New Year's Eve (2011)

On a New Year's Eve, the Times Square Ball gets stuck, neither up nor down, and this same inert state befalls a veritable Love, Actually ensemble of New Yorkers whose lives grind to a stop in deeply uninteresting, go-nowhere situations like the nurse (Halle Berry) who tends bedside to a dying man in hospital (Robert De Niro) - that's everything - or the man in pyjamas (Ashton Kutcher) who gets stuck in an elevator with a singer (that woman from Glee) - the end - or the pregnant couple who are, well, pregnant - and still pregnant each time the movie unnecessarily returns to them - or, in the most peculiar of the go-nowhere vignettes, a delivery guy (Zac Efron) escorts a woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) around NYC on a scooter skimping on her bucket list that she has no reason to rush through before midnight when, spoiler alert, the Times Square Ball drops and this dull romcom ends and life starts moving again.

★★☆☆☆

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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994)

Victor Frankenstein's experiments are given a David Copperfield jazz-magic vibe that I don't think Mary Shelley intended but by far the biggest deviation of this mostly faithful adaptation is the fact the monster is a re-creation, not a creation - Robert De Niro is a resuscitated organ recipient, - scarred but not a hideous daemon - with prior knowledge, not a birthling - probably because it isn't easy to translate to the screen Mary Shelley's caginess regarding Frankenstein's methods of bestowing life upon the inanimate (pretty much in the book a man says the word, 'galvanisation' and then a big yellow eye opens); there's also fewer deaths in a rushed ending: once this movie's grand climax is revealed (an inspired gothic moment that repulses and horrifies and finally hits the right note) the movie decouples from the book, turning into about seven minutes years of Frankenstein's madness and incarceration and anguish, as if everyone has tired of the whole exercise and wants simply to sail prematurely home.

★★★☆☆

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Angel Heart (1987)

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The King of Comedy (1982)

He doesn't have a demo tape and appears to have no regular gigs, instead just sits in his basement dreaming, so it is hard to empathise, but when fame as a stand-up comedian eludes Robert De Niro's idiosyncratic Rupert Pupkin, a citydweller as isolated and mad as Travis Bickle, he enlists the help of an unhinged friend (played with rabid relish by Sarah Bernhard) to kidnap tonight show host Jerry Langford, (played by Jerry Lewis essentially playing himself), in Scorsese's peculiar, darkly amusing comedy thriller that in the end says what: audacity over talent?

★★★☆☆

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Red Lights (2012)

Occam's Razor is the philosophical principle which states the simplest explanation is often correct, but the most banal and laughable explanations can also be correct as demonstrated in this precursor to Now You See Me that swaps the Four Horsemen's magic tricks for the paranormal feats of Robert De Niro's spoon-bending Simon Silver, a Uri Geller type who commands large sums of money for tickets to his arena spectaculars and Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy's duo of Occam's Razor-spouting CSI: Supernatural investigators are the ones getting super worked up about his feats.

★☆☆☆☆

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Taxi Driver (1976)

Martin Scorsese's masterpiece resonates powerfully even today, thirty years after its release, with its story of a war veteran taxi driver, a kind of grown-up Holden Caulfield, who over the course of on-the-job transactional exchanges with psychos, pimps, politicians and prostitutes grows increasingly alienated from and disdainful of NYC - it is hard to argue with De Niro's taxi driver, Travis Bickle's perception that this 1970s NYC is perverted, immoral, sick but it is the taxi driver who psychotically reacts to it.

★★★★★

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The Good Shepherd (2006)

Great spy stories, like Graham Greene novels, operate on two levels with agent protagonists juggling individual, emotional sides with their detached organisational spy roles, but the focus of this thriller is unrelentingly trained upon Edward Wilson's job with everyone everywhere a whispering agent or double agent, and for too long the only human side on show is in the fleeting scenes Wilson shares with his girlfriend, wife and son, and given he exhibits an emotional detachment that warrants psychological intervention, things quickly become dreary and that is a shame given the calibre of the actors in this and the potential of the story spanning decades of American history.

★★☆☆☆

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The Intern (2015)

Another Nancy Meyers film populated with only emotionally robust caring types, The Intern tells the story of an elderly man who fills an internship role with an online fashion company and for his initially skeptical boss, CEO Jules, he quickly becomes an indispenable source of sage advice and a corporate guide through the tricky matters of a messy desk, handkerchiefs, unwanted erections and feminism.

★★★☆☆

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Dirty Grandpa (2016)

An unusual sex fetish plays out amusingly near the end, but otherwise this is a revolting two-hour grind that makes you lament the state of comedy given 90-minutes of laugh-free genital and bodily fluid references emerged from a multi-million dollar production boasting, of all people, Robert DeNiro and Zac Efron.

☆☆☆☆☆

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