Woman of the Hour (2024)

The fact that in 1978 an active serial killer once appeared in real life on a dating game television show seems at first a curious car crash moment to ogle in passing, hardly worth extrapolating into a feature-length movie – not without turning real murder and real victims into sideshow spectacle – but in her directorial debut, Anna Kendrick takes that moment and almost succeeds in finding the balance between respecting its grim reality and lampooning a world – then and now – that idly indulges sick male pathology with a sympathetic "there, there", fails to vet men before, say, letting them on camera, and asks women to laugh gaily at male idiocy.

★★★☆☆

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Murder Mystery 2 (2022)

Not as sophisticated a mystery as the plot of a Murder, She Wrote episode, this sequel to Netflix's 2019 Murder Mystery at least improves on that original, generating a few laughs and keeping the pace brisk and the length blessedly short as Nick and Audrey Spitz end up on a tropical island for a wedding where a murderer strikes.

★★☆☆☆

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I Came By (2022)

A British Don't Breathe about a graffiti artist who breaks into a former judge's home, this Netflix (not-so-)original thriller completely derails in a middle stretch involving an Iraqi refugee - it is an inconsistent sequence offering rushed exposition - but then gets back on track to deliver some satisfying surprises and daring to go places the viewer will not be expecting.

★★★☆☆

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The Power of the Dog (2021)

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Campion's solemn and unaffecting Western, an adaptation of a novel by Thomas Savage, reminds me of the movies of Paul Thomas Anderson — The Master and Phantom Thread, for example — in the way its gorgeous, elaborate evocation of a world — cattle ranching in (New Zealand standing in for) Montana — ends up being for nought, the grand staging in the end unwarranted by what turns out to be just a queer little episode of crime involving four characters all so deeply repressed that their motivations scene-to-scene — if they are not vanished completely in one of the choppy-changey tv-series-style chapters — remain a mystery — in lieu of personality is offered up homosexuality and alcoholism, as if this is all we need to know.

★★★☆☆

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Unforgettable (2017)

Unforgettable is precisely what this psycho thriller is not with Katherine Heigl playing an uptight 'Bree Van de Kamp' type ex-wife determined to ruin her ex-husband's new partner's life by browsing through her stolen mobile phone, wearing the dresses she likes, catfishing her former abusive partner, accusing her of violence, and other forgettable midday movie stuff like that.

★☆☆☆☆

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Asakusa Kid (浅草キッド) (2021)

This drama is as much about the changing face of Japanese comedy in the 70s given the advent of  "manzai" (Dean Martin- and Jerry Lewis-style comedy duo routines) appearing on burgeoning Japanese television as it is a deeply moving insight into the life of Japanese television and movie stalwart Takeshi "Beat" Kitano upon whose memoir the movie is based.

★★★★☆

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Kidnapped (2021)

Nothing to do with Robert Louis Stevenson, he'd be in a hurry to tell you, this mindless mystery fare, like an especially poorly plotted episode of Murder, She Wrote, has an American couple running around a small Australian island resort called Koala Sanctuary looking for their daughter missing from hotel childcare, but who among the wooden Australian extras would want to kidnap the girl and for what possible motive you will know immediately as the story, like a Days Of Our Lives subplot given more credence than it is due plays out in soapy, bleedingly obvious fashion.

★★☆☆☆

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The Guilty (2021)

This American remake of the one-man, one-night, confined-space Danish thriller about an emergency service telephone operator trying to save a kidnapped woman, suffers the same problems as the original film with the decisions and actions of the main character so poor that a more appropriate title would have been 'The Incompetent', but I think this American remake takes the unpleasant little crime drama and better establishes the reason for Jake Gyllenhall's character's poor choices, including his heightened state of anxiety over some kind of formal hearing that is taking place at the end of his shift.

★★☆☆☆

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Run (2020)

I watched this as a double-billing with The Woman In The Window, both Netflix thrillers featuring women confined to their homes, but Run is the better film - a fun thriller and great example of Grand Dame Guignol horror with Sarah Paulson (in the role Bette Davis would have taken back in the day) playing a mum whose management of her wheelchair-bound daughter's life and medications and time might not be as altruistic as everyone in town - the pharmacist, the postie, the group therapy attendees - might think.

★★★★☆

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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.

★★☆☆☆

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The Forest of Love (あいなき森で叫べ) (2019)

What was perhaps intended here was a Japanese Memories of Murder or, given the violence and bold yellow timestamps that punctuate the film, something Tarantino-esque, but director Sion Sono takes his subject matter, the depraved and deeply disturbing real-life crimes of Matsunaga Futoshi and his spouse Junko Ogata and wallows in their every minute horrific detail, and then, perhaps recognising how unedifying, how unrewarding it all is, asks his audience to instead be interested in a second, more-than-highly-unlikely case of serial murder that bookends the gore - and that convolution comes with a loooooooong and irrelevant backstory of lesbian love during a high school production of Romeo and Juliet, nothing to do with Matsunaga, so turns to nonsense whatever lofty aspirations, if any, Sono had in mind.

★★☆☆☆

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Verónica (2017)

When a retired psychologist agrees to start seeing a new patient, it turns out she means for her consultations with this mentally ill stranger, who may or may not be responsible for the disappearance of her former therapist, to take place in the psychologist's remote forest hideaway with the two of them magically sharing the knowledge that sleepovers are a part of the bundled service, which is the point it becomes clear this psychological thriller is not going to be very intelligent no matter how many references to Freud and the Platonic forms it bandies around.

★★☆☆☆

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Murder Mystery (2019)

Adam Sandler not acting like a moron and Jennifer Aniston doing what she always does makes for a likeable pair of sleuths here but the writing is so lazy, the murder mystery plot aboard a luxury boat so run-of-the-mill, the assembled suspects (played by a surprising array of big name stars) so lacking in characterisation beyond exaggerated nationality, deformity, or idiosyncracy, and the denouement so underwhelming, so bemusing - in fact so boring - viewers will only continue watching to the end either because they're tied to their chair or because they vainly hope this Netflix offering will dish up a final twist or surprise or something, anything!, to unlock the great mystery: how Netflix sustains its subscription service when it serves up dross like this so lazily thrown together you almost suspect it has been released unfinished.

★☆☆☆☆

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I Am Mother (2019)

A girl (Clara Rugaard-Larsen) raised by a robot in a Human Re-population Facility has her solitary life of dance and psychometric testing interrupted by the arrival from outside the facility of a woman (Hilary Swank) who suggests the girl's robot 'mother' is incapable of feelings for the girl, is lying when it says the air outside the facility is toxic, and is a droid just like the ones outside who have decimated the Earth, in this better than usual Netflix original movie, a scifi thriller that really only errs in how quickly the girl proves willing to question everything she has ever known.

★★★☆☆

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Circle (2015)

You'd imagine you'd woken up in the studio of a new reality tv gameshow - wouldn't you? - when you found yourself among a group of strangers standing in a circle voting each other 'off the island' by way of electric zaps from a central pop-o-matic dice bubble, but time is short - individuals are being killed off one by one every ninety seconds - so everyone readily commits to the idea they've been abducted by aliens like it's a body and voice warm-up exercise requiring complete commitment in an actors' studio, and so with the absurdity of the premise put aside, things become a waiting game to see who will be the last standing and to see how this quirky low-budget Cube-like sci-fi fantasy will make its "who are your draft picks for your super NFL team" negotiations worthwhile viewing to the end..

★★★☆☆

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The Forest (2018)

While Japan tries to desensationalise the number of suicides that take place in the Aokigahara Forest at the foot of Mount Fuji so that less people feel encouraged to go there for this purpose and more want to go there as tourists to enjoy its expanses of still, quiet volcanic forest, the likes of Youtuber Logan Paul and the makers of this bad taste 2016 movie (just another relegated to the Netflix dross heap for undiscerning couch potatoes to watch and justify their subscriptions) insensitively turn Japan's grim problem, one attributed not to ghost-fed paranoia but to the country's social austerity, isolation and unemployment, into clickbait.

★☆☆☆☆

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Bird Box (2018)

Sandra Bullock does her best with stupid material that tries to do A Quiet Place with sight-deprivation rather than voice-deprivation affecting the survivors of a never clearly elucidated apocalyptic event - these characters, either blindfolded or with eyes clenched tightly closed, are left unable to do anything (the most exciting thing that happens over the course of 48 hours blindfolded on a boat is one character falls overboard only to be plucked back out of the water a moment later) or the characters do manage to do things and it is ludicrous, like driving to the supermarket or running around a forest for the first time, blindfolded.

★★☆☆☆

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Kidnap (2017)

The fact she is a divorcee, has a litigious ex, and is a waitress who grapples for the movie's first fifteen minutes with rude or fickle or impatient customers is all extraneous to the sixty-minute car chase Halle Berry's Karla Dyson embarks upon after she witnesses her son's abduction: the writers haven't tried to make this dross even slightly intelligent, staging the vehicular action in a logic-free fantasy land that exists free from the constraints of time, largely free from a police presence, free from geographical constraints, and free from viewers' expectations that something interesting might happen in the end to cleverly tie it all together.

★☆☆☆☆

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Little Evil (2017)

This horror-comedy that must have been written by a step-parent in-the-know has recently married Gary (Adam Scott) slowly coming to suspect his new stepson is the devil incarnate and while the movie cleverly draws on classic horror tropes (most notably from The Omen), it also cleverly likens a step-parent's devotion to a partner's child to demon-slaying, suggesting it is every parent's (and step-parent's) job to close the door to evil in a child's life.

★★★☆☆

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