The Goldfinch (2019)

I can't imagine many people enjoying this if they haven't read Donna Tartt's 780-page brick, and I can just as easily imagine many who have read it resenting the way the film glosses over all those pages and withholds the emotional keystone of the whole until the very final frame - but with expectations low from scathing reviews, I ended up thoroughly enjoying this adaptation, which, like the book, is a bewildering mass of underdeveloped themes, impossible coincidence, and meaningless allusions to the Harry Potter universe, yet still a strangely loveable, unwieldy, flawed beast that just is - who knows how or why Donna Tartt wrote it.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Baby Driver (2017)

Baby, a getaway driver for thieves, blocks out the bad around him by listening to killer music on his iPod all day, but eventually he has to de-bud and deal with the chaos closing in around him, not just that created by the psychopaths he is inextricably tied up with and who are growing more trigger-happy by the second but also the chaos of director Edgar Wright's plot which, like the psychopaths, starts off stylish and engaging but quickly becomes unreasonable and descends into a loud mess with little pay-off.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS