The Ghost of St. Michael's (1941)

The comedy is of a bawdy music hall variety and a young Charles Hawtrey appears, so this 1941 comedy thriller feels like an early entry in the Carry On series with the students and staff, including bumbling science teacher Will Lamb, relocated to a haunted church in Scotland during World War II where a plot involving a ghost and murder plays out in mildly entertaining fashion.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

A Ghost Story (2017)

All we see of their relationship is that he shares a pair of headphones with her once and, in bed, adopts a sleeping position that suggests love - not facing away from each other on opposite sides of the bed - so it hardly seems warranted that when he dies in a car crash he returns as a bedsheeted ghost and experiences, in a dreamy, dialogue-free extended indie videoclip, a mawkish Tree of Life history of the land upon which his and his partner's house stands; he watches tenants and buildings come and go over time until it starts to seem like we are watching his love affair with real estate, not with the woman played by Rooney Mara, whose relationship with Casey Affleck's ghost ends up feeling like a mere blip.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Disappointments Room (2016)

The title of this horror thriller doesn't refer to the movie theatre after the lights go back up on a paying audience but to, well, I hardly need to tell you when reading the title alone tells you everything you don't need to know about a weak Amityville Horror reiteration that not only runs out of time to sufficiently develop its main storyline (yet another couple move, for a fresh start, into a remote home only to discover it is haunted) but also completely abandons other plot points (for example, what on earth happened to the roofer?)

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Things Seen And Heard (2021)

One eye is sufficient for this long and tedious supernatural thriller set in "Headless Horseman" country where husband George, an academic, and wife Catherine Clare, an art restorer, move into a haunted fixer-upper, but the presence of ghosts, the ghosts' supernatural connection to these living counterparts, and local legends about the house's murderous past do not seem to impact very importantly on the things happening in the real world between George and Catherine and in fact just seem to obfuscate, like so many other horror movies do, the reprehensible behaviour of men.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS