Once Upon A Time In...Hollywood (2019)

In Tarantino's temporally slight ninth movie - it may be a homage to the 60s but a lot of what happens happens while Sharon Tate sits in a cinema watching herself in The Wrecking Crew - another actor, the fictional Rick Dalton and his stunt double Clint Booth saunter around an impressively recreated 60s Hollywood and with not much to do while they anxiously anticipate the demise of their Golden-Age-of-Hollywood careers due to the advent of colour television, they drop lines referencing 60s culture, have benign encounters with sinister hippies and occasionally strike poses and do things reminiscent of other Tarantino films. 

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

J. Edgar (2011)

Like the film's montage depicting J Edgar Hoover crime-busting, bursting in on organised crime gangs and making arrests, director Clint Eastwood jumps in and machineguns through the details of the life and controversial career of the founder and long-term director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, creating an interesting but hollow highlight reel that slows only occasionally to exaggerate theories of what motivated the man: a Norman Bates-style homelife, apparently, and - an aspect of the man's life not all historians agree upon - his homosexuality.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Titanic (1997)

The most irritating thing about this romance set aboard a painstakingly recreated-to-scale Titanic is that Leonardo's Jack and Kate's Rose are entirely fictitious, so at every minute of the three-plus hour epic, viewers are left discombobulated by what might be painstakingly recreated historical fact and what else is pure throwaway James Cameron fantasy.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

I read Jordan Belfort's revolting book at the insistence of an enthusiastic friend; watching this Scorsese adaptation was my own decision to see if the appeal of the book that eluded me was something discernable in the film and it turns out the extravagant rise and fall of the Wolf ("Wolfie"), a small-time Bernie Madoff, makes for a loud, looong, obnoxious film, all kinds of non-PC and hard-to-believe, but minus the book's self-adulating tone and despite the pitiful man on display and the devastating crimes just out of sight, the movie, particularly the last half, is engaging and often very funny.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

The Departed (2006)

Some tension is eventually delivered in Martin Scorsese's remake of the terrific 2002 Hong Kong action suspense thriller, Infernal Affairs, but only after a long and unconvincing set-up featuring too much farcical humour, too many implausibilities and inconsistencies, and too many Hollywood heartthrobs and not enough gravitas for the cat-and-mouse story of a crooked cop and an undercover agent.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Django Unchained (2012)

It is interesting this, another Tarantino revenge-driven pulp saga, references The Three Musketeers because it is Dumas' other work, The Count of Monte Cristo, that springs to mind watching Jamie Foxx's ex-slave Django, at one stage horseback in a shimmering electric blue Fauntleroy outfit, enjoying a renaissance in disguise, meting out a cold dish of revenge against America's South, but this is less rollicking fun than Dumas' story and more than other Tarantino, anxiety-inducing and contrived.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Great Gatsby (2013)

The camera sweeps around, never stopping for longer than two seconds, in Baz Luhrmann's overwrought, overthought adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, with the heart of the novel buried in too much of Bazzle's razzle-dazzle and, with the exception of Leonardo DiCaprio, the cast lacks gravitas, coming across like high school kids playing dress-ups.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Inception (2010)

Watching Inception made me want to disappear into a manufactured dreamscape too, away from the relentless overlong nonsense of this Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle and hopefully away from the inevitable Inception 2 and even more bodgy Inception 3 in which no-name Australian actors fight for a reality that stripped of any matrices looks more than a little like a muddy rave event in Meredith.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS