Nr. 24 (John Andreas Andersen, 2024)

Of all the resistance movements in World War II, cinema has amply covered the French one, but there is still some room for stories from other countries to be told, as long as they don't play around with facts for effect and yet work as impactful drama. Number 24 ticks both these boxes in relating the story of Gunnar Sønsteby, Norway's most decorated fighter against the German occupation, told by the man himself in extreme old age before an audience of schoolchildren from his home town. The bulk of the film is a flashback to his younger self, leading a group of saboteurs, who eventually end up killing the most prominent Nazi collaborators too. The story is told tautly and without undue dwelling on action or attempts to rouse passions, and the interruptions to the narrative by students from the audience asking naive questions about what Sønsteby personally did and whether it was justified form a neat contrast to the harsh reality of what life was in the war. It would be hard to cover the topic in a more measured and sensitive way than this.

7/10

65 (Scott Beck & Bryan Woods, 2023)

That's 65 million years ago, and an astronaut from another planet with a cargo of passengers in cryogenic suspension crashes on an unknown planet, which we are promptly told with a caption is actually Earth in the past. Only one of the passengers has survived, a truculent girl, and the pilot takes this as reason to persevere to try to get to the escape vessel that crashed some distance away. This means making their way through a primordial jungle full of dinosaurs out to eat them.

That's all there is in terms of plot, and there isn't much in the way of dialogue beyond the monosyllabic either. Adam Driver is utterly wasted in the role, apparently having opted for the route of a quality actor doing a simple-minded sci-fi flick just as Adrien Brody did with Predators. How the protagonists are near-future American humans in our Cretaceous period in their speech, mannerisms, technology and even dress isn't explained in the slightest, nor does the film bother with any other attempts at cohesiveness or logic either. Only the utterly preposterous premise, the conjoined hope of it being played out to some meaningful surprise finale and the presence of Driver made me persist to the end. I wouldn't recommend that anyone else bothers.

3/10

A Haunting in Venice (Kenneth Branagh, 2023)

Branagh's third outing as Hercule Poirot shifts Agatha Christie's lesser-known source novel Hallowe'en Party to the telegenic setting of Venice, as the jetsetters' other popular choices of the Orient Express and Nile have already been used, and sees the detective coaxed out of self-imposed retirement by a crime novelist acquaintance to investigate a local 'unsolvable' mystery. This involves the past death of the daughter of a former opera singer at her huge palazzo, a seance there on Halloween and the usual array of guests with chequered backstories to suspect once murders inevitably start occurring. Nothing new so far then, but playing with the eerie possibility that the house is actually haunted, and the fresh challenge presented by that to Poirot's analytical mind, does add a nice twist.

Diverting, but Branagh really should start considering handing the directorial reins to someone else. The pacing is uneven and the logic of the plot has more cracks in it than the walls of the palazzo.

6/10

Alien: Romulus (Fede Álvarez, 2024)

In space, no one can hear you yawn. Not that horror hack director Álvarez pays any heed to this in the seventh film of the Alien franchise, which features even more screaming and running around than ever before. It's chronologically set between the iconic first and second films, exploiting the gap in the timeline so that its young band of protagonists, boarding an abandoned space station to escape the shackles of their company contract as indentured miners on a remote colony planet, can be blissfully unaware of the existence of any alien threat and duly walk straight into mortal danger.

As also is customary these days, the reliance on sensory overbombardment by gore and CGI soon becomes a burden too, so it's interesting to note that the most interesting detail and actorly performance is that of the disembodied head of an android identical to Ash, the covert antagonist of the first film, replicating the likeness of the late actor Ian Holm with his family's blessing and, unlike the botched recent digital recreations of the appearances of key actors from the first Star Wars film, avoids taking us into the uncanny valley too, although being not quite human in the first place must help.

Scott and Cameron did both give the film their stamp of approval, but that's no surprise either, as rather than violating their works, it emphasises their quality even further.

If only the saga would end there, but not only is an Earth-bound TV series is the works, but even Scott, at 87, is unwisely contemplating one more go.

5/10

Fisherman's Friends (Chris Foggin, 2019)

A music company exec from London is tasked by his boss with trying to sign a troupe of local folk singers in an idyllic Cornish fishing village, overcomes their scepticism of his motives and then falls for a local girl and the place itself. That's the plot in a nutshell, of course culminating in the hoary crew of performers of sea shanties getting their big record deal after going viral through their curio value. What does save the film from being just a progression through the standard checkpoints of feelgood drama is that, in essence, we know that the group is real and did get their breakthrough in the end, although actually well after the film came out. The version you see now tags the events that followed as end text. The musical numbers do pad out the running time but are also the main attraction, rich in lyrical wit and a sense of music as a preserver of history. The film's success led to a sequel that couldn't add anything to the formula, but then what else could possible be expected when the music itself hasn't changed for hundreds of years?

6/10

Bank of Dave (Chris Foggin, 2023)

A local millionaire in Burnley who has been lending money to locals in the town for years decides to apply for a licence to set up an actual bank. This means going up against the Financial Services Authority, a closed shop for the big banks and riddled with entrenched class snobbery. They consequently employ underhanded means to try to put down the northern arriviste.

This is actually based on a real story, albeit that the opening titles already state that what follows is "true-ish". Some characters are composites, namely the idealistic young London lawyer taking on Dave's seemingly impossible case, while others are entirely made up as cyphers of the forces ranged against them. A happy ending is never in doubt, but it is gratifying when it arrives, and the journey there is nicely leavened with comedy.

6/10

The Last Bus (Gillies MacKinnon, 2021)

An elderly widower sets out on a mission to travel, using only his bus pass, all the way from John o'Groats to Land's End to scatter his wife's ashes in the sea near where they both grew up. There are complications on his odyssey involving encounters with drunken racist louts and officious ticket inspectors, as well as meeting kind strangers who help him on his way. The incomparable Timothy Spall, managing to project through the encumbrance of playing a man thirty years older than himself, carries a film with a fairly off-the-shelf storyline and the sum total is a heartwarming piece, though also a clichéd one. The modern world does get a cursory look in too, with hen parties, Ukrainian immigrants and the universal obsession with mobiles and selfies, albeit that for once the last of these is viewed as a positive aspect as the voyager's mission goes viral and gains him a supportive following.

Not many marks for originality, but nevertheless a far more cohesive and immersive work than anything the veteran director has managed for many years.

6/10