list/discuss/rate - your recently watched movies

This small 1983 classic from Scottish filmmaker Bill Forsyth is the dreamy tale of an American oil rep trying to convince a seaside community to sell their lands to a U.S. company and meanders through local characters & the strange but wonderful world of village life.   Funny, weird, unreal yet poignant, Local Hero is a detour worth taking.

With a healthy dose of John Wick, ANИA carries on the female assassin genre with as much imagination as possible in this tired motif, Luc Besson's script and direction brought to life by Sasha Luss, Helen Mirren, Luke Evans, and the always compelling Cillian Murphy.   Lacking some depth and original thinking, the plot has Luss as an abused young woman turned KGB killer and Mirren her mentor on the hunt for Russia's top bad boy criminals with Belgrade as a credible backdrop.   As much a culture shock fashion statement as high-power action thriller, ANИA is perfectly acceptable escapism and has its moments.

Nicely rendered but perpetually draggy sci-fi has Brad Pitt sent by the U.S. Space Command to investigate a wave of freak pulses coming from Neptune that are threatening the solar system, and to search for his lost father (Tommy Lee Jones who's excellent) who may still be alive and know what's causing the disturbances.   Writer/Director James Gray said he wanted to achieve "the most realistic depiction of space travel that's been put in a movie", and though the film does have some of the best depiction of space travel, it is far from the most realistic.   Meandering through a plot that borrows from Kubrick's 2001:A Space Odyssey but is insubstantial and improbable, Ad Astra is largely a waste of time.

Simple but moving little tale circa 1955 with Emily Mortimer as a recently widowed woman who opens a bookshop in a small English town only to be opposed by the local gentry.   Beautifully shot and worth catching if you like period human drama.

The Irishman 2019 Directed by Martin Scorcese

Shame about the w.a.n.k.y title yes? (they should have used I Heard You Paint Houses, being the type of euphemism coined by those microcephalous enough to abrogate all moral responsibility for the suffering and death they have caused) Maybe overlong and rather self consciously 'epic' meditation on the Director's own past and that of America through the prism of political ends and criminal means. To his credit, Scorcese has never been guilty of glamorizing the violence of the mob and does strive to show us its self defeating and self perpetuating nature in movies like Goodfellas, Mean Streets and Casino. That said, I remain entirely unconvinced that the vast majority of those who profess to enjoy 'gangster crime dramas' have the faintest 'scooby' about the moral abyss that lies between the baptismal fount and the body washed up on the shore. It says a lot about our deficiencies as a species that entertainments like the Sopranos, Mindhunter, the Krays, Dexter et al continue to hold our imaginations in thrall to individuals we would gladly step over in the street. As the plot-line uses flashbacks almost exclusively throughout, the 'younger' De Niro, Pacino and Pesci are recreated via a new 'de-ageing' CGI process, which works very well in the main but there are instances where what is clearly a septuagenarian body attempting to move like a 29 year old one. Pesci was coaxed out of retirement to play the Russ Bufalino role and contributes a very understated but impressive performance i.e. he doesn't revert to type by sounding like Gordon Ramsay's dialogue coach. I had consigned De Niro to the luvvie retirement home a long time ago but this is a welcome (albeit ironic) return to former glories and he exploits with unsentimental poignancy the disparity between the frail and vulnerable narrator of the present with the earlier sociopathic teamster for whom killing was as integral to the daily routine as getting your kids ready for school. I still have no idea why anyone would ask Al Pacino to appear in front of either a camera or microphone for any reason ever. He is to acting what a concrete block is to sand sculpture. Worth noting is an excellent performance by Ray Romano (Everybody Loves Raymond) as the 'Mister Fix-it' mob lawyer. Despite my ingrained and habitual scorn for criminal scumbags who should be buried beneath the prisons, I actually enjoyed the Irishman and would rate this as being on a par with many of Scorcese's most celebrated films. If you have an interest in the speculative fate of 'missing' union leader Jimmy Hoffa, the Cuban Bay of Pigs debacle, JFK, Bobby Kennedy or Watergate then this is for you. Just be advised you won't receive any definitive answers but yet more nostalgia for versions of events that in all likelihood, most of us are covertly delighted will never be either completely debunked or confirmed.