Tom of Finland (Dome Karukoski, 2017)

There aren't many internationally-known Finns besides racing drivers, but the pioneer of homoerotic art Touko Laaksonen, who adopted the nom de plume Tom of Finland, certainly qualifies. The film is a pretty straightforward biopic, charting his life from the trauma of war through the anti-homosexual repression of the '50s and '60s through to his breakthrough as a figurehead for an emerging worldwide community of gay men. It doesn't get very explicit about his own sexual life, but also doesn't shy away from showing his art, all impossibly sexualised beefcakes, and while the theme of gay men being forced to hide themselves away in a less-enlightened era is one that has been well explored in film and literature, the Finnish angle, the detailed recreation of the period and the complexity of the character lend it a substantial amount of interest beyond its most obvious target audience.

6/10

La gloire de mon père (Yves Robert, 1990)

Based on Marcel Pagnol's quasi-autobiographical novel about his early years, My Father's Glory follows his parents moving from their little Provencal town to Marseille after his birth in 1895. The young Marcel proves precociously intelligent, swallowing entire books from an early age against his worried mother's wishes and with his relentlessly optimistic schoolmaster father's wholehearted support. Then the family moves to a remote house in the hills for the summer, and Marcel undergoes formative experiences in the wild landscape.
It is rose-tinted; nothing much transpires at all, and certainly nothing ill. Yet that's really the point: it's childhood remembered rather than factually recounted, as a succession of magical moments and atmospheres never to be recaptured in quite the same way again. Provided you surrender to its vivacity and can accept its perpetual cuteness, it's quite charming.

6/10

Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, 2012)

Sightseers dates back to the phase of Wheatley's directorial career when he was still laying down the foundations for the eventual rise to centre stage, and it consolidates many of the aspects of a world view based on a lack of trust in human nature as well as a love of farce that Down Terrace and Kill List evidenced.
In a nutshell, a new couple set out on a caravanning tour of England's endearingly crappiest attractions; tram and pencil museums and sites of similar drabness, and alarm bells are soon ringing as it becomes evident that he's a grade A sociopath, first running over a man for littering, and that she's far from a full basket of sandwiches herself, first taking on board his homicidal proclivities by just getting a bit upset, and then getting into the spirit of their spree herself. Imagine Natural Born Killers shot through a League of Gentlemen (the blacker than black TV series, of course) filter, and you have some idea of the overall effect. It really is as dark and misanthropic as that would suggest, under its veil of stifled, mannered mundanity, and that alone lends it a substantial amount of interest, although whether Wheatley is really saying anything meaningful beyond that is another matter.

6/10

Avril et le Monde Truqué (Christian Desmares & Franck Ekinci, 2015)

April and the Extraordinary World takes its cue from the copious and varied French comic book/graphic novel culture, in which science fiction is a large component. The genre has not had a great history of translating successfully to the big screen, as evidenced by the recent Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, but the decision here to stick to animation rather than live action proves a judicious one, allowing a cavalcade of sumptuous backdrops of a sooty steampunk Paris.
The scenario begins with an interesting premise; a 1940s still stuck with coal and steam instead of oil and electricity, as well as perpetual war between a repressive imperial France and the United States, and follows its set-up through quite conscientiously with abundant incidental detail. Less interesting is the adventure plot, with a plucky young heroine seeking her parents and a solution to her grandfather's great and secret experiment, accompanied by her talking cat. It all goes completely bonkers along the way, but at least it stays well away from cuteness; one can only imagine how unwatchable an end product would have resulted if this outline had been handed over to an anime studio.

6/10

The Party (Sally Potter, 2017)

The intermittently-directing Sally Potter, still best remembered for Orlando 25 years earlier, brings together a bunch of veteran thesp chums for a concise affair involving a ton of secrets emerging at a party to celebrate Kristin Scott Thomas's ascension to a shadow-ministerial position. It's fundamentally a black comedy, with strong echoes of Abigail's Party except without a single dominating socially paranoid monster, more a collection of navel-gazing middle-aged middle-class individuals with more subtle flaws. At an hour and ten minutes, it can hardly be said to overstay its welcome, but aside from the divertingly fine cast which also includes the likes of Timothy Spall and Bruno Ganz and some choice lines given to them, neither does it leave much to digest besides an overall air of social unease.

6/10

En man som heter Ove (Hannes Holm, 2015)

A Man Called Ove centres around a recently widowed man who's also then forced into early retirement, and sets about trying to join his departed wife. He then fails at every varied suicide attempt, in a manner strongly echoing Jean-Pierre Leaud in Kaurismäki's I Hired a Contract Killer. So, this is a black comedy in the Scandinavian mould, but since it's also primarily in the rapidly-growing genre of fiction to do with the elderly not being allowed to go out quietly, from The Bucket List onwards, positivity creeps in very soon through his persistently cheery neighbours and his rather amusingly misanthropic and curmudgeonly ways are blunted. Thankfully, this wasn't Hollywood, since he's still allowed to retain some of his grumpy essence and hence the conclusion never becomes too cloyingly sentimental, so it remains a pleasant, unpatronising experience as a whole. That said, apparently it is being remade with Tom Hanks in the role. God help us.

6/10

Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018)

On to movie 18 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and after going for the female empowerment angle with Wonder Woman, it's time for the black vote. This proved very successful at the box office and with critics too, but once the novelty of a hero from an African kingdom more technologically advanced than any other on Earth and an almost all-black cast wears off, the plot is strictly off the shelf and the themes - a hero who must prove himself worthy and cast aside self-doubt, and a villain with a semi-justified chip on his shoulder (who, in the style of all unimaginative superhero match-ups, has exactly the same powers as the hero for their final showdown) - so tired they're threadbare. As for the Africa aspect, the kingdom of Wakanda is a mish-mash of anything vaguely African enough to satisfy a Western audience as bona fide, with tribal dancing and rhinos, and the principal cast is actually mostly composed of American and English actors competing for the title of least embarrassing generic accent. It's got the FX and pacy action of course, but that really is a given for the MCU series. Bah.

5/10