Moonfall (2022)

Mercifully skipping the usual disaster-movie preamble of ignored scientists and warnings spilling from dot matrix printers, Moonfall gets to collapsing cities and lunar chaos within minutes, but its brisk, comic-book style only makes it slightly less exhausting than it would otherwise be.

★★☆☆☆

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Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)

It didn't help that an hour in our internet cut out and my viewing partner accidentally drummed up the original 2017 cut, not this 2021 refashioning by Zack Snyder, leaving us perplexed by scenes we'd already seen playing out of sequence, but even once we got back on track this unnecessarily long re-release stretches a bad two-hour movie to an interminable four-hour slog: a first hour and a half of false starts, a muddled middle split pointlessly between Batman's Justice League recruitment drive and Steppenwolf's "mother box" raids (the raids are doing the recruiting, making Batman's story redundant), and a finale that comes only after too many musical lamentations (each time Wonder Woman appears), too many dopey Flash close-ups, far too many little-boy shrugs from Superman, and way too much of that cyborg character so stiff and miserable we never once connect — four hours later, it isn't Justice League so much as Justice beLeaguered.

★★☆☆☆

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A Kind of Murder (2016)

This movie, based on Patricia Highsmith's The Blunderer, about Walter Stackhouse, an author whose suffering in an unhappy marriage is alleviated when his wife is found dead under a bridge, has all the trappings of a good noir thriller but becomes less and less rewarding and more and more nebulous as it goes on.

★★☆☆☆

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Insidious Chapter 2 (2013)

Don't expect to be a Rhodes Scholar in the ways of the Further after watching this - just how people pass into and through director James Wan's evil limbo, the Further, introduced in the original Insidious but further elaborated upon in this sequel, seems to no longer depend upon a character being dead - alive or injured or even merely remembered people can hang out there now, so more than before it resembles something like a train station, but still it is never satisfactorily explained - and there are other areas lacking elucidation: scene by scene you'll have trouble keeping track of whose house everyone is in - the Lamberts' or Elise's? - and you'll become dizzy trying to keep track of all the versions of Patrick Wilson's character, Josh, who appears simultaneously as a kid, as an adult, as an adult in memories, as an adult in the Further, as an imposter in each of those places, in flashback sequences as each of those incarnations; and would someone please pick up that baby walker because I don't want to watch a fourth and fifth adult come down those stairs to investigate the piano only to get a jump when the baby walker comes alive with noise and light, again.

★★☆☆☆

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The Conjuring 2 (2016)

The Amityville murders are referenced, the Warrens head to London, and that and the fact Lorraine is reluctant to continue her and her husband's old-school ghostbusting are what distinguish this second outing from the first one -- everything else is so familiar you'll catch yourself checking to see if it isn't in fact the one you've already watched: the Warrens bang on locked doors, tout Christian faith, are struck occasionally with supernatural apoplexy, and again fail to answer any of those nagging questions you have about inhuman spirits - why do they sometimes drift across corridors, at other times move as a shadow across walls, and at other times again choose to only appear in reflective surfaces?

★★★☆☆

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The Conjuring (2013)

James Wan, director of Insidious, a 2010 horror starring Patrick Wilson about a family terrorised by demons, brings us The Conjuring, a 2013 horror starring Patrick Wilson about a family terrorised by demons, but while Insidious was dopey, this is an effective, tighter version of the regurgitated story.

★★★★☆

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Insidious (2010)

A dopey demon possession story that has nowhere to go except to get increasingly silly, with Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson playing parents of an incessantly crying infant and a possessed boy, all of them helpless in a whirlwind of opening and closing doors, banging furniture, and the most insidious thing, boredom.

★★☆☆☆

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Young Adult (2011)

This Jason Reitman black comedy has Charlize Theron playing a misguided woman-child intent on seducing her old high school flame now married with a child, but after the cracking dark potential of its opening scenes, the film loses momentum with the arrival too soon of Matt, the film's moral compass and sounding board.

★★★☆☆

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Watchmen (2009)

There is zero to like in this relentlessly repugnant, ultraviolent superhero movie that portrays its 'superheroes' as charmless middle-aged cosplay enthusiasts.

☆☆☆☆☆

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