The Idea of You (2024)

A romance ignites between a woman and a man, and standing in the way of their being in love forevermore are their considerable age gap (she is a 40-year-old single mother of a grown child and an art dealer; he is twenty-four) and his life in the spotlight as a boy-band idol, but both issues result in only two brief blips of conflict over the course of this breezy, thin rom-slight-com, padded out with not very rewarding Backstreet Boys-style song-and-dance routines.  

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Werner Herzog takes as his inspiration the story of Carlos Fitzcarrald, a Peruvian rubber trader in the 1800s who transported a disassembled ship over a mountain, and turns this audacious business endeavour into a tragi-comic misadventure of epic proportions, rendered with his usual metered storytelling and cinematic visuals, but there's also rich thought-provoking analogy in the fact his own film-making famously became an undertaking as audacious, dismaying, and mad as Fitzcarrald's.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Saturday Night (2024)

It was an ugly time in comedy when SNL first aired, really, when comedians were smirking smug white men being loud, woofing at women, humping legs, and plastering schoolboy notes on everything (all seen here), but SNL fans will love this behind-the-scenes look at the hours leading up to the very first episode of what is now a 50-year-old comedy institution and anyone into, say, The Muppets or 30 Rock will be interested in the madcapped goings-on behind the scenes of another live production.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Lara (2019)

All sorts of ideas about what is going on will run through your head watching this intense and drily funny character study of Lara (Lara Jenkins, the ubermother of a concert pianist) who, on her sixtieth birthday, buys up the remaining tickets for her son's premiere concert recital and spends the hours leading up to the event handing them out to her acquaintances, and exactly who she is and what she is doing and what drives her, and how and why she drives so many around her away, not just old coworkers who hate her but also her son who appears not to welcome her to his concert, isn't perfectly clear until the film ends with the formidable lead Corianne Harfouch's casting one last long deliciously ice-blue stare down the camera...and then you'll know.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Last Christmas (2019)

Kate, a Bridget Jones type - read, 'annoying' - portrayed by Emilia Clarke, makes a mess of everything - love, work, and relationships including the relationship she has with her boss (Michelle Yeoh in her now perpetual role as a cantankerous Asian Tiger mom), so it makes sense Kate falls for Henry Golding's character - he's a messily conceived part-Willy Wonka pixie-saviour, part-Mr Darcy romantic stalwart slogging-around-on-a-bicycle - who inspires Kate to fix up her messes before the movie reaches an unlikely Christmas magic fantasy ending - a bit like if Bridget Jones suddenly visited Santa's North Pole workshop - but it's an ending that somehow, through all the mess, manages to be touching.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

しんぼる ('Symbol') (2009)

This very funny oddity jumps back and forth between two disparate situations - an aged Mexican wrestler gears up for a bout as his family races to attend and, in a completely separate absurdist fantasy, a man-child wakes inside a white cube and finds he has no means of escape but there are a large number of cherubs' penis buttons dotted around the room that, when pushed, dispense food and other random objects.....really.

★★★☆☆ for the wrestler story

★★★★☆ for the absurd comedy

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Champions (2023)

A drunk driver (Woody Harrelson) is court-appointed to coach "The Friends", a basketball team made up of intellectually disabled youths, which is a position that he thinks hardly compares to the work he usually does with national league teams, but you know at the outset of this comedy-sports movie that he will fall in love with his work, fall in love with a woman with whom he initially grates, and come to better appreciate himself and his charges over the course of an easy - and on a couple of occasions emotional - watch.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Poor Things (2023)

The saddest thing about Yorgos Lanthimos's icky Poor Things, a title that I think refers to audiences after two long hours, is that it takes an elaborate steampunk alternate fairytale-reality full of wonky actors playing wonky characters - including a Frankenstein sex doll-come-to-life with, perhaps don't think about it too hard, a child's brain - for the director  to elucidate so very little about the plight of women in today's world (or to be precise, the plight of women in fantasy realities of an alternate past) and there isn't much said of interest about sex or old-school gendered-rules about social propriety, either.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Longest Yard (2005)

Winding up in jail after a drunken car crash, an ex-football player and man-generally-making-a-giant-mess-of-his-life Paul Crewe (Sandler) is coerced by the prison warden to coach a football team made up of prisoners, but things become complicated in this remake of the 1974 original when this reluctant coach becomes torn between wanting his ragtag team of prisoners to win an upcoming game versus prison guards (and so redeeming himself after so much failure) and succumbing to pressure from the prison warden to let the prison staff win.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Weird: The Al Jankovich Story (2022)

I wasn't terribly interested to know more about the 80s pop song parodist Weird Al Jankovich, but one minute with this droll comedy with its hilarious cliched approach to the music biopic and tongue-in-cheek exaggeration and I was hooked, laughing and snorting all the way through as Weird Al's life and times is, well, expertly parodied.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Housebound (2014)

A permanently scowling young woman is sentenced to house arrest at her mother's house, the cluttered multi-storeyed homestead of her childhood that her mum thinks may be haunted, in this really amusing horror comedy that entertains as well as it creeps-you-out, and it has elements of absurdly funny mystery, too.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Masquerade (Fr: 'Mascarade') (2022)

W Somerset Maughan described the French Riviera as a sunny place for shady individuals; in this movie, the shady individuals - grifters of the Parasite kind who inveigle their way into the lives of the French Riviera's rich and glamorous - are themselves gorgeous, and so it isn't hard at all to watch these beautiful creatures, like Pierre Nimey's listless toyboy Adrien or Marine Vacth's desperate single mum Margot (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels operating their grifts off yachts and from opulent mansions), even if their loooong game becomes tired and increasingly hard to believe over the movie's two and a bit long hours. 

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Doc Hollywood (1991)

The appeal of this comedy escaped me when I was in high school and all around me were lauding its praises, and now, having watched it again in 2023, I feel vindicated - again left cold, not amused by a city doctor's court-ordered stint in a rural backwater where he prattles with only personality-free hicks and embarks on a brittle romance. 

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Spin Me Round (2022)

When a restaurant branch manager scores a weeklong business trip to Italy for a professional development course delivered by the international megastar owner of her restaurant chain, she imagines that Tuscan sunsets, a rustic Italian villa, and romance are in store, but those expectations are immediately let down when dullard Craig picks her and a bunch of other hopefuls up from the airport, in this dry comedy that hilariously blends Office Space-style corporate dreariness with Masterchef-style foodie-ism and Griswold's-style Americans-in-Europe dagginess.  

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Larry Crowne (2011)

Had the title been Late to Class, this movie would clearly have been a romantic comedy about a newly-unemployed boomer who heads back to school in order to give his life new direction, but with the austere title Larry Crowne and a screenplay written by director Tom Hanks that keeps the romantic leads at a remove, held apart by educator-student propriety, the movie, drily funny, not hilarious, remains an oddity, not a Sleepless In Seattle or You've Got Mail romcom great.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Triangle of Sadness (2022)

We meet a male model and his model girlfriend having dinner at a swanky restaurant and an argument starts between them over paying the bill; from there this dry comedy moves aboard a ship offering cruises to the rich and famous and hell breaks loose there, too, offering more sharp commentary about privilege and control in a modern world of poor freeloaders, rich hoarders, those in service and those who wantonly wield power.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Murder Mystery 2 (2022)

Not as sophisticated a mystery as the plot of a Murder, She Wrote episode, this sequel to Netflix's 2019 Murder Mystery at least improves on that original, generating a few laughs and keeping the pace brisk and the length blessedly short as Nick and Audrey Spitz end up on a tropical island for a wedding where a murderer strikes.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Candleshoe (1977)

There's some dated gender stereotyping and at least one cringeworthy allusion to race, but Disney's Candleshoe is a classic family adventure in which a young Jodie Foster, a year on from her standout Taxi Driver performance, stars as a streetwise kid who inveigles her way into a family mansion by pretending to be a long-lost heir because she wants to get her hands on a hidden treasure.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

The joys of The Little Shop of Horrors, which as a musical continues to lure to theatres crowds that raucously sing along and guffaw, elude me and watching this 1960 movie which started it all - not a musical but a camp scifi with a wet sense of humour and a cult following, made on a budget of $30,000 - I am nonethewiser, mystified as to why people so enjoy the story of a plant named Audrey Two which has an insatiable appetite for human blood..

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Ghost of St. Michael's (1941)

The comedy is of a bawdy music hall variety and a young Charles Hawtrey appears, so this 1941 comedy thriller feels like an early entry in the Carry On series with the students and staff, including bumbling science teacher Will Lamb, relocated to a haunted church in Scotland during World War II where a plot involving a ghost and murder plays out in mildly entertaining fashion.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS