The Batman (2022)

When the topic of The Batman came up, a teenager I tutor summed it up perfectly as a movie about a "miserable Batman with miserable friends fighting a miserable villain in a miserable city", and he wasn't wrong, because this brooding restyling of the franchise positions Robert Pattison's Batman as a sullen emo and has him, Zoe Kravitz's slinky Selena, the mobsters and Gotham street crims, the justice system, and in fact the entire city of Gotham sunk in a psychotic depression while The Riddler, a Heath Ledger-Joker-echo, murders public figures and taunts authorities with tightly scripted David Berkowitz-style codes - all of which oppressive heaviness is fine - it's Batman, afterall - until the final act reveals the supposed root of the city's decay and it feels, in comparison, almost trivial.

★★★☆☆

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Dead Man Down (2013)

Intriguing enough given its roundabout way of revealing its fairly basic plot, this revenge flick about a man double-crossing a gang lord wants to be an Infernal Affairs/The Departed action thriller with the epic-ness of Heat but the writing, which tries to squeeze romance out of a situation between a blackmailer and the man she wants to coerce into committing murder for her - writing which also has Noomi Rapace's character driven to murder because three red lines on her forehead destroyed her career as a beautician - is just too dopey too often for the action to be able to soar to Infernal Affairs/Heat heights.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Solace (2015)

Law & Order repeats were playing back-to-back on the other channel and what a far superior viewing experience those police procedurals would have been compared to this heavy-handed claptrap also about a police investigation but one headed by a psychic (Anthony Hopkins) whose heavy metal film-clip visions, in ponderous slow motion, of coffee cups breaking and of eyes bleeding and of drips breaking the surface of some water, help serial killer investigators by telling them minutes in advance of their own human senses which bin to search at a crime scene, what the name of a news kiosk in a train station is, which of five taxis to follow in a traffic jam, and what kind of tattoo a bystander has at yet another of this film's dreary candelabra-decorated, rose-petal-strewn murder scenes. 

★☆☆☆☆

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True Detective (Season 2)

True Detective Season 2 (DVD

True Detective Season 2 (DVD)

Season 2 centres around the murder of a city planner in California and confirms True Detective as an anthology series about twisted murders committed by masked culprits, investigated by deeply flawed police officers - here, three, all deeply, deeply cracked - who engage in a massive shootout in about episode 5, and like the first season, this one is star-studded (Rachel McAdams, Taylor Kitsch, Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn star), is cinematic, but is let down by the ponderousness of its first four episodes, by its overreaching scope (cults and gay shame and extramarital affairs and adoption and sexual harrassment counselling sessions are just some of the extraneous matters that keep things mindbogglingly busy) and it is also let down by the pure (daytime) soapiness of scenes between Vince Vaughn's Frank, a club owner up to his neck in corruption and crime, and his wife, Jordan, his business partner and wannabe-bearer of his child.

★★★☆☆

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Director Yorgis Lanthimos' fascinating, disturbing allegorical tale is about a cardiologist (a shaggy-bearded Colin Farrell looking like serial killer surgeon Harold Shipman) whose wife and children are made to bear the price of his sins, and it is so rhythmic, so hypnotic, by the end you will be able to predict next lines even while the point of the whole eludes you.

★★★★☆

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Widows (2018)

Lynda La Plante's crime soap, a book previously made into a British tv series and now, here, a star-studded American blockbuster, ends up feeling like its story of gangster wives, forced to do a 'job' after the death of their husbands, overreaches in its attempts to be a sprawling epic because while its flourishes - race and gender politics, personal trauma, relationship angst - are interesting, none seems warranted given the heist at the core of the movie ends up being a home robbery requiring the widows to climb some stairs and make sure first that no-one is home.

★★★☆☆

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Horrible Bosses (2011)

Three employees plot to do away with their horrible bosses, a plan that sees them, respectable men leading regular suburban lives, venturing clumsily into an underworld of crime, which is the premise of this shrieky, snide, sneery and unpleasant comedy of minimal laughs featuring Hollywood's most smug performers.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Beguiled (2017)

In her movie based on Thomas Cullinan's novel, is Sofia Coppola commenting on the fortitude and independence of women as men all around them tear each other apart in the American Civil War, or suggesting women make really bad rash decisions in the absence of men, or is Coppola's equally celebrated and lamented light touch as a director in fact a fear of saying anything at all, and had Annie Wilkes hobbled Paul Sheldon to save his life, would 'Misery' have been a thriller of greater psychological depth, are the sorts of questions that come up while watching this beautifully acted, stunningly photographed (the scene in which Kirsten Dunst picks flowers in the overgrown garden of a great southern plantation house is alone worth the price of admission), occasionally amusing, but mystifying and very slight, slice of feminist, no, anti-feminist, no, fem...gothic period drama.

★★★★☆

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Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them (2016)

Pokemon meets Harry Potter in this 2016 adaptation of J K Rowling's book about a Doctor Who-like 'magizoologist', who appears to be constipated, who carries creatures around in a Tardis-like suitcase - there's lots of Potterverse references to delight fans but little for anyone else to care about and just as you resign yourself to the idea the movie is simply about enjoying the spectacle of fantastic beasts running amok in New York, there comes a "big reveal" that suggests you were supposed to have paid closer attention to things afterall.

★★☆☆☆

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Fright Night (2011)

Colin Farrell does a great vampire slinking around with menace and there are two inventive vampire special effects which raise a smile, but otherwise this update of the 1985 original about a high schooler who discovers a neighbour is a vampire, has, in adopting a more sophisticated look and abandoning restraint, lost some of the original's daggy fun and, er, bite.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Lobster (2015)

Several analogies about relationships and singledom, each of momentary interest, are thrown together into one excruciatingly long, incredibly boring mess of a movie about love in a rigidly dichotomous future world; it plays out like a five minute comedy skit stretched to two (or was it three?) hours and for all its effort, offers very little in the way of meaningful relationship insights.

★☆☆☆☆

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Total Recall (2012)

Strip the original of its kookiness, Schwarzenegger's wooden acting, the NQR SFX - in other words, strip it of much of its fun, imagination and daring - and you get this unnecessary remake, its problems compounded by the presence of a particularly plucked, waxed, plasticky and possibly wholly computer-generated Colin Farrell.

★★☆☆☆

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