La Vérité (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2019)

Kore-eda, who achieved widespread international success with Shoplifters in 2018, directs a cast of European actors for the first time and seems to have bitten off more than he can chew. The French cast of The Truth, led by Catherine Deneuve as a vain, insecure, spiky ageing actress and Juliette Binoche as her resentful daughter, is as dependable as you can expect and they have a real chemistry, but Kore-eda seems to afraid to step outside the set conventions of the French middle-class family drama and really bring his own style to the piece. And so we watch them bicker for the whole duration, until the whole affair fizzles out without true resolution and I promise you that it will not stay in your mind the day after. And God knows what Ethan Hawke is doing there as Binoche's American, monoglot husband. Presumably it was enough for the director that he's been in enough films set in France before, but his presence is completely superfluous.
The best aspect of the film is probably the parallel storyline involving Deneuve shooting a sci-fi film as a old woman whose mother is stuck in space and agelessness and can only visit her daughter once every seven years through her whole life lest she die. But this never quite gels with the Deneuve-Binoche dynamic to give it added value.

5/10

Mrs Lowry & Son (Adrian Noble, 2019)

This is a very self-contained film, as easily happens with direct conversions from stage plays, particularly when they really only have two characters in a single room. It's simply the story of the idiosyncratic Lancastrian painter L.S. Lowry looking after his bed-ridden elderly mother as he struggles to get out from beneath her smothering yoke, and there is no relief for him just as there is no relief for the audience either: we are as trapped as he is in the never-ending cycle of his self-sacrifice to an insecure old woman who has always sought to crush his artistic dreams under her class-based notions of proper art and deportment. Thus the story keeps on revolving around the same ideas, and this would be an insurmountable hindrance, were it not for the casting of Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave in the roles, who breathe such life into the fractious relationship that the obvious dramatic limitations of the script are surmounted.
You do find yourself thinking at times, though, now that Spall has been Turner and Lowry, which iconic English artist someone is still thinking about asking him to represent.

6/10

Mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017)

Aronofsky moves on to psychological horror and the result is somewhat of a mess. Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem star as a couple living in seclusion, Him (this is literally the name the character is given, with pretentions of universality) a poet with writer's block and Mother (likewise, that's her moniker) a younger woman who just wants a child to fill the void. Then creepy fans of his start turning up and imposing themselves to an intolerable degree on the couple, which Him is blithely unconcerned about while her mind starts to unravel, in the manner of Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion or, as still another obvious Polanski influence, Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby. The air of simmering menace and mystery sustain it for a while, but then it goes into the territory of The Purge in an orgiastically brutal manner and Lawrence is just left to weep and scream more and more. Aronofsky has proved with certain films, such as The Wrestler, that he can occasionally keep his auteurish excesses in check, but the lack of discipline here is more akin to that evidenced in his windbag sci-fi The Fountain.

5/10

SuperBob (Jon Drever, 2016)

A Peckham postman is hit by a meteorite and turns as a result into the world's first and only superhero. However, this being a British comedy film, the twist here is that the unassuming hero continues as a civil servant, with a handler who controls his public image with a tight leash and swamps him in mountains of paperwork before he's able to perform any epic feats.
Also, as with so many low-budget British forays into comedy features, this has the obligatory set of cameos from a host of stand-ups in bit parts and is very hit-and-miss in its success rate and clumsy attempts to introduce depth to offset the slapstick. But it is vicariously gratifying to see, before Trump actually assumed his station as the most powerful sociopath in the world, that a healthy contempt for U.S. imperialism was already taken for granted, with the only real villain of the piece a populist American politician who comes over to try to make the decent man, who they claim is also a WMD not under their control, kowtow to the Stars and Stripes.

5/10

Dolemite Is My Name (Craig Brewer, 2019)

Eddie Murphy in entertaining film shocker! After appearing mostly in unbearable turds for nearly 30 years, with only the secure relative anonymity of voiceovers for animations, a still blindly-devoted and undemanding fanbase and the occasional brief respite from the dross such as his supporting role in Dreamgirls to keep his career going, Murphy takes centre stage in a biopic of an oddball and actually makes it work quite spectacularly.
Blaxploitation filmmaker Rudy Ray Moore's zero-budget output may not have been quite as awful as Ed Wood's, saved largely by a tongue kept constantly in the cheek, but quality cinema it was not and owed a lrge amount of its phenomenal popularity in the '70s to its utter, devil-may-care amateurishness. Naturally, this is what My Name is Dolemite mines for rich comic effect as the indefatigable motor-mouthed comedian Moore decides that he deserves a slice of the hollywood pie after several false starts with other enterprises. The caricaturish period patter is fast, the 'fuck'-count would put Tarantino to shame and there are many bumbling setbacks along the way to inevitable ultimate success against the odds.
The perpetual likability of the character does blatantly serve to massage Murphy's ego, the assumed hilarity of Moore's stand-up performances is hackneyed and the ending has to be sprayed in schmaltz, of course, but it's such good-natured fun, and the realisation that Murphy can actually do drama as well in the occasional scene when he's required to is so startling, that it would be mean-minded to begrudge him a long-overdue justified return to respectability.

6/10

La double vie de Véronique (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1991)

The Double Life of Veronique tells the mystically entwined stories of two identical women with the same name, one a soprano in Kraków, the other a music teacher in Paris, unaware of each other's existence. The former dies suddenly mid-performance and then we switch to the French half where her counterpart has unsettling intuitions of something beyond her ken. A psychologically highly-strung love story develops between her and a puppeteer who tells a story with his puppets that mirrors what happened to the Polish Weronika.
This is a work of nuances and luminous images rather than a prescriptive narrative, and that is both its strength and weakness: its primary purpose is to allude and discomfit, and that may not work for everyone. But the fresh-faced Irène Jacob in the twin role (dubbed into Polish for the first part) is a captivating presence, coquettishly flighty at one moment, fragile the next.

7/10

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (J.J. Abrams, 2019)

The King is dead, long live the King. The saga may come to an end, but its lucrative offshoots will continue. These have been a mixed bag, but at least Rogue One gave us something new by judiciously choosing to go with heroes who were all disposable and so liable to be in real peril.
None of that here. The final instalment follows the pattern taken by its two predecessors, namely that it crams in as many elements of the original trilogy as possible. This includes the improbable return from the dead of The Emperor, the saga's villain-in-chief, which is a lazy idea and duly leads to a finale straight out of Return of the Jedi. In the meanwhile, there is a massive new fleet of Star Destroyers which look suitably menacing but sit there doing nothing so that the outnumbered goodies can locate a MacGuffin to get rid of them all, several protracted lightsabre fights and much agonising by Rey and Kylo as to their purpose. It looks spectacular, of course, but it's a hollow exercise in attempting to placate fans and somehow tie things up. Oh, and of course Tatooine and Endor feature again too, which may be generously taken as dramatic closure but also feels as if a galaxy of millions of worlds has run out of ideas for new settings. More risks could and should have been taken.

5/10