The Fabelmans (2023)

The poster says, "Capture every moment," but a more appropriate line would be "capture just a series of moments from mostly one formative year in the life of a young schoolboy who dreams of making movies, and really wallow for most of the time in the uncomfortable matter of the boy's involvement in his mother's love, sex, and fidelity, while only treating very cursorily the much more interesting ideas of the camera's fidelity - its equal ability to tell truth and lie - leaving bemused viewers wondering why, if this is Steven Spielberg's deeply personal life story, the lead is Sam, not Steven, and why the life story abruptly ends with a shrug (and a playful wink) in the middle of Sam's teens - perhaps this was to be a Wonder Years-style TV show gone wrong; perhaps seventy other years' worth of cinematic genius are on the cutting room floor.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Batman (2022)

When the topic of The Batman came up, a teenager I tutor summed it up perfectly as a movie about a "miserable Batman with miserable friends fighting a miserable villain in a miserable city", and he wasn't wrong, because this brooding restyling of the franchise positions Robert Pattison's Batman as a sullen emo and has him, Zoe Kravitz's slinky Selena, the mobsters and Gotham street crims, the justice system, and in fact the entire city of Gotham sunk in a psychotic depression while The Riddler, a Heath Ledger-Joker-echo, murders public figures and taunts authorities with tightly scripted David Berkowitz-style codes - all of which oppressive heaviness is fine - it's Batman, afterall - until the final act reveals the supposed root of the city's decay and it feels, in comparison, almost trivial.

★★★☆☆

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Swiss Army Man (2016)

If there's anything worthwhile to take away from this fantasy comedy in which a man and a dead body on a deserted island become friends and in dopey conversations teach each other nothing interesting at all about the human condition, it is that no, in actual fact it is much better to hold stinkers like this in, "Daniels".

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS