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