They Cloned Tyrone (Juel Taylor, 2023)

A drug dealer, a pimp and a prostitute in an all-black neighbourhood uncover a sinister conspiracy of social control over their community. The fact that the three are blaxploitation archetypes proves to be a fundamental part of what they unearth, as the film takes an abrupt turn into Soylent Green/Stepford Wives territory.

Much of the appeal of They Cloned Tyrone, apart from the comic interplay between the trio, peppered with every pop culture refence imaginable, lies in its splicing of genres that don't often meet. It's not so much that the individual components are new, but the blend certainly is, and makes for an entertaining ride which also manages to make serious points about the sense of the ghetto and boundaries laid down by race and background in the U.S. being a prison you can't escape from, thereby adding a layer to the satirically-tinged sci-fi set-up.

6/10

Living (Oliver Hermanus, 2022)

Whilst I'm no fan of remakes per se, largely due to the constant bastardisation of foreign originals by Hollywood to make them palatable for the U.S. audience and because the studios are too bereft of ideas themselves, every so often the source is so far removed in culture and time that it might just be an excusable act. Here, the source is Kurosawa's Ikiru from 1952, transposing the story of a grey Tokyo bureaucrat who only learns to live when he finds out he has terminal cancer to London in the same era. The plot sticks so closely to the original, that all that needs to be changed is the language and minutiae of the environment for it to ring true.

Of course, having Bill Nighy on top form in the wan lead role virtually guarantees that it will be no debasement, but other small tweaks also add to, rather than subtract from, the whole: the subtle use of a colour palette that plays endless shades of grey against period hypercolour flashes, understated turns of phrase to wryly satirical effect, such as the repeated refrain "we can keep it here for now" whenever a new document is forwarded to Nighy's office by the byzantine bureaucracy, and the toxic omnipresence of the social stratification of the time also plays a significant part.

All in all, a remake well worth doing which becomes quite affecting as it unfolds.

8/10

Det norske hus (Jan Vardøen, 2016)

An Iranian man arrives in a remote part of Norway on a bicycle, seeking to pass a series of tests to gain asylum. We're very soon disabused of the notion that this is a factual representation of the process as the tests grow increasingly more bizarre: it's a Kafkaesque satire of the Norwegian immigration system, at some turns grotesque, with the lingering possibility that some of the hoops he has to jump through may be not that far removed from real life after all, and at others very funny in their sheer ludicrosity, such as when the panel of judges closely watches every step of the applicant's attempt to make a sandwich in the approved Norwegian fashion. Droll and salutary too, House of Norway is a rare case of a film that would also well withstand being remade for any other market because of its wealth of culturally-specific references that its comedy is dependent on, and its universal applicability with regard to ideas of  nationality and the immigrant experience.

6/10

Dating Amber (David Freyne, 2020)

Two teenagers in small-town Ireland in 1995 face constant homophobic jibes at school for not chasing the opposite sex, so they adopt the front of being boyfriend and girlfriend so that they are left in peace. Of course, the arrangement doesn't run smoothly, but through visits to gay establishments in Dublin even he starts to accept his sexuality, until she is outed by the priest of their home town.

Coming out/coming of age stories cannot really offer any narrative surprises, but what sets Dating Amber apart from the crowd is its vitality and humour, making it easy to root for the beleaguered duo.

6/10

Rye Lane (Raine-Allen Miller, 2023)

It would be neat and tidy to sum this up as a Richard Curtis film set in Peckham and Brixton, Notting Hill with a young black cast, and it is indeed a breezy rom-com. But a far better point of reference is Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, with two very recently-dumped people meeting at an art exhibition and bonding quickly and deeply over the next few days. Thereafter, any discord is sure to be no obstacle to a happy end, but there's nothing cloying about this certainty. The two protagonists are highly engaging and the tone skips assuredly between pragmatic and riotously funny all the way through. The director and lead actors are definitely worth keeping an eye on.

7/10

Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021)

Astronomers Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence discover a huge comet on a course to collide with Earth six months down the line, and set about trying to convince the U.S. Government to take action to stop it. However the President is only interested in the coming elections, and the media treat their warnings of imminent global apocalypse as just too heavy for their entertainment output, so the while DiCaprio's character caves in and grabs his 15 seconds of fame, Lawrence's ends up a universal object of ridicule for letting her sense of despair show through in public.

It soon becomes patently obvious that the improbable comet is just a metaphor for climate change to allow the makers to forcibly, unambiguously drive home the point of the utter idiocy of those who deny it because they can't see it or understand it, because it's all just part of another 'fake news' conspiracy to them and because it's gloomy rather than fun and therefore surely the work of the 'wokerati'. So what's truly terrifying here isn't at all the contrived device of the doomsday comet, but the depressing credibility of the facile, moronic, self-serving political and public response to the crisis. The film can certainly be accused of heavy-handedness and bringing the big guns to bear on the viewer, such as Meryl Streep's scarily Trumpesque President, Mark Rylance's Zuckerberg/Musk self-styled tech visionary and a host of other OTT big-name cameos is almost overkill. But the ire is so justifiable and necessary that some degree of clumsiness is forgivable.

6/10 

Glass Onion (Rian Johnson, 2022)

The Southern gent master detective Benoit Blanc is back, now apparently Daniel Craig's new day job after Bond. The director has pragmatically decided not to change the formula at all from Knives Out, so it's another modernised Agatha Christie set-up, the country house replaced by the island estate of tech billionaire Miles Bron, who invites an assortment of his friends there for the weekend to play a murder mystery game. Naturally twists ensue as the contorted, unhealthy nature of the guests' connections to their host is gradually revealed. Craig's accent is even thicker than before and Edward Norton makes for a particularly contemptible villain as the vain, self-serving Bron, clearly modelled with relish on the likes of Elon Musk. It's less of a crime puzzle than a multi-pronged assault on the vapidity of the business, celebrity and media world, jam-packed with surprise cameos, but diverting enough for all that.

6/10