Joe Versus The Volcano (1990)

12-year-old Josh Baskin couldn't wait to grow up and, wish granted by a Zoltar Fortune Telling machine, made a good go of corporate life in the body of a 30-year-old Tom Hanks, whereas in this comedy released two years after Big and in some ways its reverse, another J.B. played by Tom Hanks, the adult Joe Banks, believing himself to be dying, rejects his dreary corporate life and embarks on a childish, absurdist Candide-esque round-the-world trip to an island where he is prepared to sacrifice his life for an orange soda-loving tribe.

★☆☆☆☆

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In The Cut (2003)

I love Meg Ryan as a non-comedic actress and I love Jane Campion's intelligent films, and I love Mark Ruffalo and mysteries and thrillers, which is why it pains me to say I don't very much love this ambitious Jane Campion mystery thriller starring a deadly serious Meg Ryan and Mark Ruffalo because while the movie is a clever feminist text with its message written into every line of dialogue and squeezed eloquently into the title and palpable in every scene (all of them, but consider for example Ryan and Ruffalo's first love scene which starts as a reenactment of an assault, or Ryan's self-conscious out-loud articulation of public transport poetry), In The Cut, about a serial killer who disarticulates women, doesn't work as a mystery thriller because everyone in the movie's claustrophobic circle of action is a disgusting misogynistic objectifier of women and long before the film ends it ceases to matter who among the lunatics - the really obvious culprit or one of the others on the periphery - is the killer, and unfortunately endscenes set in what is an absurd symbolic dreamscape do a disservice to the strong feminist text AND the mystery thriller.

★★★☆☆

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