Die andere Heimat – Chronik einer Sehnsucht (Edgar Reitz, 2013)

In Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision, a prequel to his acclaimed Heimat TV film series, Reitz takes us back to the village of Schabbach of 1842, suffering disease and oppression under the Prussian yoke and with anyone still young and able emigrating for the new world in droves. The main character is a hopeless dreamer, studying Amazonian tribal languages as he fantasises about leaving for Brazil, embittered when his brother beats him to it and strands him to continue the struggling family business.
It's lustrous to look at, shot in monochrome but with unexpected flashes of colour, and there is a real sense of period too, which combine to make the running length of nearly four hours not drag at all despite the events largely being a continual cycle of hardship and death. However, as always with Reitz, perhaps most reminiscently of 1979's The Tailor from Ulm, but also with the '60s-set episodes of Heimat, there is a critical fault in asking the audience to empathise with a protagonist who lives in cloud-cuckoo land to the detriment of both himself and those around him: it's not enough to be a romantic to elicit our love. Reitz has never quite got this, and it's always a pity when in other aspects his films offer so much in terms of mood and beauty.

6/10

Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)

Nominally a sequel to the original trilogy, Mad Max: Fury Road is in effect really a recycling of the second and third films, with the world already completely gone to hell and all semblance of a normal society long vanished. To be fair, this does mean that by now Max is truly mad, but that's just about all the continuation adds, bar ramping up the action intensity even more. The mere fact that there is much less reliance on CGI, which is by now widely reviled, than in most modern action films has been held up as a virtue to a wholly depressing extent: there is just too little let-up in the pace and sooner or later anyone with an attention span of over two seconds will find themselves zoning out. Tom Hardy is an actor of real presence, but he could be replaced here by almost anyone and you wouldn't notice, with so little room for actual characterisation. It's hard to see what makes the whole any better than, say, the critically panned The Chronicles of Riddick.

5/10

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (Guy Ritchie, 2015)

Another year, another spate of remakes of things which were popular in past eras, and soon the recycling may have to resort as far as the '40s. It's a Wonderful Life with, say, Bradley Cooper, anyone? Although that's probably already in post-production anyway.
That said, and forewarned with having the unsteady Guy Ritchie at the helm, this is surprisingly entertaining at times. Of course, the camp has been sucked out and with it much of the humour too, but watch the original series and say in all honesty that it was funny. Really.
Instead of the kitsch, then, we have gritty back stories, abundant violence and two men twice the size of their predecessors as the heroes. So far, so standard, but Henry Cavill's Napoleon Solo is a nice twist on Jean Dujardin's suave OSS 117 character and Armie Hammer works well as his counterpart Illya Kuryakin, with much mileage gained from ceaselessly baiting him to lose his rag. It's still no great shakes, but far better than could have been hoped for, given the raw materials.

5/10

American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973)

Lucas's second feature, based on the setting of his coming of age in a nondescript early '60s small town, offers no inkling at all of the globe-striding behemoth he was to become with Star Wars. This is both a good thing, as there is no budget to run roughshod over the script and the dialogue is natural, and then again not good at all, as it manages tediousness without any excuses.
Bizarrely, it was nominated for the year's Best Picture Oscar, which is surely testament to how many Americans will have found a resonance with their own youths in dead-end middle America in the gap between the bright-eyed optimism of the '50s and the impending arrival of Vietnam, civil rights and the concomitant counter-culture, which then upset the apple cart for good . But to the external eye, it just consists of a string of mildly amusing scenes spread over a night of minor comings-to between aimless kids, driving around and around endlessly because there's nothing else to do.

5/10

It Started in Naples (Melville Shavelson, 1960)

As in Houseboat, here Shavelson again chucks an ageing A-lister at Sophia Loren in the hope that sparks might be created between them. However, in the former film the perennial twinkle in Cary Grant's eye did a lot to engender indulgence towards the 30-year age gap in the romance; no such fortuity here as Clark Gable plays to type as a stolid lawyer impatient to settle his late brother's affairs in Naples. It's quite impossible to fathom what Loren's character might see in him, and meanwhile in the scenes in between we're stuck with Gable's little Italian nephew squeaking pidgin English, which is sadly less cute than severely irritating before long. Loren is wonderful when allowed to display her comic talents, but then she's also put through some truly excruciating song-and-dance numbers. There is a lightness of touch in the dialogue, and the settings are enchanting, but the whole doesn't quite gel.

5/10

Snow White and the Huntsman (Rupert Sanders, 2012)

Peter Jackson must shoulder part of the blame for a revival in forced resuscitations of well-worn fantasy material, which has resulted mostly in derivative dross like this 'reimagining' of the Grimm fairy tale. What reimagining in this context means is a cobbling together of meretricious staples from classics, the most transparent being the seven dwarfs, who are a carbon copy of the plucky band from The Hobbit, right down to having veteran British actors play the lot of them. Meanwhile, Snow White herself is badly served by the casting of Kristen Stewart and her slack-jawed gawp, upstaged at every turn by Charlize Theron's scenery-chewing hamming as the evil queen. It does look good, at least, but by now this is the least that one has come to expect and not sufficient compensation for a muddled and overly action-reliant script. Naturally, all this is of no consequence to its pre-teen target audience, and so a second instalment is under way, albeit thankfully without Stewart this time.

4/10

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams, 2015)

"Best/worst film EVER!" (delete as applicable). Or, dare it be said, somewhere in between? Rebooter sans pareil Abrams applies the same jazz-ups as with Star Trek, creating a melange of equal parts sharper action and sharper repartees, with nods to fanboys in abundance, than has been witnessed in the last three instalments.
The rub here is, though, that a reboot wasn't exactly what was called for, just a continuation of the original trilogy that buries the memory of the largely execrable prequels. While it does the second part of the remit with efficiency, making sure that cutesiness and helplessly clunky dialogue are largely avoided (although the expository nature of Han's and Leia's lines in their brief re-meeting scene is somewhat painful to behold), generating an entirely fresh storyline seems to be somewhat outside Abrams's range. Basically, an orphaned youth on a desert planet dreams of the galaxy beyond and is then flung into taking a droid with vital information in it to the rebellion, who then proceed to attack the Empire's planet-destroying machine. It's a shame that more effort wasn't put into this, which really cannot be counted as a spoiler, when there is so much that really works, too. The actors' performances are never less than solid, the references to the minutiae of the canon are witty and aptly placed and the visual aspects, such as the sight of the wreck of a star destroyer buried in the sand, are also quite awe-inspiring at times. And, perhaps the most importantly for fan-gratification and studio alike, it provides a few genuine shocks and sends the audience home with plenty of teasing questions still buzzing around in their minds.
So, on the whole, high marks for execution and middling ones for originality. Star Wars fans may be a conservative beast en masse, but they can surely be taken a little more out of their comfort zone. Maybe the next part, under the helm of the director of time-travel movie with a brain, Looper, will dare to do that.

7/10