Juste la fin du monde (Xavier Dolan, 2016)

A gay playwright returns to see his family in Quebec after an absence of 12 years, intending to tell them that he's dying. It's a fractious homecoming that doesn't last a day, with constant bickering and back-biting between them making productive communication arduous. But it is the lead character's diffidence that makes it quite impossible, and this is one of the most frustrating things about It's Only the End of the World. He simply does not take a stand, hardly speaking, staring off in reveries of the past when addressed and letting all the sniping wash over him. Considering that his sister is arrested in adolescence, his older brother is a self-important aggressive bully, his sister-in-law a mouse who can hardly get a sentence out and his dithering mother quite unable to control any of it, there isn't anyone at all to empathise with, which was surely not the intention.
Dolan clearly has an inkling of how to spot fractures in family relationships, but the way these are presented is overblown and clumsy, like the observations of a Martian, and disappointingly what you would expect of a director so young who also represents sexual and linguistic minorities and is obviously burdened by that fact. The top-rate cast, including Marion Cotillard and Vincent Cassel are reduced to working with caricatures of personae.
It won the Grand Prix at Cannes, which is one of those frequent cases where the jury wilfully awards something just for being hard work (and therefore not commercial), regardless of whether it actually manages to say anything.

5/10

El Incidente (Isaac Ezban, 2014)

The ambition of Ezban's debut feature is commendable, and one hopes the realisation all the way through to the end will become more rigorously thought out with time. Essentially, two groups of people in Mexico become stuck in a kind of Sartrean hell where for one set there is no escape from a stairwell, for another likewise none from a highway that keeps returning them to the same place. The conceptualisation of what then piles up as junk over their trapped lives is quite gripping, functioning effectively as both oblique commentary of rampant, soulless consumerism and the futility of human endeavour, the attempt of the director to make the strands tie up at the end far less so, becoming truly muddled. But there is real promise in evidence here.

6/10

Bienvenue à Marly-Gomont (Julien Rambaldi, 2016)

Rather perfunctorily titled The African Doctor for the English market, this is an account of the arrival of the family of the Congolese-French rapper Kamini in a village in the sticks where nary a black person has ever been seen. As you might expect, the tone is overwhelmingly comic, with the family slowly and surely converting the kneejerk racist locals into a community that venerates them, right down to the daughter becoming the star of the local boys' football team. So, it becomes very sugar-coated Hollywood and there is no trusting the narrative reliability at all (the musician wasn't even actually born before the family got there, just to begin with), but it is harmless fun all the same.

5/10

The Childhood of a Leader (Brady Corbet, 2015)

Impudently out of its time in technique - Kubrick's Barry Lyndon or Bertolucci's The Conformist are some indicators - The Childhood of a Leader presents the idea of a brief period in the childhood of a young boy dislocated to a small village in France by his American diplomat father in the wake of WWI. He rebels against all and sundry in a calculated manner and the only things that drive us to see his smallest actions as the seeds of megalomania are the film's title and Scott Walker's overpowering, frenetic score, which turns even seemingly innocuous moments into a prelude into The Omen.
As cinema, it's a rare beast in this day and age, at times taking as long as Bela Tarr over a particular shot with the intention of letting some detail sink in. Hence, you have to applaud the sheer cojones, but overall it still doesn't really reward you for your patience: the character is generic, which is frankly an unnecessary cop-out, and more questions are left than answers.

6/10

The Sense of an Ending (Ritesh Batra, 2017)

Ritesh Batra follows up his international breakthrough The Lunchbox with an adaptation of Julian Barnes's Booker-winning novel, casting the ever-watchable Jim Broadbent as a man mulling over the defining period of his life 40 years before when his best friend committed suicide after taking off with his girlfriend. The tone is naturally wistful, golden-glowed flashbacks leading from his attempts to piece together the reality of what happened. Much of Barnes's sharp dialogue remains intact, but the necessary substitution of the unreliable narrator that steers the flow of the novel with actual objectively-viewed scenes ultimately detracts from what makes the original text compelling: less is left to guesswork and Broadbent then just asserting in voiceover that we are architects of the account of our own pasts, even to ourselves, therefore carries less force. Nevertheless, the quality of the performances on show and the director's ability to focus on small nuances of expression, both verbal and non-verbal, offer adequate compensation for the lack of really telling dramatic impact.

6/10

A Walk in the Woods (Ken Kwapis, 2015)

Bill Bryson's travel books ramble on foot and in words from one place or topic of interest to another, with his omnipresent wry wit and sense of indignation, and adapting them was always going to be a challenge. A Walk in the Woods, where he undertakes to walk the whole 2,100 miles of the Appalachian Trail accompanied by an old friend, settles for paying lip service to the erudition and giving us a codgers' buddy movie instead, with the two protagonists, the put-upon Bryson and his shambolic, overweight travelling companion Katz, aged some twenty years from the book and then played by actors ten years even older than that, in the form of Robert Redford and Nick Nolte. Unsurprisingly, the veterans make an amiable pair, but the narrator's sharper comic observations about people and asides on topics from biology to history are sorely missed. It's more a nice day out than a journey of any import.

5/10

Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie, 2016)

Two brothers, one a repentant divorcee and the other a reckless ex-con, go on a spree of sloppy bank heists in dead-end Texas towns to pay off the younger one's debts, and end up being pursued by a pair of bickering Texas Rangers, one on the brink of retirement. There is lots of dust, manly cussing and blood on the horizon. So far so standard, but Hell or High Water rises well above the genre norm through a combination of factors: it doggedly takes as much time as it needs to build up social context and atmosphere, more interested in people sitting on porches mulling over the vanishing of the myth of the American dream than shoot-outs. The casting, led by stalwart Jeff Bridges as the lead ranger, is uniformly solid and they are all given meaty, sardonic dialogue to work with, and then there's the wide drawn-out shots of the parched landscape to suck you further into the ambience. As noir elegiac odes to something that never really was go, they don't come much more perfectly realised. Think of it as a No Country for Anyone.

7/10