New Year's Eve (2011)

On a New Year's Eve, the Times Square Ball gets stuck, neither up nor down, and this same inert state befalls a veritable Love, Actually ensemble of New Yorkers whose lives grind to a stop in deeply uninteresting, go-nowhere situations like the nurse (Halle Berry) who tends bedside to a dying man in hospital (Robert De Niro) - that's everything - or the man in pyjamas (Ashton Kutcher) who gets stuck in an elevator with a singer (that woman from Glee) - the end - or the pregnant couple who are, well, pregnant - and still pregnant each time the movie unnecessarily returns to them - or, in the most peculiar of the go-nowhere vignettes, a delivery guy (Zac Efron) escorts a woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) around NYC on a scooter skimping on her bucket list that she has no reason to rush through before midnight when, spoiler alert, the Times Square Ball drops and this dull romcom ends and life starts moving again.

★★☆☆☆

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Baywatch (2017)

22 Jump Street showed it is possible to simultaneously send up and update a 90s tv show on the big screen, but the promise of this big screen update of David Hasselhoff's unashamedly dopey 90s tv soap lasts just ten minutes before an erection joke plunges the tone into a deep skull-against-a-rock dive off a jetty from which it can't be revived; two loooong hours later, all that has been achieved is an overlong episode of the tv show with the attempt to justify the big screen treatment consisting of waves of adolescent humour that really could have seen the movie more successfully released as Police Academy 8: Officers on Beach Patrol.

★★☆☆☆

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Dirty Grandpa (2016)

An unusual sex fetish plays out amusingly near the end, but otherwise this is a revolting two-hour grind that makes you lament the state of comedy given 90-minutes of laugh-free genital and bodily fluid references emerged from a multi-million dollar production boasting, of all people, Robert DeNiro and Zac Efron.

☆☆☆☆☆

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Mick and Dave Need Wedding Dates (2016)

Zac Efron proved his comedy chops as that college jock in the amusing Bad Neighbours movies and so it is disappointing to find him doing pretty much that same buff college jock schtick here but in a comedy that loses its way as soon as you've finished reading the title with humour that repeatedly falls back on male and female genitals.

★☆☆☆☆

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Bad Neighbors (aka Neighbors) (2014)

New parents endeavour to shut down a riotous frathouse that keeps them and their baby awake at night, in this crude but often funny comedy that smashes together the world of the young, wild and wilful with the world of the middle-aged and totes-uncool, but the movie squanders the most interesting aspect of its story: Zac Efron's fratboy's inability to look beyond fraternity life, an idea with darkly humorous potential, introduced then abandoned..

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW