Rocketman (2019)

Fans will relish the chance to rediscover Elton John's music in this new form with clips of his songs strung together Mamma Mia-style into a kind of motion picture photo album, while others will hopefully find something to be interested in over the  course of the singer's very familiar trajectory to worldwide celebrity, although like Elton John himself, they will find it hard to find anything in the singer's adopted persona to emotionally connect with - an abandoned childhood identity, for instance.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

Woody Allen movies, and perhaps especially his romantic comedies with their thrown-together ensemble casts, ad-libbed dialogue, seemingly made-up-on-the-spot characters, and voiceover narrations of questionnable value, can give the impression the director isn't even trying, and so it is here in this romantic comedy which in its first half rambles breezily on about the love lives of seven or eight Londoners, appears to jump the shark in the middle with a sudden 'plagiarist writer' development, but finally ties everything together with lots of belly laughs and the idea that the tall, dark stranger of the title is ourselves trying things on in desperate moments, and of course there is the renewed conviction that even though it can sometimes appear he is just churning them out, Woody Allen's movies are always worth a look.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

God's Own Country (2017)

It is easy to see what attracts Johnny Saxby, a farmer's son working his father's struggling farm in The Pennines, to Gheorghe, a handsome Romanian immigrant farmhand who has arrived to help, but not so much the other way round given Johnny's boozing, drinking milk from the carton, and general all-over disaffectedness, so when first lust erupts then romance blossoms between the two, it is quite hard to believe, as is the pair's readiness to strip each other down in the freezing pre-dawn country air that otherwise dictates their need for gloves and coats while they are birthing lambs and building boundary fences together after sun up, but if you are prepared to wait out their chemistry- and drama-free couplings, there is a nice pay-off at the movie's very end when Johnny Saxby finally softens, music finally plays, and warmth finally arrives.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS