The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden, 2015)

A sequel was inevitable given the pressure of the likelihood that some of the veteran cast would soon start popping their clogs for real and so we have another instalment of the same, drawn our over two hours. This is no bad thing in that it's as cosy as a cup of cocoa and the principal players are always watchable, but the main plot is even thinner than last time around, largely ripped off from Fawlty Towers as Dev Patel's jittery young hotel impresario gets it into his head that a particular guest is a hotel inspector, with all the predictable consequences. The awkward real India of the film is also pushed so far into the background as to remain completely out of view. Still, it would be foolish and pointless to expect social realism here and the spiky verbal interplay between Maggie Smith and co. remains a delight, even if a lightweight one.

5/10

Small Apartments (Jonas Åkerlund, 2012)

Great British TV comedians have not, on the whole, had a happy history of trying their luck on the big screen, and sadly Small Apartments is no exception, though it does prove that Matt Lucas is actually capable of acting as well as doing silly voices, so he's really not to blame. He plays Franklin Franklin, a blobby loser given to playing an Alpine horn in his dingy little Californian flat, with an assortment of oddballs for neighbours and a pantomime villain landlord who he ends up killing inadvertently, leading to scrapes thickly ladled with gallows humour as he attempts to cover up the crime. The tone swings uncertainly from absurdism and gross-out comedy to pathos, and there is the vexatious overall air of a belief in the notion that if you stick enough weirdness in, profound meaning about life's rich tapestry will be generated, which is a cloying hallmark of much of American independent cinema and fiction. Thank God, then, for Lucas, who may yet have a film career on this evidence, successfully bridging the gap between his Little Britain monstrosities and a real dramatic persona.

4/10

Emil und die Detektive (Gerhard Lamprecht, 1931)

The first screen adaptation of Erich Kästner's children's adventure best-seller, the popularity of which extended far beyond Germany, Emil and the Detectives is somewhat of a historical curio due to the novel's setting in the years of the Great Depression and subsequent filming in the last days of the Weimar Republic. Added to this is the presence of Billy Wilder as scriptwriter before his flight to Hollywood and the end result is very odd indeed. The basic framework is a precursor of the Famous Five genre, with a plucky young boy and his cohorts bringing down an adult villain who has robbed him, but the Berlin setting with its low-lifes, unusual for the children's literature of the time, and the strong influence of expressionism in the photography, particularly in a tripped-out sequence where the hero is drugged by the crook, confound expectations constantly.

6/10

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller, 2014)

Both a prequel and a sequel to Sin City, in that it consists of loosely interconnected stories with the same main characters set both before and after those of the first film,  Sin City: A Dame to Kill For strives for the seemingly impossible in trying to outdo both the violence and misogyny of its predecessor, which already set the bar high in both terms for a big studio flick. The stark monochrome comic book look is the same, and it is striking, but we've been here before and whereas the first time around it impressed by being so fresh, going a considerable way to alleviating if not excusing the pubescent boy's fixations with strippers and guns, we've seen it now and the film has nothing to offer except many more scenes of Jessica Alba gyrating on stage or even more people getting decapitated or shot in the eye. Nor is there any semblance of plots beyond revenge ones this time. As a pure spectacle, it still dazzles the eye. As cinema, it's worthless.

3/10

X-Men: Days of Future Past (Bryan Singer, 2014)

Bryan Singer makes a welcome return to the helm in the clearly never-ending X-Men saga after Brett Ratner's botch-job with the main characters in the third film, a teen version by Matthew Vaughn and two stand-alone Hugh Jackman wankfests. However, the weight of all this is clearly a lot to bear: once again, Jackman has to play a more central role by virtue of his pulling power than his character would logically merit and there are just too many personae and strands to tie together, never mind then having a plot on top of that that has to somehow make feasible leaps over chasms of causality as Wolverine is sent back from a ruined future to 1973 to change history with the X-juniors. Still, it's nice to see them try gallantly, even though it hardly holds together, and having McAvoy, Stewart, Fassbender and McKellen all present alongside Jackman is a great boon. I do feel sorry for anyone who didn't grow up with the comics trying to make sense of it all, though.

6/10

The Two Faces of January (Hossein Amini, 2014)

Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst star as a seemingly carefree American flâneur couple working their way through Mediterranean cities in 1962, meeting Oscar Isaac (of Inside Llewyn Davis fame), a young American small-time con working as a tour guide in Athens. The older man's dark past soon catches up with him, however, as seems to happen a lot to Mortensen's recent characters, and the trio have to take flight to Crete.
As with The Talented Mr. Ripley, the source is a Patricia Highsmith novel, and the parallels - rich Americans on the run from a murder scene in the Mediterranean of yesteryear etc. - are obvious. It makes good use of its locations and the cast are as dependable as you would expect from their track record. But it lacks the subtlety of the earlier film, simply because there is never any prospect that getting off scot-free is an option, nor is there a character as interesting as the utterly amoral sociopath Ripley at the core. Nevertheless, in comparison with most thrillers currently made with contemporary settings, it stands up well in terms of both tension and restraint.

6/10

Memory Lane (Shawn Holmes, 2012)

Supposedly made for $300, which you don't need to be a film student to find a ridiculous claim, this is time-travel sci-fi somehow trying to splice together Primer, Source Code and Flatliners and end up with the pathos of The Time Traveller's Wife. This is a mistake as all of the above had real actors and something original to say about the device, for all their other failings.
Basically, a traumatised war veteran comes home to a small town, stops a girl killing herself , which she then does anyway, and spends the rest of the film grieving and having his friends kill him and bring him back to life so he can revisit the past to try out work out what actually happened to her. I suppose some credit ought to be given for an attempt to say something about the inability of the mind to accept shock, instead of just going off down an action route, and the editing and camerawork are rather impressive given the budget constraints, but it's to little avail. Although it might have helped if the love interest had not been such a gurning coquette or the lead such a sadsack, the end result would still have been a bit of a mess.

4/10