Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

The uprising that takes place in this third Ant-Man movie against new villain Kang, an uprising that starts with the Ant-Man family suddenly being sucked into Kang's subatomic-sized Quantum universe, spans the family's meeting the tiny world's inhabitants and choosing to side with them in a long-running conflict, and an uprising that ends with the family's takedown of Kang in a dizzying film-final cgi battle, all seems to happen in a narrative time of about twenty minutes, which isn't to say the movie is exciting - it is written so that everything happens in the time it takes to shrug your shoulders and is in fact the least interesting of the three movies of the series.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

Because they (Ivan Reitman's son Jason, who writes and directs the movie, and a group of producers that includes Dan Ackroyd) are trying here to make a movie that appeals nostalgically to kids of the 80s but also enthuses a new generation of millenials about the Ghostbuster franchise (after the vapid Melissa McCarthy one pretended the original didn't exist and aimed itself solely at the pre-teen market), the set up of Ghostbusters: Afterlife is necessarily laboured with the movie adopting the deliberate pacing of, say, the original Christopher Reeve Superman movie to build links between the ghostbusting action in 80s Manhattan and that in 2021 smalltown Summerville, Oklahoma where young Phoebe and her brother Trevor stumble across Ghostbuster research into ghouls called Zuul and Gozer.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

The antics of Marvel's goofiest, most family-friendly superhero continue in this not-as-good sequel of Ant-Man chronicling Ant-Man's encounters with a mysterious time- and space-shifting "Baba Yaga", and while most of the humour falls flat this time around (except for one "previously on..." sequence narrated by Ant-Man's sidekick and tech-guy, Luis) this is easy, undemanding and family-friendly superhero action enlivened by a couple of great action sequences and by Evangeline Lilly's appearance as Wasp, a wing- and blast-gun-enhanced hero who fights alongside Ant-Man but who could easily do it on her own.

★★★☆☆

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

Sausage Party (2016)

Food fetishists and stoners will enjoy the antics of this brazen exercise in bad taste, an adult-themed animation about supermarket produce items searching for the meaning of shelf-life, while everyone else can marvel at how such a temporally weak premise is so creatively stretched to full movie feature length.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

I Love You, Man (2009)

A likeable loner played by Paul Rudd (who does likeable goofball reliably) needs a bestman and so embarks on some platonic, male-to-male heterosexual dating, in this laid-back comedy with a script that cleverly works in solutions to some obvious problems like why the lead has no friends if he is so darn likeable and why he doesn't ask his brother to be his best man. 

★★★★☆

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Ant-Man (2015)

Marvel introduces to film the most unlikely among its stable of superheroes, Ant-Man, who can shrink in size and command ants to do his bidding (!), and succeed in striking the right tone between lighthearted and earnest with an action movie that paves the way for Ant-Man to join in in the next Avengers.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS