The King's Man (2021)

Are there people in the world, really, who weren't immediately repelled by this series' titles' shifting, changing spacing and punctuation, who in fact watched and so enjoyed the tiresome teenage-boysy action of the first two cartoons they thought what was needed, yawn, was a wartime period backstory that awkwardly combines Saving Private Ryan-style solemn battlefield war history with high-camp devil-may-care superhero derringdo?

★★☆☆☆

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Klaus (2019)

It hijacks the Christmas tradition and completely fabricates a Christmas origin story, but Klaus is worth watching for the beautiful hand-drawn animation alone, and for Jason Schwartzman's hilarious voice performance of the main character Jesper - a lazy son cast out by his father to a remote snowy outpost - who finds reward in hard work and in getting good out of people, albeit duplicitously.

★★★★☆

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Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)

The inferior sequel to Knives Out tries to repeat the same tricks, cutting back and forwards in time to interject scenes that upend what we thought we knew of the developing mystery (this time set on a tech billionaire's hi-tech Greek island where guests have gathered for a murder mystery weekend) but like that murder mystery weekend, which Daniel Craig's nondescript Benoit Blanc abruptly ends by prematurely solving it, so too is the movie's main mystery - the murder of one of the guests - abruptly over, solved within an hour of starting, and all the jumping back and forth between past and present, the crowdpleasing techpreneur teardown, and jarring celebrity cameos can't disguise how brief and empty it is.

★★☆☆☆

Kidnapped (2021)

Nothing to do with Robert Louis Stevenson, he'd be in a hurry to tell you, this mindless mystery fare, like an especially poorly plotted episode of Murder, She Wrote, has an American couple running around a small Australian island resort called Koala Sanctuary looking for their daughter missing from hotel childcare, but who among the wooden Australian extras would want to kidnap the girl and for what possible motive you will know immediately as the story, like a Days Of Our Lives subplot given more credence than it is due plays out in soapy, bleedingly obvious fashion.

★★☆☆☆

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Kóblic (2016)

Argentina's Dirty War is the context of this thriller, set in 1977, that has Ricardo Darin playing a traumatised former Death Flight pilot who becomes involved with a married woman, and it is just a shame that by film's end this fascinating context, beautifully realised in complete period detail, ceases being relevant to the thriller plot except perhaps for dictating how brutally everyone behaves.

★★★☆☆

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In Order Of Disappearance (Kraftidioten) (2014)

The 2018 American remake of this darkly funny Scandinavian Harry Brown seemed to think the interest lay in the irreverent detail - the gangster nicknames, the odd bod characters, and the quirky relationships - and so ended up an unfocused Fargo mess while the 2014 Norwegian original includes all the irreverent detail but remains tightly focused on how the actions of a revenge-seeking everyman (in fact, a small-town Citizen of the Year), um, snowball and erupt a war between rival drug gangs, all while the everyman miraculously dodges bullets.

★★★☆☆

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Keane (2004)

As the title character, Damian Lewis gives a wholehearted performance but his situation never quite rings true: after the abduction of his daughter from the New York Port Authority bus terminal, Keane teeters on the edge of insanity (but then doesn't), struggles to scrounge cash to continue his hotel limbo (but then doesn't) and for the benefit of the viewer (but not for the believability of the story), he also helpfully provides an out-loud commentary of his mad thoughts.

★★☆☆☆

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The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle) (1974)

Werner Herzog doesn't entertain the possibility that Kaspar Hauser - the short-statured 17 year-old foundling discovered one day in a Nuremberg street - was a fraud exploiting a fantastic life story for the public attention, instead opening his film with Kaspar Hauser's captivity, his first venture outside, and his public discovery exactly as the cause célèbre himself described them, and with Herzog's mesmerising ways and a terrific disconcerting central performance from Boris S., a 41 year-old non-actor with mental health issues, the film allows viewers to discover for themselves, with the wonder of Nuremberg locals in 1828, the enigma of Kaspar Hauser suddenly in the world, clutching his letters on the street, the subject of a story Herzog presents as a matter of plain fact, leaving it to viewers to turn everything in on itself and let the possibilities of a fraud or a conspiracy or a personality disorder twist in their brains like a double- or even a triple- negative. 

★★★★★

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Knives Out (2019)

Not as effective a homage to the Agatha Christie murder mystery as it is a homage to the parlour game thriller stage plays of the likes of Ira Levin and Anthony Shaffer, director Rian Johnson nods to Sleuth with his mystery novellist's mansion setting crammed full of unusual murder mystery objects (including a prominent Jolly Jack Tar figure) and Deathtrap is brought to mind watching this movie's twisting, changing thriller-, not mystery-, plot and, really, this mostly fun, mostly well-plotted movie is in fact at it worst in its messy third act and attempts at a detective dénouement - Agatha Christie was never so longwinded. 

★★★☆☆

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Your Name (君の名は) (きみのなは) (2016)

Japan's second highest grossing film of all time, this 2016 animated feature has a mindboggling story told especially mindbogglingly with the main characters, highschoolers Taki and Mitsuha, frequently swapping bodies and the action switching from past to present and back again, so it can be hard to know scene by scene who is who and when is when, but the animation is so spectacular, it doesn't matter — you are probaby going to be happy to marvel at the images all again to iron out in your mind the intricacies of the Back To The Future time travel slash Freaky Friday body swap plot.

★★★★☆

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The Candidate (Kandidaten) (2008)

When a gun defense lawyer applies for a job at his late father's law firm, it is probably just so he can get closer to the truth of his father's suspicious death in a car crash, but given there's only one person in the entire movie who can possibly be the culprit responsible, the gun defense lawyer need not have gone to the trouble of applying for the job and he might have saved himself and all of us from becoming embroiled in the stupid, definitely not thrilling plot that ensues involving the unsympathetic dolt's being framed for murder.

★☆☆☆☆

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The King of Comedy (1982)

He doesn't have a demo tape and appears to have no regular gigs, instead just sits in his basement dreaming, so it is hard to empathise, but when fame as a stand-up comedian eludes Robert De Niro's idiosyncratic Rupert Pupkin, a citydweller as isolated and mad as Travis Bickle, he enlists the help of an unhinged friend (played with rabid relish by Sarah Bernhard) to kidnap tonight show host Jerry Langford, (played by Jerry Lewis essentially playing himself), in Scorsese's peculiar, darkly amusing comedy thriller that in the end says what: audacity over talent?

★★★☆☆

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The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Director Yorgis Lanthimos' fascinating, disturbing allegorical tale is about a cardiologist (a shaggy-bearded Colin Farrell looking like serial killer surgeon Harold Shipman) whose wife and children are made to bear the price of his sins, and it is so rhythmic, so hypnotic, by the end you will be able to predict next lines even while the point of the whole eludes you.

★★★★☆

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The Kennel Murder Case (1933)

With a runtime of just 73-minutes, this 1933 whodunnit, the fifth of fifteen films adapted from the detective novels of S S Van Dine between 1929 and 1947, has a very high body count - four, including the first untimely death of a prize show dog - and it is up to super-sleuth Philo Vance, played by William Powell, to catch the culprit, which he does despite the solution to the mystery being quite preposterous, revealed in a laughable denouement.

★★★☆☆

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Kidnap (2017)

The fact she is a divorcee, has a litigious ex, and is a waitress who grapples for the movie's first fifteen minutes with rude or fickle or impatient customers is all extraneous to the sixty-minute car chase Halle Berry's Karla Dyson embarks upon after she witnesses her son's abduction: the writers haven't tried to make this dross even slightly intelligent, staging the vehicular action in a logic-free fantasy land that exists free from the constraints of time, largely free from a police presence, free from geographical constraints, and free from viewers' expectations that something interesting might happen in the end to cleverly tie it all together.

★☆☆☆☆

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Kung Fu Killer (一個人的武林) (aka Kung Fu Jungle/Land of the Best) (2014)

"Who's Killing All The Great Martial Artists of Asia?" tells the story of an imprisoned martial arts expert enlisted by police to help track down a glory-hungry kungfu serial killer and in China was clearly an event film judging by the sheer number of martial artists and celebrities who appear in it, but whether the Chinese-Hong Kong production is as good an action as suggested by all the accolades the movie garnered upon its 2014 release is hard to determine for this non-Mandarin, non-Cantonese-speaking viewer: those in charge of the subtitles might as well have used Wingdings - it is like reading a phonebook in the dark for two hours.

★★★☆☆

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Kung Fu Hustle (2004)

The effete, retiring, tired, slovenly everyday folk of Pig Sty Alley, a Shanghai slum, have some kungfu tricks up their sleeves when the not-so-dastardly Axe Gang muscles in on their territory, in this oddbod hit set in the 30s that combines wuxia thrills with cartoon fantasy, hilarious screwball and slapstick comedy, and a touching romance between Sing, a street crim whose heart isn't in it and Fong, a mute hawker.

★★★★☆

The King's Speech (2010)

Forget the DCEU and MCU: grandly staged historical dramas like this one about King George VI, the father of Queen Elizabeth II and stammering deliverer of rousing wartime speeches, form a rich and sprawling KGVIU - King George VI Universe - with Dunkirk and Darkest Hour and other recent big budget historical releases helping to turn boring WWII high school history classes into a rich cinematic tapestry that you feel you could watch stop-start, one movie in conjunction with the others and learn m9re than you ever did from your school books.

★★★★☆

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Kumiko the Treasure Hunter (2014)

Once you know it is inspired by an urban myth that sprang up to explain the 2001 death in the freezing Minnesota cold of a young Japanese woman, you can't help but be dismayed by this confection that removes poor real-life and probably broken-hearted Takako Konishi from the story of her suicide, replacing her with Kumiko, an oddbod fantasist and broad-brushstroke product of Japanese society, and replacing the genuine tragedy and elements of genuine mystery of Konishi's death with fairytale stylings, an absence of established details of Konishi's life (her ex-lover, her suicide note..) and a particularly obtuse and - I imagine offensive to some - final scene.

★★★☆☆

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K-9 (1989)

This differs from Turner and Hooch, released only three months earlier, in the way that the German Shepherd of the mismatched cop-dog duo is the straight-laced, authoritative, respectable Tom Hanks one while Jim Belushi does a slobbering Dogue de Bordeaux version of a cop-with-a-deathwish a la Martin Riggs/Axle Foley; which movie you prefer will largely depend on your actor and your dog breed preferences and how much you can tolerate this movie's weak love triangle-involving-a-dog subplot.

★★☆☆☆

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