War Machine (David Michôd, 2017)

Brad Pitt stars as a blood-and-guts general sent to Afghanistan to bring the country under control, predictably soon finding that this is a war unlike any other he's known before. He ploughs on undeterred, fuelled by rhetoric and tortuous reasoning, but all the while the ground slips away from under him.
It's a satire with obvious targets, shooting fish in a barrel even without the unnecessary voiceover hammering the point home, and uneven of tone - Ben Kingsley doing the Afghan President Karzai, a faux-naif washing his hands of any involvement, is close to rehashing his comic turn as The Mandarin out of Iron Man 3, while for a spell near the end, with the troops engaged in a firefight in some ruined town, it seems to want to have The Hurt Locker cake too.
Nevertheless, Pitt gives the general out of his depth a wounded pride alongside his blatant ridiculousness, and while it is heavy-handed, to say the least, in how it spells out the anti-U.S. Middle East crusade argument for the viewers, these days you have to conclude that the American public in particular need this kind of approach, all else having failed.

5/10

Silence (Martin Scorsese, 2016)

Two young Jesuit priests travel to 17th-century Japan in search of their missing mentor and encounter a world where the local inquisition is determined to stamp out Christianity from their populace.
Over three hours of brutality and much hand-wringing and crying from the lead, Andrew Garfield, then ensue as the authorities try to get him to renounce the faith.
As befits a director who has always sincerely wrestled in his films with the conflict between personal truth and virtuous action, even in the ones seemingly wholly outside the spiritual field, Silence is a solemn, contemplative work that raises serious issues. But to fully engage with it, one has to turn a blind eye to the inherent colonialism of the premise, with the Japanese authorities given many of the attributes of Satan as the great tempter, and the naive priest's demented refusal to give in, even in the face of all the suffering this is causing to his followers.
The film's drawn-out length does allow some balance to be restored as Liam Neeson turns up as the lost mentor, and brings mature pragmatism in to temper his disciple's fervour. But you still suspect that this is a careful director seeing that in order to be persuasive, it's necessary to have strong counterarguments, and not that these are actually supposed to detract from the validity of Garfield's belief in a voice he wants to be in his head.

6/10  

Le Cercle Rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970)

The Red Circle sees Alain Delon reunited again with Melville, as a man freshly out of jail taking on a diamond heist. The realisation is slow and collected, and this generates an impressive level of tension, despite some seriously tedious longueurs in the mechanical set pieces of getting from A to B, which is then let down for once and for all by the rushed denouement. The detail is great, as is the doing away with surplus dialogue and the overall laconicism, but you expect much more at the end.

6/10

Woman in Gold (Simon Curtis, 2015)

A fairly accurate retelling of the legal process of 7 years of an Austrian Jew to recover the art stolen from her family by the Nazis, with a panoply of star cameos, Woman in Gold should simply be more than it amounts to: all the dramatic content is ready-made, but flat direction leaves nothing that stays in the mind beyond seeing what an impressive city Vienna is and how daft Helen Mirren's stab at an Austrian accent is, alongside her reveries cast into the past. It doesn't do its theme any service at all. Maybe in the U.S. market it's more emotive to have a ridiculously wealthy family stripped of its property, because it seems like rape to them, but elsewhere in the world and with regard to how the rest of the holocaust occurred, it's pretty shallow.

4/10

Swiss Army Man (Daniel Scheinert & Daniel Kwan, 2016)

Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe star in a kookfest where the former, a loser stranded on an island and about to commit suicide finds the latter, a corpse, washed up on the beach. The corpse then proves of great value to him in getting off the island through the jet-powered flatulence generated as it decomposes and numerous other mechanical uses to allow him to survive through the wilderness on the mainland. Along the way, the corpse begins talking to him and what we then have is effectively a buddy movie. Taking place in the sadsack lead's head.
To say it's whimsical and puerile is self-evident, like Michel Gondry in collaboration with the Farrelly brothers, but what really characterises it is that undying tendency in some U.S. independent cinema to slap together as much incongruous nonsense as possible in the starry-eyed belief that beautiful life lessons will be revealed. As befits the American mentality, it's very much another religion, and when the keen-eyed amongst you spot the brief cameo at the end of Shane Carruth, the director of the even more irritating and ridiculously lauded Upstream Color, probably one of the most egregious films this reviewer has ever endured, it reaffirms the existence of a cult of weirdness for its own sake masquerading as the virtues of diversity.

4/10

Stake Land (Jim Mickle, 2010)

The idea of a world in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse has now become, in effect, an established reality and all that filmmakers choosing to go down that path can achieve to validate the effort is to bring something new to the table. Yes, here the shambling flesh-eaters are referred to as vampires, but it's all pretty much the same thing, as is the motley band that try to survive through the post-civilisation landscape (the grizzled veteran, the naive narrator boy, the pregnant girl and the token black guy).
Two things do distinguish this from most other B-movies in the genre: more attention paid to quiet interludes and mood than usual, as if the director had aspirations to create the depth of The Road rather than just a standard rampage through biting hordes, and an explicit hatred of American Christian fundamentalists, who turn out to be far worse than the undead in their zeal to bring about punishment for mankind. So if there are some original ideas behind it, why adulterate them with such a tired formula? Is there really no other way to get commercial backing for them?

5/10  

The Discovery (Charlie McDowell, 2017)

Robert Redford is a scientist who discovers another 'plane of existence' after death (he's really cranking out these existential roles now, presumably while he still can). This leads to a worldwide suicide epidemic as people decide to cash their chips with the knowledge that there is something out there. A few years later, his estranged neurologist son, a sceptic, goes to find out what he's doing in seclusion and discovers that the research has progressed to the point of establishing what there actually is in that plane.
As is so often the case with high-concept sci-fi like this, the initial premise, with its consequences on the reasoning of credulous people, is much more engrossing than what the execution actually turns out to be, which is a sort of Flatliners crossed with Another Earth. It commits the usual sin of thinking that the difficult scientific feasibility part is really just a secondary concern, whereas it's vital: without some rigour applied to that part of the story (there is not even a token attempt to explain the 'scientific undeniability' of Redford's initial findings), it just ends up as woolly as the fond imaginings of the people in it who are taken in by the dream of a continued existence.

4/10