Taking Lives (2004)

Featuring Angelina Jolie as pillow-lipped FBI profiler Illeana Lara Croft Clarice Starling Scott, Taking Lives is such a formulaic serial killer thriller a more fitting title would have been Checking Boxes, because it feels like every item on a serial killer thriller checklist has been thrown in: a Tom Ripley chameleon killer, an unnecessary Dead Ringers twins backstory, male cops antagonised by a female agency interloper with unusual methods, a motorway chase, jump scares as bodies spring out of dark recesses, a cool killer who suddenly cracks and goes goo-goo-ga-ga to reveal just how deeply-rooted his mother complex is, bad police work of the enter-the-dark-room-alone variety (and the leave-the-protected-witness-alone-for-a-quick-mo-to-go-have-a-ciggy-by-the-cop-car variety), blurred professional boundaries as Illeana beds (no, desks) a person of interest in the case, and a protracted denouement where the killer's m.o. - painstakingly compiled by the acutely perceptive profiler - is abandoned for an out-of-character stand-off between cop and culprit in which the identity thief and killer of only male victims for over twenty years suddenly becomes an obsessive stalker, domestic abuser and holder-on of Life's details.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

Shot in a style that recalls cold war propaganda, graphic novels, and 50s science fiction, this odd movie, both grandly staged and obscure, tells of a pilot, Sky Captain, a kind of Biggles in a steam-punk alternate reality, and a reporter, Polly Perkins, who team up to investigate an intrigue involving miniature elephants, metal war birds, disappearing scientists, giant robots that descend upon the world in The Day The Earth Stood Still style, and an inexplicable The Wizard of Oz tie-in, and it is always visually arresting if not always such an interesting narrative.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Salt (2010)

It's every bit as exciting and fun as The Fugitive except that in the place of suspected wife-killer Dr Richard Kimble is Angelina Jolie's Evelyn Salt, a likeable woman married to an arachnologist, on the run from Government agents who believe her to be a Russian spy; under pressure she certainly appears to be as resourceful and as acrobatic as a Bourne operative - but an American or a Russian one?

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle Of Life (2003)

Nods to the Lara Croft series of computer games — shark punches, motorbike rides along the Great Wall of China, and skimpy silver and gold tomb-raiding outfits — keep this sequel a fanboy's fantasy rather than the female-helmed Indiana Jones-style adventure of wider appeal that the movie could have been, with Lara Croft hunting an orb belonging to Alexander the Great.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Maleficent (2014)

Once upon a time, enormous hit Wicked told a backstory that sympathetically explained the wickedness of its fairytale anti-heroine, and perhaps that is what Maleficent, a boring fairytale not quite aimed at children and not quite aimed at adults, hoped to do too...but doesn't....The End.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL : ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Wanted (2008)

Absurd and utterly fun-free genre-mashing exercise about a Hogwarts-style fraternity of Neos and La Femme Nikitas bad at their jobs, one with a very dull Terminator/Darth Vader family history.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS