Los Angeles Overnight (2017)

This thriller isn't completely uninteresting - I like the dreamlike psychologist voiceover - it is just that there is another movie you might have heard of and would prefer to watch about a blonde-wigged wannabe star whose desire for Hollywood fame leads her down the rabbithole into a world of fractured realities, split consciousnesses, deliberately spoken heavies, creepy dopplegangers, ghastly garbage-dwelling spectres and neo-noirish desert and L.A. roadside body disposal escapades, and that movie is as much a masterpiece as this one is a shameless buyin seemingly thrown together by eager but amateur fanboys. 

★☆☆☆☆

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Insidious Chapter 2 (2013)

Don't expect to be a Rhodes Scholar in the ways of the Further after watching this - just how people pass into and through director James Wan's evil limbo, the Further, introduced in the original Insidious but further elaborated upon in this sequel, seems to no longer depend upon a character being dead - alive or injured or even merely remembered people can hang out there now, so more than before it resembles something like a train station, but still it is never satisfactorily explained - and there are other areas lacking elucidation: scene by scene you'll have trouble keeping track of whose house everyone is in - the Lamberts' or Elise's? - and you'll become dizzy trying to keep track of all the versions of Patrick Wilson's character, Josh, who appears simultaneously as a kid, as an adult, as an adult in memories, as an adult in the Further, as an imposter in each of those places, in flashback sequences as each of those incarnations; and would someone please pick up that baby walker because I don't want to watch a fourth and fifth adult come down those stairs to investigate the piano only to get a jump when the baby walker comes alive with noise and light, again.

★★☆☆☆

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Insidious (2010)

A dopey demon possession story that has nowhere to go except to get increasingly silly, with Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson playing parents of an incessantly crying infant and a possessed boy, all of them helpless in a whirlwind of opening and closing doors, banging furniture, and the most insidious thing, boredom.

★★☆☆☆

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