Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

The uprising that takes place in this third Ant-Man movie against new villain Kang, an uprising that starts with the Ant-Man family suddenly being sucked into Kang's subatomic-sized Quantum universe, spans the family's meeting the tiny world's inhabitants and choosing to side with them in a long-running conflict, and an uprising that ends with the family's takedown of Kang in a dizzying film-final cgi battle, all seems to happen in a narrative time of about twenty minutes, which isn't to say the movie is exciting - it is written so that everything happens in the time it takes to shrug your shoulders and is in fact the least interesting of the three movies of the series.

★★☆☆☆

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The China Syndrome (1979)

A morning news presenter of puff pieces (Jane Fonda) with aspirations for harder-hitting investigative stuff hits the jackpot when an incident occurs at the nuclear power plant that she and her cameraman (Michael Douglas) happen to be visiting, but how critical was the event, how can they get their story to air on a corrupt news network, and how can the slow-burn thrills end without the movie simply snapping suddenly to black, are the questions that ratchet up the tension to meltdown-levels in this solid thriller.

★★★☆☆

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Basic Instinct (1992)

If you can get past the fact the sweaty suited detectives are all males indistinguishable from each other and the women are all deviants whose perverse sexual desires the men must sigh and resignedly sate, then this is for most of its runtime a solid thriller with Michael Douglas doing a good job playing Michael Douglas playing a detective, and Sharon Stone channelling Vertigo's Kim Novak to play the cop's prime murder suspect-with-benefits, a mystery novelist whose bed-partners end up dead by ice-pick.

★★★☆☆

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Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

The antics of Marvel's goofiest, most family-friendly superhero continue in this not-as-good sequel of Ant-Man chronicling Ant-Man's encounters with a mysterious time- and space-shifting "Baba Yaga", and while most of the humour falls flat this time around (except for one "previously on..." sequence narrated by Ant-Man's sidekick and tech-guy, Luis) this is easy, undemanding and family-friendly superhero action enlivened by a couple of great action sequences and by Evangeline Lilly's appearance as Wasp, a wing- and blast-gun-enhanced hero who fights alongside Ant-Man but who could easily do it on her own.

★★★☆☆

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Black Rain (1989)

Ridley Scott's occasionally brutally violent buddy cop action movie takes Michael Douglas' cop Nick Conklin (a Martin Riggs type - he even sports the mullet) and his more even-tempered partner, Charlie (Andy Garcia) to Osaka to handover a yakuza criminal to the Japanese authorities, and while it is plainly and simply inconceivable to think these loose cannons would be permitted to carry on their rogue Lethal Weapon-style antics during the Japanese police investigation into counterfeiting that they become privy to, and harder to imagine even a hothead like Conklin putting himself in so much danger by wilfully headbutting and kinghitting yakuza crime figures over the course of his illegitimate, non-jurisdictional, "unwanted tag-along" police work, the movie manages to be an engaging clash-of-cultures action thriller and does achieve an occasional ring of cultural authenticity during all the nonsense, filmed as it is on location in Japan and populated with Japanese supporting actors, Ken Takakura, Yasaku Matsuda, Tomisaburo Wakayama and Shigeru Koyama. 

★★★☆☆

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A Perfect Murder (1998)

A husband's plot to murder his wife by hiring his wife's lover as a hitman comes unstuck in a number of heavily signposted ways and from there this suspense thriller low on suspense and thrills, apparently inspired by Dial M For Murder but really only similar in two ways (Gwyneth Paltrow and Grace Kelly's blonde hair and a logic problem involving apartment door keys) goes on in rudderless, convoluted ways, desperately trying to find a way to wrap up the leaden acting and plodding events.

★★☆☆☆

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Ant-Man (2015)

Marvel introduces to film the most unlikely among its stable of superheroes, Ant-Man, who can shrink in size and command ants to do his bidding (!), and succeed in striking the right tone between lighthearted and earnest with an action movie that paves the way for Ant-Man to join in in the next Avengers.

★★★☆☆

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The Game (1997)

Don't give up on David Fincher's paranoid thriller in its long, seemingly directionless middle stretch - it ultimately delivers a surprising emotional punch telling the story of Nicholas van Orton, a reclusive millionaire whose fortunes turn when his wayward brother, Conrad, turns up on Nicholas' 48th birthday with a present: a mysterious "game" run by the sinister CRS Corporation.

★★★★☆

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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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