Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, 8.5/10
Never saw the first one

What I thought was really good in this 2017 film was its dabbling (at a kid-friendly level) into transgender aspect of life. I know male-female bodyswap films have been done in the past but usually in certificate 15 films. What they did with Jack Black and Nick Jonas in Jumanji was actually a bit edgy for a kids’ film and I thought it was well done.

Film overall was good fun, maybe it is easier to make a good “video game film” if there was no real video game to base it on. Performances were really good (I don’t quite get Kevin Hart but maybe one needs to see a bit more of his output in order to join in with his schtick).

Downsizing. 
3.5/10
Not officially out until 24 Jan but I saw a preview.
Just utterly weak. 
Not sure where they went so horribly wrong with Downsizing. Seemed to be a concept with interesting potential, and a good principal cast. Intriguing trailer. 
But not since Chocolat in 2000 have I sat in a cinema just WILLING a film to end. 
It's unengaging. It doesn't seem to be ABOUT anything, despite initial promise in the opening scenes regarding overpopulation and the environment. These ideas go nowhere. It's not funny (don't let the tiny comedic asides which dominate the trailer, mislead you). Halfway through, the very idea that people have been shrunk pretty much gets jettisoned in favour of some half-arsed attempt at a "redemption odyssey" for a character who needs neither redemption nor an odyssey.
It retains some points for nice performances and cinematography and for initially offering a bit of food for thought in the first quarter, but honestly I can't think of any friends who might think this film is worth watching!
Oh and Kristen Wiig is in it for about 15 minutes and is given NOTHING to work with.

The Greatest Showman. 6.5/10?
I never wrote a review for this as I simply don’t really watch musicals, usually I don’t enjoy them (rare exceptions but never a classic-style showy one like this). I only watched it because Michelle Williams is in it. Seemed passable but I can’t really judge it.

Hostiles. 7.5/10
For about 50 minutes, it was on for 10/10 and "greatest Western ever" but it did start to lag and lose pace and engagement and focus - still very good though. 
Believe the posters - Christian Bale is astonishingly good in this, as a dark haunted troubled complex character. I know that can seem like his stock in trade, but here it is used to great effect. Rosamund Pike at least for the first two thirds of the film, is certainly his equal. 
It's basically a massive PTSD film (PTSD on national and personal levels) with great scenery and acting.
NB the "great scenery" is interesting, it's not your usual epic Monument Valley shots, but a rather more muted (yet equally vast, just a bit bleak) landscape. 

All the Money in the World 8/10
Luckily I was able to totally forget the whole Kevin Spacey thing (I somehow missed the news when it first broke) so that aspect was not the distraction that it seems to be for the rest of the world. 
Truly fascinating story, regardless of how many liberties the screenwriters might have taken with it. There is seething bitterness bubbling under, in several key characters, and it's good to see this played out.
Michelle Williams is as usual brilliant in this, she really carries the whole film (as her top billing suggests). 
It's also really well shot, the muted colour palette suits it well. 
Not the most complex characterisations of all time, to be fair, but there's enough story to fill the 135 minutes running time without bogging it down with character studies. Basically: Plummer as a wily greedy old bastard, Williams as a plucky resilient devoted mother, Wahlberg as, er, the Mark Wahlberg character, other Plummer as a pawn, and various kidnappers as "out of their depth kidnappers". 

The Post 5/10

I went in with low expectations and it did not even meet those. Some good bits, none involving Streep.
 I found it very muddled.
Lots of characters who were barely introduced so you weren't sure who was going to be important, especially as they all kept coming and going.
I think it might have benefitted from a few captions explaining who was who.  But not just muddled in terms of number of characters. It was hard to tell what the film was trying to be ABOUT.
You have the whole "woman in charge, and how that is difficult for her in the 1970s" thing.
You have the unseen scoop journalist who sounds like HE might become a key player.
You have (related to above) the New York Times retaining that journalist - so is this going to be about The Washington Post competing with New York Times? T
his all detracted from what I guess was the main "point" (a simplistic "censorship is BAD, kids" message).
There were some very good scenes. Perhaps 2 strong scenes and 2 half-good scenes. Oddly none of them involved Meryl Streep.  Ben in the motel room with the papers and Dan Ellsberg was good. But I didn't know exactly what Ben's JOB was.  Any scene with Jesse Plemons (the young lawyer) is worth watching. Going back to Streep - I think Spielberg has a long track record of not really being able to work with female characters effectively, often wasting very good actresses in roles that should be interesting and strong but simply AREN'T (e.g. Julianne Moore in The Lost World: Jurassic Park). Here, he has the great Sarah Paulson just making sandwiches, and the great Alison Brie just, what, being attractive...
I was just bored.  

Three Billboards Outside Ebben, Missouri. 7/10

In italics is someone else’s short review, my opinions agreed so my review just complements and responds to this guy’s words

> Slightly disappointed, it seemed to lose its way at times after an enjoyable first hour. The plot seemed predictable and a bit formulaic which alone would probably warrrant a 6/10. Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell and Frances McDormand's performances raise it to 7.

Almost exactly my experience of it. I think it lasted a bit longer than an hour. Just the last 30 minutes kind of killed it. Really frustrating because it was SO good for SO long (being careful not to do spoilers here, I'll say that the voiceover reading those letters was an incredibly moving scene). It didn't just lose its way, it totally changed direction. The very very end of it was utterly stupid. And the whole thing with bringing the "romance" thing in? Seemed only to be a way to fit in [actor name omitted to avoid spoilers] after casting him initially and realising they had nothing for him to do.

One problem I had was that although I'll buy into the "small town a bit like the Wild West", there were seemingly no repercussions for anyone blatantly doing vandalism and GBH! 

Darkest Hour. 5/10
A "chocolate box" neat tidy representation of "the past". Like Downton Abbey with some politics thrown in.  It seemed like a lot of soundbites and some recreations of the famous speeches, padded out by, frankly, a lot of cliche cheesy film making. Great acting from Oldman, Mendelsohn (the King) and Dillane (as Halifax) and Pickup (Chamberlain), and the bit from the trailer ("You can not reason with a Tiger when your head is in its mouth.") is enough to secure Oldman's second Oscar nomination, but mostly I just sat there literally wanting the film to end; I've never felt like that in a cinema since Chocolat in 2000. 
Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, they throw in the most time-dilated tube ride I've ever seen and fill it with horrendous dialogue (actually a lot of the film's dialogue was awful - unrealistic and expository - but it hit a real low point on the tube ride)

Molly’s Game 8/10. Looks like I never got around to writing a review

Early Man (the new one from Aardman Animations)

4/10. Rubbish. Giving it a few points because it raised 2.5 smiles and possibly the slapstick and fart jokes will entertain the target audience. The jokes aimed at adults (references and puns) were tired. Stuff like Sing and Zootopia piss all over stuff like this, regardless of the high-calibre voice cast. 

Coco 8.5/10
Pixar do it again. Beautiful visuals (especially the cityscapes) and I really like how they did the humans. Some truly moving scenes(*). Points lost for a succession of relatively minor things (not much development, explanation, or overall point of existence of, the "spirit animals"; a midway lull where the plot twist presented in this lull should be more dynamic; and a failure to cast Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo  )

But never mind all that. It was fab.

* nothing to beat the unbeatable first 15 minutes of UP, but UP did go downhill after that. There's an incredibly moving moment in Finding Dory but it's a flashback, a single moment, and something happy. In Coco, the moving bits are all about loss, which is really really good. 

Winchester. 5.5/10, a fairly predictable score. 
Rather daft haunted house film but a frustrating one to watch because it had the ingredients and potential to be interesting. 
"Loosely based on a true story" premise is that in the early 1900s we have the elderly heiress to the Winchester firearms company racked with guilt over all the people killed by Winchester firearms, and going rather dotty building huge extensions to her house to placate these ghosts. Cue the board of directors wanting to have her certified insane and bringing in a doctor to assess her psychological well-being. 

The writer-directors (The Spierig Brothers) have good form on making high-end high-concept B-movies (Daybreakers and Predestination) and here we have a strong cast with Helen Mirren, the underrated Jason Clarke, and Sarah Snook who was amazing in Predestination. 

And there are a few scenes which work really well, mostly the one-on-one doctor-patient consultations between Clarke and Mirren, and some tiny glimpses into what could be interesting (Mirren's trance-like states)

But it quickly descends into nonsensical horror film tropes, with the ghosts being a real thing and a violent menace, loads of stuff that just doesn't add up or get described properly. More ambiguity over whether or not people are all going mad and imagining these visions, would have been better. Also maybe a bit more levity to proceedings. 

Performances are good when the material is worthy, which is about 30% of the film (and Snook is given NOTHING to do)

Can't recommend it despite liking previous work from these guys. 
It's not rubbish, hence 5.5/10 mostly for art direction, intriguing starting premise, and some decent acting.

Werner Herzog’s 1979 “Nosferatu” 8/10

starring Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani and Bruno Ganz

To my shame I’d never got around to seeing it before. I’ve seen Murnau’s 1921 Nosferatu but only once and a very very long time ago. I am not sure how much of a facsimile Herzog was trying to make his version so i can’t judge it on that.

I did like it a lot though. Ambitious in scope, beautifully filmed, good pacing and a surprising amount of surely intentional campy humour (also some minor unintentional bits I would hazard)

There is not a lot else to say about it. It’s Nosferatu/Dracula and it is a legendary cult classic - deservedly so.

one comment/observation - with Kinski’s legendary craziness and perhaps Method acting, I wonder if Adjani even needed to bother to act in bits of her final scene with him as he starts to lift her dress. Her ashen expression looked very real!

Black Panther 6/10

tldr: overlong, sloppy action sequences, great bad guy was the best thing about it, all looked very pretty EXTREMELY minor spoilers herein, but not really spoilers if you've seen the trailer, or even the poster (if you have imagination  )
NB later replies to this review pointed out that I was clearly confused by the story and characters, so some of the criticisms I make below may be unfair on the film.

These Marvel films of the past 4-5 years seem to consistently score 6 - 6.5, apart from Deadpool, Ant-Man, GotG 1&2, Spiderman Homecoming and Logan. I had high hopes for Black Panther as it has something a little in common with all the above - it's almost standalone (i.e. not a bloated Avengers/Iron-Man/Captain America mess) It certainly wasn't bloated, it was certainly standalone (even with its flashback to a key event from Captain America: Civil War, it manages to make ZERO reference to the rest of the MCU). BUT....it was certainly a mess. A hot mess.  First, the good: it looks gorgeous - great sets, costumes and cinematography.

it has a fairly straightforward plot without distracting subplots. Even its obvious Macguffins are acceptable and welcome.

it has an engaging and interesting antagonist, which is more than can be said for a LOT of the MCU films.

it is quite bold in terms of throwing a lot of mostly-unfamiliar black actors at us, giving them easily-muddled made-up "mumbo jumbo" names like W'Kabi, Nakia, Okoye, N'Jobu etc, and then giving some of the women confusing "is her head shaved, is she now in a wig, what's going on?" get-ups. Also only two white actors get more than 40 seconds' speaking time. Could be some sort of first, for such a major film!

some good and committed performances - Michael B Jordan is the standout, with Danai Gurira a close second. But also pretty much all the SUPPORT cast are good. Martin Freeman provides very minor but very welcome light comic relief.

it TRIES to make some interesting and complex points about inheritance and loyalty and duty. It doesn't pull it off, but I will still count it as a positive that it at least tried. 

And now the bad: Chadwick Boseman seems to be phoning it in.

The timeline seems wrong, as this seems to be depicting this Black Panther's first excursion but he is recognised immediately by Agent Ross - I assume I am wrong on this, and his actions in Civil War were before his official coronation - but then why does the suit seem new to him?

There is en egregious (if pedantic) error in the initial backstory which describes 5 tribes, 4 of which unite and one of which stays alone, but then 5 tribes accept the new king, then ANOTHER comes to challenge (did I miss something here? Happy to be corrected!).

Action sequences are unforgivably badly done. The cast appear to be in great shape and well trained, but the choreography and editing do them a disservice. Coming from the director and cinematographer who did great work on Creed, this is shocking especially in two one-on-one combat scenes. Climactic battle is confusing. There is one smooth and brilliant sub-sequence lasting about 25 seconds, featuring Danai Gurira in a casino, but even that offers nothing we haven't seen before. 

It is mostly humourless. I was in a packed house of obvious MCU fans (70% stayed until the end of the end credits). There was one "big" laugh, one small laugh, and one line where there was silent laughter (at least I don't think I could have been the only who gave a wry silent smirk). We want a bit more levity in our 135 minutes please.

It is 135 minutes long! I know this is par for the course with these films, but this one could easily have had 30 minutes cut from it.

Some appalling CGI (them waterfalls, maaaan)

The Shape of Water.  6.5/10. Worth watching but a lot more cheesy than I think it was meant to be. I kept wanting to watch MANT!, the film within the film in Joe Dante's "Matinee" instead
 Thought the song and dance number was a cop-out that served zero narrative purpose and only seemed to be there to afford Hawkins a random moment of glam.

And, much like with the Sergi Lopez character in Pan’s Labyrinth, I was left intrigued and wanting to know more about the antagonist - he was the one interesting character in the whole thing. You could argue that because they only tease us with back story and don’t reveal much, this makes these characters one-dimensional, but they are still more interesting than the cardboard cut-outs making up the protagonist team

I, Tonya a solid 9/10

only dropping a couple of half points because Allison Janney’s performance was just a bit too shrill and cartoony and because I think that in a 2 hour running time we could have a tiny bit more info about other skaters especially, obviously, Nancy Kerrigan

aside from those niggles, this is one of the best sports biopics ever. If you have seen the trailer you’ll have seen that there is some fourth-wall-breaking talking to camera. Happily there is a lot of this and it is actually brilliantly done, as are the skating sequences (I’d love to see a “making of”, because aside from a few long shots and blurs, the transition from Margot Robbie to body doubles and VFX is nearly seamless .

speaking of Robbie, she could be a real Oscar contender here although a few factors are against her (she’d be the third consecutive pretty white under-30-year-old, Allison Janney will distract voters with her support nomination, and Tonya Harding is still seen as a “bad guy”)
additional note - Although the film is played as light-hearted comedy-drama, it is boldly unflinching in its depiction of domestic violence. It's not exactly "Nil By Mouth", but it is somewhat jarring in how it flips from comedic "to camera" interludes, to some quite nasty onscreen violence. Some people may find this aspect hard to watch. So this is just a little warning.

Lady Bird 7.5/10.

Enjoyable, well acted, a bit "Juno for grown-ups and without trying to be all hip and cool".
Approximately zero story to it, it's just a character snapshot and is enjoyable for that. It did feel longer than 94 minutes, somehow, so it is losing a point for pacing. Maybe that is unkind of me. On the positive, it pulls off the neat trick of making us engage and empathise with a central character who frankly gives us no reason to particularly be on her side (The Big Sick managed this nicely last year too).

Game Night. A surprising 8.5/10.
Admittedly it was just what I needed last night after a rotten week at work - simple comedic escapism, but it was a lot better than I thought.
A bit like a comedic version of David Fincher's "The Game". Rachel McAdams is fantastic in this - and I always like seeing Jesse Plemons.
watched a second time:  Remarkably it stood up very well to a second viewing just 15 days after my first. YES it's silly, but if you can ignore plot holes (as you should in a film of this type), the plot mechanics do work well. The twists are not annoying, and any time it starts to venture into "serious thriller plot" territory, it snaps you straight back into comedy within a minute. 
I'll mention McAdams again here - her performance is the sort of thing that would save a mediocre film. Happily the film is not mediocre at all, therefore she is merely the cherry on the icing on the cake
The 8.5/10 score was maintained on a third cinematic viewing

Red Sparrow. 4.5/10. Maybe just 4. Utter bilge, basically. I'm not surprised Jennifer Lawrence is taking a year off from acting. Don't waste your time (and it is 2h20m!). I don't even want to write any more about it!

Gringo, 5.5/10. Frustrating, it had several elements that could have made it good but it was just a random jumble of plot, characters and tone. It had that feel of something that was originally intended either as a full comedy OR a straight thriller, and had at a late stage had additional thriller/drama or additional comedy asides tacked on badly. Well made, lovely location shooting, some good performances (Theron great as a sociopathic businesswoman but her character was 100% redundant; Sharlto Copley fared better; the whole Amanda Seyfried/Harry Treadaway subplot was a waste of time)

Walk Like A Panther. 7/10.
Simple fare, does what it says on the tin - basically a variation on the Brassed Off / Still Crazy template, ever so slightly more comedic (as you’d expect when it’s based around 80s wrestling). In one ear and out the other but harmless enough, losing points for being way overlong (85 minutes would have done it) and being full of holes. Fun performances though

Love, Simon 8/10
(losing out on a higher score because of a couple of slightly ludicrous elements and it was about 15 mins too long)
Really good example of how even a fairly unoriginal story can shine in the right hands. Fantastic lead performance from Nick Robinson as closeted gay high-schooler Simon. And that’s pretty much the plot for you - it's a simple as that: It’s a high school film about Simon who is secretly gay. It is charming, relatable/believable, and at times incredibly poignant

Tomb Raider 5.5/10 although Vikander is excellent (especially considering the awful material she has to work with)

I see Little White Lies gave it a five star review because it has a tough woman in it. Patronising much?
Looks like I never got around to writing a proper review

Mary Magdalene 6/10

not sure how accurate my critical faculties were as I kept dozing off in the first 90 minutes but let’s go for 6/10, some fine performances from Mara, Phoenix and Rahim, but a mostly unengaging and overlong effort.

Ready Player One 6/10 and I am being generous.

Visually superb and a good exploitation of “uncanny valley” but even allowing for the fantasy future depicted, a lot of it just doesn’t hang together. One major aspect involving our team of protagonists, is particularly contrived but I won’t do spoilers here.

Very nice central scene involving The Shining, I’ll give them that.

Quite distracting that there is a young female henchwoman who looks and behaves like a cross between Sophia Boutella in Kingsman (minus the spring-blade legs) and Sylvia Hoeks in Bladerunner 2049.

Worth a look but don’t expect to be blown away. 

Valerian easily beats it in the “visually spectacular Sci fi extravaganza” stakes

Unsane, 4.5/10

the latest offering from oft-feted director Steven Soderbergh. Getting some attention for being filme entirely on an iPhone and for starring Claire Foy

It is utter rubbish 

Nice lead performance from Foy, but the whole thing is nonsense. Don’t waste time by going to see it out of curiosity. The cinematography is adequate (bear in mind it was iPhone plus professional lighting) but obviously all feels a bit wide angle. If you want to see a feature film for the sake of novelty filming, watch Hardcore Henry

You Were Never Really Here
7.5/10 or maybe just 7

Basically it is “Leon” as made by Ken Loach....or in fact as made by Lynne Ramsay.
Bleak bleak bleak, yet with some memorable visuals (not the violent bits but the mundane urbane scenery shots) and a superb score and sound design. Phoenix is magnificent but the story and characterisations are somewhat hollow, unless I was missing something. To those who have seen it - I thought the teasing elusive flashbacks, notably the "ex soldier" (?) one, didn't quite work. In defence of the film I was bizarrely and unexpectedly sleepy whilst watching it at a 6.30pm screening! Hence my "unless I was missing something" comment. 
It is still good, I just wanted it to be better - I really liked Ramsay's "We Need to Talk About Kevin" and "Morvern Callar". I have not yet got around to seeing her "Ratcatcher"
additional note - It seems I did overlook a major ambiguity running through the whole film (You Were Never Really Here), having now read a few other reviews. I took it at face value. Maybe if you look at it as if it is (say) Jacob’s Ladder, you get more out of it

Thoroughbreds

7.5/10

A rather strange film viewing experience:
Lead characters that give you no reason to root for them as protagonists;
A barely-there "plot";
Minimal characterisation;
Nothing original story-wise

And yet it was weirdly compelling due to great casting and performances, and a certain minimalist style (probably 80% of the film is just two characters talking in a perfectly judged 'slightly heightened/stylised' dialogue which simultaneously feels natural and believable because of the setting. It's not exactly the abstract heightened Mamet dialogue style but it's not aiming for that. 

Basically two vaguely and only mildly troubled, extremely privileged rich bitch high school girls discuss the possibility of murdering the stepfather of one of the girls. That's literally the plot. 

And it kind of works. Loses some points for clearly not being sure whether to throw occasional comic relief into the otherwise "play it dead straight" presentation, and for various other minor meanderings. 

However overall, it's really good and the lazy review comparisons to other films involving teenage girls and murder plots are just that - LAZY. This one is a bit different. 

Also, the editing, score, and cinematography are surprisingly good for a film that doesn't really need these things to be brilliant.

A Quiet Place
6/10, a real shame as I'd like to big it up a bit more due to lots of great aspects. It starts brilliantly and boldly, without spoon-feeding the audience, and maintains this for about 45 minutes; also some rather good performances (notably Krasinski and Simmonds) but then the whole second half descends into standard tropes and you realise you aren't massively bothered about the fate of the characters.It would have been bolder if they had had no incidental score. 
My 6/10 is not even taking into account various plot holes etc - I am being forgiving of those. 
It is technically very well made - the flaws are in story structure. 
And oddly, although Emily Blunt is a strong screen presence and is "good enough" in this, and somewhat provides the film's "money scene", by the end of the film you are left feeling that she was just kind of "in it" and is effectively just a device to allow Krasinski some expository dialogue WITHOUT spoon-feeding the audience.

All a bit "meh" really

Ghost Storeis [sic]
Earlier this evening I predicted a score of 5.5/10. I was close, it just is mildly better than that, let's call it 6/10 (after some late flourishes which promised a rare upgrade from 6.5 to 7.5, followed by a failure to reach 7.5, and a drop to 6.0)
An overambitious muddle that thinks it is a lot smarter than it really is. Some of my favourite films are overambitious muddles (e.g. Until the End of the World) but they DON'T have clever-clever pretensions that fall utterly flat. Ghost Stories does, and it's a shame because I like to see things that try to be a bit different, and I usually don't mind if they fall flat, but here, naaaah. Too much of it didn't work. 

Co-writer and co-director Andy Nyman really shouldn't have taken the lead role - he's rather wooden. Arguably the whole thing needed better direction of actors (Freeman and Lawther excepted, as they were great). Good film directing is NOT merely horror-film lighting tricks and suspense-horror shallow depth of field. 

A few other reviewers have mentioned that the "three story structure" felt less like a portmanteau film and more like something that needed to take more time - a 3-part mini-series or linked episodes of Twilight Zone or Tales of the Unexpected. Squeezing them into 100 minutes including the bookends, was a bit much.

Still worth a look but don't go in with high hopes. 
I'd have watched Isle of Dogs instead but it's already relegated to a single 2.20pm screening per day at my local. 

Avengers - Infinity War A surprising 9/10
…and some surprising major events during the climax (ie “I guessed very wrongly about who might become toast”)

It is brilliant, especially considering the amount of characters and sub-plots it juggles. It does mean that some folk get short-changed a bit but this is inevitable and in fairness, hardly anyone is there as any sort of token contractual appearance, so it’s all good.

It could have been a 10/10, it loses two half points for a major “why didn’t they just do THIS” plot point, and for a tedious bit with Peter Dinklage (weirdly the second film of 2018 in which he provides a weak point)

The comic asides are meshed so brilliantly with the heavy stuff, I was really impressed. It never felt clunky or disjointed ; there are so many good aspects and touches that you can't even name a standout scene.
Even the antagonist's henchpeople were interesting. 
And it never got indulgent with the action set-pieces, they were brisk and free of flab, for a change.

Acting honours go to Olsen, Hemsworth, Saldana and Brolin. Enjoyed Tom Holland too. Everyone is good though, those are just the standouts.

Go and see it!

NB in March I posted about being confused during Black Panther. Avengers - Infinity War despite having many more key characters and despite having a longer back story, is really easy to follow - and this despite my having really lost interest in Captain America : Civil War long before sides were taken!

Wonderstruck A surprising 8.5/10

Todd Haynes' latest film sounds like a rather arty and meandering enterprise on paper, where it is summarised as parallel tales of two 11-12 year-olds, both deaf or hearing-impaired, one in 1927 and one in 1977, each travelling away from home into NYC in search of family members. 
To be honest the main selling point for me was that Michelle Williams was in it, although of course I do like a good Todd Haynes melodrama (haven't seen Carol yet but enjoyed Safe and Far From Heaven)


ANYWAY the whole thing is far more accessible than I'd expected. It could be argued that it feels a bit meandering at times and that the 1927 scenes are a bit "try-hard" and aping the film "The Artist", and that some of the actual plot points are contrived. 
All three such arguments would be wrong, though. The meandering works. The b&w cinematography of the 1927 scenes (crisp and modern, not done in fake scratchy silent-movie style), and the "silent" PoV of the deaf girl (overlaid with a wonderful score from Carter Burwell) works really well. Contrived plot points fit the obvious "fairy tale" feel to the film, and bring it to a smart conclusion. 
The film is carried really well by three young lead actors: the wonderful Millicent Simmonds who is actually deaf (and was recently seen in A Quiet Place); Oakes Fegley playing a child who suddenly loses his hearing, and Jaden Michael as another youth in the story. 

Williams is in it for about 6 minutes, she's as brilliant as ever but it's something of a cameo (fair enough, her name isn't exploited on the posters etc) and Julianne Moore is at the top of her game in a lead-billed role which is significant but which doesn't command a lot of screen time. 

Highly recommended.

Tully. 8.5/10

A very smart film, a sort-of "down-to-earth fairy tale".

It's the latest from director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody, a pairing that brought us Juno (a film about which I have mixed feelings) and Young Adult (a film that I have not yet seen*).

Tully is about a 40-something mother of an 8-year-old and a 5-year-old, who has a new unplanned baby and is struggling to cope....cue the "night nanny" who swoops in to make life easier and to bond strongly with the mother.

That's not all there is to it, but to say more would be to give away a story point which has to be experienced on screen (I don't do spoilers).

Essentially it's a film where not much really HAPPENS, and it therefore relies on dialogue, characterisation and acting. Luckily it has all three in spades. Theron is utterly believable, and Mackenze Davis as the nanny is spot-on as well.

The dialogue, although crackling with zingy one-liners, never feels as forced and smarmy and unrealistic as Juno.

Er

That's about it really. Just go and see it
*NB I later watched Young Adult and gave it 10/10 – see review below

Deadpool 2. 6/10 and that is me being generous. Looks like I never got around to writing a review

Solo: A Star Wars Story NB at the time of writing the below, I started with: “I’ll not post a score just yet.”. I subsequently settled on 6/10 but then I saw the film again some weeks later and revised this to 8/10 and I felt that I had been quite unfair on Clarke’s performance which I now think was quite good. This is not uncommon with films that have con-men, con-women, tricks, double crosses and general chicanery. I don't normally do this but I am giving it 8/10 for a second viewing yet sticking with 6/10 for a first viewing

I will start by saying that it’s pretty good and certainly worth seeing on the big screen; earlier in the thread I emphasised that Alden Ehrenreich does an excellent job as a younger Han Solo, the 40 year legacy of Harrison Ford does not haunt this at all (although I am not sure how much younger Han is meant to be in this new film)

There is quite a nice story, involving Han getting into his life of galactic scrapes in the criminal underworld. There is a fantastically designed train heist action set-piece. Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian is good.

Now the bad stuff. Although the STORY is ok, the DIALOGUE is awful. It’s as if George Lucas had been brought in to write the dialogue. Clunky exposition, and shoehorning blatant references to bits of Star Wars lore. The actors do well enough to get through their lines, frankly. Woody Harrelson is good but looks like he is coasting a bit. Emilia Clarke has her moments especially later in the film, but the performance is wobbly and I couldn’t help but think that Tatiana Maslany would have perfect in her role. The cinematography is a bit dark unless that was a technical thing at my cinema. And the editing was really annoying. 

So, basically a frustrating film because it could easily have been a lot better

Young Adult, 2011’s offering from Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody, the team behind Juno and this year’s Tully (8.5/10 for the latter)

starting the month of June by again “breaking my rule” and reviewing a film seen not at the cinema but on my laptop, on a work trip.

like Tully, this one stars Charlize Theron.

and like Tully, it is really good, except better 

10/10 actually

Incredibly bold in presenting us an unlikeable lead who never really learns or grows but who still engages us. Perfectly played by Theron. It’s a bit of a “nothing” story in terms of plot but it’s an amazing character study. It reminded me of About Schmidt which similarly suffered from a terrible misleading poster campaign.

Young Adult and About Schmidt are NOT comedies. They are painfully real downbeat dramas with some nice comic relief here and there.

Young Adult follows a “failing in life” woman in her late thirties. Divorced, alcoholic, friendless former high school queen bee returns to home town to perhaps try to wreck an ex’s domestic bliss. What a nasty character . And yet so compelling to watch...

highly recommended!

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom 3/10

Yes it really was that bad. For context, I enjoyed Jurassic World, I thought it did well in the difficult task of rebooting the franchise with all-new characters etc.

This new one pretty much throws all that away.
It is witless, charmless, thoughtless, toothless, and soul-less.
The two leads from the previous film are back, but the writers and by extension the actors, just sleep-walk through it all. We are given two new young techies who are then given almost nothing to do aside from having the young woman be bolder and more feisty than the young man. It's just lazy.
The action shots and set pieces are unimaginative and badly edited. And there are plot holes, continuity errors and bad science that are all unforgivable even within the suspension of disbelief required to enjoy one of these films (e.g. three people have a near-drowning experience as terrain explodes around them on a random side of the island, and are soon seen conveniently near a big ship, bone dry with good hair and looking unperturbed. There's no continuity of scenes, it's all disjointed, like "this happens, and it's finished now, and now we move on to the next bit"
Rafe Spall and Toby Jones perhaps enjoyed playing the cartoony plummy-accented bad guys. There is zero character development, they had potential with the back story of one new major character but they didn't explore it. 
The special effects in scenes featuring larger groups of dinosaurs moving at speed, were awful. Woeful animation and I am sure there was one running scene that was recycled. 
Better when they had just one or two dinosaurs.
I said "toothless" above because this one really holds back on the graphic violence, cutting away before we even see much blood - surprising after the infamy they got for the Zara scene in Jurassic World; I thought they would go for more of the same. 

Don't waste your time on this, the weakest in the franchise (and that is really saying something as I didn't like The Lost World and its tacked-on 40 minute San Diego scene)

Hereditary. 9/10

the below in italics is someone else’s review, he wrote it before I had time to, and pretty much said what I wanted to say

An unusual experience, difficult to encapsulate in a pithy phrase. With about 10 minutes to go, as the horror has built up over the course of the last two hours, the director pulls the rug from under your feet and the phrase 'what the...' never quite completes in my head as I struggle to understand what has happened. 

The difficulty I have is not plot related. I understand the story. Its the style, the near total descent into cliche and abandonment of terror, for what is frankly unintentionally comic, right at the point where you hope for the horror to overwhelm. Its like a wave you see offshore, building in power and strength only to hit the beach and break, sending minor waves over your toes as you stand there wondering what happened to the fury. What happened to the director? Endings take time to construct, sets are built and actors learn lines. Did no-one think, 'Really? This?, Come on, lets have a word with Ari'.

The part which delivers the greatest horror, takes place much earlier and had me captivated, is a scene involving a fast car. That placed me right into the movie, wondering how you get out of this. For that scene alone and what unfolded from it, was worth going to see, as was Toni Collette's acting. Its just a shame about the lame ending.

Score 9/10 for the first 110 minutes. Final scenes? They should be reshot.

Oh, yes, I loved the sound track. Suitably sparse and creepy. Bad trip, man!

And now me:
Pretty much agree with everything there, thanks for saving me from having to write it all out 
I am sticking with 9/10 overall, it was on for 9.5 and I knocked off a half point for them ending it actually very similarly to The VVitch. 

I did like how the marketing campaign TOTALLY deliberately misled and wrong-footed us. 
It's barely a horror film, it's a family drama centred on grief and guilt and the mental state of a woman who's been troubled since birth, and for that, it's brilliant (thanks to Toni Collette)

And later I did write a bit more:
I score this film 9/10 as it is brilliantly compelling and holds your interest for its relatively long (for the apparent genre) running time of more than 2 hours. 
I say "apparent genre" because it is being marketed as a horror film along the lines of The Babadook etc, and a lot of soundbites mentioning The Exorcist blah blah. This is misleading, and for some reason I LIKE that, and I feel that the way the marketing has wrong-footed us, is almost like a part of the film which even in itself, continually surprises and wrong-foots the audience. You think it's about such-and-such, then it seems like it's about something else, then something else again. All in a GOOD way. It is impossible to say much more without doing major spoilers so as above, I'll say that it is glued together by a towering performance from Toni Collette as a character troubled from many directions.
It goes bonkers and NOT in a good way, in the last 5-10 minutes, but I'll only knock one point off for that.

Looking back now, at the end of the year, I don’t really think Hereditary WAS that good. Certainly not 9/10.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 6/10
screened as "Mystery Movie" at my local independent. 
I didn't realise this film was already 17 years old!
I am not sure that there is an obvious target market for it, it all seemed a bit "obvious" to me, just an "in one ear, out the other" camp extravaganza. However, it is really well shot, the songs are good, the costumes etc are great, and the central performance from John Cameron Mitchell is superbly committed. 
So I'll give 6/10, generously as I don't want to mark it down just because _I_ don't really like musicals

Ocean's 8 9/10
I expected this to be doubly painful (as a poor film firstly, and as a waste of some good star talent secondly); it turned out to be a lot of unpretentious "does what it says on the tin" fun and as such, under my scoring system, gets a ludicrously high 9/10 as it does very little "wrong"

Sicario 2 – Soldado 9/10

I saw Sicario and I remember being hugely impressed by the whole style of it - the casting and acting, the arty overhead shots, that oppressive yet minimalist brilliant score, the cinematographic compositions, and the way scenes were put together.....yet I also don't really remember the actual story beyond some vague stuff about the Emily Blunt character being at the forefront of the story and then revealed to only have been a pawn and bait in a bigger story. That's my fault and not the film's fault, by the way. 
So I wondered whether I would need to watch it again before seeing the sequel.

No such requirement. 

The Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro characters are retained, as is the straightforward and "gritty" serious drama approach to things, and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan. Denis Villeneuve was unable to return to direct this one and Stefano Sollima ably takes the reins. Do not be put off by the lack of the "name" director on a sequel in this case. Johan Johansson was unavailable for the  music, due to his tragic death, but the score on this one is in keeping with the first film. 

ANYWAY. This works great as a standalone - there is perhaps a little reference to the first film, regarding the working relationship between Brolin and del Toro, but that's explained anyway in some not-too-clunky expository dialogue (a device that is dropped in at several points in the film and that could be jarring to some but to be honest I let it slide). 

This film is an absolutely brutal and rather convincing insight into the murkier side of government and military intervention in global events. An opening scene shows us how uncompromising and badass the Josh Brolin "dirty hands" agent can be. And then the canvas expands (albeit whilst quickly bringing things back to the Tex-Mex border). It's quite an epic film. Imagine the intense "like you are there with them" feel of Black Hawk Down, the multiple narratives of Traffic (or, better, the TV series Traffik!), the unpretentious non-Oscar-grabbing craftsmanship of the underrated Brooklyn's Finest, and even at times the truly tense unpredictability of the strongest scenes in the massively overlooked Savior (Sicario 2, like Savior, has a fist-chewingly tense scene involving a "good soldier", a girl, a bus, and some antagonists under pressure to save face...). A great cast including a couple of young "unknowns" all get a chance to shine in dramatic one-on-one dialogue scenes. 

Would be a higher score but some of the exposition is just a bit much and there is a little bit of cheese and a bit of "plot device" stuff going on, but those are minor niggles for such a compelling piece of adult-oriented action-drama-thriller which doesn't really let up once in 2 hours. 

Adrift. 9/10

Oddly this year's second semi-major movie dramatisation of a real-life sailing disaster!

This one is about Tami Oldham who spent 41 days on a stricken yacht trying to reach Hawaii (or any land really) after smacking into a massive storm and knacking the boat. 

Directed by Baltasar Kormakur who made "Everest" a few years ago, and based on Oldham's book about the incident (spoiler - she lives!), this is a thin story indeed. It gets straight to the bare bones - young impressionable American on an endless summer in Tahiti, falls in love very rapidly with slightly older Englisman and agrees to accompany him on a job, to sail someone's 44-foot yacht back to America. That's it, that is all the characterisation and back story.

And yet...this film was excellent, mostly thanks to great shooting and a compelling, bold, committed and physical performance from the seemingly always-reliable Shailene Woodley (I have only seen her in The Descendants and Snowden, I haven't watched those Maze Runner films etc). Kormakur knows how slight the story is and wisely keeps the whole thing to just over 90 minutes. 

People who know about sailing and know more about the true story might mark it down a bit but as I know nothing about sailing, I have no comment about technical inaccuracies etc. I thought it seemed convincing. Average score on imdb is somewhat lower, but screw them. 

In the Fade. 7.5/10

Quite strong drama about the aftermath of a racially motivated bombing that leaves the Kurdish husband and son of a white German one dead. All the hype is about Diane Kruger’s performance which is indeed very good, due to great characterisation in the writing and great direction .

Superb courtroom scenes sadly give way to a rather trite and obvious final act. Also it was a fairly conventional film, so much so that I couldn’t help casting the Hollywood remake whilst watching (I think Charlize Theron, Jake Gyllenhaal, William H Macy and Elizabeth Olsen....)

Leave No Trace 8.5/10

Fittingly (wrt the title) I knew nothing about this film until I saw a poster for it at the cinema on Monday, and then the trailer too. 

Very very good little drama starring the always-masterful, always-overlooked Ben Foster and newcomer Thomasin Harcourt Mackenzie as father-and-teenage-daughter living alone in a tent in the woods outside Portland (Oregon). Remarkably little back-story is provided aside from some references to war and PTSD (it is a fairly contemporary film although could be taking place at any time in the past 15 years). 

It seems that they are totally off-grid and she's never been to school (she is about 15 or 16 [edit - I am now told 13 but I don't think they pulled that off tbh]). Inevitably things catch up with them and efforts are made to integrate them into society, and some downbeat drama and characterisation ensues. 

It's a bit like if Ken Loach watched Captain Fantastic and thenHunt for the Wilderpeople and decided that what those stories needed was a massive dose of Ken Loach 


I really liked it, it lost pace a little toward the end but overall a strong 8.5/10. Foster totally inhabits his role as usual. Mackenzie was great too, hard to judge as I haven't seen her in anything else but she was totally convincing (although a bit too clean and hair too neat, also reflected in my score there) Beautifully shot and scored. FWIW and not that I usually make a point of noticing these things, but the producing, writing and directing crew were all women.

It's based on a novel written by a man.    [edit - duhh nunmbnuts here hadn't noticed that it's much of the same team that made Winter's Bone, another downbeat well acted film about a teenage girl, a father, and the woods  ]

Tag. 4.5/10

not really something I would have sought out to watch but I needed some air conditioning and a brainless diversion on Friday night and the IMDb aggregate score wasn’t too bad, and I had some faith in Jeremy Renner and Isla Fisher not picking an absolute stinker to work on.

Film was pretty bad, all round, as you all might expect.

It was a bit like watching Game Night if Game Night had got everything wrong.

The Secret of Marrowbone A surprisingly solid 8/10

(if I were judging films on their titles and marketing campaigns, this would be lower! I thought the secret of marrowbone was that it gave your dog a glossy coat and gleaming eyes...)

Anyway. 
I admit I was attracted to this by just two names on the cast list - Anya Taylor-Joy and Mia Goth. The former seems to be carving out a nice niche for herself in arty-but-genre B-movies with a horror or psychological-horror or thriller theme (see: The VVitch, Morgan, Split, Thoroughbreds) and also has a very distinctive and intriguing conventional-but-not-conventional beauty - huge and overly separated eyes that look a bit too big for her face. She is distinctive and could go far. Mia Goth simply remembered from last year's A Cure for Wellness, another glossy B-movie...

It is hard to say much about The Secret of Marrowbone without dropping massive spoilers. It is set in the late 1960s and ostensibly follows a family hiding out, seems to be a 19-year-old eldest brother, a 16-17-year-old brother and sister, and a much younger brother. What they are running/hiding from is a plot point. It plays like a smart blend (and sometimes an inversion) of various genre classics (including guilty cheesy pleasures). 
If I said "invert Flowers in the Attic and throw in a bit of The Others", that would be fair. 

It shouldn't work. It is pure genre stuff, it utilises plenty of tropes (don't go in that room, ooh horror film music, ooh hide a major thing from the audience until it's time to reveal it), but it all DOES work. Praise is due to the actors (apart from the youngest brother); it's carried really well by George Mackay, not a name that I knew before tonight. The thing is gorgeously shot. It even has a bit of a feel of The Orphanage about it, which may be linked to it having been produced by the chap who directed that film, and written and directed by The Orphanage's writer (and honestly I didn't know this while I was watching, I just checked it now, but you get that feel). 
Points lost for a lull and for a cheesy score and the annoying device of "6 months later" then immediately teasing with the information that Major Stuff happened in those 6 months, signalling that we have to wait for a flashback reveal. But I won't mark it too harshly for that. 

A pleasant surprise. 

The Incredibles 2. 7.5/10
Mildly discombobulating seeing a sequel taking place almost immediately after the original, but separated in real time by more than a decade. Rather tedious opening action scene but it picks up and provides a non-preachy, no-agenda "feminist" slant on things as Elastigirl becomes the dominant protagonist. NOt much to say about it other than that it is simply pretty good. 

Hotel Artemis. 6/10
Enjoyable-enough nonsense but it felt like it was originally intended as perhaps a 4 hour mini-series and we were just watching the final episode bringing a bunch of characters together for a grand finale, as there was so little character background which you really felt was absent. Poor Sofia Boutella seems destined to do nothing but high-kicking action support roles. Jodie Foster was a decent lead, Jeff Goldbulm phoned in his cameo.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout 8.5/10
Seen this twice now and the score stands. Quite probably the best in the whole franchise, which is surprising for a sixth film 22 years after the first. It barely puts a foot wrong (all the predecessors suffer from at least one major flaw). Great to see the return of Sean Harris as a bad guy. Splendid twists and chicanery and good rubber-mask use. Stupendous lengthy Paris sequence....but interestingly the memorable parts are not the massive set-pieces but some smaller stuff such as Ethan and "White Widow" exiting the nightclub.

Ant-Man and The Wasp 9/10 (see note at end, I later dropped this score)

I gave the first Ant-Man film 9/10 and said it might have been 10/10 if I'd seen it in 3D (just for the "quantum realm" sequences).
I saw this one in 3D and it wasn't as effective as I'd hoped, but never mind that. 
This is a great sequel, maintaining the comedic tone (and the somewhat in-your-face mocking of The Avengers) of the first film. Great chemistry between all the leads, and actually a nice complex and sympathetic antagonist (indeed it only loses a point because I thought the protagonists should have dealt with the antagonist(s) differently, and I'd hoped for more conflict with another major character). 

additional note – I think I was just in a good mood when I saw it. When I started thinking about it, it was rather weak and more like 6/10

The Equalizer 2 3.5/10

I didn't exactly expect greatness or even "goodness" but I thought it would be a decent 6 or 6.5/10, solid unoriginal action to fill a couple of hours where I needed to switch off and have full escapism after an overlong work day. 

It was however way beneath my modest expectations. A few interesting glimmers here and there have saved it from an even lower score, but my goodness it was so bad. I don't want to spend time writing about it but the main criticism is that was pretty incoherent and all over the place - essentially I spent 70 minutes waiting for it to get going, then 50 minutes willing it to end

BlacKkKlansman. 8.5/10.
Possibly Spike Lee's "The Wolf of Wall Street" in terms of being a cracking return to form from an established director who appeared to have lost appeal for a decade or so. 
The film almost seems like a story that could sell itself in anyone hands, such is the craziness of it (true story of rookie undercover cop in the 1970s who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan despite being black) but Lee deserves credit for bringing it all together and applying just the right blend of comedy and drama to it. Also an excellent ensemble cast . Slows down in the last 15 minutes but then hits back hard with some cherry-picked contemporary clips of Trump spouting rather KKK-like statements...predictable given that Spike Lee is a bit like a black American Ken Loach  


The Children Act. 8/10.
Interesting - quite obviously a made-for-television film which has been granted a cinematic release in an attempt to secure an Oscar nomination for Emma Thompson who is absolutely sublime in this somewhat heavy-handed drama. Adapted by Ian McEwan from his own novel, and directed typically theatrically by Richard Eyre, nominally it is about Thompson as a judge who presides over juvenile medical cases. However for at least the first hour and perhaps really the whole film, it plays like a study of absolute workaholism amongst "high-fliers", with a slightly clunky "marriage collapsing" side story. For the first hour it is a masterclass in storytelling on film, notably with an incredibly efficient first ten minutes. Loses its way slightly toward the end but still one of the best things around at the moment. 

Searching. A very surprising 9/10 for what it is - an effective B-movie with a gimmick.
I thought it was going to a 6/10 potboiler and just went along to pass the time really. 
The entire film has the appearance of taking place on a couple of laptop screens as a widower searches for his missing daughter. A slightly pointless gimmick in that it doesn't add anything to the story but at the same time it seems effective and compelling (see also - the one-shot gimmick of "Victoria" a few years ago). Nothing massively original otherwise in this story but it is very watchable and benefits massively from a towering "beyond the call of duty" support performance from Debra Messing as the detective investigating the case.

The Big Sleep (1946) 8/10
Seen at a screening as part of a little film noir season at a tiny pub/theatre.
I'd somehow never seen it before despite its classic status - I always had (and still have) an antipathy toward detective mysteries and I for a long time just didn't "get" Bogart. The latter problem is solved so I went along, also because it is SUCH a classic
And what a lot of fun! I didn't expect the dialogue to be so witty, or at least it's witty through the first half before the film starts to play a bit more seriously. Women falling at Bogie's feet, ha. 
We got a nice introduction to the film from the chap who's put this season together, no spoilers but some nice info, a bit like watching Moviedrome with Alex Cox or Mark Cousins. The most interesting bit for me, relating to the film, was that they had to massively cut Martha Vickers' filmed role because she was too good and overshadowed Bacall who was being groomed into stardom. Even with what's left, in THIS film Vickers still walks all over Bacall. 

As for the famous convoluted plot, having just watched the film on Thursday and followed up by a hungover skim-read of the plot, I am still a bit lost! Yet it doesn't matter, it's no problem that it's all over the place, it's all about character and atmosphere and dialogue rather than story, in this case, for me at least. 

Cracking stuff

The Predator
A surprisingly credible 7.5/10 although it was a tricky one to reach a final score for, bits of it were excellent and bits let it down so I have settled for somewhere between 7 and 8.5 here. 

The good: it is very much in the spirit of the 1987 original. Writer/director Shane Black and co-writer Fred Dekker sensibly looked at what people like in a Predator film which is: squaddies sharing very non-PC banter; good one-liners; feisty characters; loads of gore and violence. I am not sure how they managed a 15 certificate actually (more for the swearing than the violence).

A note about Shane Black - he is very smart at creating films that are nearly spoofs of a genre, whilst actually being a fine example OF the given genre. The Long Kiss Goodnight which he wrote, is a prime example, it takes the mickey out of big action films whilst simultaneously being a really good action film. 

And he certainly gets to play with that here, throwing in wisecracks referencing the Predator franchise INTO HIS PREDATOR FILM. No spoilers other than that yes, he has someone say "get to the choppers" 

This film knows what it is, it knows what the audience wants, and just gets straight on with it. It is 1h40m, pretty short (learning a lesson from that tedious final half hour that killed Predator 2 I guess!). 
Basically, a bit like how Jurassic Park 3 simply said "here's some people, they need to get from one side of the island to the other, there are dinosaurs in the way, some people will die, 3,2,1 GO!", The Predator puts a predator on Earth, gives us some human encounters, a bit of head scratching, lots of big guns and tough guys, some aspect of alien technology that the protagonists have to work out, and aforementioned wisecracks. And a night hunt in the trees. We also get a bonus unfeasibly attractive female lead (who is every bit as kick-ass as the guys). 
Lots of laughs in the first hour, lots of fun etc. The two main leads (Boyd Holbrook who you should recognise from Logan, and Olivia Munn who you might know from X-Men: Apocalypse) really carry it quite well.

The bad: not that I am looking for deep character development or backstory, but it's obvious that chunks of the film were cut - there are gaps (not so much plot holes, but "gaps"), various "eh?" moments etc. And the fun factor diminishes in the final act so, having been laughing along at various almost "meta" humour, we are suddenly expected to engage with the (ahem) "serious" story. The downshift in tone is a little jarring. 

Still very good though and I might even go and see it again. 

NB I have not seen the AvP films - only Predator, Predator 2 and the disappointing Predators from a few years back. 

Bullitt (yes the 1968 Steve McQueen film). 6/10
Friday evening's "mystery movie" at my local independent, quite funny as the titles came up "Steve McQueen" and the imagery showing that we were in Chicago so some dick in the audience, trying to look cool and clever, said "oh so it won't be Bullitt then", just before "BULLITT" came up on the titles. 

I've seen this film years and years ago and my opinion has not changed. 
It's 6/10 at best. 

It is very well shot and arguably pioneered the "hard cynical cop doing things his own way" genre, and it is quite bold in that it has some long sequences with very minimal dialogue (the famous car chase is nearly ten minutes with no words spoken, and the less famous airport climax is nearly twenty minutes with very minimal dialogue)

So we have McQueen, a gorgeously and generously filmed San Francisco, some cool cars (forget the Mustang and the Charger, and feast your eyes on Cathy's Porsche 356!). And Robert Vaughn is brilliant.

But the STORY is simultaneously boring and baffling. There seems to be a massive character plot hole (regarding the stooge and why on earth he'd sign up for helping out, and maybe it's just me being thick - I was sleepy when watching it on Friday - but the Vicky character didn't quite make sense to me).

And yes in the chase, both cars pass the same dark green Beetle twice although I got the idea that it was deliberate repeat shots from different angles cos they were so proud of the car jumps. 

I've never really "got" the appeal of McQueen and this viewing of Bullitt didn't help MUCH. He did suit the role, all taciturn etc, but I don't think he has as much presence as he's credited with. 

Crazy Rich Asians An uncertain and probably generous 6.5/10
Very hard to score this film. It passed the time well enough and had likeable protagonists, it was beautifully shot and adequately acted (with one particularly strong performance and one standout), but at the same time I was left wondering what the point of telling us this story really was, and why we should care about ANY of these people. It tries to play the standard Hollywood formula (present likeable protagonists, give them obstacles to overcome, show them overcoming the obstacles), but the obstacles here are pretty trivial and we are left just gawping at some obnoxious show of wealth straight out of a late 1980s celebration of yuppie culture.

At 2 hours, it is way overlong and simultaneously manages to leave voids. i.e. it would have been better as a 3-episode, 4h television piece. In particular the subplot of Astrid's character should have either been better fleshed out, or left out entirely, plus there is so little explanation about the father's absence that you are left wondering if there is some other story going on there...
And after being overlong, it rushes the bloody ending AND doesn't stick to its own hitherto apparent convictions.

btw those acting honours go to Gemma Chan as the angelic Astrid, and Michelle Yeoh who was coldly terrifying and played it JUST RIGHT, as the matriarch. 

Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam aka "Turkish Star Wars" 6.5/10

Cult classic doing the rounds as a 2K restoration, touring independent cinemas under the popular title "Turkish Star Wars"

It's a bit of a "point and laugh" kind of film - a "so bad it's good" sort of thing. Camp trashy grindhouse nonsense made infamous by its shameless copyright-infringing use of (seemingly randomly inserted) footage from Star Wars and totally stealing music from Raiders of the Lost Ark and Battlestar Galactica (and a tiny bit of Queen's Flash Gordon)

It's one of those microbudget films that is fun to mock (with associated guilt for laughing at the beleaguered under-budgeted earnest film makers) BECAUSE it's not trying to funny in itself. 

Basically a no-budget early 80s Turkish attempt at making a sci-fi epic. There is plenty on the Internet about this film so feel free to Google for more professional write-ups than mine here. 

Plot and villain's motivation make no sense. Protagonists are meant to be two best buddy sub-Han-Solo types although they appear to be in their mid 40s and a little pudgy, although the main guy REALLY loves jumping around. A lot. All through the film. Using hidden trampolines etc. 

It's not really very Star Wars though, apart from the clips (also other borrowed footage from stock travelogue film, and some zombie films etc). 

I actually - beyond scoffing at it - kind of liked its goofy charm and its try-hard efforts. You do wonder what was going through the performers' heads during shooting though - they surely must have known how bad the result would be.

I am sure that daft no-budget films like this are (almost literally) ten-a-penny but to get to see this in a loving restoration on a big screen with a full audience, is a special experience (especially because if you watch it on YouTube you'll probably give up after 10 mins, which would be tragic)

Costumes are the high point. Everyone will have their favourites but personally I most liked the red Yetis that looked like evil cousins of The Banana Splits 

A Simple Favour 7/10
Billed heavily as "The dark side of Paul Feig", Paul Feig being he who brought us such delights as Bridesmaids and made a star of Melissa McCarthy. As taglines go, it's not really a strong selling point. 
BUT! To the film. Basically a low-rent knock-off of Gone Girl crossed with that late 80s-early-90s "yuppies in peril" mini-genre. It is as daft as a box of frogs and might have been better served by being done as a spoof. The Anna Kendrick character is a dimwit, the plot machinations in the middle section are horribly contrived, and it throws a few too many twists in during the final act, and it's a bit too long.

So why 7/10?
It's NOT predictable, it's really well shot (some lovely compositions), it is certainly engaging and fun (I just wish it were funnier), but mainly it's that Blake Lively carries this brilliantly - she seems to be channeling 50% Lauren Bacall and 50% Lana Turner, as a bad-girl femme fatale, and she is just brilliant at it. It's actually worth seeing the film just for her performance (even if,, like the rest of the film, it does descend into utter hokum - it does so in a fun way. A bit like Rebecca DeMornay in one of my guilty pleasures "The Hand That Rocks The Cradle")

The Little Stranger 7/10

Would like to score it higher but in fairness it plays a bit too much with the "slow burner" thing (and you will see the phrase "slow burner" a lot if you look at for example User Reviews on imdb) and almost ends up "so slow burning that it burned out before getting ablaze"

This is the film whose trailer makes it look like a knock-off of 80% The Awakening and 20% The Others.

It's actually a bit different to that and I don't want to say much about it for fear of spoiling the plot.

It is worth a watch just for the acting. It's so well cast. Domnhall Gleeson gets top billing and as usual he is so good that you barely notice he's there, so it's left to Ruth Wilson to engage your attention, and she is BRILLIANT. Very nuanced, yes the whole film is a bit theatrical/hokey but she keeps the body language and eye movements just the right side. Will Poulter (who gave one of the three most terrifying screen performances I've ever seen, last year in Bigelow's "Detroit") is good, and it's nice to see a film not shy away from a character's disfigurement. And THEN there's Charlotte Rampling, but also Liv Hill as the maid is really good. It's beautifully shot and it really nails the whole "dilapidated mansion" thing.

I'd have cut about twenty minutes from it, but on the whole it's recommended despite the middling score.

A Star is Born 5.5/10

Not really sure what I was thinking, going to see this 4th (or 5th) version of a predictable hackneyed old melodrama, but early reviews were strong and especially singled out Lady Gaga's performance and I thought "well maybe they are doing something new with this". I'm not even sure if I've ever sat through an earlier version in full. 
Anyway there's not much to say about it apart from: it is so boring, unengaging, and predictable, and seems to miss some significant scenes that might explain certain character motivations. Lady Gaga is excellent and gives it a very spirited performance; Bradley Cooper also very believable and (relatively) understated but I can't understand why septuagenarian Sam Elliott is cast as his brother (possibly I missed some dialogue explaining the thirty-year age difference, maybe he is a half-brother given that it is stated that the Bradley Cooper character's mother died at 18 in childbirth)


Basically it is rubbish, but glossy and well shot with decent lead performances and songs, so it gets a begrudging 5.5/10 and that's even allowing for cases of people who do like this sort of thing.

Venom.  5.5/10.

Actually worse than it looks in the trailer, which looked pretty bad. A few points for half-decent hunour and some decent performances from Hardy and Riz Ahmed (basically playing Elon Musk  ). Total waste of Michelle Williams in a nothing role. Not a single memorable action scene or visual. Just unengaging. It wasn't horrible, there was nothing glaringly bad about it as such, but - to use a phrase I coined many years ago in the wake of Superman Returns - "it was just kind of ON"

John Carpenter's Halloween (1978)
7.5/10
40th Anniversary cinema screening

I'd only seen this film once before, semi-reluctantly when I was about 17 (I'd liked Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing, but being a fan of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Poltergeist, the idea of this super-cheap film where the "monster" is just a slow moving man in a mask, with a knife, did not appeal). I remember thinking it was "passable"

On the big screen it really shines though. 
The presentation had a handy and informative intro from John Carpenter, filmed a few years ago. The main thing that came out of that was that his decision to shoot in Panavision was somewhat maverick at the time, because small no-budget films without epic beautiful locations were not considered standard fare for Panavision, but he wanted that wide aspect to fill the audience's field of view. And I think it worked brilliantly - the cinematography and compositions in this film are great.

As is the story. It is pretty refreshing to have an antagonist with such a minimal back-story - yes we see Michael kills his sister when he is six and we are told that in 15 years in a mental institution there has been zero rehabilitation or understanding, but there is deliberately no further attempt to explain any motivation. In turn this makes the film immune to any charges of "not making any sense"

Of course it was a star-making turn for Jamie Lee Curtis but I think it's actually Nancy Loomis as Annie who gives the more interesting performance (even if she is clearly a "bit" too old to be at high school  ) and Donald Pleasence is pretty good in it too.

Also after the brutal (and very well filmed) opening, it cleverly spends quite a lot of time having really not much actually happen. There is a bit of a lull at about three quarters through, which does spoil the pacing, but overall just a pretty good film well deserving of its cult classic status.

First Man 7.5/10

First Man essentially charts Neil Armstrong's career progress from X15 test pilot, to Apollo 11. 
This presents challenges to writer, director, actor and audience, as Armstrong was a famously reserved man so it is hard to get under his skin - however, a valiant effort is made here.
The other challenge with this sort of film is the inevitable comparisons - even though it's from 35 years ago - to The Right Stuff, which charted the Mercury space program by focusing on four of the Mercury 7 astronauts.
First Man opens boldly with a blatant reference to the earlier film, but afterward you can't help but wonder whether a) familiarity with The Right Stuff is simply assumed and b) Chazelle (director and co-writer) is sometimes trying too hard to NOT be making another The Right Stuff. 
Inevitably many ingredients are shared - questions about selection and suitability; worried wives; colleagues' deaths; frustrated wives shouting at NASA
As First Man is focusing really only Neil and Janet Armstrong, it goes a little deeper in these aspects but still doesn't offer much new, and I came away from it feeling that I'd learned very little about Armstrong and nothing at all about the other Apollo astronauts (I agree with Offwidth that especially Buzz Aldrin came across as badly written, but then maybe he really was just like that - but in the film he was almost a Greek chorus).

However, it was still really good. Aesthetically it's a joy, and not only in the high altitude and space visuals but also in some of the dramatic scenes, some compositions are wonderful. The score and the sound were brilliant. Mostly great performances - Gosling and Foy carry it brilliantly and are backed up by dependable character actors turning in solid "meat and potatoes" performances so as not to steal the show (Kyle Chandler, Jason Clarke, Ciaran Hinds)

I'd still rather watch The Right Stuff though!

Bohemian Rhapsody. 4/10 and I am being generous

This film is a meandering mess.It goes for the lowest common denominator, throwing every “rock music movie” cliche into the mix and not in any clever/ironic way but more like they showed Queen’s Wikipedia page to a child and then got that child to write to screenplay. I couldn’t believe how bad some of the “band meeting” scenes were.

You know that cheesy bit in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” where most of the band are mucking around and Ray shouts “guys, come back, I’ve got it!” as he writes the intro to Light My Fire?

Well Bohemian Rhapsody does that roughly 7 times.

Apart from a major clunker that I’ll get to shortly, I don’t really mind that factual chronology is altered, but it’s in any case all over the place with its pacing, with gaps of several years and not even any montage or caption to explain stuff (eg Freddie’s attempt to go solo in the early 1980s). For a 135 minute film it weirdly feels rushed

Rami Malek’s performance as Freddie is being heralded. It’s not that good, actually. Sure, he’s got the energy and can belt the songs out but he’s pretty dull when called upon to actually act.

Gwilym Lee as Brian May is very very good, as is Lucy Boynton in a sadly underwritten role as Mary Austin.

There is no real study of Queen’s place in rock hierarchy - I am pretty sure only two other artists (Elton John and Led Zeppelin) are even mentioned in passing. Pretty egregious given that the whole builds to a climax at Live Aid disingenuously presented in a way that can make you think Queen had been the headline stars of the event (they were on at about 6:30pm)

It is also disingenuous in appearing to suggest that Freddie was seriously ill (the old classic of “show the lead character coughing into a handkerchief and seeing spots of blood”) before Live Aid, just to make his performance look even more heroic. He was tested in 1986 and diagnosed HIV positive in 1987.

It also doesn’t really properly explore how kept his personal life quite private from the press, which should have been an interesting aspect given the general “in the closet” vibe of the whole period. Surprised at this from director Bryan Singer.

And there’s not even that many songs in it! I know it’s called Bohemian Rhapsody but hey didn’t need to keep going back to that one song! Nor is there much exploration of some of their pioneering work with pop videos. 

I am not saying that there SHOULD have been more on some of these lacking aspects, just commenting that there were more themes and material that could have been played with.

Just a big old pointless muddle. Queen and Mercury deserve better 

Nice to see the kid out of Jurassic Park as John Deacon

I've been watching a right load of B-movies lately in the cinema and got a bit behind in the reviews, here's some quick scores though

Halloween (2018), 7/10
I am not familiar with the Halloween sequels, I may have have seen Halloween 2 many years ago (decades ago) and I know I've seen Halloween H20 but I don't particularly remember it as anything other than Josh Hartnett's calling card (and of course Michelle Williams is in but isn't given much to do).
The new Halloween film works as a direct sequel to the 1978 original and it works pretty damn well. It does assume not only knowledge, but also at least respect (and at best love) for the whole lore of Michael Myers. I am in the "respect" camp. I like the first film as it sits between conventional slasher horror and a more supernatural type of horror (Michael seems so indestructible and undetectable, as if he can teleport, but no explanation is offered). 
With the new one, Laurie is an ageing recluse, Myers is in a secure compound, Laurie has an adult daughter trying to lead a normal life, and a grand-daughter at high school...and Halloween is coming up. So guess what, someone tries to transfer Michael, it all goes a bit wrong and he rocks up back in his old home town to settle some old scores. And Laurie goes a bit Sarah Connor on us, and it all pretty much works. 
Ultimately only a 7/10 as it didn't feel as effective as I wanted it to, and it meandered a bit (spending a lot of time on some interesting journalist characters whose story really ends up going nowhere, which was disappointing). But worth a look

Overlord (2018) 6.5/10
Marketed as a sort of bonkers Nazi zombie/clone/automaton horror, this is more like a decent standard Second World War action film with the "monsters" being a pretty minor part of it. By "standard", I mean that our protagonists are a plucky and diverse small unit cut off from everyone else and having to beat the Nazis, who outnumber them massively, on their own. The film plays things straight but clearly is a bit tongue in cheek with the way it embraces all the tropes. It has a vibe of 90% Inglourious Basterds and 10% Dead Snow. I didn't know any of the actors, which was refreshing as it makes things a little less predictable in "who will live and who will die" way. 
The "zombie" plot doesn't start until well into the film, so you get a good 45 minutes of well done standard WWII fare. Actually the first ten minutes are brilliant, with a D-Day air drop putting you right in the thick of it. 

Widows (2018) 6.5/10
This one was really hard to score. At times it was going to be either a 9/10 or a 3/10. It's bizarre - it's this old and often recycled story from the 1983 TV series (before my time, I never saw it) by Lynda La Plante, and there's nothing fresh or bold about it any more. Basically - a load of criminals die during a heist, and their widows use the plans for the NEXT heist to try to pull it off themselves. Maybe in 1983 this was an exciting "sisters doing it for themselves" thing, but in 2018 that's not that exciting. We've seen Thelma and Louise and Set It Off. Just this year we had Ocean's 8, and Widows has the misfortune to basically look like Ocean's 8 minus all the fun. It is presented as heavy mature adult drama, when it's still just a caper movie really. 
And yet....
It is so well made, and it does stay engaging. It's perhaps a bit pretentious, as we might expect from director Steven McQueen (Hunger, Shame, 12 Years A Slave) - or to be more kind, it's overambitious, trying to cram in themes of politics, corruption, grief, class, race etc. Maybe this would have worked better as a glossy TV series. It's a shame that it's not better given that the acting is first rate - Colin Farrell turns in maybe his best work, and the wonderful Elizabeth Debicki is an absolute standout. McQueen takes some bold directorial choices which all work well (most famously a dialogue scene between Farrell and his PA, shot from the exterior of the car so we don't even see them). But it feels like someone has taken a great chef, given them an amazing kitchen and restaurant and silver-service staff, and asked them to serve up fish fingers and spaghetti hoops. 

Young Frankenstein, 8/10 Looks like I never got around to writing a review. Loved it! Overlong, especially at the start, otherwise a higher score.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, 4/10. Looks like I never got around to writing a review, it doesn’t warrant one. Maybe an even lower score given that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Mortal Engines were 3/10

The Girl in the Spider's Web, 7.5/10
Worth a look. Looks like I never got around to writing a review. Nothing earth-shattering, Claire Foy very effective, very well shot, bit convenient/lazy with the Lakeith Stanfield character. Film does its job OK.

Mathangi/MAYA/M.I.A. 9/10
Excellent documentary about the British/Tamil hip-hop artist. You don't need to be a fan, or to be familiar with her work, or even a fan of the genre. It's a fascinating documentary covering all sorts of stuff such as immigration, pathways to success, "keeping it real", and whether an artist can or should be taken seriously when making political statements. It loses a point for dwelling just a bit too long on the Madonna Superbowl middle finger incident. 

Wildlife. 9/10

A beautifully done small family melodrama, elevated by an absolutely towering, career-best lead performance from Carey Mulligan. Sadly I missed the first ten minutes due to public transport shenanigans. Basically it's an early 1960s setting, Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal are parents to a 14-year-old boy but this is no coming-of-age story, it's all about Mulligan's dissatisfaction with life, and Gyllenhaal's perceived failure as a husband, father and even as a man. He's out of the picture for much of the running time, as Mulligan starts an affair-of-convenience with an older man. This all makes it sound very slight and very cheesy but it is neither of those things. Very effective direction (it is actor Paul Dano's directorial debut and he has done a very good job) and writing (Dano and his wife, writer/actor Zoe Kazan)
It's in limited release but if Mulligan doesn't snag an Oscar nomination for this, then something is wrong (especially as she missed out by somewhat splitting her own vote when Suffragette and Far From the Madding Crowd came out in the same year - see also: Amy Adams with Nocturnal Animals and Arrival)

Suspiria (2018) 7/10

The much-heralded remake of Argento's cult classic. I know the Argento film and admire its aesthetic but it always felt a bit overrated to me. It's certainly never scary. 
The new one comes loaded with interesting credentials - Luca Guadagnino directing (and reuniting with Tilda Swinton and Dakota Johnson), Thom Yorke doing the score, blah blah. Lots of hype about Johnson's ballet training. 

It starts well, in a bleak Cold-War divided Berlin in 1977, with a backdrop of Baader-Meinhof actions offscreen, and an effective opening scene with a terrified runaway (an extended cameo from Chloe Grace Moretz). I couldn't tell, from this point onward, whether the film assumed familiarity with the original. It felt that way to me, but then I know the original so maybe I was just thinking "they expect us to recognise that bit". 
(the wafer-thin plot of the original is simply that a ballet school is a cover for a coven of witches; the remake expands on this somewhat, beefing it up with notions of transmutation)
Parts are effective, and for sure the foley artists had a field day with their "bone crunching" button (the key scene in the main part of the film is actually pretty grisly to watch). The story deviates and expands further from the original, seemingly in order to pad it out to a frankly ridiculous 2.5 hours. 
Just as its outstaying its welcome and you're feeling bored, it enters an utterly bonkers and literally jaw-dropping finale. I can't say it was GREAT, but I'm glad that a major film is bold enough to even go that way. It's like Argento, Lynch, Cronenberg, Ken Russell, Julie Taymor and Shin'ya "Tetsuo Iron Man" Tsukamoto all got together and decided to create an insane 10 minute short. 

So all in all, it just passes muster. Swinton, oddly (given that she is working a third time with this director), phones it in. The editing is irritatingly choppy especially during all dance scenes, considering the hype about Johnson's training - she never really gets to show it off. It's elevated by a solid support performance from Mia Goth who actually comes across as more of the main protagonist than does Johnnson, at least for the bulk of the film.....

Ralph Breaks The Internet

Ralph also breaks the Blue Straggler scoring system by forcing me into a Nigel Tufnell-esque knobhead score of 11/10. Bear with me on this.

Firstly - I didn't see Wreck-It Ralph until earlier this year. I had plenty of build-up as it has earned a classic status in the past 5 or 6 years. I liked it a lot but was slightly disappointed that they didn't visit more games, and felt that it wasn't at the level of Inside Out, Finding Dory or even Coco. So I didn't go into the sequel with some loyalty bias

But my goodness this was a truly great film. It just got everything right in terms of overall story and characterisation. Unlike The Incredibles 2 which acts as if 13 real years haven't passed, Ralph Breaks the Internet takes place 6 years after the original and gives us a predictable "Ralph is happy with a simple life and Vanellope is bored and frustrated" set-up - but it does that set-up with style and charm. And, through knowing plot contrivances and machinations, they end up in "the Internet" which is depicted EXACTLY as you want it to be, with people and hover-scooters scuttling you around to the different sites. It is an absolute work of genius, the depiction of "the Internet", and visually glorious.

And here is where it gets fun, and where my knobhead score comes from......it just keeps GETTING BETTER.
Not content with simply presenting a wry "The Numbskulls out of The Dandy" depiction of the Internet, the film manages to throw in some social commentary about our inane use of this amazing resource, WHILST not being in any way preachy about it. Tweets and inane Facebook clickbait "which Disney princess are YOU?" nonsense are done BRILLIANTLY and would not insult the participants of the latter, who presumably form part of the target audience. 
It shows us spam
It shows us the Dark Web
It shows us a character wanting to expand beyond their limited universe but at the same maturing into someone who won't abandon their friends. 
It has a proper exciting and tense climax (possibly scary for the young 'uns)
The visual characterisation of new character Shank is amazing, they stay JUST the right side of "uncanny valley" with oversized Anime eyes (see also: trailers for Battle Angel Alita) and it is clear that they could have made that character look 99% human but knew that the missing 1% would be freaky so dialled it back a further 8%
Sarah Silverman's voice performance as Vanellope was brilliant, with real humanity, the best I've heard in a Disney/Pixar animated movie. 


Why 11/10?

My system - arguably flawed - is based on all films starting at 10/10 and losing points when they fall down on something or other. It's also based on what I think the film was aiming for (otherwise a great B-movie could never beat a decent A-movie even if the B-movie is more enjoyable, so I factor in the whole "is it trying to be an important Oscar winning classic, or is it just trying to entertain me brilliantly for a couple of hours?"
Ralph Breaks the Internet surely is hoping for serious recognition, Oscar for Best Animated feature etc, and on that basis it gets 10/10. But I honestly thought that somehow it reached further. Its social commentary, its charm (again, thanks Sarah Silverman) and the visuals, pushed it beyond expectations. 
It's 11/10, with apologies. 
I was genuinely weeping tears of pure joy at how good it was, whilst watching. 

Creed II 6/10 and I am being a little generous.

I really liked Creed, it was a great way to keep the franchise going, very well directed and filmed (the single-take boxing round filmed in the ring weaving between the fighters was stunning) and Michael B Jordan was superb.

I had anticipated this sequel a lot because it pitches Creed against Ivan Drago’s son, and Rocky IV was one of the first “not totally a childrens’ film” things I saw in the cinema.

To say that Creed II is incoherent is an understatement. The sense of time passing is confusing, there’s one point where i thought several weeks had passed and it turned out that about 8 months had passed, and i am not sure what year it is taking place because they refer to events in Rocky IV being thirty years ago but it it was made in 1985...

It does try to create some depth of character via animosity and bitterness between Ivan Drago and Rocky, but even that doesn’t ring true - it’s a while since I’ve seen it but don’t they respect and love each other after Rocky beats him, and invent Glasnost and bring about the end of the Cold War? “If I can do it, and he can do it, we can ALL do it?”

The depiction of Father and son Drago and their horrible bleak existence in Ukraine is probably meant to be gritty but just comes across as lazy stereotyping of Russian life.

And the fight scenes have this terrible lazy chop chop editing that does the performers a great disservice.

It has scenes in the first half that make you think there will be some really interesting drama around Ivan Drago, and Lundgren at one point looks like he’s going to be he best actor in the film, but they throw it all away and just make him a stereotypical angry pushy father. Shame, there was potential.

It’s still a 6/10, it delivers as a boxing film well enough, it’s pretty predictable (it almost is a total retread of Rocky IV with some elements of Rocky III thrown in) and the sheer physical presence of Florian Munteanu as Viktor Drago (who speaks just short of fifty WORDS in total in the film - I was able to do a half decent job of counting them, they were so few and far between!) is worth a point. He’s an absolute mountain. 

Disobedience. 8.5/10
Much more compelling than I expected. I thought I wouldn't enjoy it much and would be watching only for the sake of seeing this cast (Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams, and the always reliable and underrated Alessandro Nivola). I thought it would feel overly "worthy", being an exploration of forbidden love within the strict Orthodox Jewish community. And whilst it did start out having a "TV movie" feel to it, and overall the problems of these characters don't amount to a hill of beans, it was strangely gripping. 
Mainly thanks to the performance from Rachel McAdams. A couple of weeks ago I was raving about Carey Mulligan in Wildness. Well, it's winter so it's time for the studios to unleash their potential Oscar fare and McAdams here will give Mulligan a run for her money. Playing totally against type as a dowdy frumpy North London Orthodox Jewish housewife, she's almost unrecognisable for a lot of the film and her role is pretty complex. It actually feels like a role that Mulligan could have taken and perhaps she was offered it and turned it down on grounds of it being TOO Carey Mulligan  
Weisz is solid and reliable but doesn't particularly stand out. Nivola shines in a perhaps thankless role, and he exemplifies a stark tension that infuses this whole film.
It was also educational for me, as I have little insight into the rules of the more Orthodox Jews, even though I spent time living near the area of London shown in the film. I didn't know the women had to wear wigs over their real hair!

(the storyline is that Weisz character ran away from it all and was exiled and shunned, but returns to visit when her estranged father dies, and finds herself still shunned, during loads of fist-chewingly awkward meetings. And then it goes all Brokeback Mountain....)

Loses points for a cringingly trite use of The Cure's Love Song (seriously a radio is turned on and retuned and hits this song just as he is singing "you make me feel like I'm home again Whenever I'm alone with you You make me feel whole again" just as a character returns to a childhood home with an old friend. FFS) and perhaps a sappy ending. But still a rock solid 8.5/10. And it felt less "television" than I'd first thought, there is some interesting cinematography. 




Short Term 12. 10/10
I don't usually to bother to score/review unless it's something I saw at the cinema. Occasional special cases necessitate it though. Saw this on DVD.
A tiny masterpiece anchored by a superb performance from Brie Larson (before she made "Room" and got her Oscar). 
The film is a snapshot of young workers running a residential centre for troubled teenagers. That's about it, really! I have little more to say. It's a proper independent "no-budget" job and just shows how much can be achieved with very few raw ingredients. 

Mortal Engines. 3/10

It is quite a long time since sticking Peter Jackson's name onto something represented any kind of selling point. Fellowship of the Ring was nice, but the next two felt like homework and when they announced three Hobbit films, I said "no thanks". His King Kong was good, to a point. That was, what, 2005?
ANYWAY
The trailer for Mortal Engines was almost enough, it looked like something to watch with the sound muted (cf The Big Blue). 
And lo, it played out that way. I was amazed to see that Fran Walsh and Pippa Boyen wrote the screenplay, because the first hour was painful to behold, EVERYTHING being exposition (which can be done well - see The Abyss - but here it was so contrived). The whole thing is also a massive muddle, I had no idea what was going on for about half an hour, but the visuals were impressive. Then they throw in this guy who is like a Poundland amalgam of Whishaw, Hiddleston and Cillian M. 
The whole film just lazily cribs from all of the first three Star Wars films (Death Star, female rebel, Cloud City, flying into a reactor...) without doing anything clever with it. I don't object to its Laputa the Flying Island crib (indeed, the film comes to life when they introduce Jihae as Anna Fang (a version of Dola from Laputa) but the whole "derivative of other works without being smart about it" does really start to annoy. Obviously a lot of Mad Max in there. 
The lead actress was really good, as was Jihae. And there were moments of real potential such as the relationship between the protagonist and the robot, and Jihae's past relationship with the protagonist's mother. I got the impression that Boyle and Walsh had written a much longer screenplay but someone said "not another 5 hours" hence all the gaps (the film is just over 2 hours long). 
I hit a point where I was enjoying it as I thought it was at the climax, then looked at my watch and there was 50 minutes remaining. 

I think this film could have been more coherent if Terry Gilliam had directed it. And that says it all, really!

At several points in the first hour it got close to a walk-out or a 1.5/10

Spiderman - Into the Spiderverse. 8/10 and I wish I could score it higher. 

This was one of the craziest mainstream blockbuster franchise films I've ever seen!
As far as I understand it, it is part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (I'm not entirely sure about this as it doesn't reference The Avengers etc) but it plays almost like a mockery of it, whilst still being a solid superhero movie with an engaging plot. In this sense it brought to mind an old favourite, The Long Kiss Goodnight which mocks the buddy action genre whilst also being one of the best examples of that genre. 
In case you missed the trailer, this is an animated film featuring a collision of dimensions which brings together different Spidermen (and Spiderwoman, and a Spiderpig) from alternate dimensions. 
It was written and produced by the team that made The Lego Movie and it has that film's sense of fun and irreverence. In fact if you've seen The Lego Batman Movie and remember just how hectic and busy the first big action scene in that one is, with all the references and wisecracks - well the new Spiderman basically keeps that up for two hours! I thought it was incredibly bold. 
Nicolas Cage voicing "Spiderman Noir", a monochrome character from the 1930s, is genius. 
I believe all these alternate Spiderman/woman/pig characters are canon, from the comics.
It is also one of the most visually striking animated films I've ever seen. I saw it in 3D and there may have something wrong with the projection at times, I'm not sure. Regardless, there is a certain style to it which I haven't seen before. 

I would have scored it higher but it loses points for a rather sluggish first act, and for one extraneous character (Spiderham / Peter Porker, who is just sort of "in it" and doesn't add anything). 

Aquaman. 7/10

A pleasant surprise, I didn't have high hopes for this - another lesser-known character, trailers that looked to have very ropey VFX (and having seen awful VFX on the underwater parts in Justice League last year, I was a tad worried....), plus the ropey track record of the DCEU feature film franchise so far. And a running time of 143 minutes! But it happily exceeded my low expectations. 
It's an odd narrative, being simultaneously an origin story and NOT an origin story (we get a flashback showing the genesis of the character, with a creepily de-aged Nicole Kidman who doesn't look like 25-year-old Kidman but a younger version of Kidman with her current face  ) and a few more training-montage flashbacks of Aquaman growing up, but it doesn't dwell on these that much and if anything, I'd have liked a bit more about his existence on land - the story goes that he prefers to live on land and has no desire to get involved with the undersea tribes. It's not really clear what his day-to-day life is like, between occasional vigilante heroics. 
I moaned about expository dialogue on Mortal Engines so it would be remiss of me to ignore that Aquaman has LOADS of it. And yes it feels a bit clunky still, but at least in this case it serves the characters (mostly Princess Mera having to explain to Aquaman his new missions, tasks and responsibilities, and how the whole undersea realm works). Plus it's far more of a comic-book movie than was Mortal Engines. 
Where the film really shines is in its tongue-in-cheek approach (refreshing in the DCEU!) and the art direction. The representation of the various undersea kingdoms is astonishingly imaginative and quite beautiful. Arguably overambitious, stretching the ability of CGI maybe beyond current limits in parts (cloaks are particularly bad), but it's forgivable somehow. It takes a while to adjust to how they show people "underwater" (basically filmed in air, talking normally, with some overlay of slightly swirly water and presumably CGI flowing hair) but you do get used to it. It doesn't look "right" or "convincing" but you just have to buy into this weird movie universe.
Another surprisingly good aspect was Amber Heard who pretty much carries the whole plot and really bolsters the movie to the point where the film should have been called Aquaman and Mera (Heard's Mera does a lot more than The Wasp did in Ant-Man and the Wasp). Of all the actors, it's Heard who most gamely goes along with the camp "wink at the camera" approach (closely followed by Momoa who is a real natural in this). That Heard, playing royalty, makes no attempt at any sort of neutral/regal accent but sounds like a husky-voiced Brooklyn resident, is as punk as Bananarama not even bothering to mime on Top of the Pops. I thought it worked really well!


It is a little inconsistent in tone, I'd have liked it to be more consistently fun. But the simple story flows nicely, there is plenty going on but it's all very easy to follow and there are no pointless tangents. There are some great action set-pieces (the Sicily sequence is really well done), and there is an octopus playing drums....what more could you want?!

Stan & Ollie. 7/10

Saw this at a preview
First off, I'll say that John C Reilly's performance as Oliver Hardy is fantastic. Yes the prosthetics are good and Hardy was (literally) a larger-than-life character so it might be argued that it's easy to shine in a showy role. That would be unfair on Reilly. From the first second, he just IS Hardy
With that out of the way....
This is a little biopic covering the twilight of Laurel & Hardy's career, long after their Hollywood peak, desperately playing to sad undersold little theatres in the UK in the 1950s seemingly in some bid to drum up interest and funding for a reunion movie after 16 years apart. 
It opens in 1937 with a hugely ambitious tracking shot that seems to have used up half the film's budget, and shows the initial split (Laurel wanted to leave the Hal Roach studio, Hardy enjoyed the comfort of a steady if paltry income) and then jumps to the early 1950s. 
From there, it follows a fairly predictable pattern, expected from something that, like The Children Act, has a feel of "made for television but ushered into the cinemas for the sake of possibly snagging an Oscar nomination for an actor" but it is perfectly enjoyable stuff.
Steve Coogan arguably has the much harder role as Stan Laurel, and it took me an hour to buy into Coogan "being" Laurel. Distractingly he seemed for a long time to be playing Rob Brydon doing an impersonation of Coogan playing Laurel lifelessly, this surprised me as Coogan is an excellent performer. He does really lift things toward the end though. 
But overall it's still just a 7/10, as it was all a bit "meh".  Reminded me also of My Week With Marilyn, another 1950s-set "true showbiz story" with a cheap made-for-TV feel and a staggering central performance that the film barely deserves.
Stan and Ollie was more enjoyable than that film though, mainly as it didn't suffer from Eddie Redmayne running around being a total drip. 

The Old Man and The Gun. 7/10
Widely touted as Robert Redford's acting swansong, this film is merely passable. Redford is almost playing himself, but he plays that role well. Sissy Spacek is reliable support as always, and Casey Affleck was very good (I forgot he was in it and didn't really recognise him, had to wait until the credits to see who it was, so I guess that's good). It's just not a very engaging story, about a serial bank robber and career criminal. Got no reason to root for any of the characters, apart from maybe the Elisabeth Moss character who steals the whole film with about 4 minutes of screen time.
It's still well made, in fact apart from some camera angles and movements and some of the editing style, it could almost BE a film made in the early 1980s (when the story takes place). Nice and grainy and the period detail is great. But not really an essential film.

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