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