The Black Phone (2021)

It takes an ordeal with a masked troll (upstairs, not under a bridge - a kind of vague reiteration of Buffalo Bill) and conversations with murdered teenagers via a magic wall phone for a boy to finally get the gumption to talk to a girl he likes in science class -- that his sister is psychic, too, who sees things in dreams ends up an irrelevant detail.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Melinda and Melinda (2004)

Like a failed first draft of Blue Jasmine, this middling Woody Allen movie (one also helmed by an Australian actress) splices together the same story told twice, once as a comedy and once as a tragedy, except the comedy is almost entirely laugh-free, the tragedy just a dreary tale of woe, and really, it is just a Sliding Doors movie about wishes made on magic lamps, not a movie about the cruel theatre of life and so it can be hard to remember at times which of the two versions of Melinda's life you are watching they are both so similar.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS