The Day Shall Come (Chris Morris, 2019)

The less-than-prolific genius provocateur Morris returns to helm a film six years after Four Lions, and it's hard to see what he's been doing since, apart from continuing to rest on the laurels of his imperious reign of TV satire in the '90s. The protagonists may now be poor would-be black revolutionaries in Miami, but they're essentially just the same hapless bunch of clowns as the wannabe terrorists of the last film. The changes in the set-up, so that the FBI are constantly trying to come up with ways to incriminate the four-man 'army' in order to keep their anti-terror success rates up, and that the crackpot crew refuse to take the path of violence again and again, to the frustration of the FBI, shift the emphasis enough so the target isn't really the idealistic protagonists but the amoral machinations of the US Government, but it's far too unfocused and broad to work. There is still an acute ear for absurd turns of phrase, but one would expect so much more from Morris. He needs to rediscover his precision targeting quickly, because we need him badly.

5/10

The Old Guard (Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2020)

For the moment, still basking in the afterglow of 2017's astonishingly violent Atomic Blonde, Charlize Theron is the action queen of Hollywood, although it may be hard for her at 44 to keep it up too much longer: it's still unlikely that they'll apply the same rules to a hardass woman than to, say, Liam Neeson.
Anyway, she's the leader of a bunch of immortal soldiers who Wolverine their way out of peril again and again until things get seriously hairy with an unscrupulous millionaire in pharmaceuticals after their secret and prepared to do anything to get it. Cue a lot of balletic gunplay, bar a few brief pauses where they mull over the burden of living forever while friends and family grow old and die (yes, the Highlander thing). Its sheer freight-train momentum keeps you watching, but there's nothing new here for superpowered genre buffs.

5/10

Game Night (John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein, 2018)

A group of friends meet every week to play increasingly competitive games, and the stakes are upped when intruders burst into one of their sessions and seemingly kidnap one of them. The rest assume that this is just the host's attempt to outdo them and treat everything they find out as yet another clue left for them to follow, until things go south when, predictably, this turns out not to be the case.
It's strong on witty dialogue and character interplay among a likable cast (Jesse Plemons as the cop neighbour who's excluded from the games on the grounds of being too straight and stolid puts in the stand-out performance), but all the twists thrown in can't quite make up for a lack of originality, being essentially a daft version of David Fincher's The Game. It's diverting enough, but no more than an actual competitive game night would be.

5/10

Still Life (Uberto Pasolini, 2013)

John May, a solitary man who works quietly and conscientiously in a council office, tasked with locating the next of kin of the departed, is confronted with sudden redundancy due to budget cuts, but still feels duty-bound to complete one last case. This takes him on a search from one end of the country to the other, as he pieces together the fractured life and death of an alcoholic who died alone.
As the title suggests, the visual style of the film is a collage of long, carefully-framed static shots which mirror May's almost OCD-like obsession with creating order out of chaos, including leaving no previous case forgotten, just as the title also alludes to the static nature of his existence. The director may be Italian, but the ambience is very much that of a small, down-at-heel and neglected England, with a social concern echoing that of  Loach but without Loach's overt fury at the callousness of the powers that be. Its very quietness and slowness is a virtue: it draws the viewer in hypnotically, and Eddie Marsan is immaculate as May, with his small, sad expressive eyes and unassuming demeanour. The end, after there is a glimmer of light for him at last, comes with a jolt that left me reeling.

7/10

   

Finding Your Feet (Richard Loncraine, 2017)

You only have to take the stalwart luvvie cast list (Imrie, Staunton, Spall, Sessions, Lumley) together with the setting (Notting Hill or thereabouts) to know that the end result of feeding these into a film autogenerator will only be a feelgood product for middle-aged, middle-class people, most likely with bittersweet overtones and a life-affirming message. And so it proves. The plot, in which prim Imelda Staunton is cheated on by her husband and goes to live with her free-spirited sister, gradually loosening up in the process, is a strictly join-the-dots affair. Of course Imrie, as her sister, cares not a jot for social decorum. Of course Spall as her new love interest appears rough at first and then is revealed to be deep. And of course she'll leave her old life in the end. Still, while both audience and cast remain securely within their comfort zone throughout, it's like a good Sunday roast: comforting fare without any nasty surprises.

5/10

Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee, 2020)

Having covered the single subject of racial conflict in America in BlacKkKlansman, Lee moves on to armed conflict between the US and other countries, albeit also still through the filter of institutionalised racism against black people with four Vietnam War veterans returning to the country to look for the remains of a comrade of theirs, as well as hidden gold bullion. But there is another filter too: the fog of memory, which colours the view that each one has of the past, and also how that past is shown to us.
Overall, the film straddles the buddy adventure genre and a polemic on the theme of American historical ethnic persecution with overt comparisons made between the race riots and police brutality back in the States, through newsreel footage, and the simultaneous ideological crusade that the soldiers are forced on in Vietnam, shown in flashback. The balancing act is an uneasy one, and that impacts the message adversely. It doesn't help that Lee cannot escape the one constant of American war films: the action is stylised like a shoot 'em up and one dead American, be they black or white, is meant to be more tragic than dozens of anonymous gooks shredded by bullets in Ramboesque fashion. The traumatised Viet vet trope is also overplayed: we've seen it too many times before for it to have much impact, however true it may be, and not all that convicing going on 50 years after the event either. Delroy Lindo, as the one of the group who hasn't been able to let the past go at all, turns in a bravura performance of instability, but that also overshadows the contribution of the other characters. Then another stock theme, that of gold against the soul, is overlaid and accordingly at times the film starts to remind you of those C-grade Spaghetti Westerns where the protagonists just rant incessantly about 'the gold, the gold'. And then when one of the band expires abruptly after stepping on a landmine, it's shot in such Grand Guignol fashion that the first though that came to my mind was Mr. Creosote exploding in The Meaning of Life, which surely was not the intention, unless Lee really is making a clever allusion to the perils of greed.
The director's explicit contribution to the Black Lives Matter movement, Da 5 Bloods does have many strengths too: the interplay between the old-timers is vibrant and the intermittent use of the Viet Cong radio propaganda broadcasts back in the day by Hanoi Hannah, imploring black GIs to give up doing The Man's dirty work, has unsettling parallels with Samuel L. Jackson's soothing radio DJ throughout Do the Right Thing. But ultimately it's a lack of focus in Lee's fusion of elegiac drama, bloody action and political diatribe that lets down the whole. And, caught between a military establishment who sent them to die and the local populace for whom the soldiers are just another bunch of imperialist invaders, the protagonists are the ultimate victims and playing the victim card over and over again just can't be the way forward.

6/10

Rückenwind von vorn (Philipp Eichholtz, 2018)

A young schoolteacher in Berlin has an immature boyfriend who wants them to have a child regardless of her career and dreams of travel and her sole relative is her grandmother, who is ailing. This forces a number of big decisions to be made, so she goes out and gets utterly blotto.
It's surprising to find out that Away You Go was made by a director in his mid-thirties with several features under his belt since the characters here are all feckless, and yet apparently we're to see them as just free spirits. Likewise, there is the jittery cutting in sudden leaps from one scene to another once the director feels that he's reached another marker in his join-the-dots plot diagram and therefore considers that adding any more characterisation or depth is quite unnecessary and just such a drag. Accordingly, in only 80 minutes, it manages to fit in half a dozen turns which can only not be barmy to a flittering adolescent. It's not a horrible film per se, just so avoidably inept.

4/10