Reptile (2023)

They went to a lot of trouble to make this thriller atmospheric, muting colours and asking an ensemble of fine actors to speak and move at snail's pace, but they forgot to include anything or anyone that viewers can care much about, so there's not a whole lot of interest in the case of a real estate agent's murdered wife or in the question of whether Benicio Del Toro's worldweary cop can solve the crime.

★★★☆☆

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Wonder Wheel (2017)

When a gangster's wife on the run seeks refuge in her estranged father's home overlooking Coney Island's theme park amusements, a Tennessee Williams-style love triangle develops between her, her father's wife, and a lifeguard (a conspicuous, heavily made-up and eager-to-impress Justin Timberlake who is given the job of providing the voiceover narration and direct-to-camera monologues that are so often a tired, unnecessary feature of recent Woody Allen movies).

★★★☆☆

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The Social Network (2010)

Today's movie-making machine churns out documentaries long before a controversy is over; movie-versions come out even before books drop off the bestseller list; celebrity biopics precede celebrity deaths; and, in the case of The Social Network, a current event is committed to celluloid history long before it can truly be called history, but against all odds and despite the prematurity of the story, director David Fincher turns his movie depicting the birth of social networking site Facebook into a rivetting drama - a zippy, talky story of three lawsuits that functions as a character study of an apparently deeply unlikeable young Mark Zuckerberg.

★★★★☆

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