Heretic (2024)

What it is when it is all said and done is nothing new, but it disguises its routineness with some terrific tension, some really not very fair horror-fantasy illusions, surprises, and thriller moments (those silent exchanges of shock!) that keep you unable to see where the movie is going to go - two young Mormon missionaries fall into the web of a smiling, leering spider, an annoying, gabbing Hugh Grant playing a potential convert but religious scholar whose own ideas about religion may prove more resolute than the missionaries' own.

★★★☆☆

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Wonka (2023)

Like a Wonka' chocolate, this prequel is a confection entirely concocted from scratch by some lunatic using the weird and wonderful ingredients from Dahl's books, so there's giraffe milk and chocolatier wars, exotic oompa loompa lands and stuff, but there is also a pervading sense that the movie is all a rigmarole to perpetuate a non-canon add-on chapter of not-especially-good songs, childish acting, and some wonky cgi, making this confection a sickly sweet one – you end up feeling that to pick up a book or go to see a movie isn't worth the risk of having thrust upon you the burden of an ever-expanding film and television universe.

★★★☆☆

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Paddington 2 (2017)

This time the Peruvian marmalade-loving bear gets himself in a tangle trying to make enough money to buy his aunt a book for her birthday, even ending up in prison charged with Hugh Grant's memorable villain's theft of said book, but because Paddington looks for the good in everyone, by the end of the movie he has enchanted the whole of Windsor Gardens, Notting Hill, a veritable Who's Who of the British screen playing among others Knuckles the prison cook and Dr Jafri and prison guards and inmates and newspaper stallholders and shut-ins - and of course the Brown family - who rally behind Paddington and help him with spectacularly animated, frequently hilarious, slightly overlong but ultimately extremely touching adventures.

★★★★☆

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Love Actually (2003)

This saccharine romantic comedy is replayed on television about three times a week and I've grown to loathe it, but at least on the first occasion it is a pleasure, featuring an ensemble all-star cast in a series of interconnected stories that share the central theme of messy love.

★★★★☆

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Music and Lyrics (2007)

Most amusing when Hugh Grant's matured pop idol parades his old hits in front of small gatherings of adoring middle-aged women, this romcom is about a pair of songwriters falling in love while sparring over the business versus the authenticity of pop music lyrics, and it is all abit cloying - like being stuck in the presence of loverbirds being all adorable with each other.

★★☆☆☆

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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.

★☆☆☆☆

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Florence Foster Jenkins (2016)

Meryl Streep endears completely as the title character (part Dame Edna, part Hyacinth Bucket and a good part deluded blind auditioner on The Voice), but the central character is Florence's pianist - it is through his eyes that the audience observes the comedy of Florence's situation (she thinks she can sing but can't and it's hilarious) but the movie's sympathetic approach isn't convincing: Hugh Grant is a cheater, gaslighter and enabler, Florence's pianist and beneficiary loves her on the basis of one moment of dishwashing, and the movie's final line from Florence on her deathbed, while poignant and apparently factual, jars with what the movie has presented before.

★★★☆☆

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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.

★★★☆☆

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