Les Hommes Libres (Ismaël Ferroukhi, 2011)

In a gap-filling addition to the Nazi-occupied France genre, Tahar Rahim plays a young Algerian black marketeer in Paris who gets reluctantly sucked into the politics of the resistance. He cuts a diffident and uncertain figure, the film's main point seeming to be that heroism can happen quite without design or intent, and it's down to Rahim's charismatic portrayal that you never end up throwing your hands up in frustration at his non-committal comportment. At the same time, though, a story that was ripe for mining of deep drama never quite takes off: it's a curiously flat affair, with protracted scenes of Magrebi singing that feel like filler, vindicated largely just by its worthiness and adherence to realism.

5/10

Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014)

Ah, the old "we use only ten percent of our brains" fallacy that has got so many sci-fi dreamers drooling about the what-ifs of using more. Because this is Luc Besson at the helm once again, despite his promises to retire, the individual endowed with ass-kicking superpowers is of course a tasty starlet in the form of Scarlett Johansson, and there are the obligatory countless guns and car chases as well as Oriental gangsters, ultraviolence never more than a scene away.
Limitless may have been silly, but it was a model of hard science and restraint in comparison to this as Johansson develops god-like powers, preposterously first learning languages without any exposure to them. Then she's suddenly able to manipulate all matter, while becoming more and more estranged from mankind in a Lawnmower Man fashion, which is shown by her acting as blankly and ruthlessly as in Under the Skin. Besson was always cited as a key figure in the 'Cinéma du look', but now there really is nothing beneath the gloss, as impressive as the veneer may be.

4/10

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (Lasse Hallström, 2011)

This does indeed cover what it says on the tin, and makes sure we understand where we're going straightaway too, with Ewan McGregor's salmon specialist signposted as a closet romantic who'll end up with Emily Blunt's financial consultant as they chug along exclaiming disbelief at the conceit, namely creating a salmon-fishing river in the desert.
The film wants to have its cake and eat it by satirising a political establishment that wants to fix its Middle East image problem with a cuddly project and at the same time wanting to bolster the thin plot with spurious Islamist terrorists trying to sabotage the dam required because it's a Western symbol or somesuch thing. The fruit of their labours ends up wet and shallow, the appositeness of which hardly needs pointing out. Kristin Scott Thomas emerges from it best as the PM's press secretary, an over-the-top bitch of the first order and a departure from her serious roles that she sinks her teeth into with obvious relish.

4/10

Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn, 2014)

The superhero film production line has now reached Marvel's lesser-known heroes in its hunger for material to feed the mill, but it has to be said that this succeeds a whole lot better than many of the big-name vehicles. It's basically Serenity pushed through a Space Jam filter, which sounds awful but ends up not a million miles from Men in Black in overall tone, or, if you like, very close to what the dire TV series Farscape should have been. The reason I cite all these references is because there is nothing new here as such, with an Earthman and his band of disparate alien chums fighting a megalomaniac set on annihilating life as we know it, but it's zippy and quite funny in places too while providing solid popcorn thrills without having to resort to excesses of gore.

6/10

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2013)

Jeunet's best films have always overflowed with joie de vivre while dicing with whimsicality, and after a four-year hiatus he accordingly produced more of the same, this time in English and based on someone else's source material, but very much stamped through with his idiosyncratic style all the same. In a nutshell, a serious 10-year-old boy genius undertakes a journey from his family ranch in Montana to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. Hung on this febrile framework are digressions into various sciences, flights of fantasy and altercations with various odd characters (yes, Dominique Pinon gets a shoe-horned cameo again). It's as sweet and imaginative as you'd expect from the director and also well cast, including the child lead who stays just the right side of cloying in his squeaky elaborations. But it has to be said that Jeunet is hardly stretching himself after his latest break: you won't feel or remember much of it the next day, largely because not only he but also Gilliam, Burton and Wes Anderson, to name his closest peers, have all been over this terrain many times before.

6/10

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, 2014)

The second part of the Planet of the Apes reboot series starts with newsreels cursorily explaining that most of the world's human population has been wiped out by a genetically-engineered disease, which conveniently allows an equal struggle to unfold between the smart(-ish) simians led by Andy Serkis's Caesar and humans holed up in the ruins of San Francisco. It is at once more intelligent and less interesting than its precursor: there is more focus on the political aspects of the confrontation between the species, and yet the story arc itself is purely by the numbers, with an ape-human clash followed by an ape against ape one. The clear improvement in the CGI does mean that Serkis can now actually act with his face through the FX, so it's a shame that for the most part his character has become less articulate in verbal terms. The plot respects its own internal logic only insofar as it doesn't interfere with the imperative to get to the next scene.

5/10

Fury (David Ayer, 2014)

Fury starts out in a Saving Private Ryan tone and progressively leaches out any individual attributes it might have had. Brad Pitt commands a tank ploughing through Germany in the closing days of the war with an off-the-shelf crew of a boorish hick, a bible-basher, a stolid Hispanic and a frightened rookie. The Nazi opposition takes two forms, both equally improbable: either unstoppable behemoth tanks or droves of irrationally charging rent-a-goons. Either way, the Americans simply have to be the plucky underdogs, no matter what anachronisms that might entail (this is the director behind the infamous U-571, which prompted what was basically an apology for misappropriation of history by Hollywood from President Clinton).
Killing the heroes and their paramours equals an anti-war message in this lunk-headed milieu. Then Star Wars laser effects are superimposed on the gunfire, complete with red-green colour coding for goodies and baddies. There is some efficient dialogue and a few jarring shots, but by the time day-night continuity also goes out of the window without a care, who would care at all?

4/10