Nymph()maniac: Volume I (2013)

A man comes across a woman lying in an alley, takes her home and tends to her and while she talks him through every sexual encounter she has ever had in her life, he interjects with fly fishing analogies, in this occasionally very funny, always interesting first volume of director Lars von Trier's epic five-and-a-half hour contemplation on compulsive passionless sex, just one highlight of which is the mortifying but hilarious scene in which Uma Thurman as a spurned wife, the antithesis of Charlotte Gainsborough's Joe, tries to guilt-trip her husband and his new lover.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Snowman (2017)

Ice-cold and grisly Norwegian thrillers are popular among readers but this Jo Nesbø adaptation plays out on screen like it has been hacked to pieces and put back together again by a crazed killer with a piano wire, with scenes appearing out-of-order and side storylines, particularly the ones involving Chloë Sevigny as identical twins, Val Kilmer as a drunk detective, and J K Simmons as the leader of a Winter Olympics Host City bid, built-up elaborately like the serial killer's snowmen only to melt away without consequence.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer (2016)

Richard Gere's Norman Oppenheimer remains an enigma throughout this peculiar fantasy delivered as though it's a political biopic - nothing is learned of his family background, we don't know for certain where he sleeps, and there is no information as to his motivations for injecting himself as a "fixer" into the affairs of businesspeople, politicians and Jewish organisations in New York - and perhaps viewers are supposed to assume stuff about him, like he is the kind of dissociative, pathologically elusive character they've seen in Six Degrees of Separation or "Catch Me If You Can", which would be fine except that this frustrating film also finds myriad ways to keep Oppenheimer's actual "fixing" a mystery, with a titlecard eclipsing three crucial years of his life as Israeli Prime Minister Eshel's best friend - the relationship that is at the heart of the movie - and all potentially enlightening conversations observed unheard through shop windows or reduced to abrupt "It's done" phone conversations with "it" - his fixing - remaining as bewildering as Oppenheimer himself.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS