I'm Chevy Chase And You're Not (2025)

You can imagine, after years of being told, "You're funny," a comedian might eventually start believing it and forget about the importance of material and timing, energy, audience, and cultural context, and so end up acting zany - look at me, blowing raspberries! - rather than delivering hard-earned jokes, and Cornelius Crane "Chevy" Chase - a man as funny as he is obnoxious, as loved here as he is hated there, happy-go-lucky yet deeply ashamed - might come close to that line today; you certainly can't watch the octogenarian presented here, and can't hear about his long catalogue of laugh-free comedy film bombs, and can't hear about his childhood trials and tribulations and come away saying, simply, he's funny.

★★★☆☆

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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.

★★★☆☆

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If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025)

Mary Bronstein, who appears as Dr Spring, wrote and directed the engrossing and exhausting If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (no comma), apparently basing it on her own traumatic time caring for a sick child, and its the truth at the core, along with Rosie Byrne's "performance of a lifetime", that makes this unflinching look at motherhood - the guilt, the shame, the obsession, and the killer power - so utterly captivating: a comedy so dark it more than verges on horror, and you've got to love the reviewers, many male, saying it (read 'two hours of motherhood') is monotonous, too long, and not the entertaining experience you want when you go to the cinema!

★★★★☆

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The Idea of You (2024)

A romance ignites between a woman and a man, and standing in the way of their being in love forevermore are their considerable age gap (she is a 40-year-old single mother of a grown child and an art dealer; he is twenty-four) and his life in the spotlight as a boy-band idol, but both issues result in only two brief blips of conflict over the course of this breezy, thin rom-slight-com, padded out with not very rewarding Backstreet Boys-style song-and-dance routines.  

★★★☆☆

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In The Land of Saints and Sinners (2023)

Patriot Games also pitted an IRA terrorist against a hero who makes the mistake of killing the terrorist's brother, but this movie transports the story to an unlikely setting, a tiny coastal village of Ireland where it can be hard for viewers to believe that the two parties - Liam Neeson's brother-killing hero Finbar Murphy and Kerry Condon as the terrorist and sister of the man killed -  don't immediately find each other and have it out; the unbelievable delay is to allow the movie to build to a melodramatic - and a little out-of-place in a small Irish village - John Woo finale where the town suddenly has the population density amd proportions of a major city.

★★★☆☆

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I Saw The Devil (악마를 보았다) (Ang-ma-reul bo-at'da) (2010)

I don't mind ultra violence in movies when revenge is being meted out to those especially deserving of it, like in Harry Brown or Bedevilled, The Brave One or a zillion other bloody revenge fests, and for the first hour or so, that's what's on offer here when a secret service agent goes beserk, seeking revenge on a Korean Max Cady serial killer who has horribly killed rhe agent's pregnant girlfriend, but by film's end, when the secret service agent's very short-sighted plan for revenge has resulted in pain, suffering and death for myriad extraneous others and when so much depravity is on show - so much that the serial killer becomes just one part of a greater universal serial killer problem - the thrill of revenge becomes more than absurd: From Dusk Til Dawn presents a more reasonable, grounded world.

★★★☆☆

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

There are three minor issues to contend with watching this fifth and final Harrison Ford-led Indiana Jones adventure: one, the Uncanny Valley effect of Ford's de-aged face floating through the lengthy opening sequence; two, a plot development at the end that derails the whole movie (but only until one brief line of dialogue so glibly uttered you could miss it puts the minecart back on the track); and three, a moribund and frankly preposterous "go on without me, leave me here" moment at the end; but other than that, this is as good as Indiana Jones gets: a fun, fast, funny family blockbuster action adventure.

★★★★★

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In The Line Of Fire (1990)

What I like about Wolfgang Petersen's action thriller is how human it is, about an assassin (John Malkovich) determined to kill the President: Clint Eastwood's security guy fulfills his action hero duties, hanging from the edge of buildings and leaping into the path of bullets, but all the while he grizzles like the old man he is, has clumsy sexual encounters, gets sick, crankily dismisses the psychological games his quarry plays, and generally stays down-to-earth, which is refreshing given all the other bionically- and super-power-enhanced heroes saturating our cinemas.

★★★★☆

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Goodnight Mommy (Ich Seh, Ich Seh) (2014)

On many fronts, this Austrian horror thriller is remarkable - for the beauty of its photography, the uniqueness of its chilling premise - but not least it is remarkable for the extraordinary performances of Elias and Lucas Schwarz in the lead roles as twin boys who start to suspect the person with the bandaged head in their home is not their mother -  the twins appear to mirror and morph in and out of each other in a way that makes you start to wonder if the characters are played by just one actor, not two.

★★★★☆

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I See You (2019)

A revelation halfway through, one that cleverly had me reevaluating what sort of movie I thought I was watching, introduced me to a horror concept I probably would have been better off not knowing about - I will never listen to the creaks and groans of my home in the same way again - but once the movie aboutfaces after this surprise, it loses some credibility as the plot starts relying on an outrageous and exhausting confluence of events at the family home of Helen Hunt's Jackie Harper (although admittedly these events are all neatly tied up in the end).

★★★☆☆

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Into The Labyrith (L'uomo del labirinto) (2019)

Author Donato Carrisi directs for a second time an adaptation of one of his own books and like the first effort (The Girl In The Fog) this is again an unrestrained nonsense, a murder mystery that plays out like a garish fairytale, so over-the-top with its allusions to witches and dungeons and masked killers, none of it ends up mattering or even making sense, least of all the grandiose twists that you'd have to be a real dummy not to see coming.

★★☆☆☆

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I Came By (2022)

A British Don't Breathe about a graffiti artist who breaks into a former judge's home, this Netflix (not-so-)original thriller completely derails in a middle stretch involving an Iraqi refugee - it is an inconsistent sequence offering rushed exposition - but then gets back on track to deliver some satisfying surprises and daring to go places the viewer will not be expecting.

★★★☆☆

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It Happened In Broad Daylight (Es geschah am hellichten Tag) (1958)

The book, adapted by Sean Penn in The Pledge (2001) with Jack Nicholson as the detective who promises a grieving mother he'll catch her child's killer, came later, but this 1958 Swiss-Italian-Spanish co-production is based Friedrich Dürrenmatt's even earlier screenplay - not the book - featuring the chilling child serial killer plot with a more palatable ending - the book's subtitle (The Pledge - Requiem for the Detective Novel) hints at the dark direction Dürrenmatt took with his refashioned plot, while this film, faithful to the earlier screenplay, can be enjoyed as a detective novel proper: a jaunty Swiss mystery with a thrilling police investigation.

★★★★☆

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Infernal Affairs (無間道) (2002)

This is an exciting Hong Kong action movie bolstered by terrific performances of Tony Leung, open and warm, and Andy Lau, cool and sinister, playing fellow police academy recruits, one who ends up working for years deep undercover as a member of an international drug ring, the other rising through the ranks of the police force while working as a mole for the drug ring's "Mr Big" - a scenario so good this original spawned two sequels (not yet viewed) and a long and boring Hollywood remake, Scorsese's The Departed in 2007.

★★★★☆

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The Interpreter (2005)

The Interpreter has the distinction of being the first movie ever granted permission to be filmed inside the United Nations Headquarters but why Director Sidney Pollack thought such authenticity was needed is hard to fathom when so much else of what goes on in this political Sorry, Wrong Number (an UN interpreter overhears an assassination plot) stretches belief, like the earnestly expounded politics of made-up African nation Matobo; like the All-Access passes that supposedly allow interpreters to wander around UNHQ whenever and wherever they like, day or night; like the Dignitary Protection agents who fail to sweep bins for weapons...but Pollack ratchets up tension nicely and fits in some interesting ideas about words translated, whispered, and uttered in grief.

★★★☆☆

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I Am Legend (1999)

The virus in the 1971 Charlton Heston film adaptation of Richard Matheson's book turned people into eloquent cloaked albinos about as terrifying as the "Street Countdown" participants of that IT Crowd episode, so this much more recent adaptation is already winning by featuring truly terrifying monsters, the Darkseekers, whose cgi may be wonky but whose rapidly increasing intelligence really does pose a problem to Robert Neville, the last-man-on-Earth immune to the virus and humanity's last chance at a comeback, played by Will Smith, looking as good as he ever has and with a bottom lip that should have won an Oscar for its role in this post-apocalyptic scifi blockbuster.

★★★☆☆

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Infamous (2006)

Toby Jones' impersonation of Truman Capote is the more uncanny one and this movie provides more interesting context about Capote's trip to and interactions with locals in Holcomb, Kansas, but unlike the Philip Seymour Hoffman movie released a year earlier, which rivetted, this unfortunately timed "other movie" dealing with Capote's authorship of In Cold Blood flags by the end with the scenes between Daniel Craig's Perry and Toby Jones' Capote repetitive and the direct-to-camera commentary of friends Harper Lee and Jack Dunphy and others, particularly towards the end of the movie, a distraction.

★★★☆☆

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Incarnation (Inkarnacija) (2016)

In this bullet-riddled Groundhog Day thriller from Serbia, a man with an unchanging monotonous voice experiences an equally unchanging montonous life event - he repeatedly wakes up on a bench and is eventually tracked down and killed by masked killers - and it will take not so much ingenuity as repetitive run-through-gunfire chase scenes for the initially intriguing but quickly wearisome supernatural cycle to break and for the movie to reach the before-its-time accidentally hilarious "Take it off! Take it off! Take it off!" Masked Singer endscene.

★★☆☆☆

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D-Tox (aka 'eye see you') (2002)

Cops in a snowed-in detox facility are being picked off one-by-bloody-one in this movie, more mindless slasher than intelligent whodunnit despite the classic Agatha Christie set-up, with Sylvester Stallone playing a cop undergoing treatment for trauma after his own wife fell victim to an eye-poking serial drill killer with a ridiculous sprawling, poorly defined modus operandi, naturally still on the loose.

★☆☆☆☆

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I Miss You (Tu Me Manques) (2019)

This 2019 film about the staging of a theatre production tells a deeply personal story of loss and tells it with great effort and feeling, but heavy-handed theatrics, cliché and platitudes (lines like, "Art is the only thing that tells the truth", for instance) get in the way of the film having the impact the actual play had in Bolivia in 2015, apparently, when it got the notoriously homophobic country talking about gay suicide.

★★☆☆☆

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