TRAILER #2 FOR COLOSSAL

Sometimes, a movie receives mixed reviews from critics and you think, 'Eh... maybe not.' But other times, a movie receives mixed reviews and you think, 'Fuck yeah!' This is such a time. Colossal might not be colossally good, but it looks like the kind of film which I'll have to see to find out. Out in the US on the 7th of April; you can see its first trailer, btw, right here.

REVIEW - LOVETRUE (ALMA HAR'EL)

Young love, that which shapes us; old love, that which changes us. The expectations and the memories, the desires and the scars, the hopes and the heartbreaks. LoveTrue is a rough, poetic little gem that's as deep with empathy as it is unsure how to communicate it. Alma Har'el explores her subjects' separate milieus with such deft, supple, compassionate insight, and then expresses it with such innovation and artistry as to obfuscate exactly what her point is. Indeed, Har'el's utter rejection of the traditional documentary standard of linear, plot-driven procedural repels easy conclusions, though what she provides in its place is arguably no more satisfactory. LoveTrue is a pretty lovely experience up to an indefinite point, whereupon its minor modulations neither sustain its buoyant, tender tone nor supply an adequate replacement, and a work that has heretofore been varying degrees of delightful begins to become repetitive. Nor does it linger long - these are strictly ephemeral pleasures, though at least they are pleasures at all. Har'el employs a variety of narrative devices, adding expressive stylistic elements to poeticize her film's swoony ruminations on love. Keeping this touch playful and its application sporadic, it's far more effective than it reads, and serves both to compliment each of LoveTrue's individual stories and to unite them all via common threads we might otherwise have missed. Love, whether young or old, past or present, hopeful or heartbreaking, has a common effect on all of us. For all its little flaws, LoveTrue does a fine job of evincing something similar in its audience.

REVIEW - EXTREMIS (DAN KRAUSS)

Dan Krauss continues to pay worthy tribute to America's unsung heroes, its professionals burdened with life-or-death responsibilities on whom the nation relies for its safety and welfare. His short film Extremis takes a compassionate look at end-of-life care for terminally ill patients and the decision-making process on their ongoing dependency upon life support. It's an issue that demands a sensitive touch; Krauss' documentary chronicles are as intimate as they are detached, his purview ever centred on those toughest, truest emotions that guide people through that process. Extremis exists only through its understanding, affording the viewer the requisite insight without any potential for more troubling, affecting emotional attachment of our own. Whether it's Krauss' focus on the mundanity of life in even these most exceptional of circumstances, his refusal to dramatize, or the simple brevity of his film, there stands a robust barrier between action and viewer reaction. That perhaps hobbles this film, which one would willingly excuse extending for four or five times its runtime so that Krauss could further exercise his sympathetic inquisitiveness. Yet as a brief tribute to the medical teams overseeing these painful times, and to those undergoing them, Extremis is a fine and noble enterprise, resolutely respectful and appropriately polished. Dan Krauss himself is the kind of dedicated professional whom he profiles in his own work, and the kind of which the world could do with many more.

REVIEW - A MAN CALLED OVE (HANNES HOLM)

Even Scandinavia's comedies are well-organized. Walking a well-trodden path square in the middle of humour and pathos, A Man Called Ove has its tonal and narrative destination in sight right from the start, and stays true to its intentions throughout. Hannes Holm's faithfulness to his vision is commendable, though that vision itself is less so, and one might wish he'd seen fit to deviate from it here and there. Order is all very appealing, and Holm certainly knows how to put together a solid piece of work, but predictability is not, and it's in settling into such a comfortable mould that A Man Called Ove chips away at its modest appeal. Such is the security of Holm's guidance that it rapidly begins to feel too forceful for its own good, and it becomes especially enervating when one experiences a flash of the prescribed emotion before instantly clocking the machinations that led one to that experience. It's blatant manipulation - excessively blatant, indeed, since this is a story that needed not to indulge in such unnecessary over-development. Delicate direction and a charming empathy mitigate the slight preciousness to craft a most engaging, entertaining film at its best, blessed with fine performances and attractive production values (though the score is a gobsmacking rip-off). The whole enterprise chugs along smoothly, which needn't be to the film's detriment and often isn't - rough edges are evidently not Holm's trade, though exploiting the rigour of his approach to emphasize the contradictions and complications that are unavoidable in real life is far preferable to resigning to easy, simplistic solutions. A Man Called Ove stays both fortunately and unfortunately true to itself regardless of its best interests, and is all the more mediocre for it.

REVIEW - CAMERAPERSON (KIRSTEN JOHNSON)

If a memoir inevitably looks to the past, it's most stimulating to witness Kirsten Johnson's testament for the future, Cameraperson. It's less a highlights reel than a lowlights reel, a compilation of all we've missed and not a condemnation but an explanation of how we missed it. Her memories shaped our own with indirect force - now she presents the details of that process with direct force, and reframes our interpretations of the past with simple, straightforward honesty. Cameraperson is thus more persuasive and more enlightening as a statement in its entirety; individual scenes oscillate between plain beauty and plain ugliness, dramatic integrity and dramatic stagnancy - necessary differences given the range of sources, though the film is thereby rendered close to an anthology feature in its effect. What Johnson, whose voice is frequently heard on the consistently diegetic sound mix, proves with every image, however, is the vitality of the cinematographer in documentary filmmaking, and the extent of the viewer's dismissal of their role. Indeed, that dismissal is argued here as being greater the less the artist fights against it, and so it's fulfilling indeed to examine the nature of that role and its cruciality in the production of earnest, effective documentaries. The revelatory power of Johnson's images may deplete commensurately with their level of development; she combats this with sensitive cross-cutting whose impact is possibly a little too blunt. But these are her memoirs, and she may do as she pleases with them. And what she does is noble, skillful and resolutely valuable.

REVIEW - IT'S ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD (XAVIER DOLAN)

But would that it were! Xavier Dolan assembles a quintet of performers from whose company I'd flee even if the apocalypse were imminent, to see which one can bellow into the void with the most futile fervour. It'd be beguilingly odd if It's Only the End of the World wasn't so blatantly pretentious, for Dolan's impression of life remains remarkably dissimilar to anything resembling reality, and his attraction to theatrical works does him no favours. Whether or not it looks like the real thing - and Andre Turpin remains Dolan's greatest asset, for End of the World at least looks lovely - it certainly doesn't sound like the real thing, whether it's incessant verbosity or pompous silence. Characters drone on in monologues that seem intended to express a great deal about themselves, though whose abstract imprecision and florid style consistently only express a great deal about their writer. With receipt neither from their companions within the screen nor from their audience beyond it, the result is dull, draining and wholly lacking in insight. And that's a shame, because Dolan is genuinely on to something in his choice of mise-en-scene. The claustrophobic close-ups are easily dismissed, given their inevitable ineffectuality when set against that heinous dialogue, and their necessary unpleasantness, but they are collectively an intelligent, empathetic idea. The boldness of Dolan and Turpin's approach may convey only one pertinent thematic notion, but it does so succinctly, which is a quality elsewhere absent from End of the World. Altogether, it's a fascinating misfire, albeit one that would be much more fascinating if it weren't for its insufferability. Spend your days, whether or not they be your last, watching something else.

REVIEW - THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE (CHRIS MCKAY)

Here, now, in Trump's America, it's more important than ever to prepare for the worst, whether or not you intend to continue hoping for the best. We ought to have seen this coming, given what happened to the Transformers franchise after its vaguely-promising first film. The Lego Batman Movie doubles down on all the things that made its predecessor famous, if not made it successful; it's a distillation of its most questionable attributes, fitting the same formula to a premise altered only to better serve its worst qualities. That it's aesthetically impressive, with outstanding effects, is of negligible worth by the time it has overused its every visual motif; that it's funny is of equal worth by the time it has negated each clever quip with an ignorant or overworked one. No matter how hard he tries - and would one ever given such a wilfully noxious protagonist - the heterosexual white man just can't seem to get woke, and the viewer might wish Chris McKay and his team of five writers had just embraced this character's fascistic tendencies comme Christopher Nolan and run with it. But Warner Bros. knows what its demographic wants these days, and how to placate a gullible audience of would-be detractors; Lego knows what sells too, and there's nothing at all fundamentally intelligent or aware about bricks. The Lego Batman Movie is cheap, simplistic pandering to very little effect, and only rescued by its own intermittent technical competence. Colourful fun for the kids, no doubt, though perhaps that's all it is for the rest of us too.

REVIEW - KEKSZAKALLU (GASTON SOLNICKI)

Doors are opened in Kekszakallu, yet remain inevitably closed to those incapable of, or perhaps just unwilling to pass through. Gaston Solnicki's oblique denunciation of cyclical societal systems, feeding inequality as they simultaneously reap rewards from it, is nothing if not abstract in its treatment of an abstract idea. Solnicki is unyielding as an artist; his work may be distancing and divisive, but it's a marvellous, singular experience. Though he's not one to linger unnecessarily, his sparse shot constructions ironically reveal the abundance of thematic content in Kekszakallu, the process thus asserting Solnicki's impressive skill. The film is an art piece, without doubt, though one whose most appropriate medium of expression has correctly been diagnosed as cinema. Its sustained crypticity might withhold the very texture of what it intends to convey upon watching, though this quality is only deceptively difficult - Kekszakallu's form only becomes fuller in retrospect, enriched by the viewer's internal process of interpretation, and if that offers little solace to those shelling out and sitting down for an experience, there are always those images. This is a startlingly, uncommonly stimulating sensory work, with all range of technical aspects presented at the peak of their potential. Solnicki is a master in the making - he's arguably already there - but special mention must be afforded to cinematographers Fernando Lockett and Diego Poleri, and who could but enthuse until their beard turned blue at the posthumous contributions of that master among masters, Bartok Bela himself?

REVIEW - BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK (ANG LEE)

The grandest folly of all on the grandest scale of all. Ever a fresh, innovative filmmaker, Ang Lee has here wedded himself to a technical undertaking of such magnitude it seems to overwhelm even him. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk composites dazzling aesthetics over derisory dialogue, a bizarre jumble of perspectives both narrative and visual, a film in which each performer seems to have read a different script, each shot serving a different purpose, each scene adopting a different character. If Lee can't but indulge himself, it's to his credit - only through the remarkable panache with which he wields his limitless arsenal of tools as director can Billy Lynn's essential thematic tenor be expressed. For every element that hits, there's another that misses, though when each concurrent element is in perfect alignment, this is a glorious work of bravura ambition. In its wayward attempts at forging a narrative scope on par with its visionary technical design, Billy Lynn dulls its impact with an array of substandard subplots; their influence is of little cumulative value, as it's only under Lee's guidance that its poignancy begins to take effect. He steers a mildly militaristic script in a few wrong directions of its own, but in pursuing a commentary upon the commodification of war and the identity-related damage it causes to the individual, he's eloquent and persuasive. As enlivened by its startling technical construction as it is hampered by corniness and a problematic approach to gender representation - epitomized in appalling scenes with the title character's love interest - Billy Lynn comes off like a crazed cartoon, a case of too many cooks with too many ideas spoiling the comic book, and it's the closest thing Lee has made to his own, underrated comic book movie, Hulk. Maybe it's a too-big, brave step into new frontiers, or maybe it's just a fascinating folly. Just ignore the public's own ignorance, and trust me: this is, for good or bad, a must-see movie.

REVIEW - RESIDENT EVIL: THE FINAL CHAPTER (PAUL W. S. ANDERSON)

Whether it's just a trend or a legitimate line of critical thinking, the concept of vulgar auteurism is one which has yet to properly win me over. I appreciate the integrity of Paul W. S. Anderson's vision, and I often admire the beauty and clarity of his skill - the auteurist element of this concept is not what irks me. It's the vulgarity which, though regularly a quality which I favour in art, is simply not to my liking in Anderson's Resident Evil series. Spatial dynamism, relentless forward momentum, aesthetic symmetry, all integral components in the nucleus of Resident Evil: The Final Chapter's identity, and all valuable components too, offering bountiful viewing pleasures for the casual fan and the critical thinker alike. And then there's the sheer, simple atrociousness of fellow components such as the writing and the acting - less integral to this particular identity of film, perhaps, but still never less than essential to my own viewing pleasure. Am I a latent traditionalist in my own nucleus as a cinephile? Those critics and fans may seek to defend Anderson in dismissing the importance of these failings, primarily due to the intentionality of their failure, but that argument won't wash with me. There's no convincing purpose in employing poor actors to perform a poor script, regardless of its relevance to the formation of vulgar auteurism as a valid artistic concept. In developing that formation further, The Final Chapter offers nothing new of significance except a more fundamental grasp of basic filmmaking principles - possibly only indicating how low Anderson had set his own bar - whilst also emphasizing the hardiness of Anderson's technique, buried as it is beneath yet more and more layers of, well, vulgarity.