Hachi: A Dog's Tale (2009)

When its master dies, leaving it to run free, a Japanese Akita called Hachi takes up residence at a train station, where everyone assumes it is showing extreme loyalty to its deceased master, but it's easy to cynically flip this otherwise pleasant story - based on the 1920s real-life dog, Hachiko - into a tale of animal neglect, seeing the dog's choice to squat at the station as the result of its having been turfed out by uncaring family, made to sit through rain, hail, or shine in the only place anybody will feed and pet him...sorry.

★★★☆☆

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An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)

This eighties romantic drama is basically the very first Police Academy movie, just as not-very funny as all the others, with Richard Gere in the Steve Gutenberg role playing a new recruit trying to make his way through a thirteen week-long training camp, with a dastardly training officer, climbing walls, and the expectations of female sex partners threatening to get between him and his attainment of true self-satisfied manhood.

★★★☆☆

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Primal Fear (1996)

No, not a Jurassic Park sequel or a Saw episode but a courtroom drama based on a William Diehl book with a title that bears little relevance to its story of a lawyer who represents an altarboy accused of the stabbing murder of a priest.

★★★☆☆

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The Dinner (2017)

In a fancy restaurant, a multi-course degustation delivered to tables by convoys of sleek, choreographed waitstaff is this movie's metaphor for a smooth, controlled passage or course through things, from A to B, and the dinner guests at one particular table - a politician, his second wife, his brother and sister-in-law - are the antithesis, an uncooperative, distracted, disparate group gathered to decide on their best course now that their teenaged sons have committed a despicable crime, in this frustrating film which tries to be both profound and farcical while it grapples with themes as wide-ranging as politics, American Civil War history, teenage bullying, adolescent crime, racism, parenting, sibling rivalry, familial secrets, and mental illness, all with a sassy, isn't-this-so-so-clever attitude.

★☆☆☆☆

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Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer (2016)

Richard Gere's Norman Oppenheimer remains an enigma throughout this peculiar fantasy delivered as though it's a political biopic - nothing is learned of his family background, we don't know for certain where he sleeps, and there is no information as to his motivations for injecting himself as a "fixer" into the affairs of businesspeople, politicians and Jewish organisations in New York - and perhaps viewers are supposed to assume stuff about him, like he is the kind of dissociative, pathologically elusive character they've seen in Six Degrees of Separation or "Catch Me If You Can", which would be fine except that this frustrating film also finds myriad ways to keep Oppenheimer's actual "fixing" a mystery, with a titlecard eclipsing three crucial years of his life as Israeli Prime Minister Eshel's best friend - the relationship that is at the heart of the movie - and all potentially enlightening conversations observed unheard through shop windows or reduced to abrupt "It's done" phone conversations with "it" - his fixing - remaining as bewildering as Oppenheimer himself.

★★☆☆☆

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Arbitrage (2012)

A hedge fund magnate's elaborate house of cards - a life built up around his lies, his sham business dealings and his secret all-round rottenness to his core - teeters on the brink of collapse in this corporate thriller that is uncomfortable viewing mostly because people like the fictional Robert Miller, played by a steely, silver fox Richard Gere, really do exist and really do have the power to behave the way they do.

★★★★☆

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Movie 43 (2013)

Perhaps compiled from footage recovered from the SNL cutting room floor, this laugh-free sketch comedy compilation is remarkable only for the incredible number of A-list Hollywood stars who were willing to appear in its appalling skits about excrement, sperm, grubby sex practices, incest...

☆☆☆☆☆

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