Captain Marvel (Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, 2019)

Despite its commanding commercial lead over its DC rival, the people behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe still seem to be suffering from Superman envy, and have acted accordingly to bring forth cosmically-powered hero of their own. Not surprisingly, in keeping with the current rather forced trend towards broadening the race and gender profiles of action protagonists, the character is a woman too, and a ballsy one to boot. This is all fine, but the twin demands of dragging us through yet another origin story (here, done piecemeal through increasingly complete flashbacks) and then providing something awesome for the hero to accomplish can't be staved off. And then there is also the perennial need to graft the finished product to the rest of the MCU. So the freedoms of the makers are severely constrained from the outset. This is, of course, a burden of all introductory hero franchises, but some do manage to overcome it through subverting the formula enough, and Captain Marvel does not really manage that. The cookie-cutter villains are after a cookie-cutter object of power and it's up to the amnesiac hero to fly around, punch and zap things until they desist. Actually, the best thing turns out to be Brie Larson as the lead; much panned by fanboys with suspect agendas for having the gall to be a woman who's abrasive and arrogant, it's her embracing of those flaws that gives the character some colour. But it's not enough to distinguish it from the crowd.

5/10

Avengers: Endgame (Anthony & Joe Russo, 2019)

With half the universe and therefore also half of all heroes dead after Avengers: Infinity War, the 'final' (for there are of course never such things when billions of revenue are involved) instalment in the most all-encompassing MCU saga rather has its hands tied from the outset by the need to kill the omnipotent Thanos and resurrect its key money-spinners at the same time. The decidedly bleak state of affairs also denies the humour of the previous films to leaven the inevitable mass pagga. And then there are so many characters to try to serve some kind of closure for, whereas before they could be brought in briefly, with the possibility to promote them to the forefront if that suited narrative or marketing purposes. Finally, it must somehow be made feasible that the rump of the goodies can succeed against far bigger odds than their full complement last time.
The attempted solution to all these troublesome challenges consists of a two-fold approach: firstly, making the running length a bladder-torturing three hours, and secondly, time travel, which is what you do when you have really painted yourself into a corner. It goes without saying that each hero must get an equal turn, regardless of their capabilities, and that each must be given a task that they might just about feasibly pull off. And so the tidal wave of fighting against conveniently weight-matched opponents ensues and doesn't abate for about half a lifetime.
It is as visually awe-inducing as you'd expect, you will find yourself at frequent intervals on the edge of your seat at the sheer speed, gall and peril of the action, and there is a small shock with exactly how the end pans out, but this really can't go on. Let's hope that Disney at least gives us a breather with some smaller-scale stories before the inavertible resumption of business as usual.

6/10

Early Man (Nick Park, 2018)

Aardman is a highly dependable brand and its productions manage to appeal across the spectrum without straining to do so. Hence, Early Man comes in the established painstaking stop-motion technique, with familiar-looking characters and a mix of broad daftness and wry references to contemporary culture. The storyline this time isn't too ambitious, though, revolving around the attempt by a stone-age tribe to avoid being expelled from their verdant little valley by unscrupulous bronze-age invaders, culminating in a football match to decide the issue, which is an overused plot and a bit of a cop-out, even allowing for the fact that this is essentially a kids' film. Still, it's an innocently jolly ride and there are plenty of diversions in spotting all the British comedy and acting greats doing the voices.

6/10

Durante la tormenta (Oriol Paulo, 2018)

It's getting harder and harder for time travel films to distinguish themselves from the torrent that the genre has become, and while Mirage eschews technobabble and indeed physical time travel itself, bar the fact that a woman influences the past and hence the present by talking to someone 25 years earlier on through a TV, it's doubtful whether this is for much gain.
The key point is a 72-hour storm in 2014 that is a replica of one in 1989, and the lead character learns just before finding an old TV in her house that it was on that precise day in the earlier storm that a boy who lived in their house died accidentally. She prevents this from happening, and then finds on waking up that she has no daughter and no one close to her recognises her. This produces a brand of hysterical denial of glaring reality in her which frankly gets tiresome, since we've been here many times before and it's no fun seeing the protagonist lag so far behind the audience in terms of moving on. In any case, eventually a solution to her predicament must be found, and when it turns up it makes even less sense than the initial divergence event.
It's there emotionally and in terms of mood, but since it sets its stall out to play with butterfly effects and then seems to lose interest in the fiddly mechanics of all that, it has to ultimately be counted a failure.

5/10

I Am Mother (Grant Sputore, 2019)

Humanity is nigh-on extinct once more following an unspecified apocalyptic event and the only apparent survivor is a girl raised by a robot from one of hundreds of stored embryos in a bunker. The years pass as the robot mother raises the girl with a firm but loving hand, until the girl begins to question the state of things as she reaches teenage.
The set-up, a composite of everything from THX 1138 through 2001 and The Terminator to say, the recent Spanish Orbiter 9 or, in the non-scifi sphere, Room, is at once familiar enough that we know two things from the start: there is obviously something more to be discovered outside the confines of the bunker, and kindly robots will prove to be otherwise. And so once a woman from outside does turn up with tales of the horrors she's experienced, we're well on course to one of a limited range of endgames. All that said, it does manage to add elements all of its own along the way, mainly around the theme of social engineering, and the ambiguity of the mother character is retained long enough to keep up interest.

6/10

The Light Between Oceans (Derek Cianfrance, 2016)

A traumatised returnee from the horrors of World War I takes up a solitary post as a lighthouse keeper off the coast of Australia. For a while, his existence is brightened up by being joined there by his new young wife, but then the succession of miscarriages she suffers destabilises their happiness, until the unexpected discovery of a baby in a boat that washes up to the shore.
Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender got married shortly after this film, and the chemistry between them is palpable. On the other hand, while I would usually watch Fassbender painting a fence for two hours, and Vikander projects a strong vitality as well, here he mumbles his lines too monotonously (to cover up an inability to do an Australian accent?) and conversely her character, desperate for a child and little else, goes OTT with hysteria. All that said, it is beautifully shot, making the most of the isolated setting, and manages to evoke an air of melancholy romanticism, albeit through some melodramatic overbombardment.

6/10

Contre toi (Lola Doillon, 2010)

Kristin Scott Thomas is an actress with great range from restrained and fragile to coldly calculating, and will always be worth watching, but In Your Hands is something of a misstep as film choices go. We see her at first making a dash out of a house where she has been held captive, and then the story rewinds to explain how she was kidnapped and the period of her captivity. The idea that a sort of mutual Stockholm syndrome develops between her, an emotionally isolated doctor, and her captor, an aggrieved husband of one of her former patients, is an interesting one, but ultimately not psychologically convincing, and the apparent determination of the director to provide her with closure against any logical plot progression is frustrating.

5/10