Top ten - 2020

This is probably going to be the most extensively prepared top 10 I'll ever do - this is the last year where I'll need to watch a film or two a week for radio commitments as my 2XX gig has wrapped up, and I don't have a film-centred gig lined up to replace it at the moment. For better or worse, I'm applying the same rules I have previously, so films are included in 2020 if they've had a general release in Australian cinemas (i.e. outside of festivals or one-off screenings) - and despite cinemas being closed in Canberra for three months, I still got in over 100 films. For full listings of everything I saw (old, new, streaming, cinema, festivals, whatever) you can look at my letterboxd account at  https://letterboxd.com/simbot/ - which is usually updated quicker than this website - you can use that if you're wondering "why didn't you consider XYZ" 

Baby Teeth - A great tale of adolescence, teenage indulgence, and making the best of a limited time - I'd seen the theatre version of this almost a decade ago but this betrays none of its theatrical origins - it's up close and lively and has a great cast telling an emotionally rich story 

A Beautiful Day in the Neigbourhood - Once upon a time I had an aversion to Tom Hanks in any role that wasn't a CGI cowboy. That time has past, partially due to roles like this -where the sincerity isn't overdone, the breakthroughs are earned and the ensemble are all given their spaces to shine. Made my grinchy heart grow three times bigger

David Byrne's American Utopia - This is a damn beautiful recording of a stunning broadway concert, making a virtue of simple stylish design and choices - David Byrne with the assistance of Spike Lee delivers visual and sonic joy in a gorgeous package that plays classic songs in a here-and-now context that gives it even more life.

The Invisible Man - Leigh Whannel follows up his sublime "Upgrade" with an even better horror thriller - taking HG Welles classic novel concept and bringing it absolutely up to date through switching the protagonist and doubling down on empathy. It's startlingly smart, great at exploiting screen space and it goes delightfully over the top in all the right places

The Lighthouse - A tight story for two actors, Willem Dafoe and Robert Patterson, alone in a lighthouse with only some menacing seagulls and something mysterious to accompany them - this is a simple story of how men drive one another nuts, given gorgeous treatment as the isolation leads to the men turning on each other and themselves in ways both brutal and amusing and ultimately terrifyingly surprising. 

 Little Women - I admit I've never seen any earlier versions of this nor read the books, but  this one grabbed my attention, using four great actresses as the March sisters dealing with the challenges of civil-war-era Massachusetts and their hopes, expectations and eventual choices, judging none of them and simultaneously telling the story and critiquing its assumptions in a finale that made this a film that'll be on my rewatch queue shortly. 

Nomadland - An examination of a life after everything falls away, Frances McDormand provides a great central performance as a woman who's left behind after her husband's death and her town collapses after the death of its key industry, and her attempt to survive with minimal ties around her - how she gets support from those around her, through small jobs living paycheque to paycheque through the kindness of strangers, always keeping a slight reserve to avoid emotional entanglement as much as she can. It's a film very much of the moment, real and true and heartbreaking and engaging.

Promising Young Woman - A spectacular film with a great central performance and cleverly cast support, looking at the way women do and don't survive after male violence - it's basically a rape-revenge movie without any of the exploitative elements and with wit, intelligence, incisiveness, gorgeously shot, performed and scripted. It uses every weapon in its arsenal to point out the price of casual dismissiveness of women's mistreatment, and never lets the audience off the hook. 

Ride your wave - An anime delight, a romance between a firefighter and a surfing oceonographer which becomes far stranger and more delightful as the plot develops, with a complete earworm of a song in it that delighted me completely. 

Shaun The Sheep - Farmageddon - a ridiculous almost-silent comedy about a farmer, a dog, several sheep and the cute alien that disrupts their community in several delightful ways. Goofy and spoofy and Aardman at their best, this gave me big grins from ear to ear.  

Near misses - First Love, Freaky, Monos, The Personal History of David Copperfield, Possessor. 

Woulda been under consideration if I'd included streaming - Da 5 Bloods, Disclosure, Palm Springs, Soul 

Nomadland

 This is an expertly observed deep study of a single character epitomizing an entire culture and lifestyle - long-established actors like McDormand and Strathairn fit in perfectly with the supporting cast largely of non-professionals who have indeed been living the rootless lifestyle of modern-day American Nomads, living in their vehicle and travelling where there's work available after their long-term plans have gone up in smoke. There's a cumulative effect as various interactions show how McDormand is deliberately isolating herself, and why, while still being generous with her time and resources. There's heart and soul in this one in abundance and Zhao captures a landscape and people and emotional soul that is rare and astounding.

Shock Wave 2

A fun twisty turntable lotsa explosions film - never mind the 2, this is more a thematic sequel as it also stars Andy Lau in a film about bomb disposal but doesn't carry over any plot - this does have a fair bit of its own plot to carry and a lot of melodrama, dubious cgi and Andy Lau alternatively being stoic and hyperemotional. I was kept engaged throughout

The Midnight Sky

 This is a film that could be better if it were dumber - there's some decent action moments in here, combined with some unsteady and vague world building and emotional moments - it splits between two stories, one starring Clooney as a radio technician left behind on a desolate earth, one set on a ship returning from a colony scouting mission returning to that same desolate earth. They both take their turns at being in focus, and both have their moments, but ultimately neither utterly satisfies, and the final twist in the tale is awfully forced and awkward.

Wonder Woman 1984

 There's a certain kind of monkey's paw situation when you agree to direct a big blockbuster film - you get all the resources and publicity and eyeballs, but in exchange subtle themes and careful plot points go out the window. Instead it's all loudness and blatantly stating your themes like thesis statements and grand gestures for the lowest common denominator. Wonder Woman 84 has a couple of requirements it's decided to meet - introduce a new female nemesis for Wonder Woman, have a world-engulfing evil plot and reintroduce her deceased love interest Steve Trevor. The first and last of these works reasonably well, the middle is where everything turns to sludge. Pedro Pascal's tied to this and struggles mightily to carry a dud of a storyline, but Gal Gadot also gets sabotaged with a long ambling speech that is meant to resolve it but ends up being a parade of banal platitudes. There's some decent action sequences (although a climactic CGI-and-darkly lit fight brings back the bad memories of the messy resolution of the original film), some reasonable comedy and nostalgic tie-ins from the period, but it's all a bit of a messy sludge.

The Dry

 This suffers a bit from genre-requirements intruding on a story that could be intriguing in completely other ways - the story of a policeman who finds himself returning to his old country town home when an old friend apparently commits suicide, kilning his wife and children - suffers because ultimately it doesn't believe in playing through the self-evident solution and prefers to play a who-dunnit, rather than settling with the implications that an apparent "good guy" was capable of this kind of cruelty. It does have a lot of the familiar tricks of town-with-many-secrets, together with a packed cast of interested supporting cast characters to be possible suspects, witnesses and red-herrings. The flash-back-and-back-to-present structure also means we get two stories at slightly longer paces than they should be, rather than one well-paced one. Robert Connolly was an interesting director earlier in his career, but alas he's just delivering jorneyman solid work here, alongside Bana, equally solid but with nothing much deeper.

Promising Young Woman

 A delightfully provocative film looking at a delicate topic - it's basically a rape revenge movie without any of the prurient showing of the rape, and with wit and incisiveness and clever twists and turns of plotting. Mulligan stuns as the lead, the various supporting characters are spot on and it all comes to a highly satisfactory conclusion.

Caught in Time

 A solid Chinese cops-and-robbers story with the usual Chinese elements - slathers of melodrama, a touch more violence than you'd normally see, and a gratuitous bit of Chinese government propaganda (this time it's about how Chinese policing has successfully reduced gun crime). It's still very good at hitting the familiar beats, with some twists and turns along the ways as police chief chases down a gang of thieves. This print does have a couple of light issues - it tends to only translate dialogue, not on-screen text, which is unfortunate as the film does use a fair amount of onscreen text to tell the narrative - but it still worked pretty well for me

Oliver Sacks: His Own Life

 A pretty solid doco on the neurologist and literary figure, talking about his life and work fairly comprehensively. It's very much a meat-and-potatoes documentary covering his major work and the things he's known for, but the subject is so incredibly fascinating that it's absolutely worth watching just to learn more about a central figure in modern cognitive theory.

Bee Gees: How do you mend a broken heart

 A solid documentary history of the Bee Gees - yes, it's authorised which means we don't get all the dirty details, but the interviews provided are pretty honest about how the brothers Gibb survived the mix of fame and family over multiple decades and at least three career wipeouts. If I never quite get a sense that I know them as people rather than as music professionals at the end of the film, that's partially because the film does respect their privacy and their personal space enough to allow them their dignity. And their career slides across most of the major cultural movements of the late 60s and late 70s, which means it's also quite the cultural history. Combining all of that with interesting choices of side interviews (Noel Gallagher and Nick Jonas on maintaining a career with your siblings, Chris Martin on dealing with backlash) means it's a fascinating doco to enjoy

The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone

  This is still mostly The Godfather III, with minor variations here and there, and still suffers from the fact that the story of Michael Corleone was pretty wrapped up in Godfather II - the main plot of this one is largely him planning a business merger with the Vatican, which sees him being largely outsmarted by an accountant and some priests. The plot technically does give him a mafia nemesis played by Eli Wallach, but the nemesis never really gets enough attention to ever be anything particularly important on screen. Andy Garcia's Vincent has a much more active plot but keeps on being overshadowed by Michael's non-moving plot, and the film pretty much comes to a dead halt during the long Sicily sequence before the Opera House climax brings things back to life. Still, it's a beautiful looking film with a couple of great moments here and there, even while you're wishing that some of the loose ends were made more of than they are (Bridget Fonda's journalist in particular gets fairly short shrift, and Talia Shire's turn for the Borgia only really gets a few moments to play with). There's also something weird about Pacino playing this almost-retired character when he was age 50 - he mostly sustains it but it still feels like he's checking out on doing anything active way sooner than he should be. This is probably an improved version of the film everybody has in the back of their Godfather boxed set, and it's worth watching, but it's probably still going to be your third favourite godfather film

Happiest Season

 A friendly fuzzy Christmas lesbian movie - K-Stew is an engaging protagonist, much of the various family eccentrics around her are intriguing (in particular Mary Holland in the surely-this-was-written-for-late-90s-Missi-Pyle role of the awkward middle sister), and there's scene stealers on the edge of the story (Daniel Levy in the gay-best-friend-role, Aubrey Plaza in the mildly annoyed ex role). And it does let the not-quite-right-ness of the setup be a feature, not a bug. It does suffer slightly from being a comedy with not-a-lot-of-big-laugh-scenes in it, but it's gently genial and will be fine holiday viewing for years to come.

Misbehaviour

 This is an okay but not great British protest pic - it feels very much by the numbers, with a couple of side performances drawing attention - Jess Buckley steals every scene she's in, as does Leslie Manville and Gugu Mbantha-Raw. But ultimately this feels awfully familiar stuff.

David Byrne's American Utopia

 A beautiful celebration of music and stagecraft - this is David Byrne showing off what he can do, delving into the back-catalogue and his new material with an immaculately staged presentation. It's weird that this is the third filmed version of "This Must be the Place" that Byrne's done (between this, "This Must be the Place" the Sean Penn Nazi Hunter movie and "Stop Making Sense") but it still lands strongly. There's only one Oh Yeah This is Spike Lee section (which is presumably exactly that way because Byrne wanted it that way) and otherwise it's Byrne celebrating with a group of musicians and an audience, and it's enthralling all the way

Mank

 A reasonably engrossing look at old Hollywood through the eyes of the screenwriter of Citizen Kane, this leads into a lot of the early 30's political struggles in California as the left-leaning writers face off against the right-wing billionaires who fund their work - particularly looking at Upton Sinclair's gubernatorial campaign. I must admit the Kane element feels a little light on as a wrap-around Mank's frequent flashbacks, and the film does deliberately slight Welles rather a lot in ways that aren't quite fair (like most collaborative mediums, Wells and Mank were never as good apart as they were together, and auterism about screenwriters is ultimately as much a dead end as auterism about directors is). I feel lucky to be able to see this on a big screen - the shadow-packed photography would die on home-based media and it's a beautiful looking film.

Ellie and Abbie and Ellie's dead aunt

 A cute lesbian teen romcom with a little bit of an educational twist as a recently out young woman gets romantic advice from her deceased lesbian aunt.This is a bit high on the teen awkwardness to the point where I'm not sure if Ellie has actually matured enough to start dating, but it's mostly a good natured look at the changing nature of sexual expression between the 90s and now

Freaky

 The title they obviously wanted but weren't able to use is "Freaky Friday the 13th", and this plays the concept pretty well. Of the two body swappers Kathryn Newton does a better swap than Vince Vaughan who is a little too keen on flailing arms to indicate femininity, but this is pretty good with the self awareness, somewhat karmic kills and unwieldy Mayan bodyswapping lore

Brazen Hussies

 A look at the Australian women's liberation movement from the late sixties to the mid seventies- how it came together, things it achieved, ways it failed, with a small look at the aftereffects. It's a good look at political movements and the way they can struggle on the attempts to be both resistance to and implement practical changes within the mainstream, about the personal power of consciousness raising, about hostile media and some celebration

Monsterfest 2020

 This is my second go at seeing a film festival after Fantastic Fest, and it's difficult for anything to quite live up to Fantastic Fest's mix of access, variety, planning and programming - certainly in these COVID times, a couple of rejiggles of the programming meaning I wasn't seeing it in Melbourne, as planned, but in Sydney, and ending up booking for five films over a weekend rather than, as originally expected, a week and a half of around a dozen slots. 

Still, this wasn't a bad mix of films, though I did get a little annoyed that things ended up split over two weekends, only one of which I could schedule - meaning I did miss a couple of films I would have liked to have caught. Still, of the five, there was only one disappointment (Violent Fun, a generic 80s slasher throwback), two stone-cold classics (Possessor and Psycho Goreman, both excelent examples of their type), and two cases of middling fare (the doco Leap of Faith is a bit more bundle-of-anecdotes rather than deeply probing documentary, and Breeder is brutally direct in telling a grotesque story unrelentingly -it's well done but too grim for easy viewing). I'd definately go again but my expectations have been brought down a tad.  

The Craft Legacy

 This is a middle of the road Blumhouse joint, one of those movies clearly made by a producer who thinks texting during the movie is a good idea (yes, Jason, I carry a grudge). It's more a remake than a sequel, and only really gives one of the girls a plot and a personality. Also you can figure out a lot of the plot in advance just from the characters names. But it does have a few moments here and there for nostalgic new age 90s goth girls

Baby Done

 This is a film that gets away with a lot due to gentle charm - it really doesn't have enough substance, and never really pushes the edgier sides of its topic harder, but it is a pleasant way to spend an hour and a bit. Matafeo has charm for days which makes her pricklier characeristics pretty easy to take and means you don't object to the almost-too-neat ending

Kajillionaire

 This is very much Evan Rachel Wood in her "beautiful weirdo" phase, but also a cleverly told story of socialization, family, rebellion and escape in the backstreets of LA

Corpus Christi

 This is a fairly compelling story about faith, forgiveness and the gap between piousness and piety, with a great central performance and an intense final shot. I will say some of the plot setup is a little odd (as the criminal on work release manages to be confused for a priest), and it perhaps keeps the ending a little more ambiguous than it needs to be, but I was still pretty enthralled.

Hope gap

Very much your standard British divorce film, with Bening the emotional one whose needs drive the reticent Nighy away, and Josh O'Connor as the similarly who mediates between them. It kinda peaks early with the separation and never really gets very far out of the three of them in a tight emotional circle devouring one another. For all that, the scenery is nice and there's nice literary stuff with Napoleonic history and poetry as therapy

Dirt Music

 This is a case of a good looking but empty package - Kelly McDonald and Garret Hedlund do a pretty reasonable attempt at Australian accents, unfortunately the chemistry between them is largely of the "informed" variety, where they're both physically attractive and in an early sex scene can apparently get each other off before the clothes come off. The plot is the standard guff of "damaged men and the women who have to hang around and cure them". WA sure does look pretty and we do get to see a lot of it, but never in service of an interesting narrative.

Lucky Grandma

 A sweet and funny piece about an old Chinese lady living in Chinatown who's sudden piece of good fortune endangers her and her family... it's a slow build but it goes very satisfying places

The Last Black Man in San Francisco

A beautiful elegy of passing history as two young black men look after the house that used to be the family home - gorgeous imagery, great needledrops (yay, Michael Nyman is back) and emotional charactterwork compensate for a narrative that is a little vague

The Trial of the Chicago 7

 An engrossing look at history through the lens of the internal battles of the left, Eddie Redmayne was apparently born to play the wavering, respectability hunting Tom Hayden, with Baron Cohen and Jeremy Strong stealing scenes wholesale as the similarly scene stealing Hoffman and Rubin. It is an Aaron Sorkin down to a climactic scene hinging on grammar and men mutually admiring each other's writing, though it's careful never to throw in a gratuitous woman to have things explained to. It's still an invigorating experience

On the Rocks

 Very much coasting on Bill Murray's charm, luckily he has immense amounts. The rich person angst about whether Rashida Jones' husband is cheating on her never matters as much as whether Murray can spend more time with his daughter. And he's damn fine company

Sputnik

 A clever variation on familiarish alien tropes as a cosmonaut returns to earth with an extra passenger on board. It's a slow build but has some fun bits of gratuitous violence and a reasonable monster design plus some clever concepts going on in there.

Antebellum

 There is a problem with films with a twist, and that is that they are pretty difficult to review beyond the twist without annoying people. So all I can say is that this is pretty clunky about the twist, it's obvious and it plays out in a drawn out way that never feels as thrillingly visceral as this kinda genre movie should do. There are some reasonable performances here and a few good set pieces but it's mostly a bit of a slog.

The High Note

 This is the epitome of pretty ok - it's a personal-assistant wants to become a producer story with a not very surprising twist (main surprise is how long it takes to reveal a very obvious secret). Tracie Ellis Ross rules as the divaish singer, ice cube and June Diane Raphael get good moments as the manager and housekeeper, Dakota Johnston is not bad at a role that kinda has her being wet and useless a lot of the time, and in general it's ok without ever being great

The Broken Hearts Gallery

 A just about good enough indie-type romantic comedy as a young Brooklyn gallery-assistant finds her collection of memorabilia from previous heartbreaks turns out to be her path to success. This is another of the "deeply neurotic behavior is romantic" school of romantic comedy but once it gets past some messy establishing material where the Brooklyn hipster quirk goes a bit overboard, it settles into a reasonable groove up until the grand-romantic-gesture ending, which again falls on the "somewhat embarrassing" side of the scale. The lead pair are more "because the movie demands it" levels of chemistry rather than something that is particularly inherent to the characters, and the various side characters do slightly sink to the level of their personal quirks rather than fully rounded characters, and it's a reminder of why romantic comedy isn't the most active cinema formula at the moment - because it's become overly predictable

An American Pickle

 Charming but inconsequential - Rogen pulls off the double role better than expected but it's mostly fuzzy satire of contemporary society through the 100 year frozen Herschel. It could use extra characters - Rogen never really gets a scene partner beyond himself to bounce off

The Translators

 A cleverly twisty-turny thriller - if the ultimate result was one I'd guessed from the trailer, it at least gives us enough bonus content to mean that there's enough discoveries along the way. Lambert Wilson is practically the only performer it's not spoilery to praise, because his sliminess permeates the film from the opening mintues as the desperate publisher at the centre of the story, but there's decent set pieces and surprises to not mind too much that this is not really doing much particularly new and it is hitting that common cinematic problem where representations of a piece of art onscreen inevitably look a bit crap.

Bill and Ted Face the Music

 This is a fairly charming throwback, not falling into the trap of replaying the same gags as the previous films or disappearing down a rabbit hole of celebrity cameos - though it has a couple here and there. It's got the same gag of huge scale as Bill and Ted resolve another threat to all time and space, put against the simple goofiness of Bill and Ted. There's some good surprises in there including one surprise for the funniest character, a general geniality even when the stakes are allegedly life and death, and a resolution that perhaps plays a little too fast to really land fully but never the less feels nice.

The Eight Hundred

 A big fat Chinese WW2 epic as the gathered Chinese forces face the Japanese in a Shanghai factory, just across the river from the internationally-conceded zone. There's an immediate visual contrast between the soldiers in the shelled-and-battered factory and the residents of the international zone, full of neon and light and music and decadence (including frequent shots of a lady casino owner hanging around with a giant bird). It does have a fair bit of frequent Chinese Political Messaging about china's position in the world, the warfighting is noticeably heavy on the gore and there is a fair bit of mythologising China's glorious destiny but it's a fascinating watch of a bit of history largely unknown to most westerners.

The New Mutants

An okay superhero jaunt suffering from a lack of compelling plot or interesting characters (only Anna Taylor-Joy's Illyana really registers) - it also plays at keeping the plot and the characters mysterious at the beginning in favour of atmospheric build up which is more frustrating than compelling - its ragingly obvious what Maisie Williams' power is at least half an hour before she gets to show it off. There's a few decent set-pieces along the way as the various characters confront individally spooky circumstances and one effective CGI monster but the final big CGI big bad is a bit of a sound-and-fury-signifying-nothing kinda thing. Still, I've missed superhero epics and even at this reduced scale (six actors, one location) it provides a couple of the right feels.

Les Miserables

 This is compelling while suffering from a perspective that probably didn't seem like a problem when it was originally shot - the confrontation between the residents of a Paris housing development largely populated by muslims and africans and the police is told largely from the police perspective, and in 2020 that's a problem. The "one good cop" riding along with the two more dodgy ones is a cliche that has become increasingly unbelievable in 2020 as the cops-investigating-and-clearing-cops have piled up, and it damages the realisation of this (although admittedly this isn't entirely a film playing in reality, the igniting incident of a missing lion cub is a case of "seeking exciting visuals over believability"). Still, it builds to a suitably tense finale as the cops behaviour catches up with them brutally, and it's worth following along.

A White White Day

 At this point I'm pretty convinced that no movie shot in iceland can be all bad, simply because it's goddamn beautiful to look at. This does suffer from a plot that is beyond slow burn, and when it finally emerges it's the same old "man thinks he has the right to revenge his dead wife's sexual history" story we've seen a lot before, but there's a solid undercurrent of repressed rage for most of the film before it boils over into becoming expressed rage. Still, I'd hoped for more of a payoff to the slowboil.

Tenet

An okay blockbuster mildly damaged by Nolan's dubious dialogue and overly-impressed-by-itself structure. Robert Pattinson gets most of the limelight here as the side guy, while John David Washington is stuck with the worst of the dialogue, Kenneth Branaugh is Baris Badenoving as the baddie, Elizabeth Debicki has to do a lot of suffering on the sidelines in that way that having watched a lot of blockbusters makes me wonder whether Nolan's been going through a messy divorce, and all in all this could easily lose half an hour of moping and needless foreshadowing. 

Lowdown Dirty Criminals

 A perfectly average piece of comedic crime with some of the usual issues - tonally it's all over the place with some messy storytelling as it never quite decides if the characters are charming or dangerous. Rebecca Gibney is obviously hoping for a Jackie Weaver in Animal Kingdom calling card but this is nowhere near that level. Still, a couple of decent set pieces and a good bit with gore

The Swallows of Kabul

 This is where the animation is called "painterley" - it's a beautiful non-cartoonish style that works well for this fairly brutal story of life under the Taliban in Kabul for a few residents - it has its longeurs, and the ending feels a tad obvious a few minutes before it happens, seeking out a way to get an iota of happiness out of the grim material at the expense of credibility, but it certainly scores emotionally.

Sequin in a Blue Room

 Its credited as a homosexual film, and certainly delivers. This is not the great anonymous sex thriller - that's stranger by the lake, but it certainly captures the risks and excitement of hookup culture (although there's weird dynamics with the fake app that mean it sticks out as "moviecreated"). Was weird to have a friend in a lead role hooking up with the 16 year old protagonist. Also it is art-directed to hell and back, and it doesn't quite nail the persona-separation that the use of the sequined shirt implies.

Peninsula

 Warning - I really liked this (to the point of thinking "best action film since Fury Road") but my partner was less impressed and was itemising plot holes and unlikelihoods on the drive home, saying it woulda been fine if it was a Resident Evil movie but not as good as Busan. 

This continues in the same specific Korean Zombie-verse as Busan without any of the characters - four years after the collapse of Korea, four survivors return motivated by the possibility of getting enough cash to do more than survive as a sub-refugee in Hong Kong. Complications ensue after the arrive, including two groups of resident survivors, there's action and plotting aplenty and a suitably (over?)emotional finale. It may be that it's been a while since I've seen something with this level of action creativity in a cinema, and with a bit of scale to it, but I loved the hell out of this - it's ambitious and heartfelt and wildly engrossing for me.

Black Water: Abyss

 Every so often an Australian horror director tries to make their Croc movie - it's the Australian creature that's most like jaws. This combines the threat of being underground in a cave with rising water levels with a croc (who seems curiously afraid of leaving the water, probably because the prop doesn't look that good when above the surface), plus some home-and-away level drama among the humans. There's some okay set-pieces, but most of the people are annoying, the ending kinda throws a few extra things in there for no good reason, and it's all pretty average.

Deerskin

 This is a case of "a little too much whimsy taking a little too long to get to the good stuff", as Djardin plays a guy a little too into his jacket. Particularly the climax feels very sudden

Academy Award Winner Russell Crowe Is Unhinged

This is a fairly familiar Beware Angry White Men story as a young woman in traffic attracts the attention of our Russ, who proceeds to threaten her in various ways physical, vehicular and psychological. There are hints around the edges of various modern ailments to explain why Russ went nuts but fortunately very little time is wasted in such nonsense and instead we get to see dramatic car crashes, fights where Crowe appears to be partially made of concrete given his survival from various beatings and a closing credits appearance of a song I thought had officially retired from such purposes. Caren Pistorious serves as a solid female lead and in general this keeps tension going nicely

The Vigil

 A just about adequate horror story set during an overnight vigil to watch over a recently deceased Jewish man before he's taken off for funeral rites. It's slow, lore heavy and lacks an interesting payoff, though it does have a few decent creepy noises and concepts for the undemanding

Babyteeth

 A rich group of characters centred around Milla, a young girl who's cancer diagnosis means she starts looking into other choices in her life. Eliza Scanlan absolutely centres this film in a performance simultaneously childishly vulnerable and richly lived in, and everybody around her matches her (in particular Essie Davis and Ben Medhlson as the parents). I saw the play version of this about 8 years ago and enjoyed it, but this feels weirdly richer and stronger - there's truths about youth and experience and life through every frame.

Follow Me

 This is sorta the bad version of last year's "escape room", as an American bunch of youtubing assholes go to Russia for an escape room experience and end up over their heads in danger. The trouble is there are no interesting or likeable characters - people are either douchebags or without personality- and the room challenges offer no particular surprises either. The ending comes up with a reasonable genre twist but it's not enough to fix the flaws

The Burnt Orange Herasy

 This is a fairly familiar europudding of a film, set in the art world as a critic (played by Claes Bang from "The Square" and Netflix's Dracula, so you know early on he's dodgy) is called in to help a collecter (played by Jagger in very much a "I'm just popping over from my lake Como house, I'll be back at the end of the movie to wrap things up" way) get a painting from an elusive master (Donald Sutherland playing a sweetie pie). Elizabeth Debicki gets the short straw as Bang's lust interest and she never really gets the full character arc the writing seems to try to convince us she's going to get. It's the usual things about art as a metaphor for truth and forgery and inward honesty and it's all fairly familiar stuff.

Where'd you go, Bernadette?

 This is a weird case of a film that was clearly given funding on the basis of its "white woman disappears in mysterious circumstances, based on a novel" setup, but it avoids most of the cliches of the material (except for the plot largely involving the super-wealthy-and-with-lots-of-free-time and an undertone of suburban satire) in order to look more deeply into the personal milleau of a woman whose life has slipped out of her grasp while she wasn't looking. It's a bit messy, with the tone somewhere between broad satire and personal neurotic drama, but I liked the vibe of it, particularly the specific take on Seattle's aspirational tech class and the climax (presaged early on so it's not a spoiler) in Antarctica.

Waves

 Story of a young black high school athlete and the tensions that build up with him to a dramatic act - odd structure means that the climax sorta lands around 60% of the way through the movie and the swerve that follows ends up being, inevitably, anti-climactic. But there's true film-making verve shown here, with committed performances throughougt (okay, maybe Lucas Hedges is the whitest of all white boys when he shows up during the back half of the movie, but he's engaged) and vigorous use of montage and virtiuoso filmmaking. Captures the attention and does not let go, though the back 40% is a bit WTF.

Bellbird

 Nice enough piece that never really cuts deep into the network of damage between three different kiwi men. A bit like Hunt for the Wilderpeople without the travel

The Personal History of David Copperfield

 A clever Dickens adaptation taking the disguised-autobiography approach of Dickens original and capturing most of the high points (allowing Patel to step out and narrate and capture the moments in his story as he goes through them) - with a superlative cast of scene-stealers to play the various Dickensian eccentrics. It perhaps slightly downplays the melancholy and melodrama in favour of the comedy and rompish elements, but there's enough there to streamline a very rambling novel into a fairly tight film.

Monos

 A group of young soldiers in a rebel gang in the mountains of Columbia are left in charge of a hostage and a cow - nobody comes out very well. This is sorta a lord-of-the-flies but with military indoctrination preceding it - it's a great delve into a world wildly unlike my own, where the kids operate entirely by their own set of not-too-sensible rules and shifting alliances, surviving inhospitable circumstances and each other as best they can. Inevitably in a largely child-and-teen cast, not all of them register entirely as characters, but those that do work well.

Bloodshot

Mildly avoids being by the numbers by virtue of ... doing the by the numbers thing for the first twenty minutes before putting a twist in there. It does mean that the opening still feels super-cliched, and the twist only ends up improving things a little. Vin does his Vin thing down to spending a chunk of time in a white singlet, the supporting cast mostly gets not-a-lot to do, and the fight sequences sometimes feel quite messy (though the ending battle has a few good bits). This is at least pushing a little beyond the usual nonsense, even if it doesn't always get there.

Queen and Slim

This is an interesting near-miss for me - there's an interesting vibe between the two leads, set up as two people on a date that is probably not going to go anywhere, until a police encounter sees them stuck together on the run. There's an intriguing sense that the two of them are non-mythic people who are suddenly being caught up in something a lot bigger than themselves, and the performances of Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith in the leads really do centre this well. But there are sequences that drag a bit, and the fact that until near the end they're not really running towards anything so much as just "away" does mean that there isn't quite the plot-engine underlying everything to keep things moving - sequences sometimes play as seperate bits that rise or fall on their own energy rather than part of an overall film.

Dark Waters

This is familiar oscar bait but elevated just a tiny bit by Todd Haynes direction. Even if we haven't seen the specific DuPont water poisoning movie before, we've definatley seen the lawyer from the corporate side of the world finding a cause to believe in, fighting it in the face of his partners and even his own wife - his slick city values contrasted with the victims country innocence. Except this takes the demonstration of water poisoning far further than most of those - we see the illnesses and mutations dead on - and we see the mental effects this begins to have on the lawyer in the middle. And there's a deliberate attempt to show just how long and stretched out this case ends up being (material cover about 15 years, with title cards covering a further five). Anne Hathaway's wife character is trapped by the cliches, she does attempt to fight a little against them but .. well, she's 15 years younger than Ruffalo, and ends up having all the standard "wife tries to stop the male lead from doing what the movie is about" stuff that should be permanently retired but somehow still isn't.

Military Wives

A just-about-strong-enough version of British-inspirational-film by numbers, in this case about the wives left behind at a base while their partners are serving in Afghanistan. It never entirely reckons with the tougher elements of the material, although it seems apparent if the script wanted to go there then Kristin Scott-Thomas and Sharon Horgan absolutely could make it happen - but instead the strange culture of a military base where the wives somehow inherit the rank of their husbands in social positioning only really gets a surface-level examination. The singing is beautiful, Scott-Thomas does the stiff-upper-lip-concealing-acres-of-pain thing well, and Horgan is reasonable given the underwritten character she's left with (none of her struggles really feel like very big struggles, and her multiple subplots kinda just pile up rather than informing one another). Yet it still pays in an inspirational finale.

Honeyland

This is an intriguing documentary, done with no commentary and through just observing a honey gatherer in a small Macedonian village, and how her business is affected by new arrivals with a different philosophy. I must admit this wasn't quite up my alley - it takes its time to draw things together, and, in all honesty, I do feel that this might be open to accusations of not playing entirely fair with its subject (in particular, the father of the family of new arrivals never really gets a balanced portrait, it seems if there was any footage of him not behaving like an arsehole, it never got used). But I appreciate the underlying metaphor and the time and dedication taken - even if I don't utterly love this.

The Invisible Man

A clever look at the oft-told tale, this version completely forgrounds the experience of our invisible douchebag's victim, played by Elizabeth Moss - first seen fleeing his house, we get the creeping sense that he hasn't left her behind (despite his apparent death), as strange experiences start to pile up. Director Leigh Whannel is one of those, formerly known best as a screenwriter, who knows how to bring a strong visual sense to the table, and this one is great at letting long lingering shots play out as we are constantly disconcerted by what we can't see. The build up to vicious mayhem is ratcheted carefully, with Moss' post-traumatic figure surviving worsening odds, with a suitably bold finale. This is excellent work well worth catching.

Honey Boy

This is slightly like watching someone else's therapy with the names mildly changed. Shia LeBoef wrote and stars in this story of a child actor whose relationship with his father is best described as "mixed" - he's the sole source of income for his father (as dad chaperones him on film sets) and his dad is his main role model (LeBoef plays the dad). We know this didn't go well as we're also introduced to a twenty-something version of the kid as he goes through his third try at rehab, attempting to process this (Lucas Hedges is good if slightly miscast as he matches neither with the kid playing his younger self nor looks particularly Jewish, which dialogue establishes this kid is). It results in a visually impressive and heartfelt film that, if it never really tries to deal with a fully rounded plot, exposes something raw and moving.

Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears

Reasonable nonsense without ever really transcending its TV origins, this knows what the audience is here for (basically, Essie Davis looking fabulous in a bunch of different outfits dropping bon mots and solving crimes) and gives us as much of it as possible (she gets through four costume changes in the first ten minutes). It's at least partially aware of its own absurdity, but the actual plot tends to drag just a bit as the mix of ancient curses and British skullduggery in and around 1929 Palestine never really adds up to anything particularly special. There's not a lot around Davis to really get invested in (even Miriam Margoyles, usually a guaranteed scene stealer, doesn't get much to do), though there is a lot of period charm in the sets and costumes. Still mostly enjoyable.

