The Substance (2024)

The gothic fairytale The Substance very efficiently sets up how the peculiar science at its core works - an unboxing scene reveals boldly labelled products, one after the other, that neatly, cleverly explain the workings of a substance that promises rejuvenation to Demi Moore's has-been tv star Elisabeth Sparkle - but then the movie uses voiceover and those bold labels repeatedly flashed on screen to hammer home again and again what has been firmly established, making the really very humorous body horror movie more and more of a camp pantomime for imbeciles as it goes along.

★★★☆☆

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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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Adam (2019)

I kept waiting for the coming-of-age drama to trump me with some unexpected virtue of title character Adam, a teenaged dope who beds a conquest by pretending not to be a cis male, but no, to the end Adam remains a repugnant catfisher, a rapist by deception and character who detracts greatly from this, what?,  comedy's commendable efforts to represent gender fluidity on screen, and what's worse, Adam is given an unlikely reprieve in the end that leaves a taste in your mouth even worse than that left by his dumb campaign of lies.

★★☆☆☆

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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. 

★★★☆☆

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