Unsane (2018)

** SPOILER WARNING **

The poster asks, "Is she or isn't she?" but in fact the answer to that question is, um, dispensed early on in Steven Soderbergh's surprisingly straightforward horror thriller about involuntarily "voluntarily admitted" psychiatric patient Sawyer Valentini, whose own The Cure For Wellness situation is compounded by a plot device so ridiculous it could only exist, surely, in the head of a deluded psychiatric patient: an obsessed stalker who has somehow (don't ask questions - did you know the movie was filmed entirely on an iPhone?) inveigled his way quick-sticks into a job at the facility.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

A Cure For Wellness (2016)

** SPOILER ALERT **

Not since Leonardo DiCaprio in Shutter Island has an actor looked so much like a playacting high schooler in a gumshoe's trenchcoat as Dane DeHaan playing Wall Street stockbroker Lockhart, a man tricked into admitting himself into a sinister sanatorium in this cumbersomely titled fantasy mystery, and that and a good number of other clues peppered liberally throughout this overlong Shutter Island-Soylent Green B-movie hint at the film's big reveal: that it is actually a floundering, ponderous, distasteful mess of other films' ideas including, towards the end, sadly, Spiderman.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Handmaiden (2016)

The trouble with Park Chan-wook's movies like Old Boy and Stoker is their gleefully twisted plots tend to be detached, joyless affairs populated with cold, heartless characters, but not so this sumptuous thriller inspired by Sarah Water's "The Fingersmith" about cold, heartless swindlers enacting a cold, heartless plot - the fear halfway through is this thriller will also remain a detached robotic affair but the twist in the end is that there is heart, just not where you expect to find it.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Terminator 2 Judgment Day (1991)

In this second movie of the ever-growing Terminator series, Schwarzenegger reprises his role of assassin robot from the future only this time he is fighting with, not against, the Connors: tortured and muscly Sarah and her son John, future leader in the war against the machines but here a petulant live-action Bart Simpson rascal, are being hunted by an all-new liquid metal Skynet threat, and the chase is a ripping action story only slightly marred by the movie's persistently flat affect and some inconsistency in the liquid metal robot's functions.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Sucker Punch (2011)

Imprisoned girls in fishnets, stilettos and laced bodices are repeatedly forced to perform a cabaret dance soooo unspeakable it becomes necessary for them to dissociate, disappearing into what Zach Snyder probably imagines are empowering feminist dreamscapes - Bjork music video sequences in which the girls wear fishnets, stilettos and laced bodices and annihilate CGI monsters with ninja skills that back in the real world must be some really good twerking or something.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Twelve Monkeys (1995)

The joy of Terry Gillam's Twelve Monkeys, a thrilling drama that works with the Slaughterhouse Five themes of time, memory, and questions of what is real and what isn't, is watching the madness ebb and flow and transplant itself back and forth between the leads, so that first it is Willis, then Stowe, then Willis again, whose reality - with the help of unbalanced camera angles - teeters on collapse.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS