Slow West (John Maclean, 2015)

The Western vogue won't go away, but this wave has taken it on in the sense of an environment that's virtually sci-fi in terms of the diversity and sheer weirdness of the universe. Yet certain conventions are still beholden to. Hence, Slow West, with all its nods from El Topo down to the lowly likes of Seraphim Falls, contains ultraviolence and surrealism in equal measure, and this could be irritating indeed were it not for a simple backbone to the plot that remains constant. Once again, it ends up one of those films where, after all the beautiful scapes and ideas that suggest something larger, as probably the last thing the director wanted, i.e. simply a more thoughtful than average addition to the modern Western genre. You do have to sympathise with how hard it is to add anything more to the Western, though, or how once you've chosen that as your carrier of stories it ties up your hands.

6/10

Tomorrowland: A World Beyond (Brad Bird, 2015)

Here, director Bird continues with live action instead of the animation with which he made his name, albeit that it's cartoonish and CGI-laden enough that it might as well dispense with physical actors. The premise of a very child-oriented story is basically that there is another futuristic world that the young and spirited have access to through contact with magic pins, and a feisty teenage girl becomes determined to get there again after her first exposure to it. George Clooney turns up as a disillusioned man expelled from Tomorrowland as a child, playing a kind of substitute father figure who trots out the moral of the story, which is in essence a very middle-of-the-road woolly Disney philosophy about the value of hope and positivity in the face of the mess that the adult world is. Bird is a competent enough hand at the helm to ensure that it zips along lightly for the most part, but it's vexing to discover that there's far less substance and emotional complexity here for the adult audience than what any of his animated works contained.

5/10

Dokhtari dar šab tanhâ be xâne miravad (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)

Boy meets girl in a nameless nocturnal Iranian town, except that the girl in question is a vampire preying on the male lowlifes of the town.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night garnered much international praise, and beguiles with its blend of spaghetti Western and Jarmuschian film noir. But it's difficult to separate the just plaudits for its immersive mood and stylised look from the constant awareness that elements like drug-taking, prostitution and a total lack of religious presence are simply not what you expect from an Iranian film, and so there is a great temptation to be seduced by the novelty of that alone. It does look gorgeous in inky monochrome, uses music to great effect and understands the value of stillness, but, like its characters, doesn't actually know where to go. Still, it will be intriguing to see what Amirpour does next: there is an evident self-assuredness in the direction that promises a great deal.

6/10

The Future (Miranda July, 2011)

American independent cinema can turn out real gems that undercut the bombastic mainstream juggernauts. And then, frequently it also turns out ineffectual pieces of whimsy with all the intellectual rigour of wet tissue paper, where any unconventionality in terms of characters and events is held up as some profound statement on the meaning of life. Guess which category this tale of an aimless, largely jobless and mildly quirky Los Angeles couple, intercut with narrative asides from a cat they adopted and magical realist elements, falls into. It doesn't help that it irritates from the word go, with the cat given a croaky little-girl voice to utter pseud wisdom and the lead characters being completely devoid of any gumption. There are a few moments when the script does display a level of self-deprecation, but these turn out to be false dawns and the overall effect is to parasitically drain the viewers' energy as if the intention really was to leave them as listless as its protagonists. Avoid at all costs.

3/10

La Giovinezza (Paolo Sorrentino, 2015)

If Youth had proved to be a swansong for Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, it would have been a respectable way to go out. They play friends on a long stay in a Swiss hotel, the former a retired composer and the latter a director trying to make his 'testament' work, spending their days mulling over their lives.
There is always a danger of an artist disappearing up their own fundament when they make their main characters artists too, but on the other hand it's no sin to stick to what you know, provided you have something universal to say too. In this, Youth succeeds to a great degree, admittedly helped immensely by an arrestingly eclectic soundtrack and photography that will frequently leave you speechless. But it isn't beauty just for beauty's sake: images of this power reinforce the concept of the value and fragility of life, which works to support the central ideas of the film. Then, at other times, it's unexpectedly wryly funny too.
Thematically, this is the director recycling his preoccupations from his previous works such as The Consequences of Love and The Great Beauty; wistful musings on ageing, and it is somewhat odd to have a man in his mid-forties so fixated with the end of life. Again, it is also very stuck on the perspective of the self-involved wealthy white male. He will need another string to his bow sooner or later. But for now, you do have to marvel at the sheer command of atmosphere that Sorrentino has. It just leaves most other cinema looking heavy-handed and tawdry.

7/10

Ant-Man (Peyton Reed, 2015)

The Marvel production line moves onto its lesser superheroes with a strictly bog-standard offering where the protagonist, in this case Paul Rudd's failed burglar turned self-miniaturising powerhouse, goes through the regulation cycle of saving the world from a loon while getting back access to his daughter. Since most of the heroics occur at microscopic scale, the FX budget was always going to be even more predominant than the norm for the genre, and of course the final showdown, as with the Hulk, Iron Man etc. is with the baddie as a souped-up clone of the hero. One wonders what would happen if they accidentally got each other's nemeses just once. Anyway, the best that can be said is that the premise does allow for some decent visual jokes as things keep on changing size, and that will be quite enough to keep the kids entertained.

5/10

August: Osage County (John Wells, 2013)

A family with a fractious history is brought together when the patriarch commits suicide and each member comes with unresolved baggage, which is torn into with vigour by the surviving matriarch, who has cancer and is addicted to a panoply of prescription drugs, as well as too much truth. The film very much revolves around Meryl Streep's caustic performance in the role, and it's really that which keeps you watching, despite other able turns by the rest of the cast, since otherwise it's basically a Tennessee Williams-derivative Southern melodrama which doesn't successfully escape its stagebound origins, with a very clear sense of what is off-stage and when someone has started a monologue. The dialogue is too often prey to clunky exposition too, with characters providing the audience a potted summary of their relationships and backgrounds when lifelike interaction is really called for. But Streep really does serve up a tour de force, and that alone outweighs the negatives in the end.

6/10