A Fantastic Woman (Una Mujer Fantastica) (2017)

This is a marvellous character study, not just of the fantastic woman at the movie's heart, who resiliently navigates first the death of her partner, then the suspicion she encounters from the man's family, friends and the police, but also of the world around her, which struggles with challenges to its polarised gender constructs, with every scene in this smart, snappy movie crammed with unmistakable signs - uncertain air kisses, awkward handshakes, stammered titles - that betray the fact that the world is organised, now perhaps more than ever before, to exclude, not include.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Child In Time (2017)

Ian McEwan's book, when I read it, was a gnarly knot of plots held together not by sense nor a desire to entertain a reader but seemingly by a want to be clever about the theme of childhood and Time, and certainly some of the threads of his book - a child lost in a moment, a successful first time writer whose bestseller is mistaken for a children's book, a friend who is reverting to childhood, and a government enacting policy regarding child literacy - are interesting, most included here, but even in this adaptation, the tone is heavy, droll, haughty, and like the book, the movie is smug, joyless and left me wondering whether the point is simply recognising the author's smarts.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Ghost In The Shell (2017)

Masamune Shirow's manga, previously brought to the big screen in 1997 as the celebrated (and confusing) anime feature, is adapted here as a cartoony live action scifi but despite whiz-bang visual effects, not much interest is generated in the story of Major Kusanagi (a wooden, stiff Scarlet Johansson), the cyborg with a human mind (or "ghost" as we are repeatedly told) tasked with investigating the assassinations of several Hank company executives.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

What Happened To Monday (2017)

In an overpopulated world of food shortages and unrest, a one-child policy is strictly enforced meaning illegal septuplets, all played The Klumps-style by Noomi Rapace, grow up confined to an apartment with each able to venture outside only on their one allocated day per week and only provided they all pretend to be the same person, which is the starting point of this patently absurd scifi action that sees the septuplets' lives (blessed lives free from health emergencies, apartment fires, unwanted visitors and noise complaints from neighbours) suddenly thrown into disarray when "Monday" goes missing and the remaining six, despite their cloistered upbringings, find themselves suddenly able to take on evil agents repeatedly breaking down their apartment door.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Wall (2017)

A small crumbling wall is the only thing protecting an American soldier from an Iraqi super sniper in this thriller with a unique premise, but the psychological tension is lessened by two things: the not very likely nor insightful exchanges that take place via earpiece between the two adversaries, and the litany of rookie mistakes made by the American soldier which by movie's end proves such a comprehensive list it can not simply be dismissed as the result of the soldier's youth, his being wounded, his fear, nor his dehydration from being stuck in the searing desert heat.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

A Ghost Story (2017)

All we see of their relationship is that he shares a pair of headphones with her once and, in bed, adopts a sleeping position that suggests love - not facing away from each other on opposite sides of the bed - so it hardly seems warranted that when he dies in a car crash he returns as a bedsheeted ghost and experiences, in a dreamy, dialogue-free extended indie videoclip, a mawkish Tree of Life history of the land upon which his and his partner's house stands; he watches tenants and buildings come and go over time until it starts to seem like we are watching his love affair with real estate, not with the woman played by Rooney Mara, whose relationship with Casey Affleck's ghost ends up feeling like a mere blip.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Number One (Numèro Uno) (aka Woman Up) (2017)

In what is a really strong engrossing start to the film, a group of feminists approach Emmanuelle Blachey, a business executive, with a plan to manouevre her into the top role at a government water company, but is the corporate skullduggery Blachey has to contend with at the hands of rivals for the position better or worse than the treatment she receives from her current boss and colleagues who objectify and devalue her and in one weird moment that almost derails the whole movie, let her sing to them over dinner on an oil rig? 

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

2:22 (2017)

Most of the energy put into this Australian film, a sci-fi romantic thriller about a man experiencing odd things at 2:22pm each day, is spent trying to make Melbourne and Sydney look like New York City (or at least trying to make them look not unlike New York City, with the camera sticking close to the actors and street scenes cutting short just before a tram rumbles past), and there's not much energy to be found anywhere else because the tone is supposed to be ethereal, mystical, and mesmeric, and the two leads - playing the world's worst air traffic controller, and a victim of the near-aviation incident he causes - are brought together by Fate with their destinies written in the stars, so they are essentially automatons going through the motions whether they understand why they keep ending up at Grand Central Station or not.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Unforgettable (2017)

Unforgettable is precisely what this psycho thriller is not with Katherine Heigl playing an uptight 'Bree Van de Kamp' type ex-wife determined to ruin her ex-husband's new partner's life by browsing through her stolen mobile phone, wearing the dresses she likes, catfishing her former abusive partner, accusing her of violence, and other forgettable midday movie stuff like that.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Amityville The Awakening (2017)

A new family, one headed by a lethargic Jennifer Jason Leigh as mom, moves into the Amityville Horror house and over the course of a perfunctory 87-minutes, the son, brain-dead, bedridden, unresponsive and hooked up to machines in the front room, starts to show signs of improved condition, leading his twin sister Belle to suspect dark forces are at play and luckily her new school friends have seen and read all the books and movies in the series and so can catch her up on the based-on-a-true-family-massacre paranormal story. 

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Molly's Game (2017)

This film adaptation of Molly's Game, author Molly Bloom's autobiographical account of her rise to fame as a high-stakes poker-game madam, is Aaron Sorkin's directorial debut and is a fast-paced, funny and interesting character study featuring Jessica Chastain in the title role, Idris Elba as her reluctant lawyer, and a whole lot of fast prattle just like in that other Jessica Chastain movie, Ms Sloane.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Sense of an Ending (2017)

This movie adaptation of Julian Barnes' Man Booker prize-winning The Sense Of An Ending is as enjoyable a watch as the book is a read but with both, after you've shrugged at the end, you're left with the distinct Sense that the story was kept deliberately ambiguous because to have stated things outright would have been to reveal it to be a mere sordid sex drama...and anyway, the source of the ambiguity, ostensibly the heart of the story - that self-interested men are unreliable narrators - really only extends to main character Tony Webster's postcard- and/or letter-writing because after that, the story shifts to poor scapegoat Adrian and his life story far too closely mirroring too many others' (that of an unfortunate classmate, for one, and Tony Webster's own life, similar in far too many respects).

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Maigret's Night At The Crossroads (2017)

Perhaps Rowan Atkinson was trying here to present an especially sad Maigret given the story opens upon the funeral of a police colleague, but he is so flat, so deadpan, so morose - even more so than usual - that this episode of the usually thrilling 2016 and 2017 Maigret series is the rather flat and ponderous one of the four - at some points you wonder if the actors are speaking as slowly as they are just to try to stretch the story to movie-length and this lethargic pacing is at odds with the outlandish characters, one of them scarred and hissing like a Bond villain and another a stammering cartoon who do not fit well against the backdrop of gritty Paris and its mid-50s period detail.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Daddy's Home 2 (2017)

The 2017 Bad Moms sequel also perpetuated its comedy by introducing an older generation and in doing so, took the focus off what audiences liked in number one - the moms - but Daddy's Home manages to retain the feel by making the granddads replicas of the dads - it's the same joke being played out again in a movie that is most funny when Will Ferrell is doing his Chevy Chase National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation impersonation.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Suburbicon (2017)

The interesting part in George Clooney's sixth directorial effort, a black comedy based on a Coen Brothers' screenplay, is the desegregation happening in Suburbicon, a fictional suburb of the sort that popped up and spread, uniform and white, across the US in the 50s, but the moving in of the African-American Mayers family at the end of the decade and the ugly reaction of the locals (a situation apparently inspired by the experiences of a real-life 'Myers' family in Levittown, Pennsylvania) is just a broad context of questionable relevance to the Fargo nonsense of the plot - suburbanites get in over their heads in grubby crime - which reduces the more interesting context to just a hubbub that only serves to disguise a gunshot at one point late in the - yawn - story.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Downsizing (2017)

I was reminded of - of all things -Coneheads while watching this 2017 scifi comedy that, like Coneheads, is pretty much over as soon as you first glimpse the sight-gag, in this case not pointy crowns but something just as interesting: a miniature world of environmentalists who have chosen to literally shrink their environmental footprints - but both the big, ordinary world and this downsized world look exactly alike once you are in amongst them, so with nothing more to do with its skit, the movie shifts after its elaborate, drily funny first third of world-building into a meandering Joe Versus The Volcano adventure, interesting but all of it far from earth-shattering. 

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

I Am Elizabeth Smart (2017)

Competently acted with Skeet Ulrich in the role of Brian David Mitchell (the man who kidnapped 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 and who over nine months subjected her to rape and torture in the Utah wilderness), this made-for-tv movie is essentially a survivor impact statement with Smart herself appearing between scenes to narrate her oft-revisited real life crime story but this time from her now adult perspective as a mother, wife and activist against predatory crimes. 

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Mary Shelley (2017)

Haifaa al-Mansour's story of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein is like two hours of Laugh In's Joke Wall - a highlight reel from the Shelleys' lives punctuated by door - with Clara, Mary's sister, most often the one to throw open the door to come in and Mary's husband, Percy, most often the one to grab his coat and hat and head out, slamming the door behind him, and when the door is next thrown open, there's no telling which of the extreme ends of the human emotional spectrum these characters will be on - will they have lurched forward in time to the next most dramatic episode of the Shelleys' lives or will they still be responding to the last? - making the movie feel like a 19th Century Clueless - petulant, door, immature, door, self-pitying, door, sassy, door, morose, door - but right at the end, in reply to a publisher's question about her age, Elle Fanning's Mary Shelley, at last an author, answers, "Eighteen," and suddenly the glib nature of it all, the sore lack of monstrous creation, makes some small sense.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Villainess (악녀) (Ak Nyeo) (2017)

The opening scene of Byung gil Jung's action movie, about a female assassin hellbent on revenge, is an extended first-person ultra-violent sword massacre of hundreds of suited thugs - a startling and original sequence that has you sitting up, awake, and paying attention (through your fingers) - but no sooner does this sequence end than the movie slips into very familiar territory, not just reminiscent of Kill Bill Vol.1 and La Femme Nikita but using near-exact replica scenes - from the child-under-the-bed moment to the honeymoon-suite bathroom assassination, so that what started so startlingly and originally ends up so generic and well-trodden it almost feels like a fanboy tribute.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Mercy (2017)

In 1968, Douglas Crowhurst entered a competition to solo-race around the world by boat and what happened aboard the Teignmouth Electron, a trimaran of his own design, while on land energy was high for his Boy's-Own Adventure, makes for gripping viewing with a terrific performance from Colin Firth as Crowhurst and a career-best performance from Rachel Weisz as his poor wife - but don't be fooled by that hopeful, heroic stare on the poster: it's grim.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS