Enigma (2018)

When a television show approaches the mother of a murdered woman proposing a 90-minute true-crime special that might help reveal the truth of the daughter's death, the mother is torn because first her husband, sisters, and large number of daughters must address some matters that until now have been dealt with as deeply private, and although this is an important and very well-acted film, there is something infuriating about watching all the extended family members and friends whispering and gossiping for an hour over something that, outside of conservative Chile at least, shouldn't stand in the way of a murder investigation.

★★☆☆☆

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Sobibor (Собибор) (2018)

When James Cameron injects high spectacle, grand romance, and completely made-up characters like Billy Zane's suave, tuxedoed, gun-toting villain Caledon Hockley into a painstakingly recreated Titanic, viewers can shrug off expectations of historical accuracy and give themselves up to blockbuster spectacle - never mind the roughly 1500 real people who died in 1912 - but the same can't be said of Sobibor, Russia's odd entry for Best Foreign Language film at the 2019 Academy Awards, a high-gloss but button-pushing movie in which writer, director, and star Konstantin Khabensky presents the lead up to the uprising of the prisoners in the Jewish extermination camp, Sobibor - with a similar appetite for spectacle over accuracy, so atrocities play out in unflinching full where restraint might be more respectful, and Christopher Lambert's Karl Frenzel tips over into caricature - a mumbling, starey Dirk Dastardly whose abhorrent acts are here tied to a camp love triangle.

★★☆☆☆

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El Angel (2018)

"Serial killer" seems the wrong word for the murderous criminal portrayed here - is it possible to distinguish between serial killers and murderous criminals? - but extra confusingly, this murderous criminal is Rob Puch, a real-life babyfaced killer from Argentina who in the 60s, working as a brazen career thief, killed eleven people, but look him up later - because this striking and well-acted movie will garner your interest in this peculiar character - and discover someone quite different to this eccentric, possibly sociopathic babyface here - staring out from newsppaper photos and Wikipedia pages is a sneering rapist and abuser (did the movie neglect to metnion that?) and it becomes hard to reconcile fact with this, what, fiction?

★★★★☆

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The House That Jack Built (2018)

Grisly murder is not the spectacle it used to be and no matter how hard tryhard provocateur Lars von Trier tries to match, say, Twitter/X in its ability to parcel out sudden, unexpected visual depravity, injecting increasingly shocking crime into his rehash of Nymph()mania (that's what this simply is, a third chapter, like the director is stuck on an idea, with Charlotte Gainsborough's Joe replaced by Matt Dillon's Jack, and her sex swapped with his serial murder; the languorous voiceover remains), the net effect of this heavy-handed and really quite silly movie is inanity.

★★☆☆☆

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Ramen Teh (情牽拉麵茶) (aka 'Ramen Shop') (2018)

A Japanese kid, the son of a ramen shop owner, heads to Singapore to investigate his mother's estrangement from her Singaporean-Chinese mother (his grandmother) and in the process, embarks on a culinary tour that equips him with the skills to bridge not just culinary but also familial divides and historically entrenched cultural rifts.

★★★☆☆

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Border (Gräns) (2018)

There are lots of borders-between-things straddled by this Swedish movie - challenges to binary perspectives - and one of them is the line between it being completely ridiculous and not, and somehow the story of Tina, a border security guard who excels at her job because she can smell vice, always steers itself back from that brink; the movie, in which misfit Tina at last meets a kindred spirit and learns more about her true nature, is fascinating, challenging, emotional, beautiful, staggeringly original, and right the way through teeters on being - but never ends up being - utterly ridiculous.

★★★★☆

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The Meg (2018)

A team of marine researchers led by a wetsuit-clad, ripped Martin Brody-sort of disbelieved boy-who-cried-shark (Jason Statham) takes on a megladon, a prehistoric shark of incredible proportions dwelling unseen in the deepest parts of the ocean until thermal currents bring it to the surface; the occasional sight of the megladon leaping out of the water or torpedoing out of the ocean's darkness towards the camera makes it worth wading through the rest of this overlong creature-features's by-the-numbers mindlessness.

★★★☆☆

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Holmes and Watson (2018)

The ideas behind some of the sketches - because that's what this is, an overlong compilation of Saturday Night Live-style sketch-comedy routines featuring the recurring characters of Will Ferrell's Holmes and John C Reilly's Watson - often make you scoff with incredulity at their very outset - at the very notion - but then the sketch plays out a second longer (and for a great deal more time than that, usually) and your momentary scoff at the idea is quickly replaced with a feeling of dismay and weariness at these characters who in fact have nothing to do with Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson at all - and you hope Ferrell and Reilly enjoyed hanging out at least.

★☆☆☆☆

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Look At Me (Regarde-moi) (2018)

If you find it hard to watch the yelling and screaming, you have to spare a thought for actual parents of profoundly autistic children who live a life like that of Tunisian immigrant Lotfi and live it truly, without Lotfi's unlikely nightclub nights-out and long phone calls and shopping trips that so often in this drama leave you wondering where Lotfi's severly autistic son Youssef ends up, but get past the unlikelihood of such scenes and this is a beautifully acted, touching drama, showing a guilt-ridden absent father finally stepping up and taking responsibility and starting to make (the right? the wrong?) parenting decisions.

★★★★☆

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The Equalizer 2 (2018)

McCall is back dishing out vigilante justice in not one but five concurrent missions that so overfill this sequel there's no room for any plot details - the reason people are being killed in the main storyline is because their names are on a list (and that is literally all there is to learn about the matter), and similarly there's no time for elaboration in the "Not Without My Daughter" opening scenes nor any detail offered in the overly-ambitious Woman In Gold side story that keeps interrupting the action; there's nothing much to know in the Dangerous Minds character-building side story involving McCall keeping a young man from falling in with gangbangers, and no detail (nor sense) in the Twister denouement in which a storm event conveniently evacuates McCall's hometown just in time for a bad-guy showdown, and finally, don't expect any elaboration of any kind in yet another episode, a kind of Promising Young Woman sequence involving gang rapists.

★★★☆☆

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Book Club (2018)

Older females, book club members reading the Fifty Shades soft porn chick-lit series, are inspired by Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele's exploits to take on the challenges of modern romance, embarking upon online dating, initiating sex again with long-since-celibate partners, rekindling past romances and daring to love again after grief, and it is pretty funny in a very minor way - my 79-year-old mum particularly found it a fun watch.

★★☆☆☆

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Destroyer (2018)

If Johnny Utah grew old, had a kid, got grey hair and wrinkles and in older, less attractive age still hadn't managed to bring Bodhi to justice, you'd end up with Destroyer, a movie which flicks back and forwards between Nicole Kidman's Erin Bell's past (Point Break days of dangerous deep undercover cop work in LA - she's infiltrating a bank robbing gang) and her present (a grim life as a limping sad sack who still hasn't brought to justice the starey charimatic Lord Byron/Bodhi who exerts an influence over others so great, deep undercover police work is necessary (we learn absolutely nothing else about him) - these flashes backwards and forward are timed to distract audiences from implausibilities, improbabilities, gaping holes and nonsense in the plot, meaning this bleak Point Break manages to be a fairly engaging crime thriller.

★★★☆☆

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Rojo (2018)

The comings and goings of people from a suburban house and an altercation in a restaurant between two men, one the calm respectable lawyer and community leader Claudio and the other an agitated stranger who briefly upsets the restaurant's convivial atmosphere, are the not quite commonplace, slightly skew-whiff scenes that launch director Benjamin Naishtat's exceptional thriller; how the scenes are connected is unclear and the disparate moments continue (a fleeting tv commercial in which a model kills rather than shares his drink, a tv detective and former cop with an easy case on his hands, and a teenager to whom the immorality of simply disappearing a rival never occurs) but the movie gradually, unexpectedly ties these threads together while in the background the military coup that commenced Argentina's Dirty War starts being felt in the day-to-day of the characters.

 

★★★★★

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Three Identical Strangers (2018)

The rise to fame of celebrity triplets, Eddie Gallard, David Kellman and Robert Shafran, a trio who in the 80s appeared on the Phil Donahue show, did cameos in a Madonna movie and opened a SOHO restaurant, is a remarkable story in and of itself, worthy of a documentary, but this documentary weaves a sinister story behind the story of their trajectory to fame: a fascinating but not very substantial conspiracy theory centred around a hearsay account of a champagne toast and a box of research papers that remains unsighted and uncited.

★★★☆☆

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Blockers (2018)

Parents want to prevent their daughters from having sex on their prom night and so spend a movielength running like berserk animals from party house to party house, yelling and ending up butt-chugging beer and stuff, and then, to end this tiresome, unfunny goose chase, the parents sit down on the sides of their daughter's prom night hotel room beds and have sudden heart-to-hearts about love and trust and hope, which really are unconvincing conversations after so much wantonness sadly labelled feminist.

★☆☆☆☆

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Under the Cover of Cloud (2018)

Of very limited appeal, probably even to Tasmanians and cricket fans, this deeply personal film, like a motion picture family album, is about a writer, Ted Wilson (the writer-director-lead actor and financer, playing himself) who returns to Tasmania after he loses his job and engages in not-very-interesting conversations with his family while he embarks upon the task of writing a cricket book.

★★★☆☆

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I Am Jonas (Jonas) (2018)

This uneven coming-of-age drama (like a Sauvage companion piece that looks back at its character's past) shows the experiences that have shaped the adult Jonas (Leo), a not-very-happily employed twentysomething who gets into fights, gets into trouble with police and falls out with his parents, and the movie does a great job demonstrating how for some adults like Jonas, youth was not the magic land of self-discovery it should have been and in fact some, like Jonas, might be lucky if they can get even one make-up hour to flirt with the thrilling, dangerous unknowns of childhood..

★★★★☆

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Sauvage (2018)

Félix Maritaud transfixes as a 22-year-old who lives his life in service to others and although he is just doing what comes naturally and wouldn't himself change anything about his life — why would he? — all you want is for the poor kid to find a moment to stop dealing in the desires of others, retreat to a quiet sunny spot, and get some long overdue me-time.

★★★★★

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Drunk Parents (2018)

30 Rock alumni Alec Baldwin and Salma Hayek playing parents desperate to keep the fact they are broke from their college-aged daughter sounds hilarious, but tasteless sequences about paedophilia and molestation and continuity problems so bad you have to assume the movie has been released unfinished mean that the potential of Drunk Parents is, um, wasted.

★☆☆☆☆

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Shazam! (2018)

A wizard grants a kid a confusing mix of superpowers, and while the kid and the audience are still trying to figure out how all these powers work, this DC superhero movie, a cross between Spider-man and Deadpool, ends, finishing with an extended sequence like a Disney/Power Rangers-esque "effects spectacular" that celebrates family and panders to very young viewers but leaves the hero poorly defined and a bit irrelevant. 

★★☆☆☆

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