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.

★★★☆☆

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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.

★★★☆☆

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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.

★★★☆☆

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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.

★★★★★

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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.

★★★★☆

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The Night of the Hunter (1955)

I don't think this is as good a movie as it is now often made out to be and tend to agree with 1955 appraisals when it failed at the box office: a clearly ambitious but patchy first (and last) attempt at directing by Charles Laughton, full of shots at theatrical profundity - biblical stories, playbox sets, so many long quiet animal shots, pantomime, and nursery rhyme/fairy tale flourishes - awkwardly thrown in with a chilling serial killer story, an icy cold Robert Mitchum as the charlatan pastor, and a sense once it's over that it was all an elaborate but odd little affair.

★★★☆☆

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The Haunting (1963)

I count Shirley Jackson's book as the most anxiety-inducing one I've ever read, and this adaptation does a pretty good job recreating that uneasy world, but Eleanor's dreamy, internal monologue drove the book and revealed her often magical thinking about the paranormal investigation she finds herself a part of at the living, breathing, evil Hill House, and of course this movie truncates all that into something more prosaic and manageable, and strongly suggests a love triangle that certainly wasn't in the arguably lesbian-leaning book, in order, I suppose, to be less psychological, more tangible. 

★★★★☆

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28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

I started to wonder why I was being asked to watch the gruesome Manson Family/Funny Games goings-on of a faction of blond-wig weirdos, a cult that has formed and evolved some time during the twenty-eight years since the outbreak of the Rage virus - the cult we glimpsed at the end of 28 Years Later (2025) - and thought perhaps my interest in this dystopia was finally, completely depleted, but then, with an outrageous thrash metal film clip and a hark back to earlier forgotten scenes, the core thesis of this fourth movie in Danny Boyle's always unexpected series brings everything together, and when the film ends with even more loose threads from three previous films being reintroduced, I found I'd signed back on, ready for number five.

★★★★☆

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Project Hail Mary (2025)

There aren't many comedians in the world today who are funny without being equally annoying, but somehow Ryan Gosling - strictly speaking, not a comedian at all - manages to be hilarious and likeable and not even slightly annoying, and having watched him here playing a science teacher tasked with saving the world in this scifi adventure based on a book by Andy Weir (who also wrote the thematically similar but more earnest The Martian), I was compelled afterwards to google a list of Gosling movies to see if the actor has ever put a foot wrong.

★★★★★

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28 Years Later (2025)

It stands to reason that 28 years after the outbreak of the Rage virus, knowledge of the virus has advanced and survivors can now differentiate between the slow, the fast, and the alphas among the virus-affected, and we are suddenly confronted with the idea, too, that these creatures procreate, and on the human side, rituals have evolved and taken root - in young Spike's island safe haven, for example (his brutal rite of passage makes up the bulk of this episode) - and Ralph Fiennes' newly introduced, possibly mad doctor has obviously been working hard on an astonishing, inexplicable "bone temple", but some of this 28-year-old world into which we are suddenly thrust - remember, we were just "twenty-eight weeks later" the last time we checked -  starts to strain credulity, even under the direction of returning Danny Boyle - and starts to strain the actors' ability to deadpan their lines, too.

★★★★☆

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Gretel and Hansel (2020)

The Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index of folktale types needs a new subcategory to allow for the inclusion of Osgood Perkins' Gretel and Hansel, and might I suggest 2400-2499: "Fucking boring". 

★☆☆☆☆

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The Others (2001)

Even if you end up not impressed with the plot developments, which to some may seem obvious or derivative or - in light of other ghost stories released a year or so earlier - "done", Alejandro Amenábar's story of a family - Nicole Kidman's mother and her two photosensitive children whose condition demands they remain cloistered inside their stately manor home with curtains drawn and in the dark - will transfix with its cinematography - painterly visions of Kidman navigating a fog, for example - and captivate with the performances from Kidman, the kids - both terrific -  and Fionnula Flanagan as the head of a trio of house servants who know more than they are letting on.

★★★★☆

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Saltburn (2023)

We've seen this twisted psychological thriller before and in much, much better movies, but to cite the obvious inspiration constitutes a spoiler, so I'll just say, and leave you to guess, this is about an Oxford college social misfit who gets noticed by a cool kid and ends up stepping up over Summer break into this hip cat's lifestyle of the rich and famous, with suspense ratcheting up as holiday's end nears and our misfit's grip on this lavish world and his new best-buddy friendship starts to slip, but it is hard to engage when the story here is delivered not on a sun-dappled Italian coastline surrounded by European art and architecture but in a gothic cartoony manor with a Dark Shadows colour palette, with only bored characters - a dour-faced, laugh-free Addams Family - and with a crescendo of dismaying gothic flourishes that hardly seduce.

★☆☆☆☆

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Movie puzzle (May 2020)

The seven clues below refer to movie titles which each contain a double letter O.

1. 2002 Phillip Noyce movie based on a Doris Pilkington Garimara book

_ _ _ _ _ _ - _ _ O O _   _ _ _ _ _

2. 1990 Ray Liotta crime classic

_ O O _ _ _ _ _ _ _

3. 2018 Best Picture Oscar winner that upset the Shirleys

_ _ _ _ _  _ O O _

4. 1969 Alain Delon crime thriller La Piscine, in English

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _   _ O O _

5. Seventh installment of the interminable hockey mask killer series (1988)

_ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _   _ _ _ : _ _ _   _ _ _   _ _ O O _

6. Popular 1993 movie about the Jamaican bobsleigh team

_ O O _  _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

7. 1973 Raymond Chandler book adaptation starring Elliot Gould

_ _ _  _ _ _ _  _ O O _ _ _ _

DOUBLE TROUBLE: as an extra challenge, can you discover the hidden theme word that ties everything together? Afterall, you only live...

© Cinecal 2026

28 Weeks Later (2007)

Flaunting rules during COVID - maybe that I can kind of understand, but in the face of apocalyptic evidence post-the-virus in this sequel to 28 Days Later, it is hard to believe anyone, even kids, would "sneak out", but they do, and that lapse in credibility becomes the film's defining weakness as, repeatedly, family reunions defy apocalyptic chaos, characters display magical virus expertise, and John Woo-style theatrics push the story towards spectacle and away from the unsettling plausibility that made the original so engrossing.

★★★☆☆

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The Mean Season (1985)

Based on a book by John Katzenbach called In The Heat of The Summer, the dull The Mean Season should have capitalised on Florida's oppressive Summer, but everyone in it — Kurt Russell's journalist, a camera-toting colleague, his boss, and a detective played by a very young Andy Garcia — remains fresh despite running around after a serial killer - and Mariel Hemingway's love interest at one point even leaves Kurt a message written in a fogged up car window - and in the same way, the serial killer himself, a taunter of the public via the phone on Malcolm's news desk and a presence that really should sweep through with menace and ravage the community, never actually takes a compelling shape.

★★☆☆☆

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Peewee As Himself (2025)

My love of Pee-Wee Herman is inexplicable - I'm Australian, only learned of the existence of Paul Reubens' alter-ego as a university student, and never grew up on Pee-Wee's Playhouse or knew anything of the genesis of this character via Paul Reubens' time as a 'Groundling' and regular David Letterman guest, but having watched this gentle, mildly interesting two-part documentary, I can confirm there is something charismatic about Reubens - as Pee-wee or as himself, young or old - and I admire his not, to his death in 2023, talking about THAT...

★★★★☆

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Lifeboat (1944)

There's a terrific scene early on where the lifeboat swings around and our attention moves from Tallulah Bankhead's character, who falls out of focus and becomes slightly muted, to a group of other characters towards the front of the boat, who come into focus and become audible, revealing how cleverly Alfred Hitchcock manages and keeps interesting his adaptation of John Steinbeck's story, a confined-space war drama set almost start to finish on a lifeboat.

★★★★☆

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A Royal Night Out (2015)

We've seen royal daughters or the daughters of American Presidents going incognito to experience 'normal life', from Roman Holiday to Disney's Aladdin, and the twist here is that this movie tells of an actual example from history in which Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret embarked one night out of the palace to celebrate the end of the war, which may well have happened but almost certainly not as it is presented in this easy-enough-to-watch but heavily, heavily fictionalised comedy romance. 

★★★☆☆

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Graduation Day (1981)

Except for the fact Jamie Lee Curtis doesn't appear, this 1981 slasher follows the 80s teen slasher formula exactly — it could even be Scream -1 — opening on an initial tragedy at Woodsboro, I mean, Midvale High School that sets into motion a grisly series of killings of the members of the school's track-and-field team, and about the only thing that sets Graduation Day apart from the long line of identical others is a rocking film clip at the one-hour mark — Felony's Gangster Rock — which injects new energy — not a lot, but new — into the final thirty-minute lead-up to the clumsy reveal of The Fisherman, I mean, Ghostface, I mean...

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW