Dead Calm (1989)

Phillip Noyce sailed Nicole Kidman from the Australian small-time to the Hollywood big screen with his adaptation of Charles Williams' Dead Calm, a nautical thriller about a couple, Kidman's Rae Ingram and her husband John (Sam Neill) - characters who first appeared in Williams' Aground - on a sailing trip to recover from tragedy, but while becalmed they spot a yacht in distress and make the mistake of stopping to help the yacht's sole survivor (Billy Zane, in 1989, youthful and smouldering) - the confined-space thrills-at-sea has a beautiful simplicity with the three characters in a sphere of action no larger that just the speck of a yacht in the ocean..

★★★★☆

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Orlando (1992)

With her title character untethered by time and experiencing life in different male and female forms, Virginia Wolff in 1928 in her book Orlando: A Biography may have debuted the concept of the multiverse, not DC Comics in 1961; Sally Potter's adaptation of Wolff's book is full of painterly detail across the various times and locations, amuses with its sly humour, and lead Tilda Swinton transfixes as Orlando, staring out from the movie like a figure from a series of Romantic paintings come alive.

★★★★★

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Titanic (1997)

The most irritating thing about this romance set aboard a painstakingly recreated-to-scale Titanic is that Leonardo's Jack and Kate's Rose are entirely fictitious, so at every minute of the three-plus hour epic, viewers are left discombobulated by what might be painstakingly recreated historical fact and what else is pure throwaway James Cameron fantasy.

★★☆☆☆

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The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption (2012)

To downplay the fact The Rock had abandoned this series after its first instalment, a Dwayne Johnson lookalike plays Mathayus, this time sent on a quest about as cinematic as an episode of TVs Xena: Warrior Princess and about as well-acted as a World Wide Wrestling Federation championship, with Billy Zane appearing as the villian Talus to clinch the film's utter mediocrity.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS