The Mean Season (1985)

Based on a book by John Katzenbach called In The Heat of The Summer, the dull The Mean Season should have capitalised on Florida's oppressive Summer, but everyone in it — Kurt Russell's journalist, a camera-toting colleague, his boss, and a detective played by a very young Andy Garcia — remains fresh despite running around after a serial killer - and Mariel Hemingway's love interest at one point even leaves Kurt a message written in a fogged up car window - and in the same way, the serial killer himself, a taunter of the public via the phone on Malcolm's news desk and a presence that really should sweep through with menace and ravage the community, never actually takes a compelling shape.

★★☆☆☆

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Midnight Lace (1960)

Filled with Hitchcock alumni - Doris Day from The Man Who Knew Too Much and John Williams from Dial M For Murder, but alongside Rex Harrison, not James Stewart or Cary Grant - and about an American woman (Day), newly married and in London, in distress after she starts being stalked by a disembodied voice - first in a pea soup London fog, atmospherically, and then over a series of phone calls - this thriller directed by David Miller really feels like a classic Hitchcock: London, too, with its double deckers, phone boxes, opera performances, and pubs, and while thriller fans will know where it's heading, there are a few well-handled surprises in the end.

★★★★☆

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Majboor ('Convulsed') (1974)

Ravi has a mother, sister, young brother, and a love interest we get to know, first, watching their jolly good times at home and at the beach; time is also spent establishing the kidnap and murder case Ravi is involved in as a witness; he then develops and is diagnosed with a brain tumor; dying, he concocts a plan to falsely confess to a kidnap-murder and claim the reward money for his family; then comes an operation - miraculously - that cures him; and it is only after all this convoluted set-up - a perfunctory first hour and a half (perfunctory despite brightly coloured Bollywood music-and-dance set-pieces) - that the mystery thriller can start: poor helpless and alone ("majboor"), Ravi's only way out of the death penalty is to go on the run and find the real murderer.

★★★☆☆

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Parallel Mothers (Madres Paralelas) (2021)

Orchestral swells and tremulous strings help turn kitchen-table drama into grand operatic melodrama in Pedro Almodóvar's story of two new mothers sharing their experiences of childbirth, but the link between this melodrama and the broader politics Almodóvar bookends the movie with feels pretty tenuous - living without knowing, living with a secret, and correcting past wrongs seem to be the vague thematic bridge.

★★★☆☆

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Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025)

The final episode goes to a lot of trouble to tie in characters and storylines from across the previous I-don't-know-how-many movies, and the result is an exhausting first hour of bombast, but once these operatics are out of the way, the action starts - also exhausting (impossible missions, truly, in sunken submarines in subzero temperatures, and high-speed dogfights and plane-hopping at high altitudes) but exhausting in exactly the way fans of the Mission: Impossible movies want.

★★★★☆

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Murder By Numbers (2002)

Hitchcock's Rope, based on a play, was a chamber thriller focused with icy precision on its chilling pair of Leopold-and-Loeb intellectual killers, whereas Barbet Schroeder's Murder By Numbers might be its dopey cousin 'Fray': it starts strong, in a Hitchcockian world that extends out the window to the horizon - more Rear Window than Rope - but descends into mess as its two killers (Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt) turn on each other, with the film asking us to care about too many extraneous things - the cop's sex life, her traumatic past, one killer's love interest, and even a monkey - until the murdering pair, in the end plodding here and there in plastic body suits and swim goggles, look less icy and more and more like the bungling burglars from Home Alone.

★★★☆☆

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The Mask of Dimitros (1944)

What many say is Eric Ambler's best book is adapted faithfully here to the big screen with Peter Lorre in the lead role as the detective writer Leyden who becomes obsessed with chronicling the life of a murder victim washed up on a beach in Istanbul - Dimitrios Makropoulos, whom Leyden discovers, as he journeys across Europe and Asia talking with the dead man's victims, was a swindler, a spy, assassin, forger, drug dealer,  blackmailer, grifter, thief, and, in the book, even a human trafficker!

★★★★☆

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Missing (2023)

This doesn't quite succeed in sustaining, like "Searching" did, its wholly tech-window-delivered thrills in which everything that happens happens on a phone- and/or computer screen, about halfway through losing momentum and starting to rely on increasingly unlikely sources of video footage, but the mystery of an American teen's mother contains some clever developments.

★★★☆☆

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The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Featuring Dashiell Hammett's gumshoe Sam Spade - a character played in film twice before but immortalised here by Humphrey Bogart - this noir classic gives Sam Spade plenty of opportunity to stand up to big 'fat men' crime bosses, deflate femme fatale molls, and talk smart to cops-on-the-beat while being hired and rehired to chase an invaluable jewel-encrusted bird statue.

★★★★☆

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MaXXXine (2024)

I was confused how this third movie fitted with the previous two, confused who was who, and confused how exactly the message here fits with what came before - something like: since Hitchcock's 'Psycho' Hollywood stardom for women has required them to have sex or be murdered - but as this Hitchcock homage set in the 80s kicked into its 'Body Double' denouement with 80s electric guitar slides accompanying an outrageous shoot-out under the Hollywood sign, the one thing I did know was how much of a good time I was having!

★★★★☆

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怪物 (かいふつ) (Monster) (2023)

Hirokazu Kore-eda's drama, again just a smidge too twee, is about people, very young or old, who either throw themselves outside Japan's strict parameters of social propriety or else find themselves pushed outside those lines by circumstance or by others, and billed as a thriller, Kore-eda's movie will keep you guessing who - an arsonist, a drunk, a bully, a domestic abuser, a liar, or a strange elvin sociopath - the real kaibutsu (monster) of the title is, and it could be any number of dead-in-the-eye non-humans who are, the story shows by changing perspectives round and round, so misunderstood and sadly beautiful.

★★★★☆

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Madame Web (2024)

This much maligned Marvel superhero flick isn't so bad if you are not fussed by its relatively small (for superhero movies) budget or by its lack of male muscle and brawn (instead we have female teamwork and clairvoyance), and you need to be able to look past some weird dubbed voice acting that is never explained, but Dakota Johnson, a presence as light as a feather (like her mum in Working Girl, you feel she might blow away in a wind) is captivating as Cassandra Webb, a paramedic experiencing strange things in the lead up to her discovering by movie's end that she is a spider-enhanced superhero. 

★★★☆☆

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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

These Mission Impossible movies have steadily become more bombastic with agents like Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt - old now, his old experienced eyes staring out from under a peculiarly manicured lawn of hair and through impossibly youthful skin - now uttering lines like, "We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close--and those we never meet" - eye roll - but the set-pieces showcasing 'those' stunts and offering visions of near-future tech, plus an entertaining sequence on the Oreint Express and a pretty good snarling, gnashing new villain played by Pom Klementieff, are enough to keep you watching, just not with as much excitement as when you watched episodes 1, 4, 5 and 6.

★★★☆☆

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Moonfall (2022)

Mercifully skipping the usual disaster-movie preamble of ignored scientists and warnings spilling from dot matrix printers, Moonfall gets to collapsing cities and lunar chaos within minutes, but its brisk, comic-book style only makes it slightly less exhausting than it would otherwise be.

★★☆☆☆

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The Marvels (2023)

There's a lot of "well, just because" logic in the plot of this superhero movie which teams Brie Larsson's Captain Marvel with two other characters with similar names - I don't remember who they are or what they are called but can tell you one was young and annoying and the other serious and dull - and this threesome must prevent a villain finding a powerful pair of stones/rocks/keys, but apart from that and the bemusement I felt (I never understood for example why or how the three heroes were physically interchanging during fights, or why it made any difference), nothing else about this run-of-the-mill superhero  business stuck in my mind beyond the end credits.

★★☆☆☆

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My Salinger Year (aka 'My New York Year') (2020)

In this uneven The Devil Wears Prada set in the publishing, not the fashion, industry of the 1990s, wannabe writer Joanna Ratkoff (a real person upon whose experiences her book - and then this adapatation - are based) scores a dream entry-level job at the Harold Orr publishing agency in New York, which is the agency that really did count notoriously reclusive writer J D Salinger among its author-clients, and it is there that Ratkoff develops a working relationship with Salinger while labouring under Sigourney Weaver's Phyllis Westberg, not a savage Anna Wintour powerhouse but a more falliable Luddite whose wariness towards the office's first computer provides good humour throughout the movie.

★★★☆☆

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Mystic River (2003)

Director Clint Eastwood's Best Picture Oscar-nominated Mystic River is simply a Boston-set police procedural, really, which makes all the solemnity, all the anguish of the story - all the blue-grey bleakness - and the fact an investigation that takes a matter of days to resolve is couched in twenty-five years of trauma context, a bit much - certainly once the movie ends and you know who killed Katie Markum, the daughter of ex-convict Jimmy Markum (a Best Actor Oscar-winning performance from Sean Penn) the question will have crossed your mind why so much trouble was taken to tell what is essentially a coincidence-heavy episode of Law and Order.

★★★☆☆

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Marlowe (2022)

Tricky dicky dialogue at the start that has characters answering questions with questions in a fast prattle and repetitive circle ("What would you say, Mr Marlowe, if I said you said I said...?" sort of talk) makes Neil Jordan's adaptation of John Banville's book start out feeling like a spoof of the hard-boiled detective novel, but it's not and is in fact, eventually, a beautiful-to-look-at period crime story featuring Raymond Chandler's flatfoot Philip Marlowe, played by a perfectly hangdog, trenchcoated, fedora-ed Liam Neeson, investigating a case of a missing Lothario in 1920s Los Angeles, but some problems along the way take you out of the drama - Alan Cunmmings' overacting, for one, and a nebulous mystery that keeps going around and around on the spot, much like that fast Neil Jordan prattle.

★★★★☆

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Masquerade (Fr: 'Mascarade') (2022)

W Somerset Maughan described the French Riviera as a sunny place for shady individuals; in this movie, the shady individuals - grifters of the Parasite kind who inveigle their way into the lives of the French Riviera's rich and glamorous - are themselves gorgeous, and so it isn't hard at all to watch these beautiful creatures, like Pierre Nimey's listless toyboy Adrien or Marine Vacth's desperate single mum Margot (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels operating their grifts off yachts and from opulent mansions), even if their loooong game becomes tired and increasingly hard to believe over the movie's two and a bit long hours. 

★★★★☆

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Mississippi Burning (1988)

I think I read that potential lawsuits meant the factual story of the FBI's investigation into the murders of three young civil-rights workers in Mississippi in the 1960s couldn't simply be told as it happened, and so the identity of the case's mysterious Mr X informant is altered, names are changed, and liberties are taken with the historical facts of who did what, reducing the impact of the movie-final series of stills telling viewers what happened after the story, but as a gripping, dismaying, maddening period crime drama, this Oscar-winner is star-studded, well acted and completely engrossing.

★★★★☆

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