Run (2020)

I watched this as a double-billing with The Woman In The Window, both Netflix thrillers featuring women confined to their homes, but Run is the better film - a fun thriller and great example of Grand Dame Guignol horror with Sarah Paulson (in the role Bette Davis would have taken back in the day) playing a mum whose management of her wheelchair-bound daughter's life and medications and time might not be as altruistic as everyone in town - the pharmacist, the postie, the group therapy attendees - might think.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

Multi-Academy Award-winning despite its one oppressive-gothic-dreary-note, this Hollywood satire and film noir co-written by Billy Wilder has financially-strapped screenwriter Joe Gillis becoming ensnared in a dependent relationship with Norma Desmond, a delusional "Bride of Frankenstein"-like silent film has-been with lockjaw unable to accept her plight - the plight of all Hollywood actresses over a certain age.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Nanny (1965)

Before it succumbed to garish mod and technicolour excess in the 70s, the Hammer Film Productions company produced some psychological thrillers like this grotesque but clever, twisty-turny one starring Bette Davis as a no-nonsense Mary Poppins in a household scarred by tragedy - an uneasy peace in the home is shattered when the family's ten-year-old 'bad seed' of a son, Joey, is released from institutionalisation.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962)

The first of a series of three What Ever Happened...? horror-thrillers and the movie credited with giving rise to the dreadfully termed 'hagsploitation genre', this piece of grotesquery, like a Southern Gothic Sunset Boulevard with Hammer Film aesthetics, features Bette Davis and Joan Crawford as elderly sisters, one of whom (Baby Jane (Davis)) keeps the other (a wheelchair-bound Blanche (Crawford)) locked in an upstairs room while she plots doing away with her entirely, and the whole thing is like an exercise in bad taste.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Lady In A Cage (1964)

Olivia de Havilland uses facial expressions to convey the spectrum of emotions, but mostly terror, that comes from her being stuck a couple of metres above the ground in an elevator cage, in this unwatchable pulp, a "suspense thriller" not made any more interesting by the crazed looters running amok below her (especially considering it would be scarier if she were on the ground with them...) 

☆☆☆☆☆ (No stars)

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

As a kid I sat up into the early hours secretly watching this grisly 1960s southern gothic horror and the story of traumatised Charlotte with her Lizzie Borden-style childhood gave me the worst nightmares a movie has ever given me! 

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS