I'm Chevy Chase And You're Not (2025)

You can imagine, after years of being told, "You're funny," a comedian might eventually start believing it and forget about the importance of material and timing, energy, audience, and cultural context, and so end up acting zany - look at me, blowing raspberries! - rather than delivering hard-earned jokes, and Cornelius Crane "Chevy" Chase - a man as funny as he is obnoxious, as loved here as he is hated there, happy-go-lucky yet deeply ashamed - might come close to that line today; you certainly can't watch the octogenarian presented here, and can't hear about his long catalogue of laugh-free comedy film bombs, and can't hear about his childhood trials and tribulations and come away saying, simply, he's funny.

★★★☆☆

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Sobibor (Собибор) (2018)

When James Cameron injects high spectacle, grand romance, and completely made-up characters like Billy Zane's suave, tuxedoed, gun-toting villain Caledon Hockley into a painstakingly recreated Titanic, viewers can shrug off expectations of historical accuracy and give themselves up to blockbuster spectacle - never mind the roughly 1500 real people who died in 1912 - but the same can't be said of Sobibor, Russia's odd entry for Best Foreign Language film at the 2019 Academy Awards, a high-gloss but button-pushing movie in which writer, director, and star Konstantin Khabensky presents the lead up to the uprising of the prisoners in the Jewish extermination camp, Sobibor - with a similar appetite for spectacle over accuracy, so atrocities play out in unflinching full where restraint might be more respectful, and Christopher Lambert's Karl Frenzel tips over into caricature - a mumbling, starey Dirk Dastardly whose abhorrent acts are here tied to a camp love triangle.

★★☆☆☆

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Majboor ('Convulsed') (1974)

Ravi has a mother, sister, young brother, and a love interest we get to know, first, watching their jolly good times at home and at the beach; time is also spent establishing the kidnap and murder case Ravi is involved in as a witness; he then develops and is diagnosed with a brain tumor; dying, he concocts a plan to falsely confess to a kidnap-murder and claim the reward money for his family; then comes an operation - miraculously - that cures him; and it is only after all this convoluted set-up - a perfunctory first hour and a half (perfunctory despite brightly coloured Bollywood music-and-dance set-pieces) - that the mystery thriller can start: poor helpless and alone ("majboor"), Ravi's only way out of the death penalty is to go on the run and find the real murderer.

★★★☆☆

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Cold Sweat (1971)

In this adaptation of a Richard Mathieson novella, (also the basis of an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents) Charles Bronson's Joe Martin must protect his wife and daughter from a criminal gang he used to drive for - they've come back into Joe's life seeking redress for a wrong they feel Joe committed against them.

★★★☆☆

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Captain America: Brave New World (2025)

This seems to be Marvel's boysy 90s action tv-style superhero series - think A-team's all-male cast, its leather jackets, grey military bases, tanks and fighter jets, and lots of good old-fashioned fisticuffs - and while there's special effects, of course, they are toned down - the bad guy wears a hoodie and simply has a painted-green face for much of the movie - which makes this story of a mind-controlled White House being led into war an okay change from Marvel's otherwise younger cartoony smart-arse superhero series.

★★★☆☆

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Citizen X (1995)

You have to tolerate an Irish actor (Stephen Rea) and an English one (Imelda Staunton) and a Canadian one (Donald Sutherland) and a Swedish/French one (Max von Sydow) doing Russian accents and with straight faces spouting lines that make Soviet Union bureaucrats investigating serial murders sound like petulant preschoolers more concerned about 'saving Soviet Union face' than apprehending the killer of fifty-two victims, but this grim true crime story builds to something satisfactory over time, about Andrei Chikatilo's crimes and the advent of criminal profiling in the Soviet Union.

★★★☆☆

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Classe Tous Risque (1960)

A criminal (Lino Ventura) on the run with his wife and two young boys in tow enacts a plan with a friend to steal some money and escape to a quiet family life in Paris, but things go horribly wrong and when the man calls upon his old mobster trenchcoat fraternity for help, he discovers their loyalties have shifted.

★★★★☆

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Carry-on (2024)

It's set in an airport at Christmas time and features a pre-male pattern baldness blue-uniformed everyman (Taron Egerton) who in the course of his usual work as an airport luggage checker suddenly finds himself the sole hope in a battle against terrorists, so Die Hard comparisons have to be made and this one, in comparison, is a stinker, really - perfectly watchable but absurd, with the convoluted terrorist plot undone from the outset and everything else that follows just a ludicrous, well, carry-on.

★★☆☆☆

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Un Flic (Eng: 'A Cop') (aka Dirty Money) (1972)

All those Mission Impossible movies owe a lot to Jean-Pierre Melville's last French crime "flic" that features a centrepiece stunt distinctly Ethan Hunt in style involving a train and a helicopter...oh, and a cigar robe, a white pencil, and a horseshoe magnet (far too much detail: couldn't he have just gone into the bathroom and reappeared changed?) but unlike the Mission: Impossible movies, which plotwise are pretty straightforward, you'll need to watch Un Flic ("A cop") twice to confirm what might not be clear the first time through: that Alan Delon is a police commissioner, that apart from being committed by the same criminal gang, a drug robbery is a second crime unrelated to the first, and a second watch will help you to distinguish between far too many grey-faced trenchcoats and blonde bombshells, all of them (the bombshells AND the trenchcoats) mesmerized, transfixed by Delon.

★★★☆☆

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Champions (2023)

A drunk driver (Woody Harrelson) is court-appointed to coach "The Friends", a basketball team made up of intellectually disabled youths, which is a position that he thinks hardly compares to the work he usually does with national league teams, but you know at the outset of this comedy-sports movie that he will fall in love with his work, fall in love with a woman with whom he initially grates, and come to better appreciate himself and his charges over the course of an easy - and on a couple of occasions emotional - watch.

★★★☆☆

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Cast A Dark Shadow (1955)

Well, you pretty much have to watch this 1955 thriller play adaptation - the play is called Murder Mistaken - not just for a well-delivered surprise towards the end but also for the jaw-dropping endscenes in which one particular female character stands up to a killer in a terrifying shouting match that I think is unprecedented in its melodrama - the only similar scene I can think of is Sigourney Weaver's Helen Hudson inviting a crazed serial killer to put up his dukes in that rooftop scene in Copycat. 

★★★☆☆

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The Cursed (2021)

Like The VVitch, the attempt here is to elevate horror with history, so the first stretch of the movie involves gypsy encampments being razed by colonists in grey miserable scenes that depict real historical horrors, but then we are expected to care about a monster horror that in comparison is turgid and plodding, not half as interesting as the history.

 

★★☆☆☆

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Clue: The Movie (1985)

The actors are about as animated and have as much personality as the boardgame's character cards and it disconcerts that they are not the colours they are supposed to be — Mrs Peacock has feathers but is brown and Mrs White isn't the cook but a black-clad Goth — and the stage sets very wearily, like at the start of a board game when noone is sure of the rules, but stick with the carry-on because there are some laughs to be had towards the end as the initially easily shocked troupe grows increasingly unfazed by all the murders happening around them while Tim Curry grows increasingly irreverent as Wadsworth the butler of the Cluedo mansion.

★★☆☆☆

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The China Syndrome (1979)

A morning news presenter of puff pieces (Jane Fonda) with aspirations for harder-hitting investigative stuff hits the jackpot when an incident occurs at the nuclear power plant that she and her cameraman (Michael Douglas) happen to be visiting, but how critical was the event, how can they get their story to air on a corrupt news network, and how can the slow-burn thrills end without the movie simply snapping suddenly to black, are the questions that ratchet up the tension to meltdown-levels in this solid thriller.

★★★☆☆

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Contact (1997)

In Robert Zemeckis' adaptation that does a good job of digesting into an engrossing blockbuster the hard science fiction of Carl Sagan's novel, a researcher (Jodie Foster, in top form, perfectly cast) sits under satellite dishes with headphones listening for messages from outerspace, eventually coming across a code blipped from somewhere far off, the deciphered message of which is a set of instructions to build something, but religious leaders are wary and politicians are defensive as space agencies hurry to act.

★★★★☆

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Candleshoe (1977)

There's some dated gender stereotyping and at least one cringeworthy allusion to race, but Disney's Candleshoe is a classic family adventure in which a young Jodie Foster, a year on from her standout Taxi Driver performance, stars as a streetwise kid who inveigles her way into a family mansion by pretending to be a long-lost heir because she wants to get her hands on a hidden treasure.

★★★☆☆

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Capricorn One (1977)

Scripted in 1972 just three years after the moon landing, this slow burn, engrossing suspense takes a conspiracy theory levelled at that real-world event and applies it to a future faked Mars landing with the astronauts involved (James Brolin, Sam Waterston, and, ahem, OJ Simpson) realising themselves in grave danger given they have become keepers of an awfully big government secret while hidden out-of-public-view, supposedly on the red planet.

★★★★☆

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Apartment Zero (Conviviendo con la muerte) (1988)

In this "apartment thriller", as in Single White Female (which has the same homoerotic undertones and is about as deep), apartment doors (and masks, sunglasses and wigs) hide potential dangers (satan, psychopathy, or death, say) and certainly as Colin Firth's neurotic, introverted moviehouse owner Adrian Le Duc takes into his apartment a new tenant, the James Dean-like (or really very Tom Cruise-like) Jack Carney (Hart Bochner), there are brutal political executions taking place, and I suppose in a city like Buenos Aires in the mid-80s, so soon after State-sponsored terrorists have disappeared thousands and brutally killed artists and intellects, it is hard for the residents of an apartment complex to know whom to open their doors to.

★★★★☆

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Charlie's Angels (2019)

The earlier movies were especially vacant exercises with Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu not so much playing the Angels as playing themselves playing at being Angels in a series of spoofs that seemed more of a lark for the cast than for viewers, but this 2019 re-fashioning delivers to audiences a reasonable action plot (albeit one far too long and predictable) set in a spy agency that believes "hugs work" and includes some intelligent humour, refreshing girl-power messages and Kristen Stewart, Ella Balinska, and Naomi Scott saving the world, helped along the way by their "Bosley", director and star Elizabeth Banks.

★★★★☆

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Crowhaven Farm (1970)

In this 1970 made-for-tv horror, an unhappily married couple moves into the country estate she has inherited but far from benefitting their marriage as they had hoped, the move results in her having visions of distant-past witch trials and encountering other weirdness in her present day - but by far the most horrible thing in this mild tv distraction is not witches but an irksome subplot involving the couple's ten-year-old foster daughter.

★★☆☆☆

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