VOD: The End We Start From (dir: Mahalia Belo, 2023)

"I can't protect you."

This earnest British drama opens with a young heavily-pregnant woman (Jodie Comer) battling with London flooded catastrophically city-wide in relentless storms and the premature birth of her son.  As services collapse and her home is lost, she relocates with her husband and baby to his parents' rural idyll, but further tragedies and dwindling supplies set them on a bleak and heartbreaking path for survival.  Jodie Comer is - as always - an utterly mesmerising screen presence, with strong support from Joel Fry as her husband facing unbearable circumstances.  The story is really sombre, considered and stoically British, with key themes of love, family and resilience pushing throughout.  With the state/organisational issues forming an increasingly relevant backdrop, together with nods to climate change and displacement, the film is thoughtful and consistent in tone and driven utterly by it compelling and wonderful lead performance.  The film also boasts one of the most understated but beautifully powerful endings of recent times.

 

VOD: Weird - The Al Yankovic Story (dir: Eric Appel, 2023)

"Those aren't the right words."
"I know. I made them better."

Taking the form of a surreal fable and what is presumably a parody of biopics, the life of American comedian/musician Weird Al Yankovic is certainly a strange viewing experience with its mix of absurd tongue-in-cheek comedy and occasional serious issues (such as his relationship with his parents).  Occasionally, the sheer daftness raises a smile - Alice Cooper with a horn, Warhol and Dali at a pool party (with possibly the best line in the whole film) - and there is fun to be had with the deliberately not-quite-convincing plethora of celebrity lookalikes.  Daniel Radcliffe proves to be a good fit for the lead role, throwing himself into the off-kilter style and humour to good effect.  Increasingly veering off into fantasy, this film will probably play better to the American audience, as Yankovic was never very successful or as well-known in the UK.  Overall, the film comes across as self-indulgent, ridiculous but unstoppable, rather like the comedian's persona, and the obvious mid-credits parody just about sums up the whole movie.

 

VOD: Hit Man (dir: Richard Linklater, 2024)

"I was minding my own business when my life took the oddest of turns..."

Richard Linklater's unexpected philosophical-police-thriller-comedy tells the allegedly true(ish) story of a mild-manner professor and part-time police advisor who inadvertently becomes an undercover 'hit man' to get evidence on people who want to hire a killer, but things get complicated when he falls for a newly-separated client and gets embroiled in an actual murder.  With an interesting theme of identity threaded throughout, the story is curiously and consistently engaging if somewhat deliberate and contrived, even though not a lot actually happens until a neat twist that sets up the final act.  Long-time Linklater-collaborator Glen Powell works very well in portraying the different personalities he adopts in both his personal and professional lives, and the chemistry between Powell and Adria Adjona is effective.  Juggling genres makes the film feel a little inconsistent in tone at times - the Coen Brothers meets Woody Allen - but overall this is a well-constructed and entertaining watch. 

 

VOD: Under Paris (dir: Xavier Gens, 2024)

"Even if it got through the locks, why would it come to Paris?"
"No idea."

The shark movie is one of those genres with which there seems to be very little room for manoeuvre or creativity, and in this barmy French Netflix effort a very serious trio - a brittle marine biologist, a blue-haired climate activist and a wary police officer - team up to get rid of a shark threat in the River Seine that conveniently coincides with the city hosting the World Triathlon Championship and a mayor who wants nothing to get in the way of the big event.  Opening in a plastic-strewn part of the Pacific to establish both its eco-message and changes in animal behaviours, the prologue also sets the tone for the the surprisingly swift and vicious shark attacks that occasionally (and suddenly) appear. The film looks, sounds and feels more at home on television than as a cinema film, but Paris makes for a very attractive-looking if somewhat unlikely setting for the story.  Not a lot happens for long stretches, but there are a couple of inventive shark shots with good on-water shooting, especially at night, and there are a couple of lively scenes of mayhem in the sewers and catacombs in this silly and frothy piece of entertainment.

 

VOD: I Used To Be Famous (dir: Eddie Sternberg, 2022)

"I'm not busking, I'm practising!"
"Bit depressing though, innit?"

In this simple, sincere, low-key and small-scale British feel-good drama, Vinnie (Ed Skrein) is a former member of a successful boyband who - twenty years after their heyday - finds himself in London's Peckham on hard times with no-one interested in his music.  After an autistic teen drummer Stevie (Leo Long) joins in with an impromptu performance down at the market that goes viral, Vinnie sees an opportunity to kickstart his career as the unlikely pair's friendship develops, but he has to get past the boy's protective mother and reality kicking in as their first pub gig goes unpleasantly wrong.  This is a slow-moving and gentle film, with Ed Skrein proving to be a surprisingly sensitive match to the material, Leo Long is sympathetic and engaging as the teen, and Vinnie's retro-synthpop is convincingly introspectively naff, seemingly able to fill a gig slot with eight bars' worth of material!  It may be somewhat slight and sentimental but it is heartfelt, right through its predictably sweet punch-the-air ending.

 

VOD: Close (dir: Lukas Dhont, 2022)

"Something happened."

This remarkable Belgian drama follows two inseparable 13-year-old best friends Leo and Remi - one more sporty and sociable, the other a sensitive musician - but as they start to grow up, peer pressure mounts and their friendship fractures, an unbearable mid-point tragedy changes everything with an overwhelmingly sad second half.  It is a very simple but extremely powerful tale, showing adults and children trying to deal with the unimaginable and unfathomable and capturing the innocence and naivete of childhood and the depths of emotion very well, with the shift in tone handled very starkly and effectively.  The two young actors, Gustav De Waele as Remi and especially Eden Dambrine as Leo, give terrific and heartfelt performances, and this delicate story of the intensity of friendship and the paralysis of grief is told with heartbreaking honesty and clarity. 
 

VOD: Lumberjack The Killer a.k.a. Lumberjack The Monster (dir: Takashi Miike, 2023)

"Smartphones really are bad for your health!"

This latest Japanese psychological thriller from prolific director Takashi Miike starts off with a moodily dramatic prologue, setting up a familiar cat-and-mouse game between a cold (and murderous) lawyer, the seemingly-mythical 'Lumberjack Killer' and a determined police profiler.  The first two lively sequences quickly give way to to relentlessly dreary talky exchanges, and the wayward story about orphans and neurochips is hampered by its repetitiveness, even though the opening set-up makes the lawyer's story clear and the audience is able to piece together the different elements before the police.  There is a real effort made to make the film look moody and stylish, but with its slim and long-winded story the film might have benefitted from a bit more of the director's signature manic approach.
 

VOD: Godzilla Minus One (dir: Takashi Yamazaki, 2023)

"We're all trying to survive."

Celebrating seventy years of the franchise, this Godzilla redux was a critical and box-office hit, and rightly so.  It hits the ground running with a sombre Jurassic-styled attack on a remote Japanese island outpost in the dying days of World War II, which introduces our main character (a conscience-stricken kamikaze pilot) and sets the tone and focus for the film on survivor trauma/guilt and PTSD, the aftermath of war and its effects on the citizens.  When the Bikini Atoll atomic tests cause the lizard-creature to mutate into the more familiar iteration of Godzilla, which wreaks destruction on the recovering mainland, a team is put together to try to take down the creature.  Although the set pieces involving Godzilla are impressively destructive with well-realised effects work, these are integral to the story as opposed to the Hollywood films where they become self-serving spectacle, with the creature used sparingly but impactfully here as a big old scaly metaphor for the (American) war machine.  Previous movies have trained audiences not to expect the level of tension and emotion on display here - the third act provides a couple of real emotional wallops in this film - making Godzilla Minus One both a solid creature feature and an enjoyable and moving tale. 
 

VOD: The Hunger Games - The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes (dir: Francis Lawrence, 2023)

"People aren't so bad really.  It's what the world does to them..."

This belated and perhaps unexpected prequel to the successful quartet of Hunger Games films starts off three years before the Games are established, then jumps to the 10th Anniversary and follows an inevitably young, buff and pretty version of Coriolanus Snow and his moral quandaries as he is tasked with mentoring a female underdog tribute from the familiar District 12.  The mainly unstarry cast gives the film a suitable distance from the main series, with Tom Blyth working effectively and with strength as the young Snow and a spirited performance from Rachel Zegler as his mentee Lucy Gray, and their shifting relationship is quite interesting to follow.  Director Lawrence returns to his cinematic dystopian world, recreating and retrofitting recognisable touchstones to good effect generally.  The back-to-basics Games mid-section has some appropriately tense and mildly violent moments, and the reality TV/media control/commercialisation issues remain simple and directly handled.  Overall the film is - like its predecessors - unnecessarily and wearingly long, and it does lose momentum to a degree in the final act, but sound storytelling and some interesting backstory make this film a reasonably worthy effort for the franchise.

 

VOD: Night Swim (dir: Bryce McGuire, 2024)

"I used to be scared of pools."

Adapted from the director's 2014 short film, this limp gateway thriller finds a generic family (ill former baseball-player father, stoic working mother, teen daughter and younger son) relocating and renovating the swimming pool in the back garden, but as the father's health miraculously improves and the family members start to experience horrible visions and near-accidents, a thirty-year-old tragedy may be about to repeat itself as sinister forces go to work.  Somewhat dull and slow, Blumhouse's attempt here to make swimming pools scary does little to grip or to excite.  The narrative has the feel of a muddled lesser Stephen King short story, as the stick-a-family-in-a-house-and-see-what-happens formula is threadbare here, and there are eye-rollingly overfamiliar Jaws references used, mixed with steals from the urban supernatural terrors of Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror and a couple of J-Horror nods for good measure.  Overall, Night Swim has little impact.
 

VOD: The First Omen (dir: Arkasha Stevenson, 2024)

 "Hiding won't absolve your sins."

Following the moribund 2006 remake, this prequel to the 1976 horror classic takes us back to Rome five years before the events of the original film, where kindly young American novice Margaret is posted to an orphanage to start her career in service to the church, unwittingly playing her part in a long-planned conspiracy that leads to the birth of the son of the Antichrist.  The film is atmospheric and well-plotted, its retro stylings and sounds adding to the film's place in the timeline well.  Well-played moments foreshadow some of the events in the 1976 film nicely, and the film's slow-burn approach moves effectively from glimpses and suggestions of unpleasantness into more overt terror as the film progresses.  With a strong and compelling performance by Nell Tiger Free in the central role, The First Omen is a surprisingly effective horror/thriller and it is a welcome addition to the presumed-dead franchise.

VOD: Atlas (dir: Brad Peyton, 2024)

"I doubt she can care for a houseplant!"

In this overblown sci-fi actioner, AI bots across the world go on a murderous rampage, led by the world's first AI terrorist, Harlan (Simu Liu).  Twenty-eight years later, gritty and driven AI analyst Atlas (Jennifer Lopez) goes on a mission to a distant planet to which Harlan had absconded, where her team is ambushed, leaving her stranded and reliant on her mech-suit's onboard AI (Sterling K. Brown).  In a heady mix of thunderous music and huge glossy visual effects, the film is based around big action beats of little consequence, and what is effectively the Lopez bottle-show runs out of steam quite quickly.  JLo spits out her dialogue and purses her lips a lot, Mark Strong admirably does his best to keep a straight face as her boss, and Liu and Brown are disappointing wasted here.  The usual influences of genre classics such as Aliens, Pacific Rim, Terminator and others are never far away, and this kind of big brash sci-fi seems an odd fit for a Lopez star vehicle.
 

VOD: Wonka (dir: Paul King, 2023)

"You sure can be silly, Willy!"

This cheery musical/prequel/origin story was the hit of Christmas 2023 and is a perfect fit for the holiday season. Written and directed by Paul King, Wonka mines a similar sense of delight, whimsy and, um, pure imagination as his two Paddington films, as the titular character tries to start out his chocolates business in competition with a trio of established nefarious chocolatiers.  All aspects of design are detailed, lavish and lush, making the film look gorgeous.  The narrative has a consistently engaging momentum, and right from the engagingly sweet opening number Neil Hannon's songs work well, with Divine Comedy signature-style echoes from which the film benefits enormously.  As Wonka, Timothee Chalamet is surprisingly sincere and charming, even if the character here is notably more mainstream than in the previous movie incarnations, ably supported by a wealth of Brit talent, including, notably, Olivia Colman, Paterson Joseph and Jim Carter.  Wonka is not just the prequel we did not know we needed, it is simply a respectful, family-friendly and unexpectedly delightful treat.
 

VOD: Deathclub (dir: Ronnie Nanos, 2023)

"OK.  We've seen it.  Let's head back."

In this minimal lowest-of-budget thrillers, five unlikely and unappealing friends break into an abandoned (but in surprisingly good-looking condition) nightclub, drink, do drugs and one-by-one get to face angry spirits for their individual sins.  Consistently undermined by weak performances and poor dialogue, there are however occasional positive efforts to realise genre conventions and the synth-led score provides fair backing.  The unattractive flashbacks hardly portray the club as a hotbed of hedonism that it seems to wish for, not a lot happens in the first half and the second half is waywardly nonsensical.  That any film is completed and exhibited is always to be commended, but Deathclub is not very watchable or enjoyable.  
 

VOD: The Beatles - Get Back (dir: Peter Jackson, 2021)

"What should we do that's fun?  Besides work?"

Fans of most bands and singers would probably kill for this level of behind-the-scenes access, as Peter Jackson's three feature-length-parts documentary series assembles footage shot over January 1969, with the compelling frame of two weeks' songwriting rehearsals to create a live show (and a new Beatles album) at the end.  The madness of this monumental task by a then-imploding band follows them daily with reasonable openness, as Paul McCartney tries to wrangle some kind of working discipline, George Harrison quits briefly, John Lennon is veering off on his own Yoko path (glued to his side throughout) and Ringo Starr just seems happy to be there, eventually leading to the controversial free concert on the rooftop of their new Apple Studios in London.  Clearly missing their manager Brian Epstein and uncertain of their musical future and direction, this documentary series fascinates not only for the interaction between the band members but also to witness songs emerging through the writing and rehearsal process, such as Get Back, The Long And Winding Road, Carry That Weight and even an early incarnation of Lennon's Jealous Guy.  What emerges is a curiously fascinating and absorbing insight into one of the biggest bands of all-time, lovingly and carefully curated, and what is does best is to show with ease all four of the band members as true musicians.