In Order Of Disappearance (Kraftidioten) (2014)

The 2018 American remake of this darkly funny Scandinavian Harry Brown seemed to think the interest lay in the irreverent detail - the gangster nicknames, the odd bod characters, and the quirky relationships - and so ended up an unfocused Fargo mess while the 2014 Norwegian original includes all the irreverent detail but remains tightly focused on how the actions of a revenge-seeking everyman (in fact, a small-town Citizen of the Year), um, snowball and erupt a war between rival drug gangs, all while the everyman miraculously dodges bullets.

★★★☆☆

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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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Nymph()maniac: Volume I (2013)

A man comes across a woman lying in an alley, takes her home and tends to her and while she talks him through every sexual encounter she has ever had in her life, he interjects with fly fishing analogies, in this occasionally very funny, always interesting first volume of director Lars von Trier's epic five-and-a-half hour contemplation on compulsive passionless sex, just one highlight of which is the mortifying but hilarious scene in which Uma Thurman as a spurned wife, the antithesis of Charlotte Gainsborough's Joe, tries to guilt-trip her husband and his new lover.

★★★★☆

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The Glass House (2001)

A really excellent thriller about a newly orphaned heir to a fortune, possibly the target of a foster parents' murder plot, is Mary Stewart's Nine Coaches Waiting, a book I ripped through on the beach last summer, but this thriller, with its moribund first thirty minutes and a garbled plot about villainous foster parents who get their comeuppance even before they've realised their villainy and coordinated their dastardly plot, stars Diane Lane and Stellan Skarsgård as the impossibly beset foster parents and a stony Leelee Sobieski as the never-really-imperilled foster teenager.

★☆☆☆☆

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Our Kind Of Traitor (2016)

Even Ewan McGregor's everyman, a university Poetics professor, says two-thirds of the way through this John le Carré adaptation that he doesn't know why he is still in the picture - having been randomly chosen at the outset to run a message for the Russian mafia's creative accountant, the prof doggedly sticks around, volunteering further help when it makes zero sense for him to do anything other than remove himself entirely from the escalating danger that increasingly involves British Intelligence and dead bodies, but despite this thin plotting, Our Kind of Traitor is an entertaining thriller, tense rather than full of action, set in glamorous locations like Marrakesh, London and Paris, and a bit like Patriot Games in the way a couple's domestic everyday is threatened suddenly by spy thrills.

★★★☆☆

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