Life (2017)

About as rewarding as watching a "system failure" warning light blink at you for 90 minutes, this misfire hoped to meld the breathless rollercoaster action of Gravity, the profundity of 2001, and the horror of Alien, but fails on all accounts with key action scenes so chaotic they're nonsensical, all emotion demanded rather than earned by a script and score that doesn't just hand-hold but latches on and constricts the life out of you like a parasitic lifeform, and a really daft and totally unaffecting nonsense ending delivered with embarassing fervour!

★☆☆☆☆

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Nocturnal Animals (2016)

After 19 years apart from her first husband, an insomniac and deeply unhappy art dealer receives from him a draft novel, a devastating tale of loss she suspects conceals a sinister meaning, in this slow burn thriller with a, sadly only deceptively, arresting opening scene and first half.

★★★☆☆

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Nightcrawler (2014)

Jake Gyllenhaal's cadaverous "nightcrawler", Lou Bloom - a good part Norman Bates and good part Patrick Bateman - trawls grim scenes as a crime/accident papparazzo in this darkly humorous satire, not a satire of the moral bankruptcy of tv news so much as a satire looking at the bloodthirstiness and heartlessness of the corporately/financially driven.

★★★★☆

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Zodiac (2007)

David Fincher gives the real-life Son of Sam killings the Bong Joon-Ho Memories of Murder treatment, creating an intriguing police procedural about a cartoonist whose life becomes consumed by the investigation that spanned parts of the 60s, the 70s and 80s but remains unsolved today.

★★★★☆

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Prisoners (2013)

Elaborately detailed, harrowing child abduction thriller with points of difference that rise it above other thrillers of its kind, but like another of Denis Villeneuve's movies, Incendies, this one, once it is over, leaves you wondering about the purpose of such a grandly staged but grim little world.

★★★☆☆

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Brokeback Mountain (2005)

This Ang Lee movie is about two cowboys, Jake Gyllenhaal and a mumbling Heath Ledger, whose relaxed nudie, towel-whipping funtimes together at a favourite remote mountain spot are starkly contrasted with their separate and mostly unhappy lives back in society where respectively Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway keep their homes and families.

★★★★☆

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Donnie Darko (2001)

Mesmerising high school drama about how completely messed up a kid can become trying to deal with the inauthentic characters and lives and world around him.

★★★★★

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Source Code (2011)

A jumble of sci-fi ideas that couldn't possibly end up making any sense, ends up making sense in this smart and snappy action flick that pulls a final, surprising emotional punch.

★★★★☆

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