The Goldfinch (2019)

I can't imagine many people enjoying this if they haven't read Donna Tartt's 780-page brick, and I can just as easily imagine many who have read it resenting the way the film glosses over all those pages and withholds the emotional keystone of the whole until the very final frame - but with expectations low from scathing reviews, I ended up thoroughly enjoying this adaptation, which, like the book, is a bewildering mass of underdeveloped themes, impossible coincidence, and meaningless allusions to the Harry Potter universe, yet still a strangely loveable, unwieldy, flawed beast that just is - who knows how or why Donna Tartt wrote it.

★★★★☆

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Serenity (2019)

Interstellar, another movie starring Matthew McConaughey as a father separated by vast stretches of time and space from his child, was released five years earlier than Serenity, which is surprising because Serenity feels like the retro, 8-bit, pixelated version, playing with similar themes but in a story that awkwardly melds '40s film noir with family drama and a tuna-fishing adventure, all steeped in odd moments of reality-bending fantasy that may signal McConaughey's character's post-war trauma playing havoc with his head - or else something else delivered in not very stellar fashion.

★★☆☆☆ 

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Only the Animals (Seules les bêtes) (2019)

The way this sober, bleak Colin Niels book adaptation unfolds across chapters titled "Alice", "Joseph" and "Marion", etc - individual stories that intersect and overlap in surprising ways - and the way the movie's initial mystery of a missing woman ends up being the repercussion of events surprisingly global, means Only The Animals recalls those sombre movies of Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel, 21 Grams, etc..), but when Only the Animals ends, you feel like you have been bogged down in the sordid criminality of several individuals, not swept across the world as in Iñárritu's movies where individual lives are mere threads of a global human experience.

★★★☆☆

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Yalda, A Night for Forgiveness (2019)

There really is a tv show, apparently, televised in Iran in which criminals get a chance on camera to be forgiven for transgressions sometimes as serious as murder, and this movie takes that concept as its basis and tells the story of Anar, a young woman seeking mass public forgiveness for murder - a bit melodramatic for me, but thriller-like tension arises from the fact the young woman is not as contrite about the crime as the show producers and the murdered man's wife would like.

★★★☆☆

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南方车站的聚会 (Nanfang chezhan de juhui) (The Wild Goose Lake (2019)

This crime drama is a touch overloaded with cinematic flourishes — there is a police hunt in a zoo at night, a scene in a funhouse full of mirrors, luminescent night-bootscooting, disconcerting moments as the camera swings between twins, and loads of noirish shadow-play — but with the style and slinkiness of In The Mood For Love, sharing that classic's bold colour palette and muted sexy tone but applied to a gritty modern-day crime story, it is an utterly capivating thriller about man-on-the-run Zedong Zhou, a small-time crim caught up in big-time crime, and the prostitute who may be helping him...or might she in fact be after the reward for bringing him in?

★★★★☆

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Anna (2019)

I think what Luc Besson intended was another slick, smart, minimally-plotted sexy violent spy thriller like 'La Femme Nikita' and its American remake 'The Assassin' with Bridget Fonda, but 'Anna' is a far cry from those movies with its woeful acting, laughable casting, terrible editing that makes the fisticuff action look like tai chi. and a story told via choppy-changey timehops that you know are just an attempt to try to disguise how wafer-thin and ridiculous the story is (a globe-trotting supermodel-slash-spy brings the KGB and the CIA together with a kiss each).

★☆☆☆☆

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Abou Leila (2019)

For a long time, this tense thriller doesn't let you in on what is going on - all you know is that two men are travelling by car across the Algerian desert in 1994 looking for someone or something called Abou Leila, and you know their plan is foolhardy, misguided, or even delusional, and it is interrupted regularly, repetitively, by one man's violent dreams - and in the end, the movie didn't make much sense to me: in the context of Algeria's civil war, something is said about cyclical violence. 

★★★☆☆

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The Blonde One (Un rubio) (2019)

Viewers may want to give up on this slow-moving drama as another and another and another scene opens on poor and rather gormless Gabo, an Argentinian man in an illicit sexual relationship with his roommate, doing another and another and another household chore while staring silently into space in a lovelorn way, but stick through Gabo's blank looks over the dishes and be rewarded, eventually, with a more compelling, tense relationship drama featuring powerful performances from the two leads and, in the end, less domestic labour and more grist.

★★★☆☆

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End Of The Century (Fin de siglo) (2019)

In this beautiful slip of a film — a romance tinged with sadness — Ocho, an Argentine poet, encounters Javi, a producer of children's television, while knocking about Barcelona one day and after immediately hitting it off is startled to learn they first met twenty years earlier at a time when Ocho, perhaps due to the times, wasn't yet himself.

★★★★★

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Klaus (2019)

It hijacks the Christmas tradition and completely fabricates a Christmas origin story, but Klaus is worth watching for the beautiful hand-drawn animation alone, and for Jason Schwartzman's hilarious voice performance of the main character Jesper - a lazy son cast out by his father to a remote snowy outpost - who finds reward in hard work and in getting good out of people, albeit duplicitously.

★★★★☆

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A Good Woman Is Hard To Find (2019)

This Irish crime drama does a good job of depicting the vicious cycle of hardship and crime and the judgement women face from men, women, shopkeepers, the authorities - everyone - but there are hard-to-believe aspects to the situation Sarah, a mum of two young children, finds herself in at the start, and something unlikely about the crime that sets off her grisly journey to protect her kids and find out the truth of her husband's murder in a housing project, and the movie ends on a wilful, gleeful and unlikely climax engineered for thrills rather than realism, detracting from the bleak social crime drama that precedes it.

★★★☆☆

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Ready Or Not (2019)

The trouble with the premise of this quirky slasher - that a bride playing hide and seek on her wedding night discovers the game, played with her gaming family in-laws, is a murderous one - is that too quickly the bride is able to extricate herself from the family's gothic mansion, a move akin to taking your queen off the chessboard so it can run free across the game table, turning the game into a not terribly interesting foot chase outside between her and just one member of the in-laws' entourage...as though having set up the goofy premise the movie then didn't have enough smarts to keep the idea going for very long.

★★☆☆☆

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Midsommar (2019)

That the American tourists, magic mushroom tea-chugging stoners on a lark in Europe, suddenly sober and become earnest anthropologists fighting over the chance to write a thesis about the loony Wicker Man community they have come across in Sweden is a subplot going to a lot of trouble to justify why the group doesn't hightail it out of that lurid Teletubbie land at the first sight of a grizzly head hammering, in Ari Aster's again unrestrained short film idea-turned-into-a-near-three-hour horror slog that plays out, well, imagine the wicker totem being wheeled out at the twenty-minute mark and Edward Woodward suffering twisted rituals one-after-the-other for the final two hours - skinnings and sex rites and cliff dives and death ceremonies and bear disembowelments and pube pies and til-you-drop maypole dances - a convoluted and depraved mess which the stoners should be glad not to have to intellectualise in a thesis given it all seems to boil down to the minor question of whether one smiles through it or not.

★★★☆☆

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21 Bridges (aka Manhattan Lockdown) (2019)

The fact Chadwick Boseman's NYPD police detective locks down Manhattan Island as a means of hunting down two police killers is just a passing detail, really, but so little else of note happens in this police procedural - just several moments of clunky editing and a completely from-the-start predictable plot - it is the closure of the twenty-one exit points from Manhattan Island that gives this ho-hum crime drama its title!

★★☆☆☆

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I See You (2019)

A revelation halfway through, one that cleverly had me reevaluating what sort of movie I thought I was watching, introduced me to a horror concept I probably would have been better off not knowing about - I will never listen to the creaks and groans of my home in the same way again - but once the movie aboutfaces after this surprise, it loses some credibility as the plot starts relying on an outrageous and exhausting confluence of events at the family home of Helen Hunt's Jackie Harper (although admittedly these events are all neatly tied up in the end).

★★★☆☆

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A Rainy Day in New York (2019)

In Woody Allen's inconsequential, breezy romantic comedy - which I quite enjoyed - Timothée Chalamet's gloomy Gatsby Welles shuffles hunch-shouldered, arms in pockets around a rainy New York City, spending a day with sunny partner Ashleigh that doesn't go to plan, and just as you think it yourself about his slight and self-aware performance, Allen has Chalamet say - ostensibly about another character but far too applicable to his own performance to be coincidence - "[He's] a James Dean minus the acting chops".

★★★☆☆

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Into The Labyrith (L'uomo del labirinto) (2019)

Author Donato Carrisi directs for a second time an adaptation of one of his own books and like the first effort (The Girl In The Fog) this is again an unrestrained nonsense, a murder mystery that plays out like a garish fairytale, so over-the-top with its allusions to witches and dungeons and masked killers, none of it ends up mattering or even making sense, least of all the grandiose twists that you'd have to be a real dummy not to see coming.

★★☆☆☆

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Pet Sematary (2019)

This adaptation improves upon the wooden 1989 one but just can't overcome the silliness of Stephen King's plot about grown men, one a ER doctor for goodness sake, who - what, unable to face up to a pet cat's death? - trudge through a woods at night to make use of a magical burial ground which one of the men forgets to say only resurrects mangy demon-beasts and when the cat comes back as expected a raging, rabid monster, what do the men do but head back to the burial ground again and again to repeat the process of resurrecting as deranged murderous monsters things even more dear to them.

★★☆☆☆

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Charlie's Angels (2019)

The earlier movies were especially vacant exercises with Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu not so much playing the Angels as playing themselves playing at being Angels in a series of spoofs that seemed more of a lark for the cast than for viewers, but this 2019 re-fashioning delivers to audiences a reasonable action plot (albeit one far too long and predictable) set in a spy agency that believes "hugs work" and includes some intelligent humour, refreshing girl-power messages and Kristen Stewart, Ella Balinska, and Naomi Scott saving the world, helped along the way by their "Bosley", director and star Elizabeth Banks.

★★★★☆

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Brightburn (2019)

Brightburn flips the Superman origin story, making the baby delivered by spacepod to a couple on a remote farm the villain, not the superhero, but in the end, after the movie resorts to gore - glass shards to one character's magnified cornea and a steering wheel to another character's head - to distinguish itself and pad the runtime, all that can be said is yes, this spacepod boy is a real villain, not a superhero - and that is the extent of it.

★★☆☆☆

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