Guilty As Sin (1993)

You can tell how good a lawyer Rebecca De Mornay's Jennifer Haines is by the way she swaggers around a courtroom and drapes herself in the desk chairs of sleek 90s-minimalist law offices, but a new client played by Don Johnson is a real ladykiller - she thinks literally so - and knows just how to crack Jennifer's cocky lawyer facade, so soon she is making the worst decisions of her legal career, in Sidney Lumet's charmless but perfectly watchable legal thriller marketed disingenuously as erotic.

★★★☆☆

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Foreign Correspondent (1940)

Joel McCrea is no Cary Grant, lacking charisma as the lead of this Hitchcock thriller, but then I suppose he is supposed to - an American crime reporter in London seconded as a foreign correspondent in Amsterdam, he is both a man out of his league and a fish out of water tasked with investigating the potential for war in Europe  - but the other problem is the plot is rambly and loose and barely holds Hitchcock's setpieces together, so thank goodness those setpieces - an assassination, thrills inside a windmill, dizzying scenes atop a hotel and a chapel, and a spectacular plane crash - are so, so memorable! 

★★★★☆

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The Father (2020)

This multi-Oscar-Award-winning film is no-one's idea of a good time but it is so rivetting on account of its being so well-acted and filmed and told, you are not able to take your eyes off it and the sting in the tail of course is that while delivered with thrills of a distinctly Hitchcockian style, these thriller elements are just the trappings of a very real, commonplace, and oh-so-heart-breaking aged-care conundrum and the film cleverly makes you guilty of assuming wrong things about the cantankerous old man Anthony Hopkins plays.

★★★★☆

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Contact (1997)

In Robert Zemeckis' adaptation that does a good job of digesting into an engrossing blockbuster the hard science fiction of Carl Sagan's novel, a researcher (Jodie Foster, in top form, perfectly cast) sits under satellite dishes with headphones listening for messages from outerspace, eventually coming across a code blipped from somewhere far off, the deciphered message of which is a set of instructions to build something, but religious leaders are wary and politicians are defensive as space agencies hurry to act.

★★★★☆

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