St. Vincent (Theodore Melfi, 2014)

When making a Wes Anderson-lite comedy driven by slightly off-kilter characters doing slightly off-kilter things, be sure to cast Bill Murray, who brings the twin benefits of getting the target audience and bringing the requisite hangdog air and likability, even when cast as a misanthrope, as here. His Vincent is a curmudgeonly and broke pensioner, dreaming of a big win on the horses while caring for his dementia-stricken wife and reluctantly taking his single-parent neighbour's bullied son under his wing. The chemistry between these two forms the backbone of a slight story and its best scenes, with some crisp dialogue between the pair enlivening fairly standard set-ups. It's gentle fun until drifting into schmaltz after Murray suffers a stroke and effectively becomes a toothless presence.

5/10

Ted 2 (Seth MacFarlane, 2015)

This time around, the irksome evil of needing a plot to hang the gags on is that the potty-mouthed teddy bear has lost his legal status as a person and so has to set about re-establishing it. But that's by the by; what you judge this on is whether it contains any new innovations in upsetting the thin-skinned with irreverence, and unfortunately it doesn't. MacFarlane is too smug to bother; he's got his legions through Family Guy and clearly can't be bothered to work to get any more fans. Of course, giving the punters more of the same is the rule in Hollywood rather than the exception, but it does rile a bit when that's exactly what the best bits of his comedy are built on attacking.
So, we get entire scenes recycled from the TV cartoon like wrecking an incriminating laptop full of porn, a mishap in a sperm bank and a stoned car crash, followed by a cute Disney woodland animal bit, and then there's the tedious business of having the bear and Mark Wahlberg get caned again and again, reeling off cock jokes.
A few star cameos momentarily liven it up, but they're all too fleeting and then we're back to the plod again, with the knowledge that there's still over an hour to go and storyline boxes have to be ticked off. It's a pointless exercise, with none of the novelty and sweetness that raised the first film above the gross-out comedy norm.

4/10

L'une chante, l'autre pas (Agnès Varda, 1977)

One Sings, the Other Doesn't charts the progress of the friendship and lives of two women over 14 years. One is a mother who becomes widowed at an early age and the other a hippyish free spirit composing feminist-themed songs, of which the film contains many in a semi-musical style. The relationship is depicted in a thoughtful and relatable manner, and the wholly female perspective is refreshing, if disheartening at the same time as it underlines how far removed most cinema is from that. However, it's also badly dated in its viewpoint of gender politics and heavily burdened by dialogue that is either polemic or characters externalising their thoughts with unnatural directness, which is effective at first until you realise that all the characters do it. One also suspects that the songs, with some ludicrous lyrics by the director, are not there to be laughed at, which is a pity as many of them are hilarious.

5/10

Bleeder (Nicolas Winding Refn, 1999)

The fourth of the director's Danish films before his setting up shop in America, Bleeder is, like the Pusher trilogy before it, set in the marginalised world of working-class and dead-end urban society, part kitchen-sink drama, part in the underworld, heavily indebted to Scorsese around Mean Streets. Kim Bodnia, the lead from the first Pusher film, plays an emotionally-repressed man who has just found out he's about to become a father and the central thread is his story into disintegration in the face of being unable to cope with it or express what he feels before it's too late. The violence is intense on both a physical and mental level, and it's some comfort to have Mads Mikkelsen playing support as a no-hoper obsessed with films who finally starts to come out of his shell, providing some crumb of hope.

What Winding Refn's films had back then, while already stylised to the full extent the low budget allowed, was a fundamental heart, even if it was an angry one. By Only God Forgives, the hyperstyle had utterly swamped whatever substance there was, and one has to doubt whether The Neon Demon can recapture get him back on track to making films which also mean something beyond the fantastic gloss. But looking back at his early work, you still hold out some hope.

6/10

   

Slow West (John Maclean, 2015)

The Western vogue won't go away, but this wave has taken it on in the sense of an environment that's virtually sci-fi in terms of the diversity and sheer weirdness of the universe. Yet certain conventions are still beholden to. Hence, Slow West, with all its nods from El Topo down to the lowly likes of Seraphim Falls, contains ultraviolence and surrealism in equal measure, and this could be irritating indeed were it not for a simple backbone to the plot that remains constant. Once again, it ends up one of those films where, after all the beautiful scapes and ideas that suggest something larger, as probably the last thing the director wanted, i.e. simply a more thoughtful than average addition to the modern Western genre. You do have to sympathise with how hard it is to add anything more to the Western, though, or how once you've chosen that as your carrier of stories it ties up your hands.

6/10

Tomorrowland: A World Beyond (Brad Bird, 2015)

Here, director Bird continues with live action instead of the animation with which he made his name, albeit that it's cartoonish and CGI-laden enough that it might as well dispense with physical actors. The premise of a very child-oriented story is basically that there is another futuristic world that the young and spirited have access to through contact with magic pins, and a feisty teenage girl becomes determined to get there again after her first exposure to it. George Clooney turns up as a disillusioned man expelled from Tomorrowland as a child, playing a kind of substitute father figure who trots out the moral of the story, which is in essence a very middle-of-the-road woolly Disney philosophy about the value of hope and positivity in the face of the mess that the adult world is. Bird is a competent enough hand at the helm to ensure that it zips along lightly for the most part, but it's vexing to discover that there's far less substance and emotional complexity here for the adult audience than what any of his animated works contained.

5/10

Dokhtari dar šab tanhâ be xâne miravad (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)

Boy meets girl in a nameless nocturnal Iranian town, except that the girl in question is a vampire preying on the male lowlifes of the town.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night garnered much international praise, and beguiles with its blend of spaghetti Western and Jarmuschian film noir. But it's difficult to separate the just plaudits for its immersive mood and stylised look from the constant awareness that elements like drug-taking, prostitution and a total lack of religious presence are simply not what you expect from an Iranian film, and so there is a great temptation to be seduced by the novelty of that alone. It does look gorgeous in inky monochrome, uses music to great effect and understands the value of stillness, but, like its characters, doesn't actually know where to go. Still, it will be intriguing to see what Amirpour does next: there is an evident self-assuredness in the direction that promises a great deal.

6/10