Awake (2019)

Given Jonathan Rhys Meyer's amnesiac "John" is a man accused of murder, that he's on the run trying to solve the crime he is accused of, and that he spends a lot of time in the company of a woman sometimes in handcuffs, this mystery thriller's plot could be likened to The 39 Steps, but Awake is a far, far lesser film than that with clichéd writing, a culprit you recognise as the culprit the split second they first appear on screen, and a nebulous plot that is really just ninety tired minutes of filler until "John" finally - no, not remembers - solves the mystery by doing a search on Wikipedia.

★☆☆☆☆

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Vanity Fair (2004)

To give you an idea of the pace, war breaks out in one scene and Reese Witherspoon's all-too-American Becky Sharp, the social-climbing female-Barry Lyndon central to William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847 novel, helps her fellow pregnant friend into a shelter where they talk momentarily about their impending motherhood and in the next scene when they emerge onto the street, the Napoleonic Wars are over and they are mothers of 15-year-olds, and so it goes - a breezy line about a funeral is dropped to inform us of the death of a major character we saw cough just a moment earlier; a first kiss immediately precedes a scene of extended family bliss - and while it may be an impressive feat of screenwriting to capture most things that happen in Thackeray's 650-odd pages of sweeping, multigenerational period drama, as a movie this feels too often like a mere highlight reel.

★★☆☆☆

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Match Point (2005)

A young man is offered financial security and social standing by one woman, passion and excitement by another, in a fairly conventional story of an affair that Woody Allen turns into a measured, mesmerising thriller that references Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.

★★★★☆

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