Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)

It didn't help that an hour in our internet cut out and my viewing partner accidentally drummed up the original 2017 cut, not this 2021 refashioning by Zack Snyder, leaving us perplexed by scenes we'd already seen playing out of sequence, but even once we got back on track this unnecessarily long re-release stretches a bad two-hour movie to an interminable four-hour slog: a first hour and a half of false starts, a muddled middle split pointlessly between Batman's Justice League recruitment drive and Steppenwolf's "mother box" raids (the raids are doing the recruiting, making Batman's story redundant), and a finale that comes only after too many musical lamentations (each time Wonder Woman appears), too many dopey Flash close-ups, far too many little-boy shrugs from Superman, and way too much of that cyborg character so stiff and miserable we never once connect — four hours later, it isn't Justice League so much as Justice beLeaguered.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Rocky IV (1985)

Trading in his scantily clad beach runs alongside Apollo Creed in Rocky III for runs through Soviet snowfields with his new-look goatee, Balboa heads to Russia to fight a drug-enhanced Russian giant, Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) in this more-rudimentary-than-ever Rocky episode that is nine-tenths rock video training montage and only one-tenth boxing scenes cut with shots of what are quite possibly just cardboard cutouts of poor Adrian and her brother Paulie, both with nothing better to do than sadly watch on as the series inexorably worsens.

★☆☆☆☆

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Masters of the Universe (1987)

Dolph Lundgren does a great job as He-man - sometimes you'd think he really was a plastic Mattel action figure - and the characters and story perfectly recall the Saturday morning cartoon I grew up watching as a bleary child just out of bed and not yet capable of complex thought (He-man teams up with Earthling teenagers to recover a key that has allowed Skeletor to overtake Castle Greyskull) but despite all these positives, MotU is a famous turkey - a critical and commercial failure upon its release in 1987.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS