Barbie (2023)

It isn't terrifically funny, generating just a handful of laughs, and while a positive and important message film, it is hard to enjoy it without cynically appraising it as a Mattel marketing exercise and feeling duped: much of the film is spent positioning an antiquated white-skinned, blonde-haired and pink kitchen-accessoried doll - and prime offender over decades in promoting unrealistic female standards - as a torchbearer for feminism and cultural diversity.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020)

There are no characters and no acting here, just famous people in make-up in this terribly unengaging anti-superhero movie from the DC stable, a movie so pedestrian, so uninteresting it can't even think of anything fun to do when staging a fistfight staged in a carnival funhouse, and while it is nice to see women in the front seat of a superhero vehicle, this twisted, damaged group of caricatures unite only in the final scenes and only under threat of death, leaving the supposed girlpower message as flat and joyless as everything else.

★☆☆☆☆ 

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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

Mary Queen of Scots (2018)

The actual historical figure also had grand aspirations to be something greater but failed because there were others that had already succeeded in her place.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Suicide Squad (2016)

A government intelligence agent hits upon the bright idea of assembling DCEU villains to fight future "superhuman terrorists" but the moment these unbriefed and unwilling criminal metahumans are released from Belle Reve prison, problems erupt of the sort a slightly more forward-thinking person could have anticipated, and compounding these problems is the pervading sense throughout the movie that someone forgot to ask Batman and The Flash whether they weren't too busy to step in and the fact that it turns out the only things apart from a bomb required to overcome a many-thousands-of-years-old Enchantress are not scales, sharp teeth, fireballs and psychosis, but an ability to swim, throw and shoot at close-range.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

I, Tonya (2017)

Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding stares down the camera and announces we've reached the part of the ice-skater's life story that we've all come to the cinema to see and in fact it is at this point the movie lags and threatens to become repetitive and boring, but the details of Harding's life in the earlier stages of the movie, the question of whether Harding was complicit in the kneecapping of ice-skating rival Nancy Kerrigan, the all-round terrific performances, some neat 'how do they do it' ice-skating routines, and the dismaying idea that class injustice has pervaded even our Olympic sports, overall make I, Tonya an engrossing watch.

★★★★☆

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

Focus (2015)

*VAGUE SPOILER ALERT*

Good chemistry between Will Smith and Margot Robbie, and an Ocean's Eleven (Twelve, Thirteen...) sophistication make this movie's high stakes game of grifting and double-, triple-, quadruple-crossing, enjoyable despite gaping plotholes that leave you wondering why he didn't take the bag of money and what would have happened if he hadn't simply fled...but that is all part of the con, I suppose.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS