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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Blue Velvet (1986)

David Lynch's neo-noir cult classic from 1986 pre-dates Twin Peaks and his increasingly mind-bending films of the 90s and is remarkable for its hideous gas-sucking, dry-humping villain, its uniquely Lynchian imagery, its dreamlike scenes - like the one with the dancer on the car rooftop, and the standing lobotomee ' and for helping salvage Kyle MacLachlan's career after the director's much-maligned Dune.

★★★★☆

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The American Friend (Der Amerikanische Freund) (1977)

Wim Wender's take on Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley is to have Dennis Hopper saunter around Hamburg in overalls, a cowboy hat and a Willy Wonka haircut, but if you can get past this incongruity and accept Dennis Hopper's sharp edges and surface madness in place of the literary Ripley's sophisticated sociopathy, there is lots to enjoy about this story of a sick man coerced into a series of murders and who ends up with a strange new friend and abettor.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

River's Edge (1986)

Grubby American high school friends react to the fact one of their group has committed murder but not in the way you'd imagine, in this difficult to watch drama inspired by a true story (!) featuring such a great deal of adolescent ugliness that in the end, like the apathetic teenagers in it, you'll find the story so depressing, so grim, you'll just want to dismiss it all out of hand.

★★☆☆☆

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