Dark Phoenix (2019)

All we want from these X-men movies are some scenes in which the mutants pool their resources and unleash their powers in imaginative combination and this 2019 episode, one of the "Muppet babies" ones of late, delivers lots of that - we especially liked the  train carriage scene - and we also get some more of poor Jean Grey's backstory, though after some new details about how she came into Professior Xavier's care as a child, her story becomes the same old same old one about her reckoning with her awesome powers - it seems the only new thing that can be done with this character is adding different adjectives to her name.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

The adventures of Katniss Everdeen continue in this, for readers of the book, perfectly watchable but for all others, slightly mystifying sequel that sees the heroine propelled to celebrity status, on tour by high-speed train across 'the districts', involved in backstage image management and audience manipulation, becoming the reluctant figurehead of a rebel movement, then thrown into the death arena that now features mandrills, oh, and poison mist, oh, and lightning, oh, and tidal waves, oh, and mockingbirds, oh, and wait, it's a clock...?

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Hunger Games (2012)

If in your mind Big Brother evictions and "rose ceremonies" lack a little bloodspill and need, say, a few more snapped necks and some more arrows to the contestants' eye sockets, you'll enjoy this movie based on the first of Suzanne Collins' books about young Katniss Everdeen selected to participate in a televised fight to the death, but personally I fail to see why this series is so popular given its charmless and unnecessary extrapolation of the tenets of reality tv to their most violent extreme.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Red Sparrow (2018)

A Russian ballerina is trained in a sex school to tolerate brutal public sex with a stony face, and then, ready for secret agent work, she is entrusted to substitute top-secret floppy disks with dummy replacement ones - quickly, while no-one is looking, take real ones from a top shelf and swap them with fake ones from the bottom shelf - but is she performing these exciting spy feats for the Russians, is she working for the Americans, does anybody care, and what do the answers to these dull questions mean for romantic lead, the American spy agent played by Joel Edgerton with whom the ballerina shares zero chemistry at all?

★☆☆☆☆

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

American Hustle (2013)

This lively comic "who's grifting who" crime caper with a warm heart opens with Christian Bale's conman carefully constructing a combover to hide an unfortunate male pattern baldness and from there introduces con artists, FBI agents, politicians and mobsters who are all similarly doing what they have to do to survive - not just the high tension/high risk sting at the movie's centre (based on the FBIs actual ABSCAM operation in the 70s and 80s) but their very human frailties, dysfunctional marriages, tricky affairs, dicky tickers and office politics.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Passengers (2016)

** SPOILER ALERT **

A ripper sci-fi premise (a man's hibernation chamber malfunctions and he wakes up on a spaceship 90 years ahead of schedule) offers the potential to explore lives off-course and the human response to the abject loneliness of deep space isolation, but instead a glossy Hollywood romance takes place, only to be squandered by two things - plotting as full of holes as the breached hull of a spaceship, and the last-minute introduction of a "come back alive" machine.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

X-men: Apocalypse (2016)

Nothing will ever compare to the school invasion scene in X2: X-men United in which audiences are treated to a fast-paced showcase of weird and wonderful mutant powers — here, in X-men number 9 (counting Deadpool), things are decidedly less artful: the mutant "gifts" are presented mostly in slow-mo and further laboured by exposition of the sort, "You're in my head!? How are you doing that!?" "It's my gift..." (an exchange between students at a mutant school), and in fact, aside from a strong whiff of a political agenda (there is a near decapitation performed by the villain whose prisoner is on his knees on a sandy desert floor) nothing actually happens — for inordinate amounts of time, the mutants pose smugly, chests out, arms akimbo against cgi backgrounds, frequently not doing anything at all while the villain, a hideous, mouldy Marlon Brando-lookalike with displeased downturned lips, grumbles and performs haircuts.

★★☆☆☆

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X-men: First Class (2011)

This episode of the X-men franchise goes back to 1962 to explain Professor Xavier's love-hate relationship with Magneto (they used to be buddies) and calms down the fever-pitch energy attained over the course of the original three X-men movies while still delivering the themes and set-pieces expected of the series.

★★★★☆

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