Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Taika Waititi's Thor episode dresses up the same old same old 'superhero battles a supervillain' plot in an 80s rock opera skin and fills it with big-name cameos, Taika Waititi's trademark kooky humour, and schoolkid-pleasing nonsense, but it is like this particular Marvel franchise is a hammer of God and try as he might Taika Waititi simply isn't able to lift it.

★★☆☆☆

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Avengers: Endgame (2019)

The remedy for all of the chaos Thanos caused at the end of Avengers: Infinity Wars is time travel, so lickety split Tony Stark creates that - a kind of Fitbit, stop asking questions - and that out of the way, the rest of Endgame's three-hour runtime is able to focus on fan-pleasing stuff that has series' devotees tweeting how many times they laughed and cried and has them marvelling at which superhero did what, where and why, and who can now use whoever else's weapon and which two hugged - totally awesome - but none of it likely to jazz anyone who hasn't invested heavily in a bulk of the preceding twenty-one Marvel space opera cartoons which culminate here, for these non-fans, in a not-very-fun nor satisfactory cinema experience that wallows in the depressions and anxieties, traumas and mother- and father-complexes of myriad morose superheroes suffering in the aftermath of Infinity War, including, in what turns out to be the most peculiar and depressing story arc of the entire franchise, the thorough ruination of the character of Chris Hemsworth's Thor.

★★☆☆☆

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Bad Times At The El Royale (2018)

This is The Hateful Eight transported to Richard Nixon- and Vietnam War-era Nevada slash California, except that Quentin Tarantino can sustain pulpy violent nonsense and this movie can't, as you'll see when the terrific slowburn set-up full of surprises ends up with nowhere to go and Chris Hemsworth's cult leader is left conducting protracted interrogations of characters he has no established reason to care about.

★★☆☆☆

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Vacation (2015)

There are some amusing predicaments typical of the sort the old Griswolds got themselves into, in this 2015 new generation tie-in to the National Lampoon's movie series, but the new movie doesn't work very well because where the Chevy Chase movies were comedies for the whole family with a moral compass and humour of both the more risque adult variety and some goofy childish stuff as well, this new movie is aimed squarely at a teenage audience judging from all the young people in it who swear like troopers, the outrageous lack of consequence in scenes that end calamitously with injury and death, and not to mention the update's distinct lack of heart — this is sometimes funny, but more often shrill, puerile.

★★☆☆☆

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Thor (2011)

The Xanadu stylings of the Thor world - glittery rainbow-coloured rollerskating paths leading up to a gold fob watch hanging in space called Asgard - crossed with the horned helmets, Elvin beards, and male bawdiness of Norse mythology, do not appeal but I persisted with this Chris Hemsworth-helmed number one of the Marvel Thor series knowing one day I'd need to have watched it in order to grapple with the other two (read 'three', 'four', 'twelve'...) - 'Thor: The Dark World' and 'Thor: Ragnarok' - and apart from a Lord Of The BoRings taint to the all-male armies that are fighting to control 'the nine realms', this is very familiar in a just-like-all-other-superhero-movies kind of way (a blonde Wonder Woman from an alien Themyscira ends up among humans being aided by a female Steve Trevor who shows the sort of immediate devotion to the potential lunatic that those women do who, a couple of letter-exchanges in, chose to marry their confessed mass-murderer-in-jail penpals), and it is all fine if slightly boring...but at least I am ready now to equally reluctantly watch the endless other Thors (but, full disclosure, I still need to wiki some aspects of the plot I missed along the way like who Idris Elba is, what exactly he is doing just standing there in space, and what on earth the nine realms are.)

★★★☆☆

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Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

The fairytale is given a grubby Middle Ages look and stretched to movielength by cgi sequences and extraneous details that are boring and add nothing to the clunkily told story, but as the queen with a personality disorder, Charlize Theron is effective.

★★☆☆☆

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The Cabin in the Woods (2011)

This teen slasher flick from Joss Whedon launches routinely but quickly distinguishes itself with its hugely likeable characters, wry humour, and a number of unconventional developments that turn the movie into something unexpected, much broader and more fun than usual entries in the genre.

★★★★☆

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