Spin Me Round (2022)

When a restaurant branch manager scores a weeklong business trip to Italy for a professional development course delivered by the international megastar owner of her restaurant chain, she imagines that Tuscan sunsets, a rustic Italian villa, and romance are in store, but those expectations are immediately let down when dullard Craig picks her and a bunch of other hopefuls up from the airport, in this dry comedy that hilariously blends Office Space-style corporate dreariness with Masterchef-style foodie-ism and Griswold's-style Americans-in-Europe dagginess.  

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

New Year's Eve (2011)

On a New Year's Eve, the Times Square Ball gets stuck, neither up nor down, and this same inert state befalls a veritable Love, Actually ensemble of New Yorkers whose lives grind to a stop in deeply uninteresting, go-nowhere situations like the nurse (Halle Berry) who tends bedside to a dying man in hospital (Robert De Niro) - that's everything - or the man in pyjamas (Ashton Kutcher) who gets stuck in an elevator with a singer (that woman from Glee) - the end - or the pregnant couple who are, well, pregnant - and still pregnant each time the movie unnecessarily returns to them - or, in the most peculiar of the go-nowhere vignettes, a delivery guy (Zac Efron) escorts a woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) around NYC on a scooter skimping on her bucket list that she has no reason to rush through before midnight when, spoiler alert, the Times Square Ball drops and this dull romcom ends and life starts moving again.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

A Rainy Day in New York (2019)

In Woody Allen's inconsequential, breezy romantic comedy - which I quite enjoyed - Timothée Chalamet's gloomy Gatsby Welles shuffles hunch-shouldered, arms in pockets around a rainy New York City, spending a day with sunny partner Ashleigh that doesn't go to plan, and just as you think it yourself about his slight and self-aware performance, Allen has Chalamet say - ostensibly about another character but far too applicable to his own performance to be coincidence - "[He's] a James Dean minus the acting chops".

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

This Means War (2012)

Two intelligence operatives start dating the same woman and while she, with her bestie's help, wrests with the question, "How big of a slut am I?" the spies covertly film her, shadow her, break into and bug her home and office and manipulate her, and the most telling thing about the whole deeply unlikeable affair is the men are just keeping checks on each other - the incursion upon Reese Witherspoon's character's life is incidental, something that doesn't seem to occur to anyone.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Heartbreaker (L'Arnacœur) (2010)

In this French romcom, most amusing when it is being sensible but most of the time trying to be an unbridled screwball comedy, Romain Duris' heartbreaker-for-hire, who worms his way into his quarries' hearts by crying on demand and spouting the sort of sappy lines typically reserved for daytime soaps, ends up falling for a client's daughter days out from her marriage to Mr Wrong.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS