Still Alice (2014)

A 50-year-old Linguistics professor is diagnosed with a hereditary form of Early Onset Alzheimer's Disease in this tearjerker that is as much a character study of the debilitating disease itself as it is a character study of the unfortunate woman, Alice, and her family - of course no-one's idea of a good time but the movie features such a good performance by Julianne Moore you won't be able to take your eyes off it.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Suburbicon (2017)

The interesting part in George Clooney's sixth directorial effort, a black comedy based on a Coen Brothers' screenplay, is the desegregation happening in Suburbicon, a fictional suburb of the sort that popped up and spread, uniform and white, across the US in the 50s, but the moving in of the African-American Mayers family at the end of the decade and the ugly reaction of the locals (a situation apparently inspired by the experiences of a real-life 'Myers' family in Levittown, Pennsylvania) is just a broad context of questionable relevance to the Fargo nonsense of the plot - suburbanites get in over their heads in grubby crime - which reduces the more interesting context to just a hubbub that only serves to disguise a gunshot at one point late in the - yawn - story.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

The first looong hour reestablishes the 'anything goes' fantasy world of the original Kingsman (a world which I think is supposed to appeal to the now slightly older Harry Potter fan - this Harry Potter swears, smokes bongs, and has sex) and then the second hour demands that the viewer care (less) about a sprawling, charmless white bogan teenage boy's idea of a sophisticated spy world (more Spice World than James Bond with its hammy, unamusing cameos), care (less) about seen-it-before-in-Charlie's-Angels fight scenes, and care (less) about a plot tailor-made for the adolescent.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

Jeff Goldblum does his zany thing, reprising his role of zany chaos theorist Ian Malcolm and taking the lead in this sequel, a darker, more violent, headache-inducing and overall lesser Jurassic Park movie which has Malcolm sent by John Hammond to a second island of the park to research and document dinosaurs but he finds mercenaries from the InGen corporation are also there with less sensible, more short-term commercial interests in mind.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Carrie (2013)

The two problems with this 2013 remake of Carrie, the 1976 movie based on the Stephen King book are, one, the wildly inconsistent state of mind of the title character who one minute sobs and screams inconsolably, the next calmly employs expert conflict resolution skills in negotiations with her neurotic bible-bashing mother about how unfairly she is being treated only to immediately revert back to hysterical, incessant screaming; and two, the horror movie wants us to sympathise with Carrie and who really has sympathy for a school massacrist, bullied and telekinetic or not?

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Hannibal (2001)

Oh dear, the subtle, chilling and in many ways groundbreaking Silence of the Lambs is followed up by this blatant, bloated, over-the-top gothic melodrama, a sequel which replaces Jodie Foster's intense, determined but vulnerable Clarice with Julianne Moore's personality-free version who starts off being held responsible, ridiculously, for a 70s blaxploitation movie's stakeout-gone-wrong and then bungles her way through a dull serial killer investigation involving so much exaggerated horror without any let up or normalcy that in the end it feels like a desperate, unclassy, um, assault upon the brain.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Psycho (1998)

This is a 1998 remake of Hitchcock's 1960 thriller about a woman who goes missing after visiting a roadside motel, with so much identical to the original that it begs the question why it needed to be remade at all, particularly given everything about it is so constrained by what has come before that even the A-list stars seem like thinly disguised, taxidermied versions of their past counterparts, conspicuous in a hand-me-down wardrobe of fedoras, black skivvies, flared pant legs, and delivering lines too readily like actors going through the motions of an over-rehearsed play.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Non-Stop (2014)

Liam Neeson does his Taken tough guy act again in this ridiculous but fun Die Hard-esque action thriller set aboard an international flight which has found itself at the mercy of a mysterious...phone texter!

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS