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.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Rocketman (2019)

Fans will relish the chance to rediscover Elton John's music in this new form with clips of his songs strung together Mamma Mia-style into a kind of motion picture photo album, while others will hopefully find something to be interested in over the  course of the singer's very familiar trajectory to worldwide celebrity, although like Elton John himself, they will find it hard to find anything in the singer's adopted persona to emotionally connect with - an abandoned childhood identity, for instance.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (2017)

This biopic makes very cursory work of the early stages of the relationship between 40s Hollywood starlet Gloria Grahame, apparently once an actual person, and her much younger Liverpoolian lover Peter Turner, then wants viewers to invest themselves in that relationship's protracted death throes as Grahame, sick with breast cancer, returns to Liverpool an ailing Norma Desmond type - but quite sympathetic - seeking to convalesce in a room upstairs in Peter's family's home.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011)

Marvellous to look at and full of hilarious details that kept me and my nephews laughing, this elaborately rendered animation from Steven Spielberg brings the characters of Herge's Tintin comics to amazing 3D life but while scenes are fluid and exciting like Indiana Jones setpieces, the greater story is an anticlimactic vacuum: a drunk sailor, Haddock, needs to quit the bottle in order to be able to recall vital family history which isn't actually vital at all - at last remembered, it just catches him up with what audiences pretty much knew from the start.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Snowpiercer (2013)

In Director Bong Joon-ho's first English language cinema release - a sci-fi action movie set entirely within the confines of a futuristic train - absurdity and solemnity, lofty pretentions and humour mix in a way only Bong Joon-ho can successfully manage; the result, a story of an uprising in segregated communities of haves and havenots, is a ridiculous and audacious, enthralling and hilarious political allegory.

★★★★☆

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