This was a delight. It’s not perfect by any means, but I loved the focus on Helen coming out the shadows and taking centre stage. The sequence where she takes a call from Dash about the location of something or other mid-ultra high speed chase was spot on. It was a really feel-good film with great action sequences and a lot of laugh out loud moments.

Jack-Jack and Edna Mode stole the show.

A very assured directorial debut from Craig Roberts, with a quirky, downbeat, dark, but often funny film about not fitting in. Sometimes I think you can judge the quality of a film by the tiny incidental characters, and the guy on the bridge walking his dog broke my heart. There was just enough suggested about him that you really wanted to know more.

Watched on Saturday November 26, 2016.

This was an OK film that could have been a really interesting and ambitious film. Dev Patel was very good and sympathetic, but the direction taken was a bit bland and formulaic. I was really interested in the clash of incompatible approaches that Ramanujan (intuitive understanding) and Hardy (formal proofs) took, but they only seemed to take this so far before Hardy took the ‘my way or the highway’ ground, and the film resorted to musings about religion. Even Toby Jones was underused, and that’s practically a criminal offence.

Started unpromisingly, but picked up steam, with some brilliant laugh out loud moments. Not a classic, but sometimes you just need a funny film.

Wonderful, sharp comedy of manners. The characters are so beautifully drawn, and the dialogue is delicious.

Snappy dialogue, interesting characters, and a great ensemble cast add to this funny and engaging film.

I hesitate to use the word ‘quirky’ to describe this film, because that often suggests a certain amount of twee-ness. This film isn’t twee, but it is definitely quirky. Our heroine is still living in her mother’s garden shed at the age of 30, unable to move on after the death of her brother. She makes home-made films using her thumbs as characters, which is funnier than you would imagine.

I loved the characters, and found their problems believable and engaging, and there are some very moving moments among the profane and funny ones.

A beautiful, quiet, contemplative film about an extraordinarily content man (the eponymous Paterson, who shares a name with the town in which he lives). Paterson drives a bus, writes poetry, and quietly watches and listens to the world and the people around him. Barely anything happens, but I loved the intensity of its ordinariness. In a curious way, it reminded me a bit of ‘In The Mood for Love’, even though they are very different films. I think it’s the sense of contained intensity and the beauty and pleasure in everyday things.

I watched this first on a plane (with low expectations), and then again at home, because I enjoyed it so much. I felt that it started out a bit too portentously, but it quickly improves and becomes really fun (and funny). Paul Rudd’s Scott and his little gang of misfits are great, there’s an enjoyably evil villain, and I even found that I could bear Michael Douglas. Full marks too for a brief Agent Carter cameo (which should have been longer and she should have been given better lines, but I’ll take what I can get).

The shrunken fight scenes are inventive, particularly the one in the falling briefcase, and the one on the Thomas the Tank Engine train. The latter reminded me a bit of a similar scene in ‘The Wrong Trousers’ - in a good way. I think Wallace and Gromit set the benchmark for tense chase scenes on children’s toys, so if you somewhere near that region of excellence in a film, you are doing well.

I don’t think this film will be to everyone’s taste, but for me it was pitch perfect, poised between comedy, warmth, and pathos. All the leads are perfect, but Sam Neill (as the gruff bushman Hec), and Julian Dennison as Ricky (“a real bad egg…”) are superb and very natural in their roles. I thought Julian did particularly well to depict Ricky’s faux tough front hiding his desperate need to be wanted and to belong. There’s a moment when he silently hugs a water bottle that his foster mother has put in his bed that is really moving.

Overall, it’s a very funny and heartwarming film that I’d love to watch again.

I’m not familiar with any of the backstory of Doctor Strange, so I came to this film with a very open mind. I liked Strange’s arrogance and general borderline unlikeability (given the fact that Cumberbatch is another Brit doing an American accent, he reminded me a lot of Hugh Laurie as House), and the trippy visuals and fight scenes were amazing. There was some great humour in there too, especially from Benedict Wong’s character (Wong is a great character actor, and often shamefully under-used). And to top it all, it has Tilda Swinton in it. I love her in anything, though I do I understand the problems many people had with her part ‘whitewashing’ an Asian character.

Overall, I found it a pretty enjoyable film, and I might even bother with the sequel when that comes out. Even though every time his magic cape thing wrapped itself around his shoulders, the dire warnings of Edna Mode popped into my head.

This was enjoyable enough, but ultimately a bit forgettable. I think if it hadn’t been for the period setting (1930’s Hollywood - I’m a sucker for studying the details of period dress), I would have found it less enjoyable.

It’s a lightweight, but well-crafted film, with some nice comedic moments, but I felt that it tailed off a bit towards the end without being properly resolved.

I’m at a slight loss to know what to say about this film. I enjoyed it throughout, laughed a lot at various places, but it really is profoundly odd.

I think I had assumed that the British had the monopoly on the ‘comedy of cringe’, where the comedy arises out of massive social awkwardness, but on the evidence of this (German) film, German directors (in this case, Maren Ade) can be pretty excellent at it too.

Winfried worries about his workaholic daughter Ines, and - partly to spend more time with her - just shows up where she works and starts playing slightly childish pranks in order to get her to have more fun. I found myself almost watching some scenes through my hands because the social awkwardness levels were so stratospheric. This is completely deliberate on the part of the director Maren Ade, but it’s just toe-curling if you are sensitive to that kind of thing. However, there are also lovely moments of tenderness, and humour, and some sharp commentary on inhuman corporate culture.

I ended up thinking it was a really good and well-made film, but not loving it, if that makes sense.

A lovely, reflective film about a woman in 1900s Sweden who finds solace in photography. She wins a camera in a lottery, but doesn’t use it for years until curiosity - and perhaps a need to have something for herself that isn’t connected to her drunken, abusive husband - leads her to pick it up and learn how to use it. She is an observant person, and has an eye for a moment to capture, eventually making a little money by taking portraits of those in her village.

It is based on a real woman, and the extras interviewing her descendants and showing more of her photos are equally interesting.

On the surface, as simple film about sheep-farming brothers in Iceland, but there’s a whole iceberg-worth of other stuff going on. The brothers haven’t spoken for 40 years, but the threat of scrapie in their herds precipitates a crisis, and they have to confront one another. There are so many lovely subtle touches in this film: the decor of Gummi’s house, the way he trims his toenails (watched through my fingers), the way the brothers use a sheepdog as a postman to deliver passive-aggressive notes to one another.

There are moments of very dark comedy, but this is quite a bleak and tragic film. The last scene really broke my heart.

An amazing portrait of the profound effects of shame. It’s part thriller, part play-within-a-play (the main characters are performing Miller’s Death of a Salesman), but mostly its a delicate exploration of the effects of a traumatic event on everyone caught up in it. In a Hollywood film, the roles of victim and perpetrator would be starkly and simply drawn, but here we see the full effects of shame, anger and fear on everyone, and even - eventually - feel some compassion for the perpetrator.

An enjoyable New York-based spin-off/prequel of the Potter Universe, this was a fun couple of hours, without a lot of substance. The fantastic beasts were, well, fantastic, and I enjoyed Newt’s quiet empathy with the animals in his care. However, the rest lacked a bit of depth and backstory, and it was difficult to really engage with the characters.

Well, this really went in directions that I didn’t expect it to. The acting by the whole cast was phenomenal, and I believed in the messed up but somehow still functional relationship between Reynolds and Alma. Of course, I also really enjoyed the period costumes.

On that note, I may the only person to have watched this film and ended up very slightly disappointed that they didn’t show more of the couture dressmaking process!

This is the big-budget, big-name companion to ‘Crowhurst’ which was released in the same year, and I watched the following week. The Mercy focusses much more on the pressures Donald was under in the lead up to his departure, and much less on the voyage itself. I felt that Colin Firth did a great job of showing how trapped Donald felt by the circumstances of the race, and yet how his own pride and need to keep his promises over-rode his deep misgivings about setting sail. The rest of the voyage has doom hanging over it.

The sounds of the hull creaking, the sea slapping gently against it, and even a pencil rolling back and forth on the table were used very effectively to set an atmosphere, but ultimately I felt that Crowhurst did a better job of getting across the terrifying isolation he must have felt.

I wanted to love this as much as the original, but I didn’t. Visually and conceptually, it is stunning. I love everything about the cinematography, the soundtrack and so on. However, I just found Ryan Gosling’s K curiously unengaging. The problem was that I couldn’t work out if his character was supposed to be so blank, which would be reasonable, given who/what he is, or whether he was giving a very understated performance.

I think that coloured the rest of the film for me: I cared much more about his holographic girlfriend than I did about any of the other characters (including Deckard).

Maybe I need to watch it again.

We managed to watch two interpretations (both released this year) on successive weekends of this tragic story of Donald Crowhurst’s attempt to sail around the world non-stop. I ended up liking both for very different reasons. This is a low-budget trippy film which captures vividly the isolation he must have experienced.

The bulk of the film is set during his voyage, with occasional hallucinatory flashbacks to life before he set off. The whole thing had a kind of creeping horror, and a dream-like feel.