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

The Marvels (Nia DaCosta, 2023)

The makers of the James Bond series may have decided to finally kill off the last iteration of their perennial cash cow, but despite numerous recent critical flops the Marvel Cinematic Universe shows no sign of doing likewise.

So, MCU#33 is a continuation of the Captain Marvel story with the titular hero joined by her teenage fangirl version from the Ms. Marvel TV miniseries and her niece of sorts Monica Rambeau, all now imbued with different versions of the character's cosmic powers. The twist is that when one uses her powers, they all switch places. This leads them to work as a team to stop the latest universe-destroying vengeful villain off the production line, and the rest of it is then just the usual overbombardment of CGI action. At least Samuel L. Jackson gets to have some fun with the his supporting turn as Nick Fury, but that's really quite scant compensation for the film's lack of imagination. Naturally, some critics attacked it for epitomising the 'woke' movement by daring to have only women of various racial mixes as the main heroes and their foe too, but those critics are almost all safely trapped on the other side of the pond and so can be ignored.

5/10

Vivarium (Lorcan Finnegan, 2019)

A young couple are taken by an obsequious estate agent to a viewing in a new suburban development of endless rows of identical green houses. As soon as they decide to leave, they find his car is gone and any attempt by them to drive out of the development just leads them back to the same house.

So far, so Black Mirror, but the name of the film, referring to a confined environment created for observing animals, and the opening images showing the brood parasitism of a cuckoo, meaning its method of forcing a host to raise its young, already tell us where this is heading. Sure enough, when a young boy suddenly appears in the house and grows at an unnatural rate, while perfectly mimicking everything they say, it is clear that they are not just in a suburban prison but an alien zoo of sorts.

In comparison to most current horror, science fiction or mystery films, Vivarium does manage to generate a thoroughly unsettling atmosphere without reliance on FX, action or gore. But then it is closely based on the classic Twilight Zone episode Stopover in a Quiet Town, to which it only adds the element of the couple being nothing but powerless surrogates for unseen aliens. The potential for attacking the horrifying uniformity of suburbia is also left unexplored, partly because there are no other characters in their cage to interact with. Still, marks for creating something so disquieting.

6/10

Kuolleet Lehdet (Aki Kaurismäki, 2023)

Finland's best cinematic export and worst representative of its tourism industry returns from self-declared retirement with his 18th feature, and Fallen Leaves has all his trademarks stamped through it like a stick of rock. Underclass protagonists shat on by officious employers and indifferent officialdom, incessant smoking in the place of dialogue, what dialogue there is being absurdly matter-of-fact and never over a short sentence at a time, suicide-inducingly gloomy interiors, bloody-mindedly melancholic music and another setback for the characters always just around the corner.

This time, it's about a supermarket shelf-stacker and a construction worker who both get fired from their jobs and meet by chance, starting a fledgling relationship that is soon derailed.

As always, it's both sporadically very droll in its most deadpan moments and constantly Loach-like in its fury at the system. However, the latter aspect is undermined by Kaurismäki employing more poetic licence than ever with his depiction of the grim world. He was once asked what year his latest film was set in, and his reply was "between 1950 and now". True, there are the usual elements of both the past and present, but when it suits him for the sake of providing a target for his ire, it does not serve the purpose to create such a fiction where there is no social safety net, no employment laws, no libraries for free internet access and ludicrously antiquated and hazardous industries. This means that it is more a fantastical nightmare than a social critique.

All that said, you do get the sense that the taciturn couple will find each other in the end. That is by no means a given with the director, even as he approaches old age.

7/10

Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023)

Who'd have thunk it? Serial romcommer Bradley Cooper has evolved into a director of real films, here a biopic of the mercurial composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. Cooper plays Bernstein with a prosthetic nose , which drew accusations stateside of 'Jewface', his long-suffering actress wife also played by a non-Jew, Carey Mulligan, but Bernstein's children didn't complain, and the depiction of a man with numerous foibles and demons is a respectful one.

What does strike one as somewhat odd is the little attention paid to his musicals such as West Side Story which, despite all his other achievements, Bernstein is best remembered for. The focus is almost exclusively on his fractious marriage and soaring dreams. Those it covers well and quite affectingly at times, but you have to go in accepting that it's only an impressionistic portrait from a non-musician rather than the full picture.

6/10

3022 (John Suits, 2019)

2190 and four American astronauts begin their stint manning a refuelling station between Earth and Europa. Five years later, all of them are showing the effects of protracted isolation and then they lose all communications with Earth. A suspicion arises that there is no more Earth.

So, uncommonly bleak, even as apocalypse scenarios go. But at least the fatalism helps to set it apart from being just a lower-budget hybrid of Alien, The Expanse and Event Horizon. The technique of skipping through the first five years as key images without dialogue in the opening minutes is also a marvellously innovative one. It doesn't have much else to give besides a sense of hopelessness and slowly creeping doom, but that in itself is refreshing.

5/10

The Creator (Gareth Edwards, 2023)

In the late 21st century, the West has been at war for 15 years with East Asia over the latter's continued support for AI, which has become so advanced that there are multitudes of sentient androids. The Americans seek to hunt down the creator of the AI before he launches a strike to win the war against them.

What we have here is yet another overlong sci-fi actioner with admittedly impressive FX and a vague attempt to say something new about the AI issue, in that the robots only seek to be left in peace by humanity. But it is also so derivative of so many other films in the broad genre that the best way to pass the time through it is really to prepare a checklist of stolen ideas before starting to watch it, so that Blade Runner, I, Robot, Battlestar Galactica, Humans, Ex Machina and Children of Men can be ticked off. And that's only for starters. There's also a strong whiff of lazy cultural generalisation in lumping a vast mass of Asian nations together as backers of AI over humanity. Edwards would be better off returning to the constraints of the Star Wars franchise instead of trying to strike out on his own, as his Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was actually far more rewarding viewing.

5/10

Morbius (Daniel Espinosa, 2022)

Tied into the highly lucrative Spider-verse, Morbius stars the divisive but frequently compelling method specialist Jared Leto as a scientist crippled by a blood disorder whose self-devised cure turns him into a vampire and forces him to try to control his bloodlust. His similarly crippled friend, erstwhile Doctor Who Matt Smith, acquires the cure/curse too, and the rest really writes itself. As usual, tiresomely protracted CGI fights abound and a post-credits scene dangles the prospect of a sequel, despite this film's poor commercial and critical success. File alongside Tom Hardy's Venom films: some isolated merits, but overall just for Marvel completist fanboys.

4/10