Strangerland (2015)

Miranda and her friends similarly dreamily wandered off into an Australian landscape and vanished but this movie is far less captivating than that, clearly trying but failing at being a new enduring Australian bush mystery of the mystic Picnic at Hanging Rock variety but also failing in its attempts at gritty Australian neo-noir realism of the, say, Mystery Road variety, because although Nicole Kidman is captivating, nothing else is remotely interesting in this dreary, unrewarding story of a promiscuous teen and her brother who are removed from the face of the red Australian earth by a duststorm.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994)

A transsexual (a hilariously deadpan Terence Stamp) and two female impersonators (one, Guy Pearce playing Cesar Romero doing The Joker) hit the road in a big lavender bus, taking their drag show from Sydney to Alice Springs via mining towns Broken Hill and Coober Pedy, in this much-loved 1994 comedy drama that downplays or entirely sidesteps points of possible contention and ends up feeling like a disingenuous string of encounters between the performers and outback locals.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Wolfman (2010)

It won an Academy Award for best makeup and is star-studded but this 2010 werewolf story, a remake of a camp 1940s horror of the same name, seems to want to be an epic Hollywood blockbuster AND a camp 1940s horror remake at the same time and ends up being neither; instead, it is an elaborately staged and handsomely made-up "nothing" that should have more wholeheartedly embraced its camp 1940s horror roots and taken itself far less seriously.

★☆☆☆☆

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

Mystery Road (2013)

A detective played by the terrific Aaron Pedersen investigates the murder of a teenage girl whose body is found beside a highway in outback Queensland, in this first (the second is "Goldstone") "Jay Swan" outing, a movie that could easily have been an Arthur Upfield "Bony" adaptation except that it is more dour, monotone, and a more rudimentary police procedural than that, and also its spectacularly photographed life-in-outback-Australia features mobile phones, pokies, Facebook, and other modern-day societal ills.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW