Little Women (2019)

One strategy to try and make Louisa May Alcott's obnoxious Little Women tolerable viewing for anyone who has already sat through the seven or eight other adaptations is to populate it with Hollywood's most affected performers and rip through the story at a relentless pace after throwing the scenes into the air and presenting them in the order you pick them up off the floor.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Mary Queen of Scots (2018)

The actual historical figure also had grand aspirations to be something greater but failed because there were others that had already succeeded in her place.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Lady Bird (2018)

Any teenager transported to post 9/11 Sacramento - Anne of Green Gables, Kevin Arnold, Arnold Jackson, any - might behave something like Saoirse Ronan's character in Lady Bird, a complacent work-averse Sacramento teenager coming of age and wanting so badly to escape reality (her family's financial straits, her mother's discipline, and the tiresome realism of school nuns) that she bestows upon herself the made-up name Lady Bird, lies to friends about living in a mansion and acts sophisticated about the topics of sex and drugs even though she is a novice in both areas, and the problem with this amiable, perfectly entertaining movie is that so might any teenager act the same way - even those NOT transported to post-9/11 Sacramento, because there is not much that is remarkable about this particular journey into adulthood and nothing especially interesting about its context.

★★★☆☆

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The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

The world revels in Wes Anderson movies and this was especially the case upon the release of this precious, childish, irritating, laboured pantomime about a hotel concierge involved in a theft and murder, a movie which plays out like all of Wes Anderson's movies, like a storyboard - stylised and empty.

☆☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS