Leave The World Behind (2023)

A family's vacation is interrupted when the man who owns their holiday rental shows up with his daughter in the middle of the night and asks to stay, the set-up of this very M. Night Shyamalan-style slow-burn thriller in which characters are cut-off from the world and from information and left with only their imaginations to grapple with a seemingly absurd new reality, and it is just a shame the solid and intriguing drama concludes with a distinctly American notion that zoning-out in front of the telly beats wrestling critically with world news.

★★★★☆

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Larry Crowne (2011)

Had the title been Late to Class, this movie would clearly have been a romantic comedy about a newly-unemployed boomer who heads back to school in order to give his life new direction, but with the austere title Larry Crowne and a screenplay written by director Tom Hanks that keeps the romantic leads at a remove, held apart by educator-student propriety, the movie, drily funny, not hilarious, remains an oddity, not a Sleepless In Seattle or You've Got Mail romcom great.

★★★☆☆

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Secret In Their Eyes (2015)

This is a thriller about a 13-year-old murder case reopened by a retired FBI agent but the plot of the superior 2009 Argentinian original has been convoluted with some stuff about terrorism probably meant to add contemporary richness but which in fact just muddies the main story, and while Chwetel Ejiofor and Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts are fine, the movie is not the same without Ricardo Darin's shrewd face and sparkling eyes adding some humanness to the grim subject matter.

★★★☆☆

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Money Monster (2016)

A finance news presenter of the zany sort you might see on a morning talkshow is taken hostage live on television and saving him requires a producer to unravel the mystery of an overnight $800 million drop in shareholder value in the mega Ibis corporation; luckily for the hostage, solving the mystery is a brief matter of joining two enormous dots in a movie that eschews satire and its potential as a corporate thriller, opting instead for cartoony, highly unlikely drama.

★★☆☆☆

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Charlotte's Web (2006)

A young girl befriends a piglet and, er, saves his bacon and then a spider befriends that piglet and, er, saves his bacon, in this animatronically enhanced, treacly film version of the beloved - but for me, even as a kid, mystifying - E B White children's book: what is it the humans think is happening and why isn't it Charlotte who is celebrated?

★★☆☆☆

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