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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Hector and the Search For Happiness (2014)

Things momentarily improve when Toni Collette turns up in the last third and shines brightly as the only genuine thing on the screen, but otherwise this is a nauseating affair about a psychiatrist (Simon Pegg) - a sometimes accident-prone Mr Bean, a sometimes naive trenchcoated Monsieur Hulot, an occasionally slapstick Charlie Chaplin, once a midair doctor, and at other times a wide-eyed Walter Mitty fantasist - who zips around the world like that Eat Pray Love person, searching for happiness, which he finds and packages up in fifteen one-line platitudes that appear on the screen occasionally throughout the movie like patronising summary statements of all the nonsense that has come before - cartoon sequences, a brutal kidnapping, mawkish travelogues, cloying romance, slapstick - a series of events seemingly intended as a "wondrous kaleidoscope" of the human condition but just irritating.  

★★☆☆☆

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