The Batman (2022)

When the topic of The Batman came up, a teenager I tutor summed it up perfectly as a movie about a "miserable Batman with miserable friends fighting a miserable villain in a miserable city", and he wasn't wrong, because this brooding restyling of the franchise positions Robert Pattison's Batman as a sullen emo and has him, Zoe Kravitz's slinky Selena, the mobsters and Gotham street crims, the justice system, and in fact the entire city of Gotham sunk in a psychotic depression while The Riddler, a Heath Ledger-Joker-echo, murders public figures and taunts authorities with tightly scripted David Berkowitz-style codes - all of which oppressive heaviness is fine - it's Batman, afterall - until the final act reveals the supposed root of the city's decay and it feels, in comparison, almost trivial.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

James Franco is a bit self-consciously James Franco in this 2011 first of the rebooted Planet of the Apes series of movies but his inwardness doesn't stop this being a terrifically entertaining blockbuster about Caesar, an intelligent ape, who ends up leading as rousing an uprising as any you've seen before in cinema, with the movie playing a little like what it would have been like if Alfred Hitchcock had included a first act explaining the terrible battery farm treatment that first made the birds mad.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011)

Marvellous to look at and full of hilarious details that kept me and my nephews laughing, this elaborately rendered animation from Steven Spielberg brings the characters of Herge's Tintin comics to amazing 3D life but while scenes are fluid and exciting like Indiana Jones setpieces, the greater story is an anticlimactic vacuum: a drunk sailor, Haddock, needs to quit the bottle in order to be able to recall vital family history which isn't actually vital at all - at last remembered, it just catches him up with what audiences pretty much knew from the start.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW