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