Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014)

Tom Cruise does start off playing a coward here, shanghaied into service as unstoppable aliens sweep the Earth, but never mind the fact that you know that won't last long. What's initially more alarming is the fear that this will be no more than gung-ho grunts again playing with very big guns (now they've got exoskeletons too, like all good future soldiers do these days) and one tiresome explosion after another. All of which does of course come to pass. Yet it's quite compelling stuff, simply for the key idea: each time Cruise dies on the battlefield, he wakes up at the start of the same day, and that day is a lot harder to get through than its Groundhog Day template, as each time he has to mechanically execute the same actions just to get further to some hoped-for goal. In other words, there isn't a sense of free will: it feels like a Sisyphean hell.
Naturally, since the mission-style scenario, and even the look of the weapons and aliens are straight out of countless FPS games, you have to wonder whether the writers were fully aware of the film's vulnerability to scorn by presenting a narrative guided by scenes set in stone as, in effect, gaming save/respawn points. Nevertheless, it's a riveting ride.

6/10

The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2015)

The red planet will be a sobering place when and if we even get there; our expectations built up by so much guff about what an environment of promise it is by a full genre of films. Sure, most of the recent ones have involved people dying in horrible ways under attack from the elements, alien technology or ghosts, and The Martian can be seen as part of the sci-fi sub-genre harking back to 2001, seeking to restore some sense of proportion and realism, alongside, say Gravity or even Interstellar until it went postal. And I suppose mankind cannot bear too much reality, so there has to be some hope to cling on to. In this case, it's the notion that radiation wouldn't kill Matt Damon's stranded astronaut in an instant, after he's done surgery on himself and that he could get a potato crop started in the poisonous soil to live on. But maybe I'm too churlish; it is good, at times thrilling popcorn which also involves emotionally, and deserves some plaudits for that. Just don't tell me that it tells it like it is.

6/10

The Legend of Barney Thomson (Robert Carlyle, 2015)

Robert Carlyle stars in his directorial debut as a hapless and petulant Glasgow barber who inadvertently kills his boss, leading to an increasingly farcical downward spiral as he tries to cover up the crime, with Ray Winstone's snarling copper on his tail.
The brief here is clearly Irvine Welshesque black comedy, not a million miles removed from Trainspotting, with characters in a fag-end existence dragged humiliatingly through the drains through their own device, but the brushstrokes are even broader in a rather forced attempt to squeeze out gallows humour from the protagonist's plight at every turn. And while Carlyle, Winstone and Emma Thompson as Carlyle's monstrous mother, really chewing up the scenery. are all their usual good value for money, the descent into Grand Guignol is ham-fisted and unnecessary. If Carlyle continues in this genre, perhaps next time he'll be better served by adapting a story actually by Welsh, rather than a cruder imitation like this one.

4/10

The Lunchbox (Ritesh Batra, 2013)

In Mumbai, Saajan, a widowed office worker about to retire finds that his daily workplace lunch has started coming from someone else's wife, misdirected by the delivery company. They begin to exchange messages through the lunchboxes and a tentative relationship forms gradually between them, as they share more details about their lives in their letters.
The overall mood remains wistful, despite some levity introduced by the interaction between Saajan and his less than competent replacement-to-be. Without being railroaded into it, it becomes easy to root for the innocent romance to blossom and at the same time feel relief when the pat resolutions so common to the romantic drama genre are sidestepped. It's just a simple story of lifelike people, delicately acted and directed and serves as a reminder that there is very much an Indian cinema beyond Bollywood bombast.

7/10

Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015)

The chief virtue for me in the 24th official Bond outing is probably that the director has made a conscious decision to make all the Craig films a continuity, which is rewarding if you've seen all of them and makes sense in that the first of them was already a reboot of the franchise. As it had to be: no series could sustain all that baggage and unevenness of tone, never mind having the face and global political set-up change radically too over the years. Christoph Waltz, needless to say, also makes a superlative villain - albeit very much recycling his jovially psychotic Hans Landa - and the action scenes, of which there are the usual too many, are executed sharply enough to almost make you forget that the hero is quite indestructible. But, for all the attempts to flesh out Bond's psyche and provide a new menace for him to combat (the global commodity under threat here is intelligence), history weighs as heavy on the overall product as the script keeps on underlining that it does on the character's mind, and staging the biggest explosion ever committed to film in turn underlines the dearth of fresh ideas left in the tank.

5/10

Bikur Ha-Tizmoret (Eran Kolirin, 2007)

The Band's Visit has an Egyptian policemen's band lost in Israel while looking for the venue of their performance to open an Arabic cultural centre, tramping along like the hapless bunch from Leningrad Cowboys Go America and being taken in overnight by quizzical locals in a town in the middle of nowhere. Gradually, the two sides find common ground, but this isn't a sermon on Arab-Jewish relations, instead, the interest is just on what makes individuals tick, and it's all the better for it. There are some wryly amusing vignettes along the way, the scenes in the roller-skating rink a particular highlight amongst these, and a basic underlying decency and sweetness that make a small story carry more political weight than overt polemicising ever could.

7/10

Mr. Holmes (Bill Condon, 2015)

Ian McKellen plays a retired Holmes in the last years of his life, fighting against the dying of the light as his mental faculties decline inexorably. A growing friendship with the precocious son of his housekeeper drags him enough out of his torpor and wallowing in regret to finally tie up some loose ends, but now ones of the emotional kind, rather than of the factual. And that's fairly much the whole story: no murder mystery, this, rather a study of ageing and memory.
McKellen is clearly a loss to screen portrayals of Holmes; even in the dawning senility that the role requires, he fits it like a glove. The relationship with the forthright young boy who pushes him to revisit the past is also sweetly realised. It is a slight film, in that its perambulations don't lead anywhere except back to the beginning, but the walk there is nevertheless a pleasant and thoughtful one.

6/10