VOD: Big Time Adolescence (dir: Jason Orley, 2019)

"Don't you have friends your own age?
"But you're way cooler!"
"This is true."

Naive teenager Monroe idolises his older sister's ex-boyfriend, 20s slacker Zeke, and it is their journey as unexpected best friends that the film interestingly follows.  The difference in age and lifestyles of these two 'best friends' makes for an unusual mix, and both are played winningly by Griffin Gluck and Pete Davidson as Monroe starts to grow up and follow his buddy into criminal activity and the consequences it wreaks on his friendship and his own life. More than a standard coming-of-age movie, this is sharply, humoprously and sensitively written and directed by Jason Orley, and it does not shy away from the power of friendship and the harsher side of low-life criminality.

 

VOD: Mank (dir; David Fincher, 2020)

"Who was that again?"
"Just a writer."

David Fincher's long-gestating project  - from his late father's script - about the Golden Age of Hollywood screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz as he battles his raging alcoholism and the writing of  Citizen Kane is an astonishingly accomplished film.  There is so much to enjoy, from the sumptuous recreation of the 1930s to the gloriously crisp black-and-white cinematography, the cinema-sounding acoustics, the razor-sharp dialogue, a superb music score from (unexpectedly) Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the fictionalised characters and situations from the Hollywood of that time, and most of all another utterly towering performance by Gary Oldman (with superb support from possibly career-best Amanda Seyfried and Charles Dance) and relentlessly pitch-perfect direction from Fincher.  Mank is simply one of those very few films that come along every year that you can simply revel in, and it will make inevitable appearances in awards season.

 

VOD: Bill & Ted Face The Music (dir: Dean Parisot, 2020)

"Dude - with all due respect, I don't think you're quite getting this!"

Bill & Ted 3 could have been a disaster, but a sensibly long wait for the right script and director brings the same qualities as the two previous outings - it is a good-natured, silly runaround that pinballs around different time periods and iterations of the dopey duo to mildly humorous effect.  With Bill & Ted now middle-aged, their two daughters are a welcome addition, and the 'greatest hits' touches are inevitably rewarding when they happen.  Unlike their song, this film is not a world-changer and it could hardly be called essential, but it is pleasant viewing nonetheless.
 

VOD: Space Sweepers (dir: Sung-hee Jo, 2021)

"Space is full of trash!"

This South Korean sci-fi actioner is a huge, daft, noisy, fast-paced slice of fun.  Set in 2092, a ragtag rough bunch of scrap-merchants-in-space discover a humanoid android child called Dorothy and delight in the potential reward money, until they discover it is a nuclear bomb in human form and they themselves became the target of the bad guys.  All of this lies on top of a conspiracy thriller involving the environmental destruction of plant Earth and an unhinged corporate billionaire genius, meaning there is plenty of story to tell, yet the film also takes time to build the crew's individual characters well and uses their enforced interaction with the child to humorous and heartwarming effect at times.  Space Sweepers is a slightly mad romp, the wildly ambitious effects often (but not always) hit the mark, and it is a wild but entertaining ride.

 

VOD: Monster Island (dir: Mark Atkins, 2019)

"Something is there...."

...certainly not King Kong, Godzilla or other great kaiju of recent movie spectaculars.  Monster Island is one of the weaker mockbusters from The Asylum, where a thin script and cheap settings are not overcome by the performances, here achieving the remarkable feat of the actors seeming to be giving such a range of performances it is as if they were in different movies.  Achieving a coherent movie under tight budgetary circumstances is always to be applauded, but the end result is simply quite dull here. 
 

VOD: Skyfire (dir: Simon Webb, 2020)

"Nature doesn't love, nor does it hate.  It simply builds and destroys."

The recent trend for big-budget Chinese films taking on Hollywood blockbuster tropes is interesting to see, and Skyfire takes on Dante's Peak and the disaster movie genre to spectacular effect.  Based on the daftest of high-concepts - a holiday resort opening next door to an active volcano! - the inevitable occurs with a handful of truly expansive set pieces and creditable special effects.  The cast is clearly invested, background artists are brutally offed, and whilst Skyfire adds nothing new to the mix, it is definitely an entertaining genre entry.
 

VOD: Tremors - Shrieker Island (dir: Don Michael Paul, 2020)

"We didn't come all this way to shoot clay pigeons!"

The lush Thai locale makes this seventh entry in the Tremors franchise look terrific, and in general the film is far better than a late-entry sequel should ever be, although inevitably nowhere near the classic original.  As hunters go up against genetically-modified Graboids, this film is standard Tremors fare that unashamedly mashes up Predator and Jurassic Park in a reasonably entertaining manner, and with the awful humour that has blighted recent Tremors films mercifully dialled down.  
 

VOD: Outside The Wire (dir: Mikael Hafstrom, 2021)

"I don't have any specialist training as a field agent."
"Don't worry - I'm special enough for the both of us."

This standard hybrid of military-action-sci-fi feels so familiar that in an earlier straight-to-video life it would have starred Van Damme or Lundgren, but of course it has a contemporary glossy Netflix/CGI sheen.  In a near/alt-future in which robots serve alongside squaddies (and are integrated into the on-screen action effectively here), an ice-cold protocol-breaking drone pilot is sent to the front line for a taste of real action and its consequences, paired up with a realistic android AI to scupper - you guessed it - a villainous Russian's nuclear attack plans.  Damson Idris and Anthony Mackie are solid performers and are paired well here, and whilst everything is delivered in a slick and well-staged manner, as a whole the film never really manages to rise above doing anything more than average or merely interesting. 

 

VOD: Invasion Planet Earth (dir: Simon Cox, 2020)

"We gave it our all, didn't we?"

Invasion Planet Earth cannot be faulted for its ambition, and the fact that a low-budget crowdfunded British sci-fi movie not only managed to be completed but also become available to view is to be commended.   The film itself is an extraordinarily mixed bag in almost every way: it has too many half-realised ideas crammed in, yet dialogue and character development are stretched very thinly; some scenes have less visual appeal than most TV soaps, yet other location shooting is spectacular; effects work ranges from some truly impressive shots for low-end CGI to the downright shoddy; and whilst the story's big reveal is easy to spot very early, when it comes it actually services the third act quite effectively.  It feels as if there is a solid 45-minute TV sci-fi episode buried in here, but in spite of its glaring inconsistency as a viewing experience, it bears repeating that the scale of ambition is evident.
 

VOD: Tenet (dir: Christopher Nolan, 2020)

"Don't try to understand it.  Feel it."

As we have come to expect from a Christopher Nolan film, Tenet engages and challenges the viewer right from the outset with its dynamic and arresting opening.  Its reputation as a head-scratcher is well-founded, but once you get the idea of what it is trying to do, Tenet has a rewarding central conceit to see played out, even if the final twenty minutes feel a bit like everyone had given up on it trying to make sense and fulfil its own internal logic.  With gorgeous cinematography, mind-bending effects, some effective action sequences, a committed central performance by John David Washington and a cool hard-synth soundtrack by Ludwig Gorannson , Tenet is a secret agent thriller like no other, and whilst fans of the genre will find its sci-fi trappings way too esoteric, it is sometimes good for us as viewers not to have everything handed to us on a plate as easily as most films offer.