Altered States (1980)

As in The Fly, a scientist pushes his experiments too far but instead of a slow metamorphosis into a human-sized insect, this scientist enjoys extended psychedelic trips through a mind-expanding light fantastic - well, essentially a series of 80s rock music videos showing the star, William Hurt, looking awed against a swirling backdrop of esoteric symbols, ticking metronomes and time-lapse nature clips - and to progress the story, he eventually morphs into a caveman and then into an early version of Doctor Manhattan - pretty random scientific outcomes dictated by the makeup and the tech of the time (and anything to get the stoners to go, "Whoa, man").

★★★☆☆

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Mr Brooks (2007)

One way the existence of this incredibly boring 2007 serial killer drama makes sense is if it were originally intended as a big-screen adaptation of Dexter, the tv series which commenced in 2006 -- perhaps the people behind Dexter pulled the plug and this became the movie not of Dexter the serial killer but Mr Brooks the serial killer with his alter ego, Marshall, and his blackmailer (a wannabe killer), and his pregnant daughter embroiled in some other crime of her own, and the police woman chasing him while going through a divorce, her partner in a fedora, and a whole lot of other convoluted Dexter-ish plot threads presented here with no discernible, marketable core premise.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Good Shepherd (2006)

Great spy stories, like Graham Greene novels, operate on two levels with agent protagonists juggling individual, emotional sides with their detached organisational spy roles, but the focus of this thriller is unrelentingly trained upon Edward Wilson's job with everyone everywhere a whispering agent or double agent, and for too long the only human side on show is in the fleeting scenes Wilson shares with his girlfriend, wife and son, and given he exhibits an emotional detachment that warrants psychological intervention, things quickly become dreary and that is a shame given the calibre of the actors in this and the potential of the story spanning decades of American history.

★★☆☆☆

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