Lucky (John Carroll Lynch, 2017)

In his final film, Harry Dean Stanton returns to a character and setting with echoes of his breakthrough lead role in Paris, Texas as a cantankerous, independent nonagenarian in a small desert town having to face up to his own mortality at last. The film consists of nothing more than following him on his daily routine from morning yoga, through coffee in the diner over a crossword and buying cigarettes from the local shop, to repairing to the bar for a Bloody Mary in the company of the regulars. And why should it force in anything more? This is real life, and accordingly the key note that carries throughout it is him looking up the dictionary meaning of 'realism' at the start and then insisting on telling those he meets what it means in practice.

Stanton was to die shortly after completing the film and his artless, moving performance is infused with a corresponding sense of urgency, as good as he ever did in anything before, each small gesture and vocalisation speaking volumes, and benefiting from a wryly witty script that allows a simple story to breathe.

7/10   

The Dead Don't Die (Jim Jarmusch, 2019)

Maybe the dead don't die, but the zombie genre decisively has, and I wonder almost as much why I still persist with watching them as I do at Jarmusch's motive for making one. Since he dabbled with the nearly equally moribund vampire genre to productive effect with Only Lovers Left Alive, it was tempting to think he might have something to breathe life into the less interesting species of the undead. Unfortunately, this is just a sleepwalking comedy take, borrowing heavily from Dawn of the Dead for its parallels between the mindless behaviour of the deceased and the mindless behaviour they exhibited when still living consumers, and while the deadpan dialogue between a cast of Jarmusch's heavyweight regulars engenders goodwill and the ho-hum air they have at their impending doom is a nice break from the normal hysterics that zombie apocalypses entail, it's really totally aimless.

5/10 

Army of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2021)

In his wisdom, Zack Snyder has decided to shoehorn a zombie film in between his DC superhero blockbusters, since apparently we need another one and no one has quite filled the glaring gap in the market for undead carnage hung on a heist film framework. In brief, wrestling lunk Dave Bautista puts together a team to extract $200 million from a vault in the ruins of zombie-infested Las Vegas before the Government nukes the city. Somehow, the mayhem has to be padded out to an hour past its reasonable running time by including Bautista trying to engage with his estranged daughter and pointless parallel attempts to humanise the monsters. It adds absolutely nothing to the genre, but does remind you to go and rewatch the original Dawn of the Dead or Day of the Dead for gallows humour and 28 Days Later for actual scares. Instead, we get explosions and slo-mo shooting of big guns, Snyder's most chronic addiction, as lens flare is that of J.J. Abrams.

Quite bewilderingly, a prequel was deemed bankable and has already been made.

4/10

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