Transformers: The Last Knight

At this point, it's got to be assumed Michael Bay is making Transformers movies largely as a cry for help. There's not a lick of logic in any of them, nor particularly much interest in most of the human characters or the various robots either. What this film offers instead is, pretty much, pure undiluted insanity. Anthony Hopkins spends most of the middle third providing a shedload of ridiculously convoluted exposition that tries to connect giant robots, Arthurian legend, a secret with ties to everythign from the American Civil War to World War 2, references to the earlier films in the franchise and a sudden outburst of robot horns from the earth.

If that sounds compeltely ridiculous - congratulation, yes it is. There's also a shooting style that has scenes changing aspect ratio constantly between cinemascope and widescreen, distinguished character actresses contributing scenes where their prime objective is to get a young woman laid, wasting the voice talents of John Goodman and Steve Buscemi, random scenes throwing in John Tuturro and Josh Duhamel playing their roles from previous roles in the franchise with no real impact on the action of the film and a lot of random yelling at things while other things explode.

Look, this is does have the occasional entertaining spot when it calms down for five minutes and remembers to be the same film for a little while (Hopkins exposition spurt is probably the highlight, followed by his mildly psychotic robot butler, voiced by Downton Abbey's butler, Jim Carter). But largely this is loud, yelling nonsensical empty calories. It's never exactly dull, but that's largely because it's too loud to be dull, and because Bay's attempt to have a sense of humour is so weirdly at odds with anything actually funny.

Whitney: Can I Be Me

Nick Broomfield has made a couple of fascinating documentaries, although, like all documentaries, he's only as good as his subject. His two Aileen Wournos documentaries probably are the highlights of his work, largely because they have unfiltered access to a figure who is so deeply fascinating in her complex attitude to her situation (in both documentaries, being on death row for a series of murders) and are utterly unfiltered. His two best known docos from the late 90s/early 2000s, "Kurt and Courtney" and "Biggie and Tupac" are frequently hilarious while diving deeply into the strange world of music industry conspiracy theories, and while none of the theories could really be called vaguely believable, there is at least residual entertainment in the weird sides of people who are off to the sidelines of fame.

Alas, "Whitney: Can I Be Me" doesn't really have that level of fascination. It's a pretty straightforward music industry biography - telling Whitney Houston's story from her rise to fame in her early twenties to her decline into drugs and death. While there are a couple of reasonable interviews from band members and a couple of relatives, there isn't a single fascinating figure to really hang on to - the footage that forms the centre of this from Whitney's 1999 tour of Germany never really adds up to enough to justify the piece as anything but by-the-numbers.  When the best interview footage there is comes from an Oprah interview, you know you're in trouble. Unless you're really particularly fascinated by Whitney's story, this is probably worth skipping.

Hounds of Love

It's December in Perth in 1987. Temperatures are hot. Teenager Vicki is sneaking out for the night to go to a party, and to escape from her recently-divorced mum. But hopping into a lift with Evelyn and John White turns out to be a mistake, as it becomes increasingly apparent they plan on torturing then killing her. Any attempt to escape is going to need luck and desperation.

Ben Young's debut feature is a tight, grim, masterpiece. The threat is established early, and the characters are clearly delineated. Stephen Curry is getting a lot of the reviewer's attention by playing way against type as the menacing John, but it's Emma Booth as the other half of the deadly couple who is the real centre of the piece - we get how desperate her circumstances are that she'd participate in something this utterly horrible. The violence stops short of being exploitative - we can infer what's happening or what's about to happen without grisly close ups - and the emphasis is as much on the internal pain and terror as it is the brutal fate that awaits Vicki. Ashleigh Cummings as Vicki plays right down the middle as a teen who is clearly reckless and foolish but just as clearly not in any way deserving of what she's fallen into. The title's connection to the film is perhaps a mite obscure - there are indeed two dogs in the film, and there is an examination of the menacing nature of love, but the two don't necessarily go together as centrally as the title might suggest. Still, this is in every way a solidly great Australian film full of tension and menace.

20th Century Women

In 1979, Santa Barbra, Dorothea is bringing up her son Jamie. He's hit 15 and Dorothea is concerned she can't relate to him and his generation any more. So she asks other people in her life - her two lodgers, Abbe and William, plus Julie, a girl from the neighborhood who occasionally stays over, to help bring him up and to help him through life.

