Finding Your Feet (Richard Loncraine, 2017)

You only have to take the stalwart luvvie cast list (Imrie, Staunton, Spall, Sessions, Lumley) together with the setting (Notting Hill or thereabouts) to know that the end result of feeding these into a film autogenerator will only be a feelgood product for middle-aged, middle-class people, most likely with bittersweet overtones and a life-affirming message. And so it proves. The plot, in which prim Imelda Staunton is cheated on by her husband and goes to live with her free-spirited sister, gradually loosening up in the process, is a strictly join-the-dots affair. Of course Imrie, as her sister, cares not a jot for social decorum. Of course Spall as her new love interest appears rough at first and then is revealed to be deep. And of course she'll leave her old life in the end. Still, while both audience and cast remain securely within their comfort zone throughout, it's like a good Sunday roast: comforting fare without any nasty surprises.

5/10

Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee, 2020)

Having covered the single subject of racial conflict in America in BlacKkKlansman, Lee moves on to armed conflict between the US and other countries, albeit also still through the filter of institutionalised racism against black people with four Vietnam War veterans returning to the country to look for the remains of a comrade of theirs, as well as hidden gold bullion. But there is another filter too: the fog of memory, which colours the view that each one has of the past, and also how that past is shown to us.
Overall, the film straddles the buddy adventure genre and a polemic on the theme of American historical ethnic persecution with overt comparisons made between the race riots and police brutality back in the States, through newsreel footage, and the simultaneous ideological crusade that the soldiers are forced on in Vietnam, shown in flashback. The balancing act is an uneasy one, and that impacts the message adversely. It doesn't help that Lee cannot escape the one constant of American war films: the action is stylised like a shoot 'em up and one dead American, be they black or white, is meant to be more tragic than dozens of anonymous gooks shredded by bullets in Ramboesque fashion. The traumatised Viet vet trope is also overplayed: we've seen it too many times before for it to have much impact, however true it may be, and not all that convicing going on 50 years after the event either. Delroy Lindo, as the one of the group who hasn't been able to let the past go at all, turns in a bravura performance of instability, but that also overshadows the contribution of the other characters. Then another stock theme, that of gold against the soul, is overlaid and accordingly at times the film starts to remind you of those C-grade Spaghetti Westerns where the protagonists just rant incessantly about 'the gold, the gold'. And then when one of the band expires abruptly after stepping on a landmine, it's shot in such Grand Guignol fashion that the first though that came to my mind was Mr. Creosote exploding in The Meaning of Life, which surely was not the intention, unless Lee really is making a clever allusion to the perils of greed.
The director's explicit contribution to the Black Lives Matter movement, Da 5 Bloods does have many strengths too: the interplay between the old-timers is vibrant and the intermittent use of the Viet Cong radio propaganda broadcasts back in the day by Hanoi Hannah, imploring black GIs to give up doing The Man's dirty work, has unsettling parallels with Samuel L. Jackson's soothing radio DJ throughout Do the Right Thing. But ultimately it's a lack of focus in Lee's fusion of elegiac drama, bloody action and political diatribe that lets down the whole. And, caught between a military establishment who sent them to die and the local populace for whom the soldiers are just another bunch of imperialist invaders, the protagonists are the ultimate victims and playing the victim card over and over again just can't be the way forward.

6/10

Rückenwind von vorn (Philipp Eichholtz, 2018)

A young schoolteacher in Berlin has an immature boyfriend who wants them to have a child regardless of her career and dreams of travel and her sole relative is her grandmother, who is ailing. This forces a number of big decisions to be made, so she goes out and gets utterly blotto.
It's surprising to find out that Away You Go was made by a director in his mid-thirties with several features under his belt since the characters here are all feckless, and yet apparently we're to see them as just free spirits. Likewise, there is the jittery cutting in sudden leaps from one scene to another once the director feels that he's reached another marker in his join-the-dots plot diagram and therefore considers that adding any more characterisation or depth is quite unnecessary and just such a drag. Accordingly, in only 80 minutes, it manages to fit in half a dozen turns which can only not be barmy to a flittering adolescent. It's not a horrible film per se, just so avoidably inept.

4/10

Lazzaro Felice (Alice Rohrwacher, 2018)

Lazzaro, a simple peasant lad, lives in a sequestered village of tobacco farmers somewhere in the hill country of central Italy, put upon by the others because of his unprotesting demeanour but nevertheless ceaselessly happy with his lot. The time period is at first difficult to determine, with the villagers' quality of life seemingly stuck in the 18th century although, strangely, they have electricity too, albeit in the form of a few lightbulbs. Then it gradually becomes apparent, through regular visits by their hectoring overseer, that they are in fact stuck, not only in indentured servitude to the owner of the estate, but within the confines of the village too, quite unaware of the world outside. The estate owner's otherwise indolent son befriends Lazzaro and rails against his mother's explotation of the serfs, pretending to have been kidnapped, but this comes to nothing and then circumstances shatter the dam placed between the villagers and the modern world anyway. From then on, nothing is the same again.
Happy as Lazzaro is a decidely odd concoction, unsteadily straddling the tightrope between magical and social realism. This sometimes serves to have one aspect reinforce the other, but they can also equally well get in each other's way as the limits of the fantastical elements are left undefined, or the clearly impassioned social critique is undermined by the underlying sense of unreality, forced whimsy or some rather heavy-handed Catholic allegorical allusions around the theme of the long-suffering martyr. It manages to retain interest through being so singular and leftfield a blend, but the same blend is ultimately its failing, as no clear message gets through the resulting interference.

6/10

Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)

A star-studded whodunnit squarely of the Agatha Christie school, Knives Out proves to be a resoundingly enjoyable, riotous ride. Christopher Plummer, playing best-selling crime novelist Harlan Thrombey, is found dead in his house on the night of his 85th birthday party, attended by all of his back-biting family, and master private detective Daniel Craig (gamely essaying a Southern gentleman accent to no small comic effect) arrives to investigate. It soon transpires that all of the family members have something to hide and a motive of some kind for doing away with the head of the family, who was about to cut them off from his considerable fortune. The only apparently innocent member of the household, Thrombey's South American nurse, duly becomes the detective's confidante, even as it is revealed in gradual increments that things (of course) are not quite as clear cut as they may first appear.
The house, full of creepy curios, is obviously a direct nod to that of the crime novelist played by Laurence Olivier in Sleuth, and the casually elitist and self-centred bulk of the characters and the Poirotesque detective, with his odd little mannerisms and sayings, are all straight out of Christie. So far, so familiar. However, what Johnson has managed to add to the basic formula is a sprinkling of black humour, some very witty dialogue (Christie was never too concerned with wit) and a sociopolitical subtext that, likewise, Christie couldn't really give a fig about, as it becomes clear how much the fact that the nurse is an immigrant really means to the condescending family. All the players involved obviously enjoy themselves hugely, and it's nice to see what Johnson, an able director with a deftness of touch, can do when not constrained by having to satisfy hordes of disparate fans, as was the case with his last work, The Last Jedi.

7/10

Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017)

As a director, Anderson could not be called much more profilic than his leading man here, Daniel Day-Lewis, at least over the last twenty years of the actor's career. But normally it matters little when each film with them behind is an event to be savoured. So it's frustrating that this is not quite a brilliant swan song for Day-Lewis. There's nothing wrong with his performance as a fashion designer in 1950s London, as studied and driven as ever, or that of the support either, with Lesley Manville as his acerbic sister and Vicky Krieps as his young muse, who becomes increasingly obsessed with holding onto the waspish and egocentric artist. But the Hitchcockian/Gothically-tinged tone feels uncertain and when it reaches its denouement, it has already played all its cards. I can understand the ambition here, and it is full of sumptuous detail, but I'm just not quite convinced that it knows what point it wants to make.

6/10

Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

It's debatable how much this should be labelled, despite having the DC universe as its backdrop and one of the said universe's best-known characters as its subject, as a comic-book screen incarnation. Once you have chosen Joaquin Phoenix as the psychotic titular character, we're automatically not going to be in the primary-colour world of superheroics any more, and it proceeds accordingly. Aside from nods late on to the Batman origin story, which are actually quite unnecessary and seem to be there just as concessions to fans so that they can't go away bleating that the film wasn't about their Joker, this is essentially a dark depiction of a descent into mental disintegration, containing very little in the way of the standard action sequences.
Phoenix, an actor whose real mental state can generally only be guessed at, with his history of throwing up smoke screens, naturally goes full method with drastic weight loss as bullied, needy wannabe stand-up comedian Arthur Fleck, who has severe mental issues and lives with his ill mother, at the receiving end of an already dangerously divided society. The seeds for the eventual unravelling of his mind are all painfully obviously there at the outset, and the film thus has to depend heavily on Phoenix to avoid being merely a story of a man turning into a murderous nutjob with a perverse world view.
But his portrayal carries the whole with aplomb, unsettlingly unbalanced yet utterly mesmerising, and, above all, not pandering to 'How to Act a Looney' conventions. It feels quite frighteningly real. And the inclusion of Robert De Niro as an anodyne talkshow host who Arthur hero-worships at first until the host ridicules him publicly, is also a nice touch, with its overt allusion to De Niro playing a similarly obsessively delusional fan in The King of Comedy. Let's just hope that sense prevails and the urge to automatically turn its uniqueness into another franchise is resisted for once.

7/10