Birth (2004)

Jonathan Glazer's beautifully acted and beautiful-to-look-at Birth, about an affluent Upper East Side New York family intruded upon by a boy who claims to be a reincarnated dead husband, wants to be taken seriously - and some people oblige, calling it a mystery and treatise on profound things like belief and loss, but it plays out more like a deadly earnest fairytale - that is to say, it plays out ridiculously - and while the final scene does a good job, finally, of grounding the first-world problems of these toffs in some real emotion, getting there is far too long a road - an absurd and monotonous one - with an especially icky bath scene and kiss scene along the way.

★★★☆☆

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Six Days, Seven Nights (1998)

After crashing on an island, a pilot and his passenger must overcome their differences (including a significant age gap) in order to survive snakes, dangerous base-jumps and murderous pirates, and in all the excitement, they fall in love, in Ivan Reitman's very minor but inoffensive romantic comedy adventure.

★★★☆☆

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The Other Guys (2010)

Early on, hot-shot buddy cops, the sort of beefcakes that traditionally tear up the silver screen in action movies, die being stupidly heroic and into their macho places step desk cops Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell, a pair of Prius-driving, Little River Band-appreciating, wooden gun-bearing, bickering man-children, so the not very funny running gag here is that as a buddy cop movie, this drags its feet and is no The Nice Guys, no Central Intelligence, no Jump Street.

★☆☆☆☆

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Psycho (1998)

This is a 1998 remake of Hitchcock's 1960 thriller about a woman who goes missing after visiting a roadside motel, with so much identical to the original that it begs the question why it needed to be remade at all, particularly given everything about it is so constrained by what has come before that even the A-list stars seem like thinly disguised, taxidermied versions of their past counterparts, conspicuous in a hand-me-down wardrobe of fedoras, black skivvies, flared pant legs, and delivering lines too readily like actors going through the motions of an over-rehearsed play.

★★☆☆☆

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