Assassin's Creed (Justin Kurzel, 2016)

I confess that I haven't played the game that this is based on, but I bet it was not only more fun but more coherent. The plot, for those who would care, has a man sent back into the body of his 15th-century ancestor, a member of a sect seeking to keep the Apple of Eden, which contains the genetic code for free will, out of the hands of the Templars. That it manages to make every aspect of this fantastically uninvolving is quite a feat, preferring instead to have Michael Fassbender as the protagonist hack, kung fu and parkour his way through the mire for two hours while the rest of the criminally misused principal cast - Cotillard, Irons, Gleeson and Rampling - have to stand around delivering ridiculous lines robotically.
The fact that a film that is ostensibly about the fight for free will should move in a more mechanically predestined way than the sandbox game is staggeringly ironic. Likewise, despite the use of dramatic real-world locations across Spain, you feel that you're in a more confined environment than a virtual one is, with mist and shadow draped over everything for no good reason, as if reality was too expensive to animate. Beyond that, even the interminable fight scenes are dull and so poorly put together that it's largely impossible to follow what's happening at any given moment.
Finding out that the man who directed both Fassbender and Cotillard in the previous year's rather impressive adaptation of Macbeth was actually behind this turgid mess is the icing on the cake of its nonsensicality. It must surely have been a joke on the studios and easily-led game fanboys. Unfortunately, it's not a very funny one.

3/10

Los Parecidos (Isaac Ezban, 2015)

In the midst of torrential rains somewhere outside Mexico City in 1968, eight characters find themselves stuck in a cut-off bus station and tensions between them come to the boil even before things start going very, very badly south in an unreal sense.
Ezban's The Incident the previous year created a nightmare of time and place out of skew on a seemingly global scale, and likewise here the radio keeps blaring out reports of the world going to hell in a handcart even as the characters experience it first hand, continually turning on each other trying to apportion blame until the true cause becomes apparent.
The Similars is shot in a sickly blue-tinted sepia and makes no attempt at rationality or fleshing out the personalities, because what Ezban really wants to do is bash them - and the viewer - against each other and the impossible until the disorientation is thoroughly unsettling. The Twilight Zone-style narrative framing at the start and end almost seems to have been imposed to isolate the viewer from continued ill effects of the spillage of the film into the real world.
In fact, the outline was actually lifted from a Twilight Zone episode of 1961, but nothing there could ever have been so demented. Maybe it takes a Mexican - there's plenty of previous in the country's filmic heritage for truly insane work, from Jodorowsky onwards.

6/10

Big Game (Jalmari Helander, 2014)

The U.S. President's plane is shot down over the wilds of Finland (actually Bavaria) by a regulation vaguely Arabic psycho in a paper-thin conspiracy plot, but as the President survives the crash, he's befriended by a boy out on his own undergoing a rite-of-passage hunting trip. The hunt for them by the crooks is then under way.
This is preposterous stuff, with clunky characterisation and dialogue, but carried out with such conviction and vigour that it actually works, the action set pieces in particular, which by the end make no attempt at credulity and just try to jump an even higher stack of sharks. Presumably that's why the likes of Jim Broadbent and Felicity Huffman signed up, back in Washington, while Samuel L. Jackson must have enjoyed playing against his regular typecasting as a badass by having his handed to him on a platter at every attempt to act tough. It's good, harmless fun, against any reasonable expectations.

5/10

What We Do in the Shadows (Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi, 2014)

Such a bite in the neck for the exhausted vampire genre, this mockumentary has a bunch of vampires living as flatmates in Wellington, New Zealand and explaining the daily burdens of their life, starting with squabbles about whose turn it is to mop up the blood. It takes in every genre cliche and plays with them to hilarious effect. You'll recognise the co-director and co-writer, Jemaine Clement, from the fantastic Flight of the Conchords and so already be familiar with the tone, and it fully delivers on that expectation, with one cringeworthy episode after another and so many quotable lines. Highly recommended.

7/10

American Honey (Andrea Arnold, 2016)

Films with 'American' in the title do so, as a rule for one of two reasons: either as a direct attempt to sell to the average Joe Punter in the U.S., or as a statement of intent to say something of import about American society. With Arnold, you can guess it won't be the former, and a rambling road movie where a Texas teenager escapes her abusive father to take up with other young misfits to sell magazine subscriptions across the length and breadth of the country is hardly going to sell anyone the American dream.
They're a feral bunch, pumping themselves up continuously on booze, drugs and rap music before diving into another bout of door-to-door scamming. The rowdy travelling family, under daily pressure when leaving yet another identical motel to make good on the day, without any light at the end of the tunnel, is easy to see as an indictment of employment under faceless corporations, but it's also as much about the shorted-sighted hedonism of youth. It does labour to make its point at more than two and a half hours - some editing would really have helped here - but its avoidance of stereotypical plot turns and characterisations of the people they encounter in nearly every possible case is a huge, refreshing plus. There are no rapes, no drug overdoses, no shoot-outs, not even an arrest for their wayward actions. This is clearly deliberate: the director wishes not just to defy the genre conventions, but to suggest that things can still be fucked up even without obvious dramatic consequences.
It's not Arnold's most perfectly-realised film - you would have to go to the much smaller and more succinct Fish Tank for that - and the sound is a real hindrance, particularly with all the mumbling in accents from all over the States, but it is thought-provoking. The Lord of the Flies allusion at the end is hardly necessary, because if you've paid attention you'll have got that right at the start, but then it also underlines that for all that the lead character might have learned, no real progress for society is within sight.

7/10

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, 2015)

The stunts just have to keep getting bigger and Tom Cruise has to carry on pushing himself to do more and more in them, even though he's not many years from not needing latex to disguise himself as an old man any more. This time, as if the plot really matters, it's the good guys being discredited by their government and setting out to clear their names and prove the existence of international crime consortium The Syndicate. Cue the usual fights and chases, as efficiently handled as ever, and there is an able supporting cast, but it's pretty meaningless popcorn fare. These things only work well if there is a villain of real purpose and presence, a factor which seems to have been forgotten.

5/10

Passengers (Morten Tyldum, 2016)

A passenger on a spaceship bound for a new planet wakes up 90 years too early from hibernation, and spends a year alone trying to divert himself, until being irresistibly drawn to one of the other sleeping passengers, who he then wakes up to have a companion. They fall in love, until the day she finds out what he did.
There is a highly questionable underlying assumption here, which is that we would find what he did, i.e. curtailing her life, acceptable just because he's Chris Pratt and she's Jennifer Lawrence, and their telegenic compatibility means that their relationship is not only excusable, but was just meant to be. If you can overlook that, and the numerous plunderings of the plots and/or style of other material, Moon, WALL-E and The Shining being just some that spring to mind, it does manage to charm at times. But the director, Tyldum, whose last works were the taut thriller Headhunters and The Imitation Game, is on a slippery slope by taking the Hollywood dollar with such compromised material, which then descends into a wholly unnecessary action sequence at the end, to complete The Titanic arc.

5/10