Silent Night (2021)

What a dreary exercise this is, about an annoying group of family and friends, like all those twerps from Four Weddings And A Funeral, gathered for Christmas Eve, and as if that alone were not a situation ripe for high tension and aired grievances and awkward revelations, it also happens to be the eve of the end of the world, so all these goofuses face a decision that is sufficiently ghoulish to keep you watching through the drudgery to the end: they can die painfully from a poisoned atmosphere, or take a pill and die peacefully before the agony starts, Merry Christmas.

★★☆☆☆

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Knowing (2009)

People were scathing about this 2009 scifi that stars Nicolas Cage as a father who believes the world is ending but with good extended disaster effects and the not-quite-Hollywood direction taken by the plot, it maintains interest even if Cage and the sound department's performances are one-histrionic-note throughout - everything that happens, whether a train accident that kills thousands or a child's cry at night, elicits orchestral doom and Cage melodrama.

★★★☆☆

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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.

★★★★☆

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This Is The End (2013)

Some of Hollywood's most obnoxious personalities gather at James Franco's house for a party, and pretty soon the world decides to end rather than put up with another minute of their incessant shouting about drugs, semen, masturbation, and rape.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Melancholia (2011)

Stultifying in its attempts at sumptuousness and profundity, particularly in its first half, Melancholia, a melodrama about the world's least fun wedding played out as a planet heads on a collision course with Earth, is nonetheless so stunningly photographed, so well-acted by Kirsten Dunst, and so curious a work that it manages to overcome its many failings to be, well, watchable.

★★☆☆☆

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After Earth (2013)

Delivered with such import that it is no fun at all, this scifi has Will Smith remotely guiding his son through a series of uninteresting challenges on an abandoned Earth, most of them resolved before you've even thought to care and even Jayden Smith, the son, shakes off some of the life-threatening encounters (with monkeys, extreme cold, poison leeches...) with glib lines like, "That sucked," which in the end was my sentiment exactly. 

★☆☆☆☆

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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