Bellbird

 Nice enough piece that never really cuts deep into the network of damage between three different kiwi men. A bit like Hunt for the Wilderpeople without the travel

The Personal History of David Copperfield

 A clever Dickens adaptation taking the disguised-autobiography approach of Dickens original and capturing most of the high points (allowing Patel to step out and narrate and capture the moments in his story as he goes through them) - with a superlative cast of scene-stealers to play the various Dickensian eccentrics. It perhaps slightly downplays the melancholy and melodrama in favour of the comedy and rompish elements, but there's enough there to streamline a very rambling novel into a fairly tight film.

Monos

 A group of young soldiers in a rebel gang in the mountains of Columbia are left in charge of a hostage and a cow - nobody comes out very well. This is sorta a lord-of-the-flies but with military indoctrination preceding it - it's a great delve into a world wildly unlike my own, where the kids operate entirely by their own set of not-too-sensible rules and shifting alliances, surviving inhospitable circumstances and each other as best they can. Inevitably in a largely child-and-teen cast, not all of them register entirely as characters, but those that do work well.

Bloodshot

Mildly avoids being by the numbers by virtue of ... doing the by the numbers thing for the first twenty minutes before putting a twist in there. It does mean that the opening still feels super-cliched, and the twist only ends up improving things a little. Vin does his Vin thing down to spending a chunk of time in a white singlet, the supporting cast mostly gets not-a-lot to do, and the fight sequences sometimes feel quite messy (though the ending battle has a few good bits). This is at least pushing a little beyond the usual nonsense, even if it doesn't always get there.

Queen and Slim

This is an interesting near-miss for me - there's an interesting vibe between the two leads, set up as two people on a date that is probably not going to go anywhere, until a police encounter sees them stuck together on the run. There's an intriguing sense that the two of them are non-mythic people who are suddenly being caught up in something a lot bigger than themselves, and the performances of Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith in the leads really do centre this well. But there are sequences that drag a bit, and the fact that until near the end they're not really running towards anything so much as just "away" does mean that there isn't quite the plot-engine underlying everything to keep things moving - sequences sometimes play as seperate bits that rise or fall on their own energy rather than part of an overall film.

Dark Waters

This is familiar oscar bait but elevated just a tiny bit by Todd Haynes direction. Even if we haven't seen the specific DuPont water poisoning movie before, we've definatley seen the lawyer from the corporate side of the world finding a cause to believe in, fighting it in the face of his partners and even his own wife - his slick city values contrasted with the victims country innocence. Except this takes the demonstration of water poisoning far further than most of those - we see the illnesses and mutations dead on - and we see the mental effects this begins to have on the lawyer in the middle. And there's a deliberate attempt to show just how long and stretched out this case ends up being (material cover about 15 years, with title cards covering a further five). Anne Hathaway's wife character is trapped by the cliches, she does attempt to fight a little against them but .. well, she's 15 years younger than Ruffalo, and ends up having all the standard "wife tries to stop the male lead from doing what the movie is about" stuff that should be permanently retired but somehow still isn't.

Military Wives

A just-about-strong-enough version of British-inspirational-film by numbers, in this case about the wives left behind at a base while their partners are serving in Afghanistan. It never entirely reckons with the tougher elements of the material, although it seems apparent if the script wanted to go there then Kristin Scott-Thomas and Sharon Horgan absolutely could make it happen - but instead the strange culture of a military base where the wives somehow inherit the rank of their husbands in social positioning only really gets a surface-level examination. The singing is beautiful, Scott-Thomas does the stiff-upper-lip-concealing-acres-of-pain thing well, and Horgan is reasonable given the underwritten character she's left with (none of her struggles really feel like very big struggles, and her multiple subplots kinda just pile up rather than informing one another). Yet it still pays in an inspirational finale.