X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

(Bryan Singer, 2014)

With their thunder well and truly stolen by the Avengers franchise, the X-Men films reach a seventh instalment, needing a reinvigoration. So they return to basic principles: Bryan Singer, director of the first two films, returns, as does most of his cast, joining forces with the cast of the prequel X-Men: First Class to create an Epic, time-travel superhero story based on one of the most beloved stories from over 50 years of X-Men comics.
And Singer brings some quality back with him; this is the best X-Men film since X2, and feels the most closely related to the comics in the entire series, filled as it is with geek references and easter eggs, its ragged, messy plotting fusing a few outstanding set-pieces together by leaning on the familiarity of its strongest characters.
The plot kicks off decades in the future, when shape-shifting, seeming unbeatable robots known as sentinels have ravaged the earth, killing mutants or anybody whose genes might produce a mutant somewhere down the line. X-Men fight them in little bands. At this point, an elderly Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) come up with a plan to use the phasing power of Shadowcat (Ellen Page) to send the consciousness of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to drop into his younger body in the early 1970s, before the pivotal act which would kick off the sentinel programme can take place.
When he gets there, Wolverine must find the younger versions of the Professor (James McEvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) in order to stop Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from killing Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), creator of the sentinels. Along for the ride is Beast (Nicholas Hoult) and briefly - and thrillingly - Quicksilver (Evan Peters), whose slo-mo super-speed decimation of some security guards set to Jim Croce may be the best and wittiest action scene in this entire series.
The plot flits from New York to Paris to Washington, and from present to past to future, but Singer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg keep it all surprisingly comprehensible and the sheer amount of incident means that it never gets dull. Indeed, it fairly whips along without pause from the opening battle with sentinels to Wolverine's fight with Beast to the climactic cross-cutting of Magneto taking down the White House with a last stand in the future.
The fact that audiences know these characters so well helps immeasurably - the story just kicks in and rolls along without many introductions. The cast are probably a bit better than this material deserves; Fassbender and Lawrence, particularly, make their characters terrifyingly, believably intense. Exposition is nicely done, and Singer retains the ability to shoot big actions scenes stylishly. Oh, it can be terribly clunky, and the political and moral allegories of the first two films are now a distant memory, but as a blockbuster spectacle, X-Men: Days of Future Past succeeds splendidly.

TO ROME WITH LOVE

(Woody Allen, 2012) Woody Allen still makes "good" films. To Rome With Love, for instance, is consistently engaging, thematically interesting, occasionally hilarious, nicely acted, and shot by Darius Khondji with a fine feel for the beauty of the Eternal City in the waning evenings of a late summer. The problem is that Woody Allen once made unequivocally great films. Films that fairly throbbed with inspiration and ideas, films that were formally adventurous but always accessible, films that were moving and intriguing yet generally brilliantly funny. And, much though I realise it is poor form to criticise a film for what it is not rather than what it actually is, this is an unavoidable consideration whenever one addresses this particular writer-director's latest work. To Rome With Love is another in Allen's recent European series. Here he takes Rome as his setting, shuffling between a number of different stories: Allen himself and Judy Davis visiting their daughter, engaged to a handsome Roman lawyer, whose father is a gifted Opera singer, but only in the shower; Alec Baldwin, reminiscing about a summer in his youth when he (incarnated in the form of Jesse Eisenberg) falls for his girlfriend's pretentious friend (Ellen Page). There are also two Italian-language strands: a young couple honeymooning in the city become accidentally separated and embark on their own sexual journeys, and Roberto Benigni plays a clerk who becomes hugely famous overnight for no reason. That synopsis suggests the difference between the Woody Allen of today and the Woody Allen of the 1970s and 80s - a couple of the big comic ideas in To Rome With Love would have been tossed off in his older films, but here they are given far too much time and space for their slightness to sustain, and they seem thin and annoyingly shrill as a result. As ever with Allen, performances make up for that to some extent, and here Benigni and Penelope Cruz (as a typically caricatured/idealised Allen version of a prostitute) are entertainingly broad, while the Baldwin/Eisenberg strand holds perhaps the best mix of comedy and drama of any in the film, and is charmingly played by all involved. But mix is a problem here - these stories don't hold together well, and indeed, they don't play off one another at all, throwing off few unexpected resonances or contrasts, instead feeling somewhat randomly shuffled. The humour lurches from extraordinarily heavy satire - especially in the Benigni section - to some sparkling one liners, via a bit of decent character comedy, and even some broad farce which plays like much popular Italian tv, but its never light enough or quite snappy enough to work the way it could, for all the reliable qualities that Allen ensures in his cinema.