The Stranger Within (2013)

With the look, feel and pace of a daytime soap and populated with actors who appear to think their only job is looking good, this hard-to-watch psychological thriller about a woman dealing with trauma, paranoia, jealousy and fear in a remote mansion is of only momentary interest for featuring William 'How did I end up here?' Baldwin; the rest of the movie reeks of four friends with a camera giving movie-making a go on a 'swingers' weekend away.

☆☆☆☆☆

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Perfect Strangers (Perfetti Sconosciuti) (2016)

The laughs in this timely comedy of e-manners quickly become awkward when dinner party guests, a likeable group of fortysomethings, agree to a game in which mobile phones are abandoned to the dinner table thereby granting everyone present access to all others' incoming communications, a game which reveals lies and secrets that threaten to eclipse the circle's good times.

★★★★☆

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Doctor Strange (2016)

Marvel's latest superhero origin story is a grown-up version of Harry Potter - Hogwarts is a Kathmandu cult, Dumbledore is Tilda Swinton reprising her roles from The Beach and Vanilla Sky, Voldemort is a barely seen cosmic darksider called Dormammu, the spells are "coding", the cloak of invisibility is a cloak of levitation of unexplained sentience, and the special effects are repetitive Inception-style city-shifting ones.

★★★☆☆

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Strangers On A Train (1951)

Based on Patricia Highsmith's first novel, this Hitchcock masterpiece is notable not just for its stand-out inventive scenes (the out-of-control merry-go-round, the murder reflected in a dropped pair of glasses, the staring face among tennis spectators) but also for its unnerving portrait of delusion - Robert Walker plays the oddball who embroils a tennis star into a warped murder scheme.

★★★★★

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The Strangers (2008)

The tormentors of a couple staying in a remote summer house wear odd masks and have a seemingly supernatural ability to come and go, appear and disappear, in this horror exercise with zero plot, prefaced by an odd Law and Order-style voiceover suggesting, weirdly and not very convincingly, that it is based on a true story when in fact it is just a American teen horror ripoff of Funny Games.

★★☆☆☆

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Stranger by the Lake (L'Inconnu Du Lac) (2013)

A plodding, unconvincing police investigation headed by the film world's most uncharismatic police inspector is the context for three or four explicit gay sex scenes and the film's one belaboured point about one gay man's destructive lust.

★★☆☆☆ 

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS