The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor) (2009)

I came very late to these adaptations of the Stieg Larsson books - was I on another planet? - but have, in 2021,  finally watched the Swedish movie series and can say they are gripping, often brutal action mysteries, this first one introducing Noomi Rapace as the kickass title heroine who investigates a 40-year-old murder mystery, one of those plots that require a fair suspension of your disbelief as details from all those decades ago present themselves to the hacker-slash-investigator impossibly conveniently, untouched and intact in the modern day.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

After the misguided pagan mythology world-building of the third movie, Halloween is back to being just a grisly day on the calendar in this simple "Michael Myers comes home" fourth episode that has the masked killer heading once again to Haddonfield, Illinois, this time to kill, for no clear reason except perhaps that Jamie Lee Curtis was too expensive, Laurie Strodes's daughter (Michael's niece), a young girl whose protection from the madman depends, sadly, on a bungling loser-in-love babysitting step-sister, a gang of trigger-happy vigilante hicks, and of course Donald Pleasence's now scarred and maimed and always-too-late plodding-far-behind-for-a-third-outing-now Dr Loomis. 

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Johnny English Reborn (2011)

My attention strayed and then irritation set in as this British spy spoof, the second in a series of three Johnny English movies but the first I've tried to watch, went on and on and on in such cookie-cutter fashion that it doesn't really ask to be watched at all - a glance at the poster tells you everything you already knew about the James Bond-style opening sequence, the ho-hum scene at the hi-tech spy tools development facility, the repetitive car and boat chases, and the unpsychedelic Austin Powers, a rubbery-faced Pink Panther, at the centre of all the, er, action.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)

With a plot about as sophisticated as a Spy Kids movie, film-sets that resemble the painted polystyrene walls of a laser tag night-out, and role-playing action of the sort you might see offered up by overzealous bachelor party paintballers or DnDers running around in capes or three-piece suits and elocuting words like "Parabellum" (say it as you swirl wine in a chalice), this tiresome third in the John Wick series dares to be even worse than the previous two cartoons: a Fanta-grade (thanks, Laurence Fishburne, for that punctuation) string of gun- and knife-fantasists' wet dreams with lethargic fight-scene choreography (we all love Keanu Reeves but think of the flat-footedness of Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull..) and compound this lethargy with the nerdy flamboyance of cape-twirling and gunplay to classical music, plus insistent we-want-this-series-to-go-forever universe-building and a troubling unerring nonchalance from everyone in the face of, well, endless face-knivings, plus - the worse thing - a dismaying promise of even more prepostrousness to come.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS