Rocketman (2019)

Fans will relish the chance to rediscover Elton John's music in this new form with clips of his songs strung together Mamma Mia-style into a kind of motion picture photo album, while others will hopefully find something to be interested in over the  course of the singer's very familiar trajectory to worldwide celebrity, although like Elton John himself, they will find it hard to find anything in the singer's adopted persona to emotionally connect with - an abandoned childhood identity, for instance.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

It used to be that dinosaurs belonged in the Jurassic period, humans in the modern era, and if dinosaurs appeared in the modern era, humans needed to get away from them, but like a living breathing example of Darwinian theory itself, the Jurassic Park series is trying to self-perpetuate and has evolved so that now there are unlikely relationships between some of the humans and dinosaurs, like between Chris Pratt's theme park trainer and Blue, the velociraptor in his care, and "dinosaurs-have-rights-too" groups have sprung up, and arguments abound on the money-making value of dinosaurs, their sentience, their feelings, and it is funny because all this effort to give the series some Planet of the Apes meat on its bones ends up just a lot of noise in this movie which hides within it the movie people actually want to see featuring podcars lodged in the jaws of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, second dinosaur attacks at just the right moment, and lots of running and screaming.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Terminator Salvation (2009)

Unwisely, the Terminator series takes us for the first time to a time after the apocalyptic Judgement Day (until now, just an occasionally glimpsed bleak potential future our heroes have been working hard to avoid) and suddenly we are learning more than we ever cared to know about John Connor's dreary war against the machines - it is more Transformers with Mad Max stylings than Terminator - and muddying the Terminator formula even more than this is a lead Wolverine character whose uninteresting journey into the future delays the movie we actually wanted to watch which starts twenty minutes before the end.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Jurassic World (2015)

There is a violent, undeserved death halfway through this Jurassic Park instalment that is almost torture porn, which is the moment audiences are likely to decide the dinosaurs-wreaking-havoc-on-a-theme-park spectacular, while still replete with the requisite genuinely exciting action set-pieces, is less of a lark this time around.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Lady in the Water (2006)

Awful to the point of being unwatchable is this self-indulgent movie from M Night Shyamalan based on a bedtime story he told his kids, apparently, featuring only completely cracked characters, residents of an apartment complex with a swimming pool that is home to a mermaid-like creature. 

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS