Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Matchstick Men (2003)
(SPOILERS) Conning the conman has a lot of going for it as a premise. An enormous amount, if you’re David Mamet. Unfortunately, Sir Ridley Scott (he was plain Ridders prior to 2003) is no Mamet, and neither are screenwriters Ted and Nicholas Griffin. Ted’s Ocean’s 11 remake, curiously, had pretty much the reverse issue of Matchstick Men. There, there were never any real obstacles in the way of the crew making their score (none they couldn’t produce a rabbit out of a hat to resolve). That didn’t matter too much though, as you were in it for a breezy, good-time heist. Here, we’re told how skilled Nicolas Cage’s Roy Waller is at the con, but he spends the entire movie succumbing to the schemes of those around him. He’s everybody’s dupe, which makes the picture, on revisit, quite wearing.

Good Time (2017)
(SPOILERS) The Safdie Brothers, Ben and Josh, have been anointed the apostles of NYC grime, and duly acclaimed for their grit and verve. Good Time has made studios sit up and take notice, such that they have a 48 Hrs remake on their cards (what to do when Hollywood comes calling? Retreat from indie originality into the safety net of the unnecessary remake). I can’t say I much cared for it, however. It’s a technically proficient exercise but also an empty one.

The Post (2017)

(SPOILERS) The Post might be Steven Spielberg’s most prestige-lite filmmaking endeavour yet, a tick-box exercise that doesn’t do a whole lot wrong (until the last twenty minutes, at any rate), but feels like it has no true reason to be, and no real inspiration behind it (other than the evident boy-with-his-trains thrill of showing the workings of a good old-fashioned printing floor). Spielberg can churn these worthy, earnest based-on-real-events tales out, and they’ve been his bread and butter in fishing for critical and peer approval since the mid-80s, but they’ve only served to underline a mind that prioritises sentimental moralising over insight, and spoon-feeding, and the entertainer’s instinct, over nuance and shading (Bradley Whitford said of the director, “There’s a collision of showmanship with material that could otherwise be very preachy and dry”; the dry part I can buy).

Which isn’t to say he doesn’t often get it nearly right, or produce very competent, easil…

Freejack
(1992)
(SPOILERS) No, I won’t be making out that Freejack is an unfairly maligned, hidden classic or that it deserves cult status. It’s a movie I’d hazard got a greenlight off the back of the promise of sci-fi action with a dash of the cerebral, à la Total Recall (right down to a co-screenplay credit for Ronald Shusett) but stumbles resoundingly in both areas. Indeed, even its premise is only one-part good, such that Netflix’s forthcoming Altered Carbon, boasting a not dissimilar mind transfer conceit, is wisely not going with the daftly depicted time-travel element. Consequently, Freejack was rightly trashed on its release. Does it have anything to recommend it, then? Well…

The Lady Vanishes (1938)
(SPOILERS) Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate UK-based picture, The Lady Vanishes can be comfortably paired with The 39 Steps as a co-progenitor of his larkier suspense formula (watch these two and then jump to North by Northwest and the through line is immediately obvious). Part of its great blessing is Hitchcock being handed a screenplay by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, latterly directors themselves, and knowing to make the most of the very funny dialogue, including arguably the picture’s greatest gift (well, other than Hitch himself): Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as ultimate English cricket enthusiasts – to the exclusion of all else – Charters and Caldicott.

Darkest Hour (2017)
(SPOILERS) Watching Joe Wright’s return to the rarefied plane of prestige – and heritage to boot – filmmaking following the execrable folly of the panned Pan, I was struck by the difference an engaged director, one who cares about his characters, makes to material. Only last week, Ridley Scott’s serviceable All the Money in the World made for a pointed illustration of strong material in the hands of someone with no such investment, unless they’re androids. Wright’s dedication to a relatable Winston Churchill ensures that, for the first hour-plus, Darkest Hour is a first-rate affair, a piece of myth-making that barely puts a foot wrong. It has that much in common with Wright’s earlier Word War II tale, Atonement. But then, like Atonement, it comes unstuck.

Okja (2017)
(SPOILERS) I’d avoided Okja until now, mainly because, while I enjoyed Snowpiercer up to a point, I found its on-the-nose political allegory borderline excruciating. And that was quite beside the absence of internal logic in respect of its premise. Okja promised more of the same, and indeed, Bong Joon-ho’s hammer-to-crack-a-nut approach is entirely less than endearing, such that I was frequently prone to wishing a fate worse than sausages on the adorably titular GM porker and be done with her.

Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017)
(SPOILERS) Brawl in Cell Block 99 is most definitely cut from the same cloth as writer-director-co-composer Craig S Zahler’s previous flick Bone Tomahawk: an inexorable, slow-burn suspenser that works equally well as a character drama. That is, when it isn’t revelling in sporadic bursts of ultraviolence, including a finale in a close-quartered pit of hell. If there’s nothing quite as repellent as that scene in Bone Tomahawk, it’s never less than evident that this self-professed “child of Fangoria” loves his grue. He also appears to have a predilection for, to use his own phraseology, less politically correct content.

Doctor Who The Pirate Planet
I doubt Pennant Roberts, popular as he undoubtedly was with the cast, was anyone’s idea of a great Doctor Who director. Introduced to the show by Philip Hinchliffe – a rare less-than-sterling move – he made a classic story on paper (The Face of Evil) just pretty good, and proceeded to translate Robert Holmes’ satirical The Sun Makers merely functionally. When he returned to the show during the ‘80s, he was responsible for two entirely notorious productions, in qualitative terms. But The Pirate Planet is the story where his slipshod, rickety, make-do approach actually works… most of the time (look at the surviving footage of Shada, where there are long passages of straight narrative, and it’s evident Roberts wasn’t such a good fit). Douglas Adams script is so packed, both with plot and humour, that its energy is inbuilt; there’s no need to rely on a craftsman to imbue tension or pace. There is a caveat, of course: if your idea of Doctor Who requires a straig…

All the Money in the World (2017)
(SPOILERS) Passionless Ridley Scott has been the most common Ridley Scott of the last two decades, a craftsman churning out technically proficient movies in little danger of lingering in the mind. He’s been at his best with more idiosyncratic subject matter (the Alien prequels, The Counsellor), although your mileage may vary on those, and at his worst churning out autopilot epics (Exodus: Gods and Kings). All the Money in the World comes in at the upper end of the solid but unremarkable scale, spurred on by several impressive performances, let down by an entirely unimpressive one, buoyed by a meaty story, reduced by the need to embellish it in the wrong – as in, unlike replacing Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer, in a manner where the joins show – way.

The Fog (1980)
(SPOILERS) The Fog has its fans, but I tend to concur with Carpenter’s acknowledgement of the movie’s issues; it represents his first serious stumble, lacking both the sure, driving pace of his previous horror classic and its sense of humour (despite a surfeit of in-jokes, mostly on the character name front). It’s a short movie, but one that never really hits its stride. What The Fog undoubtedly has going for it is superb, highly memorable and evocative photography from Dean Cundey (it’s no coincidence that, when he stopped working with the director, the latter’s days delivering the goods were numbered) and a memorable cast. Although, in the latter regard, it’s telling that there are far fewer distinguished players in the much more effective, structural near-remake of the overtly Lovecraftian Prince of Darkness seven years later.

Lady Macbeth (2016)
(SPOILERS) Not being familiar with the source material, I’d wondered if the title of this adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was intended to be in some way ironic. Alas not. Alice Birch’s screenplay hits most of the main plot beats of the source material while embellishing Lady Macbeth with themes of class and race, but the material is so wretched, so squalid, and also at points so contrived, only Florence Pugh’s performance offers a reason to persevere.

Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond (2017)
Or, to give it its full subtitle, Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – The Story of Jim Carrey & Andy Kaufman Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton. Carrey’s in a contradictory place just now, on the one hand espousing his commitment to a spiritual path and enlightened/ing state, on the other being sued in respect of his ex-girlfriend’s suicide and accompanying allegations regarding his behaviour. That behaviour – in a professional context – and his place of consciousness are the focus of Jim & Andy, and an oft-repeated mantra (great for motivational speeches) that “I learned that you can fail at what you don’t love, so you may as well do what you love. There’s really no choice to be made”. The results are consequently necessarily contradictory, but always fascinating.

The Foreigner (2017)
(SPOILERS) If nothing else, The Foreigner proves Martin Campbell is still more than capable of handling the action rigours of another Bond movie (please, Eon get someone in who can focus on what’s essential, like killing bad guys with wanton relish). Unfortunately, his tail-between-his-legs six-year break from the big screen following the disastrously-received Green Lantern has been curtailed for a feature that only ever feels like two different ones spliced together, both of them beached from a different time. One is a mid-90s actioner in which a B-movie star attempts to flex their thespian muscles and doesn’t quite pull it off. The other, a nominally serious-minded post-Troubles picture that might have seemed more relevant a decade – or more – ago with its essentially pulp fiction version of Gerry Adams.

Prediction 2018 Box Office
If nobody knows anything, as William Goldman put it regarding the potential success or failure of a movie, my annual bash at guessing what may or may not do well at the year’s box office is as useful, or useless, as anyone else’s. There are definitely likely to be some major casualties this summer, with a glut of releases treading on each other’s toes for serious bank, but pulling out which ones will suffer is less clear. Even a picture Like Alita: Battle Angel, which looks at first glance as if it will go the way of Ghost in the Shell, may not be straightforward.
Movies that didn’t scrape into my Top 60, but shouldn’t be discounted are: Teen Titans Go! To the Movies (I’m told the kids just love the show), Sicario 2: Soldado (although the original didn’t make that much), Escape Plan II: Hades (will decades old harassment allegations dint Sly’s box office – more to the point, does anyone want an Escape Plan sequel, one without Arnie and from the director of st…

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)
(SPOILERS) Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is good fun, and sometimes, that’s enough. It doesn’t break any new ground, and the establishing act is considerably better than the rather rote plotting and character development that follows, but Jake Kasdan’s semi-sequel more than justifies the decision to return to the stomping ground of the tepid 1995 original, a movie sold on its pixels, and is comfortably able to coast on the selling point of hormonal teenagers embodying grown adults.

This is by some distance Kasdan’s biggest movie, and he benefits considerably from Gyula Pados’s cinematography. Kasdan isn’t, I’d suggest, a natural with action set pieces, and the best sequences are clearly prevized ones he’d have little control over (a helicopter chase, most notably). I’m guessing Pados was brought aboard because of his work on Predators and the Maze Runners (although not the lusher first movie), and he lends the picture a suitably verdant veneer. Wh…

21 to See in 2018
I don’t necessarily expect everything on this list to be good – in a couple of cases, far from it – but I’m hopeful that they should all at least be interesting. That’s essentially why I haven’t included any DC or Marvel (cinematic universe) tentpoles; I’m sure Avengers: Infinity War and Blank Panther will deliver, but their trailers thus far have included too many familiar elements (another giant CGI humanoid big back, two more guys in mech suits duking it out) to have made the difference.
As usual, there are a couple from last year’s list that failed to make a 2017 release date – White Boy Rick, Annihilation, The God Particle/Cloverfield Movie 2018 – and I still have high hopes for them. Generally, a Wes Anderson excursion would be at the top of my most-anticipated movies, but I was lukewarm on Fantastic Mr Fox, and his follow-up foray into animation, Isle of Dogs, hasn’t yet grabbed me. Likewise, much as I enjoyed Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire, having not been swayed …