Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (2023)

D&D, that role-playing game enjoyed by unwashed geeks sitting for days at a table talking about charisma points and elvin lore, is adapted in this movie with Chris Pine - charming as always - playing the roguish leader of a misfit band of thieves who must traverse wild monster-strewn landscapes collecting magical items to help them overcome some wizards hellbent on fantasy-world domination, and it is a funny and fresh adventure, and you do not need to be a fantasy-loving unwashed geek to thoroughly enjoy it.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Don't Worry Darling (2022)

It's The Stepford Wives except the peculiar cookie-cut "perfect" town is in a desert, perhaps in California - a manicured suburbia overseen by Chris Pine's sneering bad guy, clearly up-to-no-good, who somehow controls all the males who come and go from mysterious jobs in the desert while their wives, Olivia Wilde and Florence Pugh for two, visibly foreign to this time period and these circumstances, make like 50s housewives but all the time suspecting something is amiss.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

All the Old Knives (2022)

 

Chris Pine's CIA agent, Harry Pelham meets up with a former romantic interest, Thandiwe Newton's CIA agent, Celia Harrison, over dinner in a swanky restaurant and just like that scene with George Clooney and J-Lo in the carboot in Out Of Sight, the talk is smooth and there is sexual chemistry bathed in a golden light, but they can't simply jump each other's bones because time has passed, Celia has a husband and child now, and Harry is in town on assignment to find out if Celia is the member of their old spy gang who leaked top secret data to a gang of airplane hijackers, and it all almost makes sense in the end.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

 

 

 

WW84 (2020)

Towards the end of this sprawling, goofy superhero almost-cartoon, one surely modelled on Superman II and III, Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman has trouble pushing her way through a maelstrom of wind and swirling A4 papers — I don't know why — and her plight mirrors that of her audience who have at that point struggled for nearly three hours with this sequel's maelstrom of unclear ideas, left asking questions like, "Whose wishes have been granted and whose wishes have been renounced?", "When a wish is renounced, what shifts in reality take place?", "Why wasn't Steve Trevor simply magicked to 1984 in his own body instead of this movie's convoluted Oh God! You Devil! bodyswapping nonsense?", "Was that schmuck (this movie's Oh God! You Devil! original rockstar) ever missed by anyone?", "What is a broadcasting machine and how is it that a boy on a freeway can communicate with his father via it?", "Why can't today's sfx technology make superfast running look good?" and, the question that most preoccupied me during WW84's exceedingly long runtime: "Do superhero movie studios deliberately ride this wave of excellent originals followed by overcooked, cheap sequels, seeing what they can cheaply get away with once audiences have bought-in?"

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

This Means War (2012)

Two intelligence operatives start dating the same woman and while she, with her bestie's help, wrests with the question, "How big of a slut am I?" the spies covertly film her, shadow her, break into and bug her home and office and manipulate her, and the most telling thing about the whole deeply unlikeable affair is the men are just keeping checks on each other - the incursion upon Reese Witherspoon's character's life is incidental, something that doesn't seem to occur to anyone.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Hell or High Water (2016)

In the second of the loose trilogy of Taylor Sheridan-penned films set on the American frontier (a lawless, brutal frontier in Sicario, closed, secretive in Wind River, but here corporatised, forgotten and dying) two brothers commit a series of bank robberies while a pair of sheriffs try to work out who the thieves are and why they are stealing such small amounts of money.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

Have your eyelids toothpicked open while The Secret plays on repeat OR have as much fun watching this Disney fantasy as it incessantly hammers its positive psychology message - that's everything - while all else - logic and plot, story and watchability, even basic sense - is nothing. 

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Star Trek (2009)

The 11th Star Trek film is the action-packed first of the reboots which cleverly combines a fresh new cast (including a perfectly cast Chris Pine as Captain James T Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock) with an alternate reality/time travel plot that allows director J J Abrams to go right back to the beginning (the birth of Kirk) and then get loose with Star Trek dogma.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Wonder Woman (2017)

After her personality-free debut in the lamentable Batman vs Superman, Wonder Woman comes into her own in this blockbuster and even though hers is the same fish-out-of-water story as Thor's, full of the same WWI derring-do as 'Captain America', DCs 'Wonder Woman' still manages to be a refreshing change from all the movies about her male colleagues and a break from the smart-arses of the Marvel universe, featuring a mature, sensible female hero set to become a panacea for all that is wrong with the male world.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Into the Woods (2014)

If you can look past the fact this whole elaborate tangle of fairytales could have been avoided if the characters stopped their incessant singing and just sat down and calmly talked to one another, and if you are not repelled by the movie's several unpleasant adult-child relationships, you might enjoy this star-studded film version of the long-running Broadway musical featuring Meryl Streep doing her best Witchy Poo.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014)

The always charismatic Chris Pine steps into the lead role of this fifth Jason Bourne Jack Reacher Ethan Hunt Jack Ryan movie which is a glossy, youthful addition to the Tom Clancy film series but one that completely runs out of steam when Keira Knightley as Jack's fiance turns up unexpectedly in Paris mid- his first deadly assignment, is told her husband's secret business there, and then with a glib "while you're here" is enlisted by CIA zombie Kevin Costner to front up to a dinner assignment with a hideously violent Russian bad guy...and of course ends up a hapless pawn...yawn.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Star Trek Beyond (2016)

That scene, barely a second long, showing Sulu when he is not at the helm of the Enterprise is a brilliant addition to a series that at its core is a celebration of universal diversity and inclusion, with this particular episode also succeeding where perhaps Into Darkness didn't, delivering good old reliable Star Trek space exploration, action, humour and philosophy — the franchise doesn't need too many tweaks or new skins or tricks, as its fifty year anniversary this year clearly demonstrates.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

A terror attack sets in motion the convoluted events of this 2013 Star Trek episode which eventually ties together a number of plot threads about warheads, cryogenically frozen superhumans and an Enterprise stopover at Kronos where the Klingons live, but in Director J J Abrams' hands, this scifi action is punchy, fun, exciting and full of ace special effects even if it apparently disappointed Trekkies and contains no openly gay Starfleet officers.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS