X-Men: Days of Future Past (Bryan Singer, 2014)

Bryan Singer makes a welcome return to the helm in the clearly never-ending X-Men saga after Brett Ratner's botch-job with the main characters in the third film, a teen version by Matthew Vaughn and two stand-alone Hugh Jackman wankfests. However, the weight of all this is clearly a lot to bear: once again, Jackman has to play a more central role by virtue of his pulling power than his character would logically merit and there are just too many personae and strands to tie together, never mind then having a plot on top of that that has to somehow make feasible leaps over chasms of causality as Wolverine is sent back from a ruined future to 1973 to change history with the X-juniors. Still, it's nice to see them try gallantly, even though it hardly holds together, and having McAvoy, Stewart, Fassbender and McKellen all present alongside Jackman is a great boon. I do feel sorry for anyone who didn't grow up with the comics trying to make sense of it all, though.

6/10

The Two Faces of January (Hossein Amini, 2014)

Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst star as a seemingly carefree American flâneur couple working their way through Mediterranean cities in 1962, meeting Oscar Isaac (of Inside Llewyn Davis fame), a young American small-time con working as a tour guide in Athens. The older man's dark past soon catches up with him, however, as seems to happen a lot to Mortensen's recent characters, and the trio have to take flight to Crete.
As with The Talented Mr. Ripley, the source is a Patricia Highsmith novel, and the parallels - rich Americans on the run from a murder scene in the Mediterranean of yesteryear etc. - are obvious. It makes good use of its locations and the cast are as dependable as you would expect from their track record. But it lacks the subtlety of the earlier film, simply because there is never any prospect that getting off scot-free is an option, nor is there a character as interesting as the utterly amoral sociopath Ripley at the core. Nevertheless, in comparison with most thrillers currently made with contemporary settings, it stands up well in terms of both tension and restraint.

6/10

Memory Lane (Shawn Holmes, 2012)

Supposedly made for $300, which you don't need to be a film student to find a ridiculous claim, this is time-travel sci-fi somehow trying to splice together Primer, Source Code and Flatliners and end up with the pathos of The Time Traveller's Wife. This is a mistake as all of the above had real actors and something original to say about the device, for all their other failings.
Basically, a traumatised war veteran comes home to a small town, stops a girl killing herself , which she then does anyway, and spends the rest of the film grieving and having his friends kill him and bring him back to life so he can revisit the past to try out work out what actually happened to her. I suppose some credit ought to be given for an attempt to say something about the inability of the mind to accept shock, instead of just going off down an action route, and the editing and camerawork are rather impressive given the budget constraints, but it's to little avail. Although it might have helped if the love interest had not been such a gurning coquette or the lead such a sadsack, the end result would still have been a bit of a mess.

4/10

The Love Punch (Joel Hopkins, 2013)

Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson play a separated middle-aged couple who take it on themselves to get revenge on an unscrupulous businessman who has driven them to penury, although only the kind of pretend penury that exists in smug films for the chattering classes. They consequently end up hatching a plan to rob him in the Côte d'Azur, for that's where you go in a thoroughly unimaginative romantic comedy without a single original idea, wholly reliant on the charm of the leads and the support of Timothy Spall and Celia Imrie. You do wish they hadn't all been so lazy, though.

3/10

Nebraska (Alexander Payne, 2013)

Payne may have been behind the script of the atrocity that was I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, but as a director he shows no sign of faltering and returns to a more naturalistic and understated mood with the story of a borderline-delusional old man and his put-upon son in a nowhere town, the father becoming determined after receiving a mass-mail letter telling him he's won a million to make it to Nebraska to collect his fortune. It turns into a road movie for a while, with the duo bickering all the way, taking in their stay with excruciatingly brain-dead relatives, until a fairly inescapable conclusion: no fairytale, this, despite some sumptuous black-and-white photography of endless flat prairie vistas.
As the lead, Bruce Dern snarls and sulks to maximum effect, while also conveying wounded pride with great economy, and the underlying gallows-black humour doesn't swamp the basic pathos of the characters' small lives. At a stately two hours, it could probably have done with a little trimming, but then it might have ended up a standard modern product rather than a welcome blast from a bygone era of slow, thoughtful cinema. File alongside Lynch's The Straight Story.

7/10

RoboCop (José Padilha, 2014)

Cop will eat itself. Once again, a reboot for no other purpose than having a safe product, and sod consumer goodwill; it's there to be exploited if they're undemanding enough to want nothing more than more of the same. Somehow, while Michael Keaton and Samuel L. Jackson clearly don't have ethical compunctions about getting their pay cheque for this kind of thing, you expected better of Gary Oldman. It's largely irrelevant that this takes a slightly different tack to the original, with more politics and the hero's family in on what's happened from the start: these things can only be justified by improving on the source, and the satire here is toothless in comparison, seeming to be attempted only tokenistically, but so too are the generic teched-up action scenes, which really is beyond the pale.

3/10

Pietà (Kim Ki-duk, 2012)

A brutal debt collector, preying on the owners of failing machine shops, is visited by a woman who claims to be his mother. After his initial rejection of her, their relationship takes on sickly tone which is both Oedipal and parodic of a happy family.
This did very well at the international festivals, and the reason is clear: it is relentlessly grim in its outlook and prospects, and mulls heavily over the meaninglessness of anything except emotional attachment, which is then also shown to be an Achilles heel. This means it cannot be mistaken for a cheap thriller, and critics like that. But it also means that the characters are nigh-on impossible to empathise with, and as the Shakespearean revenge adage 'blood will have blood' is followed to the bitter end, contrivance takes over substance, which is something a film this bleak cannot really allow to happen.

5/10