Spin Me Round (2022)

When a restaurant branch manager scores a weeklong business trip to Italy for a professional development course delivered by the international megastar owner of her restaurant chain, she imagines that Tuscan sunsets, a rustic Italian villa, and romance are in store, but those expectations are immediately let down when dullard Craig picks her and a bunch of other hopefuls up from the airport, in this dry comedy that hilariously blends Office Space-style corporate dreariness with Masterchef-style foodie-ism and Griswold's-style Americans-in-Europe dagginess.  

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Ingrid Goes West (2017)

In the aftermath of her mother's death and having disgraced herself at a wedding, Ingrid seeks solace in the picture-perfect Instagram life of LA socialite Taylor Sloane and is soon inveigling her way into Sloane's circle of family and friends - her deceptions of course catch up with her but the problem with this darkly funny comedy drama, like a Six Degrees of Separation-lite, is that no lessons are learned and we leave Ingrid too abruptly without it ever becoming clear if she is simply acting out of grief (or was that just the finance?), is clueless, just another social media-fixated youth, criminal, or some kind of psychologically-ill special case.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

I approached warily - since Little Miss Sunshine, alot of low-budget movies have tried but failed to emulate that feelgood film's mix of quirkiness, romance, comedy and affecting human drama, but this movie about magazine writers who go to smalltown Washington to investigate a self-professed time-traveller seeking a time-travel partner, a story apparently inspired by an actual ad placed as joke filler in Oregon's "Backwoods Home" magazine, is from the same Little Miss Sunshine producers, says the poster, and really is a pleasant mix of quirkiness, romance, affecting human drama and some laugh-out-loud comedy.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Scott Pilgrim VS the World (2010)

Gamers and comic fans will go berserk for the gaming references and game level structure of this movie which pits a young "Mario" against a succession of super evil ex-partners of his "Princess Peach", but other viewers will tire quickly of these "boss encounters" and will want to declare game over by level three or four (of seven).

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS