Ready Player One (Steven Spielberg, 2018)

Spielberg follows a pattern of output well-established over his career where a serious adult-themed film (in this case, last year's The Post) is immediately followed by a child-friendly adventure, by adapting Ernest Cline's science fiction hit novel. The computer game-addicted shantytown world of the near future is a dystopia, but it's dystopia-lite: the teenage heroes striving to win the ultimate competition in the online games world that most of mankind spends most of their time in, while a megacorp tries to stop them, are very much to be seen as cool and plucky: Spielberg young protagonist archetypes. Here, they are also calculatedly target audience-driven: there are the white American romantic leads, and their second-billing accomplices are black and Japanese, with layers of naff anime style and characters thrown in for good measure. Ironically, half the cast is actually British and the few real (as opposed to CGI) urban scenes shot in Birmingham.
As the Avatar-graphic quest progresses, we go through the most intense saturation of mostly 1980s pop culture references ever seen, at least what Spielberg was allowed to use, from Batmobiles and Duran Duran through to a complete recreation of The Shining as one of the challenges. This proves both daft fun and also as exhausting as the pace which is ramped up to beat even the video games that it reproduces, because it's clearly felt that it has to in order to retain the jaded audience's attention. Of course, both of these characteristics and the FX overload are conveniently justified by the plot.
On a base level, the message is that games-obsessed teens are good and adults are squares, and pop culture cannibalising itself is perfectly acceptable. It would have been nice if there was a more complex message in it, but you don't usually get that with Spielberg's kiddie products, so it was probably pointless to expect one. Compare this with Ender's Game, which was also built on a kid hero playing games to save the world, and yet managed to work in a morally ambiguous resolution.

5/10

Maze Runner: The Death Cure (Wes Ball, 2018)

Another Divergent Runner Games saga mercifully comes to an end when even the people behind it can't justify stretching it any further, not to their consumers or to themselves. It's not that this particular one has been objectionable per se, just that it offers absolutely no surprises or distinguishing characteristics. Hence, the painfully bland hero dives straight into baddie HQ ('the last city') to rescue a mate and that leads to a lot of running around, zombies by some other name and explosions follow, with a final confrontation with big meanie Aiden Gillen on the horizon. Ta-ta then.

4/10

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh, 2017)

Bigotry and simmering violence abound once more in small-town heartland America, with a mother still seeking justice for the rape and murder of her daughter seven months earlier, believing the local police to be less than committed to the search for the culprit. She then incenses the townsfolk when she takes out three roadside billboards attacking the police: this is firmly conservative country where sleeping dogs should be left to lie.
The setting may not be new terrain then, but the film reaped just plaudits for what it actually makes of its fairly stock ingredients. There is a complexity at work throughout, with standard plot waypoints constantly avoided and a refusal to succumb to pat moralising. Then the cast really does loom large: Frances McDormand as the mother is immense; a sardonic, hard dogged shell over a damaged inside, and decent Woody Harrelson and a toxically prejudiced Sam Rockwell as the police are excellent foils to her on her quest. The film is even sure enough of its tone that it can accommodate black humour at the start, though this has to fade away out of necessity as the story moves on.

7/10

Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Taika Waititi, 2016)

A thirteen-year-old delinquent from the city is placed with a middle-aged foster couple in the remote countryside where, after an initial urge to escape, he starts to become acclimatised to his new surroundings. But when his foster mother dies abruptly and social services are on their way to get him back into the system, he takes flight once more and is reluctantly followed by his woodsman foster father, a cantankerous woodsman. A nationwide manhunt for the pair is launched and their mutual antipathy is duly worn away over the course of their trials and tribulations.
The basic plot outline could easily go the way of mawkishness and the familiar trails of buddy movies. It's completely saved from either by excellent chemistry between Sam Neill as the grizzled substitute father and Julian Dennison as the boy, sparkling humour and the playful, knowing interposition of a plethora of filmic references amongst moments of genuine pathos. It really makes the most of all its ingredients, and although it loses focus for a moment when the chase comes to a climax, the abiding impression it leaves is feelgood in the best sense of the word.

7/10 

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