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