The Expatriate
Aaron Eckhart, Liana Liberato, Olga Kurylenko - Dir: Philipp Stolzl

The Expatriate – known as Erased in America – isn't really anything special. Its plot, satisfyingly complex though it is, isn't anything you haven't seen before and there are no new wiz-bang effects. But it shows the difference between so much of the recycled dross around and what a film looks like when it is done well.
Aaron Eckhart plays a security-testing guy working in Belgium, living with his rather grumpy teenage daughter. Without warning he finds the company he has been working for has disappeared along with all record of his having worked for it. Oh, and everyone who worked with him seems to be dead. The pair are soon on the run with assassins around every corner trying to kill them for reasons unknown.
Fortunately Aaron's character used to be a CIA black ops agent so can do some ass-kicking in return when the men (and women) behind the international conspiracy are revealed.
So, like I said, nothing really new. This sort of thing seems to happen to Liam Neeson all the time. Director Stolzl is well-regarded for both his thriller North Face and love story Goethe and brings both elements to bear here, keeping the action moving along while never losing sight of the human element and relationship between father and daughter.

Olympus Has Fallen is a really really bad film. It is, however, a whole bunch of fun, if your tastes run towards the very silly. It's one of the two (yes, Hollywood, good work again on that!) current films about sieges of the White House and this time it's those naughty North Koreans (apparently changed at the last minute from Chinese after Kim Jong-un became the new 'Great Satan”) who destroy some of Washington's finest monuments before holding the Prez and his advisers hostage. Only Gerard Butler can save the day. Yes, it's Die Hard In The White House!

There are so many quality animated features around these days that people are getting a lot more discerning about them. It's no longer enough to have eye-popping visuals, which is a shame for Escape From Planet Earth, which boasts exactly that but falls short in almost every other area, presenting a story that is predictable and message-heavy. The plot has a couple of cute blue aliens trying to do exactly what the title says after being stranded on what they call 'the dark planet”. Actually, one (the brash hero) is stranded, his brother (the heroic nerd) is trying to save him. Possibly good for under-eights.

Not being an historian I had blithely assumed that Hitler (Adolf, 'the most despised man of the 20th century”, etc) had died in a Berlin bunker in 1945. Not so claims
Grey Wolf, which postulates an escape via U-boat (with Eva at his side) to Argentina and eventually a lonely death in hiding in 1962. It's based on a book so it must be true. Who knows? I won't evaluate how reliable the 'testimonies” are, given that they are read by actors and presented with no background or verification. But I can say that the recreations are laughable and the storytelling incredibly slow and mostly boring.

The Rambler is a good ol' road movie. That's a movie where a person or persons travel somewhere and the various eccentrics they encounter en route change or illustrate their state of mind/the state of the world. Think Easy Rider, think Thelma and Louise. Here it's Delbert Mulroney's ex-con, kicked out of his trailer home, heading for his brother's ranch in Montana, looking for... nothing really. It's a slow journey through the weirdly unsettling backroads of off-the-map America, with flashes of quick editing suggesting Bad Things in store. Sure enough it gets increasingly hallucinatory before going the full Lynch in the nightmare final third. Strong strange stuff.