The World's End (Edgar Wright, 2013)

Much as I have a wealth of goodwill towards Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, which is fairly inevitable considering I'm of a comparable age, slacker terms of reference and even used to live around the block from them when they were coming to the fore in their rather delicious Spaced TV series, followed by the thoroughly riotous Shaun of the Dead, it is wearing a little threadbare now. It doesn't really pull the wool over anyone's eyes to present that, Hot Fuzz and this being part of a coherent whole just by calling it the 'Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy'. But maybe I protest too much: this isn't Kieslowski, so is it funny?
Sporadically, yes. But numerous buddy scenes are rehashes reheated too many times over the years, which gives no sense of progression. And there are more derivative than meaningfully referential elements in the whole, which has Pegg's ageing goth, fighting against the dying of the light, frogmarch his friends from twenty years back around their old hunting ground on a pub crawl until they uncover an alien takeover plot. It would have been so much nicer if they'd not bothered with the token go at sci-fi/horror/kung-fu et al, because when the theme of having to face no longer being young occasionally pokes through, it's really quite sweet, just because they are such likable souls.

5/10

Kick-Ass 2 (Jeff Wadlow, 2013)

It is not a good idea to presume that setting your stall out as a superhero spoof gives you the licence to try to milk a franchise out of it yourself. Doubly so when all the wit goes out of the window at the same time: love or hate the first instalment, it had pizzazz and a guilty discomfiting sense of pleasure at having a little girl carve her way through hordes of thugs. This, however, is just hopelessly bereft of new ideas, and has to resort to even higher levels, if that were possible, of dumb violence and gross-out toilet humour. It's not a good sign when you start missing Nicolas Cage's pontificating solemnity from the last time around.

3/10

Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)

An arthouse horror drawn from the premise of 1985's panned Lifeforce, in that an alien female vampire preys on the male populace of Earth, Under the Skin earns a fair amount of kudos for opting to create disquiet rather than going for the jugular. The scenes where Scarlett Johansson drains her single male victims are nightmarish psychic events rather than being saturated with blood and the film is punctuated with longueurs where she's just driving around non-descript Scottish towns which force consideration of all the things we are asked to contemplate.
The Man Who Fell to Earth, on the level of a study in absolute alienation from contemporary society, is a relevant reference point. There are also strong echoes of Tarkovsky and Lars Von Trier in the sense of the character's haunted isolation. The lack of blood is a parallel with, though not a cause of, its bloodless air, just as the nudity is purely surgical: the predator is an autist who is defeated not by the traditional human bacteria as an insurmountable barrier to alien invasion, but her own sheer incomprehension at the complexity of the world. Credit must be given for the film's ambition, but it does succumb to mistaking that ambition for profundity.

6/10

The One Hundred-Foot Journey (Lasse Hallström, 2014)

Director Hallström does not need to break a sweat directing this feelgood fairytale concoction, seeing as he already did outsiders moving into an insular small French town and winning over the locals through the magic of food in Chocolat. This time the outsiders are an Indian family fleeing trouble in Mumbai and led by their obdurate patriarch to set up their restaurant right across the road from a snooty Michelin-starred establishment. This naturally precipitates a clash of cultures.
It's a sure-fire banker, with the Spielberg/Winfrey producers' seal of saccharinity. The trope of food as a font of memory is deemed deep enough to be revisited over and over again, while immersion in either traditional French or traditional Indian cuisine remains strictly superficial and the younger romantic leads rather lightweight. Thankfully, Helen Mirren and Om Puri are there to lend some class as the feuding seniors, and the film's best moments are all to do with them trying to cattily outmanoeuvre each other. It's a shame that an imminent break-out of love will never allow this to continue, just as you know Puri's son will return to his roots after dipping a toe into the world of stardom in nouvelle cuisine. Pleasant and undemanding sustenance, then.

5/10

Kong Curling (Ole Endresen, 2011)

Truls Pålsen is a man hard put-upon by his overmedicated OCDs and bossy wife, trying to make a comeback in the curling rink to win the money his ailing mentor needs for a transplant. Various complications and shenanigans ensue on the way to eventual triumph.
Curling King is a blatant copy of The Big Lebowski, right down to the zoomed face shots, tripped-out cutaways and the composition of the hero's motley crew and bragging rival, with just the thriller bit removed. With that large qualifier, it does however have some genuinely chortlesome moments of its own and an amiable irreverence that makes for a harmless piece of fun. Thank God the Norwegians clearly don't have the need for a fist-pumping Vince Vaughn to rally behind in this kind of thing: the frowning blob that is Pålsen remains endearingly hangdog-like even in victory.

5/10

Der ganz große Traum (Sebastian Grobler, 2011)

Daniel Brühl stars as an idealistic schoolteacher who comes back from England to a stuffy German boys' school in the late 19th century and sets about introducing football to his pupils alongside English and a sense of 'fair play'. Predictably, this meets with the disapproval of the establishment and parents alike.
Lesson of a Dream may be based on a real story, but the liberalism and non-conformity of the teacher is pure fiction, being just a convenient frame on which to hang the usual cycle of tribulations and aspirations found in any Hollywood equivalent. That said, Brühl is always a likable presence and there are some sprightly enough scenes in a film that never strives too far beyond the feelgood level.

5/10

Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2013)

Frances, a struggling dancer, shares a flat in Brooklyn with a friend who moves out, forcing her to reassess her life. A series of relocations follows, taking in various jobs and probings into relationships, until she ends up more or less back where she started, except living alone.
This is a film heavily influenced by Woody Allen's Manhattan/Annie Hall period, with the use of black and white clearly acknowledging the debt: very little of consequence happens and it is entirely driven by conversations revolving around how to live rather than any actual forward momentum. The character of Frances is symptomatic of this: flippant, irrepressible, flighty, knowing and aimless. It is a vivacious portrayal by Great Gerwig, and there are as many occasions when you laugh with her as you want to give her a kick up the backside, but humankind can only bear so much navel-gazing. Unsurprisingly Gerwig, the film's co-writer, has also worked with Whit Stillman, the uncrowned king of ineffectual and contrivedly quirky American middle-class introspection, now that Allen's output has dwindled to ever-decreasing circles around his original preoccupations.

5/10