Graduation Day (1981)

Except for the fact Jamie Lee Curtis doesn't appear, this 1981 slasher follows the 80s teen slasher formula exactly — it could even be Scream -1 — opening on an initial tragedy at Woodsboro, I mean, Midvale High School that sets into motion a grisly series of killings of the members of the school's track-and-field team, and about the only thing that sets Graduation Day apart from the long line of identical others is a rocking film clip at the one-hour mark — Felony's Gangster Rock — which injects new energy — not a lot, but new — into the final thirty-minute lead-up to the clumsy reveal of The Fisherman, I mean, Ghostface, I mean...

★★☆☆☆

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Godzilla Minus One (2023)

"Godzilla looks really ticked off," a naval officer says at one point, and it is funny because in this 37th Godzilla movie in 2023 the kaiju is still a stiff, rather rubbery, frozen-faced stare-bear - it doesn't matter if he has taken gunfire to the face, swallowed a mine, or been plunged over 1,500 metres to the bottom of the ocean, the demented grin persists - but everything else in Godzilla Minus One, which takes the series back to its roots and presents Godzilla as nuclear annihilation itself, is elaborately, effectively staged, from the razed-to-zero post-Second World War Japan setting to the big-budget Jurassic Park-style chomps and stomps.

★★★★☆

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The Goldfinch (2019)

I can't imagine many people enjoying this if they haven't read Donna Tartt's 780-page brick, and I can just as easily imagine many who have read it resenting the way the film glosses over all those pages and withholds the emotional keystone of the whole until the very final frame - but with expectations low from scathing reviews, I ended up thoroughly enjoying this adaptation, which, like the book, is a bewildering mass of underdeveloped themes, impossible coincidence, and meaningless allusions to the Harry Potter universe, yet still a strangely loveable, unwieldy, flawed beast that just is - who knows how or why Donna Tartt wrote it.

★★★★☆

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The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane (1976)

With its young female protagonist (Jodie Foster, playing 13-year-old Rynn Jacobs) living in a gothic American mansion and trying to keep the outside world out, this 1977 horror-mystery tells a very Shirley Jackson story - it's dark and there are magical elements, even, when a magician turns up - Mario - who helps Rynn avoid the world - and it is all quite chilling like a Jackson story, but perhaps this plot is a little aimless and it is a shame the most chilling aspect of it all is Jodie Foster's 21-year-old sister's nude scene that surely wasn't okay in 1977 either.

★★★☆☆

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

This Marvel superhero series distinguishes itself from all the other Marvel superhero series with its catalogue of immature characters exhibiting only the basest of functions, so the space-adventuring troupe of GotG number 1 and 2 continue to do 1s and 2s in this number 3, and like Groot's one note repeated ad nauseum (*i am Groot"), we see these base character-identifiers over and over again over two hours, and it is tiring - adults like me might like to daydream about more interesting things like what is behind the movie's central thesis, expounded gently but repeatedly, that, "Good dog," is better than, "Bad!"

★★★☆☆

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Gutland (2016)

Gutland (literally 'The Good Land') is a large part of Luxembourg, I didn't know, and is presumably where this rural noir is set: Jes turns up one day looking for farmhard work, but the fact he is toting a bag full of cash suggests he has other reasons for being suddenly in this lush and peaceful, prosperous and oh-so-welcoming land, but the locals are about to be rocked by other, more menacing outsiders.

★★★★☆

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Coup de Chance (2023)

Woody Allen's so prolific, all his new movies just seem like his old movies again, or blends of them, or gender-reversed versions, or simply retold (wasn't Blue Jasmine just Allen trying again, more successfully as it turns out, to tell again the underwhelming Melinda and Melinda) - he's done this one before, too, you find yourself thinking, and so it is with his fiftieth movie, a charming comedy suspense and kind of Irrational Man repeat or Scoop revisitation that plays with the themes of chaos and chance again, but the one big difference here is this is a good one, because that's something Allen doesn't always do - this is sharp, extremely (but subtly) funny, and beautiful to look at in terms of the costume, scenery, and actors.

★★★★☆

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Island of Hell (aka 'Devil's Island', 'Gokumon-tou', 'Hell's Gate Island' (獄門島) (1977)

Ichikawa Kon's 1977 adaptation of Seishi Yokomizo's detective novel is faithful to the book except in its final moments when whodunnit is revealed and it is whodidntdunnit in the book, a change which will rankle fans of the classic mystery featuring the recurring, dandruff-suffering, scruffy detective Kindaichi Kousuke; meanwhile, non-Japanese speakers also will be frustrated by breakneck cutting, which makes it hard to enjoy the movie's Japanese sets, costuming, and its plot while also keeping up with lightning-speed subtitles. 

★★★☆☆

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Goodnight Mommy (Ich Seh, Ich Seh) (2014)

On many fronts, this Austrian horror thriller is remarkable - for the beauty of its photography, the uniqueness of its chilling premise - but not least it is remarkable for the extraordinary performances of Elias and Lucas Schwarz in the lead roles as twin boys who start to suspect the person with the bandaged head in their home is not their mother -  the twins appear to mirror and morph in and out of each other in a way that makes you start to wonder if the characters are played by just one actor, not two.

★★★★☆

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Guilty As Sin (1993)

You can tell how good a lawyer Rebecca De Mornay's Jennifer Haines is by the way she swaggers around a courtroom and drapes herself in the desk chairs of sleek 90s-minimalist law offices, but a new client played by Don Johnson is a real ladykiller - she thinks literally so - and knows just how to crack Jennifer's cocky lawyer facade, so soon she is making the worst decisions of her legal career, in Sidney Lumet's charmless but perfectly watchable legal thriller marketed disingenuously as erotic.

★★★☆☆

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A Good Woman Is Hard To Find (2019)

This Irish crime drama does a good job of depicting the vicious cycle of hardship and crime and the judgement women face from men, women, shopkeepers, the authorities - everyone - but there are hard-to-believe aspects to the situation Sarah, a mum of two young children, finds herself in at the start, and something unlikely about the crime that sets off her grisly journey to protect her kids and find out the truth of her husband's murder in a housing project, and the movie ends on a wilful, gleeful and unlikely climax engineered for thrills rather than realism, detracting from the bleak social crime drama that precedes it.

★★★☆☆

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Ghost In The Shell (2017)

Masamune Shirow's manga, previously brought to the big screen in 1997 as the celebrated (and confusing) anime feature, is adapted here as a cartoony live action scifi but despite whiz-bang visual effects, not much interest is generated in the story of Major Kusanagi (a wooden, stiff Scarlet Johansson), the cyborg with a human mind (or "ghost" as we are repeatedly told) tasked with investigating the assassinations of several Hank company executives.

★★☆☆☆

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A Ghost Story (2017)

All we see of their relationship is that he shares a pair of headphones with her once and, in bed, adopts a sleeping position that suggests love - not facing away from each other on opposite sides of the bed - so it hardly seems warranted that when he dies in a car crash he returns as a bedsheeted ghost and experiences, in a dreamy, dialogue-free extended indie videoclip, a mawkish Tree of Life history of the land upon which his and his partner's house stands; he watches tenants and buildings come and go over time until it starts to seem like we are watching his love affair with real estate, not with the woman played by Rooney Mara, whose relationship with Casey Affleck's ghost ends up feeling like a mere blip.

★★☆☆☆

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The Green Knight (2021)

 

I read The Quest of the Holy Grail once, and this adaptation of a related tale about the nephew of King Arthur, Sir Gawain, journeying to see a Green Knight to pay a due, brought that book back to mind, perfectly evoking the dreaminess and painterliness of the book's chapters, with some, like the episodes in the movie, ending without obvious point while others thrill with chivalrous exploits, all taking place against a beautifully realised medieval time steeped in magic and religion, albeit in a movie with two or three scenes, clanging attempts at modernity, which jolt the viewer out of the otherwise mesmerising fantasy.

★★★★☆

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The Girl In The Fog (La Ragazza Nella Nebbia) (2018)

This twisty, turny and loooong and convoluted Italian mystery based on the novel by Donato Carrisi (and an adaptation directed by him) operates in a kind of exaggerated reality like a gothic fairytale which makes all that happens not matter much, but it will keep you watching as a Detective Vogel becomes involved in a teenaged girl's disappearance from a town in the Alps. 

★★★☆☆

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The Guilty (2021)

This American remake of the one-man, one-night, confined-space Danish thriller about an emergency service telephone operator trying to save a kidnapped woman, suffers the same problems as the original film with the decisions and actions of the main character so poor that a more appropriate title would have been 'The Incompetent', but I think this American remake takes the unpleasant little crime drama and better establishes the reason for Jake Gyllenhall's character's poor choices, including his heightened state of anxiety over some kind of formal hearing that is taking place at the end of his shift.

★★☆☆☆

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Border (Gräns) (2018)

There are lots of borders-between-things straddled by this Swedish movie - challenges to binary perspectives - and one of them is the line between it being completely ridiculous and not, and somehow the story of Tina, a border security guard who excels at her job because she can smell vice, always steers itself back from that brink; the movie, in which misfit Tina at last meets a kindred spirit and learns more about her true nature, is fascinating, challenging, emotional, beautiful, staggeringly original, and right the way through teeters on being - but never ends up being - utterly ridiculous.

★★★★☆

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The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan som lekte med elden) (2009)

Released in the same year, 2009, as Dragon Tattoo, this sequel in fact takes up the story one full year later, so was released in shorter time than the story - but that is still so short a time, Played With Fire feels like just the second half of one looong movie - with this part filling in some of the details surrounding Salander's, er, particular way of being (ruthless, traumatised goth fighting machine) while she computer-hacks and investigates and becomes the prime suspect in another mystery, this time involving sex trafficking, which she investigates in unison with - but again physically distanced from - her journalist friend (Michael Nyqvist as Blomkvist) and it ends up being more "James Bond" than the first movie's Agatha Christie-style 40-year-old murder-mystery-in-a-mansion - there's even a hulking Jaws character impervious to pain!

★★★☆☆

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The Grudge (2004)

Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on horror series, until now wholly Japanese productions, continues with this third movie, high on spooky atmosphere but low on sense, that casts Americans Sarah Michelle Gellar and Bill Paxton in the lead roles of a story - something about a curse that makes children blue and wide-eyed, that makes dead bodies appear and/or disappear, and sees the dead spiritually tethered to the places of their death but then also free to visit people at work or at home - don't ask too many questions.

★★☆☆☆

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Ghost Stories (2017)

Forget all those yawn-fests conjured up and insidiously churned out one after the other with budgets as big as the imagination put into them is small: this inventive, funny, and frequently chilling movie has only small screen production values but terrific performances and some truly unexpected moments in its story of a skeptic asked to investigate three separate cases of paranormal encounters.

★★★★☆

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