The Night of the Twelfth (2022)

It isn't very remarkable at the outset and could be an episode of any grey and dour television police procedural - a young woman dies horribly, and police look for the killer amongst her male friends - but The Night of the Twelfth starts with a placecard that connects the story to true crimes in France and has said something loudly by the end, rather than settling for the usual murder mystery denouement.

★★★★☆

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Speak No Evil (2022)

Homage is paid to 'Funny Games' but rather than subjecting audiences to Hanneke's movie's start-to-finish depravity, this Danish movie, like 'The Invitation' or 'Midsommar' and others in a growing subset of the thriller genre, promises Funny Games' abject horror but keeps it under wraps until a shocking movie-end reveal - tada...they are making human pies...the end, for example - and in this case, the horror reveal comes so rent from anything that has come before, it is two or three days before viewers recognise the sheer stupidity of it - I mean, just try to articulate what exactly the couple with the mute son are in fact doing in the long term - so while something interesting is said about zero tolerance to bad, violent or sick behaviour, one glib line about blunt scissors, a momentarily seen babysitter, a screaming competition on the banks of a sandpit...nothing really adds up to the horror avalanche and rocks thrown at the viewer in the last ten minutes.

★★★☆☆

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Fall (2022)

A confined-space thriller in which the confined space is a small platform at the top of a 2000-foot radio antenna in a US desert, this movie, beyond this original setting, is completely by-the-numbers, rolling out in such formulaic fashion, you suspect an AI spat out the story, but watch it for my favourite  moment when the hero, dehydrated, overexposed to the Sun and at death's door, eats a vulture and turns immediately, momentarily, into a slinky, confident Lara Croft.

★★★☆☆

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X (2022)

What makes this slasher unique is also, unfortunately, what makes it so tedious: it isn't until the last thirty minutes when grisly death starts being meted out in tried-and-true slasher style that the energy picks up and the heavy-handed exposition (that really only serves to longwindedly establish the lore of all slashers always) finally lets up; it hardly seems to matter (and in fact I didn't even realise until later when I read it) that actress Mia Goth plays both the villain and the heroine.

★★★☆☆

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Pearl (2022)

A monologue at the two-thirds mark finally gives this slasher (prequel to the underwhelming 'X') the depth that sets it apart - up to this point, Pearl, the eponymous crazy, was a mere sicko not much set apart from a Michael or Freddy or Jason except for her gender and age, but suddenly she has a more detailed than expected backstory and a tragicness that juxtaposes sensibly with the cheeky The Wizard of Oz stylings, the technicolour of a 50s melodrama,, and the cartoonish flourishes like irises-out and -in.

★★★☆☆

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The Watcher (2024)

Uprooted when her partner accepts a job in Romania, a young woman (captivating Scream Queen Maika Munroe) floats around her new city alone like Scarlett Johansson in Lost In Translation, feebly grappling with the culture and new language, and she finds her feelings of isolation compounded by the fact a serial killer is operating in the neighbourhood...and because there's a person watching her from an apartment across the street.

★★★★☆

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عنکبوت مقدس ('Holy Spider') (2022)

This unflinching look at the serial murders of Saeed Hanaei, an Iranian family man who (at least after he was caught) claimed his murders of sixteen prostitutes were religiously motivated (but, let's face it, war trauma, mummy boyness, male entitlement, and psychopathy came first, right?) is extremely hard to watch but utterly compelling given its basis in truth, given its electric performance from Zahra Amin Ebrahimi as the deep undercover journalist who dared bring Saeed Hanaei down, and given its jaw-dropping final scenes in which director Ali Abbasi reveals just how far Iran's corrupt masculinity will go to perpetuate itself.

★★★★☆

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Moonfall (2022)

Mercifully skipping the usual disaster-movie preamble of ignored scientists and warnings spilling from dot matrix printers, Moonfall gets to collapsing cities and lunar chaos within minutes, but its brisk, comic-book style only makes it slightly less exhausting than it would otherwise be.

★★☆☆☆

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The Abandoned (查無此心) (2022)

This Taiwanese crime flick takes the problem of "runaway workers" (illegal immigrants) in Taiwan (from Thailand and Vietnam, for example) and makes this gritty real issue the context of a run-of-the-mill serial killer thriller, perfectly watchable, except as it reaches its denouement (a "the serial killer wears a birthday party hat and laughs maniacally in his underground lair" denouement) the gritty realism gives way to more and more eye-rolling cliche.

★★★☆☆

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Weird: The Al Jankovich Story (2022)

I wasn't terribly interested to know more about the 80s pop song parodist Weird Al Jankovich, but one minute with this droll comedy with its hilarious cliched approach to the music biopic and tongue-in-cheek exaggeration and I was hooked, laughing and snorting all the way through as Weird Al's life and times is, well, expertly parodied.

★★★★☆

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Marlowe (2022)

Tricky dicky dialogue at the start that has characters answering questions with questions in a fast prattle and repetitive circle ("What would you say, Mr Marlowe, if I said you said I said...?" sort of talk) makes Neil Jordan's adaptation of John Banville's book start out feeling like a spoof of the hard-boiled detective novel, but it's not and is in fact, eventually, a beautiful-to-look-at period crime story featuring Raymond Chandler's flatfoot Philip Marlowe, played by a perfectly hangdog, trenchcoated, fedora-ed Liam Neeson, investigating a case of a missing Lothario in 1920s Los Angeles, but some problems along the way take you out of the drama - Alan Cunmmings' overacting, for one, and a nebulous mystery that keeps going around and around on the spot, much like that fast Neil Jordan prattle.

★★★★☆

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Reminiscence (2022)

What was apparently intended was a noir detective story set in a water-inundated future world - Hugh Jackman's Nick provides the hardboiled voiceover, wondering out-loud things like why a dame like Rebecca Ferguson's sultry bar singer Mae walked into a "memory detective" agency like his - but the photography is glossy, the actors look like they are in a fashion magazine, the set design is 'Dick Tracy' cartoony and cheap like an escape room, and the lighting is 'BioShock' neon and bright, leaving you with the impression that the writer, the lighting person, the set designer, and the actors needed to sit down together at least once for a production meeting.

★★☆☆☆

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Masquerade (Fr: 'Mascarade') (2022)

W Somerset Maughan described the French Riviera as a sunny place for shady individuals; in this movie, the shady individuals - grifters of the Parasite kind who inveigle their way into the lives of the French Riviera's rich and glamorous - are themselves gorgeous, and so it isn't hard at all to watch these beautiful creatures, like Pierre Nimey's listless toyboy Adrien or Marine Vacth's desperate single mum Margot (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels operating their grifts off yachts and from opulent mansions), even if their loooong game becomes tired and increasingly hard to believe over the movie's two and a bit long hours. 

★★★★☆

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Black Adam (2022)

The acting's a bit wonky in this one, not just from the kid (but from the kid in particular) and it features a bunch of cheap-working superheroes collectively called the Justice Society that most audience members won't know or care about (the group includes a particularly unhelpful 'swirling wind' girl and her sidekick, a lumbering dope who grows to giant size but can't think of anything to do with this skill to help out), but check it out: the tone adopted is interesting, Dwayne Johnson's title antihero behaves in a most unsuperherolike fashion, mercilessly killing bad guys in a cgi fury, and it is also interesting to think about how this fits with other episodes of the so far mostly lugubrious DC Universe series of movies.

★★★☆☆

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Don't Worry Darling (2022)

It's The Stepford Wives except the peculiar cookie-cut "perfect" town is in a desert, perhaps in California - a manicured suburbia overseen by Chris Pine's sneering bad guy, clearly up-to-no-good, who somehow controls all the males who come and go from mysterious jobs in the desert while their wives, Olivia Wilde and Florence Pugh for two, visibly foreign to this time period and these circumstances, make like 50s housewives but all the time suspecting something is amiss.

★★☆☆☆

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Spin Me Round (2022)

When a restaurant branch manager scores a weeklong business trip to Italy for a professional development course delivered by the international megastar owner of her restaurant chain, she imagines that Tuscan sunsets, a rustic Italian villa, and romance are in store, but those expectations are immediately let down when dullard Craig picks her and a bunch of other hopefuls up from the airport, in this dry comedy that hilariously blends Office Space-style corporate dreariness with Masterchef-style foodie-ism and Griswold's-style Americans-in-Europe dagginess.  

★★★★☆

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Smile (2022)

The trouble with this often lifeless retread of It Follows, about a deadly curse that jumps Fallen-style from person to person, is the wavering mental state of lead character Dr Rose Cutter, a mental health professional who finds herself the latest victim of the peculiar paranormal curse and who responds at first by being hysterical at being disbelieved; evasive when people finally believe her; pale, wan and trembling in some scenes; steely and resolved to take on personal demons in others.

★★☆☆☆

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Triangle of Sadness (2022)

We meet a male model and his model girlfriend having dinner at a swanky restaurant and an argument starts between them over paying the bill; from there this dry comedy moves aboard a ship offering cruises to the rich and famous and hell breaks loose there, too, offering more sharp commentary about privilege and control in a modern world of poor freeloaders, rich hoarders, those in service and those who wantonly wield power.

★★★★☆

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Murder Mystery 2 (2022)

Not as sophisticated a mystery as the plot of a Murder, She Wrote episode, this sequel to Netflix's 2019 Murder Mystery at least improves on that original, generating a few laughs and keeping the pace brisk and the length blessedly short as Nick and Audrey Spitz end up on a tropical island for a wedding where a murderer strikes.

★★☆☆☆

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Elvis (2022)

It garnered the lead, Austin Butler, BAFTA and Golden Globe awards but he never has a chance to act given the relentless strobe of Baz Luhrmann's three-hour docudrama: the camera flicks, spins, and sweeps, never resting for a second on anything - Butler included - and we unnecessarily spin and enter Graceland upside-down several times, so, while interesting, this is an exhausting look at Elvis's life, his upbringing, dizzying rise to stardom, financial exploitation, and premature death. 

★★★☆☆

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