1408 (2007)

In this Stephen King short story adaptation, John Cusack is perfect as the drily funny, cynical paranormal investigator and professional skeptic who checks into room 1408 of New York's Dolphin Hotel wanting to debunk claims the room is somehow evil, but both he and the viewers soon have the smiles wiped off their faces once the supernatural terror kicks in, though these chills and jump scares wear thin a good time before the movie's oblique, that'll-do, "whatever" ending.

★★★☆☆

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Spider-Man: Far From Home

In the Avenger hiatus after Endgame, the world needs a hero refresh as much as the Marvel franchise needs its ageing fanbase refreshed, so it stands to reason Far From Home delivers up a Spiderman doing a better but still far from perfect job meeting global demand for his superhero powers while the story, this time featuring a tech-enhanced villain whose tricks recall those of Batman's The Scarecrow, takes on the tone of a Spy Kids sequel.

★★★☆☆

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Captain Marvel (2019)

I'm suffering study fatigue in my neverending Masters of Marvel course and if there were exams tomorrow I'd struggle to answer questions on the finer plot points of this Marvel superhero movie and how it fits with all the others, except to say it is set on Earth in the 1990s before (all?) the other movies, Samuel L Jackson's Fury is a young man with two-eyes who hasn't even dreamt up the Avengers yet, and a good running joke in the movie is how slow dial-up internet is, especially for the technologically advanced Captain Marvel, a low-affect hero but great female role model who in the face of male detractors keeps getting up, dusting herself off, and keeps on getting on with her job as a, um, Krull saving the Earth from invading, er, Skrees?

★★★☆☆

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Glass (2019)

** SPOILER WARNING **

Having in the last unexpected scene of 2016's Split created a connection between that film and his Unbreakable film from sixteen years earlier, M Night Shyamalan continues the unlikely series in this third film by having a new character, Dr Ellie Staple, assemble the old characters in a psychiatric ward for sessions of psychoanalysis designed to break the patients' shared delusion that they are superheroes, which, as a plot, raises interesting ideas about human potential, shared experience and the limits people place on themselves, and with the glut of superhero blockbusters in cinemas, this plot provides a welcome spin on a tired genre, but the movie errs in the end when it seems to choose a side but abandons viewers on the other side of the movie's central question: is anything extraordinary happening on the screen?

★★★☆☆

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Big Game (2014)

Alone overnight in the Finnish wilderness taking part in a coming-of-age hunting ritual, a 13-year-old ends up protector, not hunter, of the President of the United States on the run from a psychotic Arab prince in German officer jodhpurs who has just downed Air Force One, and you just wish a movie with this sort of outlandish plot, one featuring Samuel L Jackson as POTUS, spent less time on the set-up and allowed more time for the 13-year-old to show his mettle and outsmart the baddies, not simply outrun them in comicbook-style for twenty minutes near the end.

★★☆☆☆

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The Other Guys (2010)

Early on, hot-shot buddy cops, the sort of beefcakes that traditionally tear up the silver screen in action movies, die being stupidly heroic and into their macho places step desk cops Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell, a pair of Prius-driving, Little River Band-appreciating, wooden gun-bearing, bickering man-children, so the not very funny running gag here is that as a buddy cop movie, this drags its feet and is no The Nice Guys, no Central Intelligence, no Jump Street.

★☆☆☆☆

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Split (2016)

I went into this horror thriller about three girls kidnapped by a man with 23 or perhaps 24 distinct personalities confident I had worked out in advance director M Night Shyamalan's trademark twist and I am pleased to say the always fascinating Split is not one of Shyamalan's bad films like Lady In The Water but a good one like Unbreakable in that it delivers a delicious curveball in the end that is as unexpected as it is dismaying (because my ending was less surprising but better and certainly what was intended, I think, before the marketing team's endscene got tacked-on instead).

★★★★☆

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National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 (1993)

Even less funny than The Hungover Games and as puerile as Movie 43, this National Lampoon's comedy is a Lethal Weapon spoof featuring Emilio Estevez in the mulleted Riggs role and Samuel L Jackson in the Murtaugh role and is yet another film belonging to the bigger-than-you-realised Hollywood genre, dismal-comedies-that-you-can't-believe-really-famous-people-agreed-to-appear-in.

☆☆☆☆☆

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Pulp Fiction (1994)

A series of interconnected noir vignettes comes to life under Quentin Tarantino's direction, in this pulp fiction romp as compulsively watchable today as it was upon its release in 1994.

★★★★☆

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Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014)

This La Femme Nikita story centres around a wayward British youth recruited to become a gentleman spy, and is a cartoony action flick that presents only a white teenage boys' fantasy of sophistication including, for instance, female prisoners willing to be coerced into anal sex in exchange for freedom. 

★★☆☆☆

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Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

This superhero action thriller on a mega-scale makes a couple of mistakes: 1) teaming the hero, Captain America alongside team mates with abilities that seem to one-up his own, and 2) ending with a glimpse of what is to come in the next inevitable instalment, leaving viewers exhausted at the thought of the whole tumultuous thing happening all over again, only with villains with a different skin...but, still, this is a very good superhero action from Marvel.

★★★☆☆

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Unbreakable (2000)

M Night Shyamalan has made some good movies and some stinkers, and this one with its hypnotic tone, Bruce Willis' gravitas as the sole survivor of a plane crash, and a clever slow shift of the story into an unexpected direction is terrific.

★★★★☆

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