Murder By Numbers (2002)

Hitchcock's Rope, based on a play, was a chamber thriller focused with icy precision on its chilling pair of Leopold-and-Loeb intellectual killers, whereas Barbet Schroeder's Murder By Numbers might be its dopey cousin 'Fray': it starts strong, in a Hitchcockian world that extends out the window to the horizon - more Rear Window than Rope - but descends into mess as its two killers (Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt) turn on each other, with the film asking us to care about too many extraneous things - the cop's sex life, her traumatic past, one killer's love interest, and even a monkey - until the murdering pair, in the end plodding here and there in plastic body suits and swim goggles, look less icy and more and more like the bungling burglars from Home Alone.

★★★☆☆

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Barbie (2023)

It isn't terrifically funny, generating just a handful of laughs, and while a positive and important message film, it is hard to enjoy it without cynically appraising it as a Mattel marketing exercise and feeling duped: much of the film is spent positioning an antiquated white-skinned, blonde-haired and pink kitchen-accessoried doll - and prime offender over decades in promoting unrealistic female standards - as a torchbearer for feminism and cultural diversity.

★★★☆☆

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The Fall Guy (2024)

As battle-scarred stuntman Col Seavers, Ryan Gosling does his gormless The Nice Guys schtick that he is so good at, and with terrific chemistry between him and Emily Blunt's Jody Moreno - she's the lead actress of a film-in-production that Seavers is working on - this romantic comedy action blockbuster overcomes its middle-stretch of ennui (during a stunt sequence set in Sydney, Australia, the film starts to feel like it has no place to go) and becomes, ultimately, utterly charming.

★★★★☆ 

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La La Land (2016)

Facing daily rejection in audition rooms, a waitress in a coffee shop on the Warner Bros Studio lot in LA longs for the day when someone discovers her, believes in her, and thinks she is perfect, but her dreams of Hollywood success are interrupted when she encounters someone who does just that - a pianist pursuing his own dreams of owning a jazz bar.

★★★★★

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First Man (2018)

This story of Neil Armstrong's career, always interesting but sometimes as dry as a NASA rocketship user manual starts with a family trauma that might, in an account less clinical than this, be used to illuminate the astronaut's drive to overcome insane physical and mental challenges to become the first man on the moon.

★★★☆☆

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Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

This is a rivetting and just in one particular area of the plot a slightly cryptic neo-noir sci-fi mystery about a replicant hunter, full of awesome future fashions, worryingly likely depictions of future city landscapes, glimpses of wondrous tech, and myriad things to think about like, "If replicants could birth children, then what would the ramifications be for humankind?" and, "If this represents a sexist, white boy's fantasy of the future, then what might the opposite look like?" and, "What freedom did director Denis Villeneuve have in creating his vision of the future and how much was dictated by Ridley Scott's classic 1982 original, and in what ways should the two, made 35 years apart, be different?"

★★★★☆

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Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

A uncommunicative young man forms an unhealthy dependency upon a mail-order Russian Build-A-Woman only to do away with her when he is ready to upgrade to something better, and true to real life, his small-town community rallies behind the murderer, is what I wanted this comedy to realise it was saying.

 

★★★☆☆

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Drive (2011)

A likeable stunt driver moonlights as a getaway driver for thieves and even though you want to believe him to be a good and caring man, his involvement with some really very nasty people, er, drives him to some dark places in this rivetting thriller full of 80s stylings and low affect characters.  

★★★★☆

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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.

★★★★☆

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All Good Things (2010)

I was not familiar with the actual Robert Durst or his bizarre true story of double (triple?) murder, and having watched this perfectly suspenseful thriller starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst, I am none the wiser - it is acted beautifully, the details of the case are laid out suspensefully, but it feels like a mere highlight reel from an unsolved case, one that frustrates by being neither outright fact nor outright fiction.

★★★☆☆

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Fracture (2007)

There's a ball track device in the apartment where Anthony Hopkin's character shoots his wife which gives the impression this movie will be a twisting, turning, complex Hitchcockian thriller; in fact, it is a mildly interesting courtroom drama that treats a small matter of police procedure as a thrilling final reveal, one that dawns much too late on Ryan Gosling's hotshot lawyer.

★★★☆☆

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