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I was drawn to this film by the fab scenery in the trailer and the intriguing subject matter. The Irish-born statesman, philosopher, and man of letters, Edmund Burke, has been described as one of the most important formative influences on English conservatism, although he took stances that might have been viewed as liberal back in the mid-18th Century. He attempted to find a peaceful resolution to the dispute between the Crown and the American colonies, pursued the impeachment of the former Governor-General of Bengal over alleged plunder and corruption, and even opposed the slave trade.

The film deals only one aspect of Burke's life and legacy - his contribution to the philosophy of aesthetics, in particular the notion of "the sublime" - that in nature which inspires awe, reverence, or a sense of wonder mixed with terror. It takes place during a (probably fictitious) research trip to the French Alps in which Burke, played by Antony Langdon, sets out to further investigate his idea of "the sublime" for a revised edition of his treatise on the subject. Improbably, he undertakes his quest with a single companion - a female servant named Awak (Nathalia Acevedo), who acts as his cook, valet and baggage-hauler on the perilous journey.

There is both dramatic and comic potential in this scenario - Burke is portrayed as fastidious, foppish, and with an overbearing sense of entitlement, brusque in his dealings with members of the lower classes, and unprepared for the harsh conditions and biological hazards he encounters on his trek. But it's a wasted opportunity. The dialogue is lame and banal, with no attempt to give it a convincing 18th century flavour. (I don't claim that speech in period dramas has to be authentic in order to work - indeed there is something to be said, on occasions, for using an ultra-modern lexicon for greater impact and immediacy - but here, the use of modern colloquialisms just comes across as lazy.) There is no back-story concerning Burke's prior career and life in London, or how his theories connect to the wider intellectual and artistic scene in existence at that time. What's more, there is no meaningful development of the protagonist. His character does not really progress or change, through interaction either with his environment or his fellow human beings. Whether he's moaning about his tea being cold, straightening his periwig, demanding his face-powder, or crawling under a glacier, he remains the same fey, self-important, upper-class twit. Even as he is driven to seek more extreme landscapes in search of the "sublime", risking hypothermia in the process, there is no real sense of peril, and Burke doesn't seem to acquire any new humility, compassion or wisdom as a result of his brushes with hardship and death on his ill-defined spiritual quest.

Such a mocking and trivialising treatment of this Hiberno-British intellectual giant might be excusable if the film was at least funny. And yet it fails on the level of comedy too. Burke's snobbishness and peevishness are too understated, and Langdon's delivery and acting style too restrained, for it to work in this way. As for Awak, I'm at a loss to understand why the writer / director couldn't have made the interplay between the two characters more exciting. She's neither a muse, nor a companion, nor an intellectual rival, nor a lover, she's just . . . well, there. Her lines are delivered utterly without conviction (not her fault because it's a rotten script). And she's miscast - it's not credible that someone would employ such a slender, willowy young lady to drag the contents of a gentleman's wardrobe and other paraphernalia up and down mountains - she wouldn't survive two days.

I can't fault the visual elements; the director of photography exploits the splendid Alpine locations to the full. So, it works on the level of a travelogue. But the lazy writing and superficial approach to characterisation failed to sustain my interest in the human aspect of this drama, and any viewers who are hoping to be enlightened about the real Burke and his intellectual life will be sorely disappointed.

"This Magnificent Cake" - the title remains as much of an enigma now as it did when I first sat down to watch this Belgian stop-motion animation.

Not only the puppets, but the props and almost the entire set, are constructed using wool or other knitted and woven fabrics, a remarkable achievement in itself. This unorthodox method is surprisingly effective at creating realistic outdoor scenes, even for things that one would not intuitively expect to work, such as a waterfall. The human puppets have very supple and naturalistic movements and I found them quite believable.

The interlinked stories begin in 1885, and are apparently set in the Congo Free State, although the territory is not referred to by name. The Congo Free State was ruled personally by King Leopold II, independently of the Belgian Government, and became notorious for the use of forced labour in rubber harvesting. According to some estimates, millions of Africans were killed by disease, reprisal killings or other atrocities in those years.

The film is not however an explicit critique of the Congo Free State in particular (the facts of which are presumably well-known to Belgians already) but more of African colonialism generally. The stories contain three familiar themes - the cruelty of European colonial rule; royal folly and vanity; and the way that colonial enterprises have always attracted rogues, chancers and misfits who travel to faraway lands both in order to find themselves, and to lose themselves. In one scene, an explorer is crossing a rope-suspended timber bridge with a train of enslaved African porters in tow; he eats a banana and casually tosses the skin behind him, causing the lead porter to slip and drag all his shackled comrades into the river gorge. In another episode, the King is at a recital of Saint-Saëns' "The Cuckoo in the Depths of the Woods" in the hotel. He furiously demands that the clarinettist stop playing, apparently because he can't abide the sound of wind instruments (which defeats the object, because the clarinet is supposed to recreate the cuckoo's call). The despondent musician wanders off into the forest. It is not always clear whether what we are witnessing is "real", a dream, or some kind of allegory. Two of the episodes take place in a big deserted house in the middle of the jungle - I assume this is the hotel but it is not clear why has it been abandoned.

The film prioritises quirky, sardonic humour over plot development, an approach that may seem out of keeping with the dark subject matter, but to give it credit, it tries to give the African characters some individuality and does not treat them merely as passive victims. One of the inherent problems in using knitted puppets is that it is difficult to feel much emotional involvement in a story in which the characters have no facial expressions. However, the craftsmanship and attention to detail is remarkable and it is never dull.

Fractious family gatherings, especially those marking a holiday or life event, are a staple of Anglophone popular culture. What Ben Wheatley seems to have done in this comedy-drama is to take this situation, although with a larger than average cast, and assume the script for a comedy-drama would just write itself. But a New Year's Eve drinks party just isn't a sufficiently high-concept idea to sustain a satisfactory full-length movie without character arcs, dramatic tension, or a plot, which are sadly deficient here.

It is filmed in an exaggerated docu-soap style, with shaky camerawork, zip pans and sudden focus changes, which many viewers will no doubt find jarring or pretentious. It wasn't this, however, that I had a problem with, so much as the structure. With such a bewildering number of characters, little attempt to provide any back-story for them before the party, and no real central protagonist, it is difficult to care much about any of the people in this movie, and the dramatic potential of the set-up is largely squandered. For me, the only truly dramatic or intense moment was Colin's rant at his serial-adulterer, family-abandoning brother David, who has arrived with his German girlfriend, about a third of the way in.

I did not feel that the dialogue was particularly witty or incisive either - the only line that stuck in my mind was when Colin was setting up the sound system and says "we have to have a disco, because if they don't dance, they fight."

The themes of indebtedness and financial embarrassment are touched on and there's even a very perfunctory conversation between two characters about Brexit and party politics, but it doesn't go anywhere with these ideas, and in the subsequent Q&A I found the director's claim that he was making, as he put it, "a film about the 'now'", to be somewhat hollow.

The country house is a nice location visually, it has a consistent visual style and a strong cast, but I don't think I can give it more than 5/10.

"Three Billboards" follows Andrea Arnold's "American Honey" (2016) and Edgar Wright's "Baby Driver" (2017) as part of a trend towards British auteur filmmakers writing and directing movies set in America.

But whilst the two earlier films were humanistic and optimistic portrayals of American life which didn't reduce Americans to stereotypes, "Three Billboards" feels trite and reductionist, and does not show the hallmarks of being written by someone who has ever spent much time in small-town America.

Apart from the strong accents there is very little attempt to create a sense of place - we get no establishing shots of the main street in the town or of its residential neighbourhoods, only individual buildings. We get a trio of memorable characters – the stoical and obstinate Mildred, the rough diamond Chief Willoughby, and the ball of impotent rage that is Jason Dixon. But some aspects of the character development feel perfunctory and even lazy, in that Mildred, (like most of the supporting characters), is defined by her relationship to the billboards controversy and very little else. For instance, it struck me as odd that Mildred appears to have no outside interests or female friends her own age, and I'm not altogether clear about how she earns a living - she works in some kind of touristy gift ship but it's unclear whether she owns the business or is just employed there. Peter Dinklage is a very good actor but he is given very little to do. James, the character he plays, is rather sad and pathetic and his entire contribution to the story, such as it is, is defined by his dwarfism.

In so far as it's a socially-aware film, the treatment of the political issues is muddled and self-contradictory. For example, early on it feebly tries to make a point about police racism, then later it shows they're not racist after all because they can accept a black senior officer's authority without difficulty...Meanwhile the two named black civilian characters don't advance beyond predictable behaviour, in that they are both anti-police.

This sort of cynicism and borderline misanthropy may be forgivable if a movie works on the level of pure comedy, but for me - and I am perhaps in a minority here - it simply didn't. I felt the humour was vulgar and unimaginative in the extreme and was overly reliant on violence, anger and profanity. Most of the audience at the sell-out UK premiere laughed audibly throughout - I chuckled maybe four times.

There were all kinds of little things that irritated me. Why does Mildred's daughter have Nirvana posters on her wall if it's set in the present day? Why does Mildred have to deliver that rant about pederasty in the Roman Catholic Church, when it has no connection to the rest of the story and when Missouri is mainly Protestant anyway? And do we really need to be told that she was victim of spousal violence in her past marriage, when the film has nothing original or meaningful to say on the subject? What's the point in creating a strong, non-stereotypical female character only to make her a victim of male violence twice over?

So, how can I justify five stars? Well, it's an unconventional story with unconventional characters. It subverts the familiar trope of the plucky loner fighting against overwhelming odds, and challenges the idea that protest, non-conformity and anti-authoritarianism are good things in and of themselves. Mildred behaves appallingly but has a completely unshakeable sense of her own righteousness. Perhaps a bit like some of the people who take part in BLM and Antifa protests and use them as an opportunity to start fights and create mayhem. The ending is pleasingly ambiguous; it leaves open the possibility of some kind of redemption for the characters, but at the same time it recognises that Damascene conversions are rare in real life and that many of us only learn from our mistakes as fast as we make new ones.

Go to see it expecting a sort of sub-Tarantino celebration of stylised violence and amorality and you won't be disappointed. As film critic James Verniere once wrote in summing up another movie, it's good nasty dirty fun. But the sad thing is it could have been so much more.

The cameras are not state of the art and there are few tracking shots - not surprising with it having been made on such a tight budget - but they still could have made better use of the resources available. The impact of some sequences is weakened by excessive cutting. Potentially majestic images, such as construction cranes against the sky, are often only in shot for about two seconds before we cut to something else, which seems entirely the wrong approach aesthetically if you trying to make a dreamy, contemplative film rather than an extended pop video.

Despite these flaws, good use is made of St Etienne's songs, and the imagery accompanying them is agreeable enough, although rarely breathtaking. If you expect a documentary to impart information or give you a radical perspective on familiar subject matter then this is definitely not for you. But if you've simply had an awful day at work and you need something to relax with, providing minimal intellectual and emotional stimulation, then Finisterre could hardly be more perfect. Bland, but soothing, it's best thought of as digital lavender oil, or perhaps the film equivalent of listening to the shipping forecast.