Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

It's debatable how much this should be labelled, despite having the DC universe as its backdrop and one of the said universe's best-known characters as its subject, as a comic-book screen incarnation. Once you have chosen Joaquin Phoenix as the psychotic titular character, we're automatically not going to be in the primary-colour world of superheroics any more, and it proceeds accordingly. Aside from nods late on to the Batman origin story, which are actually quite unnecessary and seem to be there just as concessions to fans so that they can't go away bleating that the film wasn't about their Joker, this is essentially a dark depiction of a descent into mental disintegration, containing very little in the way of the standard action sequences.
Phoenix, an actor whose real mental state can generally only be guessed at, with his history of throwing up smoke screens, naturally goes full method with drastic weight loss as bullied, needy wannabe stand-up comedian Arthur Fleck, who has severe mental issues and lives with his ill mother, at the receiving end of an already dangerously divided society. The seeds for the eventual unravelling of his mind are all painfully obviously there at the outset, and the film thus has to depend heavily on Phoenix to avoid being merely a story of a man turning into a murderous nutjob with a perverse world view.
But his portrayal carries the whole with aplomb, unsettlingly unbalanced yet utterly mesmerising, and, above all, not pandering to 'How to Act a Looney' conventions. It feels quite frighteningly real. And the inclusion of Robert De Niro as an anodyne talkshow host who Arthur hero-worships at first until the host ridicules him publicly, is also a nice touch, with its overt allusion to De Niro playing a similarly obsessively delusional fan in The King of Comedy. Let's just hope that sense prevails and the urge to automatically turn its uniqueness into another franchise is resisted for once.

7/10

The Bookshop (Isabel Coixet, 2017)

A widowed woman (Emily Mortimer) arrives in a small seaside town in 1959 and sets about opening a bookshop in a long-abandoned house, to the disapproval of the town's wealthiest woman, who immediately begins trying to chase out the new resident, underhandedly coercing the already suspicious, provincial locals against her. Her only real allies in defending her home and dream are a precocious young girl and a reclusive older widower, and the battle can only be a losing one as her vindictive opponent brings the brunt of the law to bear against her as well.
Mortimer is fine as the plucky lead, although, as is so often the case, Bill Nighy rather steals the show without raising a sweat as her widower friend. The execution is understated and sensitive in many scenes, but problem here, ultimately, is the Dickensianly caricaturish characterisation of the townspeople, either just plain simple, pompously officious or sneering, and an overall tendency to veer towards melodrama. Vicissitudes pile up on the beleaguered single woman until her situation starts to uncomfortably remind you of nothing so much as the sentimentalised plight of Little Nell in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop. Consequently, it doesn't work as a reflection of the constraints of a stifling era on independently-minded women, and surely that in part is what it was hoping to achieve.

5/10
 

Terminator: Dark Fate (Tim Miller, 2019)

What a happy get-out clause the Terminator franchise has in already being based on the concept of alterable pasts, thereby allowing this umpteenth addition to do away with a whole three films and a TV series to bring back the superannuated stars of the first two films almost three decades later and resume proceedings as if nothing else had been committed to soil the memory of the series openers, which stood head and shoulders above the dross that followed them. So that makes it doubly imperative that the continuation of Sarah Connor/Arnie adds to the storyline.
With depressing predictability, it singularly fails to do that or even seem interested in trying. It's not just lines that are recycled knowingly, but entire scenes upon scenes, and making the target for termination a young Mexican woman this time around is just window-dressing. The few moments where Arnie gets to do Data from Star Trek by explaining how he's striven to become more human in the years since are a brief respite from the otherwise tediously incessant mega-action, and I swear I've never seen so many visual FX credits for any film, or so little evidence in the finished product for their need.

4/10 

Code 8 (Jeff Chan, 2019)

Well, let's see what the punters like...superpowered mutants, check. Near-future authoritarian dystopias, check. Heists, check. That about does it. Do we need a premise beyond splicing all of this together? Hell, no.
It's Canada and individuals with 'powers' are being ostracised by the rest of society, à la X-Men, after having served their purpose in building up the economy to the point where they can now be replaced by machines. That'll be the somewhat heavy-handed political message dealt with, then. As for the actual story, a preternaturally powered young man falls in with similarly-gifted crooks to try to make enough money to restore his mother's rapidly failing health, and then has no end of moral hand-wringing over it. There is the requisite number of bangs and chases, but the hero is a drip and the principal villain, their gangster boss, is strictly cookie-cutter odious. Nothing reprehensible here, but nothing of distinguishing merit either.

4/10

Jeune Femme (Léonor Sérraille, 2017)

Meet Paula, a 31-year-old Parisienne in a state of manic desperation after being chucked out of her boyfriend's flat with nothing but the clothes on her back and his cat in a box. Mentally unstable, she has no work experience and no friends who trust her, and things look dire until she manages to start rebuilding her life through jobs as a live-in maid and childminder, selling knickers in a shopping centre and forming a few new, more solid friendships.
The first part of Montparnasse Bienvenue, as it's called internationally, is exactly what you might have feared: it's pig-headedly quirky in the belief that being contrary and dissonant always means being refreshing and daring, which is a common affliction in many modish off-centre productions, and particularly widespread in French popular music or American independent cinema. The character is motor-mouthed, self-centred, needy, slovenly and unappreciative of help offered to her. Thankfully that begins to change before it's too late for her redemption and actually turns more mature and upbeat at the same time. It still keeps walking a tightrope between ridiculing and empathising with its heroine, but you do find yourself wanting to see what conclusion is drawn. To an extent, it finally satisfies in the consistently allusory way you might have expected.

6/10

Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (Paul McGuigan, 2017)

Based on the final months in the life of the Hollywood actress Gloria Grahame, in the last stages of cancer and finding refuge with the family of her English former lover Peter Turner, Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool is, through necessity, elegiac in tone and also has obvious echoes of Sunset Boulevard with a fading star and her accordingly fragile ego. Ageing is a constant theme, not just in the final moments of the story but already in the flashbacks to when she and the far younger Peter were first together. What really elevates a fairly rudimentary structure in the end is Annette Bening's performance as Grahame: at turns coquettish, vain, sardonic and brittle, the character fits her talents and presence like a glove.

6/10

Flushed Away (David Bowers & Sam Fell, 2006)

The final film made as a collaboration between Aardman and DreamWorks, Flushed Away features the voices of Hugh Jackman and an array of British acting heavyweights as an assortment of anthropomorphic rats and frogs, and as usual, adult viewers will enjoy identifying who's who, along with those witty jokes that sail right over the heads of the ostensible target demographic of children. Jackman's character, a flapping posh twit of a rat flushed into the sewers from his palatial Kensington digs, does appear to have been expressly written for Hugh Grant instead, and Bill Nighy as a dim-witted cockney henchman is decidedly leftfield casting, but it's clear they all have fun with it nevertheless, and it zips along breezily enough with a plot involving a toad gangster scheming to kill off the rat population of the sewers while the Jackman rat tries to get back home. All that said, you miss the warmth of Aardman's stop-motion style that the computer animation doesn't quite succeed in reproducing, and so when they finally got back to doing it the old-fashoioned way with Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists in 2012, it was a welcome reminder of what they bring to the animation world that no one else does.

6/10