Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)

A string of five or six encounters with dinosaurs - one encounter at sea, one on a cliff, another in some sort of tunnel, many involving water - with very little effort made to link these encounters with a sensible story or populate the episodes with characters you care less about and want not to get chomped or stomped.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Ghost In The Shell (2017)

Masamune Shirow's manga, previously brought to the big screen in 1997 as the celebrated (and confusing) anime feature, is adapted here as a cartoony live action scifi but despite whiz-bang visual effects, not much interest is generated in the story of Major Kusanagi (a wooden, stiff Scarlet Johansson), the cyborg with a human mind (or "ghost" as we are repeatedly told) tasked with investigating the assassinations of several Hank company executives.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Black Widow (2021)

We learn more about Natasha Romanov's childhood in this action thriller that is thankfully, refreshingly a Marvel superhero movie made with adults in mind with the sort of globetrotting locations and over-the-top hi-tech-villainry (and then some) found in James Bond movies.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)

If an historically inaccurate detail like Eric Bana's black hair bothers you - King Henry VIII famously sported blonde-red locks - then this lavish book-adaptation, a period drama, is going to sorely test you, because although it is loosely based on the historical facts surrounding Anne Boleyn's marriage to Henry VIII, the story is injected with large amounts of historical supposition dismissed by historians as author Philippa Gregory's pure fantasy; nevertheless, it is thought-provoking and very entertaining, offering a vivid sense of Tudor court life (Melrose Place in lavish costumes) and cleverly weaving in the ideas that Anne Boleyn orchestrated Henry's usurpation of papal authority and that charges of incest against her were more than just wilful accusations of a king once again looking for a way out of a marriage.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

The remedy for all of the chaos Thanos caused at the end of Avengers: Infinity Wars is time travel, so lickety split Tony Stark creates that - a kind of Fitbit, stop asking questions - and that out of the way, the rest of Endgame's three-hour runtime is able to focus on fan-pleasing stuff that has series' devotees tweeting how many times they laughed and cried and has them marvelling at which superhero did what, where and why, and who can now use whoever else's weapon and which two hugged - totally awesome - but none of it likely to jazz anyone who hasn't invested heavily in a bulk of the preceding twenty-one Marvel space opera cartoons which culminate here, for these non-fans, in a not-very-fun nor satisfactory cinema experience that wallows in the depressions and anxieties, traumas and mother- and father-complexes of myriad morose superheroes suffering in the aftermath of Infinity War, including, in what turns out to be the most peculiar and depressing story arc of the entire franchise, the thorough ruination of the character of Chris Hemsworth's Thor.

★★☆☆☆

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Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

Every scene involves an orchestral fanfare as another superhero steps forth from behind something and is introduced to a troupe of other superheroes with whom he or she has an interrelationship that you, the viewer, may know something about if you've pledged allegiance to the Marvel Universe and have studied the myriad releases in the series - if you get off on discovering the minutae of these relationships (like the fact Thor's new eyeball came from Guardians of the Galaxy or that Steve Roger's new uniform makes him more 'Nomad'-like, etc., etc.) then this mega event ten years in the making is just for you, but if Avengers: Infinity War feels to you like a dizzying three-hour fight scene and scene to scene you can't remember who is where or why, then like me you probably want to snap your fingers and have the whole marketing exercise simply stop for a while.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Rough Night (2017)

Created in the mould of box office successes The Hangover and Bridesmaids, but not as fresh, as outrageous, nor as unpredictable as those movies, this comedy has its pre-wedding partyers accidentally kill someone and because one of them is running for office and they've been doing a lot of drugs, they decide not to involve authorities and instead dispose of the body.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Scoop (2006)

A journalist, a magician, and a ghost investigate the possibility a killer-on-the-loose is well-to-do man-about-town Peter Lyman in this very minor Woody Allen comedy mystery that gives the distinct impression of having too quickly made the transition from Allen's notebook to the screen because none of the elements of the story hold together very tightly (and you feel with a bit more trouble things like tarot cards, fortunes, magic, death and careers would) and everyone is ad-libbing really badly.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

You'll need a degree in Marvel to follow exactly the whos and whys and whats of this busy sequel which has enhanced twins - a freakishly fast moving boy and a mindwarping witch girl, both boring - wreaking havoc with the Avengers, causing each of the umpteen of them to experience worrying visions including of the world destroyed by an artificial intelligence; the answer, unbelievably, is for the Avengers to increase their number even though there are already too many of them to really be able to care much about their burgeoning romances (wooden), family lives (corny), backstories (meaningless) and idiosyncracies (no longer funny).

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Mademoiselle C (2013)

This is a magazine branding exercise more than it is a documentary about former Vogue Paris Editor-in-Chief Carine Roitfeld who in 2013 dares to launch a new NY fashion magazine: not even she can articulate what she actually does and after trying various words (stylist, storyteller, editor) the matter is dismissed for 90 minutes of beautiful people looking beautiful, meaning little is learned, sadly, about Roitfeld other than the fact she surrounds herself with fashion industry celebrities and 'treats service drivers as she would her own children.'

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Lucy (2014)

Not an action movie (it is too dull) nor a sci-fi (it is too empty of ideas), this really very daft movie is more like a Morgan Freeman TED Talk spliced with a Luc Besson fantasy about what happens when a woman has the unused 90% of her human brain activated - her hair bobs with confidence as she struts around, denim jackets swoosh as she puts them on, she sits in an office chair to travel through time and space, and she adopts the mannerisms of an inquisitive bird.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Joel and Ethan Coen's movie about a 1950s Hollywood film studio is full of near versions of real Hollywood personalities from that era - Carmen Miranda, Esther Williams, Gene Kelly, Lash LaRue - embroiled in a plot ripped from 1950s celebrity tabloids and while it is certainly exuberantly acted and full of elaborate period detail, the movie's biggest problem is that it distances viewers looking for meaning - it's neither a light, frothy comedy spoof nor a biting political religious satire, but probably just a largely point-free Coen brothers indulgence - them revelling in the things they love.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Vicky and Cristina, American friends on holiday in Spain, have a pleasant time exploring art galleries and historical sites but when they encounter handsome Spanish painter Juan Antonio and his fiery ex-lover played hilariously by Penelope Cruz, they also end up exploring their notions of love and sex and monogamy, in Woody Allen's riotous comedy drama that features not so much a love triangle as a love square or pentagon!

★★★★☆ 

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

This 2002 creature feature manages on its low budget to be reminiscent of Arachnophobia, Gremlins, and even The Goonies during its more inventive, comic moments; in other formulaic, less interesting scenes, viewers can marvel at a young Scarlett Johansson - a long way off 2012s The Avengers - and the forever-the-same-age David Arquette - not so far off his 1996 Scream, although someone else is playing his goofy cop here while he steps up as the hero.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Under The Skin (2013)

The singlemindedness of men driven by sex is contrasted with the image of men powerless and vulnerable - one naked, awkwardly picking his way through a field like a marionette puppet, another drowning at sea, and another again (in an act the very opposite of swelling with sexual desire) imploding to nothing - in a wholly original, mesmerising and at times repulsive sci-fi horror starring Scarlett Johansson as the otherworldly femme fatale on the prowl for victims.

★★★★★

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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.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS 

Match Point (2005)

A young man is offered financial security and social standing by one woman, passion and excitement by another, in a fairly conventional story of an affair that Woody Allen turns into a measured, mesmerising thriller that references Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Avengers (2012)

See Marvel's The Avengers and marvel at how a superbudget superhero movie with not one but six superheroes manages to fit in all the requisite superhero movie things (mega set pieces, backstories, thrills, bad guys, humour, sass) into one coherent, fun, funny, not-to-be-missed mega movie event.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Lost In Translation (2003)

Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson float around Tokyo detached and lost but end up connecting and in a country as inaccessible to outsiders as Japan - a country that Director Sofia Coppola clearly knows well - the connection they form is a strong one.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS