The Day Of The Jackal (1973)

There is so much detail in Fred Zinnemann's riveting adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal - European filming locations; real people on the street unaware they are being filmed, an audacious plot that sweeps through multiple countries yet also manages to detail the minutiae of the characters' day-to-day - that at times the political thriller starts to feel like a documentary, lending real-time urgency as we follow Edward Fox's Jackal, an assassin for hire meticulously plotting the assassination of Charles de Gaulle while the Parisian police struggle to track him, a faceless, nameless master of disguise.

★★★★★

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A Good Woman Is Hard To Find (2019)

This Irish crime drama does a good job of depicting the vicious cycle of hardship and crime and the judgement women face from men, women, shopkeepers, the authorities - everyone - but there are hard-to-believe aspects to the situation Sarah, a mum of two young children, finds herself in at the start, and something unlikely about the crime that sets off her grisly journey to protect her kids and find out the truth of her husband's murder in a housing project, and the movie ends on a wilful, gleeful and unlikely climax engineered for thrills rather than realism, detracting from the bleak social crime drama that precedes it.

★★★☆☆

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Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)

The inferior sequel to Knives Out tries to repeat the same tricks, cutting back and forwards in time to interject scenes that upend what we thought we knew of the developing mystery (this time set on a tech billionaire's hi-tech Greek island where guests have gathered for a murder mystery weekend) but like that murder mystery weekend, which Daniel Craig's nondescript Benoit Blanc abruptly ends by prematurely solving it, so too is the movie's main mystery - the murder of one of the guests - abruptly over, solved within an hour of starting, and all the jumping back and forth between past and present, the crowdpleasing techpreneur teardown, and jarring celebrity cameos can't disguise how brief and empty it is.

★★☆☆☆

Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Taika Waititi's Thor episode dresses up the same old same old 'superhero battles a supervillain' plot in an 80s rock opera skin and fills it with big-name cameos, Taika Waititi's trademark kooky humour, and schoolkid-pleasing nonsense, but it is like this particular Marvel franchise is a hammer of God and try as he might Taika Waititi simply isn't able to lift it.

★★☆☆☆

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See How They Run (2022)

Occasionally, watching this comedy mystery, you'll think, "I think that was supposed to be funny," as the dialogue between Saoirse Ronan's police officer and Sam Rockwell's inspector - clearly meant to crackle and zing - falls and clangs like a dropped murder weapon, which is a shame because setting a murder mystery around the staging in London of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap is interesting, especially given in the very beginning of the play's record-length run Richard Attenborough played the role of Sergeant Trotter and the grisly real-life case of the Rillington Place serial murders were being investigated, both details that feature in the clever historical context of this otherwise laugh-free, leaden, and, for a long middle stretch, chaotic film.

★★☆☆☆ (almost one star)

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