The Idea of You (2024)

A romance ignites between a woman and a man, and standing in the way of their being in love forevermore are their considerable age gap (she is a 40-year-old single mother of a grown child and an art dealer; he is twenty-four) and his life in the spotlight as a boy-band idol, but both issues result in only two brief blips of conflict over the course of this breezy, thin rom-slight-com, padded out with not very rewarding Backstreet Boys-style song-and-dance routines.  

★★★☆☆

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Serenity (2019)

Interstellar, another movie starring Matthew McConaughey as a father separated by vast stretches of time and space from his child, was released five years earlier than Serenity, which is surprising because Serenity feels like the retro, 8-bit, pixelated version, playing with similar themes but in a story that awkwardly melds '40s film noir with family drama and a tuna-fishing adventure, all steeped in odd moments of reality-bending fantasy that may signal McConaughey's character's post-war trauma playing havoc with his head - or else something else delivered in not very stellar fashion.

★★☆☆☆ 

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The Hustle (2019)

You'll have decided, watching Pizza in 2003, whether or not you are into Rebel Wilson's shtick but even viewers not yet sated of this routine after seventeen years will tire very quickly of The Hustle (a rehash of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (and Bedtime Story before that) about professional con artists operating in exotic French locales) because the movie amuses only twice and, under the pedestrian direction of Chris Addison, staggers with its terribly unfunny routines, juvenile antics and woeful acting.

★☆☆☆☆

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Colossal (2016)

A simple but effective metaphor, likening an alcoholic's lifestyle to a gigantic monster wreaking havoc in South Korea, becomes thoroughly mixed because someone wanted to see the monster fighting a giant robot under the spotlights of hovering helicopters - Hathaway survives but characterisation, side plots, and creative potential are left decimated.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

The Intern (2015)

Another Nancy Meyers film populated with only emotionally robust caring types, The Intern tells the story of an elderly man who fills an internship role with an online fashion company and for his initially skeptical boss, CEO Jules, he quickly becomes an indispenable source of sage advice and a corporate guide through the tricky matters of a messy desk, handkerchiefs, unwanted erections and feminism.

★★★☆☆

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The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

No Batman movie has ever taken itself quite so seriously as this third episode of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, a long and deadly earnest superhero opera that grows increasingly loud and monotonous as it goes on and on with a booming soundtrack that for almost three hours sounds like it is heralding the rise of the valkyries - your patience will be tested and you'll want to give it all away when suddenly towards the end a final act revitalises things.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

Anne Hathaway is Andrea, the skeptical fashion magazine employee not fulfilling her role as assistant to Meryl Streep's editor Miranda Priestley, a monstrous, hilarious melding of Anna Wintour and Cruella de Vil, but after some soul searching and styling by Stanley Tucci, Andrea steps up, work life changes for the better, the way she walks improves - she starts strutting - but on the other hand her relationships suffer.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Interstellar (2014)

An incredible amount of stuff to cover (multiple planets, multiple dimensions, things happening in the future and the past, and stuff occurring at different relative speeds) is probably why Interstellar felt perfunctory and rushed to me, and I thought the ending, which made others so emotional, was daft...but this was more engaging than The Martian (another lost-in-space story with a few of the same actors).

★★★☆☆

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Brokeback Mountain (2005)

This Ang Lee movie is about two cowboys, Jake Gyllenhaal and a mumbling Heath Ledger, whose relaxed nudie, towel-whipping funtimes together at a favourite remote mountain spot are starkly contrasted with their separate and mostly unhappy lives back in society where respectively Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway keep their homes and families.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS