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...

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

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.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

28 Days Later (2002)

Even though the zombie action here is tried-and-true - an apparently lone survivor stumbles across other survivors, they argue about what to do, and eventually agree to seek out the source of radio-broadcast messages about a safe haven -  director Danny Boyle keeps things stylistically and visually fresh with rapid, rabid zombies - not the slow-moving hordes - and a gritty British rock aesthetic, right from the start, for example, pairing anti-establishment thrash with frenzied scenes of a virus breach at a research lab before cutting to a lengthy sequence of unnerving silence as Cillian Murphy wakes in a hospital in a completely deserted London.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Midnight Lace (1960)

Filled with Hitchcock alumni - Doris Day from The Man Who Knew Too Much and John Williams from Dial M For Murder, but alongside Rex Harrison, not James Stewart or Cary Grant - and about an American woman (Day), newly married and in London, in distress after she starts being stalked by a disembodied voice - first in a pea soup London fog, atmospherically, and then over a series of phone calls - this thriller directed by David Miller really feels like a classic Hitchcock: London, too, with its double deckers, phone boxes, opera performances, and pubs, and while thriller fans will know where it's heading, there are a few well-handled surprises in the end.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Dead Calm (1989)

Phillip Noyce sailed Nicole Kidman from the Australian small-time to the Hollywood big screen with his adaptation of Charles Williams' Dead Calm, a nautical thriller about a couple, Kidman's Rae Ingram and her husband John (Sam Neill) - characters who first appeared in Williams' Aground - on a sailing trip to recover from tragedy, but while becalmed they spot a yacht in distress and make the mistake of stopping to help the yacht's sole survivor (Billy Zane, in 1989, youthful and smouldering) - the confined-space thrills-at-sea has a beautiful simplicity with the three characters in a sphere of action no larger that just the speck of a yacht in the ocean..

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SEMTENCE REVIEWS

Storm boy (1976)

I understand Colin Thiele makes it clear in his book that Mister Percival, the pelican raised by Storm Boy, is trained and responds to voice commands, but the movie springs this idea on its audience right when Mister Percival is needed to save a boatful of fishermen, resulting in a laughable Skippy moment that slightly strains the otherwise faithful adaptation, an emotional, likeable, and touching Australian classic, with the ten-year-old Storm Boy living a lonely but - to me - dream existence, quietly at the beach with the Coorong - its beaches, birdlife, and Ngarrindjeri culture (as taught to Storm Boy by David Gulpilil's Fingerbone Bill) - resplendent around him.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025)

Mary Bronstein, who appears as Dr Spring, wrote and directed the engrossing and exhausting If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (no comma), apparently basing it on her own traumatic time caring for a sick child, and its the truth at the core, along with Rosie Byrne's "performance of a lifetime", that makes this unflinching look at motherhood - the guilt, the shame, the obsession, and the killer power - so utterly captivating: a comedy so dark it more than verges on horror, and you've got to love the reviewers, many male, saying it (read 'two hours of motherhood') is monotonous, too long, and not the entertaining experience you want when you go to the cinema!

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

A Fantastic Woman (Una Mujer Fantastica) (2017)

This is a marvellous character study, not just of the fantastic woman at the movie's heart, who resiliently navigates first the death of her partner, then the suspicion she encounters from the man's family, friends and the police, but also of the world around her, which struggles with challenges to its polarised gender constructs, with every scene in this smart, snappy movie crammed with unmistakable signs - uncertain air kisses, awkward handshakes, stammered titles - that betray the fact that the world is organised, now perhaps more than ever before, to exclude, not include.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

"Godzilla looks really ticked off," a naval officer says at one point, and it is funny because in this 37th Godzilla movie in 2023 the kaiju is still a stiff, rather rubbery, frozen-faced stare-bear - it doesn't matter if he has taken gunfire to the face, swallowed a mine, or been plunged over 1,500 metres to the bottom of the ocean, the demented grin persists - but everything else in Godzilla Minus One, which takes the series back to its roots and presents Godzilla as nuclear annihilation itself, is elaborately, effectively staged, from the razed-to-zero post-Second World War Japan setting to the big-budget Jurassic Park-style chomps and stomps.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Exit 8 (2025)

The computer game it is based on is a simple spot-the-difference game, but this movie adaptation starring the charismatic Ninomiya Kazunari expands the premise into something at times disturbing and often profoundly moving, turning the main world-weary character's struggle to find Exit 8 in an underground train station in Japan into an analogy for stepping up, taking a stand against, and refusing to ignore life's anomalies - no easy task anywhere, but especially in consensus-driven Japan, and particularly resonant in light of recent scandals involving Fuji TV and Johnny and Associates, and more broadly in this age of male reckoning.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025)

The final episode goes to a lot of trouble to tie in characters and storylines from across the previous I-don't-know-how-many movies, and the result is an exhausting first hour of bombast, but once these operatics are out of the way, the action starts - also exhausting (impossible missions, truly, in sunken submarines in subzero temperatures, and high-speed dogfights and plane-hopping at high altitudes) but exhausting in exactly the way fans of the Mission: Impossible movies want.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Nightwatch - Demons Are Forever ('Nattevagten – Dæmoner går i arv') (2023)

You need to have seen the 1994 original to appreciate the genius of this sequel that takes the themes and look of the original and cements them as classic by reworking the story with a new gender politic, putting Fanny Leander Bornedal in the lead role as the daughter of Nikolaj Coster-Waldau's character in the original - she takes on the morgue nightwatch job to better understand her parents' ordeal - and just when you think things are going to be too same-same (moths in the light fittings, alarm lights that threaten to go off...) this gnarly, twisted mystery really goes places!

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Serpico (1973)

Sidney Lumet's biographical film, based on the book by Peter Maas, is the always interesting story of Frank Serpico and eleven years of his career as an undercover policeman, a period in which he took a stand against police corruption - against both the grass eaters and the meat eaters -  and he is an impressive man, thanks to Pacino's great performance, but the film never manages to convey the sense of danger he no doubt faced.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Nosferartu (1979)

In his 1979 remake of the 1922 original film, Werner Herzog brings sound and colour to the story, which helps him achieve his usual painterly, mesmerizing style, but he also takes the opportunity to align the story much more closely with Bram Stoker's Dracula, which of course is exactly what Nosferatu is - Dracula with the title and character names changed after a copyright challenge from Stoker's widow, Florence Stoker.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)

Number 2 left me cold, but this third Knives Out mystery is a return to form with another star-studded cast populating a twisty-turny mystery full of surprises as a priest is murdered in his church and suspicion falls on the newest assistant pastor, the fantastically likeable and wonderfully emotive (and really, I think, a big reason why this is so good even though the plot is a bit overcooked) Josh O'Connor.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Alien: Romulus (2024)

This checkbox-ticking exercise dutifully opens on a steampunk spaceship with glitchy 80s tech sailing across dark silent space, has the sleeping pods of a ragtag bunch of mercenaries open, features the curious space soundtrack, has some (but not too much) Weyland-Yutani context, and of course, there are synthetics, stomach eruptions, and women fused to walls, but what keeps it fresh is the teen cast - this is the Alien we know and love presented with a Scream/Final Destination teen-horror sensibility and it is a very effective addition to the canon with lots of terrific heart-stopping and inventive action.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Foreign Intrigue (1956)

When, in 1959, Hitchcock made North By Northwest, he had to have been aware of this 1956 thriller which features a suave hero - here, it's Robert Mitchum with a suit and slicked hair playing a personal secretary to one of the world's richest men - who becomes embroiled in an foreign intrigue after the death of his employer, and like Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill, Robert Mitchum's Dave Bishop ends up in exotic locations around the world romancing a mysterious blonde, encountering mysterious trenchcoats, in a plot involving identity mix-ups and duplicitous femme fatales (and their mothers), all presented in a richly-detailed, unhurried technicolour - a solid romantic suspense movie, albeit one that flags a little at the two-third mark unlike the rivetting from start to finish North By Northwest.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

El Angel (2018)

"Serial killer" seems the wrong word for the murderous criminal portrayed here - is it possible to distinguish between serial killers and murderous criminals? - but extra confusingly, this murderous criminal is Rob Puch, a real-life babyfaced killer from Argentina who in the 60s, working as a brazen career thief, killed eleven people, but look him up later - because this striking and well-acted movie will garner your interest in this peculiar character - and discover someone quite different to this eccentric, possibly sociopathic babyface here - staring out from newsppaper photos and Wikipedia pages is a sneering rapist and abuser (did the movie neglect to metnion that?) and it becomes hard to reconcile fact with this, what, fiction?

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Thunderbolts (2025)

I think Florence Pugh is great as Yelena Belova, the main character in a thrown-together-by-chance superhero ensemble called "Thunderbolts", a sort of rough-around-the-edges Avengers group ('the Bvengers') whose first movie outing cleverly takes on movie audiences' superhero fatigue by trumping it - the characters here are worldweary, eye-rolling rejects, and that includes the always terrific Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the cumbersomely named Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, an unflappable corrupt agent navigating career turmoil of her own callous creation.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Black Bag (2025)

Don't think too hard about the plot, which is full of outlandish extraneous details and relies on an impossible amount of inter-agent bedhopping (some of it blurring professional boundaries in very unlikely ways) and just enjoy the sleek, sexy spy thrills as Michael Fassbender's mild-mannered spy, George Wodehouse, learns his wife's name is on a list of five potential traitor agents.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS