn't. King may have intensely disliked Kubrick's highbrow, eerie adaptation of the original novel, but then the author has never been the most critically astute judge of what makes a classic film. Doctor Sleep certainly isn't one: it works perfectly well as a gory riff on the themes of psychics and psychos, but that's about as far it gets. Ewan McGregor as the now middle-aged and alcoholic Danny Torrance, the boy who survived his father's possessed rampage and has lived haunted by the trauma ever since, is as watchable as usual, as is Rebecca Ferguson as the chilling leader of the group of demonic killers after Danny and a young girl who has even more potent psychic powers than him. It's not uncommonly derivative by modern horror standards, but would have been well advised to leave the sacrosanct original alone.

6/10

Time Addicts (Sam Odlum, 2023)

A Melbourne drug dealer sends two of his customers to steal a bag of crystal meth from a grotty house, and as they bicker relentlessly one of them decides to sample what they've found. Except that it displaces him in time, 25 years into the past. She ends up doing the same, but with different results, and a seemingly neverending cycle of causality is started, also involving the dealer and an undercover cop, only the physical location never changing, except in terms of its state of repair.

This is certainly a novel take on the time travel genre, with the emphasis on the fact that time travel is a device rather than the theme. The theme is really the tortuous relationships between hopeless losers, and it deals with those fairly well, operating within a tiny budget and fuelled by more swearing than probably any other film ever made. No sentence is complete without a 'fuck' or 'cunt'. It's not elevating or enlightening in any way, but still deserves a commendation for effort.

5/10

Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023)

30 years after last turning out his last passable film, Wenders finally produces something coherent in his twilight years. We follow a solitary, ageing and taciturn public toilet cleaner in Tokyo through his repeated daily routine, the only deviations to the rigid schedule coming from chance encounters with people along the way. This could be very tedious indeed, but the very lack of drama and the simple things he takes pleasure from, that is music, novels and taking photographs of trees, make the entirety into a calming existentialist balm for the soul and two hours slip by almost unnoticed, much as the protagonist does through the city streets.

7/10

I Care a Lot (J Blakeson, 2020)

Rosamund Pike plays a con artist who exploits the legal system to give her control of the assets and very lives of elderly people, getting them confined in a retirement home on the grounds of dementia while she hoovers through their earthly wealth. This all goes swimmingly until she makes the mistake of committing the mother of a drug baron to the facility.

So far, so Better Call Saul, but Pike's character is a far colder fish without a streak of morality and therein lies the rub: there is no sympathetic protagonist at all, with even Peter Dinklage's crime boss, who tries to bring her down, at least having some element of human motivation. But it gets by on the sharpness of the scenes between the adversaries and convincingly painting the American justice system that can allow such injustices to thrive as the real villain of the piece. Once that's covered, however, it descends into a more conventional thriller mode and somewhat runs out of narrative puff. Still, some marks for creating unusual monsters who could credibly be out there, and surely are.

6/10

Settlers (Wyatt Rockefeller, 2021)

In an indeterminate time period in the future, a family live on an isolated farm on a terraformed Mars and all is quiet until bandits arrive, after what they have. The basic plot is thus completely that of the classic homesteaders under siege Western and the transposition in time and place don't alter the formula in the slightest. This has both an upside and a downside: the pace is calmer than the genre norm, with virtually no future tech or FX on show, but neither is the change of setting utilised. It's glacially slow, which does allow for tension to build up, but the scenario could have done with at least some background exposition and the conclusion is utterly unsurprising.

5/10

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Robert Bierman, 1997)

Nine years after the black comedy How to Get Ahead in Advertising,  Richard E. Grant reprises playing a man working in advertising who suddenly becomes disillusioned with the point of it all and quits to try his luck at poetry. But since this is in the 1930s London of George Orwell's source novel, elements of the story mirroring episodes in the writer's own life, he soon ends up in financial freefall and squandering what little he receives from his new vocation on costly splurges to escape his self-created new prison, now one imposed by poverty rather than creative prostitution.

Grant was born for this role, with his natural gift for conveying neurotic mania, and Helena Bonham Carter as his put-upon girlfriend is a useful addition too. The dialogue is a constant shower of wit and the London of the period, even if conveniently polarised into just a downtrodden working-class world and an upper-class echelon, is still colourfully depicted. Being so much of its time, it probably doesn't achieve anything politically the way Orwell would have intended, but is great entertainment all the same. 

7/10

Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver (Zack Snyder, 2024)

Snyder is making the most of his carte blanche from Netflix to blow tons of money on the next instalment of his own little version of the Star Wars franchise. It's all spent on explosives and CGI battle scenes, incredibly even more than the first time around, now that the tiresome business of minimal world creation and backstory is out of the way. Even the plot is recycled from the first part in an act of gratuitous auto-cannibalism, considering that its predecessor was shoddily cobbled together from the obvious Star Wars, Seven Samurai and Dune. So the same village that was previously squeezed for all the food it had now has to be defended against against a full-blown assault by the space Nazi baddies. And that's enough for two hours, apparently, once padded out with oodles of showy violence that requires no thought in terms of scripting. It goes without saying that no amount of damning reviews will kill this off and there's more to come.

3/10

Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023)

Lanthimos will never be content playing second fiddle in the deliberately provocative filmmaker game to Von Trier or Haneke. He's determined to be seen as actually clinically insane, and puts up a very convincing case. Naturally this is also lapped up by many as proof of his genius.

If you are prepared to be bombarded with scene after scene targeting every 'bourgeois' sensibility and regard for naturalism, Lanthimos gives you that in spades, even more here than before. Willem Dafoe (still on his deranged setting from The Lighthouse) plays a Frankenstein-type Victorian doctor who reanimates the corpse of a suicide using the brain of the foetus that she was carrying. The resulting woman named Bella, at first with the mind of an infant, soon discovers the delights of masturbation and the wider world outside the confines of the doctor's house, learning to talk in barrages of ornate synonyms, as she also learns about the cruelty of mankind and men in particular. As has always been obvious in the case of the director himself, she remains thoroughly autistic and this detracts quite severely from any sociopolitical point regarding the exploitation of women that one might want to read into her situation. The lavish sets, a fantastical steampunk melange of Art Nouveau, Baroque, modernist and Gothic, do make the film a visual feast, and the pitch-black humour at many instances also adds to the heady brew. But watching Emma Stone as Bella get shagged interminably by the paying male population of Paris hardly makes a feminist statement of note, even if her absolute commitment to the role shines through so clearly that her Best Actress Oscar was justly deserved.

Consider the entirety as what Terry Giliam or Wes Anderson would turn out if they had no self-control at all. Fascinating, but equally alienating.

6/10

Pieniä suuria valheita (Matti Kinnunen, 2018)

A separated former vicar arrives in a remote Finnish one-horse town with his young son and a ton of undisclosed baggage. They do not find it easy to settle in the closed community: the father is haunted by rumours about his past misdeeds and the son is systematically bullied at school. Thus it continues, until the message comes through that the only way out is to be honest at any cost.

This is a dyed-in-the-wool tenet of Finnish identity, much as making films that in no way advance the cause of the tourist industry is characteristic of their cinematic production. So, cheery it is not, but Time Out (better translated literally as 'Little Big Lies') does have a rewarding payoff, simply by remaining rooted in the reality of how people work.

6/10  

Hytti nro 6 (Juho Kuosmanen, 2021)

A Finnish archaeology student boards a train in Russia to Murmansk, where she intends to study ancient carvings in the local rocks. She is forced to share a sleeping compartment all the way there with a boorish Russian man and at first considers leaving the train, but then puts up with the duress when he shows signs of calming down.

Having set up the scenario from hell, that is the situation of being a solo western female traveller in barely post-Soviet Russia, surrounded by stone-faced officials and raging alcoholics in the middle of winter, this can go only one of two ways: to serve as a cautionary tale for anyone ever contemplating doing the same, or the less likely route, which is to show how love will find a way, no matter what it has to overcome.

One might guess after a while which option wins out. It can be seen as a Before Sunrise, but with all the picturesque scenery and sugar-coating taken out, and in some way this makes the denouement more rewarding.

It was made just before the war in Ukraine started in earnest, and this is fortuitous, both for logistical reasons and because, given the current emergency, it serves as yet another reminder of  both the individual humanity and national nihilism on the other side of the border. There isn't a causal link between these and the fact that Compartment No.6 shared the Grand Prix at Cannes with Farhadi's A Hero, and nor should we try to see one. It simply stands on its own merits.

7/10

Znachor (Michał Gazda, 2023)

Blandly translated for the English-language market as 'Forgotten Love', Znachor ('The Quack') is based on a hugely popular Polish prewar novel about a gifted and moral surgeon who is mugged after his wife has left him, presumed dead and wanders the country for 15 years stricken with amnesia, trying to remember even just his name. The one thing that he has not forgotten is his medical talent, and so he provides illicit care to the poor inhabitants of a rural village. Meanwhile, through a fantastical contrivance, his now adult daughter turns up in the same village to work at the inn. She then falls in love with the son of the domineering local countess and the course is set for a classic resolution, which can only be a happy ending.

Even when the novel was published in 1937, it would have been very old-fashioned in its themes and formulaic structure. It revolves entirely around social class and injustice, forbidden love and a fallen hero's quest, and would fit right into the milieu of the 19th century potboiler. Too many suspensions of disbelief are required. But besides that, it is beautifully shot, warmly humanistic and Leszek Lichota is a commanding presence as the doctor.

6/10

Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell, 2012)

Released from a mental institution into the care of his parents, a bipolar man is still dead set on winning back his wife, whose adultery had driven him over the edge. Along the way, which is full of bumps, he meets a spiky young woman with mental issues of her own and the manner in which they clash and make up repeatedly sends showers of sparks across the screen, as well as a rising certainty that they will end up together. Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, despite their obvious age gap, make a magnetic couple, and Robert De Niro in support as Cooper's deeply superstitious and OCD-wracked dad completes a full house of people needing some calm in their lives. It's vibrant and sharp enough that not aspiring to profundity really doesn't matter too much.

6/10

Sachertorte (Tine Rogoll, 2022)

Boy meets girl, loses her phone number and sets out to find her. This involves going to Vienna to eat the famed chocolate cake of the title every day at the posh cafe where it originated, in the hope she'll turn up there.

So that's it in a nutshell. The message is basically a reminder to not let a chance of happiness through love pass you by, spelt out repeatedly by a permanent fixture amongst the patrons of the cafe in case we missed it. It could easily have come from the pen of Richard Curtis, and is a confection as rich as the cake in question. But it's also as sweet, and charmingly funny in places too.

6/10

The Gentlemen (Guy Ritchie, 2019)

Eloquent actors playing against type as gangsters who only talk in menacing innuendoes and faux-Cockney rhyming slang? Check. Comically thick henchmen? Check. Extreme violence played for laughs? Check. Almost every line peppered with f-words and c-words? Check. A cartoon criminal underworld with abundant back-stabbing plus numerous red herrings? Check. Yes, it's a Guy Ritchie film.

But not a bad one overall. Matthew McConaughey is the overlord of a marijuana-producing empire seeking to retire peacefully, and naturally that can't be permitted. Private investigator Hugh Grant approaches his second-in-command to sell the secrets that he has collected about their illicit organisation, wanting millions for them, and then proceeds to relate what he has found out, which serves as the unreliable narrative outline of the plot.

As long as you're prepared to tolerate Ritchie's limited ambitions and infantile fixations, which I'm sure he'd be quite happy to own up to, it's one of his better products, on a par with the two Sherlock Holmes films starring Robert Downey Jr., and passes the time divertingly enough.

6/10

Eaten by Lions (Jason Wingard, 2019)

Following the death of their grandmother, who had looked after them since childhood, a pair of half-brothers set out for Blackpool to seek out the actual father of one of the boys. Predictably, this proves to be far from straightforward. The other boy has cerebral palsy and is also a habitual shoplifter, and so they're in trouble well before they get to the house of the supposed father they seek. When they do meet him, he turns out to be unaware of his paternal status and a chronically irresponsible doofus, having to be pressganged by his large, conservative Asian family into dealing with the responsibility of parenthood.

So there are serious themes present, but at the same time there's a lightness of touch and genuinely funny moments throughout, which complement the plot rather than just serving as a distraction.

7/10

Couleurs de l'incendie

Based on the real-life story of the wealthy Péricourt banking family from 1927 through the early 1930s, The Colours of Fire is essentially a protracted baroque revenge drama. The banker's daughter now in charge of the estate first has to deal with her young son crippling himself by throwing himself out of a window in the middle of the funeral, and then with her unscrupulous uncle and financial advisor wheedling her out of the whole of her entire inheritance. This leads to her developing an elaborate plan to bring down all who have wronged her, and it's pretty easy to guess that this is exactly what she will accomplish by the end. There are other factors in the background, such as a self-centered opera singer on whom her son is fixated, the looming rise of the Nazis across the border and the omnipresent class system, but it is primarily about greedy men getting their just desserts, and relates this fairly effectively and stylishly.

6/10

Page 8 (David Hare, 2011)

Prolific playwright David Hare has always been particularly concerned with politics, justice, secrecy and inner conflict, and so when he turned to directing for the screen, rather than just writing, it was apt that the result would bring all these themes together. And how! Naturally it helped a great deal to be able to draw on such a fine cast, led by the peerlessly subtle Bill Nighy. He plays the weary MI5 operative Johnny Worricker, pulled into uncovering a web of governmental corruption through reading a sensitive report. He declines to hand back the offending papers when effectively threatened to do so, and thereafter his options are increasingly straitened.

Hare's establishment cover-up plot may be a fairly off-the-shelf one, but the dialogue is quite dazzlingly sharp, each word chosen with care and carrying so much weight, and that alone puts it in a different class to most flashier conspiracy thrillers.

8/10

A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Douglas Sirk, 1958)

The undisputed king of the Hollywood technicolour melodrama, Sirk got a lot of bad press from the intelligentsia of the day for the determined overacting, lurid colour palette and jumping between frivolity and seriousness in his films.

But seen from a later perspective, this quite badly misses the point. All of the above is a Trojan horse to smuggle satire and deep-felt social critique past audiences who would have been scared away by an overt message otherwise. So in Written on the Wind, the target of the attack is the American dream and in Imitation of Life it's class, racism and sexism. Here there's no overt target, but what is unusual for mainstream American cinema of the time is that it's a love story set in collapsing wartime Germany, with the supporting characters a mix of disgruntled regular soldiers, passive resisters and amoral opportunists, as well as the more usual murderous Hitlerites. Even the author of the story, Erich Maria Remarque, best known for writing the semi-autobiographical All Quiet on the Western Front, puts in an acting appearance as a principled professor.

Yes, it's painted in broad strokes and contains a few cheap twists, but it's still far more intelligent than what could be expected from the genre norm.

6/10

Boiling Point (Philip Barantini, 2021)

A plunge into an evening even more hectic than usual at a small trendy London eatery, Boiling Point is as much about the impending nervous breakdown of the harassed head chef, played by the as about the sheer hell of working in a high-pressure restaurant environment. The threats are posed by snooty critics, shallow influencers and lairy customers, while the staff rail at each other, trying to keep to prep times counted in seconds rather than minutes, and simultaneously maintain the establishment's food quality and hygiene standards.

What really elevates the film above these basic ingredients is undoubtedly the challenges posed by shooting all 90 minutes in a single take, and unlike any single-take film ever seen in in the history of world cinema, being able to do this with dozens of characters, all fleshed out and playing their part, creating a coherent and meaningful story. It's simply a staggering piece of choreography.

8/10

Samaritan (Julius Avery, 2022)

If they are wise, musclebound action stars start turning down the volume early enough to go out gracefully, as Schwarzenegger is doing, and likewise here with Stallone, whose portrayal of a superpowered vigilante presumed dead long ago and living a quiet life as a gruff garbage man has some nice echoes of the blue-collar beginnings of Rocky Balboa.

Of course this has to change, and when the 13-year-old son of a neighbour discovers who he really is and falls in at the same time with the wrong crowd, a gang of self-styled anarchists led by a man who styles himself on the former hero's villainous dead brother, the hero has to reluctantly reassume his mantle. Thereafter the film plays out in more standard fashion with relentless fighting and explosions. But a few marks for the slower build-up all the same.

5/10

Northern Comfort (Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson, 2023)

A group of people united by having too much money to spend and a chronic fear of flying attend a course to enable them to overcome that fear. However the final test on the course, an actual flight to Iceland, goes skewwhiff, heavy turbulence causing panic, and then on arrival they find out that all return flights are cancelled for weather reasons. An overnight stay in a spa hotel only causes more tensions.

The tone of the Icelandic director's first foray into English-language cinema is as unsteady as the flight that so unnerved the passengers. It doesn't seem to know what it wants to be: a farce, a black comedy or something deeper. Timothy Spall turns in his baseline grumpy performance as a best-selling writer with issues resulting from a military background, there's a vacuous social media influencer who is satirised in a vacuously ham-fisted manner, the course leader who doesn't have a clue about what he's doing and a neurotic property developer who has had to hide where she really is from her boyfriend. It's not utterly witless all the way through, but it is highly illogical and makes one suspect that the director thought "I can give that a go" after seeing the famously execrable Sex Lives of the Potato Men.

3/10

Code 8: Part II (Jeff Chan, 2024)

The first part met with a fairly favourable response, so the law of commercial cinema dictates that there must be more of the same, except with the action elements duly ramped up a notch. And so it is, with the introduction of systemic police corruption and even more unstoppable robotic enforcers turning the repression of the superpowered minority into an outright campaign of extermination against them.

Where this and and the part before it differ from the output of the DCEU and MCU stables, apart from the obvious budget limitations, is their depiction of the powered as vulnerable, despite their abilities, and the ultimate villain being not some god-like malevolent being but the fascist state instead. Yes, the X-Men films drew parallels between the position of mutants and gay or ethnic minorities in the face of intolerance, but then their heroes were never in any real peril since they were still virtually omnipotent. These ones certainly aren't, and so the two Code 8 films act as a Trojan horse for getting liberal ideas past the anti-political filters of superhero film buffs. Which has to be applauded.

6/10

Code 8 (Jeff Chan, 2019)

Yes, it's another near-future dystopia, although here everything is just peachy for everyone except the small minority with superpowers, who are increasingly repressed by the paranoid mainstream populace. As a result many of them have to turn to crime to make ends meet, and this includes the lead, who can't afford to get treatment for his sick mother otherwise.

While the location is a fictional city and it was filmed in Canada, the mere facts that vital medical care is not available to the poor and that the underclass are policed through fascist methods make it pretty clear that this version of hell is very much based on the current state of the USA. So, a divergence from the normal superhero set-up, never mind that the powered characters are far from heroes anyway. No great shakes, but at least it tries something different with the formula.

5/10

The Lost City (Aaron & Adam Nee, 2022)

Globally famous romance novelist Sadra Bullock is kidnapped by looney tune billionaire Daniel Radcliffe to help him find buried treasure and the dim cover model of her novels, Channing Tatum, sets out to rescue her. That's about it really. It unashamedly plunders both Raiders of the Lost Ark and Romancing the Stone, to the extent that it even slyly references them, and given the two principal stars, of course evolves into a romcom of sorts. Mind you, seeing Radcliffe ham it up as a baddie for once and the sporadically amusing screwball dialogue between Bullock and Tatum at least make it an unpainful experience to watch, even though it's just froth.

5/10

The Kitchen (Daniel Kaluuya & Kibwe Tavares, 2023)

Classifiable as sci-fi due to being set twenty years in the future, this is nevertheless more a dark vision of a very plausible development of London based on the seeds that have already been sown. Constant surveillance by drones, an urban underclass being forced out of a prime real estate location, reliance on food banks and looting by the disenfranchised left with nothing but anger. The Kitchen in question, perhaps a reference to Hell's Kitchen in New York, a Manhattan working-class neighbourhood by now almost fully gentrified, but also containing the idea of being a melting pot where resentment is cooked up, is a huge council estate under siege from the forces of unfettered capitalism, with parallels to the Warsaw ghetto in 1944. Where the concept is somewhat skewed is its view that almost all of the people in the ghetto are not just of ethnic minorities but black, as if there were no Asian or Eastern European underclass. Still, that said, it's salutary to get a dystopia that isn't dependent on future tech, just a worst-case projection of how things could end up if society keeps going down the same track. Yes, it's deeply pessimistic and doesn't make much of an effort to create deep characterisation (ex-footballer Ian Wright's supporting role as the pirate radio voice of the complex, reminiscent of Samuel L. Jackson's DJ in Do the Right Thing, is about as rounded as it gets). But still chillingly compelling.

7/10