The Sex Of The Angels (El Sexo De Los Angeles) (2012)

The Sex Of the Angels (aka Angels of Sex) (or, my alternative title, How Difficult It Is To Set Up And Maintain A Threesome) is a very dry look at how Bruno, happily committed to his girlfriend Carla, encounters and starts having sex with Rai, a dancer, but despite the actors' obvious commitment to the film's positive polyamorous message and the attempt to keep things titillating with butt shots and sex scenes, this thruple never feels even slightly like it would go the distance, and the film is ultimately only as exciting as a well-intentioned public service announcement. 

★★☆☆☆

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Nightfall (大追捕) (2012)

*SPOILER WARNING*

Perhaps this Hong Kong mystery thriller belongs to a greater series, you'll wonder, as an entire team of crime-busters, headed by a shabby Columbo sort, investigate and solve the case of a musician's death without so much as a personality or a name or other distinuguishing feature among them ("Was there an earlier episode?" you'll wonder, and certainly the film has the production values and calibre of acting of a hastily churned out episode of a tv crime series) but the other problems with this mystery thriller is that the mystery is unpleasant, centred on a gross, overacted abusive father-daughter relationship, and obvious - anyone who has read Keigo Higashino will quickly recognise what the mysterious X is that holds all the dreary elements together.  

★★☆☆☆

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House At The End Of The Street (2012)

It is worth watching the whole of this unintentionally funny horror thriller for its final frame in which one of the characters breaks the fourth wall with a look to the camera that beautifully expresses the actors' and the viewers' and - well, everybody's - dismay at every silly thing that's happened up to that point, including incredibly poor continuity, in the story of a mother and daughter (Elizabeth Shue and Jennifer Lawrence, respectively - both fine) who move next door to a murder house.

★★☆☆☆

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Sinister (2012)

Desperate to repeat his past success, a true crime writer (Ethan Hawke) moves his wife and children into the home of a murdered family and starts documenting what he thinks is their unsolved serial killer case, going cuckoo in the process like Jack in The Shining but not only because he is exposed to the ghastly details of the crimes but also because just as much as viewers he must lament where this solid thriller set-up starts clumsily heading about halfway through.

★★☆☆☆

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Taken 2 (2012)

Liam Neeson is good in these Secret Service agent slash loving family guy roles, so its no wonder the Taken series got a sequel, but this is pretty rudimentary stuff with only headache-inducing, not thrilling, action sequences (so frenetically filmed you can only give up caring what is happening) and more than excusable amounts of idiocy as the heroic American family do things like let off hand grenades across Istanbul as a means of triangulating their location, and plotting thin and often discombobulating with one character left unconscious on a concrete floor behind enemy lines for a long stretch but who is in a later scene is flippantly described as "Okay" - and, anyway, it is surely not a good sign in these kinds of movies if you find yourself not caring much if the family survive or not.

★★☆☆☆

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This Means War (2012)

Two intelligence operatives start dating the same woman and while she, with her bestie's help, wrests with the question, "How big of a slut am I?" the spies covertly film her, shadow her, break into and bug her home and office and manipulate her, and the most telling thing about the whole deeply unlikeable affair is the men are just keeping checks on each other - the incursion upon Reese Witherspoon's character's life is incidental, something that doesn't seem to occur to anyone.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Hypnotist (Hypnotisören) (2012)

When the detective in charge of a brutal murder case enlists a hypnotist to help solve the crime, it looks like the solution to this icy Swedish mystery is going to hinge on matters of hypnotic suggestion, false memory, and patient-doctor control but no, in the end you realise that hypnotism has been injected into the story as a red herring, that it doesn't factor into the mystery in any meaningful way, and in fact just provides a means for one crime witness to be both comatose and communicative.

★★☆☆☆

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Passion (2012)

The original Love Crime was a peculiar slip of a corporate thriller seemingly made up of lethargic first takes and about as remarkable as an episode of Models Inc but it still managed to intrigue, which cannot be said of Brian de Palma's remake which tries to dress things up with some de Palma thriller clichés - sex and a spiral stair and masks and twins - but they add nothing, really, and the new revamped ending is meaningless.

★★☆☆☆

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Room 237 (2012)

Reviewers can be prone to overthought or unchecked enthusiasm about their favourite films but the fanatics narrating this frustrating documentary, who share but barely elucidate their thoughts on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining including that it contains embedded messages in details such as the patterns of the Overlook Hotel corridor carpets or secret images photoshopped into the clouds in the sky, are on a level that in other circumstances might be able to be diagnosed and treated with neuroleptics.

★★☆☆☆

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The Hunger Games (2012)

If in your mind Big Brother evictions and "rose ceremonies" lack a little bloodspill and need, say, a few more snapped necks and some more arrows to the contestants' eye sockets, you'll enjoy this movie based on the first of Suzanne Collins' books about young Katniss Everdeen selected to participate in a televised fight to the death, but personally I fail to see why this series is so popular given its charmless and unnecessary extrapolation of the tenets of reality tv to their most violent extreme.

★★☆☆☆

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Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

There's a positive message in this Disney animation about the young and ostracised  breaking free from the expectations of others and determining for themselves their role in life but this message is buried in such tiresome, convoluted, made-up arcade game mythology, only the most undemanding of young viewers will find any enjoyment sitting through the story of Wreck-It Ralph, an arcade game bad guy who seeks a hero's medal and so ventures outside of his own game and into other game worlds.

★☆☆☆☆

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In The House (2012)

A French literature teacher enters into the thrall of a talented writer when a student starts submitting for correction excerpts of a work-in-progress, but his story is sinister, the student's motivation in telling the story is mysterious, and pretty soon author, reader, characters and story are all vying for creative control in François Ozon's initially intriguing drama that quickly becomes laboured as characters start behaving in farcical, theatrical rather than sinister Hitchcockian ways.

★★☆☆☆

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Wish You Were Here (2012)

This well-acted 2015 movie about an Australian foursome's trouble-filled holiday to Cambodia and its aftermath is rather dishonestly marketed as a mystery and while there is an investigation (an inert and highly unlikely one) launched in Sydney, Australia after only three of the bogans return from the trip, viewers who persist through the protracted misery, I mean mystery, will be disappointed by a revelation at the end that is impossible to predict and that makes the movie's whole fall apart, unless some tenuous thing is being suggested that links marital and familial dischord, bad behaviour overseas, and trauma.

★★☆☆☆

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Alex Cross (2012)

The villain in this third movie based on the James Patterson series of Alex Cross books starts off as a skilled cage fighter, spends some time as a nasty home-invading torturer of women, is revealed to be a meticulous drawer of charcoal crime scene pictures, an accomplished portrait artist and a proficient in composing abstracts, morphs for the middle stretch of the film into a sniper assassin, then turns out to be a technical wizard who can manipulate the electrics of a city train, and on and on and on it goes, with Tyler Perry - not the first two movies' Morgan Freeman - playing the title character who uses clichėd psychology to solve the mess of a mystery and catch the utrerly implausible chameleon crim.

★☆☆☆☆

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Fresh Meat (2012)

This dopey NZ movie tries to combine violent Guy Ritchie action-comedy, the sort where gun-toting caricatures are introduced with a freeze-frame shot bearing their name and a quirky detail, and bloody horror involving a gang kidnapping a family, and the fact the family in this case is a cannibalistic Maori one is a detail so incidentally introduced it makes little difference at all to the dismaying, distasteful events of the film including an attempted gunpoint sexual assault of a high schooler supposedly funny because the attacker wears girly underwear.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Woman In Black (2012)

There's a terrific legend at the heart of Susan Hill's ghost story - one that ought to sustain a series of The Conjuring-style sequels and spinoffs - yet by adopting the very look and feel of The Conjuring brand of horror, director James Watkins drains the material of distinction, delivering a pale comparison to the low-budget but memorable 1980s TV miniseries, so this movie is inadvertently a case-study in how SFX and excess can diminish rather than enhance horror.

★★★☆☆

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The Iceman (2012)

This account of the career of real-life crime figure Richard Kuklinski, a hitman-for-hire active in the 70s, is more concerned with the gory techniques he used for his murder-for-profit than with his psychology, and so there's little of interest beyond that very briefly generated by David Schwimmer's turn as the Iceman's killer colleague.

★★☆☆☆

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Red Lights (2012)

Occam's Razor is the philosophical principle which states the simplest explanation is often correct, but the most banal and laughable explanations can also be correct as demonstrated in this precursor to Now You See Me that swaps the Four Horsemen's magic tricks for the paranormal feats of Robert De Niro's spoon-bending Simon Silver, a Uri Geller type who commands large sums of money for tickets to his arena spectaculars and Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy's duo of Occam's Razor-spouting CSI: Supernatural investigators are the ones getting super worked up about his feats.

★☆☆☆☆

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Rust and Bone (De Rouille et d'os) (2012)

A woman who loses her lower legs in an accident and a down-and-out man not doing a very good job of raising his son end up coming together and forming a shaky, mutually beneficial alliance but their paths to more stable lives are morally and physically challenging and the hardships they face almost too much to bear - almost.

★★★★☆

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Kon-Tiki (2012)

Thor Heyerdahl made an Academy Award-winning documentary about his audacious adventure in 1947 travelling from South America to Polynesia on his balsa raft, Kon-Tiki, but this is a dramatised version, great viewing, which suggests anthropological research was just one of Heyerdahl's motivations, that from childhood he enjoyed the attention that brazen stunts brought him.

★★★★☆

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