An Uncharted Moon Souvenir on the Nile in two parts

I watched several films in the last week.

Moonfall (2022)

This is very big and very dumb. There might be a small modicum of accurate scientific information in here, but it’s swamped by the dodgy dialogue and terrible exposition. The cast does their best with what they’re given, but even an actor of Oscar-winner Halle Berry’s status can’t do much, saying lines like “you’re going the wrong way, but I’m not going to say anything” and “If earth gets a second chance, we deserve one, too”… The visual effects are not universally good, either. Some of the early flooding shots look like miniatures filmed in the 80s rather than state-of-the-art vfx. All that being said, I think it’ll find its audience – namely drunk people with huge TVs and sound systems to match. It will make a great party film, with people aping the horrendous dialogue, much like the audience participation of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 2/5

The Souvenir Part One (2019)

Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical film in two parts is a nice, slow, slightly dreamy look back at film school in the 1980s for a privileged young woman called Julie, played by Honor Swinton Byrne, whose mother, Rosalind, is played by her mother, Tilda Swinton. The setting feels familiar to me as a youth who moved in privileged circles, though we didn’t have much money. Tom Burke plays the love of Julie’s young life, Anthony, a civil servant working for the Foreign Office on mysterious missions, and always requiring Julie to pay for restaurant bills, taxi fares or even to give him a bit of cash. The slow pace and seeming lack of purpose won’t agree with everyone but I thoroughly enjoyed it. 4/5

The Souvenir Part Two (2021)

I had to watch this second part in a different cinema a week later, because it was gone from the UGC, but as that afforded a visit to the Utopia, I was pleased. The second part continues in a similar vein, with Julie mourning the loss of Anthony, but nearing graduation at the film school where, instead of making a film about the downtrodden poor in Sunderland (a topic she had little knowledge or experience of), she’s now making a film about a lightly fictionalised version of herself and struggling with her vision and her memory of events. It all gets very self-referential, and the final scene is a real cap. Again, not for those in a hurry, but very good indeed. 4/5

Uncharted (2022)

Uncharted is made for people who can’t read (postcards are shown with a voiceover reading the clear, legible text) so don’t expect a complex plot, or even a thing called “continuity”. Obviously, needing to keep track of possessions and carrying capacity is not a big thing in video games, which often have an inventory wherein you can have multiple projectile and melée weapons, food, armour and trinkets that seemingly take up no volume and are weightless. The opening shot is fun, for a moment I thought we were looking at an invisible dog trick, and the rest of the film is also an entertaining ride, but it’s not one that will stick in the memory. See it on a huge screen with great sound. You’ll never need to add it to your DVD collection. 3/5

Death on the Nile (2022)

I can’t really review this film, but only give my vague impressions of it, because I slept through most of the thing, much as my dad would have done if the Peter Ustinov version was on the telly of a Sunday afternoon, after a good meal. It was pretty, my first bit of kip was before the first death, so I didn’t really miss much apart from the exposition, and I don’t really want Ken Branagh to do French again. I know Hercules Poirot is Belgian, but none of my Belgian friends speaks French as badly as Ken does. I missed a chunk more and was fading in and out as we learned the killer’s identity — it was…