Not Me That Went Viral (俺ではない炎上) (2025)

This book adaptation with a terribly translated English title starts promisingly with a social-media-age update of the Hitchcockian 'wrong man' plot, with Taisuke Yamagata, a fifty-something real estate sales manager, falsely accused of murder by well-meaning but misguided online amateur sleuths, but by the end, the tone has lurched awkwardly between comedy, thriller, and social commentary (isn't online amateur crime reporting terrible?), and the plot has required audiences to at once sympathise with Yamagata as the wronged hero while also regarding him with disdain and pity as a problematic antihero - a difficult balancing act given his portrayal by the likeable Hiroshi Abe.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Only the Animals (Seules les bêtes) (2019)

The way this sober, bleak Colin Niels book adaptation unfolds across chapters titled "Alice", "Joseph" and "Marion", etc - individual stories that intersect and overlap in surprising ways - and the way the movie's initial mystery of a missing woman ends up being the repercussion of events surprisingly global, means Only The Animals recalls those sombre movies of Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel, 21 Grams, etc..), but when Only the Animals ends, you feel like you have been bogged down in the sordid criminality of several individuals, not swept across the world as in Iñárritu's movies where individual lives are mere threads of a global human experience.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Orlando (1992)

With her title character untethered by time and experiencing life in different male and female forms, Virginia Wolff in 1928 in her book Orlando: A Biography may have debuted the concept of the multiverse, not DC Comics in 1961; Sally Potter's adaptation of Wolff's book is full of painterly detail across the various times and locations, amuses with its sly humour, and lead Tilda Swinton transfixes as Orlando, staring out from the movie like a figure from a series of Romantic paintings come alive.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Old (2021)

No, director M. Night Shyamalan doesn't have an excuse for yet another lame ending because although this time his movie, a beach-based Picnic At Hanging Rock (a group of people lug picnic baskets to a beach only to discover they are trapped and inexplicably ageing there) is based on Sandcastle, a graphic novel by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, Shyamalan actually changes the ending of the kooky Lost-like events, so the lame ending is his again, but up to that late point when the story turns rusty, he delivers a captivating fantasy horror thriller full of great acting, weird and wonderful ideas, a beautiful confined location like the stage of a theatre production, and of course his trademark cameo and camerawork, sweeping and overhead and long-take.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The 100 Year-Old Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared (2013)

Forrest Gump spouted his mother's life lessons and walked innocently, gormlessly through some of the 20th Century's most momentous historical occasions and so does Allan Karlsson, the 100 year-old birthday boy and 'Swedish Forrest Gump' of Jonas Jonasson's 2009 book adapted here into this movie which starts with good humour as Allan wanders out of his retirement home and embarks on an adventure involving a suitcase full of cash, a growing body count, and explosions, but quickly runs out of energy as the reenacted moments in history and the encounters with thugs become repetitive and the investigation into Allan's disappearance stalls and the absurd developments become more and more predictable.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Omega Man (1971)

Germ warfare in a Sino-Russian war turns everyone into Paul Bettany's character in The Da Vinci Code and it is up to an often shirtless Charlton Heston, the only person in the world not yet an eloquent albino with problematic life philosophies, to find a cure before this unrewarding scifi thriller, in which nothing much actually happens, ends up even longer than it already is.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Ordeal by Innocence (1985)

The David Brubeck Quartet jazz soundtrack is the best thing and the worst thing about this Agatha Christie adaptation, on the one hand keeping things atmospheric and cool as Donald Sutherland's paleontologist returns to the UK from Antartica after a two-year-long expedition to discover he was the missing alibi of a man since hanged for murder, but on the other hand robbing scenes of weight by going eclectically on and on and suggesting a complexity not shared by the plot.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Oh, God! You Devil (1984)

With a kid working on an ad campaign for God, the sequel in 1980, Book II, was as charming as a Charlie Brown cartoon and probably as good as these Oh God! movies were ever going to get, but the makers force things onwards with this threequel, making demands on an even older George Burns who has to play not just his cigar-chomping, wisecracking God but also a cigar-chomping, wisecracking, tap-dancing (!) Devil, both of them involved in the life of a rockstar wannabe who, thanks to not very good plotting, never really deserves the trouble he lands in and never seems to realise how much worse his poor "fill in" has it.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Oh, God! Book II (1980)

As in the 1977 original, George Burns' God's strategy for spreading the word of his existence is to appear before doubters and wow them with some 80s-cinema SFX...but not until after he has first driven one unfortunate soul to an asylum with a diagnosis of delusional psychosis, and in this sequel the poor individual isn't John Denver but Tracy Richards, an 11 year old who really should be practising spelling and coming to terms with her parents' divorce, not god-bothered, but she is such a delight, her friend Shingo is so relaxed and natural, their interactions are so well acted, and the movie is so gently amusing and unsanctimonious that the ridiculousness of God's methods doesn't matter: this is a pleasure.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Out Of Africa (1985)

Based on Karen Blixen's 1937 memoir of her time spent in British East Africa, Sydney Pollack's unhurried romance stars Meryl Streep, her porcelain skin, Robert Redford, and his blue eyes, and tells a sweeping, poetic, heartbreaking love story - no, not between Streep's Blixen and Redford's Denys but between Blixen and the object of her profoundest love: verdant, spectacular Kenya.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)

This eighties romantic drama is basically the very first Police Academy movie, just as not-very funny as all the others, with Richard Gere in the Steve Gutenberg role playing a new recruit trying to make his way through a thirteen week-long training camp, with a dastardly training officer, climbing walls, and the expectations of female sex partners threatening to get between him and his attainment of true self-satisfied manhood.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Once Upon A Time In...Hollywood (2019)

In Tarantino's temporally slight ninth movie - it may be a homage to the 60s but a lot of what happens happens while Sharon Tate sits in a cinema watching herself in The Wrecking Crew - another actor, the fictional Rick Dalton and his stunt double Clint Booth saunter around an impressively recreated 60s Hollywood and with not much to do while they anxiously anticipate the demise of their Golden-Age-of-Hollywood careers due to the advent of colour television, they drop lines referencing 60s culture, have benign encounters with sinister hippies and occasionally strike poses and do things reminiscent of other Tarantino films. 

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)

If an historically inaccurate detail like Eric Bana's black hair bothers you - King Henry VIII famously sported blonde-red locks - then this lavish book-adaptation, a period drama, is going to sorely test you, because although it is loosely based on the historical facts surrounding Anne Boleyn's marriage to Henry VIII, the story is injected with large amounts of historical supposition dismissed by historians as author Philippa Gregory's pure fantasy; nevertheless, it is thought-provoking and very entertaining, offering a vivid sense of Tudor court life (Melrose Place in lavish costumes) and cleverly weaving in the ideas that Anne Boleyn orchestrated Henry's usurpation of papal authority and that charges of incest against her were more than just wilful accusations of a king once again looking for a way out of a marriage.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Oh, God! (1977)

Given in the end it takes God turning up in person in an American courtroom to convince those gathered of his existence, his plan occupying the rest of this comedy - communing exclusively with supermarket manager Jerry Landers and having him spread the Word to people who without exception believe him to be a delusional whack-job - seems a harebrained undertaking longwindedly achieving nothing, but John Denver stars as Landers - so that's interesting for a start - and the movie avoids tiresome God-bothering and the trap of sanctimoniousness or saccharinity and instead, with George Burns as a bespectacled waddling old man of a God, is dryly funny and effortless to watch, even given the idiocy of God's plan.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Old Man and the Gun (2018)

In simpler times, when police work involved rifling through file boxes, having leads faxed through and using a rewind button to review grainy black and white surveillance footage, an old man, real-life San Quentin prison escapee Forrest Tucker, indulges in his greatest pleasure: robbing banks and going on the run, and like the wind rustling Robert Redford's impossible blonde tresses through the window of his Chevrolet getaway vehicle, this based-on-a-true-story crime drama is a gentle, refreshing breeze, like Heat meets geriatric Catch Me If You Can with a laidback soundtrack.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Office (오피스) (2015)

A detective investigating the "Hammer Killer" serial killer case finds inexplicable things going on in the workplace of an office worker who has disappeared after bludgeoning his family to death, in this creepy, horribly violent, peculiarly edited, sloppily-told mystery thriller from South Korea.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Other Side of Hope (2017)

Refugee Khaled's plight as he lands by boat and seeks asylum in Helsinki - his family killed in Syria; his sister missing, last seen at a European border crossing - could be ripped from today's headlines, but director Aki Kaurismäki gives his comedy-drama the look and feel of an early 80s TV drama populated with dour, expressionless people - government agents, police officers, businessmen, minimum wage earners, even a three-man Finland Liberation Army - all dropping their lines like "bricks falling in the wet concrete"(1)  and this deadpan stylisation reflects the director's own droll amusement at Finland's (or Australia's, or the world's) resolutely behind-the-times refugee policies; when Khaled, beaten and living in a cupboard, announces to a fellow asylum seeker he has fallen in love with Finland, a country that rejects him but has citizens willing to dabble absurdly and hilariously with multiculturalism if it might, say, rejuvenate a restaurant business, your own reaction will be a Kaurismäki-like dry, expressionless, dismayed "Ha!"

★★★★☆

(1) Filmexplorer Switzerland, 'Interview with Sakari Kuosmanen and Sherwan Haji'

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Our Idiot Brother (2011)

Prince Myshkin is The Idiot, Dostoevsky's model of the ideal Christian whose plain, guileless approach to life riles the people around him and raises questions about how it is possible to be pure and good in a base, self-interested corrupt society, so perhaps this utterly inane, uneven comedy drama starring Paul Rudd as a simpleton with Jesus looks and a plain, unthinking approach to life that causes upheaval in his sisters' lives, is a pointless refashioning of Dostoevsky's novel?

★☆☆☆☆

ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Office Christmas Party (2016)

After a really strong set-up and first half, this comedy about the Zenotech corporation's efforts to throw a Christmas party descends, like the party itself, into chaos, abandoning narrative sense, moving the action away from the titular party, and ending on the idea that financial, medical, emotional and organisational woes are best dealt with with a sex and drug orgy, as if the writers themselves lost interest in the film's second half when one of them gave the signal for the others to join him outside for another toke/smoke/chuff/shot/snort/job.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Ornithologist (2016)

It is interesting right the way through, but exactly how this "homoerotic Catholic parable" relates to Saint Anthony of Padua and what exactly the movie is about - with him watching birds and birds watching him, and goats watching him cavort with a goatherd named Jesus, and with erections and Tengu noses both stretching this way and that - is a mystery, just believe me.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS