Wonka (2023)

Like a Wonka' chocolate, this prequel is a confection entirely concocted from scratch by some lunatic using the weird and wonderful ingredients from Dahl's books, so there's giraffe milk and chocolatier wars, exotic oompa loompa lands and stuff, but there is also a pervading sense that the movie is all a rigmarole to perpetuate a non-canon add-on chapter of not-especially-good songs, childish acting, and some wonky cgi, making this confection a sickly sweet one – you end up feeling that to pick up a book or go to see a movie isn't worth the risk of having thrust upon you the burden of an ever-expanding film and television universe.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

A Rainy Day in New York (2019)

In Woody Allen's inconsequential, breezy romantic comedy - which I quite enjoyed - Timothée Chalamet's gloomy Gatsby Welles shuffles hunch-shouldered, arms in pockets around a rainy New York City, spending a day with sunny partner Ashleigh that doesn't go to plan, and just as you think it yourself about his slight and self-aware performance, Allen has Chalamet say - ostensibly about another character but far too applicable to his own performance to be coincidence - "[He's] a James Dean minus the acting chops".

★★★☆☆

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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

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.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Call Me By Your Name (2017)

This movie is not quite the intoxicating mix of art, music, philosophy and poetry that it wants to be and exactly what is appealing about older American Oliver, who has the whole town of Lombardy, Italy in a swoon, is mystifying, but thanks to Timothée Chalamet's wonderful performance as young Elio, the often dull, chemistry-free, and troubling romance culminates in a moving finale.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS