Don't Worry Darling (2022)

It's The Stepford Wives except the peculiar cookie-cut "perfect" town is in a desert, perhaps in California - a manicured suburbia overseen by Chris Pine's sneering bad guy, clearly up-to-no-good, who somehow controls all the males who come and go from mysterious jobs in the desert while their wives, Olivia Wilde and Florence Pugh for two, visibly foreign to this time period and these circumstances, make like 50s housewives but all the time suspecting something is amiss.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Midsommar (2019)

That the American tourists, magic mushroom tea-chugging stoners on a lark in Europe, suddenly sober and become earnest anthropologists fighting over the chance to write a thesis about the loony Wicker Man community they have come across in Sweden is a subplot going to a lot of trouble to justify why the group doesn't hightail it out of that lurid Teletubbie land at the first sight of a grizzly head hammering, in Ari Aster's again unrestrained short film idea-turned-into-a-near-three-hour horror slog that plays out, well, imagine the wicker totem being wheeled out at the twenty-minute mark and Edward Woodward suffering twisted rituals one-after-the-other for the final two hours - skinnings and sex rites and cliff dives and death ceremonies and bear disembowelments and pube pies and til-you-drop maypole dances - a convoluted and depraved mess which the stoners should be glad not to have to intellectualise in a thesis given it all seems to boil down to the minor question of whether one smiles through it or not.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Black Widow (2021)

We learn more about Natasha Romanov's childhood in this action thriller that is thankfully, refreshingly a Marvel superhero movie made with adults in mind with the sort of globetrotting locations and over-the-top hi-tech-villainry (and then some) found in James Bond movies.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Little Women (2019)

One strategy to try and make Louisa May Alcott's obnoxious Little Women tolerable viewing for anyone who has already sat through the seven or eight other adaptations is to populate it with Hollywood's most affected performers and rip through the story at a relentless pace after throwing the scenes into the air and presenting them in the order you pick them up off the floor.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Lady Macbeth (2016)

I knew nothing of this beyond what the poster promised ("Imagine Alfred Hitchcock directing Wuthering Heights!'") so it wasn't until the end when a titlecard states the film is based on a Russian novella that everything - the abject bleakness and the sense of confused time and place that pervades a thankless plot (a heartless Englishwoman with a household of black servants in rural England throws 19th century sensibilities into unedifying, murderous chaos) - suddenly made sense: imagine Michael Haneke directing Crime and Punishment.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS