Gutland (2016)

Gutland (literally 'The Good Land') is a large part of Luxembourg, I didn't know, and is presumably where this rural noir is set: Jes turns up one day looking for farmhard work, but the fact he is toting a bag full of cash suggests he has other reasons for being suddenly in this lush and peaceful, prosperous and oh-so-welcoming land, but the locals are about to be rocked by other, more menacing outsiders.

★★★★☆

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Blair Witch (2016)

This is simply more shaky, badly filmed home-style footage of young, would-be investigative documentarians screaming and huffing and puffing for 90 minutes in the woods while any development of the story about some sort of witch-cursed woodland is perpetually interrupted by irritating handicam malfunctions, clichéd, glitchy torches, dull drone battery problems, tangential scenes of body horror, and irrelevant camp dangers.

★★☆☆☆

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The Tip of the Iceberg (La Punta Del Iceberg) (2016)

 

This thriller about a woman, Sofia Cuevas who in her capacity as a company director is sent to investigate a series of suicides at a branch of her employer's megacorporation, has a tricky job trying to hit the right note because although you expect some moments of solemnity in a thriller about suicide, things become outright maudlin -  scarves flutter in slow motion in the wind and workers who have suicided reappear and look pained or at peace depending on the current status of Cuevas' investigation - making this a slick corporate thriller with jarring, emotionally overwrought moments, but it is always interesting, calling into question the line between work and life and control and subservience, and features a terrific performance from lead Maribel Verdú.

★★★☆☆

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The Disappointments Room (2016)

The title of this horror thriller doesn't refer to the movie theatre after the lights go back up on a paying audience but to, well, I hardly need to tell you when reading the title alone tells you everything you don't need to know about a weak Amityville Horror reiteration that not only runs out of time to sufficiently develop its main storyline (yet another couple move, for a fresh start, into a remote home only to discover it is haunted) but also completely abandons other plot points (for example, what on earth happened to the roofer?)

★★☆☆☆

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Incarnation (Inkarnacija) (2016)

In this bullet-riddled Groundhog Day thriller from Serbia, a man with an unchanging monotonous voice experiences an equally unchanging montonous life event - he repeatedly wakes up on a bench and is eventually tracked down and killed by masked killers - and it will take not so much ingenuity as repetitive run-through-gunfire chase scenes for the initially intriguing but quickly wearisome supernatural cycle to break and for the movie to reach the before-its-time accidentally hilarious "Take it off! Take it off! Take it off!" Masked Singer endscene.

★★☆☆☆

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Esteros (2016)

 

Esteros

It includes occasional glimpses of the beautiful Iberá wetlands and ends sweetly, but wading through the  flashbacks showing Matias and Jeronimo's burgeoning childhood romance and waiting for the adult Matias to reconcile long-lost feelings after he reunites with Jeronimo at the summerhouse where they first discovered their love for each other is pretty ponderous. 

★★☆☆☆ 

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A United Kingdom (2016)

This biopic does a pretty good job of condensing into a serviceable two-hour history lesson the main details of not just one but two lives during an embarrassing period of British history: the life of Seretse Khama, the first democratically-elected President of Botswana who led the country to independence from British colonisation in 1965, and the life of his English wife who defied the sensibilities of her family and her country by marrying Khama and moving to and having a baby in Bechuanaland.

★★★☆☆

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6.9 on the Richter Scale (6.9 pe scara Richter) (2016)

A gormless actor working on a musical theatre production dreams constantly of devastating earthquakes, but it is the arrival into his adult life of his long-lost pilot father and the increasingly strained relationship he has with his depressive wife that rocks him during his waking hours, in this colourful, sometimes amusing, but incredibly chauvinistic sex comedy from Romania centred on an especially irritating couple.

★★☆☆☆

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Kóblic (2016)

Argentina's Dirty War is the context of this thriller, set in 1977, that has Ricardo Darin playing a traumatised former Death Flight pilot who becomes involved with a married woman, and it is just a shame that by film's end this fascinating context, beautifully realised in complete period detail, ceases being relevant to the thriller plot except perhaps for dictating how brutally everyone behaves.

★★★☆☆

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Hell or High Water (2016)

In the second of the loose trilogy of Taylor Sheridan-penned films set on the American frontier (a lawless, brutal frontier in Sicario, closed, secretive in Wind River, but here corporatised, forgotten and dying) two brothers commit a series of bank robberies while a pair of sheriffs try to work out who the thieves are and why they are stealing such small amounts of money.

★★★★☆

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Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016)

Stephen King cites it as a source of inspiration and it has spawned innumerous cosmic horror boardgames, computer games, novels, tv shows and movies so it was only a matter of time before Lovecraftian horror, its psychotormented protagonists and its alien ghouls, was made the stuff of animated movies for preteens - right? - except with leaden voice acting, lifeless animation and dreary plotting that turns the Cthulhu mythos into an afternoon of decidedly unfun snowplay, this first of the Howard Lovecraft movies sucks more life out of the horror franchise than it injects new life into it.

★☆☆☆☆

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Spa Night (2016)

Jjimjilbang bathing culture and Korean family dynamics are what's interesting in this drama about a young man coming of age in California while his Korean immigrant parents, an alcoholic father and an overworked mother, pressure him to turn around their own failed American dreams.

★★★☆☆

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The Limestone Golem (2016)

We all love Bill Nighy, but his frozen-with-botox, duck-lipped routine as Detective Kildare in this Victorian-era serial killer thriller (based on a book, apparently) gets more than tired, and when a *shocking* revelation comes at the end - one that might make sense if you cared to think about it - he delivers one final, extended stare of such ridiculous duck-lipped intensity that you want to scream as though a Jack the Ripper-style serial killer called the Limestone Golem is upon you.

★★☆☆☆

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Your Name (君の名は) (きみのなは) (2016)

Japan's second highest grossing film of all time, this 2016 animated feature has a mindboggling story told especially mindbogglingly with the main characters, highschoolers Taki and Mitsuha, frequently swapping bodies and the action switching from past to present and back again, so it can be hard to know scene by scene who is who and when is when, but the animation is so spectacular, it doesn't matter — you are probaby going to be happy to marvel at the images all again to iron out in your mind the intricacies of the Back To The Future time travel slash Freaky Friday body swap plot.

★★★★☆

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Paris Can Wait (2016)

The Trip series was definitely referenced during intial pitches for director Eleanor Coppola's first non-documentary feature, the extremely gentle romantic comedy Paris Can Wait that too contrives a reason, the flimsiest, for its main character, Diane Lane's Anne, to be driven on a restaurant roadtrip across France, from Cannes to Paris, by her husband's film-producing partner Jacques, and while the pair gorge on local food and wine and visit historical sites and museums, they relax, laugh, and share intimate moments - but no Michael Caine impressions - and she starts to wonder if she and her always-too-busy husband will ever get to do the same.

★★★☆☆

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Sully (2016)

This workmanlike Clint Eastwood-directed movie tells the story of the 2009 emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River after the plane hit a flock of geese and even though it is all still fresh in our minds and we all know very well the miraculous outcome and the celebrity status achieved by the pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, it still proves as engrossing as any episode of Mayday/Air Crash Investigations, to see how the aviation investigation played out behind the media frenzy. 

★★★☆☆

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Bastille Day (aka The Take) (2016)

Apparently filmed before the Charlie Hebdo massacre but released after, this action movie is loaned a gritty political realism through its Paris setting, a city that in the movie experiences an act of terrorism and a chaotic aftermath as multiple agencies descend on the city to chase the pickpocket assumed responsible, but that the gritty realism was unintended becomes clear as the pickpocket and Idris Elba's CIA operative form a Lethal Weapon pair of mismatched crime fighters who run around Paris dodging bullets until a really not very sensible Die Hard siege ending.

★★☆☆☆

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Colossal (2016)

A simple but effective metaphor, likening an alcoholic's lifestyle to a gigantic monster wreaking havoc in South Korea, becomes thoroughly mixed because someone wanted to see the monster fighting a giant robot under the spotlights of hovering helicopters - Hathaway survives but characterisation, side plots, and creative potential are left decimated.

★★☆☆☆

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Denial (2016)

I remember Holocaust denier David Irving being barred entry to Australia when I was in primary school and I was visiting Auschwitz last year when I learned denying the Holocaust is illegal in Poland (and many other countries, apparently), so I was interested to catch this dramatisation of the 1996 courtcase that Irving brought against writer Deborah Esther Lipstadt, whom Irving claimed defamed him, to think more about matters of historical truth, historical revisionism, historical denial and freedom of speech and to see how these issues are handled legally, but the movie presents such stuff in only a very minor, not very gripping small-screen way and like Wilkinson's defence lawyer, resists giving Timothy Spall's Irving time or even a look in the face, instead focusing on the go-nowhere character foibles and dull personal details of the defence team as a means of padding out the story, when in fact far more fascinating would have been finally letting Irving in, finally letting him speak, and finally allowing viewers like me to stare hard at him to understand how he came to be such a vexatious denier and why Wilkinson's defence lawyer, the Australian Government, and the world censors his patently obvious lies.

★★☆☆☆

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La La Land (2016)

Facing daily rejection in audition rooms, a waitress in a coffee shop on the Warner Bros Studio lot in LA longs for the day when someone discovers her, believes in her, and thinks she is perfect, but her dreams of Hollywood success are interrupted when she encounters someone who does just that - a pianist pursuing his own dreams of owning a jazz bar.

★★★★★

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