The Child In Time (2017)

Ian McEwan's book, when I read it, was a gnarly knot of plots held together not by sense nor a desire to entertain a reader but seemingly by a want to be clever about the theme of childhood and Time, and certainly some of the threads of his book - a child lost in a moment, a successful first time writer whose bestseller is mistaken for a children's book, a friend who is reverting to childhood, and a government enacting policy regarding child literacy - are interesting, most included here, but even in this adaptation, the tone is heavy, droll, haughty, and like the book, the movie is smug, joyless and left me wondering whether the point is simply recognising the author's smarts.

★★☆☆☆

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Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness (2022)

Given the empty hero-versus-villain plots and interchangeable cgi-action sequences of all these movies, Marvel seems to believe simply striking upon different skins and tones, for example giving Thor IV an 80s-rock theme or setting Venom in a noirish San Francisco or making it horror-lite or nanosized or snart-arsed is the best way to perpetuate its exponentially-growing raft of superhero movies and in the hands of director Sam Raimi, this sequel to Doctor Strange is certainly a unique look horror-lite Marvel entry with a very Carrie-like witch, oodles of risen-dead bad guys and evil souls reincarnate and so is perhaps for a slightly older than usual Marvel viewer....say ten.

★★★☆☆

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The Power of the Dog (2021)

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Campion's solemn and unaffecting Western, an adaptation of a novel by Thomas Savage, reminds me of the movies of Paul Thomas Anderson — The Master and Phantom Thread, for example — in the way its gorgeous, elaborate evocation of a world — cattle ranching in (New Zealand standing in for) Montana — ends up being for nought, the grand staging in the end unwarranted by what turns out to be just a queer little episode of crime involving four characters all so deeply repressed that their motivations scene-to-scene — if they are not vanished completely in one of the choppy-changey tv-series-style chapters — remain a mystery — in lieu of personality is offered up homosexuality and alcoholism, as if this is all we need to know.

★★★☆☆

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Spider-man: No Way Home (2021)

I wasn't always rivetted, as evidenced by the fact I was able to make to-do lists in my head as the dizzying cgi-action sequences went on and on, but there's no denying the cleverness of this Spider-man movie (the sixth Marvel film to feature Tom Holland as the webslinger but the first to characterise him as a mature agent of salvation, not a juvenile wannabe meter-out of violent justice), one that makes all the previous iterations of Spider-man, the ones with Andrew Garfield or Toby Maguire or even, say, Shinji Tôdô an extension of this movie, neatly rendering moot any and all past inconsistencies in plot or character or circumstance that may have niggled at viewers of umpteen versions, making everything connected and sensible and, get ready for it, ripe for multiple concurrent Spider-man releases.

★★★★☆

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12 Years A Slave (2013)

This is gruelling viewing based upon the memoir of Solomon Northup, an African American of New York State who really was kidnapped in 1841 and enslaved on Louisiana cotton plantations for 12 years, and his story, presented with rich period detail, will make you shake your head in dismay.

★★★★☆

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Doctor Strange (2016)

Marvel's latest superhero origin story is a grown-up version of Harry Potter - Hogwarts is a Kathmandu cult, Dumbledore is Tilda Swinton reprising her roles from The Beach and Vanilla Sky, Voldemort is a barely seen cosmic darksider called Dormammu, the spells are "coding", the cloak of invisibility is a cloak of levitation of unexplained sentience, and the special effects are repetitive Inception-style city-shifting ones.

★★★☆☆

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Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

A terror attack sets in motion the convoluted events of this 2013 Star Trek episode which eventually ties together a number of plot threads about warheads, cryogenically frozen superhumans and an Enterprise stopover at Kronos where the Klingons live, but in Director J J Abrams' hands, this scifi action is punchy, fun, exciting and full of ace special effects even if it apparently disappointed Trekkies and contains no openly gay Starfleet officers.

★★★☆☆

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