The Sense of an Ending (2017)

This movie adaptation of Julian Barnes' Man Booker prize-winning The Sense Of An Ending is as enjoyable a watch as the book is a read but with both, after you've shrugged at the end, you're left with the distinct Sense that the story was kept deliberately ambiguous because to have stated things outright would have been to reveal it to be a mere sordid sex drama...and anyway, the source of the ambiguity, ostensibly the heart of the story - that self-interested men are unreliable narrators - really only extends to main character Tony Webster's postcard- and/or letter-writing because after that, the story shifts to poor scapegoat Adrian and his life story far too closely mirroring too many others' (that of an unfortunate classmate, for one, and Tony Webster's own life, similar in far too many respects).

★★★★☆

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Under the Sand (Sous Le Sable) (2000)

A woman's husband vanishes without trace from an unpatrolled beach in France in François Ozon's precursor to his 2003 Swimming Pool, another movie in which he has Charlotte Rampling doing what Charlotte Rampling does (in 45 Years, in Swimming Pool...), drifting around as an emotionally, physically distant older woman who may or may not be delusional, grappling with loneliness or interacting with figaments of her imagination.

★★★★☆

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45 Years (2015)

In the week leading up to a party marking their 45th wedding anniversary, a couple receive the news that the frozen body of the man's former lover has been recovered from a Swiss mountain fissure vent, which is the melodramatic premise not of an icy Scandanavian psychological horror-thriller about the past bringing into question matters of love, memory and truth, but an extremely gently - no, glacially paced British drama about the past bringing into question matters of love, memory, and truth.

★★★★☆

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The Verdict (1982)

In the 90s, John Grisham finessed the legal thriller, pitting young, ambitious "David" lawyers against corrupt "Goliath" corporations, ensuring their hardwork and unerring moral compasses were rewarded in the end with rousing courtroom wins, and cramming in a zillion thrilling subplots, but this is 1982, pre-Grisham's first novel, and Paul Newman's silver-fox lawyer is an alcoholic we don't much care about even after hearing a sob story, his hard work is confined to a single night of phone calling which just magically turns up the wee administrative matter upon which the entire court case hinges, the subplots here (a hostile judge, a duplicitous love interest) are momentary scenes abandoned, and while there are plenty of pompous, uncaring Boston stuffed shirts roaming about unfazed by moral injustice and suffering, nothing here constitutes a diabolical "Goliath" organisation that deserves its comeuppance, so all-in-all this courtroom procedural is dry and unfolds at a pace akin to reading a court transcript, not a John Grisham page-turner.

★★☆☆☆

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Swimming Pool (2003)

A mystery writer on deadline retreats to her publisher's Spanish hacienda to really engross herself in writing but instead becomes engrossed in the publisher's wayward sex-kitten daughter unexpectedly there - she creates mayhem but will surely provide enough fodder to ease the writer's writer's block, in this suspense thriller full of all the right ingredients but sadly undercooked.

★★★☆☆

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I, Anna (2012)

A man lies dead on the floor of an apartment and mystery surrounds the death only because of this movie's oblique storytelling, with Gabriel Byrne playing the detective inspector who doesn't solve the mystery so much as wait out irrelevant subplots and scenes shown out-of-order which, when all is said and done, amount to a dreary episode spanning about twelve hours.

★☆☆☆☆

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Melancholia (2011)

Stultifying in its attempts at sumptuousness and profundity, particularly in its first half, Melancholia, a melodrama about the world's least fun wedding played out as a planet heads on a collision course with Earth, is nonetheless so stunningly photographed, so well-acted by Kirsten Dunst, and so curious a work that it manages to overcome its many failings to be, well, watchable.

★★☆☆☆

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