Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)

It didn't help that an hour in our internet cut out and my viewing partner accidentally drummed up the original 2017 cut, not this 2021 refashioning by Zack Snyder, leaving us perplexed by scenes we'd already seen playing out of sequence, but even once we got back on track this unnecessarily long re-release stretches a bad two-hour movie to an interminable four-hour slog: a first hour and a half of false starts, a muddled middle split pointlessly between Batman's Justice League recruitment drive and Steppenwolf's "mother box" raids (the raids are doing the recruiting, making Batman's story redundant), and a finale that comes only after too many musical lamentations (each time Wonder Woman appears), too many dopey Flash close-ups, far too many little-boy shrugs from Superman, and way too much of that cyborg character so stiff and miserable we never once connect — four hours later, it isn't Justice League so much as Justice beLeaguered.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Zombeavers (2014)

Both words are stressed on the first syllable, making the portmanteau cumbersome — 'zɒmb(i)vəz and zɒm'bivəz are more natural, but the far more awkward 'zɒm'bi'vəz is probably correct — and a lexical horror that will gnaw at you as this low budget creature feature pretends to be meta but remains utterly derivative for its first two-thirds, setting up as disposable meat objects a threesome of scantily-clad sorority girls in a cabin in the woods, letting three revolting boys get their turn before the 'zɒm'bi'vəz are set upon them, leaving the surprisingly funny stuff — perhaps two or three intentionally ridiculous scenes of humans transforming into zɒm'bivəz and gnawing at trees to create roadblocks — for the far-too-little-too-late end.

★☆☆☆☆

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Zootopia (2016)

Real-world issues like racial stereotyping, our conscious and unconscious biases, and politics are cleverly packed into this entertaining Disney cartoon mystery about Judy the rabbit who wants to become a police officer, not a carrot farmer — a movie with such an important message you feel it should be mandatory viewing for all children.

★★★★☆

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Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

This is an undeniably rivetting account of the hunt and execution of Osama Bin Laden, but it is also chilling in its depiction of war games in which the cost of a life is rationalised.

★★★★☆

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Zodiac (2007)

David Fincher gives the real-life Son of Sam killings the Bong Joon-Ho Memories of Murder treatment, creating an intriguing police procedural about a cartoonist whose life becomes consumed by the investigation that spanned parts of the 60s, the 70s and 80s but remains unsolved today.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS