Top ten of 2021

A list of ten films I really liked that released in Australia in 2021 in Cinemas and I got a chance to see. Noting there are a couple of films that may be worthy that I didn't see this year due to release dates, and some of the films I'm listing came out overseas in 2020, never the less they count as 2021 releases for my purposes. For what it's worth, I saw 235 films this year, 135 new ones, 100 old ones. I'd rate 199 of them as "good". You can read the full reviews of all of them on letterboxd at https://letterboxd.com/simbot/films/reviews/

Another Round - An illustration of four men in midlife crisis attempting to deal with their lost youth through irresponsible behavior, with a great climactic final scene showing off Mads Mikklesen and his amazing legs.

Firestarter: The Story of Bangarra - a really great movie about a family, a culture and a movement - capturing modern dance and fame and its effect on three brothers. It's a really engrossing story with captivating dance footage and a real heart to it. 

Lapsis - A look at the modern gig-culture world through a sci-fi lens that has a specific unique look as it deals with the encroachment of big business on our lives and the increasing mechinisation of human beings.

Malignant - Probably the nuttiest left turn of a film this year, probably only the last third really belongs on this list but the last third was so much fun that it drags the film onto my list despite the somewhat laboured setup. It's one of those "you just have to see it to believe it" kinda films. 

Minari - A sweet family tale of finding a place in the world and holding onto it, as a Korean family moves to a small rural town and tries to establish their place, it's gentle, funny and a great outpouring of soul. 

Pig - Nicholas Cage only occasionally makes great movies - too often he's overacting in films that never really use his talents correctly. But in this case he's happened upon a solid script and has shaped his performance enough to give space to the rest of the performers around him - lifting Adam Arkin and Alex Wolff into strong performers rather than just sidelines to his main attraction. It's a great old-fashioned noir storyline in an unusual setting, and is incredibly pleasurable.

Riders of Justice - A really great look at the "old guy revenge" movie through giving space to the nerdy guys doing the research, thoroughly delightful. Although eventually Mads Mikklesen ends up busting up bad guys, it's not entirely a film in love with retribution so much as finding support structures around you.

Summer of Soul, or when the revolution could not be televised - A great doco about a period that's been visited a lot, from an angle that hasn't been seen much - the late sixties music scene through the eyes of African Americans, and the culture that surrounded them. 

Tick Tick ... Boom! - This is a particularly-me-kinda film - I'm aware the extreme earnestness of a 29 year old white guy declaring "I'm the future of American Theatre" is something that most people are going to find slap-worthy, but ... well, I was 23 and just leaving university when I first heard "Rent" and it kinda captured my heart before my brain had a chance to intervene. And this captured my heart too, particularly with Andrew Garfield's no-shame-whatsoever performance and the great capturing of the location and era. 

Titane - A wild pleasure, bringing us into a character who seems wildly unhinged and a situation that's somewhat absurd, and making us care about them and their choices - it's eventually almost a family bonding story through some very weird methods. 

Near Misses (just outside the top 10) - Luca, Supernova, The lost Daughter

Least Loved - A Call To Spy, Creation Stories; Every Breath You Take; Occupation: Rainfall

New To Me Favourites - Black Book, Black Narcissus, Chunking Express

New To Me Favourites (Insanely Fun but ridiculous edition) - Man's Best Friend. 

Swan Song

A nice small-scale story of the last era of gay men in a small country town, as an unashamedly flamboyant hairdresser sets out on one last mission. It's a bit rambling and sentimental but it's delightful

The Matrix Ressurections

A fun inventive sequel that acknowledges that it's going back to the well but finds rationalisation for why to do that, including playing with the questions of systems of control that the original trilogy did, and progressing the society within the piece to a more complexly intersectional one (the same way the star trek follow ups have, in fact!) Also nice to realise people over 50 can still be damn attractive! 

The Lost Daughter

 A strong film about a woman trying to keep her intellectual integrity after motherhood, almost the anti-Bluey in how nightmarish it makes the continual catering for a child's demands. Also features great daggy Ed Harris dancing (to a music cue semi ruined by featuring in a McDonald's commercial before the movie), and Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman doing a great job of matching accent and character despite never really looking much like one another

Don't Look Up

 The overstuffed with celebrities comedy often suffers from not being all that funny, often due to casting leads that aren't that funny. This has its moments but mostly falls flat, due to a combination of cynicism and rage never really feeling very grounded - Dicaprio is our apparent lead but he's never very endearing. There's a couple of decent moments including a signature weird Mark Rylance performance, Care Blanchett being a botoxed Dorothy Parker type and Challumet being quite endearingly weird, and the pay-off tag is delightful but ultimately the film wants to be directed by Armando Ianucci or Chris Morris

Spiderman: No Way Home

 A big scale epic combining 2 previous Tom Holland movies with elements of the previous cinematic attempts going back to 2002, with side elements of other bits of the MCU, in a slightly sprawling adventure that interrogates superhero morality, provides thrills and spills and spectacle and hits a couple of emotional elements plus has one joke that only I laughed out loud at but I feel good about myself for laughing at it.

Monsterfest 2021 recap

 For obvious pandemic-related reasons I've not been able to go to Fantastic fest for the last two years. So instead I've been substituting with MonsterFest - last year, I did a weekend in Sydney, this year I did the whole damn thing in Melbourne. It's sorta a bit Fantastic Fest's blokier brother - leaning very much on the horror/thriller side of things with a love of splatter, make-your-own-special-effects and backyard creation, but it comes with its own charms. In particular a lot of the films are small scale passion projects, often shot with friends and family, and rely on the virtues of script and performance over effects and flash to achieve their effects. Not all of them have spectacular scripts or performances, some just have eccentric ideas, but all of them have heart and soul to them. 

Weirdly enough for me the highlights were the retro screenings - the other 80's BMX movie, "Rad", which combined on-bicycle-ballet, an underdog-against-big-business storyline, Ray Walston channeling Mr Hand from Fast Times and a lot of pre-Whispering-Jack-John-Farnham for an enjoyable romp; 1970s "Flesh For Frankenstein", a nutty combination of monster creation, necrophilia, incest and special effects organs by the guy who created ET, and "Man's Best Friend", a 90s killer-dog movie that gives us an Ally Sheedy performance that feels carried over from Short Circuit and a lot of goofy surprises. 

Elsewhere, there were a lot of passion projects in there - some small scale and intelligent, like "Hellbinder" or "Apparitions", both simple horror stories told well (though both were somewhat subject to a little bit of logic that fell apart once you thought about the plot a little bit), some somewhat incomprehensible like Phil Tippet's long-brewing "Mad God".  In general it was good to see the heart and soul that went into these pieces, most of which are unlikely to go on to multi-millions and success but which are likely to be remembered with affection and love. 

Encanto

A strong cartoon about magic, family and growing responsibilities

The French Dispatch

 

It's a charming attempt to replicate mid 20th century literary culture and as such it isn't perhaps Anderson's most purely cinematic piece, but it does feel like being doused in erudition for two hours most exhileratingly

Pig

 A strong execution of a premise which could easily be shallow or silly. Cage plays emotionally deep and subtle and gets the best out of his scene partners, particularly Woolf and Arkin

Zola

 A dive into the overlap between modern internet culture and sex work and how the use of it damages two young women

Dune

 A sensible blockbusterisation of around 50% of the novel, with some stunning visuals, Jason Mamoa cleaning up his beard, lots of explosions and only occasional nods to the weirdness underlying the material. Looks gorgeous but feels like it's holding a lot back for part 2

Annette

 A big romantic opera about art, fame, jealousy and murder - a few too many of the songs tend towards repetitive recitative but between Caraxs inventive visuals and the performances of Driver, Cottilard and Helberg this still plays wonderfully and surprisingly

Titane

 Another film of extremes from the director of Raw, whereas that built to compulsion and insanity this starts there and finds other ways to develop. Striking, intense, emotional and goddamn weird, this is compelling and astounding.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

 A film reminiscent of sbs' entire late night line up of the 90s - it combines graphic sexual images with a political comedy that is very much specifically Romanian- there's a weird mix of provocative imagery and dead screen time as our lead wanders around Bucharest, and there's too many ideas to write this off completely, but I'm not recommending this to anyone either as fap material or entertainment

Venom: Let there be Carnage

 I enjoyed this one - yes, it's Tom Hardy being self-indulgent as hell but in a way that doesn't appear to involve actively abusing the director or his fellow cast members, and it's structured weird in that you feel like you're into the grand finale before you've really had a chance to have a movie yet, but it's the kinda film it'd be fun to make fun of on the couch during it. Yes, there is no sensible reason for Michelle Williams to be in this beyond money (same goes for Stephen Graham except that Stephen Graham probably put the money for this into "Boiling point"), and Woody Harrelson is making a doomed attempt to go bigger than Tom Hardy in a film that Tom Hardy co-wrote, and the plot is barely more than "here's one, here's another, let's bash them together a lot", the action scenes are pretty much just random pixels flying at one another, but it's pretty fleet of foot, it winds down Eddie Brock's douchebag side a lot (he just still rides a motorcycle annoyingly, popping wheelies every three seconds), and it is the somewhat disreputable sleazy cousin to the MCU's goody-goody-two-shoes.

The Rescue

 A really good solid storytelling documentary combining talking heads, file footage, re-enactments and computer simulations to tell the story of the rescue of the soccer team caught in a cave in Thailand- covers both the spiritual beliefs of the Thai people and the requirements of a largely amateur set of cave divers (because cave diving is not a professional body), dealing with extraordinary situations with skill and humility. Really gripping even when you've just watched a talking head of someone who is now telling you how they're going into a dangerous situation where they've obviously come back out of again.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

 A biopic that somewhat peaks early - while there are delights later in the film, it somewhat gets overwhelmed by following the biography in ways that feel repetitive and spiraling downwards. Enjoyed some of the more eccentric casting choices with Richard Ayoade, Nick Cave, Julian Barrat and Taika Waititi

Boiling Point

 A tense one-shot film as a restaurant undergoes a busy Friday night with staff brought to breaking point with one another. The final image is a choice I don't love but it's a tight film with plenty of interest though I'm sure people with more kitchen knowledge than my "read kitchen confidential five years ago" knowledge would be able to pick holes

No Time to Die

 A big modern style Bond epic, which is to say there's big emotions, gorgeous shooting from Fukanaga, a little bit of continuity overdose, and some messy stuff around the edges. The thing that holds this back is centering a lot of ploy on Lea Seydoux's Madeline Swan without ever giving her a personality that matches the massive amount of plot functions she's asked to bear. As a wrap up of the Craig era it has a lot of the benefits and flaws of his era (the tying everything together just feels like obsessive compulsive cleaning at the expense of feeling like we're doing anything new, the leaving Bonds employment status so casual it seems that over the course of five movies and over a decade and a half he's spent more time out of MI6 than in it), but I'll miss Craig himself and the way his films have their own distinct vibe

Tick, Tick... Boom!

 The fate of the Broadway-musical struck is that sometimes you suspend all critical faculties for something that hits all the right buttons, with complete sincerity. There are undoubtedly issues with the story told here, of a somewhat self-indulgent composer who messes up his relationships with both his best friend and his girlfriend while working on a development workshop for a somewhat befuddling musical about a future based on narcissism. But the sheer sincerity of the storytelling, the Broadway-catnip cameos, the performance of Bradley Whitford as Sondheim playing wise old mentor, all bypass any critical facilities and go straight to the heart.

The Last Duel

 A solidly scripted drama that never feels feels as long as it's running time. Damon writes himself as the Absolute Worst, Driver is opportunist and sleazy, Comer is amazing and Affleck auditions for all of Jeremy Irons old roles, having more fun than he has in ages. Ok, so it's a bit sloppy in giving a sense of the rationale for the various battles Damon goes off to fight, but the focus is right where it should be

Eternals

 Suffers from an overstuffed cast with not enough for them all to do for the running time, and an over focus on the dullest elements, in particular Gemma Chan in a love triangle with two boring Game of Thrones guys. There are some nice elements but I wish they'd given Selma Hayek more to do than be captain Exposition and we'd had a more focussed and characterised film - few of the actors really get a lot interesting to do

Summer of Soul (or when the Revolution could not be televised)

 A great piece of social, political and musical history captured with context, rich performances and deep emotional support -doesn't feel like it ever gets stuck in overly narratising history or relying overly on talking heads because all the talk is good talk and it knows to always bring things back to the music which holds the whole thing together.

Lamb

 A weird and wonderful (if a little slow) story of family through a sorta-fantasy-lens, this goes several strange places and Rapace plays it perfectly throughout just on the edge of totally nuts

Best Sellers

 A nice small scale film with comedy and heart playing with legacies and relationships, using Caine and Plaza's skills well

Last Night in Soho

 Post-Pegg-and-Frost Edgar Wright films need a certain amount of skill in their lead performers to stop from looking like empty technical exercises - something "Baby Driver" suffered from a fair bit. This doesn't suffer as much, largely due to Thomasin McKenzie and Anna Taylor-Joy being much more intriguing to watch than Ansel Elgort and Lily James. It's true that this does suffer a little from some shortcuts in the storytelling (a particular montage of Taylor-Joy only really works because she's able to sell the emotional transition which is getting fairly shallow service in the scripting), but it's stylish and classy and a strong entertainment.

 Insane but delightful, both from the basic conception to the way sequences play out (particularly the monster's weird movement style). James Wan is a guy who rarely goes half measures and in this case it's a feast of retro-enjoyment (down to the vast amount of exposition which is done on VCR tape, which proves easily playable in several locations!)

Candyman

 A proper Candyman movie, which is to say a slightly pretentious slasher, leaning into the pretension by being set partially in the modern art world, with maybe a teensy bit of messy plotting near the end but many effective gore moments

Antlers

 A grimly effective little rural horror story. If elements are familiar, and Graeme Greene has certainly done this "explain Native American Folklore To White People" role before, Keri Russell and Jesse Plemons are a step above the average cast in this kind of thing and the undertones of residual trauma and poverty play out well

Halloween Kills

 Middling, attempts to have an idea about mob justice that is kinda fumbled in the execution, takes a lot of side angles and doesn't really live up even to its immediate predecessor

Riders of Justice

 A goofy mix of revenge action, grief drama and geek comedy in a distinctly Danish way. Mickelson is our action hero aided and abetted by a trio of probability geeks on the titular biker gang responsible for his wifes death

Shang Chi and the Ten Rings

A pretty solid marvel take on Chinese cinema cliches with many grand fight sequences and a Hey There Daddy called Razorfist. Shang Chi himself is a little dull, constantly dragging the film into flashbacks that don't help to flesh out the character so much as just accumulate detail and give us the same dull character played by younger actors. Awkwafina does decent scene stealing and some of the marvel in-references drag the film down slightly (yes the events of Endgame were huge but at this point pretty much every subsequent Marvel product has references to it - time to stop looking back and start looking forward - admittedly this may not have been as much of a problem if original release schedules were followed but at this point we're two and a half years on and still bogged down in this)

The Suicide Squad

 A big scale superhero movie that mocks US military imperialism, a rag-tag collection of marginalised people who manage to succeed, a blood-and-gore-fest, a sequel to a movie that was a bit shit - this manages to be all those and more, juggling several different tones effectively in a entertaining action comedy. It also has John Cena in his jocks with very obvious visible penis line.

Gunpowder Milkshake

 A reasonable action idea elevated by the female cast and by the intensity of some of the action. Still familiar stuff

Old

 M.Night's latest suspense film feels very much like he realised the plot holes as he was writing it but as he'd already cashed the cheque to make it he threw in some bonus lines where characters admit a particular behaviour was dumb but keep right on doing it. It's full of messy jargon dumps to try to sell the premise and low on interesting variations on the premise to keep the audience interested. It's shot quite nicely, including some great use of subjective camera, but that's not enough to save it

Shiva Baby

 An entertaining comedy of extreme embarassment as a young college student goes to a shiva with her Jewish family only to encounter her current lover (complete with wife and child) and an ex-partner. The music gives this a mild horror tinge as the horrendous things pile up for our heroine, and it is very much a "thank goodness it's not you" kind of film.

Nine Days

 This has striking visuals but is a bit rambling on its way through to a powerful final scene. The performers are solid but this does meander a little on the way through. This does have a striking visual sense and an understanding of how to communicate emotionally but I do wish the narrative itself was stronger.

Werewolves within

This is a charming little oddity as a small town ranger is confronted by a possible werewolf and ends up shuttered in with the various weird townspeople. Sam Richardson is a lovely lead with goofy charm and there's a couple of good moments with the quirky townspeople (though there's also a lot of yelling going on). It's a little too in love with goofy twists and there isn't a lot of visible werewolf, but there's a reasonably satisfying ending.

Black Widow

 A clever way of doing an origin story without doing an origin story, by instead doing a "dealing with unfinished business from the origin story" tale, this is entertainment in the marvel manner, meaning that the villainous plot will not make a whole lotta sense while being suitably world endangering, there will be frequent injokes for those who remember the previous films, and it will somehow still be baseline pretty enjoyable anyway. The relationship dynamics between Johannsen, Pugh, Harbour and Weitz are damn entertaining, and as a launching point for Pugh for a wider audience this is pretty damn good. There are undoubtedly quibbles to have here and there, but at this point in my viewing I'm not really up for quibbling, I'm just enjoying the ride.

The Sparks Brothers

 This is a thoroughly entertaining dive into the musical biography genre - Wright has a good visual ability to work his way through the usual mix of clips and interviews with a wide range of admirers and observers to talk about the band in question. There's clever visual choices to bust open the narrative a bit more, and while, yes, it does get a little relentlessly gaggy in the beginning with underlined visual puns, it mostly moves fairly straightforwardly through 50-odd years of musical history with a band that never quite lives in the zeitgeist of their time - they're always either too many steps ahead or, occasionally, just a little too early to start hitting a nostalgia button. It does feel a little overextended at the end rather than hitting a good leaving point and then stopping, but that's a minor complaint on a film that's so damn entertaining to watch.

Escape Room: Tournement of Champions

 This reprise largely picks up the interesting ideas of the previous (an evil conspiracy sets up a number of death traps for various people to compete in), without doing a lot new and interesting with the idea but still playing it very much as well as possible - the various rooms are again the highlights with complicated mechanisms requiring our characters to think their way through the various problems, though I do find this time round the various new characters receive fairly light characterisations, and the ending does feel like the kind of ending that falls apart the closer you look at it. Still, it's a better Saw movie than the last three saw movies, so that's something, with a definite focus on the innocents brought into the traps rather than the trapmakers.

Little Joe

 This is an interesting twist on a somewhat familiar story that I can think of at least three prior official versions of, dealing with a plant with depression-treating properties and the mechanic of getting it to market. It is presented in an interestingly styalised way that does unfortunately tend to flatten a few of the performances (only Kerry Fox as a particularly cantankerous co-worker really stands out), and it builds in an interesting way, even if it's often pretty clear how things are going to work out.

F9: The Fast Saga

 This enjoys being a late period Fast and Furious movie, meaning there's a lot of ridiculous backstory and retcons, including as many elements of the previous movies as possible (this is a series that lets nothing go - there's plot points from a largely disconnected movie 6 films ago, as well as referencing characters whose actors have died but whose character hasn't), there's self-reflective dialogue as Roman and Teej, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the series, debate whether the fact they haven't died from the previous films nonsense means they're now effectively immortal, there's an attempt to set up the Fast and Furious universe's equivalent of Latveria, there's a nonsensical Cardi B cameo, and two characters go to space. It's a little too long and this is the third nonsensical technical mcguffin in a row, but it's playing the formula at full throttle and is suitably enjoyable with all that.

Playing with Sharks: The Valerie Taylor Story

 A bio-documentary of the famous shark-lady, it's assembled from a lot of file footage and interviews and a very little bit of new footage, but the file footage is spectacular stuff and the new footage has a good resolution to it, giving us 50 plus years of underwater investigations with particular focus on the sharks, both how they have been demonised and what Taylor has done to rehabilitate their reputation. Some stunning footage, well chosen interviewees, a look at a unique woman and how an activist is born.

Josee, the Tiger and the Fish

 This is a reasonably okay anime that operates a little too much on the soap-opera level, as a young wannabe marine biologist starts caring for a wheelchair bound girl. There's some decent emotional payoff but some of the plot developments definitely feel contrived, and the female lead has that "yelling a lot" thing that happens a lot in anime. It's not bad but it's not the bet of the genre either.

In the Heights

 This is a charming and beautifully shot exercise, albeit one with a couple of script issues that hold it back from being as wonderful as it could be. The script doesn't really bust out of cliché very much, and often seems to rely on coincidence to allow plot developments to come along, rather than seeding things on a deeper level to pay off later. It's a pity because Chu is a great musical director, coming up with inventive ways to shape scenes all over, and the performers are all great fun to watch. This isn't Miranda's greatest score either but it has pulse and energy to it that keeps things rolling along even when the plot beats are familiar, and it's a delightful emotional experience.

Wrath of Man

 A more sedate Ritchie than usual, this remake of the French film Les Conveyeurs gives us a fairly grim story of a armoured car guard (Statham) with a few secrets on board, and the complicated nature of his relationship with the perpetrators of the attacks on the armoured cars. There's good tense build up, a number of reasonably big-name actors to be red herrings or draw the attention away, and a satisfying final battle. Okay, so Statham is a bit too limited an actor to really sell the emotional turmoil which is supposedly going on beneath him, but the film still works fairly well.

Lapsis

 A great low-budget "scifi that's not-so-secretly-about-the-flaws-of-capitalism", looking at the exploitative nature of the gig economy through a complex cabling program and a new arrival to the system finding out the complexities and challenges that arise. There's a good mix of performers, mostly unfamiliar faces, some interesting twists and turns in the narrative and a solid resolution, plus gorgeous upstate New York scenery throughout giving it a feel unlike most sci-fi. Good think-material.

A Quiet Place Part II

 A fine sequel, taking the characters and situation set up in the first one in logical progression, pushing Millicent Simmonds into more of a lead action role, and presenting several new challenges to our post-apocalyptic family and those they find along the way (along with the same freaky monster things). There's good intercutting of the various perils, tight structure and very few uses of the stupid stick. If it doesn't entirely wrap the storyline, it does at least leave it in a place that feels a lot like resolution. The only negative is that Djimon Honsou has pretty much a nothing role, with nota lot of time between being introduced and being killed.

The Godmother (aka Mama Weed)

 An unusual Huppert movie in that she's somewhat overwhelmed by circumstances early in the film - a widowed Arabic translator whose financial struggles to keep her mother in a decent nursing home find relief when she finds a connection between her mother's lovely nurse and the subject of a police investigation. Huppert is not normally an actress who appears to particularly care how likably she comes across, so this kind of charming caper movie is a delightful diversion in her filmography- full of twists and turns. It is very much a "safe for your mum" drug dealing movie, but that's no bad thing in my book

My name is Guliplili

 This is a bit messily assembled - David Gulpilil talking about his career and life in his own words. The well-worn anecdotal nature of some of the stories is highlighted by cutting between current interviews and gulpilil performing them onstage decades ago, and the main new material is seeing the relationship between David and his carer, which is sweet but not quite enough to hold it all together

Mortal Kombat

 A fun reboot of the based-on-a-video-game series, this combines a lot of ludicrous lore with suitably outlandish characters finding various reasons to punch each other in preparations for a tournament (said tournament not appearing in this movie). The fights are mostly pretty fun, the lore is convoluted but mostly reasonably enjoyable, and the violence quota is suitably high. This is mostly about delivering familiar stuff in a new package, but it does that okay. Also I did pretty well at spotting the three Australian actors with small roles, but less well at spotting the two Australian voice actors.

Spiral from the book of Saw

 This is an improvement on the last attempt to bring "Saw" back, by virtue of feeling vaguely relevant and like it's enaged in its characters rather than being a dull rehash of the best bits, though it still suffers from extended flashbacks-that-you've-already-seen and a villain who's supposed to be a surprise but who feels way too obvious. The thematic look at police corruption is pretty good (although the line "Jigsaw never killed cops" is .. um, not particularly accurate), Chris Rock is not so great at the dramatic moments, Samuel L. Jackson clearly only signed up for a few days but makes them count, and it mostly works as a middling entry without all the convolutions of the later plots that turned the series into extremely gory soap opera. I enjoyed this while making the mental modifications for this just being a regular old saw movie

Cliff Walkers

 This is a beautiful looking 1930s Chinese spy thriller, with old-fashioned cars and suits and so much snow.... but unfortunately the plot feels a tad incomprehensible, with a lot of fairly undercharacterised people running around trying to find out who's betraying who. It's almost worth watching for the look, but the content just isn't there.

First Cow

 There's the core of a good idea in this, but it's all dealt with a little too slowly and with not enough investment in the characters to make them interesting. The basic concept, an odd kinda heist movie involving milk, is sound, although a lot of how it plays out requires too many characters to be stupid when it's convenient to the plot, and the central relationship isn't ever really warm enough to make us care how it ends up playing out.

The Mole Agent

 Suffers slightly from being an investigative documentary that never quite pulls out a particularly big surprise during the investigation - the main attraction is the charm of the main investigator, who's pretty darn charming, though, while I don't necessarily want to watch a lot of elder abuse, it's still a bit disappointing that there's nothing really here after the setup.

The Unholy

 This is familiar material lifted by being acted and played out really well - Jeffrey Dean Morgan in particular is a great sleazy journalist protagonist dealing with demonic forces in the face of potential miracles in a small Massachusetts town. Also strong support from William Sadler, although there is also the prospect of Cary Elwes playing a catholic priest with a Boston accent - I'm not sure he should ever be given an accent apart from british

Land

 It's a beautiful looking film and Wright is surprisingly good at directing a film where for a lot of the length she's the only actor on screen, but it does suffer a bit from leaving the backstory to the last five minutes. But the relationship that forms between Wright and Bichar is the heart and soul of the film and Bichar definitely sells his material.

Every Breath You Take

 This is a weird relic of a film, sorta feeling like it would fit in better with that block of 90s thrillers where a "normal" family gets involved with an outsider who trys to destroy them - in this case, the revenge is on a pretty awful psychiatrist (Affleck) by a relative of one of his patients who's just committed suicide. Of course, the revenge goes through both his wife and his daughter, who both fall for Sam Claiflin's ridiculously transparent performance - I remember that Michelle Monaghan used to be in good movies, but it seems like she's aged out of casting agent's attention. Claiflin has never really impressed me very much and in this he's one of the more boring cinematic psychos of all time. In general this is really kinda dull and pointless.

Raya and the Last Dragon

 This is kinda like watching an entire season of Avatar the Last Airbender in one hit, albiet one that's more Thai inspired than most, For me, that's kinda a good thing because I like this big scale adventure movie, very much female led (there's no substantial love story in here distracting things, and the male roles are all relatively minor). It's a generous, open exciting story with many different environments to explore and an entertaining heart and soul to it.

Ascendant

 This is the definition of deeply middling. It's a reasonable idea - a thriller in a lift as a girl is isolated, tortured by regular descents and mocked on a videoscreen by the dubious Russian bad guy who's kidnapped her dad. Except this keeps on ducking out for overly-expisitory flashbacks and doesn't quite have the confidence to stick to its simple setup - meaning that there's a lot of dangling threads left when the film is finished - I must admit I'm getting annoyed with films that seem to leave key exposition out and claiming it's setup for an unlikely-to-happen sequel. Still, it's got a couple of decent visuals, some reasonable performances here and there and hey, it's Australian, so I'm very slightly proud of it anyway?

Creation Stories

A bit of a shambles, this feels like the bad version of 24 Hour Party People - it's not quite got as interesting a protagonist as PArty People, and it never really finds an interesting structure to hang on to - there's interesting underlying material about material success versus integrity in the music industry, and how it can drip away as power is apparently closer, but it never quite rounds up. There's also imagery from a bunch of different films (DAnny Boyle seems to be a producer largely so he can't sue for ripping off Trainspotting), and it never really finds a reason to make Alan McGee interesting, despite trying to throw in Alistair Crowley and Malcolm McClaren as side characters, it doesn't find a reason for them to really be there

Supernova

 A touching story of two long-term lovers who are being torn apart by the encroaching dementia of one of them. Firth and Tucci have a lived-in-relationship feel of people who have an easiness between them, and their journey as they travel through the lakes district of England to catch up with family on the way to a concert by Firth is full of affection, confrontation and ultimate heartbreak - the last line of dialogue in the film lugged tears out of me. Also looks gorgeous - there's a shot of the English countryside that looks painted.

Collective

A really solid narrative documentary that follows the story of what happens after a fire into a complete indictment of corruption, cronyism and disaster within the Romanian hospital system. There's great unrolling of the story, including a mid-film twist from outside the system into the centre of the system, and shows what the struggles are in a country trying to deal with visceral ugly politics and corruption, and how such things stay enshrined for so long.

Nobody

 Bob Odenkirk's turn at being Liam Neeson in another "old white guy" action movie - this time, a suburban husband who's secretbadassness emerges after a house robbery - the film does a few swerves, bringing in an entire side-set of Russian douchebags for Odenkirk to smash through when it becomes clear the original house robbers aren't going to be able to sustain the length - and this does play more as a mid-life-crisis fantasy played out, down to and including the surprise emergence of Christopher Lloyd as his dad and another secretbadass. It still suffers slightly from Connie Neilsen's wife character being a cipher (indeed, the entire family, in particular the douchey son, are pretty much ciphers), the Russians being a tad too goofy to function as real threats, and some self-indulgence, but it's still pretty solid largely due to Odenkirk's ability to play exhausted irritation.

Godzilla vs Kong

 This is very much what it says on the tin - it works better than some of the previous monsterverse films in that it's not indulgent about the human stuff (even Skull Island, which had the best human stuff by virtue of having three great supporting actors with Jackson, Reilly and Goodman, still managed to give Brie Larson and Tom Hiddleston almost nothing to do) and it knows what you've come for. There's still ridiculous pseudoscience, and things that make no sense (why are people still running around the streets of Hong Kong in the finale rather than getting to shelter, and why is the neon still on except because it looks really cool when Kong and Godzilla are lit by it?) It also doesn't overextend its welcome too much, wrapping up pretty quickly after the last big fight. It feels big and exciting and fun in a way that a lot of wannabe epics never quite succeed in doing.

The Father

 An exercise in tension as we see through Hopkins unreliable narrator eyes the events of his mental decline, as people around him become more uncertain and his hold on reality becomes increasingly tenuous - how this effects his daughter and others around him. It does bear its theatrical origins a little with some slightly overly-rich phrasing in dialogue, but the performances of Hopkins and Colman absolutely hold it together.

Chaos Walking

 Okay but a bit muddled sf story of a planet where men's thoughts are visible - never quite gets good use out of its central device and winds up feeling a bit flat

White Riot

 There's a better doco to be made about the rock against racism movement than this one, which disappears into the backroom a little too much much and basically drops dead after the late 70s, with not a lot of follow up on what's come since. Still some interesting moments, but mostly a missed opportunity

French Exit

This never quite pops into something as interesting as it has the potential to be - it's the kind of film where the homeless guy in Central Park sounds like he's had extensive elocution training at Julliard, and the excess stylization arrives instead of actual jokes. Michelle Pfeiffer is majestically wonderful as our protagonist but she's stuck playing against mostly a set of not-quite-as-interesting characters - there's nice Parisian scenery and the occasional weird note but it never really adds up to anything of substance.

Judas and the Black Messiah

 An interesting chapter of history with a great central performance from Daniel Kaluya and some slight narrative messiness - it's not entirely sure whether it wants to talk about the FBI operation to take Hampton down or about Hampton - in particular, the appearance of some of his wife's poetry is a bit awkward. In the end Hampton sorta becomes a figure rather than a character. Still strong, but not quite as good as it could be.

Endgame

 A weird mix of thriller, comedy and action movie, as an assassin and an actor end up swapping identities after an accident in a bathhouse sees the assassin losing his memory, with a lot of moving subplots, goofy spoofs on the Chinese film industry, romantic twists and turns and one or two mentions of Peter Brook and Stanivlaski. It's an enjoyable romp with Lau deploying his considerable charisma in a number of different ways, and Xiao Yang as the actor-turned-assassin showing goofy tough-guy moments. If it's not particularly deep or substantial, it's a fun cinematic occasion.

Assassins

 An interesting doco though inevitably due to the nature of its subject, it's a little too reliant on some fairly distant talking heads. Lots of surprising twists and turns as two young women at the middle of an international incident find themselves at risk, and how things resolve has its own surprises. It's a story that doesn't quite have the visuals or the narrative completeness to completely work - it ends up leaving a few too many loose ends and a couple of conclusions aren't completely proved.

Miniari

 A sweet tale of a Korean family starting a life in rural Arkansas, struggling to start a farm in an unfamiliar community. Told largely from the perspective of the son, this is a masterpiece of gentle humour, drama and pathos as the family struggles together and apart to deal with their circumstances in the face of a hostile environment.

Zappa

 A little muddled but interesting tale of a musician who never really quite fits any of the labels you might want to put on him - the rock star whose only hit was a novelty song he wrote with his daughter, the freaky looking fellow who deeply studied his musicianship and was anti-drug, the apparent failure who ended up posthumously awarded a Grammy and a spot in the Rock N Roll hall of fame, and the way-out-freak whose final works were done with Symphony Orchestras and who became a cultural attaché for Czechoslovakia. This is basically an assembly of archival material with some side interviews and as a result I don't think it gets particularly close to the centre of a guy who probably wouldn't like to be in this kinda spotlight anyway, but it's intriguing.

Firestarter

 A great narrative telling the story of 3 indigenous brothers and the dance company they started, creating an internationally successful company through determination and skill. Has strong narrative twists and turns, presents the dance well (particularly the extraordinary Russell Page) and provides strong historical context about the cultural movements that created the opportunities and the effects this work has had subsequently

Another Round

 A funny reflective piece about four men who experiment with consuming more alcohol to reduce their inhibitions and assist their lives only to find things falling into dissaray - it's basically a chance to look at Danish men in midlife crisis mode, finding engagement in their inhibition losing and with each other - they're an interesting mix, each with their own dramas, and the choice of how the story goes mixes humour with pathos, as all four find their balances. Also worth sticking through for some truly spectacular Mads Mikkleson dance moves near the end!

The Nest

An intriguing portrait of a marriage on the edge of collapse as the husband's struggles against the limits of his charm and persuasiveness meets the wife's exhaustion with the lies and manipulations - and we get to see how this starts to impact on their two very different children. The mid-80s milieu lends urgency to Law's battle against the uncertainties of his financial job, and also lends some great sountrack moments, though I don't know it really finds a solid resolution.

News of the World

 This is a weird case of a film that knows that the stories you choose to tell can have a literal effect on the world, while at the same time not recognising that a post civil war film with minimal black people and non speaking native Americans is not a good look. It's effective at what it does, i just wish it chose to do more

Occupation: Rainfall

 Director/writer/editor Luke Sparke desperately needs friends to pick up at least two of his jobs - his action directing and editing borders on the incoherent too frequently as aliens and humans battle for the fate of humanity. The plotting is a little overstuffed as various factions pursue separate goals, but on the plus side this looks remarkably like a proper big action sci-fi movie with a few nicely ridiculous ideas.

A Call to Spy

 This kinda falls a bit flat - the three leading women are kept apart way too often and the film never really does a great job of selling how important their work is - it's just sorta assumed as spies helping the french underground, we'll know the importance - we never really see a lot of individual missions or tight squeezes or tense moments. It's one of the reasons why history needs to be rejiggled a bit for narrative purposes - if your three most important characters hardly ever met, bring them together anyway, or at least look like they're showing some common purpose. It's not great at building the bits of research into a compelling overall narrative. Still, the three lead performances are reasonably strong, there's some decent sequences and it works okay - but it does feel like there's a couple of much better movies that could come from this topic which this movie never quite is.

Shadow in the Cloud

 This is another "good execution, dumb premise" film - it's largely helped by the decision to isolate Chloe Grace Moretz early and play as much of the movie on her as possible. Some of the scripting getting her isolated is a little ropey and feels more like a chance to get a lot of anti woman statements in the script under the excuse that they're being said by assholes, and a couple of the plot twists are ludicrous but it plays what it has pretty darn well

My Salinger Year

 This is something that does pretty much what it looks like what it's going to do - young woman enters the literary world as an assistant and finds her voice through supporting other writers. It's name droppy and Qualley doesn't exactly inspire expectations of hidden depths, but it's nice to see Sigourney in condescending upper class mode and it satisfies as a classy new York vision

Pieces of a Woman

 For the title and subject of this, we get a few too many pieces of Shia LaBoef early on, leaving Kirby a tad undefined for a little too long - given this is a film largely about a woman, post the death of her baby after childbirth, and the way her responses are governed by everybody else around her. Still when the film focusses on Kirby and her attempts to regain normality and process her grief, it really finds its place and is powerful and strong.

Monster Hunter

This is an adequate time passer without ever hitting the insane heights of some of Jovavich/Anderson's previous work - based on a game series that isn't particularly plot heavy, this therefore ends up with fairly thin characters running around arid desert locations fighting various monsters which are mostly pretty generically designed. On the plus side the film minimises the guff, emphasising the monster fighting and the bonding between Mila and Tony Jaa, with a couple of exotic extra characters entering late in the flick - on the minus, the monster fights never get a chance to go gorgeously over the top - it's all presented fairly flatly - even the weird weapons don't really get a chance to show off as much as they should.