Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020)

There are no characters and no acting here, just famous people in make-up in this terribly unengaging anti-superhero movie from the DC stable, a movie so pedestrian, so uninteresting it can't even think of anything fun to do when staging a fistfight staged in a carnival funhouse, and while it is nice to see women in the front seat of a superhero vehicle, this twisted, damaged group of caricatures unite only in the final scenes and only under threat of death, leaving the supposed girlpower message as flat and joyless as everything else.

★☆☆☆☆ 

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Moulin Rouge (2001)

After Strictly Ballroom and Romeo and Juliet, Baz Luhrmann's next big breakout success was this showy "jukebox musical", a carry-on set in Paris featuring a forlorn playwright, a pompous Duke financing his play, and the leading lady they both love, and for all its showiness, boisterousness, fandango, and hot air, it is about nothing much at all and suffers dreadfully from the casting of a partucularly low-aspect Nicole Kidman as the focus of so much passion.

★★☆☆☆

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Our Kind Of Traitor (2016)

Even Ewan McGregor's everyman, a university Poetics professor, says two-thirds of the way through this John le Carré adaptation that he doesn't know why he is still in the picture - having been randomly chosen at the outset to run a message for the Russian mafia's creative accountant, the prof doggedly sticks around, volunteering further help when it makes zero sense for him to do anything other than remove himself entirely from the escalating danger that increasingly involves British Intelligence and dead bodies, but despite this thin plotting, Our Kind of Traitor is an entertaining thriller, tense rather than full of action, set in glamorous locations like Marrakesh, London and Paris, and a bit like Patriot Games in the way a couple's domestic everyday is threatened suddenly by spy thrills.

★★★☆☆

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Jack the Giant Slayer (2013)

The Giant Slayer story I remember was about a false hero talking about flies, not giants, when he boasted he'd downed six, and the Beanstalk story was a fairytale involving a cow sale and just one giant with a keen sense of smell, but this movie's hybrid Beanstalk/Slayer story — too gory for kids, only mildly entertaining for adults — mixes Giant Slayer mythology with modern flourishes and features myriad giants - cartoony Fraggle Rock ogre-ones, not real people-split-camera ones, for some reason.

★★★☆☆

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The Impossible (2012)

A family holidaying in Khao Lak in Thailand (including a very young Tom Holland aa the son of Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts) is caught up in a natural disaster in a movie which perfectly illustrates the power and destruction of tsunami in comparison to the feebleness of human life, but the movie does not sustain beyond early disaster special effects.

★★★☆☆

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The Ghost Writer (2010)

A satisfying, moody thriller from Roman Polanski about a man, Ewan McGregor, who takes over the task of ghostwriting an ex-Prime Minister's memoirs after the former ghostwriter tasked with the job mysteriously dies.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS