The Net (1995)

Most of us have shrugged off the loss of our personal privacy in the digital age because we are too busy to care, uploading dopey movie reviews, sharing cat videos or answering Facebook surveys - which Golden Girl or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle are you? - but this thriller, released when the internet was just twelve years old, has Sandra Bullock's Angela Bennett, a computer programmer, realising with horror that not only has her identity been stolen but the people who stole it have replaced her details with those of a woman wanted by police, forcing poor Angela off the grid and requiring her to navigate a murky tech underworld of highly sought-after 3.5" diskettes, dial-up cyberhacking using WHOIS commands, mysterious pi symbols that conceal html code, two-hander mobile phone bricks, and deep web stuff like a computer program that features a likeness of Mozart dressed like Beetlejuice playing electric guitar - will Angela escape the anarchy and get her old life back? (a big green block cursor blinks slowly awaiting input of the sort GETLIFEBACK)

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Crimson Tide (1995)

As if the confined spaces, the machismo of the crew and the constant threat of being sunk were not enough to pressure-cook the environment on board the nuclear submarine the USS Alabama, director Tony Scott adds a cigar smoker and a Jack Russell to the mix and then has the Second-in-Command (Denzel Washington) and the Captain (Gene Hackman) disagree on the best way to proceed through a nuclear missile crisis once their craft's communications systems go down.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

To Die For (1995)

Gus Van Sant's crime drama parody received critical acclaim despite its being little more than a glorified episode of a real-life tv crime drama like 48 Hours, only with A-list stars Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix alternately hamming things up and expecting us to care less about a grubby, inconsequential suburban crime story, Clueless meets Amy Fisher and Note On A Scandal.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Dangerous Minds (1995)

I love movies about high school - comedies (Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, Jump Street), dramas (Donnie Darko, To Sir With Love) - but the naievity displayed here by Michelle Pfeiffer's LouAnne Johnson, an ex-marine English teacher who applies a likely saviour complex to the task of educating a classroom of underprivileged American students, choosing to visit their homes, choosing to take them on dates, choosing to loan them money and choosing to invite them into her home for sleepovers - actions breezily dismissed as "choosing to care" and leading to immediate unlikely transformative outcomes - earns this a fail grade as a high school experience.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Under Siege 2 Dark Territory (1995)

A hostage situation in the Nakatomi Plaza was the first iteration of the Die Hard formula, since used in an airport (Die Hard 2), in a boys school (Toy Soldiers), aboard a boat (Under Siege), on a plane (Air Force One, Non-stop), in The White House (Olympus Has Fallen), in a neo-nazi clubhouse (Green Room) and here, in an Under Siege sequel about as cinematic as a MacGyver episode, the formula is applied to a transAmerican train and it is again up to Steven Seagal's unruffled former Navy Seal cook and his niece (a pre-comedy career Katherine Heigel) to sneak around and thwart the bad guys' diabolical nuclear plans.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Indian In The Cupboard (1995)

A boy discovers that if he locks his toys in a cupboard using a magic key, his toys come to life, meaning this 1995 kids' movie based on a series of novels by Lynne Reid Banks plays out a bit like a live-action Toy Story except instead of an animated toy cowboy with freewill, it has a morose Native American indian who lives his animated moments at the mercy of a goofy white kid.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Copycat (1995)

It tells a story of a serial killer with a completely implausible modus operandi - the copycat killer re-enacts to an impossible level of detail famous serial killer crimes of the past - but this effective thriller, one of the better ones released during the spate of hohum serial killer thrillers released after 1991s The Silence of the Lambs, stars Sigourney Weaver as an agoraphobic serial killer expert who finds herself both the hunter and the hunted as she reluctantly helps cop duo Holly Hunter and Dermot Mulroney on a difficult case.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Species (1995)

A group of way too laidback misfit investigators (including Forest Whitaker as celluloid's least insightful psychic ever), chase after - no, stroll around after -- a scantily clad Natasha Henstridge who plays an escaped and rapidly evolving half-human, half-alien science experiment and temptress killing machine, in this police procedural "sci-fi" that spawned a number of unwarranted sequels.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Twelve Monkeys (1995)

The joy of Terry Gillam's Twelve Monkeys, a thrilling drama that works with the Slaughterhouse Five themes of time, memory, and questions of what is real and what isn't, is watching the madness ebb and flow and transplant itself back and forth between the leads, so that first it is Willis, then Stowe, then Willis again, whose reality - with the help of unbalanced camera angles - teeters on collapse.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS