Cold Pursuit (2019)

In the township of Kehoe in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, against a backdrop of five-metre snows and glacial waterfalls, a snowplow driver seeks grisly revenge on those responsible for his son's death, and as in Harry Brown - because that's who this unlikely vigilante reminds you of, a snowplow-driving Harry Brown - there's a grim satisfaction to be gotten from watching smug druglords receiving their comeuppance from an unlikely avenger, but the movie makes you contend with a snowstorm of Fargo-style detail -the background details and idiosyncracies of oddball characters - that for the middle two-thirds of the movie, sends the plot and fun into hibernation.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Founder (2016)

Like The Social Network, this corporate biopic details the staggering rise and rise of a business - here, McDonalds - and uncannily it too centers on a corporate go-getter whose vision and drive far outstrip those of the founding brothers left watching their own creation run away from them; whatever your thoughts on the golden arches, Michael Keaton's Ray Kroc, with his mad enthusiasm for the speedy kitchen and his simple but ingenious corporate manoeuvres, is so compelling he will have you grinning from ear to ear. 

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Jurassic Park (1993)

I won tickets to see this in 2017 with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra performing the John Williams score live, and the movie - about a dinosaur breakout in an ill-conceived Jurassic themepark - is so full of thrilling Spielberg setpieces and humour, and special effects still impressive today, that I forgot to stop even for a moment to appreciate the orchestra.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Blue Velvet (1986)

David Lynch's neo-noir cult classic from 1986 pre-dates Twin Peaks and his increasingly mind-bending films of the 90s and is remarkable for its hideous gas-sucking, dry-humping villain, its uniquely Lynchian imagery, its dreamlike scenes - like the one with the dancer on the car rooftop, and the standing lobotomee ' and for helping salvage Kyle MacLachlan's career after the director's much-maligned Dune.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Wild (2014)

This American wilderness version of Eat Pray Love sometimes teeters on the brink of that earlier movie's awful self-indulgence but succeeds as an engaging and emotionally affecting account of a woman's journey along the Pacific Crest Trail and out of her life off-the-rails.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS