Riders of Justice (Retfærdighedens Ryttere) (2020)

While the media and police dismiss a train crash as an accident, a statistician uses an algorithm to prove to the husband and daughter of a woman killed that nothing is random and in fact the crash was murder, in this unusual, genre-bending, Mads Mikkelsen-helmed Danish movie that blends life-affirming human drama with top-notch revenge action, philosophy, and absurdist comedy.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Casino Royale (2006)

From its opening scene, a vertiginous dash through a construction site, the pace and excitement of this 2006 film of Ian Fleming's first Bond book never lets up, except perhaps for the card game where an effort is made to keep things moving with stairwell fisticuffs, a shower trauma, some defibrillator nonsense, but James has a card game to play and so the action is interrupted by really quite ridiculous scenes of the agent with a licence to kill repeatedly returning to the card table, coolly adjusting his cuff while a look of muted surprise appears on the face of bad guy Mads Mikkelsen.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Arctic (2018)

Imagine the Robert Redford character in All Is Lost on a sled, not a yacht, travelling across expanses of snow, not ocean, and having encounters with polar bears, not sharks, in a more contrived survival struggle - this movie compounds disaster upon disaster in an unlikely and ultimately unnecessary way - and you've got this beautiful-looking, extremely well-acted but very familiar man-versus-nature thriller starring Mads Mikkelsen.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Salvation (2014)

This Danish production set in an Old West with computer-generated stormy skies spends far too much of its running time demonstrating just how bad the bad guy, Henry Delarue, is - he hunts and tortures his brother's killer, hunts and batters a mute woman, kills off the townsfolk two-by-two (you won't care) and extorts from them their land deeds - so when revenge is finally metered out in a rush at the last minute, it no longer even matters by whom: it is simply the long overdue comeuppance needed to end the dreariness.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Door (Die Tür) (2009)

Forget how he manages to time travel (by following a resurrected butterfly through a hole in a wall) and forget how it ends (fairly nonsensically) and just enjoy the quirky thriller in between, as a man whose neglect leads to the death of his daughter ventures back in time to momentarily enjoy the good things of the past...before chaos reigns.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Doctor Strange (2016)

Marvel's latest superhero origin story is a grown-up version of Harry Potter - Hogwarts is a Kathmandu cult, Dumbledore is Tilda Swinton reprising her roles from The Beach and Vanilla Sky, Voldemort is a barely seen cosmic darksider called Dormammu, the spells are "coding", the cloak of invisibility is a cloak of levitation of unexplained sentience, and the special effects are repetitive Inception-style city-shifting ones.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS