Moonfall (2022)

Mercifully skipping the usual disaster-movie preamble of ignored scientists and warnings spilling from dot matrix printers, Moonfall gets to collapsing cities and lunar chaos within minutes, but its brisk, comic-book style only makes it slightly less exhausting than it would otherwise be.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

New Year's Eve (2011)

On a New Year's Eve, the Times Square Ball gets stuck, neither up nor down, and this same inert state befalls a veritable Love, Actually ensemble of New Yorkers whose lives grind to a stop in deeply uninteresting, go-nowhere situations like the nurse (Halle Berry) who tends bedside to a dying man in hospital (Robert De Niro) - that's everything - or the man in pyjamas (Ashton Kutcher) who gets stuck in an elevator with a singer (that woman from Glee) - the end - or the pregnant couple who are, well, pregnant - and still pregnant each time the movie unnecessarily returns to them - or, in the most peculiar of the go-nowhere vignettes, a delivery guy (Zac Efron) escorts a woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) around NYC on a scooter skimping on her bucket list that she has no reason to rush through before midnight when, spoiler alert, the Times Square Ball drops and this dull romcom ends and life starts moving again.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)

With a plot about as sophisticated as a Spy Kids movie, film-sets that resemble the painted polystyrene walls of a laser tag night-out, and role-playing action of the sort you might see offered up by overzealous bachelor party paintballers or DnDers running around in capes or three-piece suits and elocuting words like "Parabellum" (say it as you swirl wine in a chalice), this tiresome third in the John Wick series dares to be even worse than the previous two cartoons: a Fanta-grade (thanks, Laurence Fishburne, for that punctuation) string of gun- and knife-fantasists' wet dreams with lethargic fight-scene choreography (we all love Keanu Reeves but think of the flat-footedness of Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull..) and compound this lethargy with the nerdy flamboyance of cape-twirling and gunplay to classical music, plus insistent we-want-this-series-to-go-forever universe-building and a troubling unerring nonchalance from everyone in the face of, well, endless face-knivings, plus - the worse thing - a dismaying promise of even more prepostrousness to come.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Kidnap (2017)

The fact she is a divorcee, has a litigious ex, and is a waitress who grapples for the movie's first fifteen minutes with rude or fickle or impatient customers is all extraneous to the sixty-minute car chase Halle Berry's Karla Dyson embarks upon after she witnesses her son's abduction: the writers haven't tried to make this dross even slightly intelligent, staging the vehicular action in a logic-free fantasy land that exists free from the constraints of time, largely free from a police presence, free from geographical constraints, and free from viewers' expectations that something interesting might happen in the end to cleverly tie it all together.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Cloud Atlas (2012)

Ok, perhaps not the one with Tom Hanks and Halle Berry sing-songing about the "true true and the whatnot" (which was terminal), but any other story thread in this overlong new age scifi jumble, told artfully, carefully, and in isolation would have expressed in a more engaging way the same well-meaning message - that we are all drops in an ocean, that our lives are not our own, that both our kindnesses and evils contribute to a greater story - but as it is, with its myriad poorly told choppy, changey, superficial "chapters", its ridiculous makeup and costumes, and its Peter Sellers-, Mickey Rooney-style Asianification, Cloud Atlas is a cringeworthy yawnfest.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

X2: X-men United (2003)

The best of all the X-men movies, this sequel of the original has it all - a thrilling non-stop action plot, moments of laugh-out-loud humour mostly thanks to Wolverine, and the best thing of all — alone, worth the price of admission — is the invasion scene at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters in which audiences are treated to a fast-paced and exhilarating showcase of the mutants' weird and wonderful gifts.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Movie 43 (2013)

Perhaps compiled from footage recovered from the SNL cutting room floor, this laugh-free sketch comedy compilation is remarkable only for the incredible number of A-list Hollywood stars who were willing to appear in its appalling skits about excrement, sperm, grubby sex practices, incest...

☆☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Catwoman (2004)

Badly influenced by the Batman movies that came before it, Catwoman is a camp and shallow origin story featuring an unfocused superhero - part apologetic cupcake-baking, coquettish Bree Van de Kamp and part computer-generated and personality-free Frank N Furter dominatrix - fighting a similarly unfocused villain, a barely featured Sharon Stone representing a vague Death Becomes Her evil vanity.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

X-men: Days of Future Past (2014)

What the X-men franchise probably didn't need, with all its humans and mutants and feuding subfactions of each, was the added complication of time travel because this instalment involving a Terminator-style battle across time to stop assassin robots, is almost too convoluted to enjoy.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

X-men: The Last Stand (2006)

The third installment of the X-men series dutifully upholds the superhero filmmaking law which states a third installment superhero movie must be so unrestrained it collapses from its own bombast.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS