Black Widow (Cate Shortland, 2021)

 

The 24th film in the MCU gravy train, Black Widow continues the trend of giving the less than superpowered Avengers characters their own vehicles and in this case it means Scarlett Johansson reprising her role as the former KGB assassin, now in hiding after the disbandment of the Avengers and prior to her impending death in Avengers: Endgame. The fact that we know at the outset that the character has no long-term future is quite a yoke for the prequel to bear, and then there's the expectation that the film will deliver two hours of the standard non-stop martial arts acrobatics in between high-octane chases, and of course that's what we get. What does come as something of a relief is the back story that she connects to, meeting her fake family of undercover secret service operatives again, separated from them since they had to break cover. Here the dialogue and comic interplay sparkles intermittently, but then it's back to her hunt for the man responsible for her darker past, who is now building an army of similarly mind-controlled black widows. Yes, the action's efficient, but that's par for the course and suffers in comparison to the real sense of danger in Atomic Blonde, which casts a great shadow over this more commercially-hampered affair.

5/10

  

Maudie (Aisling Walsh, 2016)

 

Sally Hawkins plays Maud Dowley, a poor woman with acute arthritis in 1930s Nova Scotia in a biography that merits credit for sticking to the facts of her life instead of exploiting her tribulations and descending into tear-jerking, not least those to do with her relationship with a fisherman, played by Ethan Hawke, a brute of a man who takes her on as a cleaner and turns quickly into her virtual captor. But even his character is more complex than that, so when an affection develops between them as the cards and pictures she paints, initially just to keep her dreams alive, find wider and wider popularity and a degree of local fame, the introduction of a small note of happiness at last is not implausible or mawkish. The performances of the two leads help a lot too: Hawke's is nuanced and Hawkins, as much as we're used to seeing her signature role by now as an irrepressibly cheerful one, delivers the portrayal with delicate poise and deserved all the plaudits she got for the performance.

7/10

Transit (Christian Petzold, 2018)

 

It only gradually dawns on you as the story of Transit develops, that while we're in present-day France, it's really the world as it was in 1940, with Jewish refugees trying to get out of France before the Germans reach the south of the country. A curious transposition, and one that leads you to wonder whether budgetary concerns about recreating the look of the past also played a part in the decision as well as it obviously allowing the director to universalise the them of Anna Seghers's novel to include the plight of any refugees from any time.

So we follow Georg, determined to make it onto a ship in Marseille, assuming the identity of a deceased writer to get the transit visa he needs. Then he falls in love with a woman who is also trying to get away, and the ethics of keeping up so many lies start to complicate things further.

There are a lot of themes competing for space here, at times to each other's detriment, but the progression is unconventional enough to hook the viewer and reward persevering with it.

7/10

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