True Detective (Season 2)

True Detective Season 2 (DVD

True Detective Season 2 (DVD)

Season 2 centres around the murder of a city planner in California and confirms True Detective as an anthology series about twisted murders committed by masked culprits, investigated by deeply flawed police officers - here, three, all deeply, deeply cracked - who engage in a massive shootout in about episode 5, and like the first season, this one is star-studded (Rachel McAdams, Taylor Kitsch, Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn star), is cinematic, but is let down by the ponderousness of its first four episodes, by its overreaching scope (cults and gay shame and extramarital affairs and adoption and sexual harrassment counselling sessions are just some of the extraneous matters that keep things mindbogglingly busy) and it is also let down by the pure (daytime) soapiness of scenes between Vince Vaughn's Frank, a club owner up to his neck in corruption and crime, and his wife, Jordan, his business partner and wannabe-bearer of his child.

★★★☆☆

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

Jeff Goldblum does his zany thing, reprising his role of zany chaos theorist Ian Malcolm and taking the lead in this sequel, a darker, more violent, headache-inducing and overall lesser Jurassic Park movie which has Malcolm sent by John Hammond to a second island of the park to research and document dinosaurs but he finds mercenaries from the InGen corporation are also there with less sensible, more short-term commercial interests in mind.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Couples Retreat (2009)

Several couples go to an exclusive island retreat for marriage counselling, is the context of this romantic vom-edy, actually a long series of unfunny, uncharming sex, masturbation, and penis jokes featuring the most unattractive array of petulant manchildren you will ever see in a movie - far from wishing them all a speedy relationship recovery, you want to tell the women to run for the departing boats and never look back.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Old School (2003)

Before Bad Neighbours was funny enough to warrant a sequel, there was this similarly themed but dreadfully unfunny Will Ferrell movie about middle-aged men who form a fraternity to avoid eviction - do not expect a sequel.

☆☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Psycho (1998)

This is a 1998 remake of Hitchcock's 1960 thriller about a woman who goes missing after visiting a roadside motel, with so much identical to the original that it begs the question why it needed to be remade at all, particularly given everything about it is so constrained by what has come before that even the A-list stars seem like thinly disguised, taxidermied versions of their past counterparts, conspicuous in a hand-me-down wardrobe of fedoras, black skivvies, flared pant legs, and delivering lines too readily like actors going through the motions of an over-rehearsed play.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW