The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane (1976)

With its young female protagonist (Jodie Foster, playing 13-year-old Rynn Jacobs) living in a gothic American mansion and trying to keep the outside world out, this 1977 horror-mystery tells a very Shirley Jackson story - it's dark and there are magical elements, even, when a magician turns up - Mario - who helps Rynn avoid the world - and it is all quite chilling like a Jackson story, but perhaps this plot is a little aimless and it is a shame the most chilling aspect of it all is Jodie Foster's 21-year-old sister's nude scene that surely wasn't okay in 1977 either.

★★★☆☆

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Contact (1997)

In Robert Zemeckis' adaptation that does a good job of digesting into an engrossing blockbuster the hard science fiction of Carl Sagan's novel, a researcher (Jodie Foster, in top form, perfectly cast) sits under satellite dishes with headphones listening for messages from outerspace, eventually coming across a code blipped from somewhere far off, the deciphered message of which is a set of instructions to build something, but religious leaders are wary and politicians are defensive as space agencies hurry to act.

★★★★☆

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Candleshoe (1977)

There's some dated gender stereotyping and at least one cringeworthy allusion to race, but Disney's Candleshoe is a classic family adventure in which a young Jodie Foster, a year on from her standout Taxi Driver performance, stars as a streetwise kid who inveigles her way into a family mansion by pretending to be a long-lost heir because she wants to get her hands on a hidden treasure.

★★★☆☆

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Nim's Island (2008)

Perhaps if you've read Wendy Orr's children's book this kids movie about an island-dwelling girl, her father missing at sea, and a San Franciscan author of adventure novels who overcomes neuroses to come to the girl's rescue, doesn't seem so inane, but if you haven't, the movie is a not very interesting jumble of disparate details including a volcano, Doctor Doolittle animals that all but talk, Australian tourists, fantasy muses, and caricatures, not characters, with Jodie Foster's Alexandra Rover, for one, stumbling about in a mackintosh hat like Paddington Bear.

★☆☆☆☆

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Flightplan (2005)

Jodie Foster plays a mother searching an inflight jumbo passenger plane for her missing daughter while the passengers and crew members around her believe she is delusional and doesn't actually have a daughter on the plane or anywhere, in this 'nobody believes her' thriller that takes Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes from a transEuropean train and puts it 35,000 feet in the air, but this turns out to be a much lesser film than that classic on account of it taking itself way too seriously, because the movie reveals its underwhelming hand too early, because the plot doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and lastly because early scenes suggest a stark, dreamlike unreality which makes all that follows hard to care about.

★☆☆☆☆

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Panic Room (2002)

This thriller opens on Jodie Foster's Meg Altman inspecting a big empty shell of a NY brownstone which she promptly buys and discovers has a panic room just in time for three thieves to break in, and from there, this big empty shell of a movie with a neat concept boxed up deep inside becomes a long stalemate with Meg and her daughter inside the panic room, the thieves at a loss outside, and no amount of tricksy camera work sweeping in and out of keyholes, through walls or meaninglessly zooming in on torch bulbs and gas pipes can raise the tension to anything close to panic-levels given the whole situation is a mess no-one is in control of.

★★☆☆☆

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Taxi Driver (1976)

Martin Scorsese's masterpiece resonates powerfully even today, thirty years after its release, with its story of a war veteran taxi driver, a kind of grown-up Holden Caulfield, who over the course of on-the-job transactional exchanges with psychos, pimps, politicians and prostitutes grows increasingly alienated from and disdainful of NYC - it is hard to argue with De Niro's taxi driver, Travis Bickle's perception that this 1970s NYC is perverted, immoral, sick but it is the taxi driver who psychotically reacts to it.

★★★★★

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Elysium (2013)

The 'haves' on a massive star-shaped space colony, Elysium, and the 'have-nots' on a grubby Mad Max future Earth could easily be an analogy for today's Syrian refugee crisis but once this promising, elaborate cgi world-split-in-two is established, director Neill Blomkamp focuses all his attention on the action and it is like he is trying to distract viewers from the fact he has nothing more to say: there is constant noise, John Woo-style slow-mo theatrics, fleeting moments of experimental camerawork and sfx in extended fight scenes, more noise (everyone needs to yell a name twice before they receive their angry reply over the din..."Max!? Max!!?"); there are superficial references to leukemia, healthcare, robotics, war crimes, government bureaucracy; there's a superhero showdown and Jodie Foster with an accent that sounds like she is doing elocution drills, and it's a sum total of bloated, headache-inducing rigmarole that made me wonder how I might be able to retreat to the quiet of a Mars colony before the end of the movie let alone in 2145.

★★☆☆☆

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The Silence of the Lambs

*SPOILER ALERT*

Rewatching this serial killer chiller is a sobering indication of how naive a filmgoing audience we once were but are no longer, for when Hannibal Lecter says very early on, "Why do you think he skins his victims, Clarice?" the obvious answer today in place of yesteryear's innocent bewilderment, is the quick, plain, "He is probably making a human suit."

★★★★☆

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Carnage (2011)

Roman Polanski brings to the big screen God of Carnage, the successful stage play about two couples negotiating various differences of opinion, and while he manages to generate a few genuine laughs, it is all over before it begins and the impact of the satire is diminished by overtheatrics and moments of overacting.

★★☆☆☆

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