Fool's Gold (2008)

This much-maligned sun-drenched adventure from Warner Bros. has goofball divorcees, played by bronzed beach babes Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, reuniting in a race to claim a sunken treasure in the Caribbean, and it is so harmless a romantic romp, like an especially cartoony Romancing the Stone, it is hard to see why so many people regard it with such disdain, even if Donald Sutherland's appearance as a rich yacht owner feels unnecessary and his character's relationship with his daughter is irritating, even if McConaughey and Hudson are not the most likeable leads, and even if you are never going to want to watch it again, ever.

★★★☆☆

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My Dear Enemy (Meotjin Haru) (멋진 하루) (2008)

This meandering Korean drama develops gradually but there is no story to speak of except to say the lead female is an emotionally stunted ice golem harbouring resentment towards her male companion, a happy-go-lucky dolt, after their relationship ended without him paying back a debt; the movie follows them around after their reunion gives her the opportunity to get her money back, but first he has to scrounge around, gathering it bit by bit from various acquaintances on their, well, not exactly enthralling but wry, drily comic travels.

★★★☆☆

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The Candidate (Kandidaten) (2008)

When a gun defense lawyer applies for a job at his late father's law firm, it is probably just so he can get closer to the truth of his father's suspicious death in a car crash, but given there's only one person in the entire movie who can possibly be the culprit responsible, the gun defense lawyer need not have gone to the trouble of applying for the job and he might have saved himself and all of us from becoming embroiled in the stupid, definitely not thrilling plot that ensues involving the unsympathetic dolt's being framed for murder.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)

If an historically inaccurate detail like Eric Bana's black hair bothers you - King Henry VIII famously sported blonde-red locks - then this lavish book-adaptation, a period drama, is going to sorely test you, because although it is loosely based on the historical facts surrounding Anne Boleyn's marriage to Henry VIII, the story is injected with large amounts of historical supposition dismissed by historians as author Philippa Gregory's pure fantasy; nevertheless, it is thought-provoking and very entertaining, offering a vivid sense of Tudor court life (Melrose Place in lavish costumes) and cleverly weaving in the ideas that Anne Boleyn orchestrated Henry's usurpation of papal authority and that charges of incest against her were more than just wilful accusations of a king once again looking for a way out of a marriage.

★★★★☆

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Disaster Movie (2008)

Another in the string of Friedberg/Seltzer comedies of the 'Adjective Movie' franchise (Epic, Disaster, Scary, Date, etc), this one at least goes one postmodern step further than other episodes and uses its puerile jokes, talentless cast, not-quite-right impersonations that require the viewer to be told who the impersonations are of (says one character of a woman in a blonde wig and short shorts, 'Everyone, look! It's Jessica Simpson!'), inexplicable spoof (Juno? Disaster?) and male characters leering at the female form of various "bitches", to raise awareness of the disaster state of the Western world.

☆☆☆☆☆

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The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008)

It is hard to know where the homage to pulpy science fiction of the paranoid cold war era ends and where this starts simply being an over- or badly acted and largely logic-free Hollywood bastardisation of a 1951 sci-fi classic, but somehow this is enjoyable, albeit in an immediately forgettable way, perhaps because Keanu Reeves dons his suit and is supposed to be wooden as he plays a visitor from outerspace whose appearance on Earth heralds the arrival of enormous robot machines and nano-sized (robot?) insects that seem to be hellbent on taking over or destroying the planet.

★★☆☆☆

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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

Harrison Ford's performance is laboured and it is like no-one dares let him utter more than three consecutive words for fear he'll betray his inability to reprise his famous role, but with Cate Blanchett hamming it up as a Soviet agent villain and with a globe-trotting plot involving the usual maps and clues and quicksand and temples, this fourth Indy movie is enjoyable nostalgia albeit a cheesy, slow-witted adventure.

★★★☆☆

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Nim's Island (2008)

Perhaps if you've read Wendy Orr's children's book this kids movie about an island-dwelling girl, her father missing at sea, and a San Franciscan author of adventure novels who overcomes neuroses to come to the girl's rescue, doesn't seem so inane, but if you haven't, the movie is a not very interesting jumble of disparate details including a volcano, Doctor Doolittle animals that all but talk, Australian tourists, fantasy muses, and caricatures, not characters, with Jodie Foster's Alexandra Rover, for one, stumbling about in a mackintosh hat like Paddington Bear.

★☆☆☆☆

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Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)

Jason Segel is a likeable presence on film and his willingness to appear ridiculous - for example, here appearing in regular and unflattering full-frontal nude scenes - helps ground this ensemble comedy about a breakup complicated by celebrity; it's a film that easily could have been a puerile mess but thanks enormously to Segel's shamelessness it is actually very funny.

★★★☆☆

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Truck (트럭) (Teu-reok) (2008)

South Korean movies, after the success of Squid Games and Parasite, are enjoying popularity, all of them, so I watched Truck, a thriller with the promising premise of a deliveryman coerced by mobsters into a body disposal job - he has a sick daughter, needs the money, and doesn't have much choice in the matter - but when his dire situation is compounded by a serial killer hitchhiker, multiple car accidents, and one body in the back of his truck that turns out to be not a body but a live woman, it becomes harder and harder to remain patient with the impossibly unfortunate roadtrip.

★★☆☆☆

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Connected (保持通话) (2008)

This is almost a scene-by-scene Chinese remake of Cellular, the unexpected 2004 Hollywood hit about an everyman literally called upon to be a hero when a captive woman manages to contact him with a random call; this version is suspenseful fun with a likeable hero but stretches things well past the point of no return when the bad guys start nonsensically refraining from simply killing everyone who knows their secret.

★★★☆☆

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Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Vicky and Cristina, American friends on holiday in Spain, have a pleasant time exploring art galleries and historical sites but when they encounter handsome Spanish painter Juan Antonio and his fiery ex-lover played hilariously by Penelope Cruz, they also end up exploring their notions of love and sex and monogamy, in Woody Allen's riotous comedy drama that features not so much a love triangle as a love square or pentagon!

★★★★☆ 

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Disgrace (2008)

Hard to succinctly describe, this engrossing drama based on a J M Coetzee book has a disgraced university professor (John Malkovich) hiding away on his daughter's farm in South Africa where a violent attack starts him rethinking such things as the male entitlement he wilfully, intellectually defends.

★★★★☆

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The Happening (2008)

The Happening is the point most people think M Night Shyamalan's career derailed, but I love its kookiness and deliberate pace, controversially think Mark Wahlberg is good in it, find the idea of airborne threats from plants not so ridiculous, and see in the movie many of the combined elements of comedy and horror I loved so much in Signs.

★★★☆☆

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Departures (おくりびと) (2008)

A man unexpectedly finds himself working as a kind of funeral preparer and despite the negative reactions he experiences from family, friends and the mourners he serves, he comes to appreciate the job's true value, in a film that could easily have been an animated Miyazaki Hiyao film, the first movie I've wanted to hug - one that is simple, funny, and heartfelt.

★★★★☆

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The Strangers (2008)

The tormentors of a couple staying in a remote summer house wear odd masks and have a seemingly supernatural ability to come and go, appear and disappear, in this horror exercise with zero plot, prefaced by an odd Law and Order-style voiceover suggesting, weirdly and not very convincingly, that it is based on a true story when in fact it is just a American teen horror ripoff of Funny Games.

★★☆☆☆

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The Reader (2008)

*SPOILER ALERT*

Don't believe the poster: this is a very dreary drama, not a provocative thriller, that asks audiences to sympathise with a paedophile serving life in prison for war crimes she considers less abhorrent than illiteracy.

★★☆☆☆

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Wanted (2008)

Absurd and utterly fun-free genre-mashing exercise about a Hogwarts-style fraternity of Neos and La Femme Nikitas bad at their jobs, one with a very dull Terminator/Darth Vader family history.

★☆☆☆☆

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Cold Prey 2 (Fritt Vilt II) (2008)

Picking up immediately where the original ends, this sequel stretches to breaking point not just the sanity of poor traumatised heroine Jannicke but also the patience of any recent viewer of number one, but it is a gripping slasher delivered with an icy Norwegian sophistication that rises it above its Hollywood equivalents (even if it does descend to their level in the end).

★★☆☆☆

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Harold and Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008)

Number one was more Chevy Chase/National Lampoons crossed with stoner comedy whereas this second Harold and Kumar movie is more Kevin Smith/gross out/political crossed with stoner comedy and fans will concede the humour is slightly tired here and that H&KEFGB tries too hard to elaborate unnecessarily on the good ideas (like Neil Patrick Harris) from H&KGTW.

★★☆☆☆

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