Everybody Knows (2019)

A joyous wedding celebration in a wine region of Spain turns bad when a guest, the teenaged girl of an Argentinian family, disappears, possibly kidnapped, in Asghar Farhadi's beautifully acted, beautiful-to-look-at, absorbing, but ultimately inconsequential crime drama that spends so long on its sumptuous set-up, there's no time for the mystery except for in a series of lurching scenes in the film's final third in which the plot doesn't so much develop as the audience is perfunctorily caught up on a situation everyone except the audience (and perhaps, unimportantly, one or two other characters) already knows.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

Their daughter is kidnapped when a clay pigeon shooter and her husband in Switzerland learn from a dying man the details of an international intrigue, in this 1934 Alfred Hitchcock thriller with memorable scenes involving a sun-worshipping cult and a heart-pounding dentist appointment.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Nobody Knows (Dare Mo Shirenai) (誰も知らない) (2004)

A mother abandons her children for long periods with instructions that all but the eldest boy are to remain unseen and unheard inside her apartment, in Hirokazu Kore-eda's sanitised account of an actual 1988 news story; some of the blame for the tragedy that follows surely rests on the film's disconnected, apathetic Tokyo.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

I Know Who Killed Me (2007)

A serial killer's victim is found minus a foot and hand but still alive, however when she wakes up in hospital she claims to be someone else entirely, not the victim, in this truly lamentable psychological thriller featuring what would have to be one of the most imbecilic plots and laughable denouements ever committed to celluloid.

☆☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Code Unknown (Code Inconnu) (2000)

The miserable events of Babel, another everything-is-connected drama, were also sparked by a child's actions; here, in Michael Haneke's least grim but still dismaying film, the child's act is reprehensible, a truly callous moment that sparks not moribund events like in Babel, but human, compelling events and by movie's end, it is pretty clear the code referred to in the title is society's broken moral code and that the movie's loosely connected stories are commenting on the tendency of people to hide their "real faces" or mute their true feelings to rascist taunts overheard on a train, to the plight of refugees reported in the news, or to the bullish behaviour of the powerful.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Life As We Know It (2010)

Katherine Heigl in real life seems alot more interesting and sassy than the awful blonde characters she plays, and here, in one of those "omg I inherited a baby" dramedies like "Baby Boom" with Diane Keaton, she again plays a blonde who suddenly finds herself sharing the care of a baby girl with Brad-Pitt-I-mean-Josh-Duhamel, a man she had a bad date with and hates but forgives, sleeps with, fights with, makes up with, lives happily ever after with.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Unknown (2011)

Unknown starts intriguingly, a bit like Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (an American in Europe suffers a head injury and then isn't believed) and ends excitingly, a bit like Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (a race against the clock to prevent an assassination attempt at a gathering of prominent world figures), but the stretch in between is too run-of-the-mill for too long, keeping this from being a suspense action great.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS