Nobody (2021)

In terms of high-octane violence, this is John Wick, essentially but minus the fantastic element, with a suburban family man seeking bloody revenge in an everyday domestic world, but what distinguishes it from all the other violent revenge outings centred on older men thrust back into violence like Harry Brown, Taken, and In Order of Disappearance (Kraftidioten) is not just its brisk runtime of about 90 minutes but the fact that this guy played by Bob Odenkirk is not a reluctant hero but a veteran desperate to let the beast back out.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Evil Does Not Exist (悪は存在しない) (2025)

I still mean to finish Drive My Car, the Oscar-winning, much-lauded earlier movie from director Ryusuke Hamaguchi that, unlike everyone else, I found so boring, but in the meantime I did finish his Evil Does Not Exist - just - because it is marginally more interesting, I suppose, but mainly because such odd choices are made to tell its story of a Japanese village whose water supply is threatened by the development of a glamping site, like the choice to cast mostly non-professional actors (wooden barely begins to describe the performances), the choice of filming long, quiet shots that continue long after you've thought to yourself, "OK, I get it" (of winding car trips after school pickup for instance, or of treetops moving overhead during not one, not two, but several forest walks), and the choice to work in inexplicable details like "talent agents" who work as spokespeople for a property development company, feathers that look like blades, and a serial killer burial site (my theory), which are all details that keep promising significance.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Magnolia (1999)

No wonder Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia is three hours long when you consider it follows ten individuals, such as Tom Cruise's arena-filling self-help guru and Julianne Moore's trophy wife of an older television producer, over a 24-hour period of their intersecting lives in LA's San Fernando Valley - a lot of day-to-day to cover, with the movie crescendoing to an almost unbearable level of shrillness at about the two-hour mark as all of the deeply human stories reach a fever pitch, but keeping you watching through the lengthy and ultimately unrewarding melodrama is the arresting opening sequence in which urban legends are used to lend evreything that follows only the illusion of philosophical depth and cohesion.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Jaws (1975)

Steven Spielberg swings his camera over Amity beach, taking in the array of potential victims like the crowd is a shark smorgasbord, and he occasionally dares to make the victim in the end exactly the one he shouldn't in this horror-adjacent creature-feature based on the Peter Benchley book and starring Roy Scheider as the man who cried shark - so effective a film, sharks are still trying to recover from the attack on their character.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

An inane comedy about nothing decades ahead of Seinfeld and a bohemian New Wave romp centred on female friendship decades before Sex And The City, this light, frothy comedy thriller stars Madonna and Rosanna Arquette as two women - a bored New Jersey housewife and a petty-crim drifter - caught up in a case of mistaken identity and chased by lovers and mobsters across New York City, but the plot really just serves as an excuse to celebrate the movie's biggest star, downtown Manhattan in the 80s, its quirks and eccentric characters, clubs, loft apartments, thrift stores, classified ads for communication, and irresistible sense of possibility.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS