The Sex Of The Angels (El Sexo De Los Angeles) (2012)

The Sex Of the Angels (aka Angels of Sex) (or, my alternative title, How Difficult It Is To Set Up And Maintain A Threesome) is a very dry look at how Bruno, happily committed to his girlfriend Carla, encounters and starts having sex with Rai, a dancer, but despite the actors' obvious commitment to the film's positive polyamorous message and the attempt to keep things titillating with butt shots and sex scenes, this thruple never feels even slightly like it would go the distance, and the film is ultimately only as exciting as a well-intentioned public service announcement. 

★★☆☆☆

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Enigma (2018)

When a television show approaches the mother of a murdered woman proposing a 90-minute true-crime special that might help reveal the truth of the daughter's death, the mother is torn because first her husband, sisters, and large number of daughters must address some matters that until now have been dealt with as deeply private, and although this is an important and very well-acted film, there is something infuriating about watching all the extended family members and friends whispering and gossiping for an hour over something that, outside of conservative Chile at least, shouldn't stand in the way of a murder investigation.

★★☆☆☆

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Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)

A largely plotless survival horror with wooden 2D characters distinct from each other only in name, outfit, and weapon, this third Resident Evil movie, like the others, is easily dismissed as empty dross, but fans of CAPCOM's survival horror game series upon which these movies are based will derive great pleasure from the details - 3D geometric maps, zombie ravens, tourism posters - that recall so clearly the joys of the game.

★★☆☆☆

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Exit 8 (2025)

The computer game it is based on is a simple spot-the-difference game, but this movie adaptation starring the charismatic Ninomiya Kazunari expands the premise into something at times disturbing and often profoundly moving, turning the main world-weary character's struggle to find Exit 8 in an underground train station in Japan into an analogy for stepping up, taking a stand against, and refusing to ignore life's anomalies - no easy task anywhere, but especially in consensus-driven Japan, and particularly resonant in light of recent scandals involving Fuji TV and Johnny and Associates, and more broadly in this age of male reckoning.

★★★★☆

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El Angel (2018)

"Serial killer" seems the wrong word for the murderous criminal portrayed here - is it possible to distinguish between serial killers and murderous criminals? - but extra confusingly, this murderous criminal is Rob Puch, a real-life babyfaced killer from Argentina who in the 60s, working as a brazen career thief, killed eleven people, but look him up later - because this striking and well-acted movie will garner your interest in this peculiar character - and discover someone quite different to this eccentric, possibly sociopathic babyface here - staring out from newsppaper photos and Wikipedia pages is a sneering rapist and abuser (did the movie neglect to metnion that?) and it becomes hard to reconcile fact with this, what, fiction?

★★★★☆

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All the Kind Strangers (aka 'Evil In The Swamp') (1974)

A group of scowling kids inhabit a farmhouse and scout potential new fill-in 'parents' using a murderous recruitment process, in this made-for-American tv movie starring Stacy Keach as the latest mark to fall into the kids' trap, but the movie never really makes the most of its well-ahead-of-its-time 'Speak no evil' plot - there's no apparent reason for Martha to be mute, for example. 

★★☆☆☆

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Eyes Without A Face (Les Yeux sans visage) (1960)

It doesn't add up to anything terribly important, but Georges Janu's prefunctory 1960 horror is a visual pleasure and obvious inspiration for myriad horror movies to come - Vanilla Sky, Eyes Wide Shut, Halloween, Get Out, and The Silence of the Lambs are some of the horror movies I was reminded of watching many memorable scenes: a hard-to-watch face transplant, for example, and the haunting sight of a masked Ědith Scobe as Christiane picking her way through a mansion, its gardens, and dog kennels, like a bizarre marionette.

★★★★☆

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End Of The Century (Fin de siglo) (2019)

In this beautiful slip of a film — a romance tinged with sadness — Ocho, an Argentine poet, encounters Javi, a producer of children's television, while knocking about Barcelona one day and after immediately hitting it off is startled to learn they first met twenty years earlier at a time when Ocho, perhaps due to the times, wasn't yet himself.

★★★★★

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Elvis (2022)

It garnered the lead, Austin Butler, BAFTA and Golden Globe awards but he never has a chance to act given the relentless strobe of Baz Luhrmann's three-hour docudrama: the camera flicks, spins, and sweeps, never resting for a second on anything - Butler included - and we unnecessarily spin and enter Graceland upside-down several times, so, while interesting, this is an exhausting look at Elvis's life, his upbringing, dizzying rise to stardom, financial exploitation, and premature death. 

★★★☆☆

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Enola Holmes 2

In this sequel, Enola sets up a detective agency and investigates the disappearance of a girl from a London match factory, which is not a plot from Nancy Springer's books, apparently, but a new story written specially for this sequel that puts Springer's character front and centre in an actual historic union uprising - the rousing girl-power of the original movie is matched only at the very end after much long-windedness.

★★★☆☆

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Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

The irreverence of some of the universes in an infinite multiverse makes sense, but that doesn't mean literal sausage fingers, raccoon chefs, goggly-eyed rocks, and swirling black-hole bagels are any less irritating in this sci-fi adventure about a woman who learns a simple life lesson in the most repetitive, long-winded way imaginable - not from the first iteration of her multiverse, where the message was already crystal clear, but only after ad nauseam repetition of several of the silliest iterations - yes, literal sausage fingers again and again and again - over 139 minutes that feel longer than a zillion lifetimes strung together.

★★☆☆☆

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It Happened In Broad Daylight (Es geschah am hellichten Tag) (1958)

The book, adapted by Sean Penn in The Pledge (2001) with Jack Nicholson as the detective who promises a grieving mother he'll catch her child's killer, came later, but this 1958 Swiss-Italian-Spanish co-production is based Friedrich Dürrenmatt's even earlier screenplay - not the book - featuring the chilling child serial killer plot with a more palatable ending - the book's subtitle (The Pledge - Requiem for the Detective Novel) hints at the dark direction Dürrenmatt took with his refashioned plot, while this film, faithful to the earlier screenplay, can be enjoyed as a detective novel proper: a jaunty Swiss mystery with a thrilling police investigation.

★★★★☆

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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.

★★★☆☆

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The Heist of the Century (El Robo Del Siglo) (2020)

I tend not to like heist films - I lack patience with the set-up knowing the meticulous planning comes undone the second the plan is enacted and I never manage to care much for the crims (so what if everything goes belly up and they get caught?) - but this comedy thriller from Argentina is a rollicking good time, a heist film full of characters you can care about, based on the incredible true story of the 2006 robbery of the Banco Rio in Acassuso, Buenos Aires dubbed by media outlets at the time "The Heist of the Century", a crime staggering in its complexity and ingenuity and one that had the peculiar effect, only in Argentina, of turning the criminals into folk heroes including mastermind Fernando Araujo who wrote the source book and co-wrote this film's screenplay. 

★★★★☆

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Enola Holmes (2020)

The sister of the famous Baker Street detective, a character dreamt up by author Nancy Springer for a series of teen detective novels, is brought up outside the conventions of turn-of-the-century Britain and so as a young adult is perfectly equipped with the sass, street-smarts and probing scientific mind needed to solve a mystery - her mother disappears and a Marquess disappears and our hero, Enola, embarks on a rollicking, satisfying (well, mostly...not including the underdeveloped plot thread regarding Helena Bonham Carter's character) adventure through a London on the cusp of a sweeping social change.

★★★★☆

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D-Tox (aka 'eye see you') (2002)

Cops in a snowed-in detox facility are being picked off one-by-bloody-one in this movie, more mindless slasher than intelligent whodunnit despite the classic Agatha Christie set-up, with Sylvester Stallone playing a cop undergoing treatment for trauma after his own wife fell victim to an eye-poking serial drill killer with a ridiculous sprawling, poorly defined modus operandi, naturally still on the loose.

★☆☆☆☆

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Esteros (2016)

 

Esteros

It includes occasional glimpses of the beautiful Iberá wetlands and ends sweetly, but wading through the  flashbacks showing Matias and Jeronimo's burgeoning childhood romance and waiting for the adult Matias to reconcile long-lost feelings after he reunites with Jeronimo at the summerhouse where they first discovered their love for each other is pretty ponderous. 

★★☆☆☆ 

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The Equalizer 2 (2018)

McCall is back dishing out vigilante justice in not one but five concurrent missions that so overfill this sequel there's no room for any plot details - the reason people are being killed in the main storyline is because their names are on a list (and that is literally all there is to learn about the matter), and similarly there's no time for elaboration in the "Not Without My Daughter" opening scenes nor any detail offered in the overly-ambitious Woman In Gold side story that keeps interrupting the action; there's nothing much to know in the Dangerous Minds character-building side story involving McCall keeping a young man from falling in with gangbangers, and no detail (nor sense) in the Twister denouement in which a storm event conveniently evacuates McCall's hometown just in time for a bad-guy showdown, and finally, don't expect any elaboration of any kind in yet another episode, a kind of Promising Young Woman sequence involving gang rapists.

★★★☆☆

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I Am Elizabeth Smart (2017)

Competently acted with Skeet Ulrich in the role of Brian David Mitchell (the man who kidnapped 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 and who over nine months subjected her to rape and torture in the Utah wilderness), this made-for-tv movie is essentially a survivor impact statement with Smart herself appearing between scenes to narrate her oft-revisited real life crime story but this time from her now adult perspective as a mother, wife and activist against predatory crimes. 

★★☆☆☆

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The Clan (El Clan) (2015)

This true crime drama about the Puccio family, an outwardly respectable Buenos Aires family revealed soon after the end of Argentina's Dirty War in the mid-80s to be responsible for a series of shocking kidnappings and murders, ends with intertitles that tell the fate of each family member and reading them I found I still had no idea who was who, suggesting I should have paid more attention or that the movie, full of shots that linger unhelpfully over sex or offer clinical detail about who was doing what where and when, was made to revel in the horrific details, not to provide insights about the perpetrators and their motives, and was made primarily for viewers already familiar with the story.

★★★☆☆

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