The Batman (Matt Reeves, 2022)

Since Christopher Nolan left the building for good and the attempt at shoehorning Batman into the primary-colour fantasy world of the Justice League with stolid Ben Affleck in the role fell flat on its face, it's time for yet another reboot of the DCEU's most layered protagonist. Emo is now the way to go, and that Robert Pattinson can certainly do, but it's an all-round improvement, with the fewest gadgets on show of any Batman film, and being as close to realistic action and violence as the genre can possibly allow. Even the daft batgrowl of Nolan's films is replaced with Pattinson talking so softly that it forces the viewer to actually pay attention to what he's saying, and the villains, likewise, are stripped of their most cartoonish elements to good effect, including the Riddler, who Batman has to stop from sending the city into chaos by exposing and killing all the agents of corruption within its administration. Not quite just a regulation nutjob, but one with an agenda twisted by America's current fixation with the notions of empty promises and fake news.

It's definitely overlong, which now seems to be the norm for the big hitters in the superhero field, but gets by on not insulting the intelligence of the audience and some captivating visuals in the midst of the predominant murkiness. 

7/10

Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins, 2020)

Considering the paucity of recognisable characters the DCEU  has in comparison with the MCU, it's pretty futile to attempt to compete any more. It won't stop them trying to get a small slice of the massive superhero franchise cake, though. And since the first Wonder Woman film did make a tidy profit, turning out another was a foregone conclusion.

But a decent script would have helped, with the heroine now having progressed to 1984 and having to deal with a dodgy businessman who uses the power of a magical artifact that grants anyone who touches it one wish to - drumroll please - rule the world. And of course the wishes have horrendous adverse effects too, leading to a neat set of bland moral lessons to be drawn once the dust has settled, after two and a half hours of nothing much to engage the mind except spotting the numerous infringements of the film's own internal logic. Gal Gadot still makes for a strong lead and there are some entertaining scenes playing on the bewilderment of her miraculously resurrected lover from 70 years before with the world of the '80s, but that's just about all.

4/10

Mary Poppins Returns (Rob Marshall, 2018)

 

54 years after Mary Poppins, Disney finally get around to giving us a sequel. Thank God they didn't go for a reboot, although it replicates the flavour of the original so closely, from the plot to the songs and the hand-drawn animation in the cartoon sequences (in stark contrast to the sterile CGI of most modern Disney productions), that it hardly differs from one.

As before, Mary Poppins is summoned to guide the Banks family out of choppy waters when they face eviction from their house. She takes charge of the children through the tried and tested combination of a firm hand and leading them on fantastical adventures, and  naturally a happy end is never in doubt. The performances by the children, thankfully never quite too cloyingly winsome, Emily Blunt as the titular nanny, ably channelling Julie Andrews, though with steelier undertones and Lin-Manuel Miranda as their Cockney jack-of-all-trades helper, managing the accent a whole lot more convincingly than Dick Van Dyke's legendary mangling of it in the original film, are an obvious strong suit. Spotting cameos from a panoply of veteran stars is also pleasingly diverting.

But a musical will ultimately stand or fall by its songs, so while Mary Poppins Returns is unable to provide any that will linger in the memory as its predecessor did, the choreography of the dance numbers is perky and the sheer wit of the lyrics is a pleasure too. 

In short, not a disappointment or defilement by any means.

6/10

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