Number One (Numèro Uno) (aka Woman Up) (2017)

In what is a really strong engrossing start to the film, a group of feminists approach Emmanuelle Blachey, a business executive, with a plan to manouevre her into the top role at a government water company, but is the corporate skullduggery Blachey has to contend with at the hands of rivals for the position better or worse than the treatment she receives from her current boss and colleagues who objectify and devalue her and in one weird moment that almost derails the whole movie, let her sing to them over dinner on an oil rig? 

★★★☆☆

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Prince of Darkness (1987)

The John Carpenter aesthetic, kicking in immediately with the black and white opening credits set against the director's own pulsing electronic music composition - not to mention Donald Pleasence turning up as a troubled priest - rises this horror above similar others which generally don't get away with such laughable plotting: a team of physicists (a feast of Carpenter regulars (and Susan, the radiologist...in blue? With glasses?)) are gathered together in a church to investigate a glass chamber full of swirling green that seems to be alive, sentient, communicative, ancient, able to possess the bodies of others, and somehow author to strange Coptic, Latin, and English texts that contain differential equations...and if that weren't enough to overload a 102-minute horror romp, each of the gathered scientists receives tachyon messages in their dreams from the future!

★★★★☆

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The Marksman (2021)

Liam Neeson's Jim, a war veteran protecting a Mexican boy from a ruthless drug cartel, sports a circle of orange foundation on his face, reports the "I.A.s" he finds crossing his Arizona property towards the border, and takes advantage of Donald Trump's relaxed approach to gun ownership, and given all this, you'd suspect this 2021 action thriller had something political to say, but the audience is made to sit through decidedly unpolitical and unscintillating things once this movie's thin premise is set up and the man and boy are racing by car across America pursued by the cartel - things like (1) the purchase of an atlas at a gas station (2) a stop at a diner for a meal (3) a toilet break (4) an overnight trip to buy pop tarts, and when things really start to get exciting (5) the ex-Marine surprises the kid with a bag of gummi bears - so, it is only in the last twenty minutes that the criminals, grown tired of spending such a long time tracking all these credit card purchases along Route 66, finally catch up to this dreary pair of roadtrippers and bring the movie to an end with the idea that in America you have the freedom to blow your brains out.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Mystery Of The Mary Celeste (aka 'Phantom Ship') (1935)

The And Then There Were None explanation postulated in this 1935 horror thriller with Bela Lugosi is based, says an opening credit titlecard, on the findings of the Attorney-General in Gibraltar and though history has deemed him, Frederick Solly-Flood, an imbecile, the appeal of this movie is that Flood's account of the unexplained abandonment of The Mary Celeste in 1872, though certainly not presented here convincingly, came not far removed in time from the actual events, unlike so many other fanciful and outlandish theories that have sprung up and combined and morphed over the one hundred and fifty years since, blurring Mary Celeste fact and fiction.

★★★☆☆

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The Disappointments Room (2016)

The title of this horror thriller doesn't refer to the movie theatre after the lights go back up on a paying audience but to, well, I hardly need to tell you when reading the title alone tells you everything you don't need to know about a weak Amityville Horror reiteration that not only runs out of time to sufficiently develop its main storyline (yet another couple move, for a fresh start, into a remote home only to discover it is haunted) but also completely abandons other plot points (for example, what on earth happened to the roofer?)

★★☆☆☆

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Maigret's Night At The Crossroads (2017)

Perhaps Rowan Atkinson was trying here to present an especially sad Maigret given the story opens upon the funeral of a police colleague, but he is so flat, so deadpan, so morose - even more so than usual - that this episode of the usually thrilling 2016 and 2017 Maigret series is the rather flat and ponderous one of the four - at some points you wonder if the actors are speaking as slowly as they are just to try to stretch the story to movie-length and this lethargic pacing is at odds with the outlandish characters, one of them scarred and hissing like a Bond villain and another a stammering cartoon who do not fit well against the backdrop of gritty Paris and its mid-50s period detail.

★★☆☆☆

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