Lord & Miller: 22 Jump Street (2014)

22 Jump Street is the sequel to 21 Jump Street – and it is a curious kind of sequel. From the moment it begins, we’re continually, obsessively reminded that this is exactly what we saw last time, except at college – the main joke of the film is that it’s a blatant rip-off of the first one. More than that, the end credits roll over comic proposals for the next twenty or so Jump Street sequels – it gets up to about 40 Jump Street – to the point where it feels like the film’s jumped the sequel stage altogether and moved directly into franchising. For another type of film, that might spell death, but it actually works quite well for this rebooted Jump Street, and even weirdly makes 22 feel more original than 21, precisely as it revels in its lack of originality. In part, that’s because both reboots have tended to avoid straight comedy or action in favour of something more like a study in swagger – and swagger is nothing if not aroused at the prospect of being a franchise. As a result, the more generic and predictable the film becomes, the more erotic and titillating it feels, although it is an odd, dispersed eroticism, the eroticism of a swagger brand going viral, as Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill’s poses and postures ripple out across increasingly larger and more elaborately choreographed crowds, culminating with a massive Spring Break set piece. Apart from the Jump Street films, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have only worked in animation, and that really suits these heaving crowd scenes – they’re prescient that swagger yearns to become synthetic, self-replicating, divorced from any one person or body. Of course, that means that Tatum and Hill are doomed to irrelevance – their swagger quickly becomes something bigger than them, leaves them behind – but it also means that the film can’t really be bothered with their bromance, which is quite refreshing. For the most part, their endless squabbles just feel like a gay romantic comedy that nobody in the audience or film is really watching – except, perhaps, for Ice Cube, who's insatiable as the film's unimpressed godfather (or grandfather) of swagger, scowling every time this heave of white dudes presumes to pass for black.

Dardenne & Dardenne: Deux Jours, Une Nuit (Two Days, One Night) (2014)

On the face of it, Two Days, One Night is one of the Dardennes’ gentlest offerings. Like Rosetta, it’s about a factory worker who is made redundant at the worst possible time. Like Rosetta, too, it pretty much treats its protagonist as an avatar, following Sandra (Marion Cotillard) over a single weekend, as she reaches out to her coworkers and tries to convince them to give up their bonuses in exchange for her being rehired. As that might suggest, it’s also one of the most periptatetic and panoramic of the Dardennes’ films – most of it is spent travelling, or on public transport - opening up a wider cross-section of their native Seraing than any of their previous efforts. Yet that very scope is simultaneously what makes such a strong break with Rosetta and the Dardennes' other, earlier works. In those films, Seraing felt too cosmic and overwhelming to be conceptualised in any coherent way - it was more like a heightened gravitational field than a discrete location, a disruption in the Fordist space-time continuum. By contrast, Two Days, One Night gentrifies Seraing into a more recognisable place, an industrial epicentre made over as a post-industrial drossscape. And while that might reduce everyone’s risk of crashing to the ground, it also means that there’s less propulsiveness, less of an impetus to the kind of perpetual motion that prevented the Dardennes’ earlier protagonists getting too grounded. For all the time Sandra spends on buses, highways and traffic islands, she can never quite manage to jack into the vast slipstream that  buoyed up and propelled the Dardennes’ earlier films, perhaps explaining why Cotillard’s body and performance are so limp, wilted and depressive – it is like watching someone who’s been living in a wind tunnel all their life step suddenly into a vacuum, shocked by the silence that descends after a barrage of white noise. For the first time in their career, it feels as if the Dardennes' austerity has been absorbed and conquered by a more powerful, bureaucratic austerity, divested of its purification and profundity in the process – these summery visions of Seraing may be the brightest they've ever shot, but, then again, Sandra’s factory manufactures solar panels, harvesting off the brightness as soon as it’s begun.

Knight: Locke (2013)

Over the last few years, film has turned towards hard infrastructure as an elegiac approximation for an analog, empiricist world that feels well and truly behind us. In many ways, Locke feels like a culmination of that tendency. Shot in its entirety in a moving car, and anchored by a solo performance by Tom Hardy, it’s about Ivan Locke, a Welsh construction manager who takes a detour on his way home from work one night, with nothing but his SmartPhone and GPS for company. What that detour involves is perhaps best left for the film’s many phone conversations to explain, but it leads to Locke taking a respite from his job just when he is needed to supervise the biggest concrete pour in European history. As a result, he spends a great deal of the drive relaying instructions remotely, to a plethora of builders, overseers and concrete farmers, with increasing irritation at their inability to handle simple specifications. Yet the more tangible Locke’s directives become, the more intangible his communicative channels seem – with every fresh effort he makes to co-ordinate this new monolith of hard infrastructure, the technology supporting and sustaining him seems softer and softer, more and more incorporeal. Among other things, that continually, imperceptibly fuses the car with both the highway and the camera, as well as displacing the pulse and momentum of Locke’s own journey, which disperses its destination as it proceeds. By the end, the car is more a social media platform than a mode of transportation, set adrift in an archipelago of light that is perhaps truer to the nightscapes of Johnny Jewel and Chromatics than Drive, or the Drive soundtrack - as in some of Jewel’s most haunting moments, it feels as if the carscape has expanded to the point where it has simply reincorporated all the vast loneliness outside, internalised even the most desolate and panoramic of sightlines. In another time, it might have ended with a twist – perhaps Locke would simply be driving in a circle, or there wouldn’t really be anyone there on the other end of the phone line. But that all seems curiously irrelevant here, too definite or emphatic for a film that bleeds back into the world so subtly and subliminally that you barely even notice when it finishes.

Swanberg: Happy Christmas (2014)

One of the risky things about being as hyper-prolific as Joe Swanberg is that your audience can become over-familiar with your style and universe, especially if you work with a small pool of actors and scenarios. It’s a tribute to Swanberg’s sense of purpose, then, that his films always feel peculiarly unhomely – he has an uncanny knack for seeking out spaces that are so anonymous and uninviting that they feel as if they could never become familiar, however much time you spent in them. From that perspective, Happy Christmas feels like either a watershed or a defeat, depending on how you look at it. On the one hand, it’s shot in Swanberg’s actual house, giving it a homeliness and comfort that’s quite rare across the rest of his work. Swanberg essentially plays himself, Melanie Lynskey plays his wife, and it also features his baby, who puts in one of the weirdest, most charismatic performances in the film, the degree zero of Swanberg’s many floor-dwellers. What complicates that is the arrival of Swanberg’s sister, played by Anna Kendrick, who’s more redolent of his earlier films – from the moment she descends upon the family, she occupies space in much the same way as Swanberg’s camera, leaving a sprawling slumpscape in her wake, as she collapses out across couches, corners and fold-out beds, finally settling on the incredible Tiki-themed basement as her preferred niche. As might be expected, that causes some rifts within the family, but it also provides their rigid life with some much-needed slump itself – you can almost hear Lynskey’s American accent relaxing back into her native New Zealand twang as her friendship with Kendrick blossoms out into the centrepiece of the film, one of the most beautiful relationships and rapports in the whole of Swanberg’s career. By the end, the family has found a new balance – sort of – thanks to Kendrick’s interventions, but it never feels quite complete or secure either. Like so many of Swanberg’s earlier romances, it's more like an experiment, a study in sustainable slump that never quite reaches its conclusion, never quite figures out the exact dosage of downbeat needed to prevent domesticity from becoming too domestic.

Sachs: Love Is Strange (2014)

The latest film from Ira Sachs is about a New York gay couple in their sixties, who finally decide to get married after forty-three years of being together. As soon as they do, however, George (Alfred Molina) is fired from his job at a Catholic high school, forcing him and Ben (John Lithgow) to sell their apartment and move in with separate friends, where they remain for most of the movie. In its timeliness, it’s hard not to read it as the first post-DOMA film about gay life – but, then again, it’s also worth remembering that DOMA was repealed at the hands of a similarly placed couple, a couple who had nominally been married only quite recently, but had in fact been living as a married couple for close to half a century. As a result, there’s not as much novelty to the marriage as might be expected – the ceremony feels more like an anniversary party, a warm, fond memory of something that happened in the distant past, while the whole film is suffused with a calm, restrained classicism, as if to remind us that this vision of married life is an old story, one that’s been told many times before. In some ways, that recalls the warmest, least frenetic moments in Woody Allen – there’s the same sense of eternal return, the feeling that this relationship is playing out in countless other apartments, restaurants and bars across the city, which doubles as a compassionate confidant, a balm for even the most challenging or complicated lovers. And it’s clear that Sachs wants to paint a certain portrait of New York’s gay heritage, a tribute to all the lives loved and lost by gay New Yorkers, but doesn’t want to enslave his characters to it either, which makes for quite a robust, irreverent tribute to an older gay generation that’s not often that visible onscreen. In fact, the only thing that really threatens Ben and George’s relationship is getting married in the first place, since it means acting as if they haven’t been married all along. Still, they both manage to bounce back from it, if not without a little melancholy along the way  – in this comedy of remarriage, gay marriage can withstand pretty much anything, even the legalisation of gay marriage.