Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)

A string of five or six encounters with dinosaurs - one encounter at sea, one on a cliff, another in some sort of tunnel, many involving water - with very little effort made to link these encounters with a sensible story or populate the episodes with characters you care less about and want not to get chomped or stomped.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Judy (2021)

If your impression of Judy Garland is that she was a kooky pill-popping drunk and terrible mum who abandoned her kids to chase money, then you are not wrong but this biopic contextualises that image, revealing the terrible effect upon Judy of her showbiz mum as well as the Weinsteinian influence upon her of numerous entertainment industry men, and really, how could anyone stay sober and on the rails standing each night in front of the theatre audiences of London, depicted in this movie as a schizophrenic group that laugh, laud and worship Judy one night, pepper her with tomatoes and boos the next before mawkishly serenading her the one after that!

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Jack Frost (1998)

Probably not called "Frosty the Snowman" because of a copyright, Jack Frost, this peculiar, only very loosely Christmassy family fantasy made for only the most unquestioning of young audiences, never clearly articulates the rules around coming back to life as a snowman, but given his limited ability to move, tendency to melt, and never explained reluctance to be seen by anyone but his son, Michael Keaton's Jack Frost, a musician brought back to life as a snowman by a harmonica - don't ask questions - probably should have just opted to come back as a ghost like Patrick Swayze.

★★☆☆☆

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The Jane Austen Book Club (2007)

The fact that the ensemble of characters in this romantic comedy (based on a Karen Joy Fowler bestseller) spend each month reading a Jane Austen novel and meeting to discuss it simply means that they are forever comparing Austen's troubled marriages, burgeoning romances, and complicated love triangles to their own: these parallels come thick and fast but are superficial, meaning you can smile - very gently - at this romcom even if you've never read a word of Austen yourself.

★★★☆☆

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Jane Eyre (2011)

Comparison is more than fair: this 2011 adaptation is filmed in the same location (and often in the very same rooms), is based on the same screenplay, and is frequently a scene-by-scene copy of the BBC four-episode TV series of 2009, so the question is why this Cary Joji Fukunaga-directed adaptation, which gives painstaking attention to realising the look and feel of Charlotte Bronte's novel, chops the story to pieces, starting in the middle, unnecessarily, and lurching unevenly through the events of Eyre's life, either glossing over or entirely deleting key moments from the book AND the BBC TV series with the end result a visually-, aurally-pleasing video clip zapped of most of the story's romance and emotion.

★★★☆☆

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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.

★★☆☆☆

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Johnny English Reborn (2011)

My attention strayed and then irritation set in as this British spy spoof, the second in a series of three Johnny English movies but the first I've tried to watch, went on and on and on in such cookie-cutter fashion that it doesn't really ask to be watched at all - a glance at the poster tells you everything you already knew about the James Bond-style opening sequence, the ho-hum scene at the hi-tech spy tools development facility, the repetitive car and boat chases, and the unpsychedelic Austin Powers, a rubbery-faced Pink Panther, at the centre of all the, er, action.

★★☆☆☆

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John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)

With a plot about as sophisticated as a Spy Kids movie, film-sets that resemble the painted polystyrene walls of a laser tag night-out, and role-playing action of the sort you might see offered up by overzealous bachelor party paintballers or DnDers running around in capes or three-piece suits and elocuting words like "Parabellum" (say it as you swirl wine in a chalice), this tiresome third in the John Wick series dares to be even worse than the previous two cartoons: a Fanta-grade (thanks, Laurence Fishburne, for that punctuation) string of gun- and knife-fantasists' wet dreams with lethargic fight-scene choreography (we all love Keanu Reeves but think of the flat-footedness of Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull..) and compound this lethargy with the nerdy flamboyance of cape-twirling and gunplay to classical music, plus insistent we-want-this-series-to-go-forever universe-building and a troubling unerring nonchalance from everyone in the face of, well, endless face-knivings, plus - the worse thing - a dismaying promise of even more prepostrousness to come.

★★☆☆☆

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The Jacket (2005)

There are delicious moments of time travel madness early on as returned soldier, asylum inmate and murder suspect Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) richochets between a romantic future and a miserable asylum incarceration in the present, but this isn't Twelve Monkeys (Jennifer Jason Leigh is the psychiatric doctor tagging along but just stares and mumbles no matter what happens - she's no Madeleine Stowe) and the thriller elements fail to survive to an ending that, after so much dark potential, collapses into something with a corny The Lake House vibe.

★★☆☆☆

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John Carpenter's The Fog (1980)

Celebrating the town's centenary, the folk of seaside Antonio Bay are weirded out by a fog that occasions a pandemic of shattered glass and maritime deaths, but all it takes is for local Father Malone to read a couple of pages of an old diary and suddenly everyone is confidently spouting paranormal fog lore and exhibiting magical knowledge of things they can't possibly have seen or heard, and this silliness doesn't matter because The Fog is atmospheric horror so fun I'd like to see it continued as an ongoing series of sequels, origin stories and offshoots - forgetting all about the woeful 2005 remake, of course.

★★★★☆

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I Am Jonas (Jonas) (2018)

This uneven coming-of-age drama (like a Sauvage companion piece that looks back at its character's past) shows the experiences that have shaped the adult Jonas (Leo), a not-very-happily employed twentysomething who gets into fights, gets into trouble with police and falls out with his parents, and the movie does a great job demonstrating how for some adults like Jonas, youth was not the magic land of self-discovery it should have been and in fact some, like Jonas, might be lucky if they can get even one make-up hour to flirt with the thrilling, dangerous unknowns of childhood..

★★★★☆

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The Faculty (1998)

When one student says suspiciously of another, "We don't know what she is - gay, lesbian, or alien," and when problems at school are solved by snorting a home-laboratory-manufactured drug and waving a gun around, you start getting nervous about the messages in director Robert Rodriguez's sci-fi horror set in a high school and apparently based on Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers, but a surprisingly star-studded cast (Usher, Jon Stewart, Selma Hayek, and others) distracts from this irksomeness and lets other aspects of the movie pay effective tribute to the B-grade horror scifi movies of the 50s.

★★☆☆☆

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The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle) (1974)

Werner Herzog doesn't entertain the possibility that Kaspar Hauser - the short-statured 17 year-old foundling discovered one day in a Nuremberg street - was a fraud exploiting a fantastic life story for the public attention, instead opening his film with Kaspar Hauser's captivity, his first venture outside, and his public discovery exactly as the cause célèbre himself described them, and with Herzog's mesmerising ways and a terrific disconcerting central performance from Boris S., a 41 year-old non-actor with mental health issues, the film allows viewers to discover for themselves, with the wonder of Nuremberg locals in 1828, the enigma of Kaspar Hauser suddenly in the world, clutching his letters on the street, the subject of a story Herzog presents as a matter of plain fact, leaving it to viewers to turn everything in on itself and let the possibilities of a fraud or a conspiracy or a personality disorder twist in their brains like a double- or even a triple- negative. 

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

It used to be that dinosaurs belonged in the Jurassic period, humans in the modern era, and if dinosaurs appeared in the modern era, humans needed to get away from them, but like a living breathing example of Darwinian theory itself, the Jurassic Park series is trying to self-perpetuate and has evolved so that now there are unlikely relationships between some of the humans and dinosaurs, like between Chris Pratt's theme park trainer and Blue, the velociraptor in his care, and "dinosaurs-have-rights-too" groups have sprung up, and arguments abound on the money-making value of dinosaurs, their sentience, their feelings, and it is funny because all this effort to give the series some Planet of the Apes meat on its bones ends up just a lot of noise in this movie which hides within it the movie people actually want to see featuring podcars lodged in the jaws of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, second dinosaur attacks at just the right moment, and lots of running and screaming.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Just Mercy (2019)

Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of the book upon which this movie is based, is depicted here (by Michael B Jordan) setting up the EJI and working to free from death row a first client, Alabama prison inmate 'Johnny D' (Jamie Foxx) and if there are moments you wish this long and only very plainly told 5-star story were over, you'll sit through it in any case given the case Stevenson makes against capital punishment is unequivocal and uncomfortable, and incontrovertible is his presentation of the justice system, its courts, police, and jails as a flawed (but held up as sacrosanct) temple of white privilege - a theatre not furnished with iluminated exit signs for the benefit of the beset inside.

★★★☆☆

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Joker (2019)

A Rupert Pupkin's neurological condition, which causes him to laugh uncontrollably and inappropriately, continues through a compounding series of abject miseries.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Just A Breath Away (Dans La Brume) (2018)

France's contribution to the glut of situational scifi thrillers, in which family members must work together to survive an inexplicable phenomenon (think A Quiet Place, It Comes At Night, Bird Box, The Silence, and perhaps, back in the beginning, The Happening) is the incredibly contrived but entertaining Dans La Brume, (or Just A Breath Away), about a poisonous fog that envelops Paris, leaving only those living sufficiently high up in their apartment buildings alive - when they get the chance, one family does not evacuate the city because their daughter has an autoimmune disease and lives in a hermetically sealed chamber, so instead they dash in and out of the fog trying to make optimal use of a limited supply of oxygen tanks, gas masks and batteries.

★★★☆☆

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Joe Versus The Volcano (1990)

12-year-old Josh Baskin couldn't wait to grow up and, wish granted by a Zoltar Fortune Telling machine, made a good go of corporate life in the body of a 30-year-old Tom Hanks, whereas in this comedy released two years after Big and in some ways its reverse, another J.B. played by Tom Hanks, the adult Joe Banks, believing himself to be dying, rejects his dreary corporate life and embarks on a childish, absurdist Candide-esque round-the-world trip to an island where he is prepared to sacrifice his life for an orange soda-loving tribe.

★☆☆☆☆

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Jennifer’s Body (2009)

Buffy was interesting because her demon-slaying was analogous to the trials and tribulations of high school - and she lost more sleep over the latter than the former - but this horror comedy, obviously geared at Buffy audiences with its combination of demon-slaying, indie rock soundtrack, and high school drama, is a less sensible, less compelling concoction about two female students: one who has meaningful, consensual sex with her boyfriend, and one who honeytraps horny males and feeds on their dead bodies; the fact the latter, played by Megan Fox, was kidnapped and slaughtered by a four-strong gang of males is treated as a trivial detail - the important thing, apparently, is there is a right way to use your body, and Jennifer is an evil slut who deserves death, ok?

★☆☆☆☆

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Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

As I struggle with furniture companies that outsource (and so disown) unreliable delivery services, and as it feels increasingly like, in Australia, you have to fight to get anyone to do what they are in fact paid and are supposed to do, it is refreshing to watch this Japanese documentary about a man and his sons and their kitchen crews who wholeheartedly devote themselves to their jobs, turning into an art even the most menial aspects of sushi-making, like massaging the octopus (not a euphemism) - this family of sushi chefs are committed to their art, even at the cost of family- and leisure-time and even though it might all go (tuna-) belly-up after the patriarch scales down his involvement.

★★★★☆

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