The Batman (2022)

When the topic of The Batman came up, a teenager I tutor summed it up perfectly as a movie about a "miserable Batman with miserable friends fighting a miserable villain in a miserable city", and he wasn't wrong, because this brooding restyling of the franchise positions Robert Pattison's Batman as a sullen emo and has him, Zoe Kravitz's slinky Selena, the mobsters and Gotham street crims, the justice system, and in fact the entire city of Gotham sunk in a psychotic depression while The Riddler, a Heath Ledger-Joker-echo, murders public figures and taunts authorities with tightly scripted David Berkowitz-style codes - all of which oppressive heaviness is fine - it's Batman, afterall - until the final act reveals the supposed root of the city's decay and it feels, in comparison, almost trivial.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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