Charlie's Angels (2019)

The earlier movies were especially vacant exercises with Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu not so much playing the Angels as playing themselves playing at being Angels in a series of spoofs that seemed more of a lark for the cast than for viewers, but this 2019 re-fashioning delivers to audiences a reasonable action plot (albeit one far too long and predictable) set in a spy agency that believes "hugs work" and includes some intelligent humour, refreshing girl-power messages and Kristen Stewart, Ella Balinska, and Naomi Scott saving the world, helped along the way by their "Bosley", director and star Elizabeth Banks.

★★★★☆

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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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Brightburn (2019)

Brightburn flips the Superman origin story, making the baby delivered by spacepod to a couple on a remote farm the villain, not the superhero, but in the end, after the movie resorts to gore - glass shards to one character's magnified cornea and a steering wheel to another character's head - to distinguish itself and pad the runtime, all that can be said is yes, this spacepod boy is a real villain, not a superhero - and that is the extent of it.

★★☆☆☆

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The Next Three Days (2010)

In this American remake of Pour Elle (Anything for Her), Russell Crowe plays a college professor who decides to break his wife, convicted of murder, out of jail and luckily for him, he has what feels like an eternity - the film's two hours and thirty-three minute runtime - to do it and it turns out to be a rather simple matter of cutting a phone line and doing a letter switcheroo, so turn off your brains and content yourself with the college professor's reality free of inconvenient details.

★★★☆☆

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Movie 43 (2013)

Perhaps compiled from footage recovered from the SNL cutting room floor, this laugh-free sketch comedy compilation is remarkable only for the incredible number of A-list Hollywood stars who were willing to appear in its appalling skits about excrement, sperm, grubby sex practices, incest...

☆☆☆☆☆

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