This seems like a simple enough premise - but it's in the execution that this really sores. Mike Mills' script allows each of the characters to be filled out beyond the confines of the period displayed - we get voiceovers and montages that give everyone a cultural context that they come from and a destination their life is leading them, and we get to celebrate the moment they are in now. And the peculiarities of 1979 Los Angeles life are particularly observed - the music scene where punk and art-pop were starting to face off, the wider world (Jimmy Carter's presidency features with a key speech that feels alarmingly prescient, nearly 40 years later), And we get a sense of the three very different women who are raising Jamie - Dorathea played by Annette Benning as a loving woman slightly adrift in her space, Abbe played by Greta Gerwig as a looser spirit slightly rebelling against Dorathea, and Elle Fanning as Julie, just that crucial couple of years older than Jamie which makes her simultaneously tempting and distant.

It's an extrordinary film that lets us into a set of lives in a time and place that feels simultanously very familiar and very far away, where a lot of the foundational fractures in our culture are starting to set in, about sex, society and humanity. It's personal and it's political and it's incredibly intriguing. Absolutely worth watching.

My Cousin Rachel

Daphne DuMaurier's novels have formed the basis for a couple of significant films - in particular, Hitchcock's "Rebecca" and "The Birds" plus Nic Roeg's "Don't Look Now". Her other writing has largely gone under-explored - "My Cousin Rachel" being another in the realm of stories of old-style Cornwall with a mystery at the heart of it, and a reasonable amount of intrigue. In this case, the intrigue revolves around Sam Claflin as a young, somewhat irresponsible heir to an estate, and Rachel Weitz as the titular cousin who was the wife to his benefactor, and who may or may not have contributed to his death. His investigation of her is inevitably complicated by also lusting after her, and the twists and turns as this finds its way to resolution mean we're never quite sure how to view everyone.

Claflin is far better suited to this role than his clunky turn in "Their Finest" - he's far better suited to slight cluelessness than the snotty know-it-all he played in that film - and Weitz keeps things right on the edge of opportunist gold-digger or simply a woman trying to keep her independance. Roger Michell shoots with a classy eye, and the supporting cast have a nice number of british cinema ringers (Ian Glen and Simon Russell-Beale in particular). If this isn't up to the level of DuMaurier's best, it's still a reasonably intriguing film.

The Mummy

The desire to get a big box-office multi-film franchise has often obsessed studios. Even more so, now, the desire to do the Marvel thing where films are connected in a universe, even if they may not maintain the same characters, actors or creative crew - something that compels the audience to keep on coming back. THe problem, of course, is that the audience actually has to like the movie in the first place to keep on coming back for more.

This doesn't seem to be the fate for "The Mummy", Universal's attempt to launch a "Dark Universe" imprint that will have all the famous Universal monsters in it, crossing over and appearing in each other's films. The major downside, that apart from the Creature from the Black Lagoon, virtually all the characters are out of copyright, doesn't appear to have bothered anyone unduly. Launching with the franchise that was itself most recently successfully remade, "The Mummy", is perhaps more troublesome. While the 90s/2000s Brendan Fraser/Rachel Weitz Mummy movies were cheesy as hell, they had a certain easy-going matinee charm to them, And being set in the late 20s/early 30s certainly helped to take the odium off the Heroic White Saviour Against Brown-Skinned People - if it's set back before people knew any better, you can get away with a lot.

Tom Cruise has very obviously been seriously working on his body for this film - his musculature makes plenty of appearances. Unfortunately, he hasn't been intervening on the script, which feels a little ropey, particualrly in the first thirty minutes or so. His hero is meant to be one of those slightly-dodgy-fortune-hunters-who-will-be-redeemed, and in this case, Cruise tends to come off as more of a douchebag than may have been intended. Still, once the action moves out of modern Iraq and into England, things improve markably. Sophia Boutella's mummy runs free and threatening, and Cruise gets some invulnerability that means that Boutella can beat the crap out of him while some ill-defined material about his destiny works its way out. Russell Crowe gets to play professor exposition and has a pleasant sense of whimsy about him, and the final chase actually gets quite fun (although the last couple of scenes feel grotesquely like they simultaneously want to set up a sequel and don't want to commit themselves as to what that sequel may involve.

This has got a lot of international indifference and critical hatred, but I'll be honest and say despite my better instincts I did enjoy some of the verve in this film - no, it's not spectacular but it's not quite the cinematic abortion some may have painted it as. I had a reasonable amount of thrills.

Wonder Woman

I feel mildly traitorous. I merely like "Wonder Woman" quite a lot. I don't think it's the most magical film of all time (though, yes, it's a female led action movie that is doing solid numbers at the box office, and that as important as it is regrettably rare), but is quite a solid film and a welcome step back towards "not utter crap" after the last couple of DC releases.

The best thing about this is probably Gal Gadot, who nails that tough position of the inexperienced-in-the-wider-world-but-not-an-idiot hero - and she's joined by a strong supporting cast (even if not all of them are used consistently well - Lucy Davis' Etta Candy, for instance, is sadly under-served, and even Robin Wright's kickass warrior exits the film way too early. But there's a good solid not-too-patronising performance from Chris Pine (who also gets his gear off attractively), some solid action sequences (although the end of the film is a tad messy and tends to feature that annoying thing where two characters bellow the themes at one another in between punches), and generally this doesn't gratuitously insult anybody's intelligence. So, yeah, it's reasonable.

Wilson

An indie film from the director of "The Skeleton Twins" and the writer of "Ghost World", this seems like it should be on paper a slam-dunk. Unfortunately, this ends up feeling like a film whose time has passed. The problem is, it's very familiar territory - Woody Harrelson plays a slightly curmudgeonly, garroulous man who's isolated socially but winds up interacting with a few people (mostly women) anyway. Unfortunately, the treatment of most of these women is kinda marginal - Margo Martindale shows up for a scene, for example, only to be dismissed perfunctorily as the movie moves onto other thing. Laura Dern gets to carry more of the film as Wilson's ex wife but ultimately the film has to get back to being about dull Wilson rather than the interesting collateral damage of his tactless crashing-through their lives.

In some ways, this is like "Ghost World" if it was from the perspective of Steve Buscemi's character, which is to say, vast numbers of indie films made by men to gaze into the navels of men. Jon Brion's score is another memories of better indies past - it's way too intrusively mixed, trying to convince that what's going on is a jolly ironic romp rather than a disaster of a human being crashing down other people's lives. There is an interesting centre to the film (as Harrelson and Dern's plot gets more elaborate), but the early setup feels like weak sketches, and the ending has too many rewards for a character that never even vaguely starts to look like they should earn any of the rewards they get. So this is a bit of a disappointment.

Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

Okay, sometimes you see a movie simply because you have to review a movie that week and your timeslot is limited, and only the blockbuster that is in all the cinemas has a screening that is convenient for you to get to. So that's why this one.

I tuned out of the Pirates series after the third one. I'd enjoyed the first, had enjoyed a lot of the second, but felt the third was starting to get simultaneously overblown and underpowered, too in love with its own mythology and with not enough really interesting character development to take it any where. So I sat out the fourth one. But I'm back for the fifth one, shot in Queensland for that vaguely authentic tropical feel, and therefore with a few more Australian actors filling out the minor roles (the inevitable Bruce Spence and a not-given-anything-interesting-to-do-in-the-script David Wenham getting the largest of what's going). Geoffrey Rush's Barbosa is possibly the best element of the film this time - he has a gorgeous intro enjoying wealthy crapulence in a Louis XIV wig, and gets what's closest to an emotional arc in the film. Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow is all external tics - it makes you doubt there was ever anything interesting about the performance, which seems like a bad impersonation of itself even while it's going. Javier Bardem is the new baddie, and while the CGI is doing 50% of the work as he sports an impressive semi-drowned look, he does have a suitably crazed enthusiasm for the job of villaning it up.

The new generation of heroes are, sadly, a bit of a dead loss. The series turns out to miss Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley in these roles (both are back as older figures), as their replacements Brenton Thwaites is a reasoable looking chap, and Kaya Scolderio has been decent in other projects, most particularly series 3 and 4 of Skins.The mythology makes very little more sense than it did previously ,and there's not a lot of imspiration anywhere else. The finale does have a few interesting settings and ideas, but it's mostly too little too late. Largely skippable.

John Wick Chapter 2

The first "John Wick" was an efficient revenge story, showcasing Keanu Reeves' ability to move well in action scenes and communicate ruthless efficiency, while also sketching in an odd secretive world of hired assassins with their own rituals and ceremonies. The sequel goes further onto both - creating a series of set-pieces for Keanu to continue killing people all over the shop, while also bringing the background more firmly into focus. It's got a great plethora of supporting performers (in particular, Lawrence Fishburne and Ian McShane), and the climactic shootout verges into the abstract.

It's also possibly the first time I've seen an action movie have a hero with ennui - Wick is a character who is clearly tired of the killing business and would be happy to settle down if circumstances would just allow - but of course circumstances don't allow, hence the bodycount. This ends up having a lot more purity and basic simple construction working for it than other contemporary action flicks, which often seem to get ridiculously complicated on their way to serving up the action. It's good to have a stylish palate-clenser to show how the game should be played.