Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

Himesh Patel's s struggling musician discovers after a worldwide power cut that no one else has ever heard of the Beatles, and consequently uses every Beatles song he can remember to become the world's biggest rock star under the direction of his utterly unscrupulous American manager. Ultimately, he's torn between living the lie and the love he feels for his childhood friend, left behind in Suffolk.

With Richard Curtis behind the screenplay, cutesiness is to be expected, but this is mercifully tempered by having the spikier Boyle as director and letting the songs do all the work, which may be lazy, but does keep things chugging along as we're reminded, by getting them freshened up through the filter of Patel's delivery, of simply how good they were.

One to force on all of today's teens to hopefully make them reconsider the anodyne factory products that they idolise. 

6/10

L'incredibile storia dell'Isola delle Rose (Sydney Sibilia, 2020)

In  1968, engineer and crackpot inventor Giorgio Rosa decides he's had enough of living under Italian laws and constructs a platform outside the country's territorial waters. This then becomes an offshore club for allcomers and he declares the makesehift island an independent state. The authorities, naturally, take a dim view of this and set about shutting him down.

It would be hard to believe that Rose Island is a true story if you didn't know about how the machinations of the system in Italy, but knowing that it is a pretty unembellished version of the real events lends a pretty slender plot some added interest, and that's bolstered by its breezy comic air.

6/10

His House (Remi Weekes, 2020)

A refugee couple from Sudan are placed by the authorities in a grotty house in a small town. where they struggle to adapt to  the customs of their new homeland, including endemic racism. Their past has left them scarred, though, having lost their daughter on the way to England, and this soon manifests itself as waking nightmares where they are haunted by an evil presence hiding in the walls of their house.

Sadly, her's where it veers off course: it wants to talk about loss and trauma, but the horror trappings (not really helped by having Doctor Who Matt Smith as their case worker) prevent us from being able to engage properly with any serious intentions, and it doen't function too well as a horror film either.

5/10

Tove (Zaida Bergroth, 2020)

 

Swedish-speaking Finnish author Tove Jansson gained widespread international fame for her series of Moomin novels, which are one of thise rare beasts, children's literature that flips emotional switches in the psyche of the adult reader too, largely by virtue of their mix of homespun wisdom with a sense of the magic inherent in nature. When she eventually migrated to adult works, living for the latter period of her life on a remote Baltic skerry with her partner, the transition did not jar: the connection to the cycles of  nature was as intensely there as ever.

Tove does not concentrate on these periods of her life, but her formative years as an artist during the war and 1950s and her coming to terms with her attraction to women, including an affair with a self-centred theatre director. Alma Pöysti feels like a natural fit as the lead, but the structure of the film ultimately lets it down: yes, we may get a real person, warts and all, but that's not what  primarily interests us about Jansson. Her actual work is mostly absent, and then the film ends rather abruptly, feeling just like the first chapter of a trilogy.

6/10

Lucky (John Carroll Lynch, 2017)

In his final film, Harry Dean Stanton returns to a character and setting with echoes of his breakthrough lead role in Paris, Texas as a cantankerous, independent nonagenarian in a small desert town having to face up to his own mortality at last. The film consists of nothing more than following him on his daily routine from morning yoga, through coffee in the diner over a crossword and buying cigarettes from the local shop, to repairing to the bar for a Bloody Mary in the company of the regulars. And why should it force in anything more? This is real life, and accordingly the key note that carries throughout it is him looking up the dictionary meaning of 'realism' at the start and then insisting on telling those he meets what it means in practice.

Stanton was to die shortly after completing the film and his artless, moving performance is infused with a corresponding sense of urgency, as good as he ever did in anything before, each small gesture and vocalisation speaking volumes, and benefiting from a wryly witty script that allows a simple story to breathe.

7/10   

The Dead Don't Die (Jim Jarmusch, 2019)

Maybe the dead don't die, but the zombie genre decisively has, and I wonder almost as much why I still persist with watching them as I do at Jarmusch's motive for making one. Since he dabbled with the nearly equally moribund vampire genre to productive effect with Only Lovers Left Alive, it was tempting to think he might have something to breathe life into the less interesting species of the undead. Unfortunately, this is just a sleepwalking comedy take, borrowing heavily from Dawn of the Dead for its parallels between the mindless behaviour of the deceased and the mindless behaviour they exhibited when still living consumers, and while the deadpan dialogue between a cast of Jarmusch's heavyweight regulars engenders goodwill and the ho-hum air they have at their impending doom is a nice break from the normal hysterics that zombie apocalypses entail, it's really totally aimless.

5/10 

Army of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2021)

In his wisdom, Zack Snyder has decided to shoehorn a zombie film in between his DC superhero blockbusters, since apparently we need another one and no one has quite filled the glaring gap in the market for undead carnage hung on a heist film framework. In brief, wrestling lunk Dave Bautista puts together a team to extract $200 million from a vault in the ruins of zombie-infested Las Vegas before the Government nukes the city. Somehow, the mayhem has to be padded out to an hour past its reasonable running time by including Bautista trying to engage with his estranged daughter and pointless parallel attempts to humanise the monsters. It adds absolutely nothing to the genre, but does remind you to go and rewatch the original Dawn of the Dead or Day of the Dead for gallows humour and 28 Days Later for actual scares. Instead, we get explosions and slo-mo shooting of big guns, Snyder's most chronic addiction, as lens flare is that of J.J. Abrams.

Quite bewilderingly, a prequel was deemed bankable and has already been made.

4/10