Jean-Luc Godard directs Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli and Jack Palance in this tale of lust and movie-making in Italy.

Tyrannical Hollywood producer wants to fuck Bardot. Comes across as spitefully misogynistic and brightly dull. I’m watching some of these “greatest films ever made” after them not being in my cultural life for 40 years and realising I haven’t watched Face / Off in the past 5 years. I could be spending my time more effectively.

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Ramin Bahrani directs Michael Shannon, Andrew Garfield and Laura Dern in this thumping drama about a struggling construction worker who joins the payroll of a callous evictions profiteer after he is dispossessed by the same man.

When they compile lists of the forgotten or overlooked classics of the last decade this will be prominent in all of them. A Sweet Smell of Success for home owners. A Wall Street for vapers. A muscular, unleashed, moving Glengarry Glen Ross. A Big Short not interested in smugly lionising or crassly humanising the corrupt suited scumbags who profit from the misery the system produces. Like all of the above films have their seductive devil figure, this one has Shannon. A beast of a character actor – imposing, righteous, untrustworthy. Here he justifies his role’s parasitic business practices with unwavering belief and ire. Watching him patiently de-house a family with scripted rigorousness and calm scheduled aggression is just one of a series of powerhouse scenes. For the first hour, 99 Homes plays like wave after wave of distressing panic attacks. The pace and the emotional impact, the constant intelligent distress Bahrani causes to his more sympathetic protagonist, and to us, is masterful. Then the corruption comes. Always gripping, never cloying this a financial thriller, a battle for a soul, relevant. Yet it does fumble the final moments. Reaching for an overly dramatic conclusion where Garfield’s ostensible hero can get away clean. It doesn’t achieve it. But for a film this ambitious and effective not to completely join its loop isn’t the end of the world. It is not exactly a happy ending, certainly not a falsely triumphant one.

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Reed Morano directs Blake Lively, Jude Law and Sterling K Brown in this trainee assassin thriller where an orphan from a terrorist attack goes from junkie to killer.

An unpleasant variation on a genre difficult to get wrong. The visuals and storytelling are murky and jagged. I assume they are supposed to be impressing on us the lead’s paranoid and emotionally hollow state but instead it removes us from caring about the plot as it unfolds. I felt very disassociated from what was happening onscreen. There are a few immersive action sequences that are impressively executed but not enough to sate your adrenaline fix. And if we are boiling it down to bone and skull then the half-assed conspiracy mystery that strings this together is merely an excuse for Lively to try out a series of looks. Her Golden Age Hollywood glamour is muted by the miserablist wardrobe. She gets to be bruised smackhead, shivering trainee, buttoned up incompetent. Only a scene where she poses as a high class call girl delivers the goods. No one has bought a ticket to see Blake Lively underfed, suffering and looking dowdy. And looking at the opening weekend numbers, no one did.

5

Nicolas Pesce directs Andrea Riseborough, John Cho and Frankie Faison in this reboot of the haunted house curse franchise.

I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed an entry in the choppy and often incomprehensible Ju-On series. This one steals the colour chart from Mindhunter and has a cast of seasoned character actors… but I dozed for the final half hour.

3

Trey Edward Shults directs Kelvin Harrison Jr., Taylor Russell and Sterling K. Brown in this teen drama where a young black wrestling jock’s perfect life starts to unravel and his sister is left discombobulated by the aftermath.

The rare joy of going to see a film with little to no idea of what is going to happen. I was impressed by Shults’ post-apocalyptic thriller It Comes At Night and all I knew taking my seat was this was his next release. What unfolds is unpredictable, chaotically so. One of Waves pleasures is it could go any which way. We see Tyler slowly cracking up as pressures come in from all side but have no idea what his redemption will be. The film is so overwhelmingly colourful, noisy and frenetic (scenes skip forward before they are fully finished like a faulty CD) we are given no choice but to just submit to its bleak unfolding. There’s no respite to second guess it or figure out where exactly all this erratic stress will land. Then it pulls off a particularly difficult narrative switch… the lead tags another character in as our central focus. It works here, and the change of pace and outlook is reformative. Waves is a bit too messy and indulgent to be seen as a true success. And it would appear that Trey Edwards Shult wants to put his name on every production credit… I’m pretty sure some of those shared ones are undeserved. You’re a director, you are going to be in the room, but let the technician who executed the task have their dues for their job, please. And the soundtrack is very much what an adult man thinks the cool kids are into. But I think this will mean a lot to teens who discover it. And there’s enough magic, thump and genius here that I might revisit it before films I enjoyed far more easily. Harrison puts in another great turn (see: Luce) and Sterling K. Brown relishes his best role since his showy breakthrough in American Crime Story.

6

Destin Daniel Cretton directs Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx and Brie Larson in this courtroom drama based around real life attorney Bryan Stevenson, a black Harvard graduate who went to Alabama to set up his own practice specifically to represent men on Death Row.

Does a figure like Bryan Stevenson deserve more recognition? Yes. Do we want to see the incredibly charismatic Michael B Jordan in more lead roles? Yes. Does this movie have to go through the expected motions quite so unwaveringly? No. Flavourless.

4

Terrence Malick August Diehl, Valerie Pachner and Matthias Schoenaerts in this WWII drama where an Austrian farmer refuses to swear allegiance to Hitler.

The elders of the town drunkenly descend on the farmhouse with same jittery motions as Lynch’s elderly demons in Mullholland Dr. A cautious priest tries to convince our lead of his folly surrounded by mountains… are they keeping the secret of the conversation or looming like the impending doom? A Nazi prison guard stops a free man from looking out of the window of his cell. This is the Terrence Malick you want… pastoral, narration, innocence lost, lyrical. Cinema as poetry and philosophy. Could it be an hour shorter?… yes. Is it a little too close to being Jojo Rabbit without the wackiness?… Yes, but this po-faced journey is the slightly better movie.

7

George A Romero directs Stephen King, Leslie Neilsen and Adrienne Barbeau in this comedy scare anthology written by the Master of Horror and based on the old EC comics.

I had high hopes for this given the pedigree but it didn’t live up to its reputation. Quite dull and lacking scope. The black comedy isn’t funny, the shocks only fitfully disturbing. The attempt to recreate the colourful vibe of the comics works and we have Romero’s visual astuteness to thank for that. The Leslie Nielsen and Ted Danson’s two hander is the only chapter that has any staying power. More Tale of the Unexpected than horror but the comedy stars sell the darkness of it well. Natalie enjoyed this more than me.

5

Jean-Luc Godard directs Michel Subor, Anna Karina and Henri Jacques Huet in this French New Wave drama where a draft dodger gets caught in a grinding Kafka-esque tangle between French spies and Algerian freedom fighters.

Ils ne peuvent pas tous être gagnants, gamin.

3