Love and Monsters (Michael Matthews, 2020)

So, the human population of the world has been nearly totally wiped out again, this time by monsters mutated from all the animals. The protagonist is a lovelorn lad of no particular ability who sets out from his safe haven to cover 90 miles across the hazardous surface to find his pre-disaster girlfriend.

What sustains such a thin premise is its wit and lack of reliance on special effects, as well as having a likable boy-next-door lead, previously only really known for the decidedly patchy Maze Runner films. Not a waste of money, then, but also not anything that you'll feel culturally deprived for not having spent two hours on.

5/10

Shazam! (David F. Sandberg, 2019)

The seventh film in the DC Extended Universe is the first one decisively aimed at children, with its titular hero a 14-year-old foster child landed with an adult body, a host of magical superpowers and a mission to save the world from the demonic embodiments of the seven deadly sins. He initially seizes the opportunity to play Superman with all the maturity to be expected from a pubescent delinquent, until, of course, the  great responsibility that comes with great power has to be faced up to.

Mark Strong, as the villain who has a chip on his shoulder for having been deemed unworthy of the Shazam powers as a child, clearly has great fun chewing up the scenery, and there are some amusing slapstick scenes where the hero is pushed by another boy in his foster family to find out exactly what he's now capable of, but sooner or later one starts to miss a more demanding plot, and even the grim darkness and extreme violence of most recent superhero productions.

5/10

Stowaway (Joe Penna, 2021)

Another year and yet another mission-to-Mars flick. They have to have a twist beyond the basic fight against the hostility of space by now, so this one posits that a three-person crew finds themselves burdened with an accidental extra passenger, and has to take an excruciatingly tough decision on how to deal with it, with supplies no longer being sufficient for all of them.
That really is the film's only selling point: the rest is the usual supposedly thrilling, interminable spacewalks to try to fix technical problems and a lot of tearful agonising over their plight. It sells itself as hard sci-fi and then cuts corners anywhere it can when that gets too awkward, so we're to believe, for example, that the multi-billion dollar spaceship's systems essentially have no built-in redundancy. Then, after two hours, it ends on an utterly illogical and avoidable act of self-sacrifice and yet no actual conclusion.

4/10     

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things (Ian Samuels, 2021)

It is apparent within a minute that the protagonist, a small-town teenager, has an awareness of everything that will happen around him through the day that can only mean that he's seen it all many times before. Sure enough, it doesn't take long before Groundhog Day comes up explicitly as he tries to explain to a friend what's happening to him.

So, we're on terrain as familiar to us as the recurring day is to him. But then the story has the good sense to introduce a variable: as he starts to feel lonely, he meets a girl who is experiencing the same thing, and the dynamic this creates allows the plot and tone to diverge enough from that of its parent, becoming less comic and more philosophical, and therby justifying itself on its own terms.

You might find their decision to seek out all the moments of wonder in a single day in the life of their town as a means to finally escape the loop a tad too sugary as a concept, but the performances of the couple are engaging and there's a real lightness of touch throughout that makes for a pleasant, if undemanding, experience.

6/10

Made in Italy (James D'Arcy, 2020)

Actual father and son Liam Neeson and Micheál Richardson play a burnt-out artist and his art gallery manager son, who go to Italy to do up the Tuscan house they have never got rid of in the years since the accidental death of their respective wife and mother, in order to be able to sell it. While there, the son starts developing a romance with a local woman, and the father and son bond, coming to terms with unresolved issues from the death of the wife and mother.
It's inevitable that parallels must be drawn between the outline of the story and the tragic death of Neeson's wife Natasha Richardson back in 2009, and to an extent this lends a depth to the film that its otherwise off-the-shelf plot does not deserve. Neeson is as great as usual when he is persuaded to do something other than butchering criminals, completely commanding the screen, and there are some sweetly funny scenes scattered throughout, but overall it's a stock Richard Curtis derivative with middle-class characters who bemoan being skint yet are never seen to do a stroke of work, and wax lyrical over authentic pasta sauces and limpid sunsets instead.

5/10

The New Mutants (Josh Boone, 2020)

Well, it's been sold as the final instalment in the twenty-year old X-Men franchise, but what a shame to go out with such a whimper, with only a tenuous connection to the rest - naturally, including none of the expensive big guns - and wholly confined to one location, where five mutant teenagers are kept in an institution for their own protection, each having suffered some trauma as their powers manifested themselves in the outside world. The modishly diverse quintet (two boys, three girls, their ethnicities being Brazilian, Irish, hillbilly, Russian and vaguely native American) snipe at each other like high school kids, act equally truculently towards their supposed doctor and guardian, and then have to fight a supernatural mess of their own making, which turns out to be just as uninteresting as the build-up to it was. It's not that it's incompetently made, just utterly pointless.

4/10

Enola Holmes (Harry Bradbeer, 2020)

The notion of Sherlock Holmes having a sleuthing teenage sister is a worrisome one, promising just more throwaway tween adventure fodder. And when it opens with the titular character talking straight through the fourth wall, armed with the knowledge that Bradbeer also directed several episodes of the terminally annoying Fleabag, things really do not look good.

What follows is a quite a revelation. As she sets out to find her free-spirited missing mother, we get economically-crafted action scenes, a lovingly-constructed late/post-Victorian London like Dickens shot through a Lemony Snicket filter, and an actual adult context, as the subjugation of women and their struggle for universal suffrage always looms large in the background. It's witty, well-paced and bolstered by a great supporting cast, with Helena Bonham Carter as the radical mother, Henry Cavill as a diffident Sherlock and Fiona Shaw as the headmistress of a conservative finishing school for ladies, amongst others. Millie Bobby Brown as Enola, though, really stands out: she's passionate, inventive and determined, and her winking camera-mugging never proves tiresome, as you can well imagine it might have done with almost any other teen actress. An unexpected and very welcome pleasure.

7/10