Los Últimos Días (David & Àlex Pastor, 2013)

When it comes to apocalypses, what's your flavour of choice? The nuclear holocaust option, zombies or aliens? Or, if you prefer something more scientific, an ecocatastrophe or a killer virus? The Last Days goes down the latter route and sadly forgets to make it at all credible: the world population is stricken with an epidemic of agoraphobia so intense that it kills those who venture outside the buildings they're cooped up in. And then, three months in, society has of course already gone Mad Max-feral, as it always will. The visuals of a ruined and deserted Barcelona are impressive, but the daft plot is strictly join-the-dots and without a stronger premise, there's little here to make the effort or expense justifiable.

4/10

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Tim Burton, 2016)

Tim Burton, a genius of the fantastical in the '80s and '90s, has now survived on the good will of his fans for almost as long as M. Night Shyamalan, albeit that the body of work he had accumulated was considerably more substantial and that there have been enough upward blips in the decline since then, such as 2007's Sweeney Todd to sustain hopes of a possible return to his mercurial past form. But this isn't one of them.
Asa Butterfield, in search of the truth of what happened to his grandfather back in 1943 and ending up there himself through a time portal, at a home for children with supernatural talents, is as thankfully off-centre as he was as a child actor, now playing the teenage protagonist. The support of the arch Eva Green as the matron of the home, as well as a seriously OTT Samuel L. Jackson, sporting yet another daft hairstyle as the villain after the kids' eyes, i.e. the key to immortality, are stable foundations to build on too. But that isn't enough. Jane Goldman's script can't get past being a derivation of Harry Potter and there's neither the sense of menace nor timing required to make it tick. In short, it's actually quite tedious, which is something you'd never have thought a Burton film could be.

5/10

I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach, 2016)

With this, Loach hit the age of 80 and feature number 26 with his righteous ire at the inequities of the world intact and vented at full force. Dave Johns plays a joiner forced to stop working after a heart attack, who is progressively ground down by the benefits system which declares him fit for work and not eligible for work incapacity payments, contrary to his doctor's opinion, and then still denies him his employment allowance as well. He finds some respite in helping a single mother settle in the area in between struggling to get to grips with computers and bureaucracy, but it's really an unwinnable war of attrition against his resolve.
Of course, various Tory ministers criticised the depiction of Jobcentre staff as bureaucratic drones intent on doing everything to disqualify people from getting support as being unrealistic, but anyone who has come up against the cold barbarism of the hoops you have to jump through will know that there's really very little exaggeration on show here. The story does accordingly follow a depressingly preset path, but the acting - once again, with supporting roles given mostly to non-professionals - is superlative and the fury is utterly justified.

7/10

My Dinner with Hervé (Sacha Gervasi, 2018)

Based on the director's actual encounter with the actor in 1993, days before he committed suicide, My Dinner with Hervé stars Hollywood's current go-to-dwarf (for only one can be accommodated at a time) Peter Dinklage as Villechaize and Jamie Dornan of Fifty Shades of Grey as a journalist who is a recovering alcoholic and very much in the last chance saloon with this interview. The casting is of huge relevance since, without it, what we have is a rather pathetic figure famous only for being in a supporting role in one Bond film and a long-running crap if popular TV series, which he will not stop going on about as if they were God's ways of compensating him for his physical limitations. The friendship that forms between the two, Villechaize baiting the journalist continually in his nasal tones with his boozing, leching, railing against the world and spiky personal barbs until he finally snaps, is wholly credible, and this sustains a story that would otherwise be too slender, even if we know that everything said by Villechaize is in effect part of a suicide note and stained all the way through by that.

6/10

Matchstick Men (Ridley Scott, 2003)

Somewhat of a departure for Scott, since comedy isn't a genre he really dabbles in, Matchstick Men stars Nicolas Cage and Sam Rockwell as a pair of conmen who bite off more than they can chew when attempting to scam a local businessman with a currency exchange play. To complicate matters, Cage has severe OCD and Tourette's, and also discovers he's the father of a teenage girl from a previous marriage.
The chemistry between the two male leads is very much the film's strong suit: Cage's performances in anything other than junk have been curate's eggs since the '90s, but doing crazy is something he can always rely on and his array of tics and phobias provide much hilarity, even if it is pretty broad as a source of humour. Rockwell duly contributes his standard good-natured flim-flammery, and Alison Lohman, as the insouciant daughter, is quite a revelation. Knowing the director, it doesn't come as any surprise when it all goes south, and the twist ending is less than adroit, but until then it manages a fairly high entertainment quotient.

6/10 

Pride (Matthew Warchus, 2014)

The fact-based story of how an unlikely alliance was formed back in 1984 between the striking miners and the burgeoning LGBT community, Pride is very much the feelgood film with a social hardship backdrop that The Full Monty was, albeit that the lightness is forced to take a back seat more often in the face of heavier real-world issues: unemployment, prejudice and, eventually, AIDS too.
You can of course criticise the makers' unequivocal political stance against the Thatcher government, but it's indisputable that what brought such disparate sides together was having such a clearly-defined common enemy. And while the closure of the mines can be economically justified, the manner in which it was done was barbarous and the film accordingly loses its jovial composure in flashes of ire for brief spells at this.
But plucky stoicism and good humour are never that far away, and a cast of steady hands such as Bill Nighy, Paddy Considine and Imelda Staunton ensures that it remains anchored to a bedrock of decency. It's hardly a work of great depth for all that, but it does do justice to the events of a very different era not so long ago, and without hectoring either.

6/10 

Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro, 2015)

Del Toro took quite a misstep with this, a Gothic horror piece with ghosts and incest thrown in for good measure. The titular setting is a decrepit mansion in northern England just after the turn of the century harbouring a dark secret, occupied only by an aristocratic brother and sister until he marries a naive young American, heir to her recently deceased father's fortune.
It begs incredulity as to how matter-of-factly she takes the visitations of her mother's ghoulish spirit in her stride, let alone the Addams-family in extremis aspect of the house, and when things go heavily down the Grand Guignol route, it really gets both distasteful and ridiculous. Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain are wasted as the sinister siblings and Mia Wasikowska is badly out of her acting depth as the wife in a blood-soaked descendant of The Fall of the House of Usher. It bombed justifiably.

4/10