Tenet (2020)

It is basically a James Bond movie - an icy-cool, broody Daniel Craig one - but instead of a nuclear code or a diamond-powered laser or nude bomb, John David Washington's agent is pursuing a villain armed with a travel-backwards-through-time machine, meaning it's a Bond film loaded with mind-bending scenes in which some characters move forward and others backward through time, but just relax, remind yourself it's just an action film, and try to enjoy the nonsense...with subtitles on (it's incomprehensible otherwise) and while ignoring the second half's frequent clunking exposition and unsuccessful attempts at injecting emotion into the high-concept action.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

No Batman movie has ever taken itself quite so seriously as this third episode of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, a long and deadly earnest superhero opera that grows increasingly loud and monotonous as it goes on and on with a booming soundtrack that for almost three hours sounds like it is heralding the rise of the valkyries - your patience will be tested and you'll want to give it all away when suddenly towards the end a final act revitalises things.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Interstellar (2014)

An incredible amount of stuff to cover (multiple planets, multiple dimensions, things happening in the future and the past, and stuff occurring at different relative speeds) is probably why Interstellar felt perfunctory and rushed to me, and I thought the ending, which made others so emotional, was daft...but this was more engaging than The Martian (another lost-in-space story with a few of the same actors).

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Inception (2010)

Watching Inception made me want to disappear into a manufactured dreamscape too, away from the relentless overlong nonsense of this Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle and hopefully away from the inevitable Inception 2 and even more bodgy Inception 3 in which no-name Australian actors fight for a reality that stripped of any matrices looks more than a little like a muddy rave event in Meredith.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS