Judy and Punch

In any given year, it sometimes becomes inevitable that films become paired together, and for various reasons, "Judy and Punch" made me think of it as a companion piece for "The Nightingale" (both Australian, both vaguely historical, both featuring violence against women and children, both directed by women and featuring Damon Herriman). But this is somewhat different tonally - more in the territory of dark fantasy/comedy,  the historical era is deliberately undefined, and what we get is largely in the territory of an interrogation of the traditional Punch and Judy show and the dubious morals that lie beneath it. Wasikowska and Herriman both give great performances (Wasikowska with an emerging righteous anger, and Herriman with a weasel-esque cunning), and writer/director Mirrah Folkes manages a tricky tone that manages to take the subject matter seriously while still keeping eccentric and dark comedy. It's a fascinating piece that is worth catching.

Marriage Story

This is the acting powerhouse to beat this awards season - telling the story of a couple who are divorcing and how their best intentions to keep things gentle and well mannered for the sake of raising their kid together slowly fall apart as the things that broke them up in the first place start to bubble over. Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson are both simply outstanding as the couple in question, as they start to delve deeper into their desires and their emotional fragility, and tear into both themselves and each other. As the various lawyers,  Laura Dern, Alan Alda and Ray Liotta all have great moments to shine, and there's terrific support particularly from Julie Hagerty as Johhansson's mother. If I wanted to issue minor criticisms it would be that Randy Newman's score is occasionally a little intrusive, and the representation of New York's avant-garde theatre community is a little odd, but ... this comes together so well it feels petty to bitch.

Charlie's Angels

This is kinda disappointing - as someone who really liked the first "Charlie's Angels" film and thought the second had its moments, this kinda falls flat. It largely has to do with script and direction here - things just generally fail to be fun and frivolous, and there's way too many plot complications and comedy-that-doesn't-quite work. Kristen Stewart does pretty damn well here (there's a whole separate movie here which is basically "Finally Kristen Stewart gets to have fun") and as the other two Naomi Scott and Ella Balinska have their occasional moments (Scott as a tech-nerd pulled into helping the angels when her company's project turns out to have evil consequences, Balinska as the serious-minded ex-MI6 agent), but the film generally fails to take advantage of the three women getting to play together as a team - the plot setup has them as a team coming together over the course of the mission rather than as the well-oiled team we remember from previous entries, and there's never really a moment that they snap into place and become something solid, so their team bond is more something we're told is happening than something we can see. It's proof that making a fun bouncy piece of nonsense is harder than it looks.

The Irishman

This is a case of a film where it's reasonable but it could be so much more if it just was tighter or better focused. This isn't a film in a hurry to get anywhere which is ... fine, but it does mean we get a lot of conversations that are rather circular (actually, a few of them feel like bad improv class where nobody's quite ready to call "Scene"). DeNiro's been an actor who's been somewhat uninspired for roughly a decade, and this is him in clumping mode. There's stronger support from Pesci (who plays in a quieter mode than his 90s heyday but is quite good at quiet menace), Pacino (who is, admittedly, slightly in scenery-eating mode as Jimmy Hoffa, but he does at least bring the film to life when it's getting a bit aimless), and, surprisingly, Ray Romano (who's very good at shifty-lawyering). There's some strong scene-to-scene work here but there's also an overload of gangster-plots-and-counterplots which aren't all particularly clearly presented, and there's an overlong anti-climax after this reaches the point where we were all expecting this to go. Also the anti-climax does feature some of the weirdest casting, including a small role for Action Bronson, and a priest being played by a priest which explains why he's so awkward with his dialogue. Honestly, the main reason to see this in a cinema rather than wait for Netflix is that the cinema seating will probably keep you paying attention to the screen rather than allowing you to zone out. Having said all that ... this is not a bad film, it's just an indulgent film and Scorcese has done better, fairly recently.

Doctor Sleep

For a movie that doesn't entirely have a sensible reason to exist and has a plot setup that is kinda odd, this is quite reasonable. And I'm aware that probably comes as slightly lefthanded praise, but ... this isn't really any sensible kind of sequel to "The Shining", so much as a "Stephen King wanted to write a novel about a psychic kid and the older psychic who mentors her in battle with other evil psychics, and realised he already had a psychic kid from a previous novel thirty odd years back". Mike Flanagan's film does an interesting job of managing to combine the concerns of the sequel novel, the original novel AND the very much altered film that Stanley Kubrick did of the original novel to make something that, if it doesn't exactly have the depth of the original, does surprisingly well. It's definitely nice to have Rebecca Ferguson as a very active villain after she spent most of "The Kid Who Would be King" stuck in a tree, and there's striking visuals that are all this film's own work in the middle third. There is a weird stoppy-starty energy in the first third before the various plot strands come together, but once this hits the ground it does it running and works pretty well.

The Report

The story of how the senate committee study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program was put together and released does not, necessarily, sound like the stuff of cinematic dreams, so much as a CSPAN marathon for those seeking a good snooze. But for those of us with a politically wonkish bent, or if you realise this is about the CIA's torture of prisoners, it suddenly becomes a fair bit more interesting, and helps to explore a fair chunk of how the last two decades of international policy have gone down.

It is still mostly a bunch of men and women sitting in rooms talking about documents for a fair chunk of time (though there are flashbacks to show some of the more egregious moves made during the torture program - not graphic, but effective) - but fortunately this is an interesting bunch of people. Adam Driver's career civil servant drawn more and more into his work as he first prepares then has to defend the report; Annette Bening as Senator Dianne Feinstein, head of the committee trying to release it; and a fine set of supporting actors as well. This is probably not going to be everybody's cup of tea - it is very much a "how the sausage is made" approach to political maneuverings and that's not for everyone. But for those of you who are into it, this is definitely something to delve into.

Best of the 2010s – 2015 – The Dressmaker

Two of the best female performances of the decade (Kate Winslet and Judy Davis) in a film that smashes genres together with ruthless abandon, this kinda delighted me. I understand the objections people have to it (there’s some, ahem, very exaggerated performances around Winslet and Davis), and a third-act twist definitely pulls the rug out from under its audience in a way that won’t necessarily make this a crowd pleaser. But the combination of great frocks and ruthless vengeance is utterly up my alley, with writer-director Jocelyn Moorehouse absolutely achieving her aim of making, as she put it, “Unforgiven with a sewing machine”. It teeters on the edge between deliciously camp melodrama and ridiculous stupidity, and for me it triumphs – though this is the kinda tightrope where I can imagine plenty loathing it (well, I don’t need to imagine it, I’ve read the alternate opinions, and … well, for me they just plain don’t get it or don’t want to get it.