Suburbicon (2017)

The interesting part in George Clooney's sixth directorial effort, a black comedy based on a Coen Brothers' screenplay, is the desegregation happening in Suburbicon, a fictional suburb of the sort that popped up and spread, uniform and white, across the US in the 50s, but the moving in of the African-American Mayers family at the end of the decade and the ugly reaction of the locals (a situation apparently inspired by the experiences of a real-life 'Myers' family in Levittown, Pennsylvania) is just a broad context of questionable relevance to the Fargo nonsense of the plot - suburbanites get in over their heads in grubby crime - which reduces the more interesting context to just a hubbub that only serves to disguise a gunshot at one point late in the - yawn - story.

★★☆☆☆

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Contagion (2011)

In Deep Impact, another global panic disaster movie with an all-star cast, it is a meteor hurtling towards Earth that, threatening human extinction, leads the world's population to act in extraordinary ways (including holding a lottery for a limited number of life-preserving prizes), but here in Contagion, it is a new strain of virus - something like the coronavirus - that wipes out millions, starts a global panic, and launches the scientific race to find a vaccine, and even though we've seen it all before in Deep Impact and Outbreak and others, it is gripping stuff ripped from today's newspaper headlines.

★★★★☆

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The Great Wall (长城) (2017)

The poster teases, "What were they trying to keep out [by building the Great Wall of China]?" but the intrigue ends very early on in this Matt Damon-helmed fantasy action when the gnashing dog beasts, the Tao Tei, are revealed and then shown over and over and over again, with every subsequent shot of a dog beast leaping forward into a 'mouth spear' further deadening your interest, and nor is your interest likely to be kindled by scenes of political friction between Damon's European mercenary (in China in search of gunpowder) and Jing Tian's Commander Lin - back and forth, back and forth they go: are they allies or are they enemies? - for these scenes exist simply to break up the monotony of the monster wave attacks...and myriad weapons (fiery cannonballs, bungee ropes, big scissors and bedsheets fashioned into wonky balloons) also fail to recapture the wonder of that teaser question.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Jason Bourne (2016)

The camera never stays still for more than a second so imagine watching an episode of The Amazing Race on The Zipper: the "contestants" are the most technologically-enabled but most bungling CIA team ever assembled for the franchise (and only them - there are zero outsiders in this world) and the "prize" they are vying for you might think is a personality because there isn't one between them nor one to be found at any of the "roadblocks" in Berlin, Greece, London or Las Vegas - now that Jason Bourne remembers everything, has his identity back and we all know his name, a personality seems to be the last missing thing.

★★☆☆☆

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The Good Shepherd (2006)

Great spy stories, like Graham Greene novels, operate on two levels with agent protagonists juggling individual, emotional sides with their detached organisational spy roles, but the focus of this thriller is unrelentingly trained upon Edward Wilson's job with everyone everywhere a whispering agent or double agent, and for too long the only human side on show is in the fleeting scenes Wilson shares with his girlfriend, wife and son, and given he exhibits an emotional detachment that warrants psychological intervention, things quickly become dreary and that is a shame given the calibre of the actors in this and the potential of the story spanning decades of American history.

★★☆☆☆

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The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)

Despite the anticlimax of its fudged final scene, this is a terrific adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1955 book that succeeds as a classy thriller, a glamorous European travelogue, and a deeply disturbing psychological character study of a young chameleon whose talents as a voice artist and tendency to be in the right place at the right time assist him in keeping up a series of wickedly simple but deadly deceptions.

★★★★☆

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Elysium (2013)

The 'haves' on a massive star-shaped space colony, Elysium, and the 'have-nots' on a grubby Mad Max future Earth could easily be an analogy for today's Syrian refugee crisis but once this promising, elaborate cgi world-split-in-two is established, director Neill Blomkamp focuses all his attention on the action and it is like he is trying to distract viewers from the fact he has nothing more to say: there is constant noise, John Woo-style slow-mo theatrics, fleeting moments of experimental camerawork and sfx in extended fight scenes, more noise (everyone needs to yell a name twice before they receive their angry reply over the din..."Max!? Max!!?"); there are superficial references to leukemia, healthcare, robotics, war crimes, government bureaucracy; there's a superhero showdown and Jodie Foster with an accent that sounds like she is doing elocution drills, and it's a sum total of bloated, headache-inducing rigmarole that made me wonder how I might be able to retreat to the quiet of a Mars colony before the end of the movie let alone in 2145.

★★☆☆☆

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The Departed (2006)

Some tension is eventually delivered in Martin Scorsese's remake of the terrific 2002 Hong Kong action suspense thriller, Infernal Affairs, but only after a long and unconvincing set-up featuring too much farcical humour, too many implausibilities and inconsistencies, and too many Hollywood heartthrobs and not enough gravitas for the cat-and-mouse story of a crooked cop and an undercover agent.

★★☆☆☆

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Interstellar (2014)

An incredible amount of stuff to cover (multiple planets, multiple dimensions, things happening in the future and the past, and stuff occurring at different relative speeds) is probably why Interstellar felt perfunctory and rushed to me, and I thought the ending, which made others so emotional, was daft...but this was more engaging than The Martian (another lost-in-space story with a few of the same actors).

★★★☆☆

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Behind the Candelabra (2013)

Starring Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as Liberace's long-term partner Scotty, this biopic tells a fabulous, blackly funny, fascinating, but when it comes to Liberace's motivations, a frustratingly ambiguous life story, never really getting behind anything.

★★★☆☆

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