Fear (1997)

Sarah McLachlan's "Wild Horses" plays whenever Nicole (Reese Witherspoon) believes things are good between her and David (Mark Wahlberg), like during rollercoaster sex, but at other times angry thrash metal plays and David doles out a black eye to Nicole, drives like a maniac, cheats, engages in grimy partner-swap sex, and in a laughable homage to "Cape Fear" meant to confirm David a right looney tune, he self-tattoos "NICOLE 4 EVA" across his torso with black biro ink as dissonate chords crescendo, but the genuinely tense abusive relationship that develops between the teens is muddied in the last half of this psycho thriller with David turning out to be as much a lawless gangbanging squatter with daddy issues as he is obsessive about Nicole.

★★☆☆☆

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This Means War (2012)

Two intelligence operatives start dating the same woman and while she, with her bestie's help, wrests with the question, "How big of a slut am I?" the spies covertly film her, shadow her, break into and bug her home and office and manipulate her, and the most telling thing about the whole deeply unlikeable affair is the men are just keeping checks on each other - the incursion upon Reese Witherspoon's character's life is incidental, something that doesn't seem to occur to anyone.

★☆☆☆☆

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Vanity Fair (2004)

To give you an idea of the pace, war breaks out in one scene and Reese Witherspoon's all-too-American Becky Sharp, the social-climbing female-Barry Lyndon central to William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847 novel, helps her fellow pregnant friend into a shelter where they talk momentarily about their impending motherhood and in the next scene when they emerge onto the street, the Napoleonic Wars are over and they are mothers of 15-year-olds, and so it goes - a breezy line about a funeral is dropped to inform us of the death of a major character we saw cough just a moment earlier; a first kiss immediately precedes a scene of extended family bliss - and while it may be an impressive feat of screenwriting to capture most things that happen in Thackeray's 650-odd pages of sweeping, multigenerational period drama, as a movie this feels too often like a mere highlight reel.

★★☆☆☆

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Hot Pursuit (2015)

The premise (an uptight rookie cop escorts an 'opposite', a glamorous Colombian drug informant, across America and they bicker but ultimately, after surviving much danger, become friends), while hardly original, should work, especially with the likeable presence of Reese Witherspoon as the cop and Sofia Vergara as the informant, but the comedy is so unsophisticated, the performances so dialled in, and the action set pieces so laboured and unremarkable (during a freeway chase, for example, a tour bus crashes through...witches hats, and after getting evicted from a nightclub sting operation, the cop wangles her way back into the building by...going through the door), the only thing worth watching is the outtakes which run as the credits roll - they show that Witherspoon and Vergara do in fact have chemistry and are likeable, but this has somehow been stripped from a tired final product.

★☆☆☆☆

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Cruel Intentions (1999)

Just 17 years old, this biting comedy of manners - Dangerous Liaisons transported to NYs Upper East Side - has already dated terribly, especially in respect to the gay-shaming that features heavily in its plot, but if you can view the movie as a product of its homophobic time, there's a lot to enjoy including Buffy's Sarah Michelle Gellar as the schemer who wages sex to get her half-brother (Ryan Phillipe) to bed Reese Witherspoon's straight-laced virgin Annette Hargrove - oh, and if you just want to watch it because at one point Ryan Phillipe bares all, well, there's no shame in that.

★★★☆☆

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Just Like Heaven (2005)

Sandwiched by a terrible first and really terrible last fifteen minutes is a likeable romcom, a role-reversed The Ghost and Mrs Muir, which teams up a ghost with the man now living in her apartment - they bicker at first but eventually work together to find out who she is (was) and why she isn't outright dead as a doornail.

★★★☆☆

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Mud (2012)

A man on the run enlists the help of two boys adventuring on a remote part of the Arkansas river and over the course of helping him the boys learn about life and love, in this part-Huckleberry Finn, part-Tom Sawyer, part-Stand By Me coming-of-age suspense drama.

★★★★☆

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Wild (2014)

This American wilderness version of Eat Pray Love sometimes teeters on the brink of that earlier movie's awful self-indulgence but succeeds as an engaging and emotionally affecting account of a woman's journey along the Pacific Crest Trail and out of her life off-the-rails.

★★★★☆

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