Enola Holmes 2

In this sequel, Enola sets up a detective agency and investigates the disappearance of a girl from a London match factory, which is not a plot from Nancy Springer's books, apparently, but a new story written specially for this sequel that puts Springer's character front and centre in an actual historic union uprising - the rousing girl-power of the original movie is matched only at the very end after much long-windedness.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)

It didn't help that an hour in our internet cut out and my viewing partner accidentally drummed up the original 2017 cut, not this 2021 refashioning by Zack Snyder, leaving us perplexed by scenes we'd already seen playing out of sequence, but even once we got back on track this unnecessarily long re-release stretches a bad two-hour movie to an interminable four-hour slog: a first hour and a half of false starts, a muddled middle split pointlessly between Batman's Justice League recruitment drive and Steppenwolf's "mother box" raids (the raids are doing the recruiting, making Batman's story redundant), and a finale that comes only after too many musical lamentations (each time Wonder Woman appears), too many dopey Flash close-ups, far too many little-boy shrugs from Superman, and way too much of that cyborg character so stiff and miserable we never once connect — four hours later, it isn't Justice League so much as Justice beLeaguered.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Mission: Impossible Fallout (2018)

About the only area that could be improved is the likeability of the central characters but otherwise action doesn't get much better than this two-and-a-half-hour string of foot, motorbike, car and helicopter chases filmed so spectacularly every microfacial expression on Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt's face is crystal clear as he careens cars through city streets, dogfights over Kashmir, sprints glamorous European city blocks at roof level and, as is known very well right from the start, saves the world from the dastardly plot of a bamboozling number of counter- and counter-counter-spies in what is essentially the same plot as Rogue Nation.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

Zack Snyder opens this with the trauma of Bruce Wayne's childhood - a backstory no-one needs to see, not now, not again - and from this tired start it is clear he has approached his job of launching DC Comics' Justice League franchise like an overzealous fanboy wanting to include evvveeerything, mashing together Nolan's Dark Knight series with his own 2013 Henry Cavill Superman movie and ending up with a monstrous, laborious, not-fun-at-all Justice League origin story that briefly features a personality-free Wonder Woman and an overly familiar Lex LuHeathLedgZuckerbergJokethor...surely jumping straight into an already assembled Justice League-proper movie would have been more fun than this!?

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

The Man From U.N.C.L.E., based on the 60s tv show, looks terrific, like a photo shoot of mod fashions from a 60s Vogue magazine, but with one-note characters and key scenes presented as comic book panels, the spy action hunt for nuclear weapons across glamorous European locations is about as involving as flipping through a glossy.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Man of Steel (2013)

This frenetic but enjoyable instalment of the Superman franchise has Superman looking more like Wolverine than ever before - muscly, hairy, and fearless - and features dizzying but thrilling action sequences only slightly marred by the sight early on of Russell Crowe riding a Jar Jar Binks-style dragonfly around Krypton.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS