Skyscraper

The tallest, most wooden, most hollow character in this action is - surprise! - not The Rock (who is actually quite charismatic, always, and even in a dopey exercise like this) but the elaborately cgi-animated 'Nakatomi Plaza' that is this action movie's title-skyscraper 'The Pearl', a cloud-puncturing phallus full of stupid hi-tech with no purpose to exist except for a silly movie "house of mirrors" showdown - so, while the action movie starts strong, the minute it enters the hard-to-fathom cgi insides of The Pearl, things plummet into a void.

★★★☆☆

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The Walk (2015)

Phillipe Petit's wirewalk between the World Trade Towers is something I knew about but never thought much about and in fact I tended to dismiss whatever he did as the work of a serial pest like a streaker at a football game, but to watch him here progress his idea from fanciful notion in a dentist's waiting room to a death-defying feat high above an awe-struck America, is - even after so much maudlin, cringeworthy faux-Frenchness - extremely moving...and especially moving given the way the film juxtaposes Petit's contribution to history with the contributions of certain others.

★★★☆☆

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