See How They Run (Tom George, 2022)

Spoofing Agatha Christie is very much shooting fish in a barrel, and to be fair, See How They Run is fully cognisant of this and so opts for not just dialling up the silliness, but deconstructing itself as it goes along, not so much breaching the fourth wall as taking a wrecking ball to it. Sam Rockwell, cautiously essaying an English accent with a modicum of success as a wearied London policeman investigating the murder of an American film director backstage at the 100th performance of The Mousetrap, is ideal in the role and Saoirse Ronan as the rookie he's saddled with as a partner by his PR-obsessed boss, proves a great comic foil to him. The recreation of the London of 1953, facilitated by the coronavirus having emptied public areas at the time of filming, is also a strong suit. It doesn't try to to go down the full-blooded murder mystery route and settles instead for witty dialogue, but a good time is clearly had by all of the quality cast.

6/10   

Nomadland (2023 (Chloé Zhao, 2020)

Based on a non-fiction work telling the stories of people across America effectively made jobless and homeless by cold economics and choosing to range across the country from one transitory job to another, finding a loose sense of community along the way, Nomadland is as pensive and comfortless as its subject matter requires.With no promise of a happy ending and correspondingly no histrionics for dramatic effect, it just seeks to tell us things as they are. Frances McDormand as the central character, recently widowed and stoic, is just perfect, utterly unmannered casting, facilitating the use of real-life nomads around her instead of actors. Of course there will have been a liberal sense of the duty of the privileged behind many of the awards that the film picked up, but they also have to be seen as a recognition of something in real danger of being lost amidst the fanfare of blockbusters: a real story, patiently told. The lambent cinematography of impassive prairies and weathered faces also greatly assists in engagement with the lot of the protagonists.

7/10

Prey (Dan Trachtenberg, 2022)

Action and horror franchises just love having a seemingly unkillable enemy that can be brought out again and again to menace a new set of victims, but the fifth film in the Predator series proper appears to have bitten off more than it can chew, pitting another of the relentless hunters, kitted out with its space-tech arsenal, against Comanches armed with bows and tomahawks in 1719.

Accordingly, it carves its way through all the braves who confront it and an encampment of nasty French trappers whose muskets also prove useless, until only the heroine remains, a feisty and resourceful teenage girl, who of course no one listened to until it was too late.

It's certainly novel to have a main cast of native Americans of sorts in this genre, and the utter mismatch between hunter and prey calls for more invention than usual. But apart from that this is still just a monster mayhem feature, with cinematography which veers between some beautifully-lit shots and an annoying habit of repeating the same moment over and over in the action sequences, to unhelpfully confusing effect. Clearly better than Predators, but still not a very pointful exercise.

5/10

 

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (James Gunn, 2023)

 

MCU #32 eradicates any residual doubt that this is solidly a Disney product. It has even more cute talking animals than before, even less bothersome darkness despite a pretence of offering something serious for adults too in the shape of the baddie, a genetic engineer called the High Evolutionary who exterminates unworthy species in an attempt to create 'perfection' and even more merchandising opportunities for kiddies across the board. The plot, if there can be said to be one, consists of the bickering team trying to save the life of their raccoon friend through a mission that naturally involves endless busy but unexciting CGI battles and explosions. It overstays its welcome by an hour, even with the sustaining liveliness of the comic interplay between the heroes, and the apparent disbandment of the crew at the end is so very welcome. Too much popcorn will make you sick.

5/10 

Venom: Let there Be Carnage (Andy Serkis, 2021)

Somewhat unsurprisingly, given the commercial success of the first film in the franchise, we get a second instalment. More surprisingly, given the artistic poverty of the concept, this has Andy Serkis at the helm and Tom Hardy not just starring again, but also involved in the script and production. You'd have thought they'd have known better. As it is, it's a CGI bombardment with the human-symbiote antihero taking on his villainous counterpart, the hybrid offspring of the original symbiote crossed with a psychopath on death row, and in typical superhero adversary fashion, just the same as the protagonist, except bigger and meaner. The only relief to be had from the tedious pagga is the deft quipping between the hero and his amoral other half, which has been much boosted and thereby raises it above the level of the first film.

5/10

They Cloned Tyrone (Juel Taylor, 2023)

A drug dealer, a pimp and a prostitute in an all-black neighbourhood uncover a sinister conspiracy of social control over their community. The fact that the three are blaxploitation archetypes proves to be a fundamental part of what they unearth, as the film takes an abrupt turn into Soylent Green/Stepford Wives territory.

Much of the appeal of They Cloned Tyrone, apart from the comic interplay between the trio, peppered with every pop culture refence imaginable, lies in its splicing of genres that don't often meet. It's not so much that the individual components are new, but the blend certainly is, and makes for an entertaining ride which also manages to make serious points about the sense of the ghetto and boundaries laid down by race and background in the U.S. being a prison you can't escape from, thereby adding a layer to the satirically-tinged sci-fi set-up.

6/10

Living (Oliver Hermanus, 2022)

Whilst I'm no fan of remakes per se, largely due to the constant bastardisation of foreign originals by Hollywood to make them palatable for the U.S. audience and because the studios are too bereft of ideas themselves, every so often the source is so far removed in culture and time that it might just be an excusable act. Here, the source is Kurosawa's Ikiru from 1952, transposing the story of a grey Tokyo bureaucrat who only learns to live when he finds out he has terminal cancer to London in the same era. The plot sticks so closely to the original, that all that needs to be changed is the language and minutiae of the environment for it to ring true.

Of course, having Bill Nighy on top form in the wan lead role virtually guarantees that it will be no debasement, but other small tweaks also add to, rather than subtract from, the whole: the subtle use of a colour palette that plays endless shades of grey against period hypercolour flashes, understated turns of phrase to wryly satirical effect, such as the repeated refrain "we can keep it here for now" whenever a new document is forwarded to Nighy's office by the byzantine bureaucracy, and the toxic omnipresence of the social stratification of the time also plays a significant part.

All in all, a remake well worth doing which becomes quite affecting as it unfolds.

8/10