colinlomasox

You can feel a great film bubbling under the surface here. It's incredibly dark and drip feeds the narrative out brilliantly. But it's very difficult to get past the amateurish acting and awkward dialogue. For the money it cost, it is impressive. Hopefully the writers will get a bigger budget next time out to smooth over the cracks.

If you like deep cerebral metaphorical horrors then this will blow you away, and live in your mind for ages. It's beautiful and heartbreaking. If you want quick thrills and scares you'll hate it. Your call.

Difficult to say which is more responsible for this abomination. Either way it's so poor it's embarrassing.

Leith, a registered ghost town in North Dakota, is home to twenty people and a single shop. The almost entirely forgotten town suddenly becomes the most discussed settlement in America as renowned white supremacist Craig Cobb moves in to buy up land and property to rent out or give away to the country's most notorious Nazi groups. Cobb's grand plan is to become mayor of the town and create America's first legal white-only town. This startling documentary details the events of the subsequent months.

With its isolated small town backdrop and bleached, low-contrast colourisation of the stock, Welcome to Leith gives the impression of a fictional horror movie. During the winter months, you could be watching Fargo. As the feeling of threat and dread hover over the dinner table during the resident's mealtimes, it appears to come straight from a M Night Shyamalan nightmare.

Cobb's appearance is part aging thrash metal guitarist, part Peter Stringfellow with jovial smiles that betray the viciousness below the surface. Dutton is an Iraq war veteran with possibly the worst Hitler moustache in history who seems to gain more sympathy from the audience than loathing. It feels that Dutton, although harbouring abhorrent beliefs, is principally concentrating on receiving approval from Cobb, who takes on an adopted father figure role. It's Dutton's girlfriend Deborah Henderson who is the truly chilling one, with a vicious uncompromising hatred for non-whites and a predatory growl constantly smeared across her face.

What Nichols and Walker do exceptionally shrewdly is to give both corners of the ring the time to discuss their particular point of view. What this effectively does is give access to all of the players, something rarely achieved in a documentary about extremism, and this produces a wonderful insight into evil-doer's everyday life. Seconds after seeing Dutton performing aggressive sieg heils at a town meeting in the face of Leith's only black resident, Bobby Harper, we see him making banana fritters in his kitchen discussing his dreams of becoming a celebrity chef. The writers realise that given enough rope, the white supremacists will happily hang themselves anyway; the exasperated cries from the Cheyenne plains are clearly audible as Dutton argues that white births are now in the minority for the first time in American history. Cobb takes a DNA test on national television to prove his racial purity, only to find out he's fourteen percent African.

This even handedness rightfully reaps rewards towards the end of the film as they manage to obtain video footage from Deborah Henderson's smartphone. This shows Cobb and Dutton marching through the town with loaded rifles shouting racial slurs at the residents. It is at this moment, with whispered comments such as 'Make sure they shoot first', the realisation sinks in that for all the talk and arrogant discrimination, there is a true threat of lethal violence involved here.

Another attractive observation is the charming naivety the original residents have to extremism. Mayor Schock freely admits to not even knowing what a white supremacist was before meeting Cobb. It is refreshing then to observe how a community can pull together to defend one another's rights, and you get a stimulating insight into the way America works at ground level as the council try to work around the first amendment excuses Cobb obsesses on so well. When does one's right to freedom of speech become another's illegal hate- crime discrimination? The town's council at one point pass a new law requiring every living accommodation to have plumbed sewage, in one clean sweep making the majority of Cobb's rental properties, housing the white supremacists, illegal. This is a fascinating move to counteract Cobb's completely, and astonishingly, legal Nazi hate- speech and threats of gun violence.

Welcome to Leith is a terrifying yet fascinating account of a dark recess of American society and culture. It is made with clarity and observed impartiality and stands out impressively against previous documentaries of a similar ilk.

Water is the source of everything; our lives, our history, it has power, it is capable of sustaining life or destroying it, it holds communication from outer space and it defines our future. It is also the longest border to Chile, contrastingly one of the driest places on earth. These aquatic holistic musings are the basis of Patricio Guzmán's latest part documentary, part spiritual investigation into what makes his homeland what it is.

The first thirty minutes or so of The Pearl Button is an account of what the ocean represents complemented with beautiful imagery of the sea and ice-caps with poetic portrayals of the Andes semi-submerged geography. Although charmingly romantic, a simmering sensation of art-house dread starts to accumulate as the brain begins to wonder whether another hour of this is possible to sit through without cracking open the wine. Luckily however, fascinating interviews with surviving members of the original indigenous Chilean tribes break up the daydream-like ocean fascinations as the movie establishes a structure.

The main turning point of the film is when Guzmán starts to document the arrival of Catholicism and the white Europeans to the country and their utter disregard for the indigenous people. 'Indian hunters' were paid ten shillings for every child's ear they could deliver from the tribes. The shift in focus is intentionally punitive and everything suddenly takes on a much solemner tone. Humanity's beauty and poetry is abruptly pivoted to humanity's cruelty and malice, the extremes visually harmonised to the oceans comparative calm and ferocity.

The title of the movie itself comes from the payment for which Jemmy Button, a native Yámana, received to travel to England as a freak show piece for a British naval captain. The concept of a tribesman travelling to London in the middle of the industrial revolution is so alien in today's world that it's almost impossible to contemplate or truly understand.

Guzmán's narration is almost hypnotic in its delivery and smartly complements both the holistic and the brutality of the story. Although the videography and cinematography are on occasion exquisite, there are times when Guzmán allows himself a little too much creative freedom and deviates into artful whimsy. These moments are relatively short however and manage to just about successfully weave into the documentary as a whole.

The Pearl Button feels like an odd film to sit through at times as you're not sure whether you're watching an art-house documentary about natures beauty or a harrowing critique of humanity's violence, but then that's the point. It leaves you scratching your head but is powerful enough to truly get under the skin.

There are marketing companies who would charge you the price of a Jordan Belfort house party to come up with the best name for a movie. 'You need something smart' they would WhatsApp you from the break out canoe in their Shoreditch offices, 'Relevant', 'Sophisticated', 'Serene', 'Something virtual for the Millennials'. But you know what? If you've got a film about a couple living in a hole, save the budget and the BS and just call the bloody thing what it is.

Couple in a Hole, as you may have partially gathered by now, is about a couple living in a hole in the woods somewhere in rural France. The two are introduced during daily activities; John (Higgins), the hunter gatherer of the pair catching and skinning a hapless bunny for the pot, and Karen (Dickie), sitting in the hole stitching together furs into a rather fetching but doubtfully PETA approved patchwork blanket.

On a rare excursion from the hole, Karen gets bitten by a spider and becomes ill, forcing John to travel into town for medication. Here he meets Andre (Kircher), the gentle local chemist who asks how they are getting on in the wood. It is at this point, with John telling Andre he has plenty of money and doesn't need charity, that you realise the couples living accommodations are of their choosing. The key question then simply becomes 'why?'. Why are they living in a hole? Why are they so close to town? Why is Karen so utterly afraid of the world? The rest of the films sole purpose is to gradually tease these answers out.

Aside from the mysterious particulars of the living arrangements, the most engaging part about Couple in a Hole is the contradicting needs of the couple and the discord they create; Johns jovial persona longing for alternative company and Karen's obsession with locking herself away from the dread of the outside world. Dickie plays the agoraphobic Karen to perfection. Her complete regression from life and emaciated appearance are startling, the occasional panicked emergence from the hole is breath-holding material. Higgins is perfectly cast as the friendly but uncompromisingly loyal and protective John, his friendly intelligence keeping the course of the plot credible and preventing things becoming too gloomy.

Why, oh, why then Geens decided to end the film as he did only he will ever know. After being lovingly snuggled in the fur-lined blanket of Paul's progression and Karen's regression for an hour and a half, the last thing you would expect is the ending you unfortunately receive. It feels flustered, freaky and unrealistic (an impressive feat for a film about two Scottish people living in a hole in France) and undoes a lot of what has come before.

Couple in a Hole works far better than it perhaps should and productions of such limited budget and scope should always be applauded. Although flawed in places and with that terrible ending, it is for the most part a legitimately enjoyable and captivating outing.

As a species, us humans have a curious fondness for grim and gloomy art. From skull tattoos to death metal bands, there is an unrelenting fascination with the macabre and morbid, and films are no exception. It's surprisingly difficult to recall a genuinely gloomy film which didn't get inexorable approval. From the true life horrors of Hotel Rwanda and The Elephant Man through to the fictional bleakness of The Road, Nil by Mouth and Tyrannosaur, there is something peculiarly fascinating about watching unrelenting despair and observing the malevolence of humanity on the big screen.

Intentionally set in an undefined year of the near future in an indeterminate part of the world, the human population has grown exponentially to the point of saturation; food is at a premium and from the movies sporadic intimations, society has regressed back to packs of hunter/gatherers. The survivalist (as we never learn his true name) has managed to create a small farmstead in the middle of a dense wood just large enough to keep himself self-sufficient. When mother and daughter couple Kathryn (Fouere) and Milja (Goth) appear at his door asking for food and shelter, the survivalist's controlled unaccompanied existence is threatened as his morals become confused; to keep himself safe or to assist his visitor's needs.

A sound method to keep costs low when producing a movie is to isolate the action to a restricted area, keep the number of actors limited and construct a simple and focused story line. The risk with this technique is that the movie becomes more of a theatrical production where each moment becomes intensified and less freedom is given to procrastination. It is unsurprising therefore that the lead character is given to an actor with an education in walking the boards. The film devotes a significant amount of time to building McCann's character, devoid of dialogue and with extensive intense close ups.

Due to the utter desperation of The Survivalist's plot, it requires total commitment to its audience and at times starts to meander yet manages to pull itself back every time just before the bleakness becomes tiresome.

There are enough plot and character surprises to keep the movie interesting, the acting is excellent and the limited scope of environment constantly feels claustrophobic but never artistically restrictive. The Survivalist demonstrates the way, once the whiteboard of social acceptability has been wiped clean, intimacy and sex become acceptable tradeable commodities.

The Survivalist is grim, depressing and about the least life- affirming film you're likely to see this year. Yet it is tense, wonderfully acted and a fascinating illustration of the instinctive brutality of humanity's will to survive.

In management speak, it's pretty fair to say that Charlie Kaufman tends to think outside the box. Eternal Sunshine, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation are all fabulously madcap films, but for all the dreamy sequences and oddball sci-fi, all have one particular element at their core; the unforgiving exploration of humanity. For Anomalisa, Kaufmann teams up with Duke Johnson to create a stop motion puppet animation which yet again tunnels into parts of the commonplace human psyche that are so regularly ignored.

Michael Stone (Thewlis), author and respected customer service guru, has travelled to Ohio where he is to give a keynote conference speech. After a couple of awkwardly failed attempts at making his single evening in the hotel interesting, he relishes the devotion of two girls who have travelled hours to attend his speech, and slowly starts to view anxious, self-deprecating Lisa (Jason Leigh) as the perfect remedy to all his troubles.

Every person Stone speaks to converses in the exact same voice, a demonstration that everyone in his life, his wife and son included, is regarded with equivalent obscurity, merely another supporting actor in his progressively egoistic home movie. The tight-lipped frustration at his wife's insistence that he speaks to his young son on the phone is wonderfully telling. Even the hotel he stays at, the Fregoli, is a reference to a rare condition in which the sufferer imagines that every individual is in fact the same single person in disguise.

Anomalisa focuses on the mundane, the sensation of futility of one's own existence through the daily grind of life. Stone relentlessly exhibits the amplified fragility and volatility of emotions of the crisis-hit middle aged man. The movie illustrates the mounting realisation that life may not hold the unyielding delights that one once thought it would, how even success can be insignificant in comparison to the ever increasing need for something more, something stimulating. One of the movie's most devastating emotional tricks is to expose how disappointingly temporary newfound experiences really are once reality settles back in.

Possibly the most remarkable thing about Anomalisa is that despite the character's appearance being obviously puppet-like (the joins in the face are intentionally noticeable), you quickly forget this is an animation, so impeccable are the sentiments, flaws and passions given to the individuals by the plot and dialogue. A heartrending emotional attachment to Stone and Lisa is impossible to avoid as you cringingly share their awkwardness and needy sexual tension towards one another.

Thewlis is a genius piece of casting as his slow melancholic northern English delivery perfectly corresponds to Stone's solitude, irritability and desperation for attention. At no point do you deliberate his or Jason Leigh's voiceovers, such is the flawlessly intrinsic match between voice and character.

Anomalisa is desperately sad, brutally truthful and viciously funny. It is exceptionally rare to be able to genuinely label a movie unique, but Anomalisa is about as close to that as you're ever likely to get. It is a glorious, perfect masterpiece of a movie.

It's 1951 and Capitol Films Head of Physical Production and studio fixer Eddie Mannix (Brolin) has the unenviable role of keeping the cogs of the movie studio well-oiled and functioning. Dim-witted major acting star Baird Whitlock (Clooney) has somewhat predictably been kidnapped by a bunch of bickering Communist intellectuals calling themselves The Future, his safe return guaranteed only by the receipt of one hundred thousand dollars. Mannix is tasked with sourcing and delivering the ransom while endeavouring to keep a lid on a myriad of other studio tribulations. Hollywood beauty DeeAnna Moran's (Johansson) out of wedlock pregnancy is threatening to derail her sweet public image while likable cowboy Hobie Doyle's (Ehrenreich) switch from the limited dialogue of the action western to the intelligent discourse of the serious drama adaptation is proving strenuous. Maddix continues to battle on all fronts while the stories attempt to unfold around him.

The characters are all enjoyable Coen standard; Whitlock, the classic Coen Clooney idiot, Doyle the likable and honest ranch-boy made good, Laurence Laurentz (Fiennes) the theatre luvvie constantly on the edge of his patience with the new non-thespian film actor generation. No personality is wasted here and each is lovingly added to the increasingly eccentric Coen back catalogue.

Hail, Caesar! is beautifully painted and wonderfully flaunts the glorious mid-century Hollywood glamour thickly lacquered over the ego-centric stars of post-war fame. It looks and feels wonderful and is a joy to watch.

However, a serious problem with Hail, Caesar! is that none of the main stories overlap in any way so feel frustratingly disjointed, and some of the major plot lines end up fizzling out to nothing, explained away in a quick dialogue afterthought. Characters just seem to disappear completely without any finality. It seems at times that whole story lines are set up to deliver a killer line then forgotten about and discarded like an ugly Christmas puppy.

Another problem is that sometimes the character's narrative is neglected in favour of the musical routines, filmed as part of the Capitol movie-making process. Although this shows the distinction between the smiling charming on-screen personas and the problematic actor underneath, on more than one occasion it feels incorrectly weighted in favour of the choreography and doesn't really add much to the movie as a whole.

The enigma of the Coen brother's writing is that it treads an exceptionally undefined fine line; when it succeeds it's thoroughly enjoyable original film-making but when it fails it is disappointing and fragmented. The perplexing part is that it's almost impossible to quantify why a scene drops to one side or the other.

Hail, Caesar! is as barmy as you'd expect from the Coen's. It's mostly enjoyable, delivers some great laughs and the acting is top notch. Unfortunately, the plot is so disjointed at times with so many aimless tangents that by the end it feels annoyingly unsatisfactory.

Sometimes you get the impression that a movie has been composed entirely around the base premise of a trailer and the rest is simply an unwelcome necessary afterthought. When that trailer concerns itself with blowing London's most famous landmarks to bits and Morgan Freeman looking dreadfully concerned, you suspect that the movie is not going to bother the Oscars too heavily the following year.

The Prime Minister of England has just died from a suspicious heart attack, the subsequent funeral in central London attended by rest of the world's leaders is a security conundrum of unprecedented scale. Unfortunately, the entire UK's security, police, secret service and emergency response staff have been inexplicitly compromised by incensed arms dealer Aamir Barkawi (Aboutboul), seeking vengeance for the drone killing of his daughter on her wedding day two years earlier. The majority of leaders are killed in an attack on the capital apart from, surprise surprise, the US president Benjamin Asher (Eckhart), who is lucky enough to be defended by the most nauseatingly supercilious head of security in movie history, Mike Banning (Butler). What follows is a meaningless chain of silly action sequences as the endlessly irritating Banning tries to return his employer to safety.

Saying there are plot-holes in London has Fallen would unfairly suggest there is a plot, but the general narrative makes very little sense. The characters are pure stock and the tale is horribly strewn with the compulsory emotional family moments which instantaneously make you side with the terrorists. Morgan Freeman's implausibly predictable wise old man role is becoming a distinct bore, a step out of his safety zone becoming more and more necessitous as each film and identical character passes by.

There is a sadly unsurprising miasma of xenophobia littered throughout the film with jaw-dropping dialog moments; 'Get back to F*ckheadistan or wherever you're from', made all the gloomier and surprising under the watch of Iranian director Bebak Najafi.

Considering the movie was blatantly constructed entirely around the scenes of London's destruction, a surprising amount of the visual effects are mediocre; the Thames water dispersion from the Chelsea bridge bomb blast in particular has the mis-scaled feel of the Warlords of Atlantis squid attack.

There really is no excuse for this kind of garbage any more. Since Lethal Weapon and Die Hard thoroughly redeveloped and modernised the tenements of action movies almost thirty years ago, subsequent comparable films should require more than just gun-toting idiots, stupid one-liners, gore and occasional underhand xenophobia. If you like films that allow the cerebral cortex to concentrate purely on hand-to-popcorn coordination, then London has Fallen might just kill ninety minutes. If not, it's one to steer clear of. Either way, this is on a one-way mission straight to Bargainbinistan.

America is in the throes of mass paranoia, hysterical rhetoric from politicians presaging the clandestine terrorists next door, the evil doers secretly undermining the motherland through their schools, their hospitals, their media; how every man, woman and child must stand against this insurgence for the good of all. Won't someone think of the children!? Sound familiar? Well for once, this isn't a reference to (God help us all) President in waiting Trump and his fear-mongering contingent of minions, but the post-war setting of biopic Trumbo, switching modern day Islam for cold war Communism.

After opening credits disturbingly similar to that of Murder She Wrote, Trumbo begins in late 1940s America, showing news footage of Stalin flexing his military muscle to set the scene for the freshly discovered anxiety for the red under the bed. In reaction, the House Un- American Activities Committee (yes, that was a 'thing') has been set up to investigate and prosecute anyone suspected of subversive activities, a vague notion many considered to be a breach of the first amendment. Dalton Trumbo (Cranston) is about to become the highest paid writer in Hollywood but, along with a number of other highly successful Hollywood screenwriters, comes under scrutiny from the Un-American committee due to their open support of the Communist party. Fuelled by gossip columnist and staunch anti-Communist Hollywood powerhouse Hedda Hopper (Mirren), ten of these Hollywood writers, Trumbo included, are sent to prison for refusing to testify in front of the committee and are subsequently blacklisted from the industry. What follows is the story of how Trumbo spearheaded an underground guerrilla writing team, using pseudonyms and real non- blacklisted writers to get their scripts realised as movies.

It's appropriate that the film never tries to portray Trumbo through rose-tinted glasses. As well as revealing the genius behind the typewriter, it exposes the obsessively selfish worker, the bully who forces his children to miss out on school work and personal activities to deliver manuscripts, the father who doesn't have a spare minute to leave his office to watch his daughter blow out the candles on her birthday cake. It frequently shows that Trumbo, whether his fight is righteous or grounded in self-interest, forcibly compels everyone in his wake to follow. Cranston's performance perfectly captures this complex and at times hypocritical man, his unrelenting single mindedness. When quizzed on how he can encourage socialist beliefs while surrounding himself with the material treasures of a multi-millionaire he responds: "The radical may fight with the purity of Jesus. But the rich guy wins with the cunning of Satan".

Mirren rarely renders a character who is to be trifled with, and her portrayal of Hopper is no exception. Throughout the film, Hopper stops at nothing to make sure her rules are obeyed; from the fake smiles flashed at the cameras and her devious manipulation of everyone around her through to her brutal threats to the head of MGM should he not follow her request to sack Trumbo and co from the staff.

The script is sharp and it's difficult not to delight in the vicious pleasure Trumbo takes from the rebuffs he doles out to anyone in his path, at one stage asking John Wayne where he was stationed during the glorious war effort that he constantly revels in; 'On a movie set, firing blanks wearing make-up?'.

It is a beautiful film to look at, from the idyllic American family abodes to the wonderful forms of mid-century cars, it's the American dream carefully draped over the ingrained suspicion of the time. It's also worth staying around a few minutes into the closing credits to see an interview with Trumbo himself as he talks through the struggles of anonymously winning an Oscar.

Trumbo is a really enjoyable film and, although a little clumsy and predictable at times, works well as an interesting portrayal of a fascinating man in a dark, fear-filled period of American history.

When news first emerged of a Dad's Army film early last year, the main cry from the fans and general public alike was 'but why?'. Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the end product does absolutely nothing to alter this.

Beautiful German spy Rose Winters (Zeta-Jones) comes into a small town to gather information for the Nazis, blinds everyone with her looks, manipulates them to her bidding while everyone runs around suspecting everyone else but her of undercover nefariousness. Yes, it really is that derivative. It's a plot that could have been lifted lock, stock from a hundred TV movies produced from 1960 until 1980, but tellingly probably none since.

It's obvious that a lot of thought has been put in to casting as every character is perfectly shaped to match his respective character from the original series, and every one really tries to do as good a job as possible. Admittedly Bill Nighy is incapable of playing anyone other than Bill Nighy but it works as bumbling Oxford boy Sergeant Wilson, Toby Jones is almost indistinguishable from Arthur Lowe as Captain Mainwaring, Tom Courtenay does a fair Clive Dunn impression and Gambon was born to play Godfrey. But casting alone does not a film make.

At its core, the original Dad's Army series was little more than a bunch of men in a church hall bickering with each other, the different character's unique and exaggerated qualities carefully weaving a different angle into the argument and comedy as a whole. That can, and very successfully did, work for thirty minutes, but clearly it's another thing entirely to treble the running time and expect it to still function at the desired level. So the writers, as is customary, took the whole thing out of its comfort zone with a more (supposedly) extensive plot. The problem is that the plot, script and dialogue are all utterly dreadful. It is simply not funny, nor is it interesting. At no point do you care one jot what happens to the characters or the storyline. Stir in a complete lack of humour and you're left with a hollow shell of a movie that drags along and leaves you feeling utterly cheated. It manages to lack fun, pace, spirit and perhaps most surprisingly of all, nostalgia.

It's good that the home front's respective wives get some screen- time, particularly Mrs Mainwaring who was never more than a sullen passing reference in the series, but it still doesn't help.

The film is littered with tired innuendos that are seemingly delivered at times with embarrassment, and the occasional poorly timed moments of slapstick are cringe worthy. It's telling that the outtakes at the end of the movie are far funnier than anything in the film itself, although most of the audience will have rapidly headed for the exit by then like home fans fleeing a drubbing from a local rival.

Is Dad's Army a missed opportunity or an inevitable disappointment? It's difficult to care. Either way it's badly written, dull and simply not funny.

For every Inside Out there are a hundred Capture the Flag's. Considering the absurd amount of time and effort an animation feature takes to produce it's surprising that so often such little effort is made with the script and character development. Where animation masterminds Pixar really excel, putting technology aside for one moment, is how perfectly they make you connect with their characters, and this is no more obvious than when you watch a film where this simply doesn't happen. Home failed miserably with a great cast simply because all of the characters were so utterly annoying, Big Hero 6 an example of the contrary. The Incredibles 2 and Toy Story 4 are both out in the next few years and people (adults and children) care, and there's a reason for that.

A great commercial animation should be judged on its ability to fascinate the kids, gratify the parents yet produce something that is more than a kids film which gratifies the parents; a movie that stands on its own as an objective piece of work, not something that qualifies as a two hour cheapo Saturday morning outing for dads. Capture the Flag is a perfect example of the type of tripe that will saturate the throwaway Sunday one pound a seat mini-mornings across the UK multiplexes for months to come.

The film focuses on the Goldwing family; grandad Frank who missed out on his one chance to land on the moon, his son Scott, a potential astronaut on the ever pushed-back NASA missions and Mike, the youngster trying to reconcile his dad and grandad who haven't spoken for years for reasons initially unknown. A naughty billionaire, Richard Carson, attempts to discredit the initial moon landings as a diversion to his plans to mine Helium-3 from the satellite as an endeavour at super-villainy world energy control, and thus it quickly becomes super villain versus the Goldwings. There is potential for some good story lines here yet the film concentrates purely on silly action sequences and the child action- buck rather than anything remotely interesting.

The film does try and engage its older audience at times, specifically with a clip of the not-dead Stanley Kubrick, working for Carson, directing a faked moon landing, but that's about it. The storyline is disjointed and rushed, and at no point feels like one you care about the outcome of.

The other annoyance is that some of the main characters are so visually similar to characters from other films; Carson is almost identical in mannerisms and looks to Syndrome from the Incredibles, Frank Goldwing is basically Professor Callaghan from Big Hero 6 and Mike Goldwing's young sister is a lazily recreated version of Boo from Monsters Inc. It may seem fastidious to point out such similarities but it enhances the feeling of indolent character development that is such a persistent irritation throughout.

Sometimes it feels harsh critiquing a film that is so obviously a throwaway movie directed at keeping kids vaguely amused for ninety minutes, but for all that Capture the Flag is a dull incidental movie that no-one will ever remotely remember.

World famous singer Marianne Lane (Swinton), temporarily mute from a recent throat operation, is enjoying a relaxing holiday with her doting film-maker boyfriend Paul De Smedt (Schoenaerts) on a remote idyllic Italian island. Much to their initial annoyance, Lane's manic music producer and ex-boyfriend Harry Hawkes (Fiennes) turns up with his newly discovered daughter Penelope (Johnson) to gate- crash the tranquillity.

A Bigger Splash is a character development masterclass by Guadagnino. Over the first hour, the film gives everything to build up the intricacies of each character's attributes so that every subsequent variation and elaboration feels exhilarating. This is a film about people and relationships; how different associations can sometimes coalesce yet at other times grate, how secrets and history must awkwardly co-exist with the fantasies of perfection.

Fiennes is simply superb. He absolutely nails Hawkes extrovert nature, perfectly mixing it with the selfish dark underbelly which success invariably requires. Swinton marvellously continues to build her rapidly emerging reputation with a multifaceted character that says less than a hundred words throughout the entire running time. Both Schoenaerts and Johnson are solid but are unluckily eclipsed by Fiennes and Swinton's sparkle. In fact, such is Fiennes utter dominance early on, there feels a distinct possibility he will overshadow not only the other actors, but the film itself. Fortunately, as time passes the rest of the cast get their chance in the sun and, to their credit, pull it back just before it becomes the Ralph Fiennes Show.

The friction between De Smedt and Hawkes is always at the forefront; the protective grounded boyfriend against the vociferous music producer ex. Hawkes tempts Lane to speak at the dinner table, De Smedt knocks him back, Hawkes dances to a track he produced for the Rolling Stones, De Smedt pulls Lane closer on the sofa. It's the subtle fragments of both loving and sexual tension which keep the flow of A Bigger Splash so thrilling.

When the plot eventually makes its move, sides are taken, suspicions are rife, relationships are both strained and solidified. Only then do you realise just how well the film has branded its characters into your hide, and how desperate you are to know the outcome.

Until the last half hour or so not much really happens in A Bigger Splash but you simply don't notice, such is the utter delight in watching a great cast develop complex characters with a wonderfully astute script.

There was always one at school; the boy who craved attention. Invariably quite amusing at first with his silly frolics, daft faces and good-taste challenging larks. He was popular, valued, admired, almost revered; the classic class clown. As the years passed the laughter would dry up, his audience distancing themselves from him so his antics would become more desperate and anarchic. Suddenly one day he would recognise that no-one was finding him funny anymore, instead of his expectant veneration all he would receive were occasional sympathetic glances of sadness and embarrassment. Not that this would stop him, there's always another intemperate level of desperation for those willing to find it. In the school of comedy, Sacha Baron Cohen is in his last throes of hopelessness to entertain his sixth form audience with self-gratifying uber- grossness, only to find they have stopped caring and have virtually forgotten who he is.

Grimsby follows two orphaned brothers who were separated at a young age; Sebastian (Strong) went off to reside with a middle class family in London and now works as an assassin for a secret anti- terrorism cell of MI6. Elder sibling Nobby (Baron Cohen) stayed in Grimsby to a life in the council estates; drinking, taking soft drugs, fathering an inordinate amount of children and obsessing over the England football team. They meet up due to information granted to Nobby regarding Sebastian's whereabouts from a friend in the local boozer which is absurdly unexplained, Sebastian is wrongly accused of killing the head of the World Health Organisation due to Nobby's badly timed intervention and the two brothers set out to clear his name.

What follows is a menagerie of vulgar events which feel like a selection of tasteless sketches cobbled together without any thought to coherence. Grimsby is constantly bogged down with its writer's obsession to shock whether it fits the storyline or not and quickly becomes boring and inconsequential. Gross can be funny, anything can be funny given the right script and correct context. Unfortunately for Cohen, the inverse is true; gross can be unfunny, anything can be unfunny given a terrible script and disjointed context.

Possibly the most frustrating element of Grimsby are the very occasional moments of brilliant comedy; one-liners delivered with such Coogan-esque perfection that it makes the rest of the movie all the more maddening given they are so infrequent. There are also instances of attempted family tenderness but it is impossible to tell whether they are intended to be ironic or affectionate so constantly fall flat.

The most baffling thing about Grimsby is how many big names it seemed to attract. Penelope Cruz and Daniel Radcliffe's respective agents need to take a long look in the mirror and Ricky Tomlinson, Johnny Vegas and Ian McShane presumably had some down time between proper projects. Only Rebel Wilson feels like the kind of actress who would take anything that ends with a pay cheque.

At 83 minutes, Grimsby is about 80 minutes too long. It's ridiculous, self-indulging, incoherent and for all its attempted shock factor, boring.

In an age of digital marketing saturation, social media domination and notifications of the latest Disney blockbuster being sent to you while you're sat on the loo, it's always refreshing to have a film sneak up unannounced and give you that warm fuzzy hidden gem feeling. Resembling its Icelandic counterparts, Rams is like finding a Sigur Ros in a big bag of Coldplays.

Rams follows two brothers who reside next door to each other in a remote sheep farming community in the Icelandic countryside. Having not spoken to each other for 40 years, Gummi (Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi (Júlíusson) are finally forced to deal with their strained relationship after a rare disease triggers the slaughter of their entire valleys flock. Each brother deals with the situation in his own way; Gummi having the functioning sibling role; calm and calculating with his understated intelligence and Kiddi with drink induced anger and violence.

As you would expect from a film based on the hillsides of Iceland, the scenery is stunning but is never used to build the crew's cinematography portfolio. In fact, it only adds to the evident toughness of the people's lives there, surviving a challenging livelihood with the backdrop of such natural splendour. The relationship between the farmers and their animals and how it intrinsically represents, and is inherently tied to, the entire history of their family is at times both heart-warming and heart- breaking.

What is most surprising about Rams is how it creeps up on you; how you find yourself sincerely caring for its characters towards the end of the film. You genuinely feel for the brother's relationship yet the script is so subtle in its depiction of the association between the two that the feeling comes as a real surprise when it finally hits. This is made even more remarkable considering how much of a slog the first thirty minutes are to get through.

There are sweet little comedy moments too. The brothers use a sheep dog to deliver notes to each other and at one point Gummi delivers a drunken Kiddi to the local A&E in the bucket of a digger, but these moments are infrequent and never feel like forced slapstick. The humour is always believable and acts as a nice break from the melancholy of the primary story.

Rams is a lovely surprise, a film that intentionally builds up slowly and is so understated in the development of its main characters that by the end of the film, you forget about almost everything else but the affection you have subconsciously developed for the two brothers. A sneaky little treasure of a movie whose ending will stay with you for a long time.