God's Own Country

This suffers mostly from a protagonist who is not only unlikeable and unsympathetic, he's also, far worse, wildly uninteresting. A moody young man who works on his father's farm in Yorkshire, he occasionally gets his jollies from dropping into the local town and having casual, no-strings-attached-or-connections-wanted with men. After a Romanian worker starts helping out on the farm, the two of them drift into a relationship that seems mostly made of convenience, but our protagonist's grunting non-articulate moodiness seems to be intended to make us think there's a little bit of grand passion going on.

It doesn't quite cut it. Frankly, the Romanian looks like he could do a hell of a lot better than this knobhead. And given the rest of the film offers not a lot other than shots of fog and sheep, this really did leave me, excuse the pun, cold.

Ali's Wedding

This is an example of the simple Aussie crowd pleaser - a goofy hero who experiences a culture clash on his way to finding true love and a happy ending. Except in this case, the goofy hero is a Muslim and much of the culture clash is the finer points of Melbourne's islamic community (and it's very specifically Melbourne, there's a whole lot of AFL references, including one of the best jokes in the film). Which means that it's simultaneously very familiar in form as a gentle and very unusual in content. Co-writer and star Osamah Sami has an innate likability that makes this a very easy-going story where, even when our hero is hiding the truth from friends and family ,we can't ever judge him too harshly. Director Jeffrey Walker has largely worked on TV (starting in Austraian staples like Neighbours and Home and AWay, moving on to more prestigious work like Rake and Chris Lilley's Angry Boys, before working in the US on shows like Modern Family and Bones) and, certainly, this is a film that feels very much like a big-screen sitcom, with a few nice visuals added and a script that holds strong for an hour and a half.

This isn't quite back to the glory days of popular Australian Film, it's not reaching quite that far, but it's a gently loveable film that's impossible to dislike.

Gifted

The basics of this, a story of a guy who looks after his niece after her mother's suicide, and how her emergence as a mathematical prodigy presents problems in trying to raise her, seems like it should be a bit of a soggy soppy mess. Certainly the dice are somewhat loaded (our hero is a Florida native who works as a boat repairman, while his mother is a wealthy and cold academic - so cold that she's played by a British actress), and the inclusion of a cute cat, but the film is not a simple illustration of "down home values good, intellectual pursuits bad". It does open up the challenge of trying to raise a child in the best way possible, in full knowledge that there are thousands of ways to go wrong and relatively few ways to go right, and what exploring someone's full capabilities really means. Performances are pretty strong - Chris Evans is a naturally sympathetic lead, Jenny Slate feels realistically like a primary school teacher while also being an independent adult, and Lindsay Duncan gets beyond the cliche of demon-mother as someone with her own vulnerabilities and issues.  Yes, there is a somewhat unlikely correlation of mathematical ability and genetics, but never the less this is a gentle film that feels right and real and true.

Killing Ground

It's the Christmas-New Year holidays, and a couple are camping out in the bush by a river. But there's anther tent that seems unoccupied and abandoned on the shore, and soon things are going to take a turn for the worse. There's a reason this film isn't called "Best Camping Trip Ever".

Australian cinema has a reasonable recent reputation for horror, and this is a pretty solid entry, turning very much into a horrific stalking-through-the-bush along the way. There are a few hints that it's trying for something more (in particular, a one line-drop about the venue being the site for a previous Aboriginal massacre) but I don't think there's enough there to take this beyond a "beware of the great outdoors" slasher. As what it is, it's effective, and well cast (although the best known cast member, Aaron Pederson, is slightly under-utilised), but it doesn't quite transcend the genre.

American Made

Stories of international drug running often seem to leave me a little cold - often following a somewhat predictable arc from first days of enjoying the fun and profitability of the business, then slinking into the mire of getting high on your own supply and drifting further into drug addiction before a decline and miserable end. "American Made" doesn't quite follow that arc, although the initial signs aren't entirely promising. Based on true stories, it first establishes the usual elements - hotshot, somewhat naive TWA pilot agrees to help the CIA take photos over South America, and South American drug cartels persuade him to start flying their product back north of the border. Things get interesting, however, when he dodges drug enforcement through CIA help, relocating to a small town in rural Arkansas, where his business undergoes a wild, government sponsored expansion, and the challenge becomes as much to launder the ridiculous amount of money he's getting as it is to navigate the gaps between different government agencies.

Tom Cruise is, to put it mildly, a divisive actor, but in this one, partially because he's playing a guy who's frequently a couple of steps behind the 8 ball and only succeeding due to bigger figures manipulating him, the off-putting over-confidence is played way down and he's something closer to a regular human being. Domnhall Gleeson has been frequently impressive and wildly different in films like "Frank", "Ex Machina" and "Brooklyn", and is something again wildly different as the CIA agent leading our hero further into temptation. Director Doug Liman lays on a reasonable number of tricks, including montages and a recurring motif of Cruise narrating events to videotape from the perspective of 1985, letting us know where we stand. And as a film that interrogates some of the CIA's more dubious behavior, it ends up packing quite a bit of a punch by the end. So surprisingly successful.

Logan Lucky

When Steven Sodebergh "retired" from film-making in 2013, it wasn't expected to last. IN the last couple of years, he's still managed to direct 20 episodes of a TV series ("The Knick"), a play ("The Library") and was cinematographer and editor on "Magic Mike XXL". He's now back as if he's never been away with a light piece, something intended to be crowdpleasing, along the lines of the "Oceans 11" films with a high profile cast pulling off a heist - in this case, the somewhat more downmarket cash palace of the Charlotte Motor Speedway during Nascar season.

In many ways this has some of the overtones of a Coen Brothers joint - the key performers get a chance to be wildly quirky yet human in a story that celebrates their personalities as much as it celebrates anything relating to the plot. The two Logan brothers at the centre are the thoroughly humanly engaging Channing Tatum, and the mordantly deadpan Adam Driver - there's a lovely chemistry between the two of them. The biggest guest-star is Daniel Craig as explosives expert Joe Bang, who lights up the screen with pure acting glee. Riley Keogh sticks out as the Logan sister who assists with the plan, a model of common-sense in the middle of various ridiculous schemes.

Sodebergh is a master of telling a complex plot with style and simplicity, and this is no different. Perhaps the last third gets a little lackadaisical with the resolution (which doesn't go at all how most audiences may be expecting it to go) and it is very much a case of a film getting by on thoroughgoing charm rather than deep themes, but in a film as pleasurable as this, who gives a damn.