Angel Has Fallen (2019)

All you need to know is that this Part Three of the ...Has Fallen action-thriller series is the one where the President's star security agent, hero Mike Banning (an almost too-old-for-this Gerard Butler) becomes the hunted, like Ethan Hunt and Jason Bourne before him, on the run from his own agency, with the by-the-numbers action taking place on highways, at gas stations, on logging roads and at a hideaway in the woods - oh, and Dad turns up - rather than in the series' usual Die Hard-esque besieged fortress, and it is mindless, adequate but hardly excites for the future of the series where Bourne, I mean Banning, starts to recover lost memories of adamantium implant operations or finds himself having to reconnect with his estranged son and fellow agent played by Jai Courtney.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Now You See Me 2 (2016)

That huge ensemble of characters from number one, all deeply earnest about their craft - magic - which unites them in a fraternity as boysy, ridiculous and self-important as the Illuminati, reunites for this preposterous sequel that pits the Four Horsemen in a magic war with a tech wizard, except this is cinema magic, not magic magic, so there is no 'reveal' to justify the movie's long tangled string of events and you can't possibly care about what happens given the "anything goes" nature of the plot and the fact it all goes on in a one-note bombastic patter and that everything, even years in jail, might simply, quite ridiculously, be part of the slow burn.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Lucy (2014)

Not an action movie (it is too dull) nor a sci-fi (it is too empty of ideas), this really very daft movie is more like a Morgan Freeman TED Talk spliced with a Luc Besson fantasy about what happens when a woman has the unused 90% of her human brain activated - her hair bobs with confidence as she struts around, denim jackets swoosh as she puts them on, she sits in an office chair to travel through time and space, and she adopts the mannerisms of an inquisitive bird.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Ben-Hur (2016)

Forget the chariot race - it's essentially the same - and go see this Ben-Hur remake for its spectacular slave galley scenes...and because it is a very entertaining movie despite a way too pat finish, way too much Days of Our Lives hair, and way too long a runtime even at half the length of the original.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Transcendence (2014)

"Johnny Depp is a brilliant scientist who uploads his conscience to the internet and becomes all-powerful" is a winning science fiction film pitch but the resulting movie is less winning with the film opening a loooong time before Johnny Depp's brilliant scientist uploads his conscience to the internet, so there's a hohum wait for audiences as the pitch is set-up and then, too soon after things start to get interesting, the movie moves into its third act when the all-powerful A.I. is suddenly not so all-powerful, allowing an awkward hurry-let's-find-a-way-to-end-this conclusion.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

No Batman movie has ever taken itself quite so seriously as this third episode of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, a long and deadly earnest superhero opera that grows increasingly loud and monotonous as it goes on and on with a booming soundtrack that for almost three hours sounds like it is heralding the rise of the valkyries - your patience will be tested and you'll want to give it all away when suddenly towards the end a final act revitalises things.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Oblivion (2013)

There is something ho-hum about this sci-fi action and it isn't just that Tom Cruise is playing a character named Jack for the third time in his career - a serviceman, he trawls around a desolate future Earth (like the one in Elysium complete with a tetrahedral spacestation hanging in its sky) fixing stuff (like a live-action Wall-E) until one day the woman quite literally of his dreams falls to Earth, raising questions about his past and memories and launching him into a battle for freedom under the command of Morgan Freeman (in dark glasses, looking very much like Morpheus in The Matrix).

★★☆☆☆

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Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)

Once a dazzling blockbuster movie event, this Robin Hood movie now only dazzles with its mediocrity, featuring an American-accented Robin Hood engaging in slow-action sword and archery fights...even the "arrow cam" which wowed in 1991 is no longer impressive, and while his award-winning performance is still the best thing in it, the late Alan Rickman, you suspect, portrayed his Sheriff of Nottingham the way he did - sardonic, leering - to entertain himself as much as others, given how tedious a movie-making experience this now appears, one that looks just like actors mucking around in front of cameras.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Now You See Me (2013)

David Copperfield-esque magicians perform an Oceans Eleven style grift and arouse the interest of police and from there, over a series of subsequent grifts, this entertaining romp escalates the stakes to preposterous levels, particularly when real danger arrives in the form of car chases and carelessly fired guns, surely not in balance with the magicians' endgame, you'll think, even before you know what that is...

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS