Terror Train (1980)

Three years after a (really revolting) med student prank, a group of students gather for a New Year's Eve party aboard a steam train, and as the train shoots through the night, it turns out one of those on board is picking the others off one by bloody one....and the passenger we sympathise with, not so involved in that prank and striving to stay alive while all her besties end up sliced and diced is -- no, not a starey young David Copperfield who appears as a magician without a Working With Children check, hired to be the onboard entertainment - but Jamie Lee Curtis, adding her 80s-horror clout to this effective slasher with several truly chilling moments.

★★★☆☆

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The Green Knight (2021)

 

I read The Quest of the Holy Grail once, and this adaptation of a related tale about the nephew of King Arthur, Sir Gawain, journeying to see a Green Knight to pay a due, brought that book back to mind, perfectly evoking the dreaminess and painterliness of the book's chapters, with some, like the episodes in the movie, ending without obvious point while others thrill with chivalrous exploits, all taking place against a beautifully realised medieval time steeped in magic and religion, albeit in a movie with two or three scenes, clanging attempts at modernity, which jolt the viewer out of the otherwise mesmerising fantasy.

★★★★☆

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Crowhaven Farm (1970)

In this 1970 made-for-tv horror, an unhappily married couple moves into the country estate she has inherited but far from benefitting their marriage as they had hoped, the move results in her having visions of distant-past witch trials and encountering other weirdness in her present day - but by far the most horrible thing in this mild tv distraction is not witches but an irksome subplot involving the couple's ten-year-old foster daughter.

★★☆☆☆

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F/X: Murder By Illusion (1986)

Two things - Crocodile Dundee (another 1986 movie release with an Australian lead) and a nonsensical, inexplicably punctuated title - probably detracted from F/X: Murder By Illusion's success in the box office, and revisiting it today reveals a good concept stretched by middling action sequences into a way-overlong movie-with-a-tv-budget, but as a kid I loved this Mission: Impossible-lite, Now You See Me crime-magic story, about Hollywood special effects man Rollie Tyler (Australia's own Bryan Brown) hired by the Justice Department to fake the murder of a mobster in the Witness Protection program.

★★★☆☆

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Now You See Me 2 (2016)

That huge ensemble of characters from number one, all deeply earnest about their craft - magic - which unites them in a fraternity as boysy, ridiculous and self-important as the Illuminati, reunites for this preposterous sequel that pits the Four Horsemen in a magic war with a tech wizard, except this is cinema magic, not magic magic, so there is no 'reveal' to justify the movie's long tangled string of events and you can't possibly care about what happens given the "anything goes" nature of the plot and the fact it all goes on in a one-note bombastic patter and that everything, even years in jail, might simply, quite ridiculously, be part of the slow burn.

★★☆☆☆

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Scoop (2006)

A journalist, a magician, and a ghost investigate the possibility a killer-on-the-loose is well-to-do man-about-town Peter Lyman in this very minor Woody Allen comedy mystery that gives the distinct impression of having too quickly made the transition from Allen's notebook to the screen because none of the elements of the story hold together very tightly (and you feel with a bit more trouble things like tarot cards, fortunes, magic, death and careers would) and everyone is ad-libbing really badly.

★★☆☆☆

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Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

This is a breezy Woody Allen romantic comedy after Oscar Wilde about a cynical magician (Colin Firth) who, despite his scepticism about her claims, falls in love with a psychic (an always delightful Emma Stone).

★★★★☆

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The Illusionist (2006)

Childhood sweethearts are reunited in adulthood when she, now fiance to the Austrian Crown Prince Leopold, is called up on stage to participate in his David Copperfield-style magic show, in this very romantic mystery that slightly frustrates with its NQR historical context too blurry to justify the morally ambiguous implications of the movie's twist.

★★★☆☆

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Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)

L Frank Baum wrote fourteen stories about Oz - thirteen sequels to the book we all know - and this fantasy adventure doesn't appear to be any one of them but a kind of dreamt up origin story a la Gregory Maguire featuring early versions of myriad Oz characters - China Girl (not the China Princess), Finley, a winged monkey in a bellhop uniform, the witches before they have hit their good or evil strides (South, East, West, but not Locasta-Tattypoo), and James Franco is the wizard twenty years prior to his being sought out by Dorothy, and while it slightly disappoints fans of the books and hasn't a patch of the classic movie's wonder, it is fun, entertaining and a clever tie-in.

★★★☆☆

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Now You See Me (2013)

David Copperfield-esque magicians perform an Oceans Eleven style grift and arouse the interest of police and from there, over a series of subsequent grifts, this entertaining romp escalates the stakes to preposterous levels, particularly when real danger arrives in the form of car chases and carelessly fired guns, surely not in balance with the magicians' endgame, you'll think, even before you know what that is...

★★★☆☆

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The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (2013)

Siegfried and Roy-style magicians find their Vegas-style magic show under threat from a brash, grungy street performer, in a well-executed comedy that is often very funny, with a final scene that had me in tears of laughter.

★★★★☆

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