Unhinged (2020)

An opening scene of shocking brutality sets the unchanging tone of this - what? - neither a horror movie nor a thriller, perhaps it's a rage movie: an unedifying long-note of misery and brutality, about a road rage incident that goes on for about an hour after a deeply uninteresting opening twenty-five minutes in which the filmmakers pretend it is important to care about their meat-sack characters.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Next Three Days (2010)

In this American remake of Pour Elle (Anything for Her), Russell Crowe plays a college professor who decides to break his wife, convicted of murder, out of jail and luckily for him, he has what feels like an eternity - the film's two hours and thirty-three minute runtime - to do it and it turns out to be a rather simple matter of cutting a phone line and doing a letter switcheroo, so turn off your brains and content yourself with the college professor's reality free of inconvenient details.

★★★☆☆

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The Mummy (2017)

At his best when playing steely-eyed and unerring truthsayers, Tom Cruise as this movie's Nick Morton, a character of "troubling moral turpitude", is the first thing that is wrong with The Mummy, and the second is the movie's three disparate elements - action adventure, horror, and longwinded "Dark Universe" exposition, all presented in switching, changing fashion, a symptom of the curse affecting Universal Studio's overriding concept: like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which failed to get viewers excited about a bewildering mix of disparate literary figures (the Invisible Man, Mina Harker, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Captain Nemo, Dorian Gray, etc, all thrown together in one story), Universal Studios wants the world to get excited about a "Dark Universe" in which gods and monsters from all over hangout and cross paths and mix in a universe that Universal hopes will lead to endless blockbuster instalments, but I'd have preferred intelligent updates of individual monster classics linked together by genre alone over this already, after just one instalment, disjointed marketing exercise.

★★☆☆☆

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State of Play (2009)

A Washington Globe reporter, the friend of a US Congressman, investigates the murder of a petty thief, a pizza delivery guy and the woman the politician was having an affair with, and in doing so uncovers political shenanigans, in this ripping political mystery that holds together well except towards the end when there are revelations that would have 'out' earlier in the natural course of a story not so desperate to prolong its mystery.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Nice Guys (2016)

This oddity, a buddy cop comedy set in an elaborately realised 70s LA, has mismatched private investigators searching for a young woman-on-the-run, and what is so refreshing and disarming about it is that you can enjoy its unexpected, laidback mystery and Ryan Gosling's hilarious turn as a bungler without having to buy into a cynical, overbearing, greater franchise - and no sooner do you think that, the thoroughly enjoyable movie ends with the strong suggestion of a sequel.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW