Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Ryan Coogler, 2022)

 Another MCU franchise trundles on, unsurprising considering the huge commercial success of the first instalment and it's very much a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", with all the same principal protagonists, apart from the original hero played by the sadly-deceased Chadwick Boseman. The film milks his memory for all it's worth, and then moves on to introducing a new antagonist in the form of Namor, the king of a sub-aquatic civilisation with a bee in his bonnet about the possibility of the greedy surface nations acquiring the super-mineral vibranium, the source of both Wakanda's and his people's power and security.

It is sad to see how many people will insist on this again being somehow fresh and divergent from the superhero film norm, when all that's actually different is that the majority of the cast are black. That aside, we still get non-Europeans mostly played by British and American actors, interminable and repetitive fight scenes, oodles of unimaginative CGI (fittingly, the sub-aquatics are really just Na'vi underwater) and all this built on the infantile notion that all a nation needs to become technologically and socially advanced is to be gifted one natural mega-resource. Don't believe the hype.

5/10

Jäniksen vuosi (Risto Jarva, 1977)

 

The first screen adaptation of Arto Paasilinna's picaresque novel (followed by Christopher Lambert in the somewhat slipshod  Le lièvre de Vatanen in 2006), The Year of the Hare follows Kaarlo Vatanen, who quits his job in deodorant advertising to live a quiet life in the wilds of Finland with a hare that he adopts after it's hit by his colleague's car. However the quiet life proves difficult to find, even in the middle of nowhere, being disturbed in turn by the police, aggressive landowners, backwoods oddballs and irritating tourists who want to meet a real hermit.

The patient pacing of the film allows the novel's blend of wry humour and philosophical contemplation to come through intact, and thereby makes a persuasive case for following the sympathetic protagonist's example to likewise give up on the rat race altogether.

7/10 

A Quiet Place Part II (John Krasinski, 2020)

 

A sequel was inevitable after the first part ended up narratively unconcluded and with critical acclaim, so the story picks up right where it cut off, with Emily Blunt still trying to keep her children safe in a hostile world where no sound goes unpunished. Nothing new is introduced, however, apart from Cillian Murphy's bereaved, reluctant ally, so it's really just a game of avoiding the aimless monsters, which are still given no motive or rationale, only relying on their presence as a means of forcing the human protagonists to cope with each other. This results in some emapathetic small dialogues as well as a constant sense of tension when the danger simply can't be planned for, but can't get any further than some vague War of the Worlds-type get-out clause. The franchise has duly reached the end of its natural lifespan, no matter how much anyone might still see bucks to be made by carrying on.

6/10   

Arctic (Joe Penna, 2018)

Without any preamble, we're with Mads Mikkelsen next to a crashed plane, surrounded by ice and snow. Most of what follows is without dialogue, just agonised grunting and panting as he goes through all means possible to feed himself and try to work out a way to contact civilisation, even after dragging a badly injured woman from a helicopter that crashes while responding to his distress beacon. The scenario is as bleak and unhistrionic as its setting, and while it certainly doesn't require artful writing and accordingly provides no great insights into the human condition as such, it does succeed in utterly immersing the viewer in the unforgiving situation, helped a great deal by Mikkelsen's determined command of the screen, not unlike Robert Redford's in the very similar set-up of 2013's All Is Lost.

6/10  

Enola Holmes 2 (Harry Bradbeer, 2022)

After the success of the first instalment with both critics and audiences, we get more of the same and can expect more to come, knowing that there are seven books so far in the series following the escapades of Sherlock's teenage sister. Though the question is whether the character alone can sustain the franchise, since while Millie Bobby Brown's performance as the titular heroine is again engaging, despite the incessant mugging to the camera, the vaguely women's lib-oriented plot (female matchstick factory workers being poisoned by their work environment) is fairly thin. So it requires plenty of filler, of which the lively wit of the dialogue is most welcome, and conversely the overlong and unconvincing action sequences decidedly less so. Fewer chases and more proper detective work next time, please!

6/10

Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

Waititi, between directing two instalments of the MCU Thor franchise, takes a step to the side to cover the Nazi era from a skew-whiff angle, with a ten-year-old member of the Hitler Youth, who has Adolf himself as his imaginary friend, finding out that his mother has been hiding a Jewish girl in their house. This causes no end of self-questioning in the callow lad, and he ends up reversing his untested views.

Superficially, this is the same set-up as in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, but the emphasis is much more, as you would expect from essentially a director of comedies, on breaking down the grotesque absurdity of the times through ridicule rather than earnest, explicit outrage. It may thus seem frivolous, but there's such an abundance of serious, weighty cinema about the topic that there is still room for an attack on the sheer concept of Nazism done just through jokes, with Waititi himself playing the imaginary Hitler as an utter buffoon. Laughing at the enemy does not mean making light of their crimes, no matter what po-faced critics of this approach would insist.

6/10

The Matrix Resurrections (Lana Wachowski, 2021)

The law of gravity cannot be disobeyed. However, in Hollywood the law of diminishing returns usually is. Hence, 18 years on from the flat conclusion to the Matrix trilogy, we get a sequel that is almost a reboot, bringing Neo back in one piece, again unaware of existing in a virtual world and having to relearn all the chopsocky stuff to fight a new version of the matrix. Of course, there are the blue pills too, and Trinity needs to be rescued, so the rest writes itself once lashings of unremarkable chases and fights are thrown in. It doesn't help that Hugo Weaving and Laurence Fishburne aren't there either to add at least some air of gravitas to the proceedings.

A small saving grace is a recognition of its futility and having some fun with that, but it brings nothing new to the table in terms of fresh conceptual ideas, so let's finally call it a day, shall we?

4/10