The Beautiful Game (Thea Sharrock, 2024)

National treasure Bill Nighy plays against type as a former football coach who takes an assorted bunch from London to the Homeless World Cup in Rome. Naturally, were this a Hollywood product, you'd expect them to triumph against all odds, but although it still ends up a feelgood affair, it's more concerned with mental health issues, principally the sense of stroppy aimlessness felt by the team's star striker. The standard sports drama boxes are still ticked, it goes on for far longer than necessary to make its point and the Japanese delegation at the competition are just used to run through all of Rome's best-known photogenic attractions. So, no great shakes on any front, but the at least the humour is gentle and sweet, making for a reasonable heartwarmer.

5/10

Nope (Jordan Peele, 2022)

 

Peele's caustic and scintillating directorial debut, Get Out, set the bar high indeed, and while Us in 2019 was a more conventional horror film, it atill bore enough distinguishing characteristics, chiefly in its social nuancing. However, all that Nope has to nod in that direction is that the principal protagonists are a black brother and sister who happen to rear horses. As much as I loathe the term 'woke', that alone seems to have scared critics into pouring universal acclaim on this film, because it has nothing else to recommend it. The UFO that appears in the skies above their house to harass them has no rational motive and ascribing its poor conceptualisation to an intentional decision by Peele to critique overreliance on gore and CGI in sci-fi films is ludicrously generous. The barbs against the superficiality of social media are tired and blunt, and on top of all that it's overlong and, frankly, dull. I know that the director has much more in his tank, so laziness is the most apparent reason for this pointless exercise.

3/10

Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

The Shining needed a sequel as much as, say, Citizen Kane would have done, but since the never-ending mine of Hollywood horror material that is Stephen King had already written one, it was bound to happen. And one wishes they hadn't. King may have intensely disliked Kubrick's highbrow, eerie adaptation of the original novel, but then the author has never been the most critically astute judge of what makes a classic film. Doctor Sleep certainly isn't one: it works perfectly well as a gory riff on the themes of psychics and psychos, but that's about as far it gets. Ewan McGregor as the now middle-aged and alcoholic Danny Torrance, the boy who survived his father's possessed rampage and has lived haunted by the trauma ever since, is as watchable as usual, as is Rebecca Ferguson as the chilling leader of the group of demonic killers after Danny and a young girl who has even more potent psychic powers than him. It's not uncommonly derivative by modern horror standards, but would have been well advised to leave the sacrosanct original alone.

6/10

Time Addicts (Sam Odlum, 2023)

A Melbourne drug dealer sends two of his customers to steal a bag of crystal meth from a grotty house, and as they bicker relentlessly one of them decides to sample what they've found. Except that it displaces him in time, 25 years into the past. She ends up doing the same, but with different results, and a seemingly neverending cycle of causality is started, also involving the dealer and an undercover cop, only the physical location never changing, except in terms of its state of repair.

This is certainly a novel take on the time travel genre, with the emphasis on the fact that time travel is a device rather than the theme. The theme is really the tortuous relationships between hopeless losers, and it deals with those fairly well, operating within a tiny budget and fuelled by more swearing than probably any other film ever made. No sentence is complete without a 'fuck' or 'cunt'. It's not elevating or enlightening in any way, but still deserves a commendation for effort.

5/10

Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023)

30 years after last turning out his last passable film, Wenders finally produces something coherent in his twilight years. We follow a solitary, ageing and taciturn public toilet cleaner in Tokyo through his repeated daily routine, the only deviations to the rigid schedule coming from chance encounters with people along the way. This could be very tedious indeed, but the very lack of drama and the simple things he takes pleasure from, that being music, novels and taking photographs of trees, make the entirety into a calming existentialist balm for the soul and two hours slip by almost unnoticed, much as the protagonist does through the city streets.

7/10

I Care a Lot (J Blakeson, 2020)

Rosamund Pike plays a con artist who exploits the legal system to give her control of the assets and very lives of elderly people, getting them confined in a retirement home on the grounds of dementia while she hoovers through their earthly wealth. This all goes swimmingly until she makes the mistake of committing the mother of a drug baron to the facility.

So far, so Better Call Saul, but Pike's character is a far colder fish without a streak of morality and therein lies the rub: there is no sympathetic protagonist at all, with even Peter Dinklage's crime boss, who tries to bring her down, at least having some element of human motivation. But it gets by on the sharpness of the scenes between the adversaries and convincingly painting the American justice system that can allow such injustices to thrive as the real villain of the piece. Once that's covered, however, it descends into a more conventional thriller mode and somewhat runs out of narrative puff. Still, some marks for creating unusual monsters who could credibly be out there, and surely are.

6/10

Settlers (Wyatt Rockefeller, 2021)

In an indeterminate time period in the future, a family live on an isolated farm on a terraformed Mars and all is quiet until bandits arrive, after what they have. The basic plot is thus completely that of the classic homesteaders under siege Western and the transposition in time and place don't alter the formula in the slightest. This has both an upside and a downside: the pace is calmer than the genre norm, with virtually no future tech or FX on show, but neither is the change of setting utilised. It's glacially slow, which does allow for tension to build up, but the scenario could have done with at least some background exposition and the conclusion is utterly unsurprising.

5/10