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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The Lost City (2022)

Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum make a likeable, if slightly indistinctly characterised, leading pair (is he a dopey muscle-bound try-hard, sage truth-bomber, or simply gaga in love?) in this romantic action comedy that is most fun in its first twenty minutes before the action shifts to a "forgotten island" (which turns out to have an airport, a village, and a volcano that features in the tv news) where Daniel Radcliffe's villain, dressed as Colonel Sanders, seeks a treasure and the movie's initially sharp wit quickly descends into juvenile things like bum leeches and dick carry-on.

★★☆☆☆

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Ad Astra (2019)

Baby Astronaut goes to a great deal of trouble to reconnect with long-lost Papa Astronaut, not only embarking on an epic trip with multiple transfers, lengthy stopovers and terrible inflight service but also making the effort to narrate his tribulations apparently aware that an audience somewhere is watching him, and while it is all spectacularly filmed and suitably measured and mesmeric for a deep space film, a middle section features clunky, lurching plot progression and the emotion, when it comes, barely registers.

★★★☆☆

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Once Upon A Time In...Hollywood (2019)

In Tarantino's temporally slight ninth movie - it may be a homage to the 60s but a lot of what happens happens while Sharon Tate sits in a cinema watching herself in The Wrecking Crew - another actor, the fictional Rick Dalton and his stunt double Clint Booth saunter around an impressively recreated 60s Hollywood and with not much to do while they anxiously anticipate the demise of their Golden-Age-of-Hollywood careers due to the advent of colour television, they drop lines referencing 60s culture, have benign encounters with sinister hippies and occasionally strike poses and do things reminiscent of other Tarantino films. 

★★★☆☆

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Moneyball (2011)

Brad Pitt continues his best Robert Redford impression since being schooled by him in Spy Games, here playing a distinctly Redfordesque Billy Beane, a real-life sabermetrician whose unconventional drafting process (based on research and analysis, not whether a player's girlfriend is hot or not) led his Oakland Athletics major league baseball team to a record-breaking winning streak in 2002.

★★★★☆

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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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Allied (2016)

The second half of the second act becomes momentarily clumsy as the film rushes some necessary information while at the same time Brad Pitt's stoic intelligence officer, faced with the idea his wife is a double agent, starts making emotional rather than cool-headed-agent decisions - and Brad Pitt's woodenness is appropriate for the stoic stuff but doesn't quite support the emotional - but otherwise this is a ripping, well-acted romantic spy yarn told in a really very sumptuously presented wartime Morocco and London.

★★★★☆

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Babel (2006)

With a change of tone from moribund to comical, this well-intentioned miserable load of nonsense could easily have been a sequel to Lemony Snickett's Series of Unfortunate Events, presenting a ridiculous account of a day Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett really shouldn't have gotten out of bed.

★☆☆☆☆

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Twelve Monkeys (1995)

The joy of Terry Gillam's Twelve Monkeys, a thrilling drama that works with the Slaughterhouse Five themes of time, memory, and questions of what is real and what isn't, is watching the madness ebb and flow and transplant itself back and forth between the leads, so that first it is Willis, then Stowe, then Willis again, whose reality - with the help of unbalanced camera angles - teeters on collapse.

★★★★★

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Inglourious Basterds (2009)

In making Inglourious Basterds, a movie about a troupe of Nazi scalp hunters, Quentin Tarantino has clearly had so much fun that not even Nazi history, film-making and story-telling conventions, or even the expectation that he'd correctly spell the title, has restrained him, and despite the film's grave subject matter, that fun translates to the audience.

★★★★★

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Fight Club (1999)

This is a subversive drama about a lot more than just a club of men that secretly meets in a basement so that members can beat each other senseless.

★★★★☆

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