Insomnia (2002)

Because there is so much to cover - the Alaskan environment, its community and way-of-life, the effect the extended daylight hours of the region has on Al Pacino's cop and his investigation into a girl's murder, not to mention his tense relationship with his partner and his burgeoning one with an eager young Alaskan cop-in-training played by Hilary Swank - Christopher Nolan's exceptionally well-acted thriller, with its fine production values, ends up feeling thin as ice where it really demands to be grand and sweeping.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Fatale (2020)

The fact that at the start of the movie the married sports agent sleeps with a woman in Las Vegas - who turns out to be the lead investigator when he is attacked by a home invader - has no bearing at all on the runaway plot, which starts out all Fatal Attraction, drifts into Dial M For Murder, squeezes in a convoluted Strangers On A Train finale, and as if all that weren't already far too much for what is really just a throwaway sleazy thriller of the Basic Instinct kind, finally embarrasses itself by dumping into the vapid mix some weighty messaging about the very real plight of Black men at the mercy of white American law enforcers.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Hunt (2020)

The Most Dangerous Game, the classic 1924 short story and its 1932 film adaptation about humans being hunted for sport, is not really embellished or improved upon or developed here, just retold with 1. more gore, 2. wet Tarantinoism, 3. modern weapons that mean the twelve victims who wake up in an elaborately constructed fake Arkansas are dispatched remotely and en masse - there's no hunt required; and, 4. weak political satire - the nebulous joke here, about increasingly partisan American politics, seems to be that the hunters are woke lefties coolly slicing and dicing Trump supporters while demonstrating an uber political correctness in conversations with each other. 

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Core (2003)

When Earth's electromagnetic forces start misbehaving, unleashing a barrage of stock-footage world-landmark destruction, a crew of scientists, geologists and astronauts is assembled to drive a worm-like burrowing craft to the centre of the Earth to "restart the Earth's core", and boy do they have their work cut out for them: no, not saving the Earth but trying to make look interesting their repetitive chair-shaking encounters with, "Oh my god, diamonds the size of Cape Cod" (chair shake, chair shake) and "Oh my god, giant empty geodes" (chair shake, chair shake) and "Oh my god, hull-breaching lava" (chair shake, chair shake) etc, etc.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

I Am Mother (2019)

A girl (Clara Rugaard-Larsen) raised by a robot in a Human Re-population Facility has her solitary life of dance and psychometric testing interrupted by the arrival from outside the facility of a woman (Hilary Swank) who suggests the girl's robot 'mother' is incapable of feelings for the girl, is lying when it says the air outside the facility is toxic, and is a droid just like the ones outside who have decimated the Earth, in this better than usual Netflix original movie, a scifi thriller that really only errs in how quickly the girl proves willing to question everything she has ever known.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS