Mickey 17 (2025)

Bong Joon-Ho's Mickey 17 is a messy overreaching film about an "expendable", a worker on a spaceship who is employed to die over and over (with a new self 3D-printed after each death); it's a childish pantomine of conflated woke themes presented plainly - a rehash of ideas from Okja and Snowpiercer - with Toni Collete stepping in for Tilda Swinton, and Mark Ruffalo arrived directly from the set of Poor Thing.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Human Trap (aka The Trap) (2021)

The synopsis of this 2021 South Korean 88-minute mere slip of a movie - teenagers go camping and end up terrorised in the woods - will drive away most non-slasher fans, and that is a small shame because while the events undoubtedly grow grisly by the end, the story preceding that is a punchy, reasonably restrained and intelligent one - a thriller with twists and turns not so hard to predict but doled out quick enough to maintain interest, at least in my case - for eighty-eight minutes of a nine-hour flight.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Midnight (미드나이트) (2021)

The events take place over a compact couple of hours and amount to a string of scenarios bordering on offensive that try to derive thrills from the fact a deaf mute woman is being terrorised by a serial killer: she is unable to alert passersby and unable to convey the intricacies of her plight to police or to her mother, and just as you start to think it is all too silly (the killer, afterall, acts so brazenly, operating in plain sight he's essentially a Freddy Kruger in a dreamscape), something interesting happens with some military service cadets briefly seen on screen and suddenly a very silly, unlikely thriller starts to seriously indict male toxicity in South Korea, and suddenly this woman with no voice and no ownership of her own body and dress is not alone, and the outrageous situation she is in seems not so uncommon.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS