Pet Sematary (2019)

This adaptation improves upon the wooden 1989 one but just can't overcome the silliness of Stephen King's plot about grown men, one a ER doctor for goodness sake, who - what, unable to face up to a pet cat's death? - trudge through a woods at night to make use of a magical burial ground which one of the men forgets to say only resurrects mangy demon-beasts and when the cat comes back as expected a raging, rabid monster, what do the men do but head back to the burial ground again and again to repeat the process of resurrecting as deranged murderous monsters things even more dear to them.

★★☆☆☆

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Daddy's Home 2 (2017)

The 2017 Bad Moms sequel also perpetuated its comedy by introducing an older generation and in doing so, took the focus off what audiences liked in number one - the moms - but Daddy's Home manages to retain the feel by making the granddads replicas of the dads - it's the same joke being played out again in a movie that is most funny when Will Ferrell is doing his Chevy Chase National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation impersonation.

★★★☆☆

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Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

James Franco is a bit self-consciously James Franco in this 2011 first of the rebooted Planet of the Apes series of movies but his inwardness doesn't stop this being a terrifically entertaining blockbuster about Caesar, an intelligent ape, who ends up leading as rousing an uprising as any you've seen before in cinema, with the movie playing a little like what it would have been like if Alfred Hitchcock had included a first act explaining the terrible battery farm treatment that first made the birds mad.

★★★★☆

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Cliffhanger (1993)

1988s Die Hard is transported to the snowy peaks of the Rocky Mountains in this 1993 action that tells the rollicking good story of mountain rescuers who find that their rescuees are in fact a gang of violent criminals seeking to recover money lost in a plane crash, and the only unfortunate thing is that the movie scatterguns the treacheries of the mountains (bats, glaciers, avalanches, rockfalls, dizzying heights, stalactites) and doesn't instead make use of longer Spielberg-style set-ups designed to heighten the thrills beyond the merely episodic.

★★★★☆

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Beatriz at Dinner (2017)

This episode of 'Touched By A Vegetarian, Reiki-Practising Angel' overreaches with its story of a Cecil the Lion-killing business mogul who is never, over the course of a dinner, going to be made to accept responsibility for all the evils of the world (including the murder of a pet goat) and so, with nowhere to go, it ends exactly as all your dinner parties ever have when someone wants to drunkenly cure all societal ills - guests end up wanting to kill themselves.

★☆☆☆☆

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Footloose (1984)

A city kid rocks the foundations of a conservative town in America's Midwest by challenging its ban of rock music and dancing, in this 80s classic, a dull, ridiculous melodrama that is not so ridiculous if you believe claims it is based on real events in the township of Elmore City, Oklahoma, and not so dull if you try to find ways in which it is analogous to real situations like, say, the Australian Government's stance on same-sex marriage.

★★☆☆☆

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Blow Out (1981)

A movie sound guy becomes an earwitness to the death of a US politician, and his sound recordings of the incident suggest an assassination, in Brian De Palma's classic but very ugly, masochistic thriller starring John Travolta.

★★★★☆

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2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)

This science fiction sequel is fascinating for having special effects that are worse in 1984 than the prequel in 1968 sixteen years earlier, and where that Kubrick film was philosophical, metered, balletic and profound, this is like a DLC expansion pack offering fans a quick add-on storyline that isn't terrible (Russian and American astronauts investigate the failed Discovery One mission to Jupiter) but is certainly, compared with the original, obvious, cursory, and fairly forgettable with a narrative driven by Captain Kirk-style diary logs. 

★★★☆☆

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