Mickey 17 (2025)

Bong Joon-Ho's Mickey 17 is a messy overreaching film about an "expendable", a worker on a spaceship who is employed to die over and over (with a new self 3D-printed after each death); it's a childish pantomine of conflated woke themes presented plainly - a rehash of ideas from Okja and Snowpiercer - with Toni Collete stepping in for Tilda Swinton, and Mark Ruffalo arrived directly from the set of Poor Thing.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Batman (2022)

When the topic of The Batman came up, a teenager I tutor summed it up perfectly as a movie about a "miserable Batman with miserable friends fighting a miserable villain in a miserable city", and he wasn't wrong, because this brooding restyling of the franchise positions Robert Pattison's Batman as a sullen emo and has him, Zoe Kravitz's slinky Selena, the mobsters and Gotham street crims, the justice system, and in fact the entire city of Gotham sunk in a psychotic depression while The Riddler, a Heath Ledger-Joker-echo, murders public figures and taunts authorities with tightly scripted David Berkowitz-style codes - all of which oppressive heaviness is fine - it's Batman, afterall - until the final act reveals the supposed root of the city's decay and it feels, in comparison, almost trivial.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Tenet (2020)

It is basically a James Bond movie - an icy-cool, broody Daniel Craig one - but instead of a nuclear code or a diamond-powered laser or nude bomb, John David Washington's agent is pursuing a villain armed with a travel-backwards-through-time machine, meaning it's a Bond film loaded with mind-bending scenes in which some characters move forward and others backward through time, but just relax, remind yourself it's just an action film, and try to enjoy the nonsense...with subtitles on (it's incomprehensible otherwise) and while ignoring the second half's frequent clunking exposition and unsuccessful attempts at injecting emotion into the high-concept action.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Lost City of Z (2016)

It doesn't matter whether Charlie Hunnam's Colonel Percival Fawcett is fleeing a poison dart ambush in the jungles of Bolivia, leading his men to violent death in The Battle of the Somme, or in bed telling his wife he is heading on yet another expedition to Amazonia to look for a fabled city, he talks - the - whole - way - through - this - movie in a breathy half-whispered monotone to the point of making this beautifully photographed but dreary, adventure-free Boys Own Adventure almost unbearable to sit through.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS