The Green Knight (2021)

 

I read The Quest of the Holy Grail once, and this adaptation of a related tale about the nephew of King Arthur, Sir Gawain, journeying to see a Green Knight to pay a due, brought that book back to mind, perfectly evoking the dreaminess and painterliness of the book's chapters, with some, like the episodes in the movie, ending without obvious point while others thrill with chivalrous exploits, all taking place against a beautifully realised medieval time steeped in magic and religion, albeit in a movie with two or three scenes, clanging attempts at modernity, which jolt the viewer out of the otherwise mesmerising fantasy.

★★★★☆

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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?

★☆☆☆☆

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Wish You Were Here (2012)

This well-acted 2015 movie about an Australian foursome's trouble-filled holiday to Cambodia and its aftermath is rather dishonestly marketed as a mystery and while there is an investigation (an inert and highly unlikely one) launched in Sydney, Australia after only three of the bogans return from the trip, viewers who persist through the protracted misery, I mean mystery, will be disappointed by a revelation at the end that is impossible to predict and that makes the movie's whole fall apart, unless some tenuous thing is being suggested that links marital and familial dischord, bad behaviour overseas, and trauma.

★★☆☆☆

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Midnight Special (2016)

Some sort of commune, the government and a mum and dad vie to get their hands on a young boy whose eyes and hands glow and who seems to have an otherworldly ability to cause destruction, in this morose scifi road chase movie stuck in low gear, that goes nowhere slowly with only glum monotone passengers.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Gift (2015)

This slow burn psychological thriller about two men linked by a secret past threatens to derail on two or three occasions - into melodrama, into bad taste, into meaninglessness - but the ultimate gift of The Gift, written and directed by Australian wonder Joel Edgerton, is that it always knows exactly what it is doing, in the end delivering a profound reckoning for a deeply flawed bad guy.

★★★★☆

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The Great Gatsby (2013)

The camera sweeps around, never stopping for longer than two seconds, in Baz Luhrmann's overwrought, overthought adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, with the heart of the novel buried in too much of Bazzle's razzle-dazzle and, with the exception of Leonardo DiCaprio, the cast lacks gravitas, coming across like high school kids playing dress-ups.

★★☆☆☆

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