I'm Chevy Chase And You're Not (2025)

You can imagine, after years of being told, "You're funny," a comedian might eventually start believing it and forget about the importance of material and timing, energy, audience, and cultural context, and so end up acting zany - look at me, blowing raspberries! - rather than delivering hard-earned jokes, and Cornelius Crane "Chevy" Chase - a man as funny as he is obnoxious, as loved here as he is hated there, happy-go-lucky yet deeply ashamed - might come close to that line today; you certainly can't watch the octogenarian presented here, and can't hear about his long catalogue of laugh-free comedy film bombs, and can't hear about his childhood trials and tribulations and come away saying, simply, he's funny.

★★★☆☆

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Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

My finger hovered over the OFF button right the way through the first half hour of this umpteenth Deadpool movie, one with long-dead Wolverine brought back to life and injected into the story for what proves very little reason, but then something Ryan Reynolds says made me laugh despite my wariness of wanton pop-song-accompanied violence and all of a sudden the credits were rolling, I'd laughed out loud multiple times and enjoyed what felt most like an extended comedy skit rather than a superhero movie full of nerdy superhero details to geek out on (it is that, but it is possible to ignore it)..

★★★☆☆

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The Amityville Horror (2005)

Given the entire series is built upon the premise of providing a paranormal 'out' for a real-life family massacrist, I shouldn't be surprised Ryan Reynold's George Lutz gets such an easy reprieve for dog murder, a wanton and unnecessary Russian Roulette axe game, and emotional and physical spousal abuse ("It was just a bad bout of pinkeye, honey - I won't do it again," you can imagine him saying as the boat speeds away to the non-satanic side of the lake where men like him continue these behaviours of their own accord), but apart from this unchecked male violence, this update of the 1979 horror classic incorporates some great improvements: a thankfully truncated 89-minute runtime; a terrifically improved, gleefully sinister babysitter scene; a sculpted Ryan Reynolds waddling around in pajama bottoms (unless you prefer a sculpted James Brolin waddling around in his y-fronts), and gone is all that "I've gone blind," twaddle with the priest.

★★★☆☆

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Woman In Gold (2015)

A monumental Supreme Court decision proves not so monumental a cinema experience in Woman In Gold with the verdict in the case (one brought by Maria Altmann against the Austrian Government in an attempt to reclaim Klimt artworks lost to her family during Austria's Nazi occupation) padded out to movie-length by way of tired, "but we already know what happened" hurdles to her cause and, further padding, the irrelevant (to the law) and not very illuminating character foibles of Altmann and her lawyer Randy Schoenberg, played respectively by underoccupied Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds.

★★☆☆☆

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Deadpool 2 (2018)

My least favourite Marvel superhero continues his incessant juvenile prattle in a sequel that pits Deadpool like a T-800 against a time traveller from the future hunting a New Zealand kid who will one-day be a super-powered archvillain, and despite ultraviolence that is troubling (especially when it features kids cheering on the decapitations, dismemberments and mass murder (all condoned, it seems, with logic of the sort 'all white-coated males who work with children are paedophiles and all paedophiles deserve to be crushed under a taxi and all average joes who crush paedophiles under a taxi are superheroes')), I was surprised at how greatly entertained I was by this, laughed alot, and thought this number two with its ripping female superhero sidekick, Domino, a great improvement on the original.

★★★☆☆

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Self/Less (2015)

An unscrupulous mind-transplant company gets its comeuppance when it makes the mistake of transplanting a rich old dying man's mind into the body of a self-conscious, adorable pupp-- I mean, into the body of Ryan Reynolds, a military-trained husband and father, in this high concept, low-budget action thriller that after a convincing opening, flags and ends up feeling as interesting as a tv episode of The Pretender.

★★☆☆☆

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Life (2017)

About as rewarding as watching a "system failure" warning light blink at you for 90 minutes, this misfire hoped to meld the breathless rollercoaster action of Gravity, the profundity of 2001, and the horror of Alien, but fails on all accounts with key action scenes so chaotic they're nonsensical, all emotion demanded rather than earned by a script and score that doesn't just hand-hold but latches on and constricts the life out of you like a parasitic lifeform, and a really daft and totally unaffecting nonsense ending delivered with embarassing fervour!

★☆☆☆☆

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Deadpool (2016)

An especially juvenile entry into Marvel's superhero canon is 2016's Deadpool about a superhero whose superpowers seem to be slow body rejuvenation, an ability to run through machine gun fire, and an inexhaustible stream-of-consciousness prattle about erections, masturbation, blowjobs and other topics Marvel counts on being popular with its target demographic - not me.

★★☆☆☆

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Buried (2010)

The horror of being buried alive compares favourably with the horror of dealing with government departments over a mobile phone in this unique but ultimately not very satisfying thriller set entirely in a box buried in Iraq.

★★☆☆☆

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