Live Flesh (Carne Trémula) (1997)

Director Pedro Almodóvar turns Ruth Rendell's psychosexual thriller into a rambling soapy melodrama and turns Rendell's main character, the 38-year-old serial rapist Victor, into a more palatable naif whose inexperience-in-love and obsession with his 'first' results in an incident in which a policeman is shot and ends up a paraplegic.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Everybody Knows (2019)

A joyous wedding celebration in a wine region of Spain turns bad when a guest, the teenaged girl of an Argentinian family, disappears, possibly kidnapped, in Asghar Farhadi's beautifully acted, beautiful-to-look-at, absorbing, but ultimately inconsequential crime drama that spends so long on its sumptuous set-up, there's no time for the mystery except for in a series of lurching scenes in the film's final third in which the plot doesn't so much develop as the audience is perfunctorily caught up on a situation everyone except the audience (and perhaps, unimportantly, one or two other characters) already knows.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Mother! (2017)

A fleeting shot at the start hints very strongly at Darren Aronofsky's movie's whole but even so the movie goes on to tell its story three times; the first iteration, in which a young homemaker is too polite to ask two unwanted visitors to leave her house, is the most restrained, gleefully sinister and enjoyable, with the subsequent retellings just becoming noisier, more extreme, more crowded, and more unnecessary, not adding much to the parable that has already been determined by that opening moment.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Vicky and Cristina, American friends on holiday in Spain, have a pleasant time exploring art galleries and historical sites but when they encounter handsome Spanish painter Juan Antonio and his fiery ex-lover played hilariously by Penelope Cruz, they also end up exploring their notions of love and sex and monogamy, in Woody Allen's riotous comedy drama that features not so much a love triangle as a love square or pentagon!

★★★★☆ 

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Skyfall (2012)

A masterpiece addition to the Bond canon, up there with the recent Casino Royale as one of the best Bonds ever made, but why are M and the agent with the license to kill left in such a dire pickle in the end with just a doddery old Groundskeeper Willie with a shotgun to help?

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

No Country For Old Men (2007)

Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem really act in this compelling but ultimately unnecessary neo-Western that tries to disguise its pointlessness with some lofty last minute dialogue.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS