Films that aren't Star Wars 17

It’s 1952; Timothée Chalamet is an irritating, self-obsessed table tennis player who hustles and swindles an income so that he can travel to international table tennis tournaments. People are talking about Chalamet winning an Oscar for his performance; he certainly makes himself very unlikeable, but I am puzzled as to how anyone enjoys it.

There is not much plot to speak of. Marty lost to a Japanese penholder1 with a new sponge rubber racquet in the final of the British Open; now he has to scrounge up the money to make it to the World Championships, and his swindling attempts are chaotic and exhausting. Much of the runtime is men shouting at each other.

Gwyneth Paltrow is good for the few minutes she has, and I did chuckle at one joke, but the experience was tiresome and I am only becoming more annoyed at the film in retrospect.

Will Arnett separates from wife Laura Dern and takes to using open-mic comedy nights as therapy sessions. Other comedians are played by real-life comedians, one of whom (Chloe Radcliffe) I recognised from a YouTube video.

The film is less comedic than the setting would suggest, and goes needlessly over-the-top at least once, but all up it’s a little endearing.

It is 1977, and there is much corruption during the Brazilian military dictatorship. Wagner Moura is being persecuted and trying to escape with the help of some contacts. I had the unfortunate sense that the writers knew what was happening but they weren’t telling me everything, but it’s an entertaining few hours and the framing device is satisfying to me.

Hepl?

This is not a film that works your brain very hard. Rachel McAdams and her disrespectful new boss end up stranded on an island, the only survivors of a plane crash; the poster has her holding a knife, so it is not a spoiler to say that they don’t always get along.

I found it pretty dire and uninteresting until it got violent; I was noticeably tense for the second half and jumped at the jump scares.

An Iranian film; a former prisoner is pretty sure that he recognises his torturer and kidnaps him, but isn’t confident enough in his identification to murder him.

The middle of the film, lightly comedic and without too much happening, isn’t quite as strong as my rating suggests – if there were a number between 8.5 and 9, then I would probably rate the film somewhere in that open interval. But the last 20 minutes is incredible, including possibly the most intense scene I’ve ever watched.

I went into this guessing that it was a sequel of some kind but knowing nothing about what might have been the original. It turns out that Peaky Blinders was a TV series; the film functions perfectly well without knowing any of the previous story. It’s World War II; Cillian Murphy is a former criminal gang leader whose son is now in charge; the son gets involved in a Nazi plot to flood the British economy with a huge sum of counterfeit bank notes.

I wanted to dislike the film based on some of its elements – electric guitars in an anachronistic score, gypsy magic – but it’s a strong story.

Murphy told us before the film started not to give any spoilers before it appears on Netflix.

The film opens with Glenn Powell four hours from his execution, and he tells his story to a priest. As indicated by the trailer, he was seventh in line to an enormous family fortune, and started murdering the people in front of him (it’s a comedy).

I enjoyed a good number of scenes in this, but they connected into a whole that I found surprisingly dull and uninteresting. It was quite disconcerting: either a very boring entertaining film, or an entertaining boring film.

The Martian is my favourite film of all time (I’m not sure what’s second), and that was based on a novel by Andy Weir. That film was remarkably science-heavy, with incredibly satisfying problem-solving being displayed and a lot of little references to real past Mars missions that I enjoyed because I recognised them.

The question was, if a space film based on an Andy Weir novel doesn’t have hard science in it, would I still enjoy it? On the evidence of Project Hail Mary, the answer is “sort of, it’s fine, whatever”. Ryan Gosling wakes up from a coma more than eleven light-years from earth; the earth’s sun and many nearby stars are dying, and Gosling’s the only survivor on a mission to the only star that’s still in good health. He teams up with a rocky alien who’s there for the same reason, and they have to figure out how that star is surviving.

It’s a kids’ film with way too many silly jokes for my liking. There’s a good karaoke scene back on earth. The ending is pretty meh. It’s OK though. Overhyped.

Zendaya and Robert Pattinson are getting married in a week, but the week goes very badly. The advertised “one of them reveals a dark secret from their past” -type twist underwhelmed me but they do a lot with it and the results are funny.