The Fabelmans (2023)

The poster says, "Capture every moment," but a more appropriate line would be "capture just a series of moments from mostly one formative year in the life of a young schoolboy who dreams of making movies, and really wallow for most of the time in the uncomfortable matter of the boy's involvement in his mother's love, sex, and fidelity, while only treating very cursorily the much more interesting ideas of the camera's fidelity - its equal ability to tell truth and lie - leaving bemused viewers wondering why, if this is Steven Spielberg's deeply personal life story, the lead is Sam, not Steven, and why the life story abruptly ends with a shrug (and a playful wink) in the middle of Sam's teens - perhaps this was to be a Wonder Years-style TV show gone wrong; perhaps seventy other years' worth of cinematic genius are on the cutting room floor.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

Some of these superhero cartoons feel especially lightweight, like an eight-page comic that is opened, flipped through, closed and discarded in almost one motion, like this sequel to the original Venom featuring a villain who is vividly brought to life by an oddly-wigged Woody Harrelson but only for a few moments — a moment involving chickens, one about a dinner date, and a sfx-laden car-ride moment — before he is dispatched in a climactic sfx spectacle, chomped by Tom Hardy's symbiot (investigative journalist Eddie Brock and his cartoony, toothy alien parasite, Venom, who leaps out from between Brock's shoulderblades) and then the credits roll, before we learn anything interesting — or anything at all —about Brock, about Venom (he eats chickens), about that villain, or about Brock's three "in-the-know" allies: a shopkeeper, a former lover, and the former lover's new man. 

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Venom (2018)

Like the title character, Venom, a deep-voiced cartoony many-toothed alien parasite with a permanently protruding tongue that somehow doesn't get bitten off, this Marvel superhero genesis story is in a desperate race to reach symbiosis: Tom Hardy's Eddie Brock, Venom's host, is one minute sitting with a deathly pallor in a restaurant fishtank eating live lobsters and the next is exchanging wisecracks with his new partner in fighting street crime — I didn't want to watch it, but the movie needed twenty more minutes to calmly set things up instead of quick-sticks racing to a scribbly mess of a climax because, presumably, there are more episodes to make.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

All The Money In The World (2017)

ATMITW starts thrillingly with director Ridley Scott sweeping us back and forwards through time and around the world from Morocco to Saudi Arabia and New York and back to set up the details of the famous Getty kidnapping of 1973, but after an hour, when the movie goes back to square one and Michelle Williams' and Christopher Plummer's impressive performances become strained and repetitive through their having nothing new to do, it becomes clear that what we are watching is akin to the chess game that Plummer's Getty is momentarily seen playing by himself - no amount of lavish period Italian detail can hide the fact Scott is treading water and using exposition, nebulous developments and inconsistent characterisation to protract to epic length a stalemate.

★★★☆☆

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Manchester by the Sea (2016)

Casey Affleck is Kenneth Lonergan's latest emotionally stunted, middle-aged, blue-collar white guy dealing with trauma - this time the death of a brother - and while he grapples with his responsibilities to his orphaned nephew, his own heartbreaking backstory is revealed, punctuated by moments of Lonergan's trademark bittersweet poignancy and laugh-out-loud comedy.

★★★★☆

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Species (1995)

A group of way too laidback misfit investigators (including Forest Whitaker as celluloid's least insightful psychic ever), chase after - no, stroll around after -- a scantily clad Natasha Henstridge who plays an escaped and rapidly evolving half-human, half-alien science experiment and temptress killing machine, in this police procedural "sci-fi" that spawned a number of unwarranted sequels.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

This Ang Lee movie is about two cowboys, Jake Gyllenhaal and a mumbling Heath Ledger, whose relaxed nudie, towel-whipping funtimes together at a favourite remote mountain spot are starkly contrasted with their separate and mostly unhappy lives back in society where respectively Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway keep their homes and families.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS