Reptile (2023)

They went to a lot of trouble to make this thriller atmospheric, muting colours and asking an ensemble of fine actors to speak and move at snail's pace, but they forgot to include anything or anyone that viewers can care much about, so there's not a whole lot of interest in the case of a real estate agent's murdered wife or in the question of whether Benicio Del Toro's worldweary cop can solve the crime.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

No Sudden Move (2021)

The elaborate costuming of the ensemble cast and period 1960s Detroit setting feel like an affectation until late in this Steven Soderbergh movie when a card is played that turns the riveting, finely-acted neo-noir crime flick into something sharper: a pointed social commentary.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Pledge (2001)

The trouble with director Sean Penn's mostly-gripping The Pledge, about a cop who promises a grieving mother to find the killer of her child, is not Jack Nicholson's gnarlier-than-usual detective (compare him with the clean-cut Foyle-like turns of It Happened In Broad Daylight's Heinz Rührmann and Cold Light of Day's Richard E Grant) nor the story's movement from the Swiss Alps to Nevada, but Penn's muddling Dürrenmatt's screenplay - a jaunty mystery with a detective-novel ending - with the author's later book, "The Pledge - Requiem for the Detective Novel, which refashions that screenplay's plot into a much darker existential drama; Penn borrows scenes from the earlier 1958 adaptation and incorporates aspects of the screenplay (such as a sequence that demystifies the serial killer), and so detracts from the book's grim philosophy.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Wolfman (2010)

It won an Academy Award for best makeup and is star-studded but this 2010 werewolf story, a remake of a camp 1940s horror of the same name, seems to want to be an epic Hollywood blockbuster AND a camp 1940s horror remake at the same time and ends up being neither; instead, it is an elaborately staged and handsomely made-up "nothing" that should have more wholeheartedly embraced its camp 1940s horror roots and taken itself far less seriously.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Sicario (2015)

The covert black ops mission that sweeps up Emily Blunt's FBI agent is a shadowy, violent, and lawless battle against a powerful drug cartel, and the more she sees the more conflicted she becomes about the ethics of the mission, in Denis Villeneuve's brutal thriller and must-see travel guide for anyone contemplating a holiday to Juarez, Mexico.

★★★★☆

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