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.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997)

Sandra Bullock's character, Alex, wasn't this annoying in number one, I don't think - she whines incessantly about past boyfriends and driving badly and serves only as potential collateral loss in a police operation - while Jason Patric, bravely stepping in where Keanu left off, plays a hero left looking ridiculous as the plot has him leap unhelpfully toward lifeboats and psychically navigate flooded ship corridors, and the writing lets down Willem Dafoe, too, playing the villain who unnecessarily kidnaps Alex when he already has what he wants, leaving this sequel feeling like it is the product of writers asked to follow up a hit at super speed and with no brakes. 

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Lost City (2022)

Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum make a likeable, if slightly indistinctly characterised, leading pair (is he a dopey muscle-bound try-hard, sage truth-bomber, or simply gaga in love?) in this romantic action comedy that is most fun in its first twenty minutes before the action shifts to a "forgotten island" (which turns out to have an airport, a village, and a volcano that features in the tv news) where Daniel Radcliffe's villain, dressed as Colonel Sanders, seeks a treasure and the movie's initially sharp wit quickly descends into juvenile things like bum leeches and dick carry-on.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS 

The Blind Side (2009)

In this adaptation of Michael (Moneyball, The Big Short) Lewis' based-on-fact book, a woman (Sandra Bullock) takes in a homeless student, real-life Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), and helps him carve out an education and a future in sport, but while the first half pulls at heartstrings with its Christian saviour story and the second half occasionally amuses with its cameo-laden comedic look at the NFL college draft, what you realise by the end is that Oher himself is missing - a physical presence in the film but little more than a mere shape, a centrepiece for a whole lot of other people's busy-ness and noise around the table.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Infamous (2006)

Toby Jones' impersonation of Truman Capote is the more uncanny one and this movie provides more interesting context about Capote's trip to and interactions with locals in Holcomb, Kansas, but unlike the Philip Seymour Hoffman movie released a year earlier, which rivetted, this unfortunately timed "other movie" dealing with Capote's authorship of In Cold Blood flags by the end with the scenes between Daniel Craig's Perry and Toby Jones' Capote repetitive and the direct-to-camera commentary of friends Harper Lee and Jack Dunphy and others, particularly towards the end of the movie, a distraction.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Net (1995)

Most of us have shrugged off the loss of our personal privacy in the digital age because we are too busy to care, uploading dopey movie reviews, sharing cat videos or answering Facebook surveys - which Golden Girl or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle are you? - but this thriller, released when the internet was just twelve years old, has Sandra Bullock's Angela Bennett, a computer programmer, realising with horror that not only has her identity been stolen but the people who stole it have replaced her details with those of a woman wanted by police, forcing poor Angela off the grid and requiring her to navigate a murky tech underworld of highly sought-after 3.5" diskettes, dial-up cyberhacking using WHOIS commands, mysterious pi symbols that conceal html code, two-hander mobile phone bricks, and deep web stuff like a computer program that features a likeness of Mozart dressed like Beetlejuice playing electric guitar - will Angela escape the anarchy and get her old life back? (a big green block cursor blinks slowly awaiting input of the sort GETLIFEBACK)

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Bird Box (2018)

Sandra Bullock does her best with stupid material that tries to do A Quiet Place with sight-deprivation rather than voice-deprivation affecting the survivors of a never clearly elucidated apocalyptic event - these characters, either blindfolded or with eyes clenched tightly closed, are left unable to do anything (the most exciting thing that happens over the course of 48 hours blindfolded on a boat is one character falls overboard only to be plucked back out of the water a moment later) or the characters do manage to do things and it is ludicrous, like driving to the supermarket or running around a forest for the first time, blindfolded.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Premonition (2007)

Premonition seems like the wrong word at first because what Sandra Bullock's Linda Hanson experiences is more like a Sliding Doors-style double life - the life she has always lived and the other, a gothic nightmare featuring a dead husband, a disfigured child, empty pill bottles, and forced psychiatric incarceration - but as real life catches up to this nightmare future, the mystery of the premonitions becomes less bewildering, although it is never very involving and some details of the earlier-on premonitions are conveniently forgotten.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Heat (2013)

The funny moments in this mostly unfunny buddy cop comedy are, first, when Melissa McCarthy's rough-as-guts street cop throws a watermelon at a perpetrator, and second, the slightly un-PC moment when Sandra Bullock's by-the-book opposite is asked earnestly if she is a man or a woman - and that's it.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Gravity (2013)

An exhausting ninety minute space shuttle rollercoaster ride.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS