Le Passé (Asghar Farhadi, 2013)

Farhadi's sixth film is another complex relationship drama preoccupied, as most notably in the case of A Separation, with the break-up of a marriage. But here we are thrown into the aftermath instead, with an Iranian man returning to France to tie up loose ends with his ex-wife, and the title, The Past, reflects the backwards-looking nature of the story with the couple dealing with the emotional fall-out four years after the event and buried events gradually coming to light. Farhadi again makes effective use of his trademark technique of the deliberate omission of certain links and information to draw the viewer in, although more understatedly than before.
The trio of principal actors put in layered, naturalistic performances in which body language and expressions play a large part, no doubt owing to the director not speaking French and so focusing on more than just the dialogue. It's not comfortable viewing, particularly Bérénice Bejo's portrayal of the self-centred and unstable ex-wife, a million miles removed from her perky charm in The Artist, but has an emotional truth that reaffirms Farhadi as a distinctive and thoughtful voice in modern world cinema.

7/10

V Tumane (Sergei Loznitsa, 2012)

In the Fog is a spartan exercise, with only as much character or historical background, or indeed plot, as is required to get its point across. It's set in a German-occupied Belarus in 1942, with a local man released by the Nazis after an act of sabotage and therefore immediately suspected by the community of collaboration, two of whom take it upon themselves to execute him in the woods. The woods form an amorphous and directionless stage for a story that feels very much like a play, accentuating the sense of the indifference of the universe to the characters' switching concerns, and the encroaching fog at the end has been there all along in the obfuscation that occurs in people's minds during a war where it's not taken as a given what an individual can do to remain morally in the right. The pace does get pretty funereal at times, but there is plenty of food for thought here nevertheless.

7/10

Saving Mr. Banks (John Lee Hancock, 2013)

A selectively embellished telling of how author P.L. Travers was coaxed by Disney into having Mary Poppins made, Saving Mr Banks is patently a Disney product with its ultimate message of the power of fantasy as salvation. Yet there is also an adult core to the story, with the writer's childhood flashbacks, centred around the decline of her alcoholic father, resonating through her work and present day mindset. The greatest factual liberty the film is guilty of taking is creating a genuine friendship between a genial Walt Disney and the spiky, distrustful author, but the soft-soaping is bearable because this is done to accommodate the film's principal assets, Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson, with the latter's performance being somewhat of a tour de force. a scream when delivering streams of cutting bon mots and quite affecting when required to dig into the character's conflicted psyche. A rare beast, then: a film that serves Disney's marketing purposes to make you want to see Mary Poppins again, while working as entertainment and drama in its own right.

7/10

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden, 2015)

A sequel was inevitable given the pressure of the likelihood that some of the veteran cast would soon start popping their clogs for real and so we have another instalment of the same, drawn our over two hours. This is no bad thing in that it's as cosy as a cup of cocoa and the principal players are always watchable, but the main plot is even thinner than last time around, largely ripped off from Fawlty Towers as Dev Patel's jittery young hotel impresario gets it into his head that a particular guest is a hotel inspector, with all the predictable consequences. The awkward real India of the film is also pushed so far into the background as to remain completely out of view. Still, it would be foolish and pointless to expect social realism here and the spiky verbal interplay between Maggie Smith and co. remains a delight, even if a lightweight one.

5/10

Small Apartments (Jonas Åkerlund, 2012)

Great British TV comedians have not, on the whole, had a happy history of trying their luck on the big screen, and sadly Small Apartments is no exception, though it does prove that Matt Lucas is actually capable of acting as well as doing silly voices, so he's really not to blame. He plays Franklin Franklin, a blobby loser given to playing an Alpine horn in his dingy little Californian flat, with an assortment of oddballs for neighbours and a pantomime villain landlord who he ends up killing inadvertently, leading to scrapes thickly ladled with gallows humour as he attempts to cover up the crime. The tone swings uncertainly from absurdism and gross-out comedy to pathos, and there is the vexatious overall air of a belief in the notion that if you stick enough weirdness in, profound meaning about life's rich tapestry will be generated, which is a cloying hallmark of much of American independent cinema and fiction. Thank God, then, for Lucas, who may yet have a film career on this evidence, successfully bridging the gap between his Little Britain monstrosities and a real dramatic persona.

4/10

Emil und die Detektive (Gerhard Lamprecht, 1931)

The first screen adaptation of Erich Kästner's children's adventure best-seller, the popularity of which extended far beyond Germany, Emil and the Detectives is somewhat of a historical curio due to the novel's setting in the years of the Great Depression and subsequent filming in the last days of the Weimar Republic. Added to this is the presence of Billy Wilder as scriptwriter before his flight to Hollywood and the end result is very odd indeed. The basic framework is a precursor of the Famous Five genre, with a plucky young boy and his cohorts bringing down an adult villain who has robbed him, but the Berlin setting with its low-lifes, unusual for the children's literature of the time, and the strong influence of expressionism in the photography, particularly in a tripped-out sequence where the hero is drugged by the crook, confound expectations constantly.

6/10

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller, 2014)

Both a prequel and a sequel to Sin City, in that it consists of loosely interconnected stories with the same main characters set both before and after those of the first film,  Sin City: A Dame to Kill For strives for the seemingly impossible in trying to outdo both the violence and misogyny of its predecessor, which already set the bar high in both terms for a big studio flick. The stark monochrome comic book look is the same, and it is striking, but we've been here before and whereas the first time around it impressed by being so fresh, going a considerable way to alleviating if not excusing the pubescent boy's fixations with strippers and guns, we've seen it now and the film has nothing to offer except many more scenes of Jessica Alba gyrating on stage or even more people getting decapitated or shot in the eye. Nor is there any semblance of plots beyond revenge ones this time. As a pure spectacle, it still dazzles the eye. As cinema, it's worthless.

3/10