Mindscape (aka "Anna") (2013)

The high-concept sci-fi is really just a contrivance, the only thing separating this movie from a more run-of-the-mill whodunit with Mark Strong's "memory investigator", a man able to piggybank along in people's memories, really just a Hercule Poirot who might otherwise have to simply interview those involved in a mystery involving a housebound and hunger-striking teenager (another eye-roll-inducing contrivance), a family secret, a murder, schoolyard bullying and mistaken identity.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Shazam! (2018)

A wizard grants a kid a confusing mix of superpowers, and while the kid and the audience are still trying to figure out how all these powers work, this DC superhero movie, a cross between Spider-man and Deadpool, ends, finishing with an extended sequence like a Disney/Power Rangers-esque "effects spectacular" that celebrates family and panders to very young viewers but leaves the hero poorly defined and a bit irrelevant. 

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

The first looong hour reestablishes the 'anything goes' fantasy world of the original Kingsman (a world which I think is supposed to appeal to the now slightly older Harry Potter fan - this Harry Potter swears, smokes bongs, and has sex) and then the second hour demands that the viewer care (less) about a sprawling, charmless white bogan teenage boy's idea of a sophisticated spy world (more Spice World than James Bond with its hammy, unamusing cameos), care (less) about seen-it-before-in-Charlie's-Angels fight scenes, and care (less) about a plot tailor-made for the adolescent.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Brothers Grimsby (2016)

A scene involving an elephant's uterus is clearly an attempt at the sort of scandalous, much-talked-about comedy that fans of Sacha Baron Cohen have come to expect of his movies but in this terribly tired story that throws mismatched brothers together in a spy caper, the elephant scene comes after so much other not-very-funny dross that it just reeks of last-ditch desperation and Sacha Baron Cohen who is normally so hilarious when his fictional characters spear social issues in real world situations, here flounders in an entire fiction.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Before I Go To Sleep (2014)

A victim of a violent attack wakes each morning without memory of the days before in this gimmicky thriller which cares less about its "bad guy reveal" and more about distracting audiences from plot holes and from asking too many questions about the woman's condition (which she may have caught from Guy Pearce in Memento).

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS