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.

Best of the 2010s - 2019 - Parasite

Of course this is going to be my favourite movie of the year. If you've heard me on the Movie Bears Podcast episode I was on for Fantastic Fest (linked here), you'll have heard me go thorougly excitable about this (around the 1:17:00 mark to 1:19:00 or so). It just is that damn good. And if you haven't seen it, I'm not going to tell you why beyond that, yes, this deserved to win the Palme D'Or. And it deserves to win ... pretty much anything on offer. It's griping, stunning, clever, twisted, hilarious, scary, and completely engrossing. If you haven't seen it yet ... well, get to it whenever you can.