Citizen X (1995)

You have to tolerate an Irish actor (Stephen Rea) and an English one (Imelda Staunton) and a Canadian one (Donald Sutherland) and a Swedish/French one (Max von Sydow) doing Russian accents and with straight faces spouting lines that make Soviet Union bureaucrats investigating serial murders sound like petulant preschoolers more concerned about 'saving Soviet Union face' than apprehending the killer of fifty-two victims, but this grim true crime story builds to something satisfactory over time, about Andrei Chikatilo's crimes and the advent of criminal profiling in the Soviet Union.

★★★☆☆

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Ordeal by Innocence (1985)

The David Brubeck Quartet jazz soundtrack is the best thing and the worst thing about this Agatha Christie adaptation, on the one hand keeping things atmospheric and cool as Donald Sutherland's paleontologist returns to the UK from Antartica after a two-year-long expedition to discover he was the missing alibi of a man since hanged for murder, but on the other hand robbing scenes of weight by going eclectically on and on and suggesting a complexity not shared by the plot.

★★★☆☆

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

The second film adaptation of Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers (after the first in 1956) is this terrifically creepy and frequently startling 1978 version with Donald Sutherland,  Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, and Brooke Adams playing Public Health inspectors and friends who investigate when, seemingly overnight, San Francisco (its mud bath bathhouses, its bookshops, its restaurants, workplaces and streets) become overrun with people who, according to their loved ones, aren't really them at all!

★★★★☆

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The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

The adventures of Katniss Everdeen continue in this, for readers of the book, perfectly watchable but for all others, slightly mystifying sequel that sees the heroine propelled to celebrity status, on tour by high-speed train across 'the districts', involved in backstage image management and audience manipulation, becoming the reluctant figurehead of a rebel movement, then thrown into the death arena that now features mandrills, oh, and poison mist, oh, and lightning, oh, and tidal waves, oh, and mockingbirds, oh, and wait, it's a clock...?

★★☆☆☆

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The Hunger Games (2012)

If in your mind Big Brother evictions and "rose ceremonies" lack a little bloodspill and need, say, a few more snapped necks and some more arrows to the contestants' eye sockets, you'll enjoy this movie based on the first of Suzanne Collins' books about young Katniss Everdeen selected to participate in a televised fight to the death, but personally I fail to see why this series is so popular given its charmless and unnecessary extrapolation of the tenets of reality tv to their most violent extreme.

★★☆☆☆

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JFK (1991)

As New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, Kevin Costner is required to deliver only short and grammatically simple lines and he delivers them all the same wooden way with upward inflection as though everything is a question, but his woodenness suits the machine-gunned details of the JFK investigation, presented here in the first of Oliver Stone's three President movies (so far), this one an epic three-and-a-half hour conspiracy theory, some of the details of which you have the advantage over Jim Garrison of being able to shoot out of the water with a quick Wiki search on your phone while you are watching.

★★★☆☆

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The Best Offer (2013)

An auction house director becomes besotted with an agoraphobic client who keeps her identity a secret and never shows her face in this rather annoying mystery full of weirdos, peculiar steampunk fairytale flourishes, affected acting, heavy-handed analogies, unconvincing relationships, and shameless red herrings keep you guessing to the end but leave you feeling cheated.

★★☆☆☆

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The Calling (2014)

Susan Sarandon plays Frances McDormand in a Fargo-style police procedural complete with cops out of their depth in a snowladen backwater, but the Fargo quirkiness which is interesting gives way to a leaden serial killer plot with an especially daft final scene.

★★☆☆☆

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Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

With an elaborate lie, Will Smith ingratiates himself with affluent Ouisa and Flan Kittredge in this pretentious, wordy, tragic, and ultimately cathartic treatise on the human condition, inspired by a real New York professional interloper -- and I love it!

★★★★★

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