Peppermint

This is a fairly rote revenge thriller, with Jennifer Garner playing the woman whose family is gunned down in front of her, whose attempts within the system to get justice lead to naught, and who finds herself gunning down vast amounts of Latino gang members. There’s some nice ludicrousness in the setup (her preparation involves disappearing for five years after robbing a bank for $55,000 – that seems an incredibly low budget to be come, basically, Batman), and a few reasonable twists and turns, but this is pretty conventional by the numbers stuff that just doesn’t have a lot of fun with what it’s doing, and doesn’t really provide any new ideas or deep insight beyond the obvious that Jennifer Garner really does deserve to be in more action movies, although probably better ones than this. It’s difficult to argue with the rote racism or vengeance prone politics because the film doesn’t particularly seem to have very much invested in its ideas or in its execution - it’s just going through the motions.

The Mortal Engines

This big-scale young-adult fantasy epic feels a little squished at a little over two hours, but it does the job in combining a distinctly odd premise (a post apocalyptic future where cities-on-wheels roam the land devouring other cities) with a familiar personal story of one girl’s quest for revenge on the man who killed her mother. If this suffers a little from lore-overload (the characters have a tendency to recite backstory if even slightly prodded), there are a couple of subplots and minor characters where it feels like a larger subplot has been chopped down to meet running times (a couple of characters seem to exist largely to get plot from A to B rather than really getting much time of their own to develop), it’s still an intriguing examination of a rich fantasy world. The relationship between the two leads does smack a little of “well, our two leads are opposite genders, so therefore there’s going to be a love plot here regardless of chemistry”, and only Hugo Weaving and Stephen Lang as two of the villains really get much to sink their teeth into acting wise, but the storytelling is constantly propulsive as the leads are constantly on the run and in jeopardy, either chasing or being chased. The distinctly steampunk aesthetic means that there’s always a lot to look at, even if the overall arc is somewhat familiar.

Sorry To Bother You

This modern satire of corporate culture, 21^st century capitalism and the state of interracial America is a winner. Cassius Greene (Lakieth Stanfield) is our bemused hero as he starts working for a call-centre, struggling to make a connection to people across the nation to sell some useless product or other. But when he’s told of the secret power of using his “white voice”, opportunities open up to him – and expose him to more surreptitious ways that corporate America plans to use him and his friends.

Director Boots Riley has a sure visual style here – this is, in some ways, Michel Gondry crossed with Karl Marx, as he captures complex issues in a few deft images and unusual sights. The cast is all-round strong – whether it be Stanfield’s bemused protagonist, Tessa Thompson back again as the artistically inclined girlfriend of the lead (it’s unfortunate in a way that this film has been held back long enough in Australia that it looks like Thompson’s stereotype next to her appearance in “Creed II”, but she’s got enough other things coming that hopefully she’ll be a lead before too long), or Armie Hammer carelessly embodying the don’t-give-a-shit nature of the wealthy as a careless corporate mogul. The satire only gets more extreme as the film goes on yet it’s never enough to break the immersion, for me – it’s a finely provocative look at the modern American landscape.

Can you ever forgive me?

Lee Israel is a biography writer who’s finding it harder and harder to get published. Her distaste for modern writing trends, together with a disposition that sees her liking cats more than people and generally isolating herself sees her running broke in early 90’s Manhattan. But on finding a letter while researching a Fanny Brice biography, she gets involved with the world of collectible memorabilia. And soon it becomes easier to manufacture her own fake memorabilia for the various literary snobs, and with the assistance of her drinking buddy, the vain but impoverished Jack Hock, she starts to pull off a scam that can only end in disaster.

Melissa McCarthy is a bit of an odd case of superstardom – coming reasonably late to the job (while she’s been a working actress for over 20 years, her big break in “Bridesmaids” was only 7 years ago, after the age of 40). And it’s true that some of her recent star vehicles have been less than impressive – such middling nonsense as “Identify Thief”, “Life of the Party” and “The Boss” are less the work of a comedic powerhouse than a hack milking her moment in the sun (It doesn’t help that her husband, Ben Falcone, has been the deeply middling director behind some of these duds). But underneath all that there is a deeply impressive actress who should not be underestimated – when given the right meat to chew on. And this is exactly the right meat – Lee is a fully rounded, complicated human being whose frustration verges but never tips over completely into self-pity. Her erudition, pride and disappointment with the rest of the world gives us a smart heroine whose adaptation to circumstances sees her finding a perverse kinda pride in capturing the voices of her beloved literary celebrities. Richard E. Grant is a worthy companion – the relationship remains spiky and ever-close to dissolving into complete disaster, and Hock’s independent pride that can never quite communicate how desperate his circumstances really are makes him a fascinating figure who keeps his dignity no matter how bad things get. This knows how to choose the “true story” elements and play them so that nothing feels thrown in just because it’s an interesting anecdote – everything contributes to the core portrayal of this character and how she finds herself in these circumstances. It's pretty standard for awards season to offer mildly contrived biographical arcs that feel twisted into fake inspiration – but this feels genuine and immersive and with a smart literary heart to it.

Climax

Gaspar Noe is one of cinema’s great provocateurs. Experimental in form and in content, he delivers films that are unlike anything else – extreme and astounding and with strange moments of beauty bashing up against intense and disturbing material. And this is him delivering a short, sharp shock to the senses as he examines a dance troupe assembled in the French countryside whose meet-up party spirals out of control when the sangria is tainted by LSD. Noe does things that simply shouldn’t work – putting the credits in at a random point, shooting entire sequences from odd angles (there’s a dance sequence shot entirely from overhead that enthrals, and later another scene is shot upside down), with a mulit-racial, muitl-sexuality troupe of some 25-odd characters each with their own moods, opinions and agendas. It’s a letting go of all inhibitions yet despite that, it’s also a controlled, clever, emotional and intense masterwork – able to be at any moment joyous, horrific, romantic, brutal, political, abstract and precise. Absolutely worth indulging in.

Lean on Pete

Looking at the barely-surviving Midwest underclass in the US through the story of a teenage boy and the horse he relies on as his situation gets increasingly dire, this is not exactly the most uplifting or gentlest of stories. But it has a raw honesty to it, whether it be through the performances (Charlie Plummer’s determined but naïve boy, Steve Buscemi and Chole Sevigny as the resolutely practical trainer and jockey who he works with) or the unfussy style that director Andrew Haigh applies to the film. The film turns the knife a few times more than is necessary in the last 15 minutes - one particular incident about twenty minutes before the end feels like it should be the climax of the film,  and instead the film piles on more events before reaching resolution (and the performances continue to be good here, it’s just … I don’t know the extra material really justifies the screentime in terms of theme or characterisation – I know this is based on a novel, but this feels like the bit of the novel you cut for the movie). That doesn’t completely ruin the film but it does water down my appreciation a little bit.

Creed II

I’ve never seen a full “Rocky Film” – but I have seen the previous “Creed”, and liked it as a smart, populist boxing film about a young man finding himself and coming to terms with his legacy and his desire to excel at his chosen profession. And I’m aware of the Rocky films as a sort of shared cultural memory – the mild-mannered Italian boxer who rises to the championship in the face of various rivals while developing his relationship with his girlfriend, then wife, Adrian. I’m particularly aware of the wildly nationalistic, very very 80s, Rocky IV, which sees Rocky take on Ivan Drago, an evil Russian who kills his former opponent Apollo Creed in the ring before Rocky sets things right in a climactic fight right in the middle of the Soviet Union.

And to a certain extent, the setup for this film is a little gimmicky – Adonis Creed fights the son of the man who killed his father, Viktor Drago. It’s acknowledged early on that this is a cheap marketing ploy on the part of a boxing promoter, but there’s also emotional baggage here – Adonis’ desire to avenge the father he never knew, and Viktor, trained by Ivan to redeem what he perceives as his 30-years-old failure. And certainly the melodrama comes fairly regularly – Adonis also has to deal with his girlfriend’s encroaching deafness, and Rocky’s own reluctance to reengage with the brutality of the  past. This does lack the finely tuned sense of the first Creed, bringing far more melodrama and flat out cheese to the story. But dammit, a lot of this cheese works. I do think Adonis gets a little bit lost in the multiple subplots – the film never quite comes as clearly from his perspective as it did in the first one- and some plot points feel more like they are happening because they have to happen to get us to the next thing, rather than naturally earning them. But there’s still the strong cast – not only Jordan and Stallone, but also the wonderfully engaging Tessa Thompson as Adonis’s Girlfriend and the just plain spectacular Phylicia Rashad as his adoptive mother, pumping out wisdom and authority with every pore. Dolph Lungren is surprisingly good as the returned Drago, communicating the pain and rage of the previous decades (and pretty much embodying the term “toxic fatherhood”), and the climax feels incredibly climactic. So yes, it’s a little less well-constructed than the first film – but still, it is a pretty decent film that (damn the pun) still packs a punch.