SuperBob (Jon Drever, 2016)

A Peckham postman is hit by a meteorite and turns as a result into the world's first and only superhero. However, this being a British comedy film, the twist here is that the unassuming hero continues as a civil servant, with a handler who controls his public image with a tight leash and swamps him in mountains of paperwork before he's able to perform any epic feats.
Also, as with so many low-budget British forays into comedy features, this has the obligatory set of cameos from a host of stand-ups in bit parts and is very hit-and-miss in its success rate and clumsy attempts to introduce depth to offset the slapstick. But it is vicariously gratifying to see, before Trump actually assumed his station as the most powerful sociopath in the world, that a healthy contempt for U.S. imperialism was already taken for granted, with the only real villain of the piece a populist American politician who comes over to try to make the decent man, who they claim is also a WMD not under their control, kowtow to the Stars and Stripes.

5/10

Dolemite Is My Name (Craig Brewer, 2019)

Eddie Murphy in entertaining film shocker! After appearing mostly in unbearable turds for nearly 30 years, with only the secure relative anonymity of voiceovers for animations, a still blindly-devoted and undemanding fanbase and the occasional brief respite from the dross such as his supporting role in Dreamgirls to keep his career going, Murphy takes centre stage in a biopic of an oddball and actually makes it work quite spectacularly.
Blaxploitation filmmaker Rudy Ray Moore's zero-budget output may not have been quite as awful as Ed Wood's, saved largely by a tongue kept constantly in the cheek, but quality cinema it was not and owed a lrge amount of its phenomenal popularity in the '70s to its utter, devil-may-care amateurishness. Naturally, this is what My Name is Dolemite mines for rich comic effect as the indefatigable motor-mouthed comedian Moore decides that he deserves a slice of the hollywood pie after several false starts with other enterprises. The caricaturish period patter is fast, the 'fuck'-count would put Tarantino to shame and there are many bumbling setbacks along the way to inevitable ultimate success against the odds.
The perpetual likability of the character does blatantly serve to massage Murphy's ego, the assumed hilarity of Moore's stand-up performances is hackneyed and the ending has to be sprayed in schmaltz, of course, but it's such good-natured fun, and the realisation that Murphy can actually do drama as well in the occasional scene when he's required to is so startling, that it would be mean-minded to begrudge him a long-overdue justified return to respectability.

6/10

La double vie de Véronique (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1991)

The Double Life of Veronique tells the mystically entwined stories of two identical women with the same name, one a soprano in Kraków, the other a music teacher in Paris, unaware of each other's existence. The former dies suddenly mid-performance and then we switch to the French half where her counterpart has unsettling intuitions of something beyond her ken. A psychologically highly-strung love story develops between her and a puppeteer who tells a story with his puppets that mirrors what happened to the Polish Weronika.
This is a work of nuances and luminous images rather than a prescriptive narrative, and that is both its strength and weakness: its primary purpose is to allude and discomfit, and that may not work for everyone. But the fresh-faced Irène Jacob in the twin role (dubbed into Polish for the first part) is a captivating presence, coquettishly flighty at one moment, fragile the next.

7/10

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (J.J. Abrams, 2019)

The King is dead, long live the King. The saga may come to an end, but its lucrative offshoots will continue. These have been a mixed bag, but at least Rogue One gave us something new by judiciously choosing to go with heroes who were all disposable and so liable to be in real peril.
None of that here. The final instalment follows the pattern taken by its two predecessors, namely that it crams in as many elements of the original trilogy as possible. This includes the improbable return from the dead of The Emperor, the saga's villain-in-chief, which is a lazy idea and duly leads to a finale straight out of Return of the Jedi. In the meanwhile, there is a massive new fleet of Star Destroyers which look suitably menacing but sit there doing nothing so that the outnumbered goodies can locate a MacGuffin to get rid of them all, several protracted lightsabre fights and much agonising by Rey and Kylo as to their purpose. It looks spectacular, of course, but it's a hollow exercise in attempting to placate fans and somehow tie things up. Oh, and of course Tatooine and Endor feature again too, which may be generously taken as dramatic closure but also feels as if a galaxy of millions of worlds has run out of ideas for new settings. More risks could and should have been taken.

5/10

Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)

Peele follows up his acclaimed horror Get Out with another set of black protagonists in peril from the supernatural, with a family under attack from their own doppelgangers. However, this time the characters only happen to be black and there is no overt racial element, although undertones of division and privilege are still present. This is a small pity, as the result is a film that, while being an unconventional and effective addition to the nuclear family-under-siege and bodysnatcher genres, has no more layers to the onion than that. Perhaps it's unfair to expect Peele to dish out more social allegory or satire, and see the film as it is, which is as disturbing and stylistically singular work as you can get, all the way from the dissonant Goblins-like soundtrack, albeit one that does lose its sense of focus towards the end under the sheer pressure of having to provide a bigger scheme to tie all its ideas together.

6/10

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (Chad Stahelski, 2019)

Picking up the story minutes after Keanu Reeves's unkillable hitman is forced to run with open season declared on his head, this hits the action without anything so attention-demanding as a preamble and then keeps on steaming ahead at full throttle. Keeping track of the bodycount, which some tried to do with the previous instalments, is quite futile by now. Perhaps stats might, by this stage, be better kept on the methods of dispatching the droves of goons who keep on materialising everywhere he goes, as conveniently timed as in any FPS so that there's always no more than two popping up any second to be sent to Hades with a kick in the balls - which actually seems to be more effective than the ultrafetishised arsenal of guns brandished - followed by the obligatory headshot or three for good measure.
If the first two films left any room for doubt, that is now decisively dispelled: this is action as a two-hour porn film, with all the begrudging concessions to story that implies. The increasingly jowly and single-expression Reeves occasionally just has enough time to growl a piece of wit unworthy of a Schwarzenegger actioner after another execution and then it's on to the next swarm of nondescript enemies. It becomes quite staggeringly boring long before the half-hour mark and reviewers praising the hyperstylisation of the violence choreography (which they always call 'balletic', as if that conferred any artistic merit on it) are either corporate shills or have the minds of 13-year-old boys.

3/10

L'homme qui voulait vivre sa vie (Éric Lartigau, 2010)

The initial fifteen minutes or so of The Big Picture fill me with an ominous foreboding that once again a French film has decided that the daily lives of smug, wealthy Parisians with their nannies and dinner parties are quite enough to entertain a middle-class audience for two hours, but then the central character, a young lawyer, starts suspecting his wife is having an affair, there is a confrontation with the other man involved and suddenly everything unravels in quite a shocking way. My hands are rather tied by the necessity to refrain from laying out exactly what transpires next, but suffice it to say that there is a strong Hitchcockian air in following a tortured, guilty protagonist (Romain Duris, who proves a perfect fit for this) desperate to avoid being caught and it keeps you guessing right up to the end, which is no easy feat in a well-worn genre.

7/10