The Call of the Wild

A reasonable example of a dog-story (and frankly, I'm glad the dog looks a little CGI stylized - films with real looking dogs going through these kinda stunts make me uneasy as I worry about how many dogs got hurt or maimed along the way). While the plot is largely an odd collection of incidents as Buck goes from pampered judge's dog to Sled Dog to Harrison Ford's Best Friend, there's some decent moments along the way, along with a collection of weird stuff (including getting Bradley Whitford in a Southern-style-mansion-with-slaves that inevitably invokes "Get Out", and Dan Stevens channeling the soul of late-period Cary Elwes as a foppish villain). Harrison Ford's narration plays like the narrative blu-tack that it is, though when he's actually on screen he's not nearly as sleepy as he is in voice over (he does appear to enjoy being round CGI the Dog). And it's touching and adorable and probably has no resemblance to anything that's actually happened in nature or any theories of animal behaviour ever, but I still mostly enjoyed it.

Fantasy Island

Look, in many ways this is a mediocre horror movie stapled onto a pre-existing property (the 1970s anthology-by-stealth series where various guest stars experienced "be careful what you wish for" fates on a weekly basis). This time Michael Pena takes over the Montalban mantle, keeping suitably mysterious as our master of ceremonies, with a bunch of middling actors mostly with CW backgrounds as the guests, And yeah, this is, to a certain extent, gory soap opera - but dammit, I liked that in the late 90s and I like it now. There are a tonne of dumb twists piling up here, and I can't guarantee some character behaviour makes a lot of sense ... but never the less, I didn't actually hate this, for reasons that probably say more about me than they do about the movie.

Emma

This is a pretty solid Jane Austen adaptation with a bit of wit, romance and, yep, a random butt shot early on (apparently someone wanted to up the stakes on the Colin Firth Wet-Flouncy-shirt scene from the BBC Pride and Prejudice). There's strong visual style and enjoyment of the period, though it does take a while for this to really settle into being fun - the set-up of so many characters and side plots does take a while (and this doesn't top "Clueless" in getting that out of the way early). Anna Taylor-Joy enjoys a chance to do British snobbery for a bit, Johnny Flynn is damn good looking as the leading man type she's going to end up with, Bill Nighy kinda steals every scene he's in with sardonic side glances. Once it's settled into its groove this pays off pretty reasonably for those looking for a period romp.

Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)

Enjoyable but shallow, this uses some of the style of "Suicide Squad" in a far more coherent manner. While it's got the standard shopping bag of requirements most superhero movies seem to have (further adventures of one antihero, introducing three more new heroes, a sidekick and two villains), this pulls it off reasonably well. While a lot of the early-movie adventures do slightly lack an individual style (only the nightclub scenes really get a decent set, and everything else feels a little like it's on a generic street scene backlot), the last act finds an enjoyable way to stage action scenes (with fights that actually feel weighty and violent, rather than the usual airless scrapping and posing). Robbie's very much at the centre and manages to keep Harley on the right side of manic pixie psychotic, with Rosie Perez getting most of the serious plotting, Ewan McGregor getting to be a sleazy bad guy and Mary Elizabeth Winstead largely being enigmatic for most of the movie before being hilariously straightfaced to the rest of the nutso shenanigans. This isn't top flight stuff, and it probably is going to suffer from being a little too violent for family audiences, but for those of you who want a female led action movie, this does pretty darn well.

The Peanut Butter Falcon

A gentle piece, this has a little bit of a 90s-Sundance-Movie feeling, a story of three people on a road trip - in this case, led by a 22 year old with Downs syndrome determined to escape from the nursing home he's been stuck in since he has no other family - meeting up along the way with a lonely seafood thief and the carer who's meant to bring him back. There's a very sweet nature to this one - while it's a little unlikely in some places, and the ending is, to say the least, abrupt (the climax reaches the right heights, but the following scene-and-a bit leave us a bit "that's it"?) the journey along the way pays off. Including a very strong cast (La Boef proves to be quite a resoanable actor when not having to talk to giant robots exclusively, Zack Gottsagen is a great presence, and such performers as Bruce Dern and John Hawkes are, frankly, slightly overqualified for what the film needs from them but nevertheless give solid background - Dakota Johnston is the one member of the lead trio who feels underwritten). So it's a reasonably enjoyable flick

Seberg

This never quite finds its focus between a more general biopic of Jean Seberg and a more focussed look at the FBI surveilance program that acted to shame her for financially supporting the Black Panthers. Part of it is that the film keeps on going over to a fictional FBI agent (played by Jack O'Connell), who begins to feel conflicted about the FBI's treatment of Seberg (it's never a conflict we feel particularly compelled by). Part of it is that the acting side of Seberg's career keeps on being pushed off to the side (we're introduced to her about to make the utterly ridiculous film "Paint your Wagon", but we never get to see more than a little bit of an audition for the film, and while there's reference to her being in the cheesy disaster movie "Airport", again, we never get to see any of it). Kristen Stewart doesn't really get a character to play so much as a series of political attitudes and emotional breakdowns. The recreation of the late 60's looks pretty good, and there's moments with Anthony Mackie and Zazie Beets where the film looks like it might actually engage with the Black Panthers as an organisation, but they mostly feel like mild background to a story of an actress and a Fed. And it's a bit blah.

A Hidden Life

Terrence Malick's move from film-making recluse to suddenly becoming a dynamo of productivity has not been an unalloyed joy - much of his recent filmography has felt like self indulgences without much of a plot motivator. This one at least has a reasonable amount of story (although, yes, it is stretched across a three hour running time, and it's not exactly a speedy piece of storytelling). But at this point in his career, Malick is more interested in scenery than he is in people, and this tale of refusal to go along with the Nazis without actually actively taking action against them does feel a tad mild. It is gorgeously shot, and the Austrian scenery is wonderful to behold. And this is a film that manages to give a fair bit of space to the wife left behind once Franz is imprisoned, as she continues to try to maintain the farm with him gone in the face of a town that has turned its back on both of them. This isn't quite what I rush out to the cinema to see, but for what it is, it's pretty good at doing what it intends to do.

Underwater

This is kinda spectacularly dumb action/horror, but with a bit more to reward it than a lot of films dumped into a January slot. For starters, it doesn't mess around with exposition - the characters are under threat pretty much from minute two of the film, and it doesn't let up much until the finale. The action does occasionally get a bit incoherent, and there are one or two annoying or underwritten characters (TJ Miller, who seems to be in this movie largely because it was shot in 2017 and has been hanging around waiting for release, and people weren't completely sick of him back then), and a few too many excuses to get the cast into their underwear, but Kristen Stewart is pretty engrossing as a lead and there is a nice build to a suitably bonkers finale (plus Jessica Henwick gets a fair bit to do in support). So if you're looking for a reasonable monsterthon, this may tick a box or two.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood

A zen parable about finding emotional stability through the story of an investigative journalist assigned to write about a beloved children's entertainer, this uses the device to ensure anything that could possibly be irritating or feel disingenuous about Mr. Rogers is immediately disarmed by seeing him through the eyes of someone very disenchanted. There's a deliberate stylalisation all the way through that helps, and I do think Matthew Rhys leads the film quite solidly as the viewpoint character (Hanks uses his "everybody's dad" air to good effect in the role, though dammit I wish that the script had avoided him using the word "Toy" - it's so associated with Woody that it can't help throw me out for a coupla seconds). And Heller really knows how to connect with damaged broken protagonists. Well worth seeing.

Just Mercy

This is a bit "exactly what you expect it to be", down to the big speech to congress at the end, but as this sorta thing goes ("failed oscar bait", basically), it's not altogether a writeoff. Michael B. Jordan and Jaime Foxx are quite solid in the leads as crusading lawyer and death row inmate respectively, Brie Larson is underused as Jordan's paralegal (she's basically there so he can have someone to talk to outside of prison), and Tim Blake Nelson steals the couple of scenes he's in. The one execution sequence, though, is very effective. If it's seldom surprising, it's at least reasonably solid at being unsurprising.

Bombshell

This is reasonably acted, and has a couple of decently impactful scenes. However ... the three-headed protagonists never really feel more than three different movies going on in parallel (they never really interract as much as they feel like they should), there's some vague attempts at mixing narrative style towards the beginning (as Theron playing Kelly provides opening exposition in the style of a newspiece, walking and talking through the sets) which falls away pretty quickly, it doesn't quite find a central storytelling motor (Kelly feels like she's carrying most of it, except that her mid-film run of not being sure whether or not to speak up about it never feels particularly dynamic), and the gotcha-ending of the Kidman story feels a little cheaply unearned. Robbie's story as a sorta symbolic "every-victim" does have moments when it feels a little exploitative (I'm not entirely convinced we needed the lifted-skirt shot during her confrontation with Alles), more a collection of "traits this character needs to have" than an actual individual. And in a film with at least five Australian cast members, two of whom share a scene with him, Malcolm McDowell's Australian accent as Murdoch could be a whole lot better. There's an obvious reason why this story is being told now (it's topical and Alles is very happily dead and unable to sue), but this doesn't really feel like much depth has been applied.

The Biggest Little Farm

This is a nice piece, albeit something that does suffer a bit from clearly being a propoganda/promo piece for the filmmakers. Looking at a couple of years running a farm (by an ex-Animal-Planet cameraman and his food-blogger wife), as they commit to running a biodiverse operation in an attempt to renew the soil and stay running. And the footage of the animals, in particular, is great (as it should be, since, well, filming animals was the guy's job) - and it's good to get an understanding of the complexities of working in a biodiverse way, as getting the interconnections to work takes some doing - although we never really get a firm sense on where all the bonus helpers our two leads seem to have really come from (there's supposedly only two employees, but they seem to have a lot more people coming around - are they using volunteers, casual labour, how is this actually working?).

And due to the fact they haven't actually gone bankrupt at this point, our lead duo do tend to pat themselves on the back a bit for their various wise decisions - many of which do kinda look a bit like luck rather than good judgement. And some of the narration waxes a bit too philosophical, and I'm not a huge fan of the animated-exposition early on, which can come across as cutesy and a bit smug. But for all of those complaints, this pans out pretty reasonably, albeit inevitably self-promotingly.

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon

This is a nice return to form from Aardman - it's very silly but quite enjoyable - no dialogue, lots of entertaining silent gags, some playing with sci-fi tropes and a couple of fun injokes. No, it's not particularly deep, and Shaun as a hero is a bit of a douchebag occasionally (particularly to the long-suffering dog), but damnnit if this isn't charming.

1917

This manages to power through what is a fairly simple narrative (two guys are sent on a mission to get a message to the front line, and we follow them across various encounters on the way) with a lot of bravura filmmaking as it gives the impression of being shot in virtually real time with no apparent cuts.  And moment to moment it's pretty gripping (particularly the almost surreal-looking french town sequence) - though I don't think there's really a lot of depth to the characters, so much as just "people we just happen to follow" - even the various well known actors who show up to meet our heroes along the way don't really get a lot to do (the only one who, for me, really lands is Andrew Scott early on as a particularly disillusioned Lieutenant). It's a solid movie to experience in a theatre, I just don't know that it'll survive home viewing particularly.

The Gentlemen

Guy Ritchie comes back to the crime genre, a little older and a little rusty. There's a lot of familiar tics here, together with one or two decent performances (Hugh Grant has a lot of fun as a most unrelaible narrator, and Colin Farrell again shows he's always more interesting when he's Irish). But there's also somewhat stiff turns from McConneghey and Hunnam, and while the plot never really goes completely off the rails (although it gets pretty dicey both with some gratuitous racism and a not-particularly great role for Michelle Dockery) it's more a familiar bunch of genre exercises rather than anything particularly new or fresh.

Little Women

A rock solid interpretation of the classic novel, while at the same time interrogating a couple of the assumptions underneath it. It's funny, emotional and gorgeously constructed - the parallel timelines as it moves back in forth use some of the novel's repetitive nature to reflect on and parallel itself, as the four March sisters face up to the challenges of life during the Civil War and in the post war period, as their four different talents (writing, art, acting and piano) either find places of expression or become subsumed under other sides of life. Acting standouts from the always reliable Saroise Ronan and Florence Pugh plus a great introduction for me to Eliza Scanlan who, in one scene, brought me to tears. Major work from a major talent.