2:22 (2017)

Most of the energy put into this Australian film, a sci-fi romantic thriller about a man experiencing odd things at 2:22pm each day, is spent trying to make Melbourne and Sydney look like New York City (or at least trying to make them look not unlike New York City, with the camera sticking close to the actors and street scenes cutting short just before a tram rumbles past), and there's not much energy to be found anywhere else because the tone is supposed to be ethereal, mystical, and mesmeric, and the two leads - playing the world's worst air traffic controller, and a victim of the near-aviation incident he causes - are brought together by Fate with their destinies written in the stars, so they are essentially automatons going through the motions whether they understand why they keep ending up at Grand Central Station or not.

★★☆☆☆

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Wish You Were Here (2012)

This well-acted 2015 movie about an Australian foursome's trouble-filled holiday to Cambodia and its aftermath is rather dishonestly marketed as a mystery and while there is an investigation (an inert and highly unlikely one) launched in Sydney, Australia after only three of the bogans return from the trip, viewers who persist through the protracted misery, I mean mystery, will be disappointed by a revelation at the end that is impossible to predict and that makes the movie's whole fall apart, unless some tenuous thing is being suggested that links marital and familial dischord, bad behaviour overseas, and trauma.

★★☆☆☆

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Berlin Syndrome (2017)

Probably a better name would have been, "Girl in Berlin", or "Berlin Girl", or "Backpacker Girl On A Trip To Berlin", because you'd know then that this is a creepy thriller in the vein of Gone Girl and Girl On A Train and not a movie with anything important or even anything very interesting to say about Germany or men or German men or women or sexual relationships between men and women, and in fact, this thriller about an Australian woman held captive in a Berlin apartment has so little to say, much of its padding - repetitive scenes of the psychopath coming and going from the apartment - is presented in slow motion, presumably to fill the time.

★★☆☆☆

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