Before and After (1996)

When their teenage son is suspected of murder, Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson, as the boy's parents, must grapple with small-town police friends, lawyers, vigilantes, and their own feelings of culpability over covering up the crime, in Barbet Schroeder's earnest but a touch too pat adaptation of Rosellen Brown's book.

★★★☆☆

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Bird on a Wire (1990)

Mel Gibson's mullet and wild-eyed "loose cannon" routine feels self-conscious and tired here - after Lethal Weapon 1 and 2 - but he and Goldie Hawn generate chemistry together, and occasional laughs, as former lovers fleeing killers from his pre-witness protection life, and helping bind the wafer-thin plot, action and comedy together into a palatable something is the Neville Brothers' easy-listening cover of Leonard Cohen's Bird On A Wire.

★★★☆☆

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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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Black Bag (2025)

Don't think too hard about the plot, which is full of outlandish extraneous details and relies on an impossible amount of inter-agent bedhopping (some of it blurring professional boundaries in very unlikely ways) and just enjoy the sleek, sexy spy thrills as Michael Fassbender's mild-mannered spy, George Wodehouse, learns his wife's name is on a list of five potential traitor agents.

★★★★☆

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Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

The world-building and mythologising reign over plot, logic, and sense in this sixth (has it really only been six?) Final Destination movie, which plays like a cartoon series - it's glossy, wonkily computer-generated in parts, and the deaths are separate mini-episodes - and it is hard to care about the family members being picked off one-by-one by Death given noone in it cares either, and anyway, the characters are always secondary to the attempts here at a origin story and attempt at a reboot, often cornball - the holed-up Death-whispering grandma doesn't belong in the series, and the death-by-peanut allergy is a low point.

★★★☆☆

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The Big Sleep (1946)

Even Humphrey Bogart said he didn't know what was happening scene-to-scene in this adaptation of Raymond Chandler's hardboiled private eye crime story, and having just read the book, I can attest that the film is faithful to its sprawling mess of a plot - sprawling because Chandler in fact wrote it by fusing two previously published short stories, merging characters, renaming others, caring less about resolving plot threads and more about building not so much a mystery as a noir character study of criminal California circa 1940, delivered in hilarious deadpan and steeped in worldweary immorality.

★★★★☆

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Barbie (2023)

It isn't terrifically funny, generating just a handful of laughs, and while a positive and important message film, it is hard to enjoy it without cynically appraising it as a Mattel marketing exercise and feeling duped: much of the film is spent positioning an antiquated white-skinned, blonde-haired and pink kitchen-accessoried doll - and prime offender over decades in promoting unrealistic female standards - as a torchbearer for feminism and cultural diversity.

★★★☆☆

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Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos) (2009)

I think it was the laugh-out-loud melodrama I enjoyed most watching Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces, an overwrought carry-on about a blind film writer's affair with an actress, but everything else left me a little cold, including the rush to tie all the nonsense up sensibly in the end.

★★★☆☆

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Blue Beetle (2023)

It took me four or five sittings to get through this looong DC superhero movie that tells, with a glossy magazine look, the origin story of a superhero called Blue Beetle, a human teenager enhanced with a glowing blue parasitic alien technology that effectively disappears the movie's biggest asset, the young and good-looking Xolo Maridueña into a Power Ranger suit.

★★☆☆☆

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The Blonde One (Un rubio) (2019)

Viewers may want to give up on this slow-moving drama as another and another and another scene opens on poor and rather gormless Gabo, an Argentinian man in an illicit sexual relationship with his roommate, doing another and another and another household chore while staring silently into space in a lovelorn way, but stick through Gabo's blank looks over the dishes and be rewarded, eventually, with a more compelling, tense relationship drama featuring powerful performances from the two leads and, in the end, less domestic labour and more grist.

★★★☆☆

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Black Adam (2022)

The acting's a bit wonky in this one, not just from the kid (but from the kid in particular) and it features a bunch of cheap-working superheroes collectively called the Justice Society that most audience members won't know or care about (the group includes a particularly unhelpful 'swirling wind' girl and her sidekick, a lumbering dope who grows to giant size but can't think of anything to do with this skill to help out), but check it out: the tone adopted is interesting, Dwayne Johnson's title antihero behaves in a most unsuperherolike fashion, mercilessly killing bad guys in a cgi fury, and it is also interesting to think about how this fits with other episodes of the so far mostly lugubrious DC Universe series of movies.

★★★☆☆

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Body Double (1984)

A down-on-his-luck horror film actor scores free accommodation in a plush pad with a revolving bed and views of a sexy neighbour's nightly stripshow, in Brian de Palma's sleazy thriller, an unabashed exercise in emulating Hitchcock replete with voyeuristic hero (Rear Window) with a debilitating psychological condition that gets in the way of his uncovering the truth of a mystery involving body doubles (Vertigo), double-crosses, and murder.

★★★★☆

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Bros (2022)

The point is made that members of the LGBTQIA+ community need to be seen - in schools, in gallery exhibits, in movies - and that their lives are not heteronormative...and then a story as mawkish as a traditional Hallmark romance plays out with one of the two main characters even needing love to help him open the chocolate shop of his childhood dreams - perhaps I missed the irony - and that the film stays close to our central couple who have very little chemistry, and that there are no peripheral characters whose names, stories or faces you'll remember make Bros pretty irritating and boring, and anyway, Hallmark released its first gay romance in December 2022, so check out that schmaltz instead, maybe, if romance is your thing.

★★★☆☆

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Blair Witch (2016)

This is simply more shaky, badly filmed home-style footage of young, would-be investigative documentarians screaming and huffing and puffing for 90 minutes in the woods while any development of the story about some sort of witch-cursed woodland is perpetually interrupted by irritating handicam malfunctions, clichéd, glitchy torches, dull drone battery problems, tangential scenes of body horror, and irrelevant camp dangers.

★★☆☆☆

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Beauty (Skoonheid) (2011)

What starts as a clinical, no-holds-barred look at a forty-something family man who has sex with men but doesn't identify as homosexual shifts, as soon as this detail is established, into a psychosexual thriller about his obsession with a young law student, Christian, but it isn't really clear how the sexuality presented first relates to the obsession presented later, and nor is the fixation clearly with Christian's Beauty (I mean, probably) or his youth, openness, freedom, sex - is it something borne of jealous? - and this ambiguity - and the likely reason for it - not that Christian is into it or that wives and families condone it, but just that, well, homosexual sex is aberrant) is more troubling than the thriller is thrilling.

★★★☆☆

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Bullet Train (2022)

It is supposed to be a bit of Tarantino-esque fun, this adaptation of Kōtarō Isaka's book about five assassins aboard the same fast train in Japan, but there's something sad about it: not even Tarantino does Tarantino very well, lately; Brad Pitt in the lead role certainly doesn't manage a young and edgy "Tyler Durden" anymore; and by casting him and other non-Japanese actors in an American adaptation of the Japanese story set in Japan, the action movie inadvertently becomes a message film, with the message - the destructive influence of foreigners upon Japanese society - front and centre, an inescapable part of every crescendoing action scene, yet completely ignored.

★★☆☆☆

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Basic Instinct (1992)

If you can get past the fact the sweaty suited detectives are all males indistinguishable from each other and the women are all deviants whose perverse sexual desires the men must sigh and resignedly sate, then this is for most of its runtime a solid thriller with Michael Douglas doing a good job playing Michael Douglas playing a detective, and Sharon Stone channelling Vertigo's Kim Novak to play the cop's prime murder suspect-with-benefits, a mystery novelist whose bed-partners end up dead by ice-pick.

★★★☆☆

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The Black Phone (2021)

It takes an ordeal with a masked troll (upstairs, not under a bridge - a kind of vague reiteration of Buffalo Bill) and conversations with murdered teenagers via a magic wall phone for a boy to finally get the gumption to talk to a girl he likes in science class -- that his sister is psychic, too, who sees things in dreams ends up an irrelevant detail.

★★☆☆☆

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Black Widow (1987)

In this very straightforward easy-to-watch soapy 80s thriller, a Government agent (Debra Winger) tries to prove that a series of deaths are connected not just by bad lurching editing but by a mysterious 'black widow' with crimped blonde hair who marries rich men then kills them for their money.

★★★☆☆

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Bloodmoon (1990)

For the first three-quarters of this ugly, lamentably plotted slasher, no one in the movie even knows for sure that anything is wrong: two or three high schoolers disappear but their absences are shrugged off as runaways, which means a long plod for audiences who must endure woefully scripted school dances, waterhole picnics, and the like waiting for the characters to catch up with what the opening scene established - that someone is killing students with a barbed wire garotte in the nearby woods - and when the killer is finally revealed, the plot, the town's collective obliviousness, and the ignorance of one townsperson in particular (given the celestial and historical circumstances of the crimes) ceases to make any sense at all.

★☆☆☆☆ 

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