Rampage

Chris Pratt, I mean, Dwayne The Rock Johnson is a dinosaur wrangler, I mean a primatologist, who has developed a special friendship with a velociraptor, I mean a gorilla, but when a mutagen is released on Earth that causes the gorilla and several other beasts to mutate into city-wrecking colossi, it takes the white-shirted hero, himself a big mutant cinematic monster, to overcome the dinosaurs, I mean, the genetically-mutated animals and the fact this B-grade Jurassic Park action blockbuster is all based on an arcade game series is unimportant except that it sort of helps to explain the movie's pair of villains, a remotely located pair of buffoons so dastardly they make Lazy Town's Robbie Rotten seem like Hannibal Lecter.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Spectre (2015)

A message from beyond the grave from Judy Dench's M sends Daniel Craig's icy James Bond from a Dias de Los Muertos parade in Mexico to Austria, Morocco and to the deserts of Northern Africa as he hunts the head of a powerful network of evil, in this 24th Bond instalment, for the most part a spectacular thrill ride but punctuated with a number of scenes in which the agent's luck is groanworthy.

★★★★☆

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Moonlight (2017)

This heart-rending drama traces the formative years of Chiron, a boy in so much pain you yearn for life to show him a little kindness as it moulds him into a man not strictly of his own choosing.

★★★★☆

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Our Kind Of Traitor (2016)

Even Ewan McGregor's everyman, a university Poetics professor, says two-thirds of the way through this John le Carré adaptation that he doesn't know why he is still in the picture - having been randomly chosen at the outset to run a message for the Russian mafia's creative accountant, the prof doggedly sticks around, volunteering further help when it makes zero sense for him to do anything other than remove himself entirely from the escalating danger that increasingly involves British Intelligence and dead bodies, but despite this thin plotting, Our Kind of Traitor is an entertaining thriller, tense rather than full of action, set in glamorous locations like Marrakesh, London and Paris, and a bit like Patriot Games in the way a couple's domestic everyday is threatened suddenly by spy thrills.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS