Bone Tomahawk (S. Craig Zahler, 2015)

Another genre extension of the Western in which Kurt Russell, who spends a lot of screen time being roughed up these days, as if his grizzled aspect invites it, takes on a bunch of cannibalistic troglodytes. The level of gratuitous violence is jacked up to the levels now demanded of horror films in the Saw vein, and while there is a certain skill in making the viewer cringe and believe that none of the characters are safe, it is basically just a zombie film with stetsons, made with clinical efficiency.

5/10

Renoir (Gilles Bourdos, 2012)

A biopic of the painter's last years and the fractitious relationship he has with his middle son, Renoir certainly looks the part cinematographically: some shots are utterly lustrous. However, it also does little more than relate the events, with a flatness of insight - and an odd lack of attention to the quality of the actual paintings - that is not elevated by the painter periodically just telling his son that he doesn't understand art. There is also a preoccupation with undressing the headstrong young model who is his muse, to an extent that smacks rather of the perving after little girls which is endemic of much French cinema with artistic pretensions.

5/10

Kollektivet (Thomas Vinterberg, 2016)

The Commune relates the story of a middle-class couple who decide to invite an assorted bunch of people to fill the big house they've inherited as an experiment in communal living (in the seventies, of course). Along the way, the usual tropes of fiction on the topic crop up: there are squabbles about budgets and habits, and the project turns sour as the father and owner, who entered into the undertaking unwillingly, engages in an affair with one of his students, which makes his wife bitterly regret taking the idea so lightly.
Nothing out of the ordinary as such occurs, and the film is therefore heavily reliant on realistic depictions of interpersonal relationships - which it mostly manages, except for some uncertainty of tone when it can't decide whether to satirise the cohabitants instead - and indebted to strong performances, particularly by Trine Dyrholm as the naive wife whose life is ruined by the changes. But, overall, it doesn't really add anything new to the theme.

5/10

Orfeu Negro (Marcel Camus, 1959)

Black Orpheus made a clean sweep of every major award going on its release, and it's easy to see how resetting the Orpheus story in the heady environment of the Brazilian carnival bewitched audiences in the post-war European gloom. It's far removed in this aspect from the melancholia of Jean Cocteau's artful and surreal take, for example. The pace is hyperactive, the characters overblown, and yet this works effectively to create a sense of dislocation and romanticism that's powerful enough that the supernatural element of the original myth can be done away with when the denouement is reached. It's very much a product of its time, and no less fascinating for that, even if just for anthropological reasons, with sexual morality being seen as very much an optional extra rather than a guiding principle.

6/10

Comes a Bright Day (Simon Aboud, 2012)

The British off-centre heist film has become quite a sub-genre of its own, and Comes a Bright Day ticks all the boxes, with the narrator's voiceover, random violence, self-consciously quirky elements and Geoff Bell in the wings. Basically, a young lad dreaming of a brighter future in the big city gets caught up in a bungled armed robbery at a jeweller's and the rest of the story is the unfolding of the hostage situation that ensues. Timothy Spall is also in attendance for star value as the jeweller, getting some fairly cringeworthy monologues on what precious objects represent in terms of history and dreams. It passes by innocuously enough, and at the same time is quite untrue to life and pointless as an exercise.

4/10

Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016)

Well, here it finally is, the comic book fan boys' wet dream. And appositely a sticky mess. The film bends over backwards to achieve the implausible fight between DC's biggest hero guns, and having achieved that, suddenly realises they have to pal up subito to deal with the villains. There is far too much time wasted on meandering towards this, with Batman's origin story yet again inexplicably filling up screen time, while Jeremy Irons doing his stint as a sardonic and weary Alfred, on the other hand, is criminally underused. Then there's Jesse Eisenberg not so much channelling as karaokeing Ledger's jittery and psychotic Joker in the Lex Luthor role, a pointless digression mid-action where the next characters in the franchise chain are set up through having Wonder Woman look at computer files - yes, really - and a monster at the finale who could just as well as ogre #373 in the background of some Lord of the Rings scene. The script also manages to ransack the bits from the Batman and Superman histories that are probably of the richest dramatic potential - i.e. the Dark Knight Returns graphic novel and the death of Superman story line, thus ensuring they can never be done properly again, while leaving us none the wiser to anyone's motivations, least of all Luthor, who just seems to want Superman dead because he's nuts, not because there's some grand plan.
It's a pity because if you listen carefully enough, there's some pithy dialogue tucked in amongst the bombastics, and the cast is brimming with quality. As for the characters, Batman should really be rescued from this, scurrying around like a mouse between giant explosions by the end with sod-all else to do. It's dismaying to see that Christopher Nolan is along as executive producer; his moody creation deserves better than this ignominy, which will only get worse with the silly sequels coming up.         

4/10

Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman, 2015)

Kaufman's second film as director after a string of successful screenplays takes us further into the relationship drama through a surrealistic perspective with physical actors replaced by unnervingly life-like stop-motion figures. This serves to support the air of dissociation that the script is predominantly concerned with, as a motivational business speaker finds all people around him with the same faces - reminiscent of everyone turning into John Malkovich in a scene in one of Kaufman's earlier work - and even the same voice. This is until the titular figure turns up, and there is a flash of love between them.
The painstakingly-created animation in puppet form of mundane real environments is an effective medium to convey the solipsism of the principal character. It also highlights the shallowness and homogeneity of, varyingly, what people say - as we inevitably focus more on verbal content than on real faces - and the American customer service experience as the epitome of the crushingly anodyne to a degree which is almost excruciating to behold.
But, here's the rub: it's also deeply disingenuous. The director chucks in a sweet nothing of an ending in a throwaway manner to steer the viewer towards thinking they've learnt something, and this is done in a far more brazen way than in, say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. whereas it's actually just a deflection from what has been a barrage of barely contained misanthropy, alternating with wallowing in the main character's shallow mid-life crisis, up until that point. While it doesn't quite inflict pseud torture on the audience like his ridiculously lauded Synecdoche, New York, it would appear that Kaufman is someone used best as a source of ideas which are reined in and refined by another director.

5/10