The Sex Of The Angels (El Sexo De Los Angeles) (2012)

The Sex Of the Angels (aka Angels of Sex) (or, my alternative title, How Difficult It Is To Set Up And Maintain A Threesome) is a very dry look at how Bruno, happily committed to his girlfriend Carla, encounters and starts having sex with Rai, a dancer, but despite the actors' obvious commitment to the film's positive polyamorous message and the attempt to keep things titillating with butt shots and sex scenes, this thruple never feels even slightly like it would go the distance, and the film is ultimately only as exciting as a well-intentioned public service announcement. 

★★☆☆☆

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Scream (2022)

I had to check with ChatGPT to find out at the halfway point whether, after all, this 'Scream' was a Scream episode I'd already seen, and when ChatGPT told me this particular one - informally known as Scream V - was made in 2022, features Melissa Barrera as Samantha Carpenter and Jenna Ortega as younger sister Tara and follows a thousand Woodsboro teens being hunted one by one by the masked killer Ghostface, with Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette reprising their legacy character roles as Sidney Prescott, Gale Weathers, and Dewey Riley, respectively, I was none the wiser - except to say I had definitely seen it all before.

★★☆☆☆

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Sobibor (Собибор) (2018)

When James Cameron injects high spectacle, grand romance, and completely made-up characters like Billy Zane's suave, tuxedoed, gun-toting villain Caledon Hockley into a painstakingly recreated Titanic, viewers can shrug off expectations of historical accuracy and give themselves up to blockbuster spectacle - never mind the roughly 1500 real people who died in 1912 - but the same can't be said of Sobibor, Russia's odd entry for Best Foreign Language film at the 2019 Academy Awards, a high-gloss but button-pushing movie in which writer, director, and star Konstantin Khabensky presents the lead up to the uprising of the prisoners in the Jewish extermination camp, Sobibor - with a similar appetite for spectacle over accuracy, so atrocities play out in unflinching full where restraint might be more respectful, and Christopher Lambert's Karl Frenzel tips over into caricature - a mumbling, starey Dirk Dastardly whose abhorrent acts are here tied to a camp love triangle.

★★☆☆☆

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The Stranger (2025)

My head was racing as François Ozon's adaptation of Camus' The Stranger started and, unlike my millions of thoughts, the movie proved glacially paced and yet its exquisite spell managed to entrance me: an enthralling moving artwork of black and white images that builds Camus' stark, existential, absurd treatise into a quiet fervour.

★★★★★

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Storm boy (1976)

I understand Colin Thiele makes it clear in his book that Mister Percival, the pelican raised by Storm Boy, is trained and responds to voice commands, but the movie springs this idea on its audience right when Mister Percival is needed to save a boatful of fishermen, resulting in a laughable Skippy moment that slightly strains the otherwise faithful adaptation, an emotional, likeable, and touching Australian classic, with the ten-year-old Storm Boy living a lonely but - to me - dream existence, quietly at the beach with the Coorong - its beaches, birdlife, and Ngarrindjeri culture (as taught to Storm Boy by David Gulpilil's Fingerbone Bill) - resplendent around him.

★★★★☆

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Agatha Christie's Seven Dials (2026)

Agatha Christie wasn't called the Queen of Mystery for her occasional attempts at the espionage thriller, as any reader of The Big Four, They Came to Baghdad, and Passenger to Frankfurt can attest, and so, except for a ridiculously embellished final reveal, we can't entirely blame the makers of this three-part series for the ludicrous plotting of their adaptation of The Seven Dials Mystery, a comic adventure after Nancy Drew rather than a traditional murder mystery, about British government agents, scientists, spies, absurd secret societies, and, when you dissect it, a circular story of unlikely coincidence rather than sensible clues.

★★★☆☆

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Scream 4

The kill count at ten minutes is five, halfway through it is seven, and overall, thirteen - not bad for an hour and forty minutes - so number four in the meta-horror series really drives the knife in for slasher fans, but even in an exercise this tongue-in-cheek - and it succeeds in being funny a number of times - it can be frustrating sitting through the idiocy on display: remember, Ghostface is a serial killer who has well and truly put a dent in the population of Woodsboro High on three previous occasions, yet in the midst of spree number four, as the body count rises, these teens hold parties, get drunk, wander outside into the dark woods, and play astonishingly tone-deaf "Ghostface" pranks on each other, making it more than a little tiresome waiting out the Scooby-Doo unmasking at the end.

★★★☆☆

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Superman (2025)

I grew up on Christopher Reeve's Superman, loved the caped hero the most out of the Saturday morning's Justice League ensemble, used to throw myself off the verandah, arms forward, in an effort to fly, and still get excited every time there is a reboot, sequel, update, or new actor cast in the role, but something feels really off about this James Gunn movie, which awkwardly blends cartoony, goofy kiddie stuff (repetitive — really repetitive — Superdog cuteness, for example) with deeply disturbing real-world issues (genocide, beheadings, mass death, and war), and what makes it worse is that the whole movie is populated with only deeply unlikeable characters — Lois and Clark, as presented here, unfortunately included. 

★★☆☆☆

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Scream VI (2023)

Just brutally violent, not scary, this sequel to 2022's "rerequel" Scream and the meta-horror series' sixth entry riffs on the idea that Scream is now a mega-franchise with the momentum to continue even without its legacy characters, so Courteney Cox's investigative reporter Gale Weathers (here, again) and other long-timers are apparently at risk of being killed off - it isn't a big point of difference, and other standard elements, like the opening set-piece, are tired, but the mystery elements of Scream VI and a neat sequence on a New York City subway train keep the bloodletting intermittently interesting.

★★★☆☆

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Serpico (1973)

Sidney Lumet's biographical film, based on the book by Peter Maas, is the always interesting story of Frank Serpico and eleven years of his career as an undercover policeman, a period in which he took a stand against police corruption - against both the grass eaters and the meat eaters -  and he is an impressive man, thanks to Pacino's great performance, but the film never manages to convey the sense of danger he no doubt faced.

★★★★☆

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Silent Night (2021)

What a dreary exercise this is, about an annoying group of family and friends, like all those twerps from Four Weddings And A Funeral, gathered for Christmas Eve, and as if that alone were not a situation ripe for high tension and aired grievances and awkward revelations, it also happens to be the eve of the end of the world, so all these goofuses face a decision that is sufficiently ghoulish to keep you watching through the drudgery to the end: they can die painfully from a poisoned atmosphere, or take a pill and die peacefully before the agony starts, Merry Christmas.

★★☆☆☆

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Skyscraper

The tallest, most wooden, most hollow character in this action is - surprise! - not The Rock (who is actually quite charismatic, always, and even in a dopey exercise like this) but the elaborately cgi-animated 'Nakatomi Plaza' that is this action movie's title-skyscraper 'The Pearl', a cloud-puncturing phallus full of stupid hi-tech with no purpose to exist except for a silly movie "house of mirrors" showdown - so, while the action movie starts strong, the minute it enters the hard-to-fathom cgi insides of The Pearl, things plummet into a void.

★★★☆☆

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Saturday Night (2024)

It was an ugly time in comedy when SNL first aired, really, when comedians were smirking smug white men being loud, woofing at women, humping legs, and plastering schoolboy notes on everything (all seen here), but SNL fans will love this behind-the-scenes look at the hours leading up to the very first episode of what is now a 50-year-old comedy institution and anyone into, say, The Muppets or 30 Rock will be interested in the madcapped goings-on behind the scenes of another live production.

★★★☆☆

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Still of the Night (1982)

Roy Schneider is a psychiatrist - the sort role Cary Grant plays in a Hitchcock thriller - and Meryl Streep is the blonde femme fatale who comes to him for help when her lover (his patient) is found murdered, in this enjoyable but dopey tv-grade mystery thriller full of attempts at classic Hitchcock thriller moments - a dream sequence, psychobabble, auction-house hijinx - but all delivered in a laughable threadbare plot.

★★★☆☆

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Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023)

When mythological monsters run amok in Philadelphia and among them are angry unicorns only placated by handfuls of Skittles, things in this DC-related superhero movie start to teeter at my "switch off" point, especially given up to that point I'd already tired of a superhero movie that wants to champion a true mythological hero while also making him an annoying teen only as strong as each of his six team members, not to mention all those uncomfortable scenes showing teenaged boys holding hands and being romanced with 6000-year-old women. 

★★★☆☆

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Speak No Evil (2024)

Neither this Hollywood remake nor the Danish original are classics - far from it - but this new one is actually better in its first two-thirds, better scaffolding the horror reveal and better filling in the nebulous plot of the Danish one with backstory and hints at what is to come - when horror finally arrives in the original, it is, in so many ways, so divorced from what has come before that it undid the tension ratchetted up so painstakingly in its first half.

★★★☆☆

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Only the Animals (Seules les bêtes) (2019)

The way this sober, bleak Colin Niels book adaptation unfolds across chapters titled "Alice", "Joseph" and "Marion", etc - individual stories that intersect and overlap in surprising ways - and the way the movie's initial mystery of a missing woman ends up being the repercussion of events surprisingly global, means Only The Animals recalls those sombre movies of Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel, 21 Grams, etc..), but when Only the Animals ends, you feel like you have been bogged down in the sordid criminality of several individuals, not swept across the world as in Iñárritu's movies where individual lives are mere threads of a global human experience.

★★★☆☆

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The Substance (2024)

The gothic fairytale The Substance very efficiently sets up how the peculiar science at its core works - an unboxing scene reveals boldly labelled products, one after the other, that neatly, cleverly explain the workings of a substance that promises rejuvenation to Demi Moore's has-been tv star Elisabeth Sparkle - but then the movie uses voiceover and those bold labels repeatedly flashed on screen to hammer home again and again what has been firmly established, making the really very humorous body horror movie more and more of a camp pantomime for imbeciles as it goes along.

★★★☆☆

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Agatha Christie "Marple": The Sittaford Mystery (2006)

Despite not really fitting the image I have in my head of the character, Geraldine McEwan is a good Miss Marple - shrew and mischevious, her eyes positively twinkle as she contemplates twisted human psychology and murder, so much that you can forgive her spritely frame and impish energy - and even though she has been thrust into this adaptation of a book she didn't even appear in, she adds good value to the story, quietly solving a murder that takes place in a snowed-in inn populated with a star-studded array of likely suspects (Carey Mulligan, Timothy Dalton, Mel Smith, James Murray, and more, in a scenario very reminiscent to the one in The Mousetrap).

★★★☆☆

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Speak No Evil (2022)

Homage is paid to 'Funny Games' but rather than subjecting audiences to Hanneke's movie's start-to-finish depravity, this Danish movie, like 'The Invitation' or 'Midsommar' and others in a growing subset of the thriller genre, promises Funny Games' abject horror but keeps it under wraps until a shocking movie-end reveal - tada...they are making human pies...the end, for example - and in this case, the horror reveal comes so rent from anything that has come before, it is two or three days before viewers recognise the sheer stupidity of it - I mean, just try to articulate what exactly the couple with the mute son are in fact doing in the long term - so while something interesting is said about zero tolerance to bad, violent or sick behaviour, one glib line about blunt scissors, a momentarily seen babysitter, a screaming competition on the banks of a sandpit...nothing really adds up to the horror avalanche and rocks thrown at the viewer in the last ten minutes.

★★★☆☆

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