Dracula 2000 (2000)

Risen by elaborate means from a treasure vault in modern-day America, Gerard Butler's Dracula is an almost entirely non-verbal ponce whose exhilaration at the sight of ripe virginal necks looks like constipation, but this Wes Craven-endorsed exercise in horror, featuring Christopher Plummer as a Van Helsing descendant, Jonny Lee Miller as geeky-chicy muscle, and Justine Waddell as a woman with a supernatural bond to the ancient bloodsucker, is so-bad-it's-not-so-bad mindless horror-action fun.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS 

Final Destination (2000)

Death itself, not some gimmicky fiend masked or back-from-the-dead, stalks the teens in the Final Destination slasher series and this original is where the innovative concept kicks off...but not in quite the polished fashion of later instalments, for although a group of teens cheat their way out of dying in a freak accident and Death comes knocking like it does in all the FD films, Death here is a malicious fiend, occasionally visible as a shadow that passes through kitchens and down streets - like the shadows in Ghost - and occasionally a manipulator of physics, so not yet the invisible but terrifying potential of violent, body slicing and dicing domestic Rube Goldberg machines.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Harry, He's Here To Help (aka With A Friend Like Harry) (Un Ami Qui Vous Veut Du Bien) (2000)

Thrillers are described as Hitchcockian with wild abandon but the term is applied to this 2000 French thriller with only slight abandon: there's something wrong (some trouble) with the main character, Harry, a variety of Psycho whose waddle and gaze, at once twinkly and steely, recalls Robert Walker's deranged Bruno Antony and like Antony, this Harry has an off-kilter plan — but the real trouble with Harry, who turns up and wreaks havoc in his old school chum Michel's life, is there is no clear motivation for his actions - Hitchcock wouldn't have simply called him a psycho without also injecting the character with a mother or psychoanalysis or an inflated sense of superiority — and even Patricia Highsmith, whose works this thriller with its two males in stand-off very closely resembles, kept things cracking, not dour like this, and imbued her wafer-thin characters with clear motivations, ensuring her psychopath-driven plots were more than just shell...

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

What Lies Beneath (2000)

In director Robert Zemeckis' supernatural mystery, a wife comes to believe her renovated lakehouse is haunted by the ghost of a blonde, green-eyed female, probably a former locksmith given the incredible number of times we see doors swing open by paranormal force, and it is all dopey fun that doesn't warrant too much thought except when all is said and done and the protracted denouement is over (having made very elaborate use of only momentarily spotted paralysed laboratory mice and a bridge in a mobile reception blackspot), viewers who do stop to think twice about what has occurred will recognise the irrelevance of the first hour of the movie, the sheer number of unnecessary characters, and an ennui that pervades the performances, probably a result of the actors being involved in so much redundant nonsense.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Big Momma's House (2000)

"Honky Grandma Be Trippin'" for realsies has Martin Lawrence playing the undercover cop who thinks the best way to inveigle his way into a wanted criminal's circle is to use a leftover The Klumps bodysuit to disguise himself as a large Southern grandmother, which seems a lot more work than simply developing the chemistry he finds he has as himself with the gangster's girlfriend.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Under the Sand (Sous Le Sable) (2000)

A woman's husband vanishes without trace from an unpatrolled beach in France in François Ozon's precursor to his 2003 Swimming Pool, another movie in which he has Charlotte Rampling doing what Charlotte Rampling does (in 45 Years, in Swimming Pool...), drifting around as an emotionally, physically distant older woman who may or may not be delusional, grappling with loneliness or interacting with figaments of her imagination.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍) (2000)

Some may believe Ang Lee's 2000 film represents a mere Hollywood bastardisation of wuxia but it introduced the genre to Western cinemas, heralded a string of terrific mainstream martial arts cinema releases like Hero and The House of Flying Daggers, and for me was an eye-popping, awe-inspiring introduction to wire fu with a ripping story of a sword thief, an arch criminal and a detective duo, all embroiled in multiple love stories.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Alone With A Stranger (2000)

There actually is fun to be had with this so-bad-it's-worth-watching-but-only-if-you-are-up-late-unable-to-sleep-on-a-weekend movie about a man who so badly wants everything his twin brother has, he sets out to get it at any diabolical cost and no matter how much bad acting is required.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Scream 3 (2000)

This third instalment of the Scream series continues to inventively postmodernise the slasher flick by taking yet another step back, this time setting the gruesome events against the backdrop of a slasher flick being made within a slasher flick, so there are now lookalike actors playing the actors and movie sets of the movie sets, but boy it is a long episode and it tries so hard that all its energy goes out the window well before the movie's drawn-out conclusion.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Coyote Ugly (2000)

The "Coyote Ugly" bar's Occupational Health and Safety standards are sorely tested by a wannabe songstress so desperate to make a go of her miming skills, she risks strutting up and down the venue's slippery bar juggling glass bottles and then, just when you think her life couldn't get any more out there, she makes the difficult but life-changing decision to karaoke Blondie's One Way Or Another during a bar fight, and pretty soon she's got it all.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The 6th Day (2000)

Arnold Schwarzenegger's Adam Gibson finds his life has been taken over by a clone and finds that Robert Duvall's team of clone scientists wants him dead in this overlong and woefully written 80s scifi that awkwardly blends action and cornball humour and presents a hi-tech vision of the future featuring hologram and clone technology but also featuring venetian blinds, door hinges, duct-taped eskies, glitchy Betsy Wetsies, and Cadillac car chases through leafy suburban streets.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Cast Away (2000)

Tom Hanks plays a plane crash survivor stranded on an island with a Wilson volleyball Man Friday in this extended Fedex advertisement that seeks to demonstrate the extreme lengths the company will go to ensure its parcels get delivered - lengths much greater than most attention spans.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Snow Day (2000)

Thematically similar to Ferris Bueller's Day Off and perhaps originally intended as a National Lampoon's vacation, this not very interesting kids' entertainment has young schoolkids conspiring to prolong a Snow Day by hijacking a snowplow and features the wasted comic talents of Chevy Chase and the less wasted comic talents of Chris Elliott.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Hollow Man (2000)

The special effects are so good in this Paul Verhoeven scifi thriller, they still hold up today 16 years after the film's release and it's clear the time, trouble and money spent on them was at the cost of all else - the Jekyll-and-Hyde story of a mad scientist is essentially a comic book superhero tale without a superhero - inert, rudderless and with nowhere to go - and it has the diabolical invisible madman villain tipped over the deep end not by his brilliance but by a petty love triangle...all that sfx invisibility simply becomes the means he uses to exact his tired horror movie revenge.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Little Man (2006)

Like Tootsie, Mrs Doubtfire, Big Mamma, White Chicks, and the Jump Street movies, this is a "disguised interloper" comedy, one with the momentarily amusing premise of an ex-jailbird posing as a child in a family home, but an inert plot, pantomime performances, questionable sex jokes, and odd effects that for ninety minutes see Marlon Wayan's face hovering disconcertingly over an infant's body of wildly inconsistent size, mean the movie is intolerable.

☆☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Code Unknown (Code Inconnu) (2000)

The miserable events of Babel, another everything-is-connected drama, were also sparked by a child's actions; here, in Michael Haneke's least grim but still dismaying film, the child's act is reprehensible, a truly callous moment that sparks not moribund events like in Babel, but human, compelling events and by movie's end, it is pretty clear the code referred to in the title is society's broken moral code and that the movie's loosely connected stories are commenting on the tendency of people to hide their "real faces" or mute their true feelings to rascist taunts overheard on a train, to the plight of refugees reported in the news, or to the bullish behaviour of the powerful.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

The Taste of Others (Les Gout des Autres) (2000)

This thoroughly enjoyable romantic comedy drama about a mismatched businessman and an actress with whom he becomes infatuated, tells a clever and sweet story of people and their differences coming together and working together.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Unbreakable (2000)

M Night Shyamalan has made some good movies and some stinkers, and this one with its hypnotic tone, Bruce Willis' gravitas as the sole survivor of a plane crash, and a clever slow shift of the story into an unexpected direction is terrific.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Not Forgotten (忘れられぬ人々) (Wasurerarenu hitobito) (2000)

When a sinister cult encroaches, taking advantage of one of their group, a number of Japanese war veterans find the feelings they have long harboured of having been left behind and taken advantage of by modern Japanese society physically manifest and no longer possible to ignore!

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

You Can Count On Me (2000)

This is a heartwarming drama about a brother and sister reunited in adulthood after the deaths of their parents in childhood, starring next gen Marlon Brando and future Bruce Banner, Mark Ruffalo, and Matthew Broderick, a Culkin, and the always enchanting Laura Linney. 

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS