A Fantastic Woman (Una Mujer Fantastica) (2017)

This is a marvellous character study, not just of the fantastic woman at the movie's heart, who resiliently navigates first the death of her partner, then the suspicion she encounters from the man's family, friends and the police, but also of the world around her, which struggles with challenges to its polarised gender constructs, with every scene in this smart, snappy movie crammed with unmistakable signs - uncertain air kisses, awkward handshakes, stammered titles - that betray the fact that the world is organised, now perhaps more than ever before, to exclude, not include.

★★★★☆

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Un Flic (Eng: 'A Cop') (aka Dirty Money) (1972)

All those Mission Impossible movies owe a lot to Jean-Pierre Melville's last French crime "flic" that features a centrepiece stunt distinctly Ethan Hunt in style involving a train and a helicopter...oh, and a cigar robe, a white pencil, and a horseshoe magnet (far too much detail: couldn't he have just gone into the bathroom and reappeared changed?) but unlike the Mission: Impossible movies, which plotwise are pretty straightforward, you'll need to watch Un Flic ("A cop") twice to confirm what might not be clear the first time through: that Alan Delon is a police commissioner, that apart from being committed by the same criminal gang, a drug robbery is a second crime unrelated to the first, and a second watch will help you to distinguish between far too many grey-faced trenchcoats and blonde bombshells, all of them (the bombshells AND the trenchcoats) mesmerized, transfixed by Delon.

★★★☆☆

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The Blonde One (Un rubio) (2019)

Viewers may want to give up on this slow-moving drama as another and another and another scene opens on poor and rather gormless Gabo, an Argentinian man in an illicit sexual relationship with his roommate, doing another and another and another household chore while staring silently into space in a lovelorn way, but stick through Gabo's blank looks over the dishes and be rewarded, eventually, with a more compelling, tense relationship drama featuring powerful performances from the two leads and, in the end, less domestic labour and more grist.

★★★☆☆

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Uncharted (2022)

Tom Holland is a far too baby-faced Nathan Drake, the supposed-to-be manly hero of Naughty Dog's Uncharted game series adapted here for the big screen, and casting Mark Wahlberg, too young and clean-shaven, as the game's Victor "Sully" Sullivan robs the movie of some of the game's emotion given the character is supposed to be a father-like figure in grown-up orphan Nathan's life, but despite this horrible casting, the movie succeeds as an engaging popcorn adventure with moments of great excitement and, for lovers of the series, plenty of nods to the game.

★★★☆☆

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Unforgettable (2017)

Unforgettable is precisely what this psycho thriller is not with Katherine Heigl playing an uptight 'Bree Van de Kamp' type ex-wife determined to ruin her ex-husband's new partner's life by browsing through her stolen mobile phone, wearing the dresses she likes, catfishing her former abusive partner, accusing her of violence, and other forgettable midday movie stuff like that.

★☆☆☆☆

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Unhinged (2020)

An opening scene of shocking brutality sets the unchanging tone of this - what? - neither a horror movie nor a thriller, perhaps it's a rage movie: an unedifying long-note of misery and brutality, about a road rage incident that goes on for about an hour after a deeply uninteresting opening twenty-five minutes in which the filmmakers pretend it is important to care about their meat-sack characters.

★☆☆☆☆

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A United Kingdom (2016)

This biopic does a pretty good job of condensing into a serviceable two-hour history lesson the main details of not just one but two lives during an embarrassing period of British history: the life of Seretse Khama, the first democratically-elected President of Botswana who led the country to independence from British colonisation in 1965, and the life of his English wife who defied the sensibilities of her family and her country by marrying Khama and moving to and having a baby in Bechuanaland.

★★★☆☆

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Under the Cover of Cloud (2018)

Of very limited appeal, probably even to Tasmanians and cricket fans, this deeply personal film, like a motion picture family album, is about a writer, Ted Wilson (the writer-director-lead actor and financer, playing himself) who returns to Tasmania after he loses his job and engages in not-very-interesting conversations with his family while he embarks upon the task of writing a cricket book.

★★★☆☆

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Under the Silver Lake (2019)

Andrew Garfield is a 33-year-old Donnie Darko, jobless and just as untethered from Hollywood as Donnie was detached from High School, but where that earlier classic puzzle of a movie mesmerised, this one, a kind of neo-noir LA stoner thriller about a missing woman, is utterly tedious and nothing it eventually says about "playing life" makes up for the dreary time it takes to say it.

★☆☆☆☆

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Harry, He's Here To Help (aka With A Friend Like Harry) (Un Ami Qui Vous Veut Du Bien) (2000)

Thrillers are described as Hitchcockian with wild abandon but the term is applied to this 2000 French thriller with only slight abandon: there's something wrong (some trouble) with the main character, Harry, a variety of Psycho whose waddle and gaze, at once twinkly and steely, recalls Robert Walker's deranged Bruno Antony and like Antony, this Harry has an off-kilter plan — but the real trouble with Harry, who turns up and wreaks havoc in his old school chum Michel's life, is there is no clear motivation for his actions - Hitchcock wouldn't have simply called him a psycho without also injecting the character with a mother or psychoanalysis or an inflated sense of superiority — and even Patricia Highsmith, whose works this thriller with its two males in stand-off very closely resembles, kept things cracking, not dour like this, and imbued her wafer-thin characters with clear motivations, ensuring her psychopath-driven plots were more than just shell...

★★☆☆☆

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Upgrade (2018)

RMIT Melbourne film school success story, Leigh Whannell keeps his high-octane revenge thriller, an exceedingly violent sci-fi, surprisingly fresh for a movie that simply rehashes Robocop with Tom Hardy lookalike, Logan Marshall-Green, playing the victim of brutal violence that leaves his girlfriend dead and him a quadriplegic...until he is upgraded by a Venom-like technology implant.

★★★★☆

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Dracula Untold (2014)

If they'd dispensed with the tired false promise of that title and marketed it as a live-action Castlevania, maybe more people would have enjoyed this origin story that melds together the mytholology of the world's most famous nocturnal neckbiter, Bram Stoker's Count Dracula, with the history of the 15th Century exacerbater of the Ottoman Empire, Vlad the Impaler even if the movie does rely a little too often on its swirling cgi bats and even if, like the film's antihero, the film refuses to die despite several ideal moments when it should impale itself on a stake and end but instead rises diabolically again and again and again (each time with a swirl of bats) because the gap between history and mythology that the film is bridging is actually a chasm with nothing in it, one that requires at some point just a stupid leap.

★★★★☆

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Us (2019)

The fact the aggressors are doppelgangers does not make Jordan Peele's home invasion thriller any more interesting than, say, The Strangers, (another home invasion thriller with a bemusing preface note) and in fact simply ends up quadrupling the number of wearying "must try to reach the scissors" scenes of violence that viewers need to wait through before the thriller's US sociopolitical analogy is elucidated, but by the time that rush of exposition comes, your other self, not the mindless zombie tethered in the dark forced to dumbly contemplate rabbits and impossibly weighted coffee tables but your more intelligent, educated equal, will be other places, in the privileged position of making shopping lists and the like.

★★☆☆☆

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The Teacher (Učiteľka) (2016)

In Communist-era Bratislava, a teacher extorts favours from parents in exchange for academic favour for their children, in this movie that tells a wickedly funny, stomach-churningly unjust and supposedly true story while also commenting on authoritarian rule in pre-Velvet Revolution Czechoslovakia and making viewers wonder in the end if they themselves harbour the wicked self-interests of the comfortable and the privileged like The Teacher.

★★★★★

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Unsane (2018)

** SPOILER WARNING **

The poster asks, "Is she or isn't she?" but in fact the answer to that question is, um, dispensed early on in Steven Soderbergh's surprisingly straightforward horror thriller about involuntarily "voluntarily admitted" psychiatric patient Sawyer Valentini, whose own The Cure For Wellness situation is compounded by a plot device so ridiculous it could only exist, surely, in the head of a deluded psychiatric patient: an obsessed stalker who has somehow (don't ask questions - did you know the movie was filmed entirely on an iPhone?) inveigled his way quick-sticks into a job at the facility.

★★☆☆☆

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The Ugly Truth (2009)

Katherine Heigl is a morning news show producer with integrity but low ratings and Gerard Butler is a crude, politically incorrect sharer of 'hard truths' who attracts huge numbers of viewers (basically he says that women are to blame for their own lovelessness; that they need to try harder to appeal to men), and of course these two opposites butt heads but pretty soon he's got her trying harder to appeal to men, having public orgasms, becoming willing to be scrutinized and groped and dressed in lingerie that men want to put in their mouths and swearing like a trooper, so a romance becomes possible between the two.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Unsuspected (1947)

The slightly mindbending title, a negated past participle typically used as an adjective but used with the definite article as a noun, hints at the greater convolutions to come in this noirish 1947 suspense thriller that involves - wait for it - not just a love-triangle but a love-pentagon, a shipwreck, a murder made to look like suicide, the return to life of someone presumed dead, a fake husband gaslighting a fake wife suffering amnesia, a hired hitman, blackmail, and a diabolical plot to commit a string of murders that might be the perfect crime except for the fact it almost leaves everyone but the culprit dead.

★★★☆☆

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Under the Sand (Sous Le Sable) (2000)

A woman's husband vanishes without trace from an unpatrolled beach in France in François Ozon's precursor to his 2003 Swimming Pool, another movie in which he has Charlotte Rampling doing what Charlotte Rampling does (in 45 Years, in Swimming Pool...), drifting around as an emotionally, physically distant older woman who may or may not be delusional, grappling with loneliness or interacting with figaments of her imagination.

★★★★☆

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Under Siege 2 Dark Territory (1995)

A hostage situation in the Nakatomi Plaza was the first iteration of the Die Hard formula, since used in an airport (Die Hard 2), in a boys school (Toy Soldiers), aboard a boat (Under Siege), on a plane (Air Force One, Non-stop), in The White House (Olympus Has Fallen), in a neo-nazi clubhouse (Green Room) and here, in an Under Siege sequel about as cinematic as a MacGyver episode, the formula is applied to a transAmerican train and it is again up to Steven Seagal's unruffled former Navy Seal cook and his niece (a pre-comedy career Katherine Heigel) to sneak around and thwart the bad guys' diabolical nuclear plans.

★★☆☆☆

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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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