Poor Things (2023)

The saddest thing about Yorgos Lanthimos's icky Poor Things, a title that I think refers to audiences after two long hours, is that it takes an elaborate steampunk alternate fairytale-reality full of wonky actors playing wonky characters - including a Frankenstein sex doll-come-to-life with, perhaps don't think about it too hard, a child's brain - for the director  to elucidate so very little about the plight of women in today's world (or to be precise, the plight of women in fantasy realities of an alternate past) and there isn't much said of interest about sex or old-school gendered-rules about social propriety, either.

★☆☆☆☆

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La La Land (2016)

Facing daily rejection in audition rooms, a waitress in a coffee shop on the Warner Bros Studio lot in LA longs for the day when someone discovers her, believes in her, and thinks she is perfect, but her dreams of Hollywood success are interrupted when she encounters someone who does just that - a pianist pursuing his own dreams of owning a jazz bar.

★★★★★

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The Favourite (2018)

Director Yorgis Lanthimos's latest and most accessible movie to date tells of Queen Anne's friendships with the privileged Lady Sarah and 'downstairs' Abigail, two women in competition to be the Queen's favourite; sumptuous period detail, a cracker performance by Olivia Coleman as Queen Anne, and titled chapters that recall Barry Lyndon help disguise the fact that this is essentially an episode of Melrose Place transported to the 1700s - one of the ones where Jane Mancini and her sister Sydney Andrews fight and end up in the pool.

★★★★☆

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Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

This is a breezy Woody Allen romantic comedy after Oscar Wilde about a cynical magician (Colin Firth) who, despite his scepticism about her claims, falls in love with a psychic (an always delightful Emma Stone).

★★★★☆

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Irrational Man (2015)

Not only is this 2015 Woody Allen movie thematically similar to his 2005 Match Point - another of his movies that references Crime and Punishment -- but this movie's Joaquin Phoenix (a tormented philosophy professor who is reinvigorated by murder) very closely resembles that movie's Jonathan Rhys Meyers, which makes you wonder if Woody Allen hasn't churned out so many films so often that he has lost track of which ideas he has already committed to celluloid, but thankfully he casts Emma Stone as a college student in the murderous professor's thrall and she is a fresh element and is as always captivating.

★★★☆☆

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Birdman (2014)

What we tell ourselves and what our critics tell us, what the truth is and whether or not we or them or anyone else really gives a sh*t are the ideas tossed around in this "talky, depressing, philosophical bullsh*t" about a superhero movie celebrity trying to open a Broadway production, anxious about how it will be received.

★★★★☆

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The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

The first Andrew Garfield-helmed Spiderman movie was perky and fun but this second outing wallows from start to finish - it feels like the plot was an afterthought written around the computer-generated action sequences. 

★☆☆☆☆

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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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The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

The credits of the three Spiderman movies starring Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst had barely rolled when this unnecessary but thoroughly enjoyable reboot appeared with the perkier casting of Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone and a shinier, less thoughtful take on the awkward high schooler's first outing as a superhero.

★★★☆☆

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