Interstellar

I would not have seen Christopher Nolan as the ideal director to bring this story to the screen, but perhaps Inception was a clue as to his style.  His treatment of the science material is very well done, with superb effects, and yet this is not the usual tedious effects driven film.  In fact, humans remain the focus throughout, the emotions brought on by a dying Earth and a last gasp attempt by a reduced NASA to do something to save the race - but not necessarily the planet.  There are shock moments too, such as the re-writing of history to suit the new political regime.  That it could still happen in a future involving the internet is perhaps what gave me pause.  McConaughey plays the long redundant astronaut perfectly, although, as in True Detective, you have to have your wits about you to pick up his drawling delivery.  The star cast all play their parts well but a special mention must go to Mackenzie Foy who plays the young Murph brilliantly.

Congratulations to a film that depicts action in space in silence (there are quite a few homages to 2001: A Space Odyssey and this is just one of them, as well as a scene towards the end where McConaughey almost becomes the star-child), and makes real the serious problem of relative time in space travel, especially when a black hole is nearby.  This harks back to The Songs of Distant Earth, another Arthur C. Clark novel, and as if that isn't enough there is a cylinder world straight out of Rendezvous with Rama.

Ultimately, this is a compelling film that needs its length to allow the story to be told without rushing.  All known physics is properly depicted (see what I did there) and it's quite a spectacle.  However, for me the performances, the sense of loss and lost time and the sheer humanity which pulls at your emotions, takes it up there against 2001 with its extreme austerity.  A very rare 10/10 from me.

The Counsellor

It's a Ridley Scott film so it demands to be seen.  I'm so glad that I did as I may have been swayed by the panning it got, but I like a different kind of film and I liked this a lot.  There are certain things that Scott does in all his films, and one of them is to surround himself with a great cast (actually, I think it's more a case of them falling over each other to be in any film he makes).  Another is how he extracts an atypical performance from many of them.  In this respect, Cameron Diaz is better than I've ever seen her: cold, calculating and genuinely unsettling.  For once, Penelope Cruz is upstaged.  Brad Pitt plays to his strengths, but it's effective here.  You could divide the film into two parts: the first half is spent just trying to work out what exactly is going on, with parallel storylines and little clue as to how they all fit together.  In the second half, it all coalesces into a sense of menace and irretrievable doom as you realise that one person is manipulating everything.  There is a telephone conversation between the Counsellor (Fassbender) and a police chief towards the end of the film that is delivered in gentle tones but which makes your skin crawl with the grim reality of his predicament.  The whole thing is wonderfully menacing and a lot of it is delivered via dialogue rather than action.  For this alone, I'm going to have to watch it again.

Scott's camera work is different here: the Arizona vista is beautiful but there isn't the sense of a vast country taking over the screen as was the case in Thelma and Louis.  It's more subtle and I might have had trouble identifying it as one of his films, but there is just enough in the panned and fixed shots to give you the clue.  The score underpins the growing sense of foreboding.  9/10.

World War Z

Dear oh dear.  Zombie flick updated.  It's not as if any zombie film has ever interested me and this one failed to endear me any more than the others.  Brad Pitt and a host of sidekicks (for this is, without doubt, a Brad Pitt Vehicle) goes out to find the source of the 'virus' in gung-ho fashion in the silliest film I've seen since Battleship (and, boy, that was a crap film).  As soon as I saw the heavy transport plane take off from the aircraft carrier (yes, really), with just half a dozen soldiers accompanying him, I stopped caring.  Then we have Jerusalem, a safe haven because they built a wall after intercepting an e-mail with the word 'zombie' in it.  As you would.  The zombies themselves only attack the uninfected, not each other.  Mindless garbage.  Don't waste two hours of your life on it.  2/10 (only because 1/10 has to be reserved for Battleship).