Logan Lucky (Steven Soderbergh, 2017)

Soderbergh is clearly well and truly out of his notions of premature retirement by now, and it's just as well as he is, with plenty more in the pipeline and this rollicking piece, where Channing Tatum and Adam Driver play hick brothers planning a heist, this time not to do with a bank, but instead stealing the gambling proceeds of a NASCAR track. This being a compound of Soderbergh's wry slant on things and the modern heist formula, they of course turn out to be overconfident and dice with bungling the whole job at several junctures, of which there are dizzyingly many. It's not as much of a flashy parade of setpieces as its natural predecessors, the Ocean's Eleven films, but taken out that of that frame of reference, well in the upper quality echelons of the genre in terms of smartness and lightness of execution. Daniel Craig provides able comic support as an expert safe cracker, his mouth fumbling alarmingly with a southern accent, and overall the tone is effortlessly breezy. The director's break seems to have made sense.

7/10

The Founder (John Lee Hancock, 2016)

The story of how the McDonald's empire arose from one outlet in California run by a pair of brothers, The Founder benefits from the decision to give the role of Ray Kroc, the itinerant salesman who approaches the brothers in the 1950s to develop their business to Michael Keaton, who can do persuasive sloganeering and wheedling in his sleep. This is exactly what the role requires, as Kroc's natural capitalist opportunist sees the brothers' intransigence when he repeatedly tries to convince them to compromise for the sake of financial gain as carte blanche for him to act as he pleases with their brand, first rapidly creating a chain of franchises and then taking over completely. In other words, the title of the film really refers to Kroc as the founder of the empire, rather than the actual founders of the first restaurant. His machinations are the dramatic driving force of the story, and while that doesn't leave for much else of a human dimension, it's surprisingly entertaining given the potentially dry subject matter.

6/10

Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016)

A loner janitor in Boston is called to his small coastal home town upon the death of his brother, to discover that he has been appointed the guardian of his teenage nephew in the will. It's immediately apparent that he left the town years before under a cloud, and the root cause for that unfolds through flashbacks and encounters with the locals.
He's very damaged goods, alternating between being sullenly withdrawn and abruptly violent, and Casey Affleck conveys the dichotomy credibly. The relationship with his nephew, who's outwardly cocksure, seeming to take his father's death in his stride, while being inwardly very brittle, is also affectingly portrayed. It never lapses into the formula of inevitable healing or bonding between clashing males and different generations: they remain co-passengers on a road of sorrow. The script is also confident enough in its emotional substance that it even allows humour to exist where it occurs naturally, without any danger of this trivialising the key theme. There is a flaw in that not only the protagonists but the film itself almost suffocate under the weight of their suppressed grief, leading to a lack of tonality, but it still deserves the plaudits it garnered for its fundamental truthfulness.

7/10

The Square (Ruben Östlund, 2017)

The curator of a Stockholm art museum meanders through various escapades and trials after his phone and wallet are stolen, distracted enough to neglect the museum's hare-brained marketing campaign for their new exhibition, vaguely themed around the idea of a square as society. And that's about it for two and a half hours, but Östlund's grip on the tiny details that make up human interaction is masterful, and the characterisations accordingly all have depth and subtlety.
It has been sold as satire, but the complacent vacuousness of the affluent culture vulture world feels scarily lifelike, and so the whole thing comes over more as a sneak peek behind the facade of how that sphere ticks, with all its hypocrisies. This is most evident in a protracted scene where a performance artist playing a gorilla assaults the guests at a grand dinner for the museum until they just snap. Meanwhile, the world of the homeless and socially excluded is constantly pressing in at the margins. It's hypnotic, daring, perceptive and maddeningly fluctuating in terms of tone and message, but never boring.

8/10

The Death of Stalin (Armando Iannucci, 2017)

As The Thick of It, The Day Today and Veep have proved, just to name a few of his body of work, Armando Iannucci can be relied on to wring the tragicomedy out of any political situation. But the story of the poisonous power struggle following Stalin's death is almost too rich with satirical potential, like Trump, and it's true that given such a wide target, the end result actually has less of a bite than Iannucci's attacks on more evasive prey. Taking that caveat into account, the film still succeeds as frequently rip-roaring entertainment, undoubtedly aided by a fine cast: Steve Buscemi's calculating Khruschev, Simon Russell Beale's monstrous Beria and Jeffrey Tambor's vacillating Malenkov as the leads, with a plethora of able support from veteran faces of British comedy such as Michael Palin.
It plays out as a dark farce, which is the only logical way to go as the panicking Central Committee have to go through the motions of maintaining a united front while frantically backstabbing each other at the same time, the constant threat of a one-way trip to Siberia malingering in the background. It's both extremely funny in places and also oddly convincing as a historical document of the goings-on behind the scenes in the Soviet Union, aided rather than hindered by its frequent recourse to modern vernacular and generally playing out things too grim to contemplate as comedy instead. No wonder the Russians and many other former Soviet states banned it, proving its fundamental verisimilitude and judicious choices of target at once.

7/10

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017)

Lanthimos returns to the twisted family scenario of Dogtooth, except this time the twisted element comes from outside and the tone is turned up to full horror. It's a loose retelling of the Greek tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis, and certainly Lanthimos is well-qualified to do justice to the form, with its endless expository monologues and overblown themes. He's proven himself to be an autist of the first order, with the cypher-like actors given the brief to deliver their lines as robotically as possible, and a vicarious desire to upset bourgeois sensibilities, with random violence and sexual deviancy as his principal tools. In that aspect, the director is a sort of blood brother of far too many Austrians in particular, such as Ulrich Seidl.
Colin Farrell takes the lead role again, as a cardiac surgeon who for some initially unexplained reason welcomes an odd teenage boy into his family home. It's clear as he begins effectively stalking Farrell and his daughter that he's a sociopath, but with the rest of the cast virtually as mechanical as he is, the end result is utter dramatic flatness, which recedes far too late: only once the tragedy is almost complete and Farrell and Nicole Kidman as his wife finally get to show some emotion. Of course it's very strong in visual style and blasts of unsettling music, and has once again earned the director some rave reviews for the combination of these with the shock quotient. But whoever is impressed by this is basically as far up their own fundament as Lanthimos is.

4/10

Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016)

The first film with an all-black cast to win the Best Picture Oscar, and with a gay lead character to boot, Moonlight at first glance goes through all the standard motions for both genres: he's a skinny poor kid in a Miami ghetto, bullied for being so different from an early age, his mum's a hopeless crackhead, and then he goes to prison to emerge a beefed-up drug dealer. That would indicate that there's nothing new on offer.
But that summary is exactly the point of the film: it's a causal progression that suggests that given an unfavourable enough set of circumstances to begin with, your destiny is inescapable. That would still be thoroughly depressing if the monosyllabic, withdrawn lead wasn't given an inner dream life and it wasn't handled with such finesse. The sheer desperate loneliness of the character at all the three stages of his life that we see is a searing indictment of how society can force those who don't fit in into a guise of hyper-masculinity and a lifetime of opportunities missed. It won't be everyone's cup of tea for all that, but the merits do have to be acknowledged.

7/10