Mercury Rising (1998)

Thankfully swapping out the title of the book it is adapted from ("Simple Simon"), this uninspired action thriller has Bruce Willis starring as a cop protecting nine-year-old Simon from assassins after Simon cracks a top-secret government "super code", and about the only convincing thing in the whole movie is not its action - a yawn-inducing string of shootouts across busy public spaces like hospitals - nor its depiction of autism, Rain Man-style brilliant savantism used purely only as a MacGuffin that could just as easily have been studiousness or, let's face it, an RSA key on a dog's collar, and not its cryptography (government supercodes published in wordfind magazines as a strength test) but its depiction of gendered home roles: Bruce Willis bumps into a woman in a cafe - a woman he doesn't know - and within minutes, in heated bathroom arguments, he guilts her into passing up career opportunities to be Simon's stay-at-home carer.

★★☆☆☆

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Still Alice (2014)

A 50-year-old Linguistics professor is diagnosed with a hereditary form of Early Onset Alzheimer's Disease in this tearjerker that is as much a character study of the debilitating disease itself as it is a character study of the unfortunate woman, Alice, and her family - of course no-one's idea of a good time but the movie features such a good performance by Julianne Moore you won't be able to take your eyes off it.

★★★★☆

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Malice (1993)

This thriller, a bit Pacific Heights in that Nicole Kidman and Bill Paxton's married Boston couple take in a charismatic but likely troublesome renter to overcome a financial trouble, is really quite fun despite how silly and overstuffed it all is, featuring an entire serial rapist/killer subplot (with an early career Gwyneth Paltrow) seemingly for the sole purpose of justifying the taking of a sperm sample for a grander story arc involving a too-good-to-be-true Uncle Charlie, a ludicrous Rear Window flourish, and a Witness For The Prosecution consultation in a squalid apartment where truths are out.

★★☆☆☆

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It's Complicated (2009)

Some of Nancy Meyer's movies are so clean, so sanitised, with sets so "interior-designed" they feel like laundry detergeant commercials, but she keeps things more down-to-earth and more relatable in this romantic comedy, another movie in which she squarely targets a more mature generation of female movie-goer, this time telling the story about a woman (Meryl Streep) who embarks upon an affair with her married ex-husband (Alec Baldwin) while keeping up appearances with her adult children and with the architect (Steve Martin) renovating her house.

★★★★☆

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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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Paris Can Wait (2016)

The Trip series was definitely referenced during intial pitches for director Eleanor Coppola's first non-documentary feature, the extremely gentle romantic comedy Paris Can Wait that too contrives a reason, the flimsiest, for its main character, Diane Lane's Anne, to be driven on a restaurant roadtrip across France, from Cannes to Paris, by her husband's film-producing partner Jacques, and while the pair gorge on local food and wine and visit historical sites and museums, they relax, laugh, and share intimate moments - but no Michael Caine impressions - and she starts to wonder if she and her always-too-busy husband will ever get to do the same.

★★★☆☆

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The Hunt For Red October (1990)

In this first of the Jack Ryan movies, released in 1990 with Alec Baldwin as Tom Clancy's hero, Jack Ryan is a mere "expendable" analyst but even so he is the only one among CIA heavies and the navy elite of two countries who can intuit what is really going on (nothing terribly thrilling) when a Russian nuclear submarine, the Red October, goes awol.

★★★☆☆

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The Good Shepherd (2006)

Great spy stories, like Graham Greene novels, operate on two levels with agent protagonists juggling individual, emotional sides with their detached organisational spy roles, but the focus of this thriller is unrelentingly trained upon Edward Wilson's job with everyone everywhere a whispering agent or double agent, and for too long the only human side on show is in the fleeting scenes Wilson shares with his girlfriend, wife and son, and given he exhibits an emotional detachment that warrants psychological intervention, things quickly become dreary and that is a shame given the calibre of the actors in this and the potential of the story spanning decades of American history.

★★☆☆☆

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Concussion (2015)

The story of Bennett Omalu's important work establishing the links between American football and brain injury works best as a human drama between people who prefer to 'leave things alone' versus those like Omalu who can't, and the movie offers food for thought about the ability to causally link specific behaviours to brain trauma, but the not always convincing framing of the movie as a corporate thriller and some Hollywood flourishes towards the end are a disservice to this fascinating drama.

★★★☆☆

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Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)

The worst line in this, the most incessant and most implausible M:I movie yet, is, "Ethan Hunt is the epitomy of destiny," (thanks, Alec Baldwin, the new secretary of the IMF), a line as overwrought as the whole of this fifth outing that goes on and on, never letting up, with the most bombastic and ridiculous set-pieces ever, making me wonder if it is me that is too old for this, not Cruise. 

★★★☆☆

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Seduced and Abandoned (2013)

Alec Baldwin and James Toback are at the Cannes Film Festival pitching a questionable movie concept, affording us a glimpse of the movie-making 'machine' in this documentary that focuses particularly on the thankless task of grubbing for film funding, with Ryan Gosling among the celebrities offering industry insights.

★★★☆☆

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Blue Jasmine (2013)

Like many recent Woody Allen films, this is a story based around a flip state of its main character's situation, with Cate Blanchett playing the southern Tennessee Williams-esque Jasmine (or Janet), a woman who has had it all but is now facing tougher times, and the movie is very good except that it ends feeling unfinished.

★★★★☆

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