Event Horizon (1997)

More Hellraiser than Alien, this horror (not scifi) movie from director Paul W S Anderson really does make space travel feel like time spent stuck in a hellbox, especially given H R Giger, not ergonomics, has informed the design of the ship and chaos, not sense, governs the shouty, gory events on board.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

My Brilliant Career (1979)

Fierce and intelligent and packaged off to live with relatives like an Australian Anne of Green Gables, Sybylla (Judy Davis, in her first lead role) waves off anatopic turn-of-the-century British sensibilities and as much as possible determines her own irreverent way through her Australian bush life, juggling family responsibilities and personal endeavours with a blossoming romance with dashing landowner Harry Beecham (Sam Neill in his first lead role).

★★★★☆

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Jurassic Park III (2001)

This is the not so good one with Téa Leoni and William H Macy playing the annoying parents of a boy we little care about who has been lost alone on the Site B island of Jurassic Park - the one good thing the annoying couple do in order to get help locating their boy is trick Dr Alan Grant to return to the park (and so back into the series after an absence from number two).

★★★☆☆

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The Hunt For Red October (1990)

In this first of the Jack Ryan movies, released in 1990 with Alec Baldwin as Tom Clancy's hero, Jack Ryan is a mere "expendable" analyst but even so he is the only one among CIA heavies and the navy elite of two countries who can intuit what is really going on (nothing terribly thrilling) when a Russian nuclear submarine, the Red October, goes awol.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Jurassic Park (1993)

I won tickets to see this in 2017 with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra performing the John Williams score live, and the movie - about a dinosaur breakout in an ill-conceived Jurassic themepark - is so full of thrilling Spielberg setpieces and humour, and special effects still impressive today, that I forgot to stop even for a moment to appreciate the orchestra.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Hunt For The Wilderpeople (2016)

This Taiki Waititi comedy about a man and his foster son who become subjects of a massive manhunt in the New Zealand bush is an occasionally amusing, occasionally touching kids movie with childish overacting and a cloyingly cute story likely to bore adults.

★★☆☆☆

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And Then There Were None (2015)

This is a ripper star-studded BBC adaptation of the oft-adapted Agatha Christie serial killer mystery, one made for tv that thankfully sticks to the plot of the book (so many others deviate), and one that looks great, sounds terrific, and even if you are someone who has watched six or seven other iterations and know very well the whos and whats and whys, the three episodes of this series will grip you to the no-longer-surprising but surprisingly unspoilt surprise end!

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Hunter (2011)

This movie about an American sent to Australia to hunt a thylacine is built around one extremely, um, hard-to-swallow factual inaccuracy that almost, well, poisons the rest of the movie - to tell you what it is would constitute a spoiler - but if you can accept the oddity then the rest of the movie, starring Willem Dafoe and Frances O'Connor and spectacular Tasmanian scenery, is a well-acted, engaging mystery drama.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS