Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, 2015)

A socially awkward high school kid with a passion for movies is forced by his mum to befriend a girl with leukaemia, something that then turns into a real platonic relationship. We are very much in American independent Dave Eggers/Michel Gondry country here, with the quirkiness laid on thick just so we know how magical life can be, and both the lead character's incongruously street black mate and the waning, poetic girl serve rather flimsily as mere foils for the stock self-obsessed white middle-class male in the centre, but it is redeemed overall by having a sparkling sense of wit - evident in the film spoofs that the boys make in particular - and a real emotional sensitivity too, even if it falls quite decisively short of saying anything truly insightful.

6/10

I.T. (John Moore, 2016)

For an actor who, post-Bond, has been able to demonstrate bags of acting talent and commands the screen too, Pierce Brosnan really does make unwise choices. Here, as a self-satisfied aviation tycoon who inadvertently upsets a socially dysfunctional employee, it's not that he does anything wrong per se in the role, just that the role is shallow and so's the psycho stalker plot that we're then plunged into without much further ado. Then it's just a matter of joining up the dots, while wondering what on earth I.T. really has anything to do with it, besides the looney utilising technology as his torture instrument of choice.

4/10

John Wick: Chapter 2 (Chad Stahelski, 2017)

This is a rarity in the world of action sequels in that it's actually superior to the first instalment. Unfortunately, since the first film was almost entirely an exercise in monitoring the body count, with only a cursory origin story serving as a respite, this is not high praise. Keanu Reeves has slowed down noticeably in dutifully wading through more and more disposable thugs and it isn't a pretty sight for Neo: jowlier does not always equal more grizzled, and he's always been an actor heavily dependent on how he comes across visually in the absence of any greater talent. It covers its Ronseal non-stop violence remit and finishes open-endedly with Wick even worse off than before, and that is pretty much the sum total of its virtues.

5/10

Death Note (Adam Wingard, 2017)

Hollywood's ransacking of Japanese horror manga continues with a wholly unnecessary loose remake of the first of the live-action versions of the story. The story essentially involves a high school student who comes across a notebook which causes the death of anyone known to the writer whose name is written in it. He begins by offing just truly evil people and then predictably loses focus. It's a premise with legs, explaining why it has gone on for so long in Japan, and the death god Ryuk who periodically visits the hapless protagonist to taunt and cajole him is an unsettlingly opaque presence: having Willem Dafoe voice the character was probably the best decision made in this adaptation. On the other hand, focusing excessively on the sulky teenage lead instead of his more interesting demonic tormentor, adding a spurious love interest and cramming in as much as possible from the source material in case the U.S. franchise doesn't take off do it no favours at all.

4/10

A Street Cat Named Bob (Roger Spottiswoode, 2016)

Based on James Bowen's best-selling autobiographical book about his life on the streets as a heroin addict and subsequent salvation attributed to finding a cat to take care of, this is quite a departure for a director best known for Hollywood action films. But then many people get soppy with old age, and despite the bleak beginnings, this is a film with a very soft centre. Which is no bad thing in itself, because while offering hope, it still doesn't eschew showing the realities of the gutter, and it ultimately works because we can believe that all this really happened. Although you may have to be a cat-lover to swallow that having to look after a feline can really provide you with enough of an emotional anchor to drag yourself out of the mire.

6/10

Coherence (James Ward Byrkit, 2013)

A bland dinner party of friends turns into an existential nightmare in an impressive zero-budget debut by the director. But who needs a budget when you have a brain, and although the notion of a bunch of people becoming trapped in a confusion of realities, which occurs here as a comet passes close to Earth, is now becoming another sub-genre in itself - partly owing a debt to films such as Nacho Vigalondo's Timecrimes and now continued by the films of Mexico's Isaac Ezban, for example - the twists here are both unexpected and deeply disturbing, even if it does giddily overreach itself and turns into quite a muddle in the process.
It's a very difficult film to categorise; a summary of the premise would suggest science fiction, but it's really a drama that turns into horror without violence. And to say anything more would be a cruel spoiler.

6/10

Toivon tuolla puolen (Aki Kaurismäki, 2017)

The iconic director's 17th feature film outing is a revisit to the theme of Third World immigrants interacting with Europeans, as with his last film, Le Havre. This time however, the director is on more solid ground with the setting moved to Finland and his anger is more pronounced, with racist thugs turning up at times to victimise the main character, a young Syrian asylum seeker, who is also treated unfairly by the system that decides to send him back to Aleppo after judging the situation there to be not perilous enough to warrant asylum.
The structure of The Other Side of Hope is one with two parallel storylines: the asylum seeker's tribulations and a middle-aged travelling shirt salesman who leaves his wife to somehow manage to set up a restaurant in Helsinki. That these storylines exist in isolation from each other for so long into the film is its major weakness: the tone in the former is serious, whereas with the Finns it's overwhelmingly comic. Correspondingly, when we get the characters staring wordlessly into space or the camera in Kaurismäki's emblematic style, the effect with the asylum seekers is one of suffering and saudade, while with the less-troubled Finns it conveys a broader range of emotion from dismay to disapproval or hostility.
Nevertheless, this is Kaurismäki's most complete and satisfying film for a long time, and not just because it's a great exercise in ticking off literally every one of his trademarks (characters smoking incessantly as a substitute for conversation, sparse deadpan dialogue, protracted interludes of awful music, dismal anachronistic interiors and expressionist lighting, to name just a few). By the time the restaurateur takes the would-be immigrant gruffly under his wing, we've been waiting for it a long while and it's truly gratifying.

7/10