Heist (2001)

There's a gunfight near the end that has the actors barely bothering to point their guns in the right direction, a sign that the actors' care factor, like the audience's, has dwindled to nothing over the course of David Mamet's increasingly unlikely crime caper, which is a shame given the movie's arresting start that introduces, mid-caper, our gang of grifters headed by Gene Hackman's Joe Moore, the mastermind who, yes, needs to do one more job but this time accompanied by the inexperienced nephew (Sam Rockwell) of his fence (Danny DeVito).

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Pledge (2001)

The trouble with director Sean Penn's mostly-gripping The Pledge, about a cop who promises a grieving mother to find the killer of her child, is not Jack Nicholson's gnarlier-than-usual detective (compare him with the clean-cut Foyle-like turns of It Happened In Broad Daylight's Heinz Rührmann and Cold Light of Day's Richard E Grant) nor the story's movement from the Swiss Alps to Nevada, but Penn's muddling Dürrenmatt's screenplay - a jaunty mystery with a detective-novel ending - with the author's later book, "The Pledge - Requiem for the Detective Novel, which refashions that screenplay's plot into a much darker existential drama; Penn borrows scenes from the earlier 1958 adaptation and incorporates aspects of the screenplay (such as a sequence that demystifies the serial killer), and so detracts from the book's grim philosophy.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Mostly Martha (Bella Martha) (2001)

Even though No Reservations with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart is basically a scene-by-scene remake, this original from Germany is a far superior film - funny, affecting, and involving, not odd, charmless and limp - but like the Catherine Zeta-Jones film, this too irks with those unnecessary shrink appointments, tacked on at the start and finish and thrown in occasionally here and there, suggesting that despite her being the top chef in Germany who runs her own kitchen and despite her taking in her deceased sister's daughter and caring for her without hesitation, and despite her choosing to take time-out in the walk-in refrigerator rather than lose her steam at at her team, Martha apparently feels herself in need of a mental health professional - or perhaps the writer feels she is - because...why?...she is orderly, in control, and lives life without a man?

★★★★☆

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The Glass House (2001)

A really excellent thriller about a newly orphaned heir to a fortune, possibly the target of a foster parents' murder plot, is Mary Stewart's Nine Coaches Waiting, a book I ripped through on the beach last summer, but this thriller, with its moribund first thirty minutes and a garbled plot about villainous foster parents who get their comeuppance even before they've realised their villainy and coordinated their dastardly plot, stars Diane Lane and Stellan Skarsgård as the impossibly beset foster parents and a stony Leelee Sobieski as the never-really-imperilled foster teenager.

★☆☆☆☆

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Hangman (2001)

A series of word-game themed murders and serial killer movie clichés are being committed by someone called Hangman but the dogged work of detective Nick Roos, who links the murders to a scandal-prone psychiatrist, will help answer important questions like is the murderer exactly who you think it is and whatever happened to Lou Diamond Phillips?

★☆☆☆☆

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Glitter (2001)

A singer - who performs Mariah Carey songs like Mariah Carey, and is in fact played by her, but called Billy - is steered to stardom by the men who control the music industry, and when she finally achieves her dream of singing to a packed Madison Square Garden, she feels bad for not having been more grateful to the less talented agent in her life, who over the course of the movie grows steadily more jealous of her success and starts treating her badly - the end.

★☆☆☆☆

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Jurassic Park III (2001)

This is the not so good one with Téa Leoni and William H Macy playing the annoying parents of a boy we little care about who has been lost alone on the Site B island of Jurassic Park - the one good thing the annoying couple do in order to get help locating their boy is trick Dr Alan Grant to return to the park (and so back into the series after an absence from number two).

★★★☆☆

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Hannibal (2001)

Oh dear, the subtle, chilling and in many ways groundbreaking Silence of the Lambs is followed up by this blatant, bloated, over-the-top gothic melodrama, a sequel which replaces Jodie Foster's intense, determined but vulnerable Clarice with Julianne Moore's personality-free version who starts off being held responsible, ridiculously, for a 70s blaxploitation movie's stakeout-gone-wrong and then bungles her way through a dull serial killer investigation involving so much exaggerated horror without any let up or normalcy that in the end it feels like a desperate, unclassy, um, assault upon the brain.

★☆☆☆☆

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Scary Movie 2 (2001)

The especially sober moments in this laugh-free horror movie spoof are any of the scenes featuring Chris Evans as the repulsive-looking manservant of a haunted house, and the scenes in which the homosexuality of Shawn Wayans' character is repeatedly offered up sans comedic effort because apparently this is a hilarious thing in itself.

☆☆☆☆☆ (No stars)

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Moulin Rouge (2001)

After Strictly Ballroom and Romeo and Juliet, Baz Luhrmann's next big breakout success was this showy "jukebox musical", a carry-on set in Paris featuring a forlorn playwright, a pompous Duke financing his play, and the leading lady they both love, and for all its showiness, boisterousness, fandango, and hot air, it is about nothing much at all and suffers dreadfully from the casting of a partucularly low-aspect Nicole Kidman as the focus of so much passion.

★★☆☆☆

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Mulholland Drive (2001)

For some like me, the fun is trying to figure out what exactly David Lynch means with his mindboggling puzzle of a movie about identity, reality, and the nature of fame in Hollywood, while for others I understand it is a hard-to-watch yawnfest.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

A.I. (2001)

A.I. is like two movies in one: the first half is like a Stanley Kubrick movie and is rich and thoughtful, cinematic, and cool in tone, about loss and maternal love, and the second half is like a Spielberg movie and is a sloppy childish mess with a disney-feel and with so many ideas in it none of them get any adequate consideration.

★★☆☆☆

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Vanilla Sky (2001)

Awful, painfully long-winded "Total Recall" minus the fun and action, preoccupied instead with the psychological anguish of its hero who doesn't know minute to minute what is real, whether he killed one of his girlfriends, or if he has just been "Rekall-ed" by a sinister company called Life Extension.

★☆☆☆☆

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Donnie Darko (2001)

Mesmerising high school drama about how completely messed up a kid can become trying to deal with the inauthentic characters and lives and world around him.

★★★★★

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