American Ultra (2015)

This is a charmless blend of stoner comedy and one of those "dormant sleeper-agent wakes up" action movies of the Jason Bourne and The Long Kiss Goodnight sort, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart as an uncharismatic Bill-and-Ted pair of small-town America stoners who one day find themselves thrust headlong into a CIA conspiracy inspired by the MKUltra experiments of the 50s and 60s.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Charlie's Angels (2019)

The earlier movies were especially vacant exercises with Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu not so much playing the Angels as playing themselves playing at being Angels in a series of spoofs that seemed more of a lark for the cast than for viewers, but this 2019 re-fashioning delivers to audiences a reasonable action plot (albeit one far too long and predictable) set in a spy agency that believes "hugs work" and includes some intelligent humour, refreshing girl-power messages and Kristen Stewart, Ella Balinska, and Naomi Scott saving the world, helped along the way by their "Bosley", director and star Elizabeth Banks.

★★★★☆

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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

Panic Room (2002)

This thriller opens on Jodie Foster's Meg Altman inspecting a big empty shell of a NY brownstone which she promptly buys and discovers has a panic room just in time for three thieves to break in, and from there, this big empty shell of a movie with a neat concept boxed up deep inside becomes a long stalemate with Meg and her daughter inside the panic room, the thieves at a loss outside, and no amount of tricksy camera work sweeping in and out of keyholes, through walls or meaninglessly zooming in on torch bulbs and gas pipes can raise the tension to anything close to panic-levels given the whole situation is a mess no-one is in control of.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Personal Shopper (2016)

The viewers most likely to get something out of this monotonous ghost story slash new-gen existential drama with fleeting murder mystery are teen Twilight fans, slightly older now than they were when Kristen Stewart was romanced by vampires and werewolves but still sporting their multimedia-enhanced attention-spans that enable them to deal with Personal Shopper's flux of unfinished ideas, and who, like the main character, experience a lot of the world alone with eyes trained on a screen, expressing their emotions primarily via emoticons - "I'm scared," "I'm ashamed," Maureen (Kristen Stewart's anachronistically-named psychic personal-shopper) punches into her phone during a text exchange that makes up a boring bulk of the film (an exchange she has with a ghost or a murderer or herself or someone else...stop asking questions) but despite these texted e-motions, Maureen never looks scared nor ashamed nor anything else: her scowl and low affect go unchanged for the duration of the movie - she is neither happy nor sad, here nor there; she is always in transit, between worlds, like the twenty-somethings who might, like, deign to hit LIKE on social media in response to all this more-mature-Twilight supernatural angst.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS