Red Sparrow (2018)

A Russian ballerina is trained in a sex school to tolerate brutal public sex with a stony face, and then, ready for secret agent work, she is entrusted to substitute top-secret floppy disks with dummy replacement ones - quickly, while no-one is looking, take real ones from a top shelf and swap them with fake ones from the bottom shelf - but is she performing these exciting spy feats for the Russians, is she working for the Americans, does anybody care, and what do the answers to these dull questions mean for romantic lead, the American spy agent played by Joel Edgerton with whom the ballerina shares zero chemistry at all?

★☆☆☆☆

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Red Hill (2010)

In this predictable but entertaining 2010 Australian thriller, a prison escapee looking like a cross between Machete and Freddie Krueger hunts down and kills the inordinate number of male police officers and locals residing in the rural Red Hill township, and caught up in the middle of the bloodshed is Constable Shane Cooper who has recently moved to the town with his pregnant wife and is experiencing a tough first day on the job.

★★★☆☆

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Red Lights (2012)

Occam's Razor is the philosophical principle which states the simplest explanation is often correct, but the most banal and laughable explanations can also be correct as demonstrated in this precursor to Now You See Me that swaps the Four Horsemen's magic tricks for the paranormal feats of Robert De Niro's spoon-bending Simon Silver, a Uri Geller type who commands large sums of money for tickets to his arena spectaculars and Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy's duo of Occam's Razor-spouting CSI: Supernatural investigators are the ones getting super worked up about his feats.

★☆☆☆☆

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Red Eye (2009)

A hotel manager on a red eye flight sits beside a creep and finds herself the lynchpin of his pretty harebrained assassination plot, in this Wes Craven thriller that doesn't make much of the potential of its midflight setting - couldn't the creep just have staked out the hotel or intercepted the hotel manager in, say, a taxi instead?

★★☆☆☆

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Red Dog (2011)

The inhabitants of Dampier gather and share stories about a red dog that has featured prominently in their lives in this gentle drama apparently based on a true story except - as is the irritating way of all mainstream Australian films - the eccentric townfolk have been exaggerated to all get out.

★★★☆☆

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