Rogue One

"Star Wars" is my generation's mythology. It's simply ingrained in us. There's something fundamental about the battle between good and evil, in a galaxy far far away, where pure heroes fight dark villains.

"Rogue One" takes a couple of interesting risks with this formula - some of which work, some of which don't as well. For starters, this is a story very much about the soldiers on the sidelines - those whose bodycount forms the background for the other films' heroics. A team assembled just to allow other people to get a chance to end the suffering.

The opening couple of scenes are a bit all-over-the-place - our characters aren't quite focussed on a mission, so much as all out for their own ends, without a clear idea where everything is going. But as the plot develops, everything starts to pull together, until the final half-hour is pure epic heroics with a brutal undercurrent, as we know not all the heroes are going to make it out alive.

Director Gareth Edwards excels at the big stuff - the battles and explosions and space battles. The individual character-level stuff is a bit spottier - the two highlights being Alan Tudyk's sarcastic droid and Donnie Yen's blind monk (paying slight tribute to the saga's samurai roots by basically being Zatoichi). Yes, this is a nostalgia trip, but it's a trip that feels rich in its own right, rather than just picking up reflected glories (or, as some nostalgia trips have done, lessening the impact of the first films).

Rosalie Blum

Vincent is a mildly lonely hairdresser, living downstairs from his mum in a small town, with a life that isn't quite going anywhere. Then a trip across town suddenly introduces him to Rosalie Blum, a woman he's sure he's seen before. And so struck is he by her that he feels the need to follow her. Frequently. Until suddenly something very different starts to reveal itself...

This does sound an awful lot like a "stalking is very charming" film. And to a certain extent, yes, that's the opening premise. But the story does eventually open up to be about something else - somewhere around the one-third mark. This is still a bit of a French Charm Offensive, with everybody kinda sweet and wacky and a little bit odd, but it's an offensive that works - you are won over by these odd people in their individual quests to find something to keep themselves occupied. The story unravels in a smooth, gentle way - not something that's ever going to rock your world, but it's going to make you feel nice and cosy. Jean Rappeneau directs with a firm hand - again, there isn't really anything here where you're going to be knocked out, but it works as what it is, a fun gallic trifle.

La La Land

The old-fashioned Hollywood Romance, with singing and dancing and all that, has been long in abeyance. Attempts in the seventies and early eighties to give it a comeback by Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola were signature flops ("New York New York" and "One from the Heart" respectively). So how is it that Damien Chazelle is able to capture it so well?

Well, it turns out it's the chemistry, stupid. Robert DeNiro and Frederick Forrest are both highly skilled actors, but romantic chemistry is not in their wheelhouse. But it is definitely in Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone's. Chazelle bets a lot on that chemistry - they are basically the only two characters in the film, and if that doesn't work, the entire film disappears down the drain - but it pays off well. You want to see these two people together and you enjoy it when they are.

Of the other elements - the songs themselves are no more than middling, and the plot itself is mostly something that exists to give the characters things to do rather than something particularly driving. But this is such a gorgous film to look at (lush retro cinematography and the not-inconsiderable-charms of the two leads) that it barely matters. It's a bit of a lopsided love-letter to LA, the city that both offers dreams and denies them simultaneously, where this kind of simple fantasy can come alive under the ever-present sun.

This is a very comfy film to go into awards season with - its major intent is to entertain rather than to deeply plow into the human condition - but none the worse for that.

Up for Love

Romantic comedy throws a lot of awkward obstacles in the face of true love. Can two people find love on opposite sides of the country (Sleepless in Seattle)? Can love bloom in what starts as a financial transaction? (Pretty Woman) Or in this case - can love bloom when the guy is a whole lot shorter than the girl?

Yes, that does not seem like a particularly compelling concept. And when you consider Jean Dujardin is a regular-highted actor and therefore is only shrunken through special effects, meaning that he and Virginie Efira (as the girl) aren't able to touch particularly regularly (as everytime they do, it's an expensive effects shot), it's even further weakened. With all this obvious baggage on board, the rest of the film is pretty mild and charming in that not-trying-very-hard-French-way, and the story starts to be "can a woman fall in love if all her friends are horrible people". Dujardin's character is a pleasant charmer with not a lot of complications, Efira is a lovely lady with a dodgy ex-husband and a doepy secretary, and it's only very rarely that we get any suggestion that there's anything particularly holding them apart (a brief moment where seeing him in a mirror shows his i childlike proportions to Efira, which is momentarily a bit interesting, but then that's hurried away from again).

This isn't an utterly uncharming way to waste an hour and a half, but it is kinda pointless. It's not so much a "go see it" as "you don't have to run in the opposite direction if this is showing near you"

Dancer

There are two things in making a good documentary. First, you must have a good subject. Second, you must exploit that subject to full effect.

"Dancer" has the first, but doesn't quite hit the second. Sergei Polunin is an incredible dancer, with a grand array of leaps and movements and an agressive ability to stalk the stage, dominating it. He's also deeply conflicted about his own job - his family sacrificed incredibly to allow him to train at the top level, but while performing at the UK royal ballet he had a mental snap and fled back to eastern Europe. There's drugs, there's confusion, there's a young man trying to figure out what he wants to do when he's been carved very distinctly into being good at this one, physically demanding, thing.

Alas, this is also an authorised film, so it doesn't quite dwell deeply enough into the various issues involved. The drugs in particular are almost skirted over - we don't really know what this meant to his body, or what this meant to his mind, Polunin's declarations that he's quitting dancing feel particularly weird as ... well, he doesn't actually appear to be doing that. The climactic video, shot by David LaChapelle, is an emotional and artistic crescendo, but the follow up as the video gets comments like "inspires me to be a dancer" should feel far more conflicted than they actually do - is bringing more people into a body-breaking profession like this really a good thing?

Still, this does have Polunin's dancing compiled in interesting ways and a broad outline of the issues that his life gives rise to, even if it doesn't, for my taste, cut quite deep enough.

The Fencer

A Finnish/Estonian co-production that tells the story of events in post world-war 2 Estonia, where a country that had been occupied by the Nazis was now occupied by the Russians instead, and where people's pasts could very easily be suddenly used against them. It's a paranoid time into which arrives a new schoolteacher who sets up a fencing club. Many of the kids are orphaned or just have a mother after the war and the soviet purges that have followed, so the activity becomes increasingly appealing to them. But the headmaster and the local political officer are increasingly against the club, and it seems inevitable the secrets of the schoolteacher's past are going to have to come out....

This is a film that has a little bit of cliche at the centre of it - the kids are a ragtag bunch who get inspired by their teacher, and there's elements of the sports movie in the climax as the schoolteacher take the kids to a tournament in Leningrad. But the reason cliches come back is because, if deployed correctly, they work. And they largely work in this - in particular, some of the kid actors are pretty damn good, I can't argue that this is amazing and unmissable, but it is a nice story nicely told.

The Founder

Ray Kroc is known as the founder of McDonalds. But, well, he isn't. He's the guy that spread the fast-food gospel, getting the franchise to move from one burger stand to the across-America phenomena it became (future CEOs would get it to go international). That simple inflation, though - that desire to be just a bit more than he actually is, defines the guy. He's that dark side of American Capitalism, a kind of pointless desperation just to be the best guy, not for any financial reasons, just because if you're not the best you don't count.

Michael Keaton almost manages to make this creature vaguely sympathetic. It's easier in the early stages, where he's struggling, than it is later on, when he's demolishing people around him just cause he can. He dismisses his marriage (this is a flaw in the film - Laura Dern's wife character disappears after the divorce and doesn't even get the benefit of a closing wrapup "this is what happened to her later" - possibly nothing much did, but I wish the screenwriters had thought her at least wothy of five minutes of research), he dismisses the guys who actually came up with the McDonalds concept (the McDonald brothers, played well by John Carroll Lynch as the avuncular Mac and Nick Offerman as the somewhat more technically minded Dick) and a couple of other business partners along the way.

This is a little bit "failed oscar bait" - it doesn't seem to have picked up on the awards circuit and that does appear to be kinda the reason why it was made. And this is a little soft at the centre - it's not quite willing to commit to blackening the name of American Capitalism, though it does incidentally make it look kinda bad. But it does have a nice motion to it, and a pretty strong cast. I fully admit that I probably buy into the "lives of awful men" trope a fair bit, so I was happy to go with this, but this isn't exactly the strongest meat out there. Still, it's effective in telling the story it's got