The House (Emma de Swaef & Marc James Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr and Paloma Baeza, 2022)

 

A stop-motion animation film with three different stories, this may have the linking strands, owing to having only a single writer behind all all three, of all of it being set inside the same house and each part being saturated in a creepy surrealism. But the end results, after the adjustments made by each director, are wildly variable.

The first, about a family offered a huge house by a wealthy architect in exchange for their own hovel, is the one that stands out, having the clearest sense of purpose. It becomes truly unsettling as their new home turns into a maze they can't escape from and the parents literally become part of the furniture.

The second and the third, respectively featuring anthropomorphic rats and cats voicing mundane human concerns and agendas, are less sure-footed. Yes, the animation is still splendidly realised and the dialogue is witty, but using animals instead of the blank-faced people puppets of the first part feels a little aimless, as if that's just what you're supposed to do with stop-motion, rather it than adding any value to the stories.

So, a mixed bag, but still one with plenty of incidental moments to savour, including of course the game of identifying all the well-known voice talents behind the puppets.

6/10

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2021)

MCU feature #25, and the sound by now is that of the bottom of the barrel being scraped. Now it's the turn of Shang-Chi, originally created by Marvel to cash in on Bruce Lee mania and then given a mystical dimension to fit into the world of superheroes. There's now a glaringly obvious cash-in motive for Disney to promote the character to centre stage, namely the Chinese market, and accordingly large cheques have also been thrown at Michelle Yeoh and Tony Leung to lend their names as back-up to the lesser-known younger leads.

There is a suggestion of wit in the dialogue, and Ben Kingsley reprising his ham actor character from Iron Man 3 raises hopes briefly, as does having a more than usually complex antagonist in the person of the hero's father, who's prepared to bring about doom to bring back his dead wife, but it's ultimately submerged by the generic chopsocky sequences (nothing Chinese about these any more, since every MCU fight is rooted in all protagonists being expert martial artists) and daft dragons and monsters duking it out in the finale.

Move along, nothing to see here.

5/10

Bigbug (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2022)

Jeunet jumps on the 'perils of AI/overreliance on technology' train with a household confined for their own protection by their domestic servant robots while an android uprising takes place outside. This being Jeunet, wackiness abounds and while it can't be faulted for visual inventiveness, that used to be accompanied by narrative inventiveness as well. Instead, the plot is quite off the peg. Also beyond that, Bigbug doesn't have much to say about the theme that hasn't already been said more succinctly before. Jeunet on the topic of AI is uncomfortably akin to watching your uncle disco-dance at a wedding.

It's still drolly entertaining enough, provided that you can withstand the level of hyperactivity. The director really does have to rediscover his personal sense of direction, though.

5/10

La Belle Époque (Nicolas Bedos, 2019)

 

Daniel Auteuil plays an illustrator in his sixties who has lost his mojo along with his joie de vivre and is on the verge of  losing his wife too. Then his son persuades him to fork out for a role-playing exercise run by a company that recreates any point in the past that the client desires in painstaking detail, with period sets and actors. So he starts reliving the moment in 1974 when he first met his wife, and soon can't distinguish fact from fiction, seduced by forced recollections of all that he'd lost over the years.

Soon, neither can the viewer, and herein lies both the charm and vexatiousness of the film. We're moving in Kaufman/Gondry country, where magical realism serves as the medium for drawing us into a fresh view of the world we take for granted when it works, and sojourns in cloud cuckoo land when it doesn't. Overall, it just about manages to tread the right side of the line between the two, but don't go expecting to take away great personal insights.

6/10

Mestari Cheng (Mika Kaurismäki, 2019)

 

A widowed Chinese man, with his son in tow, arrives in a roadside cafe in Finnish Lapland searching for someone called "Fongtron", and has no luck with this. However, things take an upturn when he starts making Chinese meals there, initially to the bewilderment of the backwoods locals, then earning their universal approbation.

A Spice for Life is a film of limited ambition or scope, content to rely on the culture clash set-up for sustenance, but it's a sweet concoction nevertheless, full of little moments of comedy and pathos.

6/10

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