Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse ( Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman, 2018)

With the appeal of Spider-Man to kids above and beyond that of almost all other superheroes, and the way the comics have both cultivated and exploited this, with multiple versions of the character, it was inevitable that they would make it into cinematic form. It also figures that computer game-style animation is the only way to go about it, since having infant anime and comedy pig Spider-People amongst the line-up would hardly have worked within the confines of the real universe. That said, it turns out to be surprisingly good fun at times, centring on the teenage Miles Morales version as a way of still sneaking in the eternal bane of the comic-book film, the origin story, but then zipping along with some inventive visuals until caving into the all-out whizzbang hypercolour action of the final fight with the Kingpin, anguished villain of the week, and wrapping up with the usual homilies. Strictly for kids, of course, but not the most painful thing an adult will ever have to sit through either.

6/10

Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

Well, the classics of horror are there to be mined for remakes, aren't they, so we should be thankful after 2006's Nicolas Cage atrocity (which must surely be a tautology of the highest order by now) that this settles for keeping the commune of pagan nutcases but changing enough to stand in its own two feet. Yes, it's still The Wicker Man, and transposing it to Northern Sweden (played by Hungary) is a cosmetic alteration, but making the lead's personal problem the fact that she's emotionally trampled over by her blank boyfriend, rather than Edward Woodward's own self-crippling religion in the corresponding character, is quite effective too in providing some depth.

Of course having young Americans hopelessly out of their depth in Old Yurp in the context of a horror film lowers expectations from the outset, but this has no aspirations to compete Hostel in the insane mutilations stakes. Rather, there's a slow rise in tension and when the brutality does come, it's in short, operatic shocks, and followed immediately by a return to sunshone and downplaying which creates the impression in our minds almost as much as the characters' that maybe what we just saw was just a bad dream. Add to that cinematography which is quite astonishingly beautiful at times, constantly drawing you in beguilingly, and the result is something of a curate's egg.

7/10

Papadopoulos & Sons (Marcus Markou, 2012)

The overreaching ambition of food industry magnate Harry Papadopoulos leads him to take out a massive loan on a property development just before the bank granting it collapses and the end result is that when his estranged livewire brother turns up to propose reopening the chippy that they ran together decades back, he's forced to accede to the idea. The shock adjustment to slumming it proves easier for his kids, as he resists what he sees as abject failure in returning to where he started from. But then this is a feelgood comedy, where we know that any seed of residual kindness in the protagonist is destined to grow eventually. And so it proves.

Made in Morden on a micro-budget, Papadopoulos & Sons is hardly cinema breaking out into fresh pastures, with its basic East is East set-up, but fares well on a combination of good performances, particularly Stephen Dillane as the beleaguered, resigned and finally reborn Harry, crisp dialogue and an obvious love for its characters.

6/10

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Jason Woliner, 2020)

14 years down the line, Sacha Baron Cohen obviously just couldn't resist returning to his most successful creation and so we have the hapless Kazakh journalist sent off again to act the buffoon in America's backwaters in an attempt to draw out the prejudices that his soft targets have, bubbling only just under the surface. Only this time it's all a tad too familiar (just as Baron Cohen is forced to admit at the outset, with Borat being recognised everywhere he goes) and there's a lingering feeling with nearly every scene that it's stage-managed, which rather defeats the satirical purpose. The backing storyline of having Borat accompanied by his daughter whom he now intends to marry off to some rich old politician ("like Melania" in her dreams) does provide some choice moments as he keeps consulting a manual of husbandry of women to keep her in line, and Maria Bakalova proves an able comic foil to him in the role. But this invariably draws the focus away from where it should be, and the strongest suit of the first film, namely ripping the piss mercilessly out of toxic bigots.
Of course there are still some genuine chuckles, but the teeth are lacking too much of the time, and the topical anti-Trump reelection message, while of course welcome, is nothing anyone else couldn't do. Perhaps Baron Cohen has just got tired of getting of torrents of death threats and litigations.

5/10

El hoyo (Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, 2019)

To describe The Platform as a dystopian prison film is at once reductionist and misleading. It's so much more than that. The premise is that prisoners exist two per cell in a stack of an unknown number of cells, depending each day on a platform of food that passes from the ceiling to the floor of their cell for sustenance, with the catch that they can only cram in the butchered scraps what the occupiers of the floors above haven't managed to eat yet, and each month they find themselves transferred in drugged sleep to another, randomly-assigned level. The concept is brutalising by its very nature: if they find themselves on level 100 rather than level 10, starvation is more than likely, and desperation will lead to any means necessary to survive, as far as cannibalism. 
Having thus utterly grossed out the audience, and in a novel manner too, many directors could consider their work done. Not so Gaztelu-Urrutia, for this is a deeply serious film, making an incendiary point not just about social stratification, which is obvious, but the fallacy of trickle-down economics and the ridiculous inadequacy of religion as a comfort to boot. You won't have seen anything like it before, and its damning message haunts the mind long after the gore has faded.

8/10

 

Lilting (Hong Khaou, 2014)

A young man tries to reach out to the mother of his recently-deceased boyfriend. He's English and she's Chinese, and they have no shared language, so he brings in a British Chinese woman to interpret between them and also, as an olive branch, between her and a man who she has a sexual relationship with in the care home she's cooped up in.

Ben Whishaw has perhaps been slightly stuck with being cast repeatedly as emotionally awkward characters, and Cheng Pei-pei as the mother presnts a truculent and nonconciliatory front at first, railing against all she does not understand about either her son's death, the society she's still an outsider in and Whishaw's motives for helping, but the film delicately develops a quiet charm nevertheless as they gradually reach some of kind of understanding.

6/10
 

Mission: Impossible - Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie, 2018)

Tom Cruise and his assistants-cum-sounding boards are back again and so is the same storyline, give or take, as in 2015's Rogue Nation. Nominally, this means trying to find some plutonium to be used in a fiendish plot to build bombs, but also numerous global locations for shoot-ups and manic chases. Kashmir (played by New Zealand) for the finale might be a slight, modish divergence, but apart from that it's business as usual with Berlin, Paris (with the Eiffel Tower never out of sight, of course) and London. It's a bit more po-faced than before, with even Simon Pegg not allowed much rein as the comic relief, as if not only the characters but the ageing cast were caught in a race against time, and the plucky Cruise requires a greater and greater suspension of disbelief on our part as he sprints non-stop from shot to shot, only pausing to deliver his lines as if he were talking through a sock.

But as disposable thrills go, you can acknowledge why the franchise is so popular. The chases and other action sequences are even more breathtaking than before, shot with panache and edited with maximum efficiency, the skydiving scene over Paris and the subsequent street pursuits in the city itself in particular. That's really what these films are for, after all, and Fallout accordingly delivers them in spades.

6/10