Every Secret Thing (2014)

You have to wonder at the atmosphere within the home of husband and wife authors David Simon and Laura Lippman: he wrote that rivetting but grim-as-grim true crime brick Homicide, and she is the author of over twenty detective novels, including the bleak one upon which this movie is based, about a detective (Elizabeth Banks) investigating a case of baby abduction that puts her back into contact with two kids, now adults, who seven years prior were charged, like the boy killers of real-life James Bulger, with the kidnap and murder of an infant - a sobering plot (and dinner-table conversation in the Simon-Lippman household, one presumes) given it is more interested in probing baby killer psychology than having fun with mystery reveals.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Murder at 1600 (1997)

Calamity in the White House, a movie motif on the increase after 1996s Mars Attacks and Independence Day, continues with this 1997 action mystery in which Wesley Snipes' get-in-there-and-do-it detective and Diane Lane's cool give-nothing-away Secret Service agent investigate the murder of a woman in a White House toilet cubicle and the pair of investigators go renegade, even breaking into the White House via its unsecured access tunnels, when they uncover a, yawn, conspiracy involving the President, the President's son, an international hostage situation, and a motive for murder that very strongly suggests - again - that film thinks women are completely disposable objects.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Glass House (2001)

A really excellent thriller about a newly orphaned heir to a fortune, possibly the target of a foster parents' murder plot, is Mary Stewart's Nine Coaches Waiting, a book I ripped through on the beach last summer, but this thriller, with its moribund first thirty minutes and a garbled plot about villainous foster parents who get their comeuppance even before they've realised their villainy and coordinated their dastardly plot, stars Diane Lane and Stellan Skarsgård as the impossibly beset foster parents and a stony Leelee Sobieski as the never-really-imperilled foster teenager.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

Zack Snyder opens this with the trauma of Bruce Wayne's childhood - a backstory no-one needs to see, not now, not again - and from this tired start it is clear he has approached his job of launching DC Comics' Justice League franchise like an overzealous fanboy wanting to include evvveeerything, mashing together Nolan's Dark Knight series with his own 2013 Henry Cavill Superman movie and ending up with a monstrous, laborious, not-fun-at-all Justice League origin story that briefly features a personality-free Wonder Woman and an overly familiar Lex LuHeathLedgZuckerbergJokethor...surely jumping straight into an already assembled Justice League-proper movie would have been more fun than this!?

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS