Under the Silver Lake (2019)

Andrew Garfield is a 33-year-old Donnie Darko, jobless and just as untethered from Hollywood as Donnie was detached from High School, but where that earlier classic puzzle of a movie mesmerised, this one, a kind of neo-noir LA stoner thriller about a missing woman, is utterly tedious and nothing it eventually says about "playing life" makes up for the dreary time it takes to say it.

★☆☆☆☆

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Silence (2016)

In the 1600s, Portugese Jesuit priests head to Japan where Christians are being persecuted and one of their own, true-life historical figure Cristovao Ferreira is missing-in-missionary-action, in Martin Scorsese's epic and looong treatment of Shusaku Endo's 1966 novel about the effect Christianity and Japan have on each other.

★★★★☆

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99 Homes (2014)

Set against America's foreclosure crisis, this thriller is extremely uncomfortable viewing - it starts with Dennis Nash and his mother and son being forcibly evicted from their home and then follows a desperate Dennis as he becomes embroiled in a corrupt realtor's work taking advantage of other victims of the crisis, and it is just a shame a movie about such a real and complex situation ends so patly.

★★★☆☆

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The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

The first Andrew Garfield-helmed Spiderman movie was perky and fun but this second outing wallows from start to finish - it feels like the plot was an afterthought written around the computer-generated action sequences. 

★☆☆☆☆

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The Social Network (2010)

Today's movie-making machine churns out documentaries long before a controversy is over; movie-versions come out even before books drop off the bestseller list; celebrity biopics precede celebrity deaths; and, in the case of The Social Network, a current event is committed to celluloid history long before it can truly be called history, but against all odds and despite the prematurity of the story, director David Fincher turns his movie depicting the birth of social networking site Facebook into a rivetting drama - a zippy, talky story of three lawsuits that functions as a character study of an apparently deeply unlikeable young Mark Zuckerberg.

★★★★☆

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The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

The credits of the three Spiderman movies starring Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst had barely rolled when this unnecessary but thoroughly enjoyable reboot appeared with the perkier casting of Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone and a shinier, less thoughtful take on the awkward high schooler's first outing as a superhero.

★★★☆☆

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