Longlegs (2023)

The thing Longlegs most reminded me of were the cutscenes of the original Silent Hill computer game on PS1 (they also strung together to make a monotonous, logic-free jumble of satanic goings-on set to a jangly soundtrack of ringing noises and clanks and clangs), but Longlegs includes in its garble Nicolas Cage doing a Jennifer Coolidge impersonation and a this-is-a-bit-right? Silence of the Lambs routine that insults most only after the "we don't even care anymore" abrupt final cut-to-credits when, woken by the return of cinema lights, audience members realise they've been tricked into seeing, I wouldn't be surprised, another prequel-series of the Annabel franchise.

★☆☆☆☆ 

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Frozen Ground (2013)

The action is heightened and some of the events clearly can't have happened in real life exactly as they play out here, but this based-on-a-true-story movie is gripping viewing with Nicolas Cage playing a cop who needs to first convince dismissive colleagues and officials that there is a serial killer active in Anchorage, Alaska before he can bring to justice Robert Hansen, a man whose real-life existence and crimes you"ll probably wish you'd stayed unaware of.

★★★☆☆

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Adaptation (2002)

Adapting US journalist Susan Orlean's novel The Orchid Thief for the big screen causes screenplay writer Charlie Kaufman an existential crisis because it is a largely narrative-free contemplation on flowers and disappointment, but by inserting himself into the story and finding parallels between his own midlife crisis and the article's eponymous hero Laroche's obsessive work hunting the elusive ghost orchid, Kaufman succeeds in creating a thought-provoking and often funny, self-referential drama that won Meryl Streep an Oscar for her performance as Orlean.

★★★★☆

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Moonstruck (1987)

An Italian American widow falls for her fiance's brother in this romantic comedy that delights with its neurotic and histrionic characters experiencing chaotic, complicated, operatic love, perhaps under the spell of a full moon.

★★★★☆

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Working Girl (1988)

In her career best performance, Melanie Griffiths plays Tess McGill, a big-haired receptionist from Staten Island who decides she deserves better than her demeaning job and cheating boyfriend and so sets about making it big in the corporate world, in this comedy drama that anyone who has ever had a job or a boss they didn't like will find impossible not to love: a kind of 80s corporate office version of The Devil Wears Prada with Sigourney Weaver in the role of boss from hell.

★★★★★

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Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

A year after Michael J Fox was sent Back to the Future to his parents' teenage lives in 1955, a 40ish Peggy Sue, like a temporal Dorothy Gale, was zapped back to her high school days in this adorable 1986 comedy drama and, resembling Sandra Olsson but with modern day sensibilities, she takes the opportunity to make different choices and ends up better appreciating her future in a troubled marriage.

★★★★☆

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