In The Land of Saints and Sinners (2023)

Patriot Games also pitted an IRA terrorist against a hero who makes the mistake of killing the terrorist's brother, but this movie transports the story to an unlikely setting, a tiny coastal village of Ireland where it can be hard for viewers to believe that the two parties - Liam Neeson's brother-killing hero Finbar Murphy and Kerry Condon as the terrorist and sister of the man killed -  don't immediately find each other and have it out; the unbelievable delay is to allow the movie to build to a melodramatic - and a little out-of-place in a small Irish village - John Woo finale where the town suddenly has the population density amd proportions of a major city.

★★★☆☆

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Abou Leila (2019)

For a long time, this tense thriller doesn't let you in on what is going on - all you know is that two men are travelling by car across the Algerian desert in 1994 looking for someone or something called Abou Leila, and you know their plan is foolhardy, misguided, or even delusional, and it is interrupted regularly, repetitively, by one man's violent dreams - and in the end, the movie didn't make much sense to me: in the context of Algeria's civil war, something is said about cyclical violence. 

★★★☆☆

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The Power of the Dog (2021)

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Campion's solemn and unaffecting Western, an adaptation of a novel by Thomas Savage, reminds me of the movies of Paul Thomas Anderson — The Master and Phantom Thread, for example — in the way its gorgeous, elaborate evocation of a world — cattle ranching in (New Zealand standing in for) Montana — ends up being for nought, the grand staging in the end unwarranted by what turns out to be just a queer little episode of crime involving four characters all so deeply repressed that their motivations scene-to-scene — if they are not vanished completely in one of the choppy-changey tv-series-style chapters — remain a mystery — in lieu of personality is offered up homosexuality and alcoholism, as if this is all we need to know.

★★★☆☆

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Nomadland (2020)

The underpaid and overworked man I'm friendly with in my supermarket didn't recognise the name of this movie when I told him it was the reason why I was passing through on the way home so much later than usual, so I told him, "A woman lives in a van and drives around America," and joked that that was everything, he didn't need to see it, he knew everything, but of course there is so much more to Nomadland than that: it is a poem, really, full of breathtaking moments, about the humans who out of necessity pare life down to its most simple form and push, drive on, and somehow manage to still find great beauty in things - say, broken eggshells - even when all else around them is broken.

★★★★☆

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Far From Men (Loin des Hommes) (2014)

So that he can be tried in a French court, Daru, a schoolteacher, reluctantly transports Mohamed, a confessed murderer, across Algeria's Atlas mountains and along the way the two men become embroiled in the beginnings of Algeria's War of Independence, in this visually arresting, philosophically interesting, and broadly politically relevant neo-Western drama based on a 1957 Albert Camus short story, The Guest.

★★★★☆

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Westworld (1973)

In this 1973 Michael Crichton written and directed scifi thriller, the author's first directorial effort, Isla Nubla is an immersive theme park and the dinosaurs are robots built to interact with and accommodate the high-paying tourists' every holiday whim, and while especially shallow (the plot is three-quarters peculiar robot glitches that perturb the theme park scientists but not enough to progress the plot, and one quarter sudden showdown (in which mildly perturbed scientists flip their lids and turn suddenly into shrieking there's-no-stopping-them, robots-will-kill-us-all nihilists) it is a ripping sci-fi tale full of Planet Of The Apes/Soylent Green era kitsch and quite prescient future-imagining, with amusing performances from Richard "The 70s? I'm in everything" Benjamin, Josh "Am I twenty or seventy?" Brolin, and a 1973 version of the T-800, a sinister, sparkly-eyed Yul Brynner.

★★★★☆

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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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The Salvation (2014)

This Danish production set in an Old West with computer-generated stormy skies spends far too much of its running time demonstrating just how bad the bad guy, Henry Delarue, is - he hunts and tortures his brother's killer, hunts and batters a mute woman, kills off the townsfolk two-by-two (you won't care) and extorts from them their land deeds - so when revenge is finally metered out in a rush at the last minute, it no longer even matters by whom: it is simply the long overdue comeuppance needed to end the dreariness.

★★☆☆☆

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The Magnificent Seven (2016)

"Staged" is one word that springs to mind watching this update of the updates of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, with sets and props so pristine and removed from the action that they look like cartoons and with costumes that look like dress-ups, close-ups of sweaty brows that look like Sergio Leone playacting, and scenes of men entering buildings via saloon doors and exiting seconds later via windows looking like comedic sore thumbs...and other words that spring to mind are "dreadfully boring", "horribly unengaging", "by the numbers" and "far from magnificent".

★☆☆☆☆

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The Hateful Eight (2015)

The signature Quentin Tarantino violence, when it comes, detracts from this otherwise metered, suspenseful story of eight or so men and a whole lot of lies holed up in a snowed-in room; I'd have preferred more plot and twists to the From Dusk Til Dawn gorefest that brings everything to a decidedly unfun finish.

★★☆☆☆

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Django Unchained (2012)

It is interesting this, another Tarantino revenge-driven pulp saga, references The Three Musketeers because it is Dumas' other work, The Count of Monte Cristo, that springs to mind watching Jamie Foxx's ex-slave Django, at one stage horseback in a shimmering electric blue Fauntleroy outfit, enjoying a renaissance in disguise, meting out a cold dish of revenge against America's South, but this is less rollicking fun than Dumas' story and more than other Tarantino, anxiety-inducing and contrived.

★★★☆☆

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Cowboys and Aliens (2011)

There is a deadly earnestness throughout this weird hybrid sci-fi western that jars with 1) its occasional vague comedy 2) its nods to alien horror classics, and 3) the fact that Harrison Ford looks like he is trying hard not to roll his eyes; viewers will take time working out this is not a parody a la Mars Attacks, not an absurd genre mashup like Wild Wild West but a film adaptation of a fanboy graphic novel that has misfired (and perhaps Harrison Ford knows it).

★★☆☆☆

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