Parallel Mothers (Madres Paralelas) (2021)

Orchestral swells and tremulous strings help turn kitchen-table drama into grand operatic melodrama in Pedro Almodóvar's story of two new mothers sharing their experiences of childbirth, but the link between this melodrama and the broader politics Almodóvar bookends the movie with feels pretty tenuous - living without knowing, living with a secret, and correcting past wrongs seem to be the vague thematic bridge.

★★★☆☆

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Silent Night (2021)

What a dreary exercise this is, about an annoying group of family and friends, like all those twerps from Four Weddings And A Funeral, gathered for Christmas Eve, and as if that alone were not a situation ripe for high tension and aired grievances and awkward revelations, it also happens to be the eve of the end of the world, so all these goofuses face a decision that is sufficiently ghoulish to keep you watching through the drudgery to the end: they can die painfully from a poisoned atmosphere, or take a pill and die peacefully before the agony starts, Merry Christmas.

★★☆☆☆

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No Man of God (2021)

It's the American criminal justice system, one in the 1980s with a newly established criminal profiling department, that is the star of this oft-told, awful true crime story, approached from a peculiar angle - somehow Elijah Wood as real-life founding criminal profiler Bill Hagmaier and Luke Kirby's idiosyncratic and distracting Ted "Surely he sat up straight and spoke without a hand in front of his face, once?" Bundy disappear into the beige 1980s backgrounds, achieving little in their conversations about the infamous killer's crimes, and it is the access rules, prison protocols, and government bureaucracy that step forward and gently but insistently drive the interest here.  

★★★☆☆

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The Cursed (2021)

Like The VVitch, the attempt here is to elevate horror with history, so the first stretch of the movie involves gypsy encampments being razed by colonists in grey miserable scenes that depict real historical horrors, but then we are expected to care about a monster horror that in comparison is turgid and plodding, not half as interesting as the history.

 

★★☆☆☆

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Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (Felkészülés meghatározatlan ideig tartó együttlétre) (2021)

A neurosurgeon quits her job in New Jersey, USA, and heads to Budapest, Hungary for a romantic rendevous on the Pest side of the Liberty Bridge, but the object of her infatuation, a surgeon she met at a conference, doesn't show up and when she tracks him down, he doesn't know who she is, so is she mad, is he lying, or is there a Hitchcockian thriller afoot - it's suspenseful, intriguing, but you won't know until the very last frame precisely the nature of this slowburn but razor sharp film. 

★★★★☆

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The King's Man (2021)

Are there people in the world, really, who weren't immediately repelled by this series' titles' shifting, changing spacing and punctuation, who in fact watched and so enjoyed the tiresome teenage-boysy action of the first two cartoons they thought what was needed, yawn, was a wartime period backstory that awkwardly combines Saving Private Ryan-style solemn battlefield war history with high-camp devil-may-care superhero derringdo?

★★☆☆☆

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The Black Phone (2021)

It takes an ordeal with a masked troll (upstairs, not under a bridge - a kind of vague reiteration of Buffalo Bill) and conversations with murdered teenagers via a magic wall phone for a boy to finally get the gumption to talk to a girl he likes in science class -- that his sister is psychic, too, who sees things in dreams ends up an irrelevant detail.

★★☆☆☆

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Judy (2021)

If your impression of Judy Garland is that she was a kooky pill-popping drunk and terrible mum who abandoned her kids to chase money, then you are not wrong but this biopic contextualises that image, revealing the terrible effect upon Judy of her showbiz mum as well as the Weinsteinian influence upon her of numerous entertainment industry men, and really, how could anyone stay sober and on the rails standing each night in front of the theatre audiences of London, depicted in this movie as a schizophrenic group that laugh, laud and worship Judy one night, pepper her with tomatoes and boos the next before mawkishly serenading her the one after that!

★★★☆☆

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No Sudden Move (2021)

The elaborate costuming of the ensemble cast and period 1960s Detroit setting feel like an affectation until late in this Steven Soderbergh movie when a card is played that turns the riveting, finely-acted neo-noir crime flick into something sharper: a pointed social commentary.

★★★★☆

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Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City (2021)

Moments from the games are brought to life and strung together with more concern for perfectly realised game haircuts, weapons, and cosplay outfits than for telling a coherent story, so this reboot, after so many Milla Jovovich movies,  feels like it false-starts right the way through to at least the halfway mark before an unwarranted denouement (a live-action reenactment of that train-carriage bossfight that players of the game will remember).

★☆☆☆☆

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Memoria (2021)

Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's movie, an almost plotless stringing together of quiet, painterly and occasionally long and perfectly still moments, defies conventions and easy categorisation and is absolutely hypnotic, about a Canadian (Tilda Swinton) in Bogota, Colombia who wakes one morning to the sound of a strange earthy thud and then starts to experience oddities in her interactions with her sick sister, whom she is visiting, and in her blossoming friendship with a sound engineer named Hernan.

★★★★☆

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

Some of these superhero cartoons feel especially lightweight, like an eight-page comic that is opened, flipped through, closed and discarded in almost one motion, like this sequel to the original Venom featuring a villain who is vividly brought to life by an oddly-wigged Woody Harrelson but only for a few moments — a moment involving chickens, one about a dinner date, and a sfx-laden car-ride moment — before he is dispatched in a climactic sfx spectacle, chomped by Tom Hardy's symbiot (investigative journalist Eddie Brock and his cartoony, toothy alien parasite, Venom, who leaps out from between Brock's shoulderblades) and then the credits roll, before we learn anything interesting — or anything at all —about Brock, about Venom (he eats chickens), about that villain, or about Brock's three "in-the-know" allies: a shopkeeper, a former lover, and the former lover's new man. 

★★☆☆☆

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Last Night in Soho (2021)

The life of 60s performer Sandie - think nightclubs, cocktails, Cilla Black-types, Dusty Springfield-lookalikes, and lots of leering, lecherous men - and that of fashion student Eloise in the present day - think peer pressure at college, bar-hopping, part-time beer-pulling and rental applications - supernaturally collide with the help of reflective surfaces, an impressive series of effects that is this psychological horror's pièce de résistance, but if there is anything to learn from Eloise's bunny hop into so elaborate a Swingin' 60s fandango, it seems just to be the idea that no matter how much women are used and abused over decades by lecherous men, in the end they'll always trump men with their own villainry.

★★★☆☆

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Halloween Kills (2021)

A "kill" isn't over until the camera has come to rest on the blood pooling in the cavity left by, say, a fluorescent tube or a broken stairpost in this especially unedifying 2021 Halloween movie that starts up right where 2018's Halloween left off (Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode is being rushed to hospital believing herself to have killed Michael Myers for good) and ends some time later that same loooong Halloween night after the townfolk of Haddonfield form lynch mobs to hunt Michael Myers (still alive, afterall -- or, well, nevermind...) while Laurie literally does nothing - she gets up from her hospital bed just once, only to get straight back in again to spout some never-before-uttered dubious Michael Myers mythology and that's all.

.

★★☆☆☆

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The Green Knight (2021)

 

I read The Quest of the Holy Grail once, and this adaptation of a related tale about the nephew of King Arthur, Sir Gawain, journeying to see a Green Knight to pay a due, brought that book back to mind, perfectly evoking the dreaminess and painterliness of the book's chapters, with some, like the episodes in the movie, ending without obvious point while others thrill with chivalrous exploits, all taking place against a beautifully realised medieval time steeped in magic and religion, albeit in a movie with two or three scenes, clanging attempts at modernity, which jolt the viewer out of the otherwise mesmerising fantasy.

★★★★☆

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Don't Breathe 2 (2021)

Well, they've certainly fulfilled the brief, taking all that ugliness of the first movie (remember when things turned unexpectedly nasty in the basement?) and fashioning a really equally vile sequel in which that blind ex-Navy Seal kidnapper, rapist and murderer in number one returns, the victim of another home invasion but this time a kind of antihero as he resists the efforts of a group of men trying to kidnap his daughter, a crime that starts out mega-gory and ends with sickening "who thinks up this stuff?" gothic horror involving, wait for it, involuntary organ donation, some Grande Dame Guignol psycho-biddy grotesquery, hacked off arms and popped eyeballs.

★★★☆☆

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The Man With The Answers (2021)

This unhurried, tender and utterly charming comedy has former diving champion Victor, a Greek, driving an old Audi from Greece to Germany, and on the ferry to Italy, he meets Mathias, a German whose Rupert Everett drollness so disarms Victor he eventually, after initial resistance, lets his guard down, braves the dangers of being chopped up into pieces on Italy's provincial backroads and welcomes Mathias as a companion on his journey to reinvigorate himself, a trip full of highs and lows, ups and downs, and beautiful scenery.

★★★★☆

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Old (2021)

No, director M. Night Shyamalan doesn't have an excuse for yet another lame ending because although this time his movie, a beach-based Picnic At Hanging Rock (a group of people lug picnic baskets to a beach only to discover they are trapped and inexplicably ageing there) is based on Sandcastle, a graphic novel by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, Shyamalan actually changes the ending of the kooky Lost-like events, so the lame ending is his again, but up to that late point when the story turns rusty, he delivers a captivating fantasy horror thriller full of great acting, weird and wonderful ideas, a beautiful confined location like the stage of a theatre production, and of course his trademark cameo and camerawork, sweeping and overhead and long-take.

★★★☆☆

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Spider-man: No Way Home (2021)

I wasn't always rivetted, as evidenced by the fact I was able to make to-do lists in my head as the dizzying cgi-action sequences went on and on, but there's no denying the cleverness of this Spider-man movie (the sixth Marvel film to feature Tom Holland as the webslinger but the first to characterise him as a mature agent of salvation, not a juvenile wannabe meter-out of violent justice), one that makes all the previous iterations of Spider-man, the ones with Andrew Garfield or Toby Maguire or even, say, Shinji Tôdô an extension of this movie, neatly rendering moot any and all past inconsistencies in plot or character or circumstance that may have niggled at viewers of umpteen versions, making everything connected and sensible and, get ready for it, ripe for multiple concurrent Spider-man releases.

★★★★☆

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Asakusa Kid (浅草キッド) (2021)

This drama is as much about the changing face of Japanese comedy in the 70s given the advent of  "manzai" (Dean Martin- and Jerry Lewis-style comedy duo routines) appearing on burgeoning Japanese television as it is a deeply moving insight into the life of Japanese television and movie stalwart Takeshi "Beat" Kitano upon whose memoir the movie is based.

★★★★☆

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