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.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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).

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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...

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS