A Royal Night Out (2015)

We've seen royal daughters or the daughters of American Presidents going incognito to experience 'normal life', from Roman Holiday to Disney's Aladdin, and the twist here is that this movie tells of an actual example from history in which Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret embarked one night out of the palace to celebrate the end of the war, which may well have happened but almost certainly not as it is presented in this easy-enough-to-watch but heavily, heavily fictionalised comedy romance. 

★★★☆☆

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The Relic (1997)

It starts like a tongue-in-cheek episode of Law & Order with Tom Sizemore's suited cop joining forces with Linda Hunt's museum director and Penelope Ann Miller's evolutionary biologist to investigate grisly urban deaths, and for as long as the investigation lasts, it is fun 90s horror nostalgia full of sassy lines and smirks, but the second half - once the hideous reptilian monster from South America is revealed - plays out in the near-total darkness of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History's afterhours, and it doesn't matter how many times Penelope Ann Miller's biologist is able to find time to put her hair up and don glasses at a computer, the results of her scans of Brazilian leaf eggs - revealing a dizzying confluence of genetics, South American mythology, and something about hypothalami and DNA and a "Kothoga" - never help and merely drag out to overlong the shadowy goings-on.

★★☆☆☆

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Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)

A largely plotless survival horror with wooden 2D characters distinct from each other only in name, outfit, and weapon, this third Resident Evil movie, like the others, is easily dismissed as empty dross, but fans of CAPCOM's survival horror game series upon which these movies are based will derive great pleasure from the details - 3D geometric maps, zombie ravens, tourism posters - that recall so clearly the joys of the game.

★★☆☆☆

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Alien: Romulus (2024)

This checkbox-ticking exercise dutifully opens on a steampunk spaceship with glitchy 80s tech sailing across dark silent space, has the sleeping pods of a ragtag bunch of mercenaries open, features the curious space soundtrack, has some (but not too much) Weyland-Yutani context, and of course, there are synthetics, stomach eruptions, and women fused to walls, but what keeps it fresh is the teen cast - this is the Alien we know and love presented with a Scream/Final Destination teen-horror sensibility and it is a very effective addition to the canon with lots of terrific heart-stopping and inventive action.

★★★★☆

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River Wild (2023)

There's not much connecting this thriller to the 1990's The River Wild starring Meryl Streep except the title and the fact that whitewater rafting and a psychopath feature, but beyond these things, this is a grim crime story, charmless and full of low budget nasty realism, not high adventure, that makes it feel more like a re-enactment on that 48 Hour tv true crime doco, the sort you might snap off when it gets too bleak.

★★☆☆☆

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The Royal Hotel (2023)

This refreshing Australian suspense avoids tired outback horror tropes and instead presents a horror of the sort you read about in the news, of international tourists on an adventure ending up working under terrible circumstances in remote parts of Australia, on farms, say, or in this movie's FIFO mining town and specifically  at a pub that everyone - the drunk local men, the two new female staff, the audience - knows needs to be burned to the ground long before an alcohol-fuelled Mick Taylor is let to wreak his inevitable bloody havoc.  

★★★☆☆

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Reptile (2023)

They went to a lot of trouble to make this thriller atmospheric, muting colours and asking an ensemble of fine actors to speak and move at snail's pace, but they forgot to include anything or anyone that viewers can care much about, so there's not a whole lot of interest in the case of a real estate agent's murdered wife or in the question of whether Benicio Del Toro's worldweary cop can solve the crime.

★★★☆☆

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The Blonde One (Un rubio) (2019)

Viewers may want to give up on this slow-moving drama as another and another and another scene opens on poor and rather gormless Gabo, an Argentinian man in an illicit sexual relationship with his roommate, doing another and another and another household chore while staring silently into space in a lovelorn way, but stick through Gabo's blank looks over the dishes and be rewarded, eventually, with a more compelling, tense relationship drama featuring powerful performances from the two leads and, in the end, less domestic labour and more grist.

★★★☆☆

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Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles (2005)

This melodrama, a Chinese production, has an older Japanese man, an emotionally detached fisherman, travelling to China with a hare-brained scheme to reunite with his dying son - his misguided and really only completely self-serving actions cause enormous trouble to everyone he encounters including Japanese-speaking tour guides, Chinese village leaders and townsfolk, Government officials, prison wardens and staff and prisoners, and they in return go to so much trouble for him - ridiculous amounts of trouble - that you have to wonder in the end if this infuriating, humorous, and emotional story from director Zhang Yimou really means to pull your heartstrings or comment on a cultural difference.

★★★★☆

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Reminiscence (2022)

What was apparently intended was a noir detective story set in a water-inundated future world - Hugh Jackman's Nick provides the hardboiled voiceover, wondering out-loud things like why a dame like Rebecca Ferguson's sultry bar singer Mae walked into a "memory detective" agency like his - but the photography is glossy, the actors look like they are in a fashion magazine, the set design is 'Dick Tracy' cartoony and cheap like an escape room, and the lighting is 'BioShock' neon and bright, leaving you with the impression that the writer, the lighting person, the set designer, and the actors needed to sit down together at least once for a production meeting.

★★☆☆☆

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Ramen Teh (情牽拉麵茶) (aka 'Ramen Shop') (2018)

A Japanese kid, the son of a ramen shop owner, heads to Singapore to investigate his mother's estrangement from her Singaporean-Chinese mother (his grandmother) and in the process, embarks on a culinary tour that equips him with the skills to bridge not just culinary but also familial divides and historically entrenched cultural rifts.

★★★☆☆

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The Red House (1946)

This dreary 1946 film is about an abandoned red farmhouse that conceals a dreadful secret, but given no one can find the house, most of the movie is taken up with the characters in-the-know, like Edward G Robinson's histrionic farming family man, being annoyingly, whiningly circumspect about the importance of not visiting the house while all the other characters not-in-the-know, like adopted daughter Meg and her farmhand chum Nath, make repeated attempts to find it, walking in circles and talking in circles through the woods, padding out the dreariness before a final underwhelming reveal.

★★☆☆☆

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Road Games (1981)

Patrick Quid (Stacy Keach), a truck driver transporting pig carcasses across the Nullabor Plain, repeatedly encounters on that long straight stretch of road through the Australian desert a green van, the driver of which he suspects is a serial killer, and Patrick supposes out loud to a hitchhiker he's picked up (Jamie Lee Curtis) that the killer thinks "women are pigs", a hint that there's an intellectual game happening in this horror thriller, but when all is said and done, the road games are just that: puns, wordplay and shallow tongue-in-cheek to while away time along the way.

★★★★☆

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Ready Or Not (2019)

The trouble with the premise of this quirky slasher - that a bride playing hide and seek on her wedding night discovers the game, played with her gaming family in-laws, is a murderous one - is that too quickly the bride is able to extricate herself from the family's gothic mansion, a move akin to taking your queen off the chessboard so it can run free across the game table, turning the game into a not terribly interesting foot chase outside between her and just one member of the in-laws' entourage...as though having set up the goofy premise the movie then didn't have enough smarts to keep the idea going for very long.

★★☆☆☆

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Riders of Justice (Retfærdighedens Ryttere) (2020)

While the media and police dismiss a train crash as an accident, a statistician uses an algorithm to prove to the husband and daughter of a woman killed that nothing is random and in fact the crash was murder, in this unusual, genre-bending, Mads Mikkelsen-helmed Danish movie that blends life-affirming human drama with top-notch revenge action, philosophy, and absurdist comedy.

★★★★☆

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Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City (2021)

Moments from the games are brought to life and strung together with more concern for perfectly realised game haircuts, weapons, and cosplay outfits than for telling a coherent story, so this reboot, after so many Milla Jovovich movies,  feels like it false-starts right the way through to at least the halfway mark before an unwarranted denouement (a live-action reenactment of that train-carriage bossfight that players of the game will remember).

★☆☆☆☆

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A Rainy Day in New York (2019)

In Woody Allen's inconsequential, breezy romantic comedy - which I quite enjoyed - Timothée Chalamet's gloomy Gatsby Welles shuffles hunch-shouldered, arms in pockets around a rainy New York City, spending a day with sunny partner Ashleigh that doesn't go to plan, and just as you think it yourself about his slight and self-aware performance, Allen has Chalamet say - ostensibly about another character but far too applicable to his own performance to be coincidence - "[He's] a James Dean minus the acting chops".

★★★☆☆

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The Girl In The Fog (La Ragazza Nella Nebbia) (2018)

This twisty, turny and loooong and convoluted Italian mystery based on the novel by Donato Carrisi (and an adaptation directed by him) operates in a kind of exaggerated reality like a gothic fairytale which makes all that happens not matter much, but it will keep you watching as a Detective Vogel becomes involved in a teenaged girl's disappearance from a town in the Alps. 

★★★☆☆

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Run (2020)

I watched this as a double-billing with The Woman In The Window, both Netflix thrillers featuring women confined to their homes, but Run is the better film - a fun thriller and great example of Grand Dame Guignol horror with Sarah Paulson (in the role Bette Davis would have taken back in the day) playing a mum whose management of her wheelchair-bound daughter's life and medications and time might not be as altruistic as everyone in town - the pharmacist, the postie, the group therapy attendees - might think.

★★★★☆

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Regression (2015)

Wanting on one hand to be a horror thriller full of red-eyed demon cat jump scares, rattling barn doors and Rosemary's Baby gothicism but on the other hand wanting to provide journalistic insight into satanic ritual abuse allegations (starting and finishing intertitles, scant on concrete detail, recall the embarrassing "Michelle Remembers" literary hoax of the 1980s that Oprah made into something once), this dopey movie has the "Michelle", Emma Watson acting like she's a character in a hard-hitting historical exposé of the Spotlight variety (her raised eyebrow and clenched jaw suggest she finds satanic ritual abuse about as exciting as a game of quidditch) while Ethan Hawke as the detective on her case carries on like he's still on the set of Sinister.

★☆☆☆☆

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