Natural Born Killers (1994)

Just what Oliver Stone intended with this wafer-thin heavy metal video clip - all symbolism, zero realism, and seemingly a grand thesis of one simplistic note - I don't know but it is loud, long and monotonous: a two-hour fight scene that plays out as though everyone is making it up as they go along, with one-dimensional characters screaming their way through one long unlikely situation, with the chaos of mass murderers Mickey and Mallory's "deep love" affair (read occasional "dry humping" and tongue kisses) and violent crime spree spliced meaninglessly with cartoon clips, black and white photography and - in a last-ditch attempt at relevance - media clips of actual celebrated tv crime reports. 

★☆☆☆☆

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Ma (2019)

Older people wanting in with younger - intergenerational ingratiation - is the really interesting thing at the core of this well-acted horror thriller and is something reflected not only in Octavia Spencer's Ma's relationship with the group of high schoolers she lures to parties in her basement but also in the relationship Juliette Lewis's mother-character has with the Julie Roberts-lookalike daughter she hopes will stay interested in their movie-nights-in together, but the thriller makes little of this, instead squeezing in issues of race, gender, animal cruelty, catfishing, Munchausen By Proxy, bullying and trauma, so that Ma, in the end, becomes a broad caricature - in fact, she recalls Homer Simpson the way she gets about in that one outfit, her scrubs - and her psychoticism in the end is a generalised disorder, themeless, levelled at everyone for everything, and manifests in outrageous, unjustified Human Centipede flourishes - she's just a rank nutter who needs to be violently dispatched, undermining the already longwinded, not-very-interesting psycho origin story told across too many flashback interruptions.

★★☆☆☆

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Cape Fear (1991)

Because another auteur, Francis Ford Coppola, released his Bram Stoker's Dracula just a year later, I've always had this fanciful notion that Gary Oldman's Count is Scorsese's hideous, half-melted Max Cady, the monstrous-on-a-mythological-scale psychotic rapist, first played in 1962 by Robert Mitchum but immortalised here by Robert de Niro in 1991 and in my mind forever to rise, psychotic eyes first, from the depths of Cape Fear, that terrifyingly named nexus of his revenge plot against Nick Nolte's Sam Bowden, the lawyer who wronged him and whose unfortunate family members, Jessica Lange as Bowden's wife and Juliette Lewis in the performance of her career as the terrified but electrified daughter, Danielle, unfortunate pawns in Cady's game of bloodlust.

★★★★☆

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Enough (2002)

Based on an Oprah's Bookclub book surely better than this, Enough is a domestic violence thriller and a daft one given it is broken up into unhelpful chapters by Frasier-style titlecards (one scene opens with a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge and then 'San Francisco' appears written on the screen, for example, and other titles announce stages in Slim's relationship with the abusive Mitch when, really, the white dress or the home reno scene, etc. etc., are pretty good signposts alone) and what really makes Enough, well, Not  Enough is the fact Slim, played by Jennifer Lopez, extracts herself from her violent marriage with help from "Jupiter, all-mighty powerful king of the gods", a white saviour father figure and bankroller of cars and homes, self-defense lessons and wigs, detracting from the otherwise tantalising concept of a helpless, resourceless, battered woman learning to fight back.

★★☆☆☆

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Husbands and Wives (1992)

From their apartments to their workplaces, and in cafes and at parties, a foursome of New Yorkers talk neurotically about sex, fidelity and marriage, men and women, but this is not Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, but Gabe and Judy, Sally and Jack, two couples in Woody Allen's hilarious 1992 comedy, who are all rocked by the latter pair's decision to separate.

★★★★★

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From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

Director Robert Rodriguez and writer Quentin Tarantino display their penchant for talky, stylised violence and fun unconstrained by genre conventions with this road movie that halfway through suddenly changes into a vampire horror, a precursor to their later grindhouse collaborations.

★★★☆☆

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