Time Addicts (Sam Odlum, 2023)

A Melbourne drug dealer sends two of his customers to steal a bag of crystal meth from a grotty house, and as they bicker relentlessly one of them decides to sample what they've found. Except that it displaces him in time, 25 years into the past. She ends up doing the same, but with different results, and a seemingly neverending cycle of causality is started, also involving the dealer and an undercover cop, only the physical location never changing, except in terms of its state of repair.

This is certainly a novel take on the time travel genre, with the emphasis on the fact that time travel is a device rather than the theme. The theme is really the tortuous relationships between hopeless losers, and it deals with those fairly well, operating within a tiny budget and fuelled by more swearing than probably any other film ever made. No sentence is complete without a 'fuck' or 'cunt'. It's not elevating or enlightening in any way, but still deserves a commendation for effort.

5/10

Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023)

30 years after last turning out his last passable film, Wenders finally produces something coherent in his twilight years. We follow a solitary, ageing and taciturn public toilet cleaner in Tokyo through his repeated daily routine, the only deviations to the rigid schedule coming from chance encounters with people along the way. This could be very tedious indeed, but the very lack of drama and the simple things he takes pleasure from, that being music, novels and taking photographs of trees, make the entirety into a calming existentialist balm for the soul and two hours slip by almost unnoticed, much as the protagonist does through the city streets.

7/10

I Care a Lot (J Blakeson, 2020)

Rosamund Pike plays a con artist who exploits the legal system to give her control of the assets and very lives of elderly people, getting them confined in a retirement home on the grounds of dementia while she hoovers through their earthly wealth. This all goes swimmingly until she makes the mistake of committing the mother of a drug baron to the facility.

So far, so Better Call Saul, but Pike's character is a far colder fish without a streak of morality and therein lies the rub: there is no sympathetic protagonist at all, with even Peter Dinklage's crime boss, who tries to bring her down, at least having some element of human motivation. But it gets by on the sharpness of the scenes between the adversaries and convincingly painting the American justice system that can allow such injustices to thrive as the real villain of the piece. Once that's covered, however, it descends into a more conventional thriller mode and somewhat runs out of narrative puff. Still, some marks for creating unusual monsters who could credibly be out there, and surely are.

6/10

Settlers (Wyatt Rockefeller, 2021)

In an indeterminate time period in the future, a family live on an isolated farm on a terraformed Mars and all is quiet until bandits arrive, after what they have. The basic plot is thus completely that of the classic homesteaders under siege Western and the transposition in time and place don't alter the formula in the slightest. This has both an upside and a downside: the pace is calmer than the genre norm, with virtually no future tech or FX on show, but neither is the change of setting utilised. It's glacially slow, which does allow for tension to build up, but the scenario could have done with at least some background exposition and the conclusion is utterly unsurprising.

5/10

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Robert Bierman, 1997)

Nine years after the black comedy How to Get Ahead in Advertising,  Richard E. Grant reprises playing a man working in advertising who suddenly becomes disillusioned with the point of it all and quits to try his luck at poetry. But since this is in the 1930s London of George Orwell's source novel, elements of the story mirroring episodes in the writer's own life, he soon ends up in financial freefall and squandering what little he receives from his new vocation on costly splurges to escape his self-created new prison, now one imposed by poverty rather than creative prostitution.

Grant was born for this role, with his natural gift for conveying neurotic mania, and Helena Bonham Carter as his put-upon girlfriend is a useful addition too. The dialogue is a constant shower of wit and the London of the period, even if conveniently polarised into just a downtrodden working-class world and an upper-class echelon, is still colourfully depicted. Being so much of its time, it probably doesn't achieve anything politically the way Orwell would have intended, but is great entertainment all the same. 

7/10

Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver (Zack Snyder, 2024)

Snyder is making the most of his carte blanche from Netflix to blow tons of money on the next instalment of his own little version of the Star Wars franchise. It's all spent on explosives and CGI battle scenes, incredibly even more than the first time around, now that the tiresome business of minimal world creation and backstory is out of the way. Even the plot is recycled from the first part in an act of gratuitous auto-cannibalism, considering that its predecessor was shoddily cobbled together from the obvious Star Wars, Seven Samurai and Dune. So the same village that was previously squeezed for all the food it had now has to be defended against against a full-blown assault by the space Nazi baddies. And that's enough for two hours, apparently, once padded out with oodles of showy violence that requires no thought in terms of scripting. It goes without saying that no amount of damning reviews will kill this off and there's more to come.

3/10

Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023)

Lanthimos will never be content playing second fiddle in the deliberately provocative filmmaker game to Von Trier or Haneke. He's determined to be seen as actually clinically insane, and puts up a very convincing case. Naturally this is also lapped up by many as proof of his genius.

If you are prepared to be bombarded with scene after scene targeting every 'bourgeois' sensibility and regard for naturalism, Lanthimos gives you that in spades, even more here than before. Willem Dafoe (still on his deranged setting from The Lighthouse) plays a Frankenstein-type Victorian doctor who reanimates the corpse of a suicide using the brain of the foetus that she was carrying. The resulting woman named Bella, at first with the mind of an infant, soon discovers the delights of masturbation and the wider world outside the confines of the doctor's house, learning to talk in barrages of ornate synonyms, as she also learns about the cruelty of mankind and men in particular. As has always been obvious in the case of the director himself, she remains thoroughly autistic and this detracts quite severely from any sociopolitical point regarding the exploitation of women that one might want to read into her situation. The lavish sets, a fantastical steampunk melange of Art Nouveau, Baroque, modernist and Gothic, do make the film a visual feast, and the pitch-black humour at many instances also adds to the heady brew. But watching Emma Stone as Bella get shagged interminably by the paying male population of Paris hardly makes a feminist statement of note, even if her absolute commitment to the role shines through so clearly that her Best Actress Oscar was justly deserved.

Consider the entirety as what Terry Giliam or Wes Anderson would turn out if they had no self-control at all. Fascinating, but equally alienating.

6/10