My Salinger Year (aka 'My New York Year') (2020)

In this uneven The Devil Wears Prada set in the publishing, not the fashion, industry of the 1990s, wannabe writer Joanna Ratkoff (a real person upon whose experiences her book - and then this adapatation - are based) scores a dream entry-level job at the Harold Orr publishing agency in New York, which is the agency that really did count notoriously reclusive writer J D Salinger among its author-clients, and it is there that Ratkoff develops a working relationship with Salinger while labouring under Sigourney Weaver's Phyllis Westberg, not a savage Anna Wintour powerhouse but a more falliable Luddite whose wariness towards the office's first computer provides good humour throughout the movie.

★★★☆☆

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Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

Because they (Ivan Reitman's son Jason, who writes and directs the movie, and a group of producers that includes Dan Ackroyd) are trying here to make a movie that appeals nostalgically to kids of the 80s but also enthuses a new generation of millenials about the Ghostbuster franchise (after the vapid Melissa McCarthy one pretended the original didn't exist and aimed itself solely at the pre-teen market), the set up of Ghostbusters: Afterlife is necessarily laboured with the movie adopting the deliberate pacing of, say, the original Christopher Reeve Superman movie to build links between the ghostbusting action in 80s Manhattan and that in 2021 smalltown Summerville, Oklahoma where young Phoebe and her brother Trevor stumble across Ghostbuster research into ghouls called Zuul and Gozer.

★★★☆☆

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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.

★★★☆☆

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The Ice Storm (1997)

Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, based on a book by Rick Moody, does for the 70s what The Big Chill and Grand Canyon did for the 80s and 90s - present middleclass America in a moment, here an era of nuclear families contending with post-Vietnam War sexual liberation - and while the movie might have benefitted from a few more laughs as 70s upheaval is paraded in the form of packaging peanuts, Jesus Christ Superstar, est training and key parties, the sombre drama is redeemed by affecting endscenes suggesting the inexorable thaw and moving forwards of Time...and along the way compelling evidence is provided that Tobey Maguire and Elijah Wood are not, in fact, the same person.

★★★☆☆

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Ghostbusters (1984)

It is hard to imagine, despite decades of advances in cinema technology and the various sequels and reboots that started with the Melissa McCarthy one in 2016, that anyone is ever going to improve upon this classic 80s comedy - even rewatching it today, so many years after its initial release in 1984, it impresses with its special effects and comedy, and Bill Murray is in top form as the drily hilarious Dr Peter Venkman who, with his fellow Ghostbusters, takes on New York's growing number of paranormal problems including the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

★★★★★

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Red Lights (2012)

Occam's Razor is the philosophical principle which states the simplest explanation is often correct, but the most banal and laughable explanations can also be correct as demonstrated in this precursor to Now You See Me that swaps the Four Horsemen's magic tricks for the paranormal feats of Robert De Niro's spoon-bending Simon Silver, a Uri Geller type who commands large sums of money for tickets to his arena spectaculars and Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy's duo of Occam's Razor-spouting CSI: Supernatural investigators are the ones getting super worked up about his feats.

★☆☆☆☆

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Ghostbusters II (1989)

Apparently not even Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, the writers, thought Ghostbusters II was a good idea - it was never going to improve upon the original - but as far as studio-driven money-grabbing sequels go, it is pretty fun: like a Lethal Weapon sequel, the cast has grown and so things are busier - Dana has a baby, for one, and there are several new characters standing between the Ghostbusters and the city mayor, and Louis Tully has been adopted into the Ghostbusters' circle, so his role of goofball demigod conduit is handed over to newcomer Peter MacNichol who plays a very Rick Moranis-ish 'Igor' assistant to the evil Vigo - when their evil plot requires a loan of Sigouney Weaver's baby, the Ghostbusters get their proton packs back on.

★★★☆☆

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Alien Resurrection (1997)

This time, in an Alien instalment too clever by half, Ripley is resurrected in director Jean-Paul Jeunet's "Delicatessen", a futuristic green-yellow world of zany characters and irreverent detail, but in fact, Ripley isn't Ripley at all but a Ripley-alien clone and empath who once again takes charge of a group of mercenaries when aliens - distinctly Jurassic Park raptor-like ones - break free from their Umbrella Corporation science experiment chambers and start - you guessed it - picking off everyone on board the Earth-bound spaceship Auriga (including elfin robot, Winona Ryder) one-by-especially-bloody-one.

★★★☆☆

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Copycat (1995)

It tells a story of a serial killer with a completely implausible modus operandi - the copycat killer re-enacts to an impossible level of detail famous serial killer crimes of the past - but this effective thriller, one of the better ones released during the spate of hohum serial killer thrillers released after 1991s The Silence of the Lambs, stars Sigourney Weaver as an agoraphobic serial killer expert who finds herself both the hunter and the hunted as she reluctantly helps cop duo Holly Hunter and Dermot Mulroney on a difficult case.

★★★★☆

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Alien 3 (1992)

The gunmetal-blue quiet of space that marked the first two Alien movies is switched for the brown bluster of a prisoner-run refinery in this third movie directed by David Fincher and that change is the movie's fundamental flaw - rather than an unseen, unfathomable, latent horror suddenly, noisily bursting out of space's deep dark and quiet, here the alien burns around Thunderdome at breakneck speed, noisy, more lit up and visible and more understood than ever before, and it is killing not mercenaries or astronaut scientists but a noisy, repellent bunch of grubby convicts that it is hard to care about.

★★☆☆☆

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Aliens (1986)

For poor Rip-(van Wink)-ley, 57 years of sleep in an escape pod must have seemed like a mere heartbeat when in fact it was plenty of time for the eggs on the LV-426 colony (sighted in the original Alien) to hatch into an alien plague; Ripley skips breakfast and gets straight into alien-busting consultant mode for some macho commandos, but before long, Director James Cameron wipes everyone else out so that the mother-progeny theme that is to become the series' signature can come to the fore as Ripley defends herself and Newt, the colony's lone survivor and first daughter figure of the series, from the aliens and their queen.

★★★★★

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Alien (1979)

Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley became the archetypal kickass heroine after her introduction in this original Alien movie, essentially a pick-them-off-one-at-a-time horror like many American slasher flicks full of teens camping in remote locations with masked evil hunting them down, but Alien transcends its genre with its muted, echoey spaceship campground, its otherworldly Jason always kept at a distance, never seen fully extended, always in shadow and so not just masked but unfathomable, and the movie is rich in other details - robot crew members, extraterrestrial remains, slumber pods - that have been developed into a detailed mythology across four sequels to date (and happily counting!).

★★★★★

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Abduction (2011)

Make it through the longwinded set-up in which the uncharismatic Taylor Lautner veeery slooowly discovers he was adopted in a government conspiracy and be rewarded with an equally longwinded chase in this dopey retelling of River Phoenix's dopey "Little Nikita" featuring government spies who use bunches of balloons to evade pursuers.

★☆☆☆☆

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Galaxy Quest (1999)

A group of actors from a scifi tv series are mistaken for real intergalactic heroes in a funny comedy that pokes fun at nerd conventions, Star Trek actors and fandom.

★★★☆☆

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