REVIEW - ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (JAMES BOBIN)

Breaking the rules by the numbers: two contradictory cliches do not make one original film in Alice Through the Looking Glass, a film that fittingly defies itself in pursuit of meaning and purpose. If Lewis Carroll should turn in his grave, you may turn from the cinema and stroll straight out - a wise choice if you've seen this film's predecessor, Alice in Wonderland. The two films are bound not only by story and character but by tone, design, demographic, and the remarkable sensation of being overwhelmed by banality, of being confronted with limitless artistic and technical wizardry yet being moved by so little of it - a genuine contradiction, perhaps. Since the two are so alike, this latter film is best analysed in direct comparison to the former. As such, it's neither as odd nor as fresh, but resultantly not as willfully enervating. It's not as aesthetically attractive, but only by a little. It's thematically more aware, which is to little diegetic avail, but since so little of Alice Through the Looking Glass actually is, this is one of the more savourable aspects to the film. Indeed, the finest takeaways here are often the most fleeting: there's Helena Bonham Carter's amusing performance as the Red Queen, there's appealing production design - markedly, gratifyingly more physical, more tactile than before - by Dan Hennah, and there's the bizarre sight of a film that casts Geraldine James, seems to make a genuine effort to provide her with even a single line of dialogue, and yet somehow fails. It's an appropriate summation of Alice Through the Looking Glass on the whole, in fact: fitfully fun, but despite all it tries, it's ultimately a failure.

LES COWBOYS - TRAILER

Last May, Thomas Bidegain's Les Cowboys was one of the best-received films screening at the Cannes Film Festival, if not quite securing unanimous praise from attending critics. It finally reaches US screens on the 24th of June, with the above trailer playing up American movie star John C. Reilly's role in an obvious attempt at drumming up interest. The trailer does a decent job of that, however, inspiring some of that interest in me too. No UK release has yet been confirmed.

TRAILER FOR WIENER-DOG

Out on the 24th of June in the US, here's the first trailer for Todd Solondz's new movie Wiener-Dog. It's the latest of the American auteur's many films about weird white people, but features a more commercial tone (or appears to) than most of his previous work. Check it out!

REVIEW - THE DAY BEFORE THE END (LAV DIAZ)

Shouting into the void: not the past but the future, a cultural landscape devastated by indifference. The West has infiltrated the East, usurped its codes and conventions with its own, creating a clusterfuck of nonsense, and its silent, sinister wake. Lav Diaz once more pulls from the past to illustrate the present, and gives a glimpse of that future in The Day Before the End, a montage of bewilderment that will bewilder its viewers. Who, what, why: any number of questions, and many more answers, though too few of any discernible consequence. In Diaz's desolation, you take what you can. He respects artists, and the artistic process, but laments the perceived pointlessness therein - the actors unheard, unnoticed, standing strong and shouting, preserving for preservation's sake. He loves his country, or is it just an idea of his country, an aspiration for it? Is it more of a reminiscence that he prefers, one lifted from the works of other artists, foreign artists? If his nation's self-destruction was not, in fact, by itself, but by Western influence, then can its salvation truly be Shakespeare, a paragon of Western culture? Or is that salvation too merely a reminiscence, a poignant reminder from what is before? And he fears - a danger that is identified yet unidentifiable, something at stake, but exactly what? Equally unidentifiable. If it truly is the day before the end, what to do? Diaz gives up and keeps going, a hopeless harbinger yet a determined one. If all we can do is shout into the void, then at least someone has something to shout about.

REVIEW - NINA (CYNTHIA MORT)

Incompetence reigns in Nina, a blazing beacon to light the way of 'What Not To Do' when making a movie. An exploitative industry unmasked and unwittingly unpicked in this most egregious example of it - in the basic conceit and in the efforts to disguise that exploitation. Put simply: to 'honour' the life of Nina Simone, one of the most gifted, outspoken, influential figures in the Civil Rights Movement, with a treatment so dishonest, so misguided is a grave insult to the woman herself and to the whole movement; to proffer the legitimacy of that treatment, to insist upon its artistic and political merit, is to discredit all that both she and they stood for. Nina is no mere mistake either, since its callous distortion of history and honesty is entirely willful, an attempt at bolstering dramatic intensity at the expense of dramatic integrity. This is a common trait among films based on true events, but it's a despicable one when it contributes to a betrayal of the nature and purpose of those events. To boot, Nina is also an example of hideous filmmaking, truly awesome awfulness. Cynthia Mort's direction is devoid of atmosphere, structure, at times even a fundamental understanding of how to frame an image so that it is comprehensible. Her script is one clunking platitude after another, lacking in the most rudimentary knowledge of its subject's character, consistently shoehorning truths about her life into false constructs to add more conventional 'colour.' Speaking of colour, the skin-darkening makeup on Zoe Saldana is as offensive as the effort to make this size 2 stunner appear plump is stupid; Saldana is no better, barely approximating Simone's speaking voice, completely missing her singing voice, imbuing her with not a jot of her passion at any point. It's a horrible, amateurish impersonation, resembling Simone no more than it resembles a human being, which is rather little indeed. A catastrophic biopic - surely one of the worst ever made.

OFFICIAL TRAILER FOR ANDRZEJ ZULAWSKI'S COSMOS

Here's the trailer for Andrzej Zulawski's Cosmos, and it's as wondrously bizarre as one would hope for. A prize-winner upon premiering last Summer at the Locarno International Film Festival, it finally arrives in US screens on the 17th of June. Be sure to catch it, since it is the final film from this maverick filmmaker - Zulawski died on the 17th of February.

REVIEW - LAND OF MINE (MARTIN ZANDVLIET)

The allure of prestige picture status hampers so many international mid-budget productions, predominantly those of a historical nature. Martin Zandvliet's Land of Mine is one such production - modestly mounted, helmed with sense and sensitivity, but hindered by adherence to commercial tropes and bland stylistic choices. And it's regrettably unambitious too, identifying the virtue of its story in its very existence, rather than examining it with any discernible insight. Alas, Zandvliet isn't entirely incorrect in this assumption: Land of Mine's unfamiliar but true, dramatically rich story of young German POWs forced to sweep the Danish coast for Nazi landmines shortly after WWII is a compelling one, and deserving of respect and some level of accuracy in its treatment. This it is provided by Zandvliet's gentle, measured approach, but if there's any point to the film it is made early and often, with no development beyond the obvious. Indeed, Land of Mine traces wretchedly obvious narrative lines from beginning to end, thus signposting each of the supposedly shocking events that occur and nullifying their emotional impact. Yet average filmmaking reaps some rewards, getting as much right as its gets wrong. Performances are shoehorned into melodramatic conflicts and resolutions, but are uniformly capable; period recreation is strong, with an admirably authentic feel to everything but the overcooked grey tint of the cinematography. It's a mistake, but an expected one, in a film where virtually everything is expected; it's one thing this story definitely does not deserve, though - a faded postcard aesthetic, resigning Land of Mine to history. The film itself may suffer a similar fate.

FINDING DORY: TRAILER #3

Drag SeaWorld! Drag it to the bottom of the ocean and let it drown! Much as I, unlike many, do not consider Finding Nemo to be among Pixar Animation Studio's best works, it's nevertheless a lovely adventure movie, so my hopes and expectations are understandably high for the sequel, Finding Dory. Pixar are being their usual irritating selves with the release date strategy, though: out on the 17th of June in the US and on the 29th of July in the UK. Check out the first and second trailers for Finding Dory too.

REVIEW - A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING (TOM TYKWER)

A film, stranded as its lead, in the strange desolation of Dave Eggers' prose, with a mandate to idiosyncrasy. Tom Tykwer soon establishes a rhythm and a tone that fulfill that mandate, as the experienced cinephile might expect of him; and who better than this director to craft a work so fulsome in its design, from material so reticent to assist. Tykwer's films aren't just mere dabblers in the art of emotional architecture, they're devotees of it. Few working filmmakers today examine the influence of our immediate surroundings on our mental state with such depth and with such detail as Tykwer, and A Hologram for the King is a consistently interesting, surprising continuation of this artistic obsession. There's a vibrancy to every moment, every movement, that is matched by the tone of the film - buoyant, ebullient, sun-drenched and silly. As per, the bigger the budget, the less the strain on the filmmakers' collective creativity; one rather wishes to feel some sense of resistance in A Hologram for the King, some grit, some flaw in the construction that might better reflect the protagonist's feeling of depressed dislocation. We observe his ennui without ever engaging in it, and the film's odd lack of ambition is uncovered in its inability to approach this topic from another angle, or arguably at all. For something so apparently esoteric in style and content, A Hologram for the King is unusually entertaining, in a very commercial manner, and not unwelcomely so. 'Strange... surprising... odd... unusual:' on paper (or on screen), it's literally all of the above. In person, though, this is a most affable, enjoyable film, and all the more surprising for that.

REVIEW - X-MEN: APOCALYPSE (BRYAN SINGER)

Styled from the syntax of the superhero movie, X-Men: Apocalypse is a dead-weight entry into a franchise whose reputation diminishes as its size expands. Any more expansion and this film would explode - it's blustered bloat from first to last, too much CGI, too many characters, too much bombast and portent, too much of everything. The old X-Men movies cared about their characters; Apocalypse cares only for their plot-pushing potential. The old movies cared about place, location, spatial dynamics; Apocalypse cares only for monolithic digital extravaganzas, soulless, gargantuan creations of derivative imaginations. The old movies employed silence not as an accent to the action but for its own virtues; Apocalypse is brash, noisy, sound and fury signifying, alas, nothing. Bryan Singer is getting progressively worse at making his X-Men films genuinely meaningful, and ever less sensitive as to the broader implications their barely-surviving subtext might possess. The film is a stylistic nightmare, and a conceptual one too, but does it succeed on its own terms, as entertainment? Sad that a franchise that once challenged the mindlessness of its genre has now succumbed to it, but this film is at least serviceable in this regard. It has moments of menace, and of levity, the latter largely attributable to Evan Peters, who's underused here but far from alone in this respect. So much happens, or merely seems to happen, that none of the film's finer qualities are granted the time and energy to properly develop, though a number of effective action sequences are nonetheless enjoyable. That this is what the X-Men films have come to may have been inevitable, if they were to survive in this era of mega-franchises, but it's no less disappointing for that fact.