Barton Fink (1991)

After auterial success in New York, a playwright is snapped up by a film studio to work as a writer of a wrestling movie in Hollywood, but in this world of lucrative contracts, deadlines, and hothead studio bosses, the writer starts to question what's in his head, who it belongs to, how to get it out or keep it in and keep it unsullied, and whether anyone is interested, and it is perhaps this last question that the Coen brothers themselves might have thought longer about in relation to their unsympathetic Fink in their mean-spirited story full of motor-mouths.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Patriots Day (2016)

This moment-by-moment account of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing is a moving tribute to the city, its first responders and citizens injured or killed in the two explosions, and coming so soon after events, is naturally not a movie interested in turning the camera away from the victims and heroes to explore more deeply the genesis of the crime or the backgrounds, rationales or personalities of the perpertrators, their relationship to each other, with their families or to Islam.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Coyote Ugly (2000)

The "Coyote Ugly" bar's Occupational Health and Safety standards are sorely tested by a wannabe songstress so desperate to make a go of her miming skills, she risks strutting up and down the venue's slippery bar juggling glass bottles and then, just when you think her life couldn't get any more out there, she makes the difficult but life-changing decision to karaoke Blondie's One Way Or Another during a bar fight, and pretty soon she's got it all.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

*SPOILER ALERT*

A captive woman, always one to flee at the first sign of trouble, learns to, er, bunker down and fight, in J J Abrams' thriller full of painstakingly plotted minor details and enormous gaping unanswered bigger questions, making this a not very impressive movie except for the menace of John Goodman's captor, a doomsday prepper who may not be telling the truth about what lies beyond the airsealed bunker doors (an air filtration system in a stupid place, for one thing, and another problem which turns out to be nothing that a stiff drink and a smoke can't sort out, so calm down, Houston).

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW