The White Lotus (Season 3)

I have been heard to say White Lotus Season 2, the one set in Italy with its Shakespearean treatment of themes like trust, commitment, sex, and gender relations, is the best tv I have ever watched, so what a disappointment Season 3 proved to be with its stagnant storylines, repetitive scenes (Greg staring ominously over a brandy glass over and over and over; the dad popping pills over and over and over; everyone in a resort with nothing to do and nothing motivating them, left to go to the pool, then a different pool, then a bar, then a different bar...), and the dreariest storyline of all, that security guard walking to and from his gatehouse in dull conversation with his love interest, the girl hellbent on him climbing the ladder to mega success as a security guard, and the most dismaying thing of all was this season's more tenuous than ever - perhaps completely missing - link to place, because while Season One and especially Season Two were indelibly connected to their settings of Hawaii and Sicily respectively, moribund Season Three could have been set anywhere at all. 

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Within The Pines (2024)

There are movies that make good use of sound (The Conversation, Berberian Sound Studio, A Quiet Place...) but this uneven Australian horror makes no use at all of the fact its main character is a sound engineer in a forest where he stumbles upon something nasty: every time he dons his headphones and points his dead cat, we hear nothing at all and it is not until he takes his headphones off that what he hears with his ears, finally, is rendered moot by what he sees (the light of a torch or the light of a helicopter, for example), and at other times, when our terrified-before-anything-actually-happens hero trips, cries, chases a helicopter screaming, rolls down a hill, kills a dog, and generally stomps around with gay abandon, noone in the pine forest seems to hear anything, not even the hillbilly standing just over there who seems to forget in a scene a moment later that someone is trampling around his caravan of horror.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Wolf man (2025)

The poignant family drama at the start suggests something interesting will follow — perhaps the strong cast is getting you ready for creature chills and spills that mean something to the family psychology – and don't forget director Leigh Whannel did something interesting in 2020's The Invisible Man – except once Wolf Man's family retreats to a cabin in the woods, complete ennui devours the movie and the cast: there are scenes where the two leads literally stand opposite each other and appear not to know what they should do or day to continue the scene, and the whole movie amounts to one single tiresome werewolf-transition scene extrapolated to movie-length.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Longlegs (2023)

The thing Longlegs most reminded me of were the cutscenes of the original Silent Hill computer game on PS1 (they also strung together to make a monotonous, logic-free jumble of satanic goings-on set to a jangly soundtrack of ringing noises and clanks and clangs), but Longlegs includes in its garble Nicolas Cage doing a Jennifer Coolidge impersonation and a this-is-a-bit-right? Silence of the Lambs routine that insults most only after the "we don't even care anymore" abrupt final cut-to-credits when, woken by the return of cinema lights, audience members realise they've been tricked into seeing, I wouldn't be surprised, another prequel-series of the Annabel franchise.

★☆☆☆☆ 

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Anna (2019)

I think what Luc Besson intended was another slick, smart, minimally-plotted sexy violent spy thriller like 'La Femme Nikita' and its American remake 'The Assassin' with Bridget Fonda, but 'Anna' is a far cry from those movies with its woeful acting, laughable casting, terrible editing that makes the fisticuff action look like tai chi. and a story told via choppy-changey timehops that you know are just an attempt to try to disguise how wafer-thin and ridiculous the story is (a globe-trotting supermodel-slash-spy brings the KGB and the CIA together with a kiss each).

★☆☆☆☆

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Where The Crawdads Sing (2022)

In this D-grade To Kill A Mockingbird that takes Harper Lee's Southern Gothicism and replaces it with Hallmark schmaltz, a patently absurd Boo Radley archetype — a "Marsh Girl" ostracized by townsfolk despite being polite, independent, self-sufficient, strong, well-groomed, self-educated, and someone who easily attracts a spunky local boyfriend not once but twice, and who sets herself up as a mussel-monger and later as a book illustrator by communicating winningly with local shop owners and uppity city book publishers — is made a cause célèbre when she contrives a way to have her abusive boyfriend drop sixty-five feet from a firetower.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Poor Things (2023)

The saddest thing about Yorgos Lanthimos's icky Poor Things, a title that I think refers to audiences after two long hours, is that it takes an elaborate steampunk alternate fairytale-reality full of wonky actors playing wonky characters - including a Frankenstein sex doll-come-to-life with, perhaps don't think about it too hard, a child's brain - for the director  to elucidate so very little about the plight of women in today's world (or to be precise, the plight of women in fantasy realities of an alternate past) and there isn't much said of interest about sex or old-school gendered-rules about social propriety, either.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Natural Born Killers (1994)

Just what Oliver Stone intended with this wafer-thin heavy metal video clip - all symbolism, zero realism, and seemingly a grand thesis of one simplistic note - I don't know but it is loud, long and monotonous: a two-hour fight scene that plays out as though everyone is making it up as they go along, with one-dimensional characters screaming their way through one long unlikely situation, with the chaos of mass murderers Mickey and Mallory's "deep love" affair (read occasional "dry humping" and tongue kisses) and violent crime spree spliced meaninglessly with cartoon clips, black and white photography and - in a last-ditch attempt at relevance - media clips of actual celebrated tv crime reports. 

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Bloodmoon (1990)

For the first three-quarters of this ugly, lamentably plotted slasher, no one in the movie even knows for sure that anything is wrong: two or three high schoolers disappear but their absences are shrugged off as runaways, which means a long plod for audiences who must endure woefully scripted school dances, waterhole picnics, and the like waiting for the characters to catch up with what the opening scene established - that someone is killing students with a barbed wire garotte in the nearby woods - and when the killer is finally revealed, the plot, the town's collective obliviousness, and the ignorance of one townsperson in particular (given the celestial and historical circumstances of the crimes) ceases to make any sense at all.

★☆☆☆☆ 

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Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City (2021)

Moments from the games are brought to life and strung together with more concern for perfectly realised game haircuts, weapons, and cosplay outfits than for telling a coherent story, so this reboot, after so many Milla Jovovich movies,  feels like it false-starts right the way through to at least the halfway mark before an unwarranted denouement (a live-action reenactment of that train-carriage bossfight that players of the game will remember).

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Morbius (2022)

 

This vampire superhero hardly endears himself to viewers when, early on, he slaughters a roomful of people, but somehow we are still asked to sympathise with him and gun for him as he enters into a battle with a similar bat-bite-influenced villain in what is, dreary-start-to-dreary-finish, a lethargic entry into the Marvel universe with the only thing less charismatic than the lead character being Jared Leto, the lead actor himself, whose appeal as a Hollywood superstar completely eludes me.

★☆☆☆☆

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Unforgettable (2017)

Unforgettable is precisely what this psycho thriller is not with Katherine Heigl playing an uptight 'Bree Van de Kamp' type ex-wife determined to ruin her ex-husband's new partner's life by browsing through her stolen mobile phone, wearing the dresses she likes, catfishing her former abusive partner, accusing her of violence, and other forgettable midday movie stuff like that.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Alien Vs Predator - Requiem (2007)

In the second of this daft series of movies that pits Predators from Predator movie against Aliens from Alien - though scene after dark, murky scene fails to distinguish which is which - the action shifts from the first movie's subterranean Antarctic pyramid to small-town USA, where way too many human characters blur together while a Predator, again sporting woeful Amstrad CPC-quality predator-vision, hunts Aliens whose number and purpose for marauding the town remain maddeningly unclear - they are just having a bad day, maybe.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Astronaut's Wife (1999)

Charlize Theron, at least, got a chance at a do-over in The Devil's Advocate, another, better scifi-fantasy in which a woman with a boy-cut experiences mental collapse while her husband becomes distracted by otherworldly issues at work, a concept that works well within the context of a morally bankrupt law firm but which here, set in Florida and centred around NASA male astronauts and their wives who wait fearfully on Earth, never is definitively a story about mental health nor alien abduction nor paranormality nor trauma, is never exactly a story about the after-effects of space travel, of loneliness, of body snatching, nor twinship, just a long string of ponderous scenes, the tedium of which is eventually put to death by an hysterical ending so random it is as if it comes suddenly from outer space.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Halloween II (2009)

I thought director Rob Zombie got away with his first Halloween remake, taking viewers inside the head of masked crazy Michael Myers and giving the killer a sympathetic backstory and rationale for his killing in his adult life, but this 2009 sequel confirms the director is trying too hard with his vision for the slasher series - in every scene, Zombie distracts with his communications direct to viewer that what he is doing is arthouse: messages are graffitied on every wall and unlikely posters appear in every room pronouncing cultural subversiveness (a victim of a serial killer has a poster celebrating Charles Manson on her bedroom wall, really?), and even Weird Al Yankovich turns up as Zombie attempts to culturally contextualise what is better suited as a cartoony slasher for teens...and the results are a ridiculous mess: viewers share in the killer's delusory thoughts and are privy to manifestations of his madness in the form of mother, dressed like Legolas, leading a white horse on their journey back to Haddonfield, all the while as a separate movie, a misguided comedy, is spliced in here and there featuring Malcolm McDowell's Doctor Loomis as a whiny fame-whore, suddenly not the Doctor Loomis of previous iterations, in a storyline unrelated to the whole nor relevant to the greater series.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Brahms: The Boy II (2020)

Viewers of the original movie, The Boy, in 2016 were either dismayed by the ending which undid the classic "creepy doll" horror they thought they were watching or like me thought the ending clever - a way to freshen up a stale old "creepy doll" b-horror movie - and now, this sequel, presumably hoping that that dismayed half of viewers might be able to be coaxed back and get behind another creepy doll franchise, creates a backstory that serves to revert to a mere creepy doll horror the events of the original film, with Katie Holmes, as concerned mom watching her son develop far too strong a bond with a doll, valiantly trying to disguise the movie's staggering lack of originality, its utter hohum-ness.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Queen Of The Damned (2002)

The last embarrassment - the last nail in the coffin, so to speak - is the sight of Matthew Newton in a Paddlepop Lion wig trying to explain, in his only line right near the end, why one of the other vampires has turned to stone; I didn't hear what he said (the audio throughout is terrible) and, like me, you won't care anyway after this dreary adaptation of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles book has everyone (notably Aaliyah and Keira Knightley -- oops I mean Stuart Townsend) trying so hard to be slinky, sexy vampires that watching it is like being the fully-clothed party guest at an orgy suddenly underway - you're not sure what you are still doing there, and everyone is so intent on what they are doing no one seems very interested that you're watching; filmed in part at an impressive-looking Mont Salvat in Melbourne, the Australian production forgets you are there and, worse, forgets to tell you what or who you should be rooting for: Lestat, the vampire who has woken himself up in the Noughties to become a nu metal rockstar, or humankind represented briefly by a beach violinist, a redheaded vampire researcher, and enthusiastic throngs at a metal concert - and no-one else - or perhaps we are supposed to care about some of the vampires and not others - Matthew Newton's, maybe, or the jazz-ballet-miming ones throughout?

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Marksman (2021)

Liam Neeson's Jim, a war veteran protecting a Mexican boy from a ruthless drug cartel, sports a circle of orange foundation on his face, reports the "I.A.s" he finds crossing his Arizona property towards the border, and takes advantage of Donald Trump's relaxed approach to gun ownership, and given all this, you'd suspect this 2021 action thriller had something political to say, but the audience is made to sit through decidedly unpolitical and unscintillating things once this movie's thin premise is set up and the man and boy are racing by car across America pursued by the cartel - things like (1) the purchase of an atlas at a gas station (2) a stop at a diner for a meal (3) a toilet break (4) an overnight trip to buy pop tarts, and when things really start to get exciting (5) the ex-Marine surprises the kid with a bag of gummi bears - so, it is only in the last twenty minutes that the criminals, grown tired of spending such a long time tracking all these credit card purchases along Route 66, finally catch up to this dreary pair of roadtrippers and bring the movie to an end with the idea that in America you have the freedom to blow your brains out.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

Those roman numerals in the titles count up the episodes, in case you thought it was a daftness factor inexorably ratcheting up, a reasonable mistake given things are dafter than ever in this eighth installment - as daft as the acting is bad (try to decide which death scene is the most lethargic) - with a resurrected-from-his-Camp Lake Crystal-grave Jason Voorhees - sodden, moldy, mute and ridiculous, not scary -  plodding around a NY-bound ship (it sometimes resembles the Love Boat but at other times looks like a weather-beaten paddle steamer), killing one-by-one a group of high schoolers who are on as unlikely a cruise as you are ever likely to see - 'unlikely' because it is a school group with a supervising teacher but the students on board nonetheless participate in full-gear boxing matches; they take saunas; they honeytrap their Principal and film it with the canera equipment they've brought with them on the trip; they pack in their luggage electric guitars so they can jam in the boiler room; and other really really daft things-to-do while they wait, like the bored audience, for Jason to, well, not so much 'strike' as 'lumber heavily, tiredly in'.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Unhinged (2020)

An opening scene of shocking brutality sets the unchanging tone of this - what? - neither a horror movie nor a thriller, perhaps it's a rage movie: an unedifying long-note of misery and brutality, about a road rage incident that goes on for about an hour after a deeply uninteresting opening twenty-five minutes in which the filmmakers pretend it is important to care about their meat-sack characters.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS