Weekend At Bernie's (1989)

This 80s comedy with a cult following will make you smirk a couple of times, especially when Bernie — the dead body Andrew McCarthy's shouty and annoying Larry and Jonathan Silverman's straight-man Richard drag around pretending it to be alive — is dragged behind a boat and banged against buoys or dragged across uneven ground, but these black slapstick moments, a single joke played over and over, hardly sustain the just-short-of two-hour runtime.

★★☆☆☆

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Cold Pursuit (2019)

In the township of Kehoe in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, against a backdrop of five-metre snows and glacial waterfalls, a snowplow driver seeks grisly revenge on those responsible for his son's death, and as in Harry Brown - because that's who this unlikely vigilante reminds you of, a snowplow-driving Harry Brown - there's a grim satisfaction to be gotten from watching smug druglords receiving their comeuppance from an unlikely avenger, but the movie makes you contend with a snowstorm of Fargo-style detail -the background details and idiosyncracies of oddball characters - that for the middle two-thirds of the movie, sends the plot and fun into hibernation.

★★☆☆☆

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Barton Fink (1991)

After auterial success in New York, a playwright is snapped up by a film studio to work as a writer of a wrestling movie in Hollywood, but in this world of lucrative contracts, deadlines, and hothead studio bosses, the writer starts to question what's in his head, who it belongs to, how to get it out or keep it in and keep it unsullied, and whether anyone is interested, and it is perhaps this last question that the Coen brothers themselves might have thought longer about in relation to their unsympathetic Fink in their mean-spirited story full of motor-mouths.

★★★☆☆

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