Klaus (2019)

It hijacks the Christmas tradition and completely fabricates a Christmas origin story, but Klaus is worth watching for the beautiful hand-drawn animation alone, and for Jason Schwartzman's hilarious voice performance of the main character Jesper - a lazy son cast out by his father to a remote snowy outpost - who finds reward in hard work and in getting good out of people, albeit duplicitously.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

21 Bridges (aka Manhattan Lockdown) (2019)

The fact Chadwick Boseman's NYPD police detective locks down Manhattan Island as a means of hunting down two police killers is just a passing detail, really, but so little else of note happens in this police procedural - just several moments of clunky editing and a completely from-the-start predictable plot - it is the closure of the twenty-one exit points from Manhattan Island that gives this ho-hum crime drama its title!

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

Because they (Ivan Reitman's son Jason, who writes and directs the movie, and a group of producers that includes Dan Ackroyd) are trying here to make a movie that appeals nostalgically to kids of the 80s but also enthuses a new generation of millenials about the Ghostbuster franchise (after the vapid Melissa McCarthy one pretended the original didn't exist and aimed itself solely at the pre-teen market), the set up of Ghostbusters: Afterlife is necessarily laboured with the movie adopting the deliberate pacing of, say, the original Christopher Reeve Superman movie to build links between the ghostbusting action in 80s Manhattan and that in 2021 smalltown Summerville, Oklahoma where young Phoebe and her brother Trevor stumble across Ghostbuster research into ghouls called Zuul and Gozer.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Patriots Day (2016)

This moment-by-moment account of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing is a moving tribute to the city, its first responders and citizens injured or killed in the two explosions, and coming so soon after events, is naturally not a movie interested in turning the camera away from the victims and heroes to explore more deeply the genesis of the crime or the backgrounds, rationales or personalities of the perpertrators, their relationship to each other, with their families or to Islam.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Accountant (2016)

Seemingly conceived and made by people who forgot an audience needs to watch it, The Accountant has its narrative split between the mysterious exploits of Ben Affleck's Batman-with-Asperger-Syndrome, Christian Wolff (an unlikely mix of Clark Kent nerdiness, Batman solemnity and Jason Bourne machismo), and the efforts of a government agent hot on his tail trying to catch up on everything we the viewers already know or can guess about Wolff from the beginning: that Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters has untapped the mutant accounting skills of this man who now tows around a stainless steel Airstream batcaravan freelancing as a bookkeeper for dangerous gangbangers who mustn't realise he has a propensity to turn around and take out entire criminal entourages with his assault weapons....did I understand that right?

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Snowman (2017)

Ice-cold and grisly Norwegian thrillers are popular among readers but this Jo Nesbø adaptation plays out on screen like it has been hacked to pieces and put back together again by a crazed killer with a piano wire, with scenes appearing out-of-order and side storylines, particularly the ones involving Chloë Sevigny as identical twins, Val Kilmer as a drunk detective, and J K Simmons as the leader of a Winter Olympics Host City bid, built-up elaborately like the serial killer's snowmen only to melt away without consequence.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

New In Town (2009)

There are a lot of these corporate-city-slicker-ends-up-in-a-small-town comedies (Did You Hear About the Morgans?, Doc Hollywood, TV's Northern Exposure, City Slickers, etc), and lots of better ones than this harmless, not especially good one that gets by on mindless caricature and the not-very-convincing chemistry between leads Renee Zellweger and Harry Connick Jr, but it is a perfect time-waster for, say, a long-haul flight or a hangover.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

I Love You, Man (2009)

A likeable loner played by Paul Rudd (who does likeable goofball reliably) needs a bestman and so embarks on some platonic, male-to-male heterosexual dating, in this laid-back comedy with a script that cleverly works in solutions to some obvious problems like why the lead has no friends if he is so darn likeable and why he doesn't ask his brother to be his best man. 

